Читать книгу Westward with the Prince of Wales - W. Douglas Newton - Страница 14

St. John, on August 15, was perfectly aware of the office it had to fulfil. It was on its quays that the Prince was first to set foot on Canadian soil, and St. John had made up its mind that that occasion should be handled in a befitting manner.

True, it did not manage its weather quite so neatly as St. John's, Newfoundland, but on the other hand it refused to allow the rain to interfere with its plans or with its warmth of welcome.

The entrance of the two light cruisers from the drenched, brown-grey Bay of Fundy, past the rather militaristic looking Partridge Island, was the signal for immediate attention.

The inevitable motor launches came out by scores, and with them high-backed tugs; launches and tugs were covered with flags and people bearing flags, both flags and people being damp but enthusiastic.

The long harbour itself gives a sense of pit-like depth. Not only are the black quay walls extremely high, to accommodate a tide that has a drop of twenty-five feet, but on the quays themselves are piled immense grain elevators, with "Welcome" written in giant letters on their towering sides, coal-loading sheds with their lattice derrick arms that always seem to have been constructed by Mr. Wells's Martians, and great freight buildings.

Round this huge, black amphitheatre of welcome, on whose sea-floor was the Dragon and ourselves, people collected thickly, and everywhere there was the glint of flags through the rain.

But even the crowds about the harbour did not give a hint of the vast throng waiting on the landing-stage. Hidden away from the water by sheds, this very cheery crush filled the wide, free space of the harbour approach. Their numbers and eagerness had already proved the mutability of the police force, and volunteers in khaki were enrolled by the score in order to keep them back.

Almost as imposing as the throng were the photographers; not a few photographers, but a battalion of them, running about with that feverish energy Press-photographers alone possess, and climbing on to walls and roofs as though impelled by some divine, inner instinct towards positions from which the Prince of Wales could be shown to the world at unique and astounding angles.

Movie men and "stills" men, the former the real workers of the world, for they carry their heavy machines with all the energy of Lewis gunners, nipped about, formed in groups ready to shoot notabilities, mixed themselves up in the guard of honour until chased away by sergeants, and in the end forming up in a solid phalanx that almost obliterated Canada, to snap His Royal Highness as he came up the covered way from the wharf.

He had been received on the wharf by the Governor-General of Canada, the Duke of Devonshire, a heavy figure, whose very top hat seemed to have an air of brooding meditation in keeping with his personality; the Premier of Canada, Sir Robert Borden, an individuality of almost active reticence, a man who somehow seemed to get all the mass and weight of Canada into a mere "How d'y' do?" And with these were many of the leaders, political, commercial and social, of the Dominion, come together to join in Canada's first greeting.

It was raining, but there was no dampening that magnificent welcome. The meeting with Dominion leaders down by the waterside had been formal. The meeting between the Prince and the mass of people in the big, open space was the real welcome. Here, as in every other town in the Dominion, the formal side of the visit was entirely swamped by the human. The people themselves made this welcome splendid and overwhelming, elevating it to that plane of intimacy and affection that made the tour different from anything that had been conceived before.

After facing this superb welcome, which obviously moved him a great deal, the Prince passed to another side of the square, to where St. John had added a touch of youth, prettiness and novelty to the loyalty of her greeting.

In a big stand there were massed several thousand school children, all of them in white, all of them carrying small flags, all of them thoroughly wet, and all of them enthusiastic beyond discipline.

They had carried the first outburst of cheering well beyond the capacity of mere adult lungs and endurance, and as they cheered without break, they waved their flags, so that the whole stand seemed a big fire, over which a multitude of tiny red, white and blue flames unceasingly played. This mass flag-wagging is a great feature of Western welcomes, and a most effective one. It enables the hands to join in an enthusiasm which the Canadian does not seem to be sufficiently able to express by his cheering and whistling. Really ardent Canadians put a rattle into their empty left hands, and express their joy of welcome with the maximum of noise as well as activity.

Only on the approach of His Royal Highness did these delightful children staunch their cheering, and that merely because they wanted their lungs to sing.

They transferred their enthusiasm into their songs. Their sharp, high singing, with a touch of the nasal in it, and a Canadian accenting of "r's," introduced us to the splendid and inevitable hymns—beginning with "O Canada" and ending with "God Bless the Prince of Wales"—that we were to hear across the breadth of the Dominion and back again.

On the stage below this great flower-box of infants was a number of girls; each of them, it seemed, a princess of her race, having the wonderful poise, the fine skin, and the bright comeliness that make Canadian women so individual in their beauty.

These girls wore bright, symbolical dresses, and each carried a shield bearing the arms and the name of the province of the Dominion of Canada she represented. It was a pageant of greeting in which, advancing in pairs, all the provinces the Prince was to visit in the next few months came forward to bid him welcome at the moment he set foot in the Dominion.

Curtsying to the Prince, the girls fell back and formed a most attractive tableau. It was a delightful picture, delightfully carried out, and there was no doubt about the Prince's pleasure.

While His Royal Highness witnessed this spectacle and listened to the singing of the kiddies, the crowd, vanquishing police and boy scouts and khaki, flooded over the open space and gathered about him. It was a scene we were to see repeated almost daily during the trip.

Without police protection, and, what is more, without needing it, the Prince stood in the centre of a homely crowd, rubbing shoulders with it, becoming an almost indistinguishable part of it, save for the fact that its various members found it an opportunity to shake hands with him.

It was a state of things a trifle strange to Britons. It would probably have seemed little less than anarchy to a chief of British police, yet one was immensely impressed by it. It had all the intimacy of a gathering of friends. And the Prince was as natural a part of that genial and informal crowd as any Canadian.

The crowd shared his amusement at the strenuous work of the camera men, who wormed their way through the masses of people with their terrible earnestness, dogged his steps whenever he ventured to move a yard, and who seemed to feel that the reason he stopped to make speeches was that they should be able to get a steady, three-quarter face snap of him at a distance of two feet.

When the Prince slyly hinted to a photographer that, really, the most important and newsy part of the function was the massed battalion of camera men, and that actually they were the people who should be photographed and not him, the crowd shared the joke with him.

Prince and people were all part of one democracy, the real democracy that never thinks about democracy, but simply acts humanly and naturally in human and natural affairs.

"He'll do," said one man. "Why—he's just a Canadian after all."