We waited and
quartered the ground back and forth for a long hour, while the rain fell
and the seas slapped along our sides, and the steam fluttered drearily
through the escapes. Then we went ahead.
The St. Lawrence on the last day of the voyage played up nobly. The
maples along its banks had turned - blood red and splendid as the banners
of lost youth. Even the oak is not more of a national tree than the
maple, and the sight of its welcome made the folks aboard still more
happy. A dry wind brought along all the clean smell of their
Continent-mixed odours of sawn lumber, virgin earth, and wood-smoke; and
they snuffed it, and their eyes softened as they, identified point after
point along their own beloved River - places where they played and fished
and amused themselves in holiday time. It must be pleasant to have a
country of one's very own to show off. Understand, they did not in any
way boast, shout, squeak, or exclaim, these even-voiced returned men and
women. They were simply and unfeignedly glad to see home again, and they
said: 'Isn't it lovely? Don't you think it's beautiful? We love it.'
At Quebec there is a sort of place, much infested by locomotives, like a
coal-chute, whence rise the heights that Wolfe's men scaled on their way
to the Plains of Abraham. Perhaps of all the tide-marks in all our lands
the affair of Quebec touches the heart and the eye more nearly than any
other. Everything meets there; France, the jealous partner of England's
glory by land and sea for eight hundred years; England, bewildered as
usual, but for a wonder not openly opposing Pitt, who knew; those other
people, destined to break from England as soon as the French peril was
removed; Montcalm himself, doomed and resolute; Wolfe, the inevitable
trained workman appointed for the finish; and somewhere in the
background one James Cook, master of H.M.S. Mercury, making beautiful
and delicate charts of the St. Lawrence River.
For these reasons the Plains of Abraham are crowned with all sorts of
beautiful things - including a jail and a factory. Montcalm's left wing
is marked by the jail, and Wolfe's right by the factory. There is,
happily, now a movement on foot to abolish these adornments and turn the
battle-field and its surroundings into a park, which by nature and
association would be one of the most beautiful in our world.
Yet, in spite of jails on the one side and convents on the other and the
thin black wreck of the Quebec Railway Bridge, lying like a dumped
car-load of tin cans in the river, the Eastern Gate to Canada is noble
with a dignity beyond words. We saw it very early, when the under sides
of the clouds turned chilly pink over a high-piled, brooding,
dusky-purple city.
