At the
same time, in no other part of the Continent did I meet so many men who
insistently decried the value and possibilities of their country, or who
dwelt more fluently on the hardships and privations to be endured by the
white immigrant. I believe that one or two gentlemen have gone to
England to explain the drawbacks viva voce. It is possible that they
incur a great responsibility in the present, and even a terrible one for
the future.
THE FORTUNATE TOWNS
After Politics, let us return to the Prairie which is the High Veldt,
plus Hope, Activity, and Reward. Winnipeg is the door to it - a great
city in a great plain, comparing herself, innocently enough, to other
cities of her acquaintance, but quite unlike any other city.
When one meets, in her own house, a woman not seen since girlhood she is
all a stranger till some remembered tone or gesture links up to the
past, and one cries: 'It is you after all.' But, indeed, the child has
gone; the woman with her influences has taken her place. I tried vainly
to recover the gawky, graceless city I had known, so unformed and so
insistent on her shy self. I even ventured to remind a man of it. 'I
remember,' he said, smiling, 'but we were young then. This thing,'
indicating an immense perspective of asphalted avenue that dipped under
thirty railway tracks, 'only came up in the last ten years - practically
the last five. We've had to enlarge all those warehouses yonder by
adding two or three stories to 'em, and we've hardly begun to go ahead
yet. We're just beginning.'
Warehouses, railway-sidings, and such are only counters in the White
Man's Game, which can be swept up and re-dealt as the play varies. It
was the spirit in the thin dancing air - the new spirit of the new
city - which rejoiced me. Winnipeg has Things in abundance, but has
learned to put them beneath her feet, not on top of her mind, and so is
older than many cities. None the less the Things had to be shown - for
what shopping is to the woman showing off his town is to the
right-minded man. First came the suburbs - miles on miles of the dainty,
clean-outlined, wooden-built houses, where one can be so happy and so
warm, each unjealously divided from its neighbour by the lightest of
boundaries. One could date them by their architecture, year after year,
back to the Early 'Nineties, which is when civilisation began; could
guess within a few score dollars at their cost and the incomes of their
owners, and could ask questions about the new domestic appliances of
to-day.
'Asphalt streets and concrete sidewalks came up a few years ago,' said
our host as we trotted over miles of it. 'We found it the only way to
fight the prairie mud. Look!' Where the daring road ended, there lay
unsubdued, level with the pale asphalt, the tenacious prairie, over
which civilisation fought her hub-deep way to the West. And with asphalt
and concrete they fight the prairie back every building season. Next
came the show-houses, built by rich men with an eye to the honour and
glory of their city, which is the first obligation of wealth in a new
land.
We twisted and turned among broad, clean, tree-lined, sunlit boulevards
and avenues, all sluiced down with an air that forbade any thought of
fatigue, and talked of city government and municipal taxation, till, in
a certain silence, we were shown a suburb of uncared-for houses, shops,
and banks, whose sides and corners were rubbed greasy by the shoulders
of loafers. Dirt and tin cans lay about the street. Yet it was not the
squalor of poverty so much as the lack of instinct to keep clean. One
race prefers to inhabit there.
Next a glimpse of a cold, white cathedral, red-brick schools almost as
big (thank goodness!) as some convents; hospitals, institutions, a mile
or so of shops, and then a most familiar-feeling lunch at a Club which
would have amazed my Englishman at Montreal, where men, not yet old,
talked of Fort Garry as they remembered it, and tales of the founding of
the city, of early administrative shifts and accidents, mingled with the
younger men's prophecies and frivolities.
There are a few places still left where men can handle big things with a
light touch, and take more for granted in five minutes than an
Englishman at home could puzzle out in a year. But one would not meet
many English at a lunch in a London club who took the contract for
building London Wall or helped bully King John into signing Magna
Charta.
I had two views of the city - one on a gray day from the roof of a
monster building, whence it seemed to overflow and fill with noises the
whole vast cup of the horizon; and still, all round its edge, jets of
steam and the impatient cries of machinery showed it was eating out into
the Prairie like a smothered fire.
The other picture was a silhouette of the city's flank, mysterious as a
line of unexplored cliffs, under a sky crimson - barred from the zenith
to the ground, where it lay, pale emerald behind the uneven ramparts. As
our train halted in the last of the dusk, and the rails glowed dull red,
I caught the deep surge of it, and seven miles across the purple levels
saw the low, restless aurora of its lights. It is rather an awesome
thing to listen to a vanguard of civilisation talking to itself in the
night in the same tone as a thousand-year-old city.
