Down Under With the Prince Part 13

The Prince and his staff landed unostentatiously in white naval kit from a bra.s.s-funnelled steam picket-boat. The usual procession of carriages was formed, after the reception formalities, each drawn by a fine pair of horses, and the Prince was taken through decorated streets to the House of a.s.sembly, where he inspected a guard-of-honour composed of seamen from H.M.S. _Calcutta_. Within were a.s.sembled members of the Executive and Legislative Councils and other leading residents and their families, in the garb with which civilized ceremony defies temperatures the world over.

The Governor read an address of welcome, in the course of which he reminded the Prince of their having met in France, where he, Sir James, was in command of the Indian Army Corps. The Prince, in the course of his reply, referred to the celebration of the tercentenary of the establishment of representative inst.i.tutions in Bermuda, then taking place in the island, having been postponed for a month to coincide with his own visit. He also acknowledged the courtesy of the United States Government in sending the U.S.S. _Kansas_ to meet him. In conclusion he touched upon the impressions left upon himself by his tour and its lesson of the unity, strength and devotion which bind all parts of His Majesty's dominions to British ideals.

Later on in the garden of the public buildings the Prince laid the foundation-stone of a war-memorial, the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps and Militia artillery furnishing guards-of-honour, and relatives of fallen men being presented.

On the following day the Prince inspected the Royal Navy dockyard, and placed a wreath upon the grave of the late Admiral Napier, until recently in command of the Royal West Indian squadron, who was one of the victims of an outbreak of typhoid in these islands. He also paid a farewell visit to H.M.S. _Calcutta_, Flagship of the Royal West Indian Squadron, which had been his escort throughout the tour in these waters, and said good-bye to its officers and men, at the same time conferring the Knight Commandership of the Victorian Order upon Admiral Everett, and the Companionship on Captain n.o.ble, R.N.

The final day of the Prince's visit to Bermuda found him at St. George, the quaint coral-built old capital, to which he drove himself from Government House, Hamilton, in a high-seated mail phaeton, with two horses, Sir James Willc.o.c.ks beside him. The drive was twelve miles along the coast, through most beautiful country, a fresh sea-breeze mitigating the heat, which had previously been trying. Much of the way the road was shaded by feathery Lignum-vitae trees, here known as cedars, which have deliciously scented wood and were once a rich a.s.set for shipbuilding.

Flowering groves of pink oleander, dense thickets of scarlet, pink and yellow hibiscus, purple ma.s.ses of bougainvilleas bordered the way, which was past garden after garden of the wonderful rich red loam which has won for Bermuda potatoes, Bermuda onions and Bermuda bananas a reputation almost world-wide.

_En route_ the Prince alighted to look into the shadowy depths of the Devil's Grotto, a deep rock-bound pool of clearest water connected with the sea, in which big fish of brilliant colours swim lazily. He also wandered hundreds of yards underground, through an extraordinary rift in the coral formation known as the Crystal cave, from hundreds of thousands of semi-transparent stalact.i.tes, many of them reaching from floor to ceiling, in some cases overhanging still pools of clear salt water, or forming grotesque figures, with which the electric lamps, that light the place, played the most fantastic tricks. The cave is one of a number in different parts of the islands, and claims to be of extraordinary antiquity, the stalact.i.tes growing at so slow a rate that a hundred thousand years are believed to be represented by a mere fraction of their length.

The entire route from Hamilton to St. George had been decorated, the arches representing an immense amount of willing labour. One of them had been solidly constructed of square blocks of sawn coral rock by coloured volunteers, who had built it at night after their ordinary working hours were over. Another, which had been put up by members of the garrison, was a wonderfully worked-out reproduction of the sailing ship _Patience_ built near by, over three hundred years ago, by which the shipwrecked crew of Sir George Somer's ship _Sea Venture_ made their way to Virginia. This arch was entirely constructed of the local cedar, which was the wood used in building the _Patience_.

At St. George the Prince was entertained by Mayor Boyle and members of the local town council, the Mayor's tiny but very self-possessed grand-daughter presenting a bouquet, the last local attention of the tour. He was given a great send-off when he finally embarked by launch to rejoin the _Renown_ waiting for him beyond the reefs with the end of her mission in sight and her blunt grey nose pointing toward home.

Eight days later, on the 11th October, early in the morning, the heart of England turned for a moment to her old harbour of Portsmouth, where, through one of her own October fogs, her great battle-cruiser was drawing majestically into port, bringing home from his second journey to kinsfolk the eldest son of her Royal House. Perhaps the heart of England felt a certain pride....

XXVI

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TOUR

This Chapter is, by kind permission, largely reproduced from an article by the writer published in the "Nineteenth Century" of December, 1920.

"The tumult and the shouting dies," and what, now that it is over, remains to Britain of the enterprise? What treasure came back in the _Renown_ to make this Royal adventure worth while?

The word may be disputed. The nation's heir, it may be said, does not adventure in travelling to the hearths of kinsfolk. There is no adventure in a voyage surrounded by every means of safety and comfort that modern science can devise, a voyage backed by the blessing and sped by the hope and pride of this sound old Mother Country. Yet in the fluid state of social and political emotion to-day it was an adventure, a challenge in the very teeth of those unbridled forces that are so blatant and busy in the disservice of the British Empire, and a challenge before which not one of them raised its head.

The constantly recurring scene of the Prince making acquaintance with overseas audiences is long since familiar. It has been depicted in the columns of hundreds of newspapers and actually thrown before the eyes of thousands in cinemas. It is far more than a twice-told tale that His Royal Highness was everywhere received with enthusiasm which was altogether phenomenal, that he was everywhere able to draw the whole of the inhabitants of the places he visited away from their business, their occupation or their pleasure, to concentrate during the time he was amongst them, the whole of their attention and interest upon himself, and the idea of race, Empire and loyalty for which he stands. In so far as the hackneyed words of newspaper reports can produce that effect, their reiteration must by now have turned the remarkable scenes of his progress into a kind of Royal commonplace, and retired them into the back of the popular imagination as matters to be taken for granted. It is difficult to put into terms of flags and decorations, patriotic songs and calculated mult.i.tudes, however gay and hoa.r.s.e and unexampled, anything of the fine essence discharged from men's hearts and minds that made the soul of these occasions. Only perhaps to those who actually saw them will they survive conventional description, as experiences of the rare sort that baffle it. It did not seem to matter who his audiences were. Keen, sharp American business men with square jaws and shrewd eyes, to whom a Prince would necessarily hover somewhere between a figure of mediaeval romance and a comic anachronism, proved no less susceptible to the something he has to offer than the crowds of our own family in New Zealand, Tasmania or New South Wales. Queensland, with its advanced Labour Government, its public ownership of utilities and enterprises, its schedules of progress in which at least no conspicuous place is allotted to Royal personages, proved just as enthusiastic as did conservative New Zealand. Centres of culture, learning and wealth like Sydney and Melbourne, showed exactly the same spirit as did rough mining and logging camps, and lonely sheep stations in the far interior.

Cornish gold diggers of Bendigo and Ballarat rivalled the cordial welcome of the Welsh coal-miners of Westport and Greymouth. Catholic Irishmen newly arrived in cattle stations in Northern and Western Australia mustered as keenly in honour of the Prince as Presbyterian farmers in settled Tasmania. Fuzzy-headed Fijians, dignified Samoans, Polynesians of Honolulu, negroes of Demerara and Trinidad seethed and bubbled with like enthusiasm.

There was more than the personal factor in an appeal so widely honoured, more than the touch of romance upon imaginations untravelled along Royal roads, yet recollection harks back irresistibly to the spectacle of the human equation as between the Prince and his audiences. There is no other way of explaining their quick pleasure at the sight of him and their instant and unerring formulas for his relation to themselves and to the world. Anything mechanical, anything perfunctory, would have worn out with the first gratification of curiosity; but a point which struck the onlooker was that enthusiasm grew instead of cooling off, as the Prince's visit to each place continued and as acquaintance with him ripened. "Yes, but only once," was a little Australian girl's wistful answer when asked if she had seen the Prince. Nor were children of a larger growth content with only once. Their eyes could not be too well filled with this young symbol of their race and Empire, whose person pleased them and whose negligence of the pomp and privileges their minds had given him upset their preconceptions with a thrill of delight.

To be of the Imperial present, with its dignity and untarnished splendour, to come of the Royal past with its long discipline of duty and decoration of anointed names, and to let it all sink as the Prince lets it sink into the simplest background of his personality, is an achievement--or should it be called just a habit--which makes at once the happiest appeal to human nature, the world over. He does not even appear to be aware that these things should do anything for him. He is as diffident as, say, the naval officer who blocked Zeebrugge harbour or the flight-lieutenant who brought down the first Zeppelin over London.

The touch is British and of the essence. It is an odd inconsistency of race consciousness which makes us recognize and take pride in it, but we do. Another characteristic almost as immediately perceived by an audience is the Prince's plain delight in giving pleasure, his obvious satisfaction in doing the thing that he has to do and doing it well.

There are endless stories of his disregard of physical fatigue in the desire to take out of himself every ounce that could be given to the gratification of public gatherings. There is never a hint of boredom in his face or bearing. Thus the bond of sympathy is complete. The people are there and he is there for the same purpose, and nothing breaks the circuit of goodwill. There was something nave and touching in the constantly possessive note that hailed him "ours" from the wharfs of Sydney to the string-bark avenues of Perth; and to this claim also something in the Prince responds with an unselfishness that might be the supreme lesson of kings.

The Prince's personality is greatly deepened and broadened by his speeches, which in their simplicity and directness are perfectly the expression of himself. They never exaggerate, and they never fall short.

They are pervaded by a sincerity that is perhaps more than anything the secret of their instant appeal. There is no forcing of the note, no effort at elaboration, no sacrifice to rhetorical points. Withal he says the things that people instinctively expect and want to hear, and he says them with a happy grace and a plain belief in the message that underlies them all, the a.s.surance of the strength and solidarity of the Empire for which he speaks.

The whole projection of this Royal personality upon the world is extraordinary. Look at the circ.u.mstances under which it is made. The pa.s.sionate under-trend of society towards the dogmas of democracy, the tragic extinction, within the last five years, of more than one dynasty, the perpetual tendency of privilege, royal as well as any other, to liquesce into the common stream of human rights, are all against him.

One would have supposed that roses strewn in the path of a Prince, at this point of the world's history, if strewn at all, would be none of nature's growing. Yet this Prince seems to prove that the King and the King's heir are far more a part of the people and bred from the nation, than any president. The Prince stands for the people. His character has been formed, his ideals fostered by healthy English training. It may possibly not be far-fetched to say that he is the product of intensive cultivation along national lines. Thus he appeals to the nation's pride of possession, and his place in their hearts is ready before he occupies it.

It is no depreciation of the personal magnetism of the Heir to the Throne to say that he brought to light and stimulated Imperial enthusiasm already existing below the surface, and waiting only to be evoked, rather than that he created anything not already in being.

Nevertheless, it must be remembered that the idea of the Empire as a union of sister nations co-operating and sharing ideals and hopes in a future they are bound together to bring about, is a young idea, as young as the Prince. It is not long since the Dominions and India had little beyond domestic affairs to exercise their powers of administration upon; their share in the Imperial idea was largely commercial, and chiefly concerned with the attraction of capital for the development of their natural resources. They had no voice in the world policy of the Anglo-Saxon race, and no apparent prospect of getting it. The Prince and his youth happily blend in the new partnership and the new prospect, making for all of us a very potential figure. Beside the charm, the buoyancy of youth, he has the romance of an epoch of world history full of possibilities for the peoples who live under the British flag. To this romance he contributes all that he is, and he contributes it in the most whole-hearted manner.

The Prince was never tired of referring in his speeches to the bond created by common service in the great war. Wherever he went it was the returned soldier that he must see and greet, wounded or whole--how often has this chronicle had to dwell upon the long lines of them. "Returned sailors and soldiers, relations of the fallen, nurses and war-workers,"

backed by the shouting school-children--they have risen perhaps with some iteration before the eye of those who have followed the tale. But, looking back, the splendour fades out of the tropic sky and the opulence out of the great city, the whole panorama of sheep-run and factory, orchard and mine rolls up into a decoration; and the meaning of all we saw abides in those men and women and children working out their lot and their lives far from the home of the race, but standing, and ready to stand again, for its flag and its ideals.

"One heritage we share though seas divide," declared the citizens of Sydney with the emphasis of a triumphal arch. The claim rang true.

Distance cannot weaken this tie, nor oceans wash it out. No one undervalues the picturesqueness of the emotion the Prince has evoked amongst members of other races living under Anglo-Saxon tutelage and protection, but the real significance is in what it has drawn from peoples of our own stock. Supreme among the values that come out of it is the enduring quality of the British portion in the things of the mind and of character, in ideals, and standards. It is no vague sentiment that binds together the various branches of our people, but a unity that lives. The part of the Prince of Wales has been to waken a new consciousness throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. He stands for all that joins us and for all that we can do when we are together.