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.
All the country hereabouts is riddled with railways for business and
pleasure undreamed of fifteen years ago, and it was a long time before
we reached the clear prairie of air and space and open land.
