Part 15 (1/2)
”VERMILION STATION, C.P.R., ”_May 25, 1908_.
”Here we are, stranded at a tiny wayside station of the C.P.R., and have been waiting _sixteen hours_, while eight miles ahead they are repairing a bridge which has collapsed in a marsh owing to heavy rain. Three trains are before us and about five behind. A complete block on the great line. We arrived here at six this morning, and here it is 9.50 p.m.
”It has been a strange day--mostly very wet, with nothing to look at but some scrubby woods and a bit of cutting. We captured a Manitoba Senator and made him come and talk to us, but it did not help us very far. Snell, our wonderful cook and factotum, being in want of milk, went out and milked a cow!--asking the irate owner, when the deed was done, how much he wanted. And various little incidents happened, but nothing very enlivening.
[_Later._]. ”Here we are at the spot, a danger signal behind us, and the one in front just lowered. Another stop! our engine is detached and we see it vanis.h.i.+ng to the rear. The track won't bear it. How are we going to get over!--Here comes the engine back, and the brakesman behind our car imagines we are to be pushed over, the engine itself not venturing.
”10.5. Safely over! The engine pushed us to the brink, and then, as it was taken off, a voice asked for Mrs. Ward. It was the a.s.sistant Manager of the line, Mr. Jameson, who jumped on board in order to cross with us and explain to me everything that had happened. He had been working for hours and looked tired out. But we went out to the observation-platform, he and I and Dorothy, and the _trajet_ began--our train being attached to some light empty cars, and an engine in front that was pulling us over. I thought Mr. Jameson evidently nervous as we went slowly forward--we were the first train over!--but he showed us as well as the darkness allowed, the marshy place, the new bed made for the line (in the morning the rails were hanging in air and an engine and two cars went in!) and the black mud of the sink-hole pushed up into high banks--trees on the top of them--on either side by the pressure of the new filling put in--50,000 cubic yards of sand and gravel. On either side of the line were crowds of dark figures, Galician and Italian workmen, intently watching our progress. Altogether a dramatic and interesting scene! We were all glad, including, clearly, the a.s.sistant manager, when he said, 'Now we are over it'--but there was no real danger, even if the train had partially sunk, for it was only a causeway over a marsh and not a real bridge.
”Well, it is absurd to have only a day for Winnipeg, but this accident makes it inevitable. The journey has been all of it wonderful, and I am more thrilled by Canada than words can describe!”
After a breathless day in Winnipeg, very pleasantly spent, under the care of Mr. and Mrs. Sanford Evans, in endeavouring to overtake the engagements lost in the ”sink-hole,” Mrs. Ward and her daughter resumed their journey across the vast prairie, over the Rockies and the Selkirks, and down into Vancouver. On her return she thus summed up her impressions of it in a letter to ”Aunt Fan”:
”Everybody was kindness itself, everywhere, and the wonderful journey across Canada and back was something never to forget. To see how a great railway can make and has made a country, to watch all the stages of the prairie towns, from the first wooden huts upwards to towns like Calgary and Regina, and the booming prosperity of Winnipeg--to be able to linger a little in the glorious Rockies, to rush down the Fraser Canon, which Papa used to talk to us about and show us pictures of when we were children--I thought of him with tears and longing in the middle of it--and then to find ourselves at the end beside the 'wide glimmering sea' of the blue Pacific--all this was wonderful, a real enrichment of mind and imagination. At least it ought to be!”
In Vancouver they were under the chaperonage of Mr. F. C. Wade, now Agent-General for British Columbia, and of Mr. Mackenzie King, the future Prime Minister, whom they had already met at Ottawa, but with whom Mrs. Ward had a far more intimate link than that, since about five years before he had come to live as a Resident at the Pa.s.smore Edwards Settlement, and had made great friends with us all. He now acted as guide, not only to the marvellous beauties of Vancouver, but also to the recesses of the Chinese quarter, where he had many friends, owing to the fact that he happened to be engaged in dealing out Government compensation for the anti-Chinese riots of the year before. Mrs. Ward was immensely interested in all the problems of Vancouver--racial, financial and political--being especially impressed by the danger of its ”Americanization” through the buying up of its real estate by American capital. She stayed long enough to lecture to the Canadian Club of Vancouver in aid of Lord Grey's fund for the purchase of the Quebec battlefields as a national memorial to Wolfe, and then set her face definitely homewards. But she could not allow herself to hurry too swiftly through the Rockies, where the snow was beginning to melt and expeditions were becoming possible. From Field she drove to feast her eyes on the Emerald Lake; from Laggan she pushed on to Lake Louise.
To T. H. W.
”BANFF, ”_June 4, 1908_.
”Since we left Vancouver we have had a delicious time, but yesterday was the cream! We started at 8.30 from the very nice Field Hotel, on a special train, just our car and an engine, and--the car being in front--were pushed up the famous Kicking Horse Pa.s.s, on a glorious morning. The Superintendent in charge of the Laggan division of the line came up with us and explained the construction of the new section of the line, which is to take the place of the present dangerous and costly track down the pa.s.s. At present there are no tunnels, nothing but a long hill, up and down which extraordinary precautions have to be taken. Now they are to have spiral tunnels, or rather one long one, on the St. Gotthard plan. One won't see so much, but it will be safer, and far less expensive to work.
”The beauty of the snow peaks, the lateral valleys, the leaping streams, the forests!--and the friendliness of everybody adds to the charm. At Laggan we left the car and drove up--three miles--to Lake Louise--a perfectly beautiful place, which I tried to sketch--alack! It is, I think, more wonderful than any place of the kind in Switzerland, because of the colour of the rocks, which hold the gorgeous glacier and snow-peak. We spent the day there, looked after by a charming Scotchwoman--Miss Mollison--one of three sisters who run the C.P.R. hotels about here. About 6.30 we drove down again to find Snell and George delighted to welcome us back to the car. Then we came on to Banff, sitting on the platform of the car, and looking back at a beautiful sunset among the mountains. We shall part from the Rockies with a pang! Emerald Lake and Lake Louise would certainly conjure one back again, if they were any less than 6,000 miles from home! As it is, I suppose one's physical eyes will never see them again, but it is something to have beheld them once.”
At Field Mrs. Ward had met the eminent explorer, Mrs. Schaffer, who was busy collecting guides and ponies for another expedition into the unknown tracts of the Rockies. She and Mrs. Ward made great friends, and some months later the latter was delighted to receive from her photographs of a wonderful lake which she had discovered, and to which she gave the name of Lake Maligne. Mrs. Ward could not resist weaving the virgin lake into the last chapter of her story, _Canadian Born_.
When at length the long journey was over and the faithful car landed her safely at Montreal, Mrs. Ward still had one pleasant duty to perform--the handing over of her earnings at Vancouver to Lord Grey, as a thank-offering for all the good things that had fallen to her lot since she had parted from him three weeks before. His reply delighted her, especially since she had just ended her Canadian experiences by an expedition up the Heights of Abraham, escorted by Col. Wood, the Canadian military historian.
_June 12, 1908._
MY DEAR MRS. WARD,--
You are _most_ kind! I have received no contribution to the Quebec Battlefields that has given me greater pleasure. I value it partly because it is yours and partly Vancouver's. Every cent that filters through from B.C. and the Prairie Provinces is a joy to me. The Canadian National Problem, the Imperial Problem, is how to link B.C. and the Western Provinces more closely with the Maritime Eastern Provinces--how to improve the transportation service, East and West, and cause the great highroad of human traffic from Europe to Asia to go via Montreal and Vancouver--that is the problem, and that is why I rejoice over every Western Piccanin who subscribes his few cents to Quebec. A feeling for Quebec will remain engraven on his heart for all time.
...I do not think the character of the debt owing in s. d. by the British race to the Wolfe family has ever been put before the public. Wolfe's father never could obtain the repayment from the British Government of 16,000 advanced by him during the Marlborough campaigns. The different Departments did the pa.s.s trick with him--the first rule of departmental administration--played battledore and shuttlec.o.c.k with him until he desisted from pressing his claim for fear of being considered a Dun!
Then James Wolfe, our Quebec hero, never received the C. in C.
allowance of 10 per day. His mother claimed 3,000 from the British Treasury as the amount owing to her son on September 13, 1759--but the poor hard-up departments played battledore and shuttlec.o.c.k with her, and she, like her Wolfe relations, was too great a gentleman to press for payment. When, however, she found that James had left 10,000 to be distributed according to the instructions of his will, and that his a.s.sets only realized 8,000, the dear good lady did try and squeeze 2,000 out of the 19,000 owing by the Government to the family, in order that she might carry out her boy's wishes--but it was a hopeless, useless effort, and the splendid dame heaped all the coals of fire she could on the heads of the stony-hearted, perhaps because stony-broke, British People, by leaving the whole of her fortune to the widows and orphans of the officers who fell under Wolfe's command at Quebec.
Now I maintain that the whole Empire has a moral responsibility in this matter, for have not the most energetic of the descendants of the British People of 1759 emigrated into Greater Britain? The story of how we recompensed Wolfe for giving us an immortal example and half a continent has not, so far as I know, been told.
Delighted to think you are going back to England a red-hot Canadian missionary. Send out all the young people whom you know and believe in, and who are receptive and sympathetic and appreciative, and have sufficient imagination not to be stupidly critical. Send them all over here. We shall be delighted to see them, although I fear they cannot all get Private Cars!
If Mrs. Ward did not, on her return to England, set up altogether as an amateur emigration agent, she yet paid her debt to Canada by the delightful enthusiasm for the young country with all its boundless possibilities, combined with a shrewd appreciation of its difficulties, which she threw into her novel, _Canadian Born_. Neither Canada nor Lord Grey had any reason to complain of the devotion, both of heart and of head, which she gave to the cause. To her American friends, on the other hand, her impa.s.sioned attack in _Daphne_, or _Marriage a la Mode_, on the divorce laws of the United States, came as something of a surprise, for they had not realized, while she was with them, how deep an impression these things had made on her, or how much her artistic imagination had been captured by their tragic or sordid possibilities.
_Daphne_ is, indeed, little but a powerful tract, written under great stress of feeling, but the Americans missed in it the happy touch that had created Lucy Foster, and regretted that Mrs. Ward should have felt bound to portray for their benefit so wholly disagreeable a young person as Daphne Floyd. Time has, however, brought its revenges in the strong movement that has now arisen in the United States for the unification of the widely-differing divorce laws of the various States under one Federal Law.
Yet there were deeper forces at work in the writing of _Daphne_ than any which Mrs. Ward's brief visit to America alone could have accounted for.
The growing disturbance which the Suffrage question was making in the currents of English life had thrown Mrs. Ward's thoughts into these channels for longer than her critics knew. _Daphne_ was one result of this fermentation; another was what we should now call ”direct action.”
Within a month after her return from America Mrs. Ward wrote to Miss Arnold of Fox How (herself an undaunted Suffragist at the age of seventy-five): ”You will see from the papers what it is that has been taking all my time--the foundation of an Anti-Suffrage League.”
CHAPTER XII