The Personality of American Cities Part 25

To see Toronto as a British city, however, you must go to her in May--at the time of her spring races. The fair is very much like any of the great fairs in the United States. The race-meet is distinctly different.

In the United States horse-racing has fallen into ill-repute, and most of the famous tracks around our larger cities have been cut up into building lots. The sport with us was commercialized, ruined, and then practically forbidden. In Canada they have been wiser, although the tendency to make the sport entirely professional and so not sport at all has begun to show itself even over there. But in Toronto they go to horse-races for the love of horse-racing, and not in the hopes of making a living without working for it.

The great spring race-meet is the gallop for the King's Guineas. It is at the Woodbine and in addition to being the oldest racing fixture in America it is also just such a day for Canada as Derby Day is for England. If you go to Toronto for Plate Day--as they call that great race-day--you will be wise to have your hotel accommodations engaged well in advance. You will find Plate Day to be the Sat.u.r.day before the twenty-fourth of May. And, lest you should have forgotten the significance of the twenty-fourth of May, permit us to remind you that for sixty-four long years loyal Canada celebrated that day as the Queen's birthday. And it is today, perhaps, the most tender tribute that the Canadians can render Victoria--their adherence to her birthday as the greatest of their national holidays.

If you are wise and wish to see the English aspect of Toronto, you will reserve your accommodations at a certain old hotel near the lakefront which is the most intensely British thing that will open to a stranger within the town. Within its dining-room the lion and the unicorn still support the crown, and the old ladies who are ushered to their seats wear white caps and gently pat their flowing black skirts. The accents of the employes are wonderfully British, and if you ask for pens you will surely get "nibs." The old house has an air, which the English would spell "demeanour," and incidentally it has a wonderful faculty of hospitality.

From it you will drive out to the track, and if you elect you can find seats upon a tally-ho, drawn by four or six horses, properly prancing, just as they prance in old sporting-prints. Of course, there are ungainly motor-cars, like those in which the country folk explore Broadway, New York, but you will surely cling to the tally-ho. And if your tally-ho be halted in the long and dusty procession to the track to let a coach go flying by, if that coach be gay in gilt and color, white-horsed, postilioned, if rumor whispers loudly, "It's the Connaughts--the Governor-General, you know," you will forget for that moment your socialistic and republican ideas, and strain your old eyes for a single fleeting glimpse of bowing royalty.

For royalty drives to Plate Day just as royalty drives to Ascot. Its box, its manners and its footmen are hardly less impressive. And in the train of royalty comes the best of Toronto, not the worst. Finely dressed women, jurists, doctors, bankers--the list is a long, long one.

And in their train in turn the artisans. The plumber who tinkers with the pipes in your hotel in the morning has a dollar up on the "plate,"

so has the porter who handles your trunk, so have three-quarters of the trolley-car men of the town--and yet they are not gamblers. The "tout"

who used to be a disagreeable and painfully evident feature of New York racing is missing. So are the professional gamblers, the betting being on the _pari-mutuel_ system. And the man who loses his dollar because he failed to pick the winning horse feels that he has lost it in a patriotic cause. It should be worth a miserable dollar to see royalty come to the races in a coach.

From Toronto we will go to her staunch French rival, Montreal. If we are in the midsummer season we may go upon a very comfortable steamer, down the lonely Ontario and through the beauties of the Thousand Islands. And at all seasons we will find the railroad ride from Toronto filled with interest, with glimpses of lake and river, with the character of the country gradually changing, the severe Protestant churches giving way to great tin-roofed Roman churches, holding their crosses on high and gathering around their gray-stone walls the houses of their little flocks.

21

WHERE FRENCH AND ENGLISH MEET

Our hotel faces a little open square and in the springtime of the year, when the trees are barely budding, we can still see the sober gray-stone houses on the far side of the square, each with its brightly colored green blinds. At one is the "Dentiste," at another the "Avocat," a third has descended to a _pension_ with its "Chamber d'Louer." There are shiny bra.s.s signs on the front of each of these three old houses, and every morning at seven-thirty o'clock three trim little French Canadian maids attack the signs vigorously with their wiping cloths. Then we know that it is time to get up. By the same fashion we should be shaved and ready for our marmalade and bacon and eggs as the regal carrier of the King's mail trots down the steps of the French consulate and rings at the area door of the neighboring "Conservatoire Musicale." In a very little time that row of houses across the Place Viger Gardens has become a factor in our very lives. It is the starting-point of our days.

In the morning, when the marmalade and the bacon and eggs are finished, we step out into the Gardens for the first breath of crisp fresh air of the north. There is a line of wonderful cabs waiting at its edge, and a prompt driver steps forward from each to solicit our patronage. The cab system of Montreal is indeed wonderful--it first shows to the stranger within that city's gates its remarkable continental character. For you seemingly can ride and ride and ride--and then some more--and the cabby tips his hat at a quarter or a half a dollar. He has an engaging way of smiling at you at the end of the trip, and leaving it to you as to what he gets. You can trust to the Montreal cabby's sense of fairness and he seems to feel that he can trust to yours. But that is not all quite as altruistic as it may seem at first glance. Back of the cabby's smile is the unsmiling, sober sense of justice always existent in a British city, and it is that which really keeps the Montreal cab service as efficient as it really is, as cheap and as accessible. For at every one of the almost innumerable open squares of the city, are the cab-stands, the long line of patiently waiting carriages, and the little kiosk from which they can be summoned. It is all quite simple and complete and an ideal toward which metropolitan New York may be aspiring but has never reached.

On sunny mornings we scorn the cabs and stroll across the Gardens.

Sometimes we drop for a moment on one of the clumsily comfortable benches under the shade of the Canadian maples, and glance at the morning paper--a ponderous sheet much given to the news of Ottawa and London, discoursing upon the work of two Parliaments, but only granting grudging paragraphs to the news of a home-land, scarce sixty miles distant. That is British policy, the straining policy of trying to make a unified nation of lands separated from one another by broad seas. That England has done it so well is the marvel of strangers who enter her dominions. Montreal is loyal to her mother land, despite some local influences which we shall see in a moment. A surprising number of her citizens go back and forth to the little island that governs her, once or twice or three times a year. There are thousands of business men in the metropolis of Canada who know Pall Mall or Piccadilly far more intimately than either Wall street or Times square--and New York is but a night's ride from Montreal. So much can carefully directed sentiment accomplish.

The paths that lead from the Gardens are varied and fascinating. One stretches up a broad and sober street to Ste. Catherine's, the great shopping promenade of the town, where the girls are all bound west toward the big shops that stretch from Phillips to Dominion squares--another at the opposite direction three blocks to the south and the harbor-front, a wonderful place now in a chaos of transformation that is going to make Montreal the most efficient port in the world. We can remember the water-front of the old town as it first confronted us a quarter of a century ago, after a long all-day trip down the rapids of the upper St. Lawrence--back of the gay shipping a long stretch of sober gray limestone buildings, accented by numerous domes, the joy of every British architect, the long straight front of Bonsecours market, the little spire of Bonsecours church, and the two great towers of Notre Dame rising above it all. There was a curving wall of stone along the quay street and it all seemed quite like the geography pictures of Liverpool, or was it Ma.r.s.eilles?

[Ill.u.s.tration: A church parade in the streets of Montreal]

Nowadays that quiet prospect is gone. A great waterside elevator of concrete rises almost two hundred and fifty feet into the air from the quay street; there are other elevators nearly as large and nearly as sky-sc.r.a.ping, a variety of grim and covered piers and the man from a boat amidstream hardly catches even a glimpse of Notre Dame or Bonsecours. And Montreal gave up her glimpses of the river that she loves so pa.s.sionately, not without a note of regret; the market-men gently protested that they could no longer sit on the portico of the Bonsecours and see the brisk activity of the harbor. But Montreal realizes the importance of her harbor to her. She is a thousand miles inland from "blue water" and for five months of the year her great strength giving river is tightly frozen; despite these obstacles she has come within the past year to be the most efficient port in the world, and among twelve or fourteen of the greatest. And commercial power is a laurel branch to any British city.

There are other paths that lead from Place Viger Gardens--that lead on and on and to no place in particular, but all of them are filled with constant interest. The side streets of Montreal are fascinating. Their newer architecture is apt to be fantastic, ofttimes incongruous, but there are still many graystone houses in that simple British style that is still found throughout the older Canada, all the way from Halifax to the Detroit river. There are the inevitable maple trees along the curbs that make Montreal more of a garden city than un.o.bservant travelers are apt to fancy it. And then there are the inst.i.tutions, wide-spreading and many-winged fellows, crowned with the inevitable domes and shielded from the vulgarity of street traffic by high-capped walls. These walls are distinctive of Montreal. Often uncompromising, save where some gentle vine runs riot upon their lintels and laughs at their austerity, they are broken here and there and again by tightly shut doors, doors that open only to give forth on rare occasions; to let a somber file of nuns or double one of cheaply uniformed children pa.s.s out into a sordid and sin-filled world, and then close quickly once again lest some of its contaminations might penetrate the gentle and unworldly place. And near these great inst.i.tutions are the inevitable churches, giant affairs--parish churches still dominating the sky-line of a town which is just now beginning to dabble in American skysc.r.a.pers, and standing ever watchful, like a mother hen brooding and protecting her chicks.

These chance paths often lead to other squares than the Gardens of the Place Viger--squares which in spring and in summer are bright green carpets spread in little open places in the heart and length and breadth of the city, and which are surrounded by more of the solid graystone houses with the green blinds. When we go from Montreal we shall remember it as a symphony of gray and green--remember it thus forever and a day.

But best of all we like the path that leads from the Place Viger west through the very heart of the old city and then by strange zig-zags, through the banking center, Victoria square, Beaver Hall Hill and smart Ste. Catherine's to Dominion square and the inevitable afternoon tea of the British end of the town. We turn from our hotel and the great new railroad terminal that it shelters, twist through a narrow street--picturesquely named the Champ d'Mars--and follow it to the plain and big City Hall and Court House. They are uninteresting to us, but across the busy way of Notre Dame street stands the Chateau de Ramezay, a long, low, whitewashed building, which has had its part in the making of Montreal. This stoutly built old house was built in 1705 by Claude de Ramezay, Governor of Montreal, and was occupied by him for twenty years while he planned his campaigns against both English and Indians. Then for a time it was the headquarters of the India company's trade in furs, and for a far longer time after 1759 the home of a succession of British governors. Americans find their keenest interest in the Chateau de Ramezay, in the fact that it was in its long rambling low-ceilinged rooms that Benjamin Franklin set up his printing-press, away back during the days of the first unpleasantness between England and this country.

After that, all was history, the Chateau was again the Government House of the old Canada--until Ottawa and the new Dominion came into existence. Nowadays, it faces one of the busiest streets of a busy city--and is not of it. It is like a sleeping man by the roadside, who, if he might awake once more, could spin at length the romances of other days and other men.

Beyond the Chateau de Ramezay is a broad and open market street that stretches from the inevitable Nelson monument, that is part and pride of every considerable British city, down to that same water-front, just now in process of transformation. Sometimes on a Tuesday or a Friday morning we have come to the place early enough to see the open-air market of Montreal, one of the heritages of past to present that seems little disturbed with the coming and the pa.s.sing of the years. Shrewd shoppers coming out of the solid stone ma.s.s of the Bonsecours pause beside the wagons that are backed along the broad-flagged sidewalks. The country roundabout Montreal must be filled with fat farms. One look at the wagons tells of low moist acres that have not yet lost their fertility.

And sometimes the market women bring to the open square hats of their own crude weaving, or little carved crosses, or even bunches of delicate wild-flowers and sell them for the big round Canadian pennies. There is hardly any barterable article too humble for this market-place, and with it all the clatter of small sharp pleasant talk between a race of small, sharp, pleasant folk.

From the market-place leading out from before the ugly City Hall and the uninteresting Court House, our best walk leads west through Notre Dame street up to the nearby Place d'Armes. It is a very old street of a very old city and even if the history of the town did not tell us that some of the old houses, staunch fellows every one of them, high-roofed and dormered, with their graystone walls four and five feet thick and as rough and rugged as the times for which they were built, would convince us, of themselves. They are fast going, these old fellows, for Montreal has entered upon boom times with the multiplication of transcontinental railroads across Canada. But it seems but yesterday that they could point to us in the Place d'Armes the very house in which lived LaMothe Cadillac, the founder of Detroit, nearby the house of Sieur Duluth.

Montreal seems almost to have been the mother of a continent.

It is in this Place d'Armes, this tiny crowded square in the center of the modern city, hardly larger than the garden of a very modest house indeed, that so many of the romantic memories of the old Montreal cl.u.s.ter. With the great church that has thrust its giant shadow across it for more than three quarters of a century, the Place d'Armes has been the heart of Montreal since the days when it was a mere trading post, a collection of huts at the foot of the lowest rapids of the mighty river.

Much of the old Montreal has gone, even the citadel at the west end of the town gave way years ago to Dalhousie square, which in turn gave way to the railroad yards of the Place Viger terminals. But the Place d'Armes will remain as long as the city remains.

At its northwest corner is the colonnaded front of the Bank of Montreal, one of the finest banking-homes in Canada.

"It is the great inst.i.tution of this British Dominion," says a very old Canadian, whom we sometimes meet in the little square. "It is the greatest bank in North America."

Offhand, we do not know as to the exact truth of that sweeping statement, but it is a certain fact that the Bank of Montreal is the greatest bank in all Canada, one of the greatest in the world, with its branches and ramifications extending not only across a continent four thousand miles in width but also over two broad seas. To Montreal it stands as that famous "old lady of Threadneedle street" stands to London.

"And yet," our Canadian friend continues, "right across the Place d'Armes here is an inst.i.tution that could buy and sell the Bank of Montreal--or better still, buy it and keep it."

Our eyes follow his pointing hand--to a long, low building on the south side of the little square. It is very old and exceeding quaint. Although built of the graystone of Montreal, brought by the soot of many years to almost a dead black, it seems of another land as well as of another time. Its quaint belfry with delicate clock-face and out-set hands is redolent of the south of France or Spain or even Italy. It does not seem a part and parcel of Our Lady of the Snows--and yet it is.

"You know--the Seminary of St. Sulpice," says our Canadian friend. "It was the original owner of the rich island of Montreal. No one knows its wealth today, even after it has parted with many of its fee-holds. It still holds t.i.tle to thousands of acres and no one save the Gentleman of the Corporation of St. Sulpice, themselves, knows the wealth of the inst.i.tution. To say that it is the richest ecclesiastical inst.i.tution of the Americas is not enough, for here is an organization that for coherency, wealth and strength surpa.s.ses Standard Oil and forms the chief financial support of the strongest church in the world."

And this time we feel that our acquaintance of the Place d'Armes is not by any chance over-stepping the mark. In the quaint little Seminary that stands in the half-day shadow of the second largest church on the continent--a church that it easily builded in the first third of the nineteenth century from its acc.u.mulated wealth--there centers much of the mystery of Montreal, a mystery which to the stranger takes concrete form in the high walls along the crowded streets, in whispered rumors of this force or that working within the politics of the city, in the so-called Nationalist movement, and flaunts itself in rival displays of Union Jack and the historic Tricolor of France. There is little of mystery in the outer form of the Seminary. The quiet folk who live within those very, very old walls are hospitality itself--even though their ascetic living is of the hardest, crudest sort. The only bed and carpeted room within the building is reserved for the occasional visits of bishop, or even higher church authority. But hidden from the street by the earliest part of the Seminary--almost unchanged since its erection in 1710--and enclosed by a quadrangle of the fortress-like stone buildings of the inst.i.tution, is a most delicious garden with old-fashioned summer flowers and quaint statues of favored saints set in its shaded place. We remember a garden of the same sort at the mission of Santa Barbara, in California. These two are the most satisfactory gardens that we have ever seen. And it is from the rose-bushes in the Seminary of Montreal that one gets a full idea of the size and beauty of the exterior of the parish church of Notre Dame. Like so many of the cathedrals of Europe, it is so set as to have no satisfactory view-point from the street.

And yet Notre Dame is one of the most satisfying churches that we have ever seen. It is not alone its size, not alone its wonderfully appropriate location facing that historic Place d'Armes, not any one of the interesting details of the great structure that comes to us, so much as the thing which the parish church typifies--the intact keeping of the customs, the language and the faith of a folk who were betrayed and deserted by their motherland, more than a century and a half ago. One rarely hears the word of English spoken in the shadowy and worshipful aisles of Notre Dame. It is the babbling French that is the language of three-quarters of the residents of Montreal.

For there stands French, not only entrenched in the chief city of England's chief possession, but a language that, in the opinion of unprejudiced observers, gains rather than loses following each twelvemonth. There are reasons back of all this, and many of them too complicated and involved to be entered upon here. Suffice it to say here and now that the city school taxes are divided pro rata between Protestants and Roman Catholics for the conduct of their several schools of every sort. And that in most of the Catholic schools French is practically the only language taught, a half-hour a day being sometimes given to English, whenever it is taught at all. The devotion of these French Canadians to their language is only second to their religion, and is closely intermingled with it. There is something pathetic and lovable about it all that makes one understand why the _habitans_ of a little town below Montreal tore down the English sign that the Dominion government erected over their Post Office, a year or so ago. And the Dominion government took the hint, made no fuss, but replaced its error with a French sign. Remember that there are more Tricolors floating in lower Canada than British Union Jacks.

The signs of Montreal point the truth. Half of the street markers must be in English, half in French, just as the city government that places them divides its proceedings, half in one language, half in the other.

This even division runs to the street car transfers and notices, the flaring bulletins on sign-boards and dead-walls, even so stolid a British inst.i.tution as the Harbor Commissioners giving the sides of its brigade of dock locomotives evenly to the rival tongues.

To attend high ma.s.s in Notre Dame is to make a memory well-nigh ineffaceable. It is to bring back in future years recollections of a great church, lifted from its week-day shadows by a wealth of dazzling incandescents, to be ushered past silent, kneeling figures to a stout pew, by a stout _Suisse_ in gaudy uniform; to look to a high altar that stands afar and ablaze with candles, while priests and acolytes, by the hundreds, pa.s.s before it chanting, and the Cardinal sits aloft on his throne silent and in adoration; to hear not a word of English from that high place or the folk who sit upon the great floor or in the two encircling galleries, but to catch the refrain of chant and of "Te Deum;" these are the things that seem to make religion common to every man, no matter what his professed faith. And then, after it is all over, to come out of the shadows of the parish church into the brilliant sunshine of the Place d'Armes, the place where they once executed murderers under the old French law by breaking their backs and then their lesser bones, and to hear Gros Bourdon sing his chant over the city from the belfry of Notre Dame--this is the old Montreal living in the heart of the new. They do not swing the great bell any more--for even Notre Dame grows old and its aged stones must be respected--but they toll it rapidly, in a sort of sing-song chant. We have stood in the west end of the town, three miles distant from the Place d'Armes, and heard the rich, sweet tones of his deep throat come booming over the crowded city--a warning to a half a million folk to turn from worldier things to the thought of mighty G.o.d.

Our best path leads west again from the Place d'Armes, past the newly reconstructed General Post Office, more stately banks here concentrating the wealth of the strong, new Canada; smart British-looking shops and restaurants. In these last you may drink fine ales, munch at rare cheeses, of which Montreal is _connoisseur_, and eat rare roast beef done to a turn, with Yorkshire pudding, six days in a week. But you will look in vain for real French restaurants with their delectable _cuisines_. We have looked in vain in our almost innumerable trips to the city under the mountain. We have enlisted our friend Paul, who avers that he knows Montreal as he knows the fingers on his hand. Paul is a reporter on a French paper. He works not more than fourteen consecutive hours on dull days, at a princely salary of nine dollars a week, and the rest of the time he is our entertainment committee--and an immense success at that. Paul has taught us a smattering of Montreal French, and he has shown us many curious places about the old city, but he has never found us a French restaurant that could even compare with some we know in the vicinity of West Twenty-seventh street in the city of New York. Sometimes he has come to us with mysterious hints of final success and we have girded our loins quickly to go with him. But when we have arrived it has been a place white-fronted like the dairy lunches off from Broadway, and we have never seen one of them without the listing of breakfast foods from Battle Creek, Michigan, mince-pie or other typical dishes from the States. And at Paul's rarest find we interviewed _Monsieur le proprietaire_, only to have the dashing news that he had once served as second _chef_ in the old Burnet House, in Cincinnati. There is, after all, a closer bond between two neighboring nations than either Ottawa or London is willing to admit and even Paul, loyal to his language and to his traditions, admits that.

"Some day--some day," he dreams to us between cigarettes, "I am going down to see the Easter parade on Fifth avenue. Last year twelve thousand went from Montreal"--he chuckles--"and folks from Bordeaux ward looked at the swells from Westmount and thought they were real New Yorkers."

And a little while later, between another change of cigarettes, he adds:

"And I may not come back on my ticket. I understand--that reporters get fifteen or twenty dollars a week on the New York city papers."

Paul's collar is impossible and his appet.i.te for cigarettes fiendish, but he has ambitions. Perhaps he shares the ambitions of the city which, old in heart and traditions, is new in enterprise and hope, and looks forward to being the mighty gateway of the greatest of all English great possessions--a city filled with more than a million folk.

We pa.s.s through the splendors of Victoria square and up the steep turn of Beaver Hall Hill into Phillips square and smart Ste. Catherine street. In a general way, the French element have preempted the eastern end of the city for themselves, while the English-speaking portion of the population clings to the section north and west of Phillips square and Ste. Catherine street right up to the first steep slopes of Mount Royal. This part of the city looks like any smart, progressive British town--with its fine Gothic Cathedral of the Church of England facing its showy main street, its exclusive clubs and its great hotels. And nowadays smart modern restaurants are also crowding upon Ste. Catherine street, for modern Montreal will proudly tell you, and tell you again and again, that it is more continental, far more continental than London, which in turn is tightly bound down by the traditions of English conservatism. Montreal is not very literary--Toronto surpa.s.sing it in that regard--but it has a keen love of good paintings, good art of every sort. It ranks itself next to New York and Boston and among North American cities in this regard.

"We are more proud of our public and private galleries," says the citizen of the town who sips tea at five o'clock with you in the lounge of the Windsor, "than we are of our New Yorkish restaurants that have imported themselves across the line within the past year or two. We have smiled at our daughters drifting in here for their tea on matinee afternoons, but dinners and American c.o.c.ktails--well there are some sorts of reciprocity that we decidedly do not want."

We understand. Montreal wants her personality, her rare and varied personality, preserved inviolate and intact. That is one great reason why she has cherished the pro-British habits of her press. New York is well enough for a trip--Montreal delights in our metropolis, as she does in our Atlantic City--as mere pleasure grounds, and the Easter hegira, in which Paul is yet to join, grows each year. But New York is New York, and Montreal must be Montreal. With her wealth of tradition, her peculiarly unique conservatism of two languages and two great peoples working out their problems in common sympathy, without conceding a single heritage, one to the other, the city of the gray and green must keep to her own path.