Читать книгу There are Victories - Charles Yale Harrison - Страница 6

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If one wandered carelessly through the heart of Montreal, round the Hotel de Ville, across the asphalted Champ de Mars (at that time resounding to the tramping feet of soldiers training for the war against the Boers), up narrow Notre Dame Street, along St. Antoine Street with its machine shops and huge warehouses, back along St. James Street lined with banks and newspaper offices, one came sooner or later to Place d’Armes. To the east and west of the square stood large brown office buildings which housed the musty offices of Queen’s Counsellors, barristers and notaries. In the center of the plaza stood a bronze figure of Maisonneuve, holding the royal flag of France aloft to the indifferent gaze of hurrying passers-by. To the north of the square stood the squat, threatening Bank of Montreal building with its stone columns of marbled viridescence which stood guard like sentries before the temple of commerce. On the other side of the square, facing the bank, stood the gray, gothic Notre Dame Cathedral, ancient and discolored by the intruding but nevertheless welcome smoke of industry. The imposing cruciformed building dwarfed the flag-bearing Maisonneuve to minute impotence; the contrast was symbolical of the towering power of the Church as compared to the puny strength of individual man. At the foot of the church passed Notre Dame Street, dark with dingy office buildings and smaller storehouses, hundred-year-old buildings which here and there housed a sweet-sour-smelling saloon.

One Sunday morning in her eighth year Ruth and a host of girls from the convent came to the cathedral for holy communion. It was a proud day for Mrs. Throop. She wore an all-embracing fluttering dress, a short military jacket, a tightly fitting bonnet and long white kid gloves. Major Throop, twisting and tugging at his drooping mustache, stood beside his wife near the holy water stoup watching the company of devout Pleiades march sedately into the cathedral. The girls shimmered in white silken dresses, their faces were covered with long veils and each head was crowned with a wreath of fleur-de-lis.

Inside the cathedral the Bishop himself administered the blessed sacrament. Mrs. Throop looked upon the scene in reverent wonder. She recalled the day of her own communion and soon found herself weeping. She daintily tapped each eye with a sad gesture of philosophical resignation.

——I am nearly thirty-five. Heavens, how time flies! Now it is communion, soon it will be marriage. ...

The intonations of the Bishop’s Latin (desecrated by his French-Canadian accent) brought to Mrs. Throop’s mind a schoolgirl joke. She tried to dismiss the thought, but without avail. “Tempus is always fugiting,” she said to herself. She smiled and then remembered that levity in church was sinful. She finally composed herself and followed the ceremony with close attention.

To Mrs. Throop the ritual was so satisfying; despite its mystery there was something so positively substantial about it all: the massiveness of the pillared stone nave, the comfort of numbers, the tonal ascensions and descensions of the service, the majestic bearing of the Bishop.

After communion the Throops walked out on to the broad, shallow steps of the cathedral, blinked in the sudden brilliant Canadian sunlight and pulled their gloves on with studied care and composure. For Mrs. Throop the Place d’Armes was the symbol of her security and peace of mind; behind her stood the cathedral, gray and worn with time, and before her crouched the Bank of Montreal, looking like a low-slung British bulldog with monstrous, long, green fangs.

Later, with Ruth home for the afternoon (a very special privilege), the Throops ate the customary, substantial English Sunday dinner: roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, a tart, and afterwards old port, rich and nutty—as old and as pleasant to the taste as the Bank and the cathedral were to the sight.