Westward with the Prince of Wales Part 3

He was one of a number of kiddies occupied in the national sport of Halifax--bathing. He and his friends spotted the Prince and his party before that party saw them. Being a person of ac.u.men the wise kid immediately "placed" His Royal Highness, and saw the opportunity for financial operations.

"Betcher ten cents that's the Prince of Wales," he said, accommodating the whole group, whereupon the inevitable sceptic retorted:

"Naw, that ain't no Prince. Anyhow he doesn't come till tomorrow, see."

"Is the Prince, I tell you," insisted the plunger. "And see here, betcher another ten cents I goes and asks him."

The second as well as the first bet was taken. And both were won.

This is not the only story connected with the Sunday stroll of the Prince. Another, and perhaps a romantic version of the same one, was that it was the Prince who made and lost the bet. He was said to have come upon not boys but girls bathing. Seeing one of them poised skirted and stockinged, for all the world as though she were the authentic bathing girl on the cover of an American magazine, ready to dive, he bet her a cool twenty that she dare not take her plunge from the highest board.

This story may be true or it may be, well, Canadian. I mean by that it may be one of the jolly stories that Canadians from the very beginning began to weave about the personality of His Royal Highness. It is, indeed, an indication of his popularity that he became the centre of a host of yarns, true or apocryphal, that followed him and acc.u.mulated until they became almost a saga by the time the tour was finished.

II

In this short stroll the Prince saw much of a town that is certainly worth seeing.

Halifax on the first impact has a drab air that comes as a shock to those who sail through the sharp, green hills of the Narrows and see the hilly peninsula on which the town is built hanging graciously over the sparkling blue waters of one of the finest and greatest harbours in the world.

From the water the multi-coloured ma.s.sing of the houses is broken up and softened by the vividness of the parks and the green billowing of the trees that line most of the streets. Landing, the newcomer is at once steeped in the depressing air of a seaport town that has not troubled to keep its houses in the brightest condition. As many of those houses are of wood, the youthful sparkle of which vanishes in the maturity of ill-kept paintwork, the first impression of Halifax is actually more melancholy than it deserves to be.

The long drive through Water Street from the docks, moreover, merely lands one into a business centre where the effect of many good buildings is spoilt by the narrowness of the streets. Such a condition of things is no doubt unavoidable in a town that is both commercial and old, but those who only see this side of Halifax had better appreciate the fact that the city is Canadian and new also, and that there are residential districts that are as comely and as up-to-date as anywhere in the Western Continent.

Halifax certainly blends history and business in a way to make it the most English of towns. It is like nothing so much as a seaport in the North of England plus a Canadian accent.

There is the same packed ma.s.s movement of a lively polyglot people through the streets. There is the same keen appet.i.te for living that sends people out of doors to walk in contact with their fellows under the light of the many-globed electric standards that line the sidewalk.

There is the same air of bright prosperity in the glowing and vivacious light of the fine and tasteful shops. They are good shops, and their windows are displayed with an artistry that one finds is characteristic throughout Canada. They offer the latest and smartest ideas in blouses and gowns, jewellery and boots and cameras--I should like to find out what percentage of the population of the American Continent does not use a camera--and men's shirtings, shirtings that one views with awe, shirtings of silk with emotional stripes and futuristic designs, and collars to match the shirts, the sort of shirts that Solomon in all his glory seems to have designed for festival days.

At night, certainly, the streets of Halifax are bright and vivid, and the people in them good-humoured, laughing and st.u.r.dy, with that contempt of affectation that is characteristic of the English north.

The bustle and vividness as well as the greyness of Halifax lets one into the open secret that it is a great industrial port of Canada, and an all-the-year-round port at that, yet it is the greyness and narrowness of the streets that tells you that Halifax is also history.

In the old buildings, and their straggled frontage, is written the fact that the city grew up before modernity set its mark on Canada in the s.p.a.cious and broad planning of townships.

It was, for years, the garrison of Britain in the Americas. Since the day when Cornwallis landed in 1749 with his group of settlers to secure the key harbour on the Eastern seaboard of America until the Canadians themselves took over its garrisoning, it was the military and naval base of our forces. And in that capacity it has formed part of the stage setting for every phase of the Western historical drama.

It was the rendezvous of Wolfe before Quebec; it played a part in the American War of Independence; it was a refuge for the United Empire Loyalists; British ships used it as a base in the war of 1812; from its anchorage the bold and crafty blockade runners slipped south in the American Civil War, and its citizens grew fat through those adventurous voyages. It has been the host of generations of great seamen from Cook, who navigated Wolfe's fleet up the St. Lawrence, to Nelson. It housed the survivors of the _t.i.tanic_, and was the refuge of the _Mauretania_ when the beginning of the Great War found her on the high seas. It has had German submarines lying off the Narrows, so close that it saw torpedoed crews return to its quays only an hour or so after their ships had sailed.

III

The Prince of Wales was himself a link in Halifax's history. Not merely had his great-great grandfather, the Duke of Kent, commanded at the Citadel, but when he landed he stepped over the inscribed stone commemorating the landing on that spot of his grandfather on July 30th, 1860, and his father in 1901.

His Royal Highness made his official landing in the Naval Dockyard on the morning of Monday, August 18th. As he landed he was saluted by the guns of three nations, for two French war sloops and the fine Italian battleship _Cavour_, which had come to Halifax to be present during his visit, joined in when the guns on sh.o.r.e and on the British warship saluted.

At the landing stage the reception was a quiet one, only notabilities and guards of honour occupying the Navy Yard, but this quietness was only the prelude to a day of sheer hustle.

The crowd thickened steadily until he arrived in the heart of the city, when it resolved itself into a jam of people that the narrow streets failed to accommodate. This crowd, as in most towns of Canada, believed in a "close up" view. Even when there is plenty of s.p.a.ce the onlookers move up to the centre of the street, allowing a pa.s.sageway of very little more than the breadth of a motor-car. Policemen of broad and indulgent mind are present to keep the crowd in order, and when policemen give out, war veterans in khaki or "civvies" and boy scouts string the line, but all--policemen, veterans and scouts--so mixing with the crowd that they become an indistinguishable part of it, so that it is all crowd, cheery and friendly and most intimate in its greeting. That was the air of the Halifax crowd.

It always seemed to me that after the roaring greeting of the streets the formal civic addresses of welcome were acts of supererogation. Yet there is no doubt as to the dignity and colour of these functions.

From the packed street the Prince pa.s.sed into the great chamber of the Provincial Parliament Building, where there seemed an air of soft, red twilight compounded from the colour of the walls and the old pictures, as well as from the robes and uniforms of the dignitaries and the gowns of the many ladies.

As ceremonies these welcomes were always short, though there was always a number of presentations made, and the Prince was soon in the open again. In the open there were war veterans to inspect, for in whatever town he entered, large or small or remote, there was always a good showing of Canadians who had served and won honours in Europe.

Everywhere, in great cities or in a hamlet that was no more than a scattering of homesteads round a prairie's siding, His Royal Highness showed a particular keenness to meet these soldiers. They were his own comrades in arms, as he always called them, and when he said that he meant it, for he never willingly missed an opportunity of getting among them and resuming the comradeship he had learned to value at the Front.

In most towns, as in Halifax, his round of visits always included the hospitals. His car took him through the bright sunshine of the Halifax streets to these big and very efficient buildings, where he went through the wards, chatting here and there to a cot or a convalescent patient, and not forgetting the natty Canadian nurses or the doctors, or even, as in one of the hospitals on this day, a patient lying in a tent in the grounds outside the radius of the visit.

In Halifax, also, there was another grim fact of the war which called for special attention; that was the area devastated by the terrible explosion of a ship in the docks in December, 1917.

The party left the main streets to climb over the shoulder of the peninsula to where the ruined area stood. It is to the north of the town, on the side of the hill that curves largely to the very water's edge. Down off the docks, and an immense distance away it seems from the slope of ruin, a steamer loaded with high explosive collided with another, caught fire and blew up, and on the entire bosom of that slope can be seen what that gigantic detonation accomplished.

The force of the explosion swept up the hill and the wooden houses went down like things of card. In the trail of the explosion followed fire.

As the plank houses collapsed the fires within them ignited their frail fabric and the entire hillside became a ma.s.s of flames.

The Prince looked upon a hill set with scars in rows, the rock foundations of houses that had been. Houses had, in the main, disappeared, though here and there there was a crazy structure hanging together by nails only. Across the arm of the harbour, on the pretty, wooded Dartmouth side, he could see among the trees the sprawled ugliness of the ruin the explosion had spread even there.

On this bleak slope, where the gra.s.s was growing raggedly over the ruins, the old inhabitants were showing little inclination to return.

Only a few neat houses were in course of erection where, before, there had been thousands. It was as though the hillside had become evil, and men feared it.

Over the hill, and by roads which are best described as corrugated (outside the main town roads of Canada, faith, hope and strong springs are the best companions on a motor ride), he went to where a new district is being built to house the victims of the disaster.

Modern Canada is having its way in this new area, and broad streets, gra.s.s lawns and pretty houses of wood, brick or concrete with characteristic porches give these new homes the atmosphere of the garden city.

Perched as it is high on the hill, with the sparkling water of the harbour close by, one can easily argue that good has come out of the evil. But as one mutters the plat.i.tude the Canadian who drives the car points to the long, tramless hill that connects the place with the heart of the city, and tells you curtly:

"That's called Hungry Hill."

"Why Hungry Hill?"

"It's so long that a man dies of hunger before he can get home from his office."

IV

The social side of the visit followed.

The Prince went from the devastated area, and from his visit to some of the people who were already housed in their new homes, through the attractive residential streets of Halifax to the Waegwoltic Club.

This club is altogether charming, and one of the most perfect places of recreation I have seen. The club-house is a low, white rambling building set among trees and the most perfect of lawns. It has really beautiful suites of rooms, including a dancing hall and a dining-room.

From its broad verandah a steep gra.s.s slope drops down to the sea water of one of the harbour arms. Many trees shade the slope and the idling paths on it, and through the trees shines the water, which has an astonishing blueness.

At the water's edge is a bathing place, with board rafts and a high skeleton diving platform. Here are boys and girls, looking as though they were posing for Harrison Fisher, diving, or lolling in the vivid sun on the plank rafts.

With its bright sea, on which are canoes and scarlet sailed yachts, the vivid green of its gra.s.s slopes under the superb trees, the Waegwoltic Club is idyllic. It is the dream of the perfect holiday place come true.