Читать книгу There are Victories - Charles Yale Harrison - Страница 13

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In the center of Montreal stands Mount Royal after which the city is named. It protrudes suddenly from the flatlands of the center of the island, verdant and delightful, surrounded by miles of grayish dwellings and smoking, flatulent factory chimneys. From the lookout at the summit, the buildings and streets look like ruts of dun basalt at the base of a long extinct volcano. In the summertime Ruth rode up the spiraling roadways to the plateau on the top and leaned over the railing of the lookout at the serried streets and the midget people below. Here one bought spruce beer, rich and creamy, and later jog-trotted home in the family’s victoria. Sometimes Major Throop accompanied his stepdaughter. He puffed at his enormous pipe and bemoaned the fact that the beauty of the mountain was despoiled by the herd.

“Too damned good for the beggars,” he said on one occasion, “coming up here and littering the driveways and walks with their filthy leavings. Picnics—huh!”

And Ruth was inclined to agree. The people who walked up the roads, singing and shouting, sitting under trees, swarms of children grouped about large and sweating parents, seemed so remote from her own life. It was as though these people were of a different species. They were loud French-Canadians from Maisonneuve and the east end of the city and swarthy Jews from St. Lawrence Boulevard and St. Urbain Street. And the Major detested French-Canadians; hated their simple ways, their patois (he himself spoke Parisian French with an execrable English accent), their celluloid collars (worn only by mechanics on Sunday but which the major attributed to all French-Canadians, the Bishop of Montreal excepted), their gaudy manner of dress: red and green cravats, brightly colored gingham dresses, buttoned tan shoes. “Dressed like a Frenchman,” was a terrible phrase on the lips of the Major.

“That sort of thing,” he said, thinking of the mechanics and their families on the side of the mountain, “is all right in France but it’s no damned good here. This is Canada.” By which he meant the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Governor-General, Westmount, the defeat of Montcalm by Wolf—and all things English. “They have parks in the east end—Dominion Park and merry-go-rounds and chute-the-chutes—why do they have to come here?” (Petulantly.)

Ruth didn’t know, but even with the French-Canadians and Jews the mountain was a delightful thing. There was the cable car by which one was hauled up to its top, as though one were flying; there were long walks with her companions when they clambered up the sides picking choke-cherries and coming home with stained fingers and mouths.

And in the wintertime the mountain was the joy of every lover of winter sports. There was tobogganing down the icy Park Slide all lit up with colored electric lights, skating parties on the open-air rink on Fletcher’s Field at the eastern base of the mountain. And one winter after an early thaw it suddenly froze again and the fields were crusted with a veritable sheet of ice so that Ruth and her friends coasted up and down the rolling fields as though they were on skis, only it was infinitely faster and much more fun. Then when the snow was good and deep there were night snowshoe parties. The boys and girls, accompanied by a few silly chaperons (who were easily lost in the woods near Outremont), made the trip halfway around the mountain, tumbled into ten-foot snow drifts, and rubbed each other’s faces with the light, feathery Canadian snow. Sometimes when the Major took his stepdaughter for a night drive in a red cutter to the top of the mountain the city below presented a miraculous appearance: thousands of arc-lights shone on the glistening snow-covered streets and one thought, if one were not too cynical, that it looked like a fairy city encrusted with diamonds—which was precisely what Ruth thought. When parties came to the top during a sleigh ride in a huge affair drawn by eight horses with colored feathers in their harness, the party invariably became silent at the sight of the white city below—afterwards there was hot chocolate with floating islands of whipped cream and dainty biscuits.

One winter there was a civic celebration on Fletcher’s Field. The city had built an enormous ice palace (it was really a castle but the aldermen thought that palace sounded more regal) made of great blocks of ice with turrets, machicolations, a towered donjon. At night the interior was illuminated by colored electric lights and, when viewed from the summit of the mountain, it was an exciting sight. On the night of the gala celebration the Throops and many friends came to see the storming of the castle. Edgar Kennedy, the son of the shipping man, came along to watch the fun. At the outset he attached himself to Ruth; this was her first experience with a “young man” and she enjoyed it greatly. There was an immense crowd around the palace waiting for the storming to begin. Soon from all sides of the field massed battalions of sportsmen marched on the ice structure: French-Canadian snowshoe clubs with their cat-gut shoes slung over their shoulders, and Westmount skiing clubs carrying their skis at the slope like rifles, tobogganers, hockey teams, skaters. As they approached the iced fosse they discharged roman candles at the bastions and other Montrealers hidden in the castle returned the red and green fire from the lancet windows. Intricate fireworks leaped up from the bailey of the castle and the night was lit up with whirling and scurrying pyrotechnics.

It was all very exciting and as the attackers made their final rush upon the castle, the crowd broke through the police lines. Edgar caught Ruth by the hand and pulled her along towards the ice moat. He was ordinarily a pale young man, but now his face was bright red with the cold, he laughed as he ran and his breath steamed with the frost, and in some strange way this reminded Ruth of the gallant knights of old. (When she thought about it later she smiled because it was the dragon which belched fire and not the knight.) There were shouts from the assailants as they took the castle and Ruth and Edgar crowded quite close to watch the official surrender. It was very romantic standing there pressed close to Edgar (the crowd was irresistible, there was simply nothing that she could do about it) watching the parabolas of light go rocketing over the battlements of the ice palace.

Of course in the excessive excitement Ruth and Edgar lost touch with the older people, and when the celebration was over they walked along St. Catherine Street and wandered off into one of the side streets and found a grill room where they had a cold bird and a bottle of wine. Ruth was terribly thrilled, although Edgar, who was nearly twenty and was going into his father’s shipping business when he got out of McGill, was quite casual about it all.

It was past midnight when Edgar brought her home and Mrs. Throop was waiting up and greeted her daughter with pretended anxiety. She was rather pleased, because the Kennedys were quite acceptable; the young man’s father, it is true, had worked up from the ranks, but that was forgotten in view of the high position he now held in the life of the business community. All in all, Ruth’s mother was satisfied and as she went to bed she smiled and told the Major, who was nearly asleep and resented pre-slumber conversation, that everything seemed to be going well with Ruth and young Kennedy.

“Imagine her scampering off and coming home at this hour,” she said. The Major merely grunted. “Of course, the Kennedys are a little tiresome but after all he is head of the Board of Trade.” The Major made no reply. “They went into the Hoffman Grill on McGill College Avenue and had some chicken and burgundy. It’s romantic, Frederick,” she said to her husband with a note of expectation in her voice, “romantic, that’s what I call it.”

But by this time the Major was sound asleep.