Westward with the Prince of Wales Part 21

The visitors take their own food, and use these articles. The Chinese cook at the house near by provides boiling water, and all the owner asks is that those who use his crockery shall wash it up at the sink provided, and with the dish-cloths provided, and leave it in readiness for the next comer.

That generosity is the final and completing touch to the charm of that exquisite place, which is a veritable "Garden of Allah" amid the beauties of Canadian scenery.

Another drive was over the Malahat Pa.s.s, through superb country, to a big lumber camp on Shawnigan Lake. Here we saw the whole of the operations of lumbering from the point where a logger notches a likely tree for cutting to the final moment when Chinese workmen feed the great trunks to the steam saw that hews them into beams and planks.

Having selected a tree, the first logger cuts into it a deep wedge which is to give it direction in its fall. These men show an almost uncanny skill. They get the line of a great tree with the handle of their axes, as an artist uses a pencil, and they can cut their notches so accurately that they can "fall" a tree on a pocket-handkerchief.

Two men follow this expert. They cut smaller notches in the tree, and insert their "boards" into it. These "boards" have a steel claw which bites into the tree when the men stand on the board, the idea being both to raise the cutters above the sprawling roots, and to give their swing on the saw an elasticity. It is because they cut so high that Canada is covered with tall stumps that make clearing a problem. The stumps are generally dynamited, or torn up by the roots by cables that pa.s.s through a block on the top of a tree to the winding-drum of a donkey-engine.

When the men at the saw have cut nearly through the tree, they sing out a drawling, musical "Stand aw-ay," gauging the moment with the skill of woodsmen, for there is no sign to the lay eye. In a few moments the giant tree begins to fall stiffly. It moves slowly, and then with its curious rigidity tears swiftly through the branches of neighbouring trees, coming to the ground with a thump very much like the sound of an H.E. sh.e.l.l, and throwing up a red cloud of torn bark. The sight of a tree falling is a moving thing; it seems almost cruel to bring it down.

A donkey-engine mounted on big logs, that has pulled itself into place by the simple method of anchoring its steel rope to a distant tree--and pulling, jerks the great trunks out of the heart of the forest. A block and tackle are hitched to the top of a tall tree that has been left standing in a clearing, and the steel ropes are placed round the fallen trunks. As this lifting line pulls them from their resting-place, they come leaping and jerking forward, charging down bushes, rising over stumps, dropping and hurdling over mounds until it seems that they are actually living things struggling to escape. The ubiquitous donkey-engine loads the great logs on trucks, and an engine, not very much bigger than a donkey-engine, tows the long cars of timber down over a sketchy track to the waterside.

Here the loads are tipped with enormous splashes into the water to wait in the "booms" until they are wanted at the mill. Then they are towed across, sure-footed men jump on to them and steer them to the big chute, where grappling teeth catch them and pull them up until they reach the sawing platform. They are jerked on to a movable truck, that grips them, and turns them about with mechanical arms into the required position for cutting, and then log and truck are driven at the saw blade, which slices beams or planks out of the primitive trunk with an almost sinister ease.

Uncanny machines are everywhere in this mill. Machines carve shingles and battens or billets with an almost human accuracy. A conveyor removes all sawdust from the danger of lights with mechanical intelligence. Another carries off all the sc.r.a.pwood and takes it away to a safe place in the mill yard where a big, wire-hooded furnace, something like a straight hop oast-house, burns every sc.r.a.p of it.

The life in the lumber camp is a hard life, but it is well paid, it is independent, and the food is a revelation. The loggers' lunch we were given was a meal fit for gourmets. It was in a rough pitch-pine hut at rough tables. Clam-soup was served to us in cylindrical preserved meat cans on which the maker's labels still clung--but it lost none of its delightful flavour for that. Beef was served cut in strips in a great bowl, and we all reached out for the vegetables. There were mammothine bowls of mixed salad possessing an astonishing (to British eyes) lavishness of hard-boiled egg, lemon pie (lemon curd pie) with a whipped-egg crown, deep apple pie (the logger eats pie--which many people will know better as "tart"--three times a day), a marvellous fruit salad in jelly, and the finest selection of plums, peaches, apples, and oranges I had seen for a long day.

I was told that this was the regular meal of the loggers, and I know it was cooked by a chef (there is a French or Belgian or Canadian chef in most logging camps), for I talked with him. To live in a lonely forest, in a shack, and to work tremendously hard, may not be all the life a man wants, but it has compensations.

I understand that just about then the lumbermen were p.r.o.ne to striking.

In one place they were demanding sheets, and in another they had refused to work because, having ordered two cases of eggs from a store, the tradesman had only been able to send the one he had in stock.

While we were in this camp we had some experience of the danger of forest fires. We had walked up to the head of the clearing, when one of the men of a group we had left working a short distance behind, came running up to say a fire had started. We went back, and in a place where, ten minutes before, there had been no sign of fire, flames and smoke were rising over an area of about one hundred yards square.

Little tongues of flame were racing over the "slashings" (_i.e._, the debris of bark and splintered limbs that litter an area which has been cut), snakes of flame were writhing up standing trees, sparks blown by the wind were dropping into the dry "slashings" twenty, thirty and fifty yards away and starting fresh fires. We could see with what incredible rapidity these fires travelled, and how dangerous they can be once they are well alight. This fire was surrounded, and got under with water and shovelled earth, but we were shown a big stretch of hillside which another such fire had swept bare in a little under two hours. The summer is the dangerous time, for "slashings" and forests are then dry, and one chance spark from a badly screened donkey-engine chimney will start a blaze. When the fire gets into wet and green wood it soon expires.

These drives, for us, were the major events in an off time, for there was very little happening until the night of the 28th, when we went on board the _Princess Alice_ again, to start on our return journey.

CHAPTER XVIII

APPLE LAND: OKANAGAN AND KOOTENAY LAKES

I

On Monday, September 29th, the Prince of Wales returned to Vancouver and took car to New Westminster, the old capital of British Columbia before picturesque Victoria a.s.sumed the reins.

New Westminster was having its own festival that day, so the visit was well timed. The local exhibition was to begin, and the Prince was to perform the opening ceremony. Under many fine arches, one a tall torii, erected by Chinese and j.a.panese Canadians, the procession of cars pa.s.sed through the town, on a broad avenue that runs alongside the great Fraser River. Drawn up at the curb were many floats that were to take part in the trades' procession through the town to the exhibition grounds. Most of them were ingenious and attractive. There were telegraph stations on wagons, corn dealers' shops, and the like, while on the bonnet of one car was a doll nurse, busy beside a doll bed.

Another automobile had turned itself into an aeroplane, while another had obliterated itself under a giant bully beef can to advertise a special kind of tinned meat.

All cars were decorated with ma.s.ses of spruce and maple leaf, now beautiful in autumn tints of crimson and gold. And Peace and Britannia, of course, were there with attendant angels and nations, comely girls whose celestial and symbolical garments did not seem to be the right fashion for a day with more than a touch of chill in the air.

Through this avenue of fantasy, colour and cheery humanity the Prince drove through the town, which seems to have the air of brooding over its past, to the exhibition ground, which he opened, and where he presented medals to many soldiers.

II

From New Westminster the Royal train struck upward through the Rocky Mountains by way of the Kettle Valley. It pa.s.sed through a land of terrific and magnificent scenery. It equalled anything we had seen in the more famous beauty spots, but it was more savage. The valleys appeared closer knit and deeper, and the sharp and steep mountains pinched the railway and river gorges together until we seemed to be creeping along the floor of a mighty pa.s.sage-way of the dark, aboriginal G.o.ds.

Again and again the train was hanging over the deep, misted cauldron of the valley, again and again it slipped delicately over the span of cobweb across the sky that is a Canadian bridge. In this land of steep gradients, sharp curves and lattice bridges, the train was divided into two sections, and each, with two engines to pull it, climbed through the mountain pa.s.ses.

This tract of country has only within the last few years been tapped by a railway that seems even yet to have to fight its way forward against Nature, barbarous, splendid and untamed. It was built to the usual ideal of Canada, that vision which ignores the handicaps of today for the promise of tomorrow. Yet even today it taps the rich lake valleys where mining and general farming is carried on, and where there are miles of orchards already growing some of the finest apples and peaches in Canada.

On the morning of Tuesday, September 30th, the train climbed down from the higher and rougher levels to Penticton, a small, bright, growing town that stands as focus for the immense fruit-growing district about Okanagan Lake.

Here, after a short ceremony, the Prince boarded the steamer _Sicamous_, a lake boat of real Canadian brand; a long white vessel built up in an extraordinary number of tiers, so that it looked like an elaborate wedding-cake, but a useful craft whose humpy stern paddle-wheel can push her through a six-foot shallow or deep water with equal dispatch. And a delightfully comfortable boat into the bargain, with well-sheltered and s.p.a.cious decks, cosy cabins and bath-rooms, and a big dining saloon, which, placed in the very centre of the ship with the various galleries of the decks rising around it, has an air of belonging to one of those attractive old d.i.c.kensian inns.

On this vessel the Prince was carried the whole length of Okanagan Lake, which winds like a blue fillet between mountains for seventy miles. On the ledges and in the tight valleys of these heights he saw the formal ranks of a mult.i.tude of orchards.

A short distance along the lake the _Sicamous_ pulled in to the toy quay of Summerland, a town born of and existing for fruit, and linked up with the outer world by the C.P.R. Lake Service that owned our own vessel.

All the children of Summerland had collected on the quayside to sing to and to cheer the Prince, and, as he stood on the upper deck and waved his hat cheerfully at them, they cheered a good deal more. When he went ash.o.r.e and was taken by the grown-up Olympians to examine the grading and packing sheds, where the fruits of all the orchards are handled and graded by mechanical means, prepared for the market, and sold on the co-operative plan, the kiddies exchanged sallies with those waiting on the vessel, flipped big apples up at them, and cheered or jeered as they were caught or missed.

The _Sicamous_ went close insh.o.r.e at Peachland, another daughter town of Mother Fruit, to salute the crowd of people who had come out from the pretty bungalow houses that nestle among the green trees on a low and pretty sh.o.r.e, and who stood on the quay in a ma.s.s to send a cheer to him.

At Okanagan Landing, at the end of the lake, he took car to Vernon, a purposeful and attractive town which is the commercial heart of the apple industry. Indeed, there was no need to ask the reason for Vernon's being. Even the decorations were wrought out of apples, and under an arch of bright, cherry-red apples the Prince pa.s.sed on to the sports ground, and on to a platform the corner posts of which were crowned with pyramids of apples, and in the centre of which was a model apple large enough to suit the appet.i.te of Gargantua.

In front of this platform was a grand stand crowded with children of all races from Scandinavian to Oriental, and these sang with the resistless heartiness of Canada. The Oriental is a pretty useful a.s.set in British Columbia, for in addition to his gifts of industry he is an excellent agriculturist.

After the ceremonies the Prince had an orgy of orchards.

Fruit growing is done with a large gesture. The orchards are neat and young and huge. In a run of many miles the Prince pa.s.sed between ma.s.ses of precisely aligned trees, and every tree was thick with bright and gleaming red fruit. Thick, indeed, is a mild word. The short trees seemed practically all fruit, as though they had got into the habit of growing apples instead of leaves. Many of the branches bore so excessive a burden that they had been torn out by the weight of the fruit upon them.

It was a marvellous pageant of fruit in ma.s.s. And the apples themselves were of splendid quality, big and firm and glowing, each a perfect specimen of its school. We were able to judge because the land-girls, after tossing ap.r.o.ns full of specimens (not always accurately) into the Prince's car, had enough ammunition left over for the automobiles that followed.

Attractive land girls they were, too. Not garbed like British land-girls, but having all their dashing qualities. Being Canadians they carried the love of silk stockings on to the land, and it was strange to see this feminine extremity under the blue linen overall trousers or knickers. They were cheery, sun-tanned, laughing girls.

They were ready for the Prince at every gate and every orchard fence, eager and ready to supplement their gay enthusiasm with this apple confetti.

The Prince stopped here and there to chat with fruit growers, and to congratulate them on their fine showing. Now he stopped to talk to a wounded officer, who had been so cruelly used in the war that he had to support himself on two sticks. Now he stopped to pa.s.s a "How d'y' do"

to a mob of trousered land-girls who gathered brightly about his car, showing himself as laughing and as cheerful as they.

The cars left the land of growing apples and turned down the lake in a superb run of thirty-six miles to Kelowna. This road skirts fairyland.

It winds high up on a shoulder above Long Lake, that makes a floor of living azure between the b.u.t.tresses and slopes of the mountains. Only when it is tired of the heights does it drop to the lake level, and sweeping through a filigree of trees, speeds along a road that is but an inch or two above the still mirror of Wood Lake, on the polished surface of which there is a delicate fret of small, rocky islets. So, in magnificent fashion, he came to Kelowna, and the _Sicamous_, that carried him back to the train.

III

Through the night and during the next morning the train carried the Prince deeper in the mountains, skirting in amazing loops, when the train seemed almost to be biting its tail, steep rocky cliffs above white torrents, or the shining blue surfaces of lakes such as Arrow Lake, that formed the polished floor of valleys. Now and then we pa.s.sed purposeful falls, and by them the power houses that won light and motive force for the valley towns from the falling water. There are those who fear the harnessing of water-power, because it may mean the spoiling of beautiful scenery. Such buildings as I saw in no way marred the view, but rather added to it a touch of human picturesqueness.

Creeping down the levels, with discretion at the curves, the train came in the rain to Nelson on Wednesday, October 1st. Rain spoilt the reception at Nelson, a town that thrives upon the agricultural and mining products of the hills about. There seemed to be a touch of mining grey in the air of the town, but, as in all towns of Canada, no sense of unhappiness, no sense of poverty--indeed, in the whole of Canada I saw five beggars and no more (though, of course, there may have been more). Of these one man was blind, and two were badly crippled soldiers.

There are no poor in Nelson, so I was told, and no unemployed.

"If a man's unemployed," said a Councillor with a twinkle in his eye, "he's due for the penitentiary. With labourers getting five dollars a day, and being able to demand it because of the scarcity of their kind, when a man who says he can't find work has something wrong with him ...

as a matter of fact the penitentiary idea is only speculative. There's never been a test case of this kind."