'It's so rich in bone,
d'you see. The only thing that has beat us up to date is their hides;
but we've fixed up a patent process now for turning 'em into floorcloth.
Yes, they're beautiful beasts. That fellow,' he pointed to a black hump
in a wreath of spray, 'would cut up a miracle.'
'If you go on like this you won't have any whales left,' I said.
'That is so. But the concern pays thirty per cent, and - a few years
back, no one believed in it.'
I forgave him everything for the last sentence.
A CONCLUSION
Canada possesses two pillars of Strength and Beauty in Quebec and
Victoria. The former ranks by herself among those Mother-cities of whom
none can say 'This reminds me.' To realise Victoria you must take all
that the eye admires most in Bournemouth, Torquay, the Isle of Wight,
the Happy Valley at Hong-Kong, the Doon, Sorrento, and Camps Bay; add
reminiscences of the Thousand Islands, and arrange the whole round the
Bay of Naples, with some Himalayas for the background.
Real estate agents recommend it as a little piece of England - the island
on which it stands is about the size of Great Britain - but no England is
set in any such seas or so fully charged with the mystery of the larger
ocean beyond. The high, still twilights along the beaches are out of the
old East just under the curve of the world, and even in October the sun
rises warm from the first. Earth, sky, and water wait outside every
man's door to drag him out to play if he looks up from his work; and,
though some other cities in the Dominion do not quite understand this
immoral mood of Nature, men who have made their money in them go off to
Victoria, and with the zeal of converts preach and preserve its
beauties.
We went to look at a marine junk-store which had once been Esquimalt, a
station of the British Navy. It was reached through winding roads,
lovelier than English lanes, along watersides and parkways any one of
which would have made the fortune of a town.
'Most cities,' a man said, suddenly, 'lay out their roads at right
angles. We do in the business quarters. What d'you think?'
'I fancy some of those big cities will have to spend millions on curved
roads some day for the sake of a change,' I said. 'You've got what no
money can buy.'
'That's what the men tell us who come to live in Victoria. And they've
had experience.'
It is pleasant to think of the Western millionaire, hot from some
gridiron of rectangular civilisation, confirming good Victorians in the
policy of changing vistas and restful curves.
There is a view, when the morning mists peel off the harbour where the
steamers tie up, or the Houses of Parliament on one hand, and a huge
hotel on the other, which as an example of cunningly-fitted-in
water-fronts and facades is worth a very long journey. The hotel was
just being finished. The ladies' drawing-room, perhaps a hundred feet by
forty, carried an arched and superbly enriched plaster ceiling of knops
and arabesques and interlacings, which somehow seemed familiar.
'We saw a photo of it in Country Life,' the contractor explained. 'It
seemed just what the room needed, so one of our plasterers, a
Frenchman - that's him - took and copied it. It comes in all right,
doesn't it?'
About the time the noble original was put up in England Drake might have
been sailing somewhere off this very coast. So, you see, Victoria
lawfully holds the copyright.
I tried honestly to render something of the colour, the gaiety, and the
graciousness of the town and the island, but only found myself piling up
unbelievable adjectives, and so let it go with a hundred other wonders
and repented that I had wasted my time and yours on the anxious-eyed
gentlemen who talked of 'drawbacks.' A verse cut out of a newspaper
seems to sum up their attitude:
As the Land of Little Leisure
Is the place where things are done,
So the Land of Scanty Pleasure
Is the place for lots of fun.
In the Land of Plenty Trouble
People laugh as people should,
But there's some one always kicking
In the Land of Heap Too Good!
At every step of my journey people assured me that I had seen nothing of
Canada. Silent mining men from the North; fruit-farmers from the
Okanagan Valley; foremen of railway gangs, not so long from English
public schools; the oldest inhabitant of the town of Villeneuve, aged
twenty-eight; certain English who lived on the prairie and contrived to
get fun and good fellowship as well as money; the single-minded
wheat-growers and cattle-men; election agents; police troopers
expansive in the dusk of wayside halts; officials dependent on the
popular will, who talked as delicately as they walked; and queer souls
who did not speak English, and said so loudly in the dining-car - each,
in his or her own way, gave me to understand this. My excursion bore the
same relation to their country as a 'bus-ride down the Strand bears to
London, so I knew how they felt.
The excuse is that our own flesh and blood are more interesting than
anybody else, and I held by birth the same right in them and their lives
as they held in any other part of the Empire. Because they had become a
people within the Empire my right was admitted and no word spoken; which
would not have been the case a few years ago.
