Delphi complete works of.., p.298
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 298
If I had had the wisdom of a mature man I should have stopped there on the threshold. But I was after all little more than a boy and half full of soda. Somehow, Ellen — I think her name was Ellen, but it may have been Helen — continued to introduce me to half a dozen of her girl friends among the congregation. Somehow, I don’t know how, I found myself turning up at Sunday school, where Helen — or Aileen — persuaded me to take a class. Then before I knew where I was I found myself hand in glove with a regular church crowd and going the pace as only a young man started that way does. I was in the Young People’s Bible Class, out at night with curate’s young people’s debating society and working early and late at the church bazaar. Often I would come rollicking home on the street-car as late as ten at night with two or three girls and a couple of curates and would blow in as much as fifty cents’ worth of car tickets in a couple of evenings. The pace was too swift. To keep myself going throughout the day I would have perpetual recourse to the soda-water bottle. At night when I came home to my room — often not till nearly eleven — I would rush at once to the soda water. My impatience was such that I found opening the bottles one after the other too slow and installed a five-quart siphon. At this I would make a rush after my return from the church at night and squirt it all over my face and head.
Wine, women and song! So stands the familiar trinity of destruction. My own case was no exception to the rule. I don’t remember just at what stage of downward course I bought a gramophone. But I can recall the surreptitious purchase, my waiting outside the music-shop and looking furtively up and down the street for fear that I might be recognized, and my return home, the gramophone under my arm and my hat down to avoid the glances of the passers-by. After that, I would spend long hours in my room, sogged with soda, listening to coon songs, such as “Old Black Joe,” “There Is a Happy Land, Far, Far Away,” “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” and other negro melodies.
Well, as everybody knows, if a young man once gets started with a fast crowd of associates such as that, gambling and cards inevitably turn up as an accompaniment. Till then I had never played cards in my life and indeed hardly knew one card from another. But one night as we were coming home from choir practice — excited a little no doubt by some of the hymns — the mother of one of the girls said, “Come on into the house and let’s play bridge.” If I had had sense and recollection I should have quietly said, “I refuse.” But the temptation was too much and I succumbed without an effort. The cards were produced, the game was explained and for the first time in my life I found myself sitting down to play cards for money. We played, I remember, for a tenth of a cent, and I lost it. After that I played practically every night, always for a tenth of a cent, and I lost it every night for ten nights. After that I had chance streaks of luck and three or four times running would win a tenth of a cent, but somehow by the end of each month I was always behind and began to have financial worry and embarrassment added to my own troubles. By the end of six months I owed the curate’s wife ten cents, I owed the rector twenty-five cents and ten cents each to the choir and ten cents that I borrowed from one of the girls’ mothers to pay the girl with. Nor could I see any way to pay it.
Meantime my law studies had degenerated into a mere farce. I would sit over my books, sogged with soda water, my brain unable to function.
There is no need to follow in detail the stages of my downfall to my final disaster. I had soon abandoned all attempts at serious study; spent my whole evenings hanging around the Sunday school and choir practice.
Then came the inevitable crash. I have noticed in reading memoirs similar to my own — but inferior — that the inevitable crash always comes. In fact, it seems to be unavoidable. I was picked up one evening on the street — I believe that victims such as myself are always finally picked up on the street. I believe that when found I was practically insensible from soda water, that I had five aces and the rules of bridge in one pocket, and in another a gramophone record, evidently just purchased, of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
Luckily I fell in good hands. The medical man in whose care I was placed prescribed for me five months’ complete rest on a truck farm, either that or driving a truck for five months on a rest farm.
He recommended also that I might put together the record of my experiences as a human document for magazine use as a means of paying his fee. It is while waiting for a truck to take me to the truck farm, that I have borrowed this condemned cell to write my confessions in. I can only hope they may be of service in saving others from the fate that has been mine.
A GUIDE TO THE PROVINCE OF QUEBEC. FOR THE USE OF AMERICAN TOURISTS
I TRAVELLED THE other day from New York to Montreal, where I live, in the pleasant company of some Americans coming to the Province of Quebec for a brief vacation. “I like the altitude,” said one. “The air,” said another, “is wonderful.” “What I specially like,” said a third, “is the charm of the old French civilization.”
Now what they said was true. But it seemed to me to leave out something. The man who said he wanted altitude was six feet high already. So he must have had another purpose as well. The man who said he needed air was a big hearty-looking fellow four feet round the waist: that man needed something more than air to keep him going. And the other one who said he loved the old French civilization was very probably one of the Bourbons of Kentucky.
Something or other, some malign influence, seemed to have been at work to rob these men of their natural candour and plain speech. Presently I discovered what it was. They had with them, for reading turn and turn about, a little Guide Book to the Province of Quebec. I realized when I looked through this little volume how mendacious are all the “guide books” that are compiled for travellers: how artfully they conceal the true motives that start the average man upon a vacation journey.
The writers of these little books either are, or pretend to be, labouring under a constant misapprehension. They pretend that every tourist is crazy over history, with a perfect thirst for dates, memorials, and survivals of the past. They presume that if there is anything in the way of a tombstone within ten miles he will be wild to see it: that if you can show him a rock on which Charlemagne once sat he takes a twenty-four-hour round-trip just to sit on it.
When the tourist is not busy with histories, tombstones, and graveyards, he is supposed to get excited over folk-lore, old customs, and the dress of the peasants. When this interest flags, the tourist is expected to fall back on geological information, altitude above the sea, and relative rainfall. Thus his pretty little vacation is filled up with examining what the peasants wear, how high they are above the sea, how much rain falls on them each year, and whose grave is said by tradition to be situated at, or near, their village.
Now as a matter of fact this kind of tourist lived in the days of Washington Irving, a hundred years before Sunday afternoon radio information, and is as dead as Washington Irving.
Let me illustrate the case by an examination of the Guide Book carried by my American friends. It starts out, as such books always do, with a burst of romance.
It is not without a thrill of romantic interest that we find ourselves on our journey northward from New York, swiftly borne along in the night through the great forests of the Adirondacks and thundering through the darkness along the historic shores of Lake Champlain. The broad surface of the lake lies sleeping under its winter mantle.
Quite so: and so we don’t see it: the lake is frozen, and it’s night and it’s dark and we’re asleep and we don’t see it. We didn’t come to see it, either. No passengers, except crooks, stay awake in an Adirondack sleeper at three o’clock in the morning. So much for Lake Champlain.
But the Guide Book rattles on.
We are now in a country replete with historic interest. It was here that the heroic Montcalm stormed Fort Ticonderoga, here that Ethan Allen overwhelmed the slumbering British; here General Burgoyne, hopelessly surrounded, made his last stand on Bunker Hill while Sitting Bull and his mounted braves closed in upon his devoted band, with Sheridan still forty miles away. . . .
Exactly so. But we learned all that stuff in Grade Eight and we passed our examination and are done with it. Anyway, we’re still asleep. Again the Guide Book —
We have now passed the height of land and are speeding down the Appalachian Slope into the Laurentian plain. The rugged massif of the Adirondacks is exchanged for the broad valley of the Richelieu, an alluvial plain, thrown up, perhaps, in the postprandial epoch. The soil about is a conglomerate semi-nitrogenous loam; our altitude is now 200 feet with a saturation of 175 per cent. and a barometric air pressure of twenty-seven point three.
Precisely. But as a matter of fact we are in the dressing-room of the car trying to shave and we do not propose to risk cutting our throat in the interests of geological science. So the Guide Book goes off on another tack and takes up its favourite lines of manners, customs, and the peasantry. This sort of thing was worked for so many centuries in Europe that it is hard to let it go.
We are now passing through some of the oldest settlements of La Nouvelle France. We observe the quaint houses, taken as they were right out of Old Normandy, with the solid stone walls, the high gabled roofs, and the little windows of the dortoir projecting high above the fenêtres of the cuisine. Behind is the écurie of the cows nestled beside its pleasant fumier.
That’s enough of the French. Will the guidebook people never understand that we speak nothing but our own language, acquired at great difficulty and cost and already brought as near to perfection as we hope to go? This is all that we can afford. But we know, of course, what the next item will be— “the picturesque peasant.” All right. Bring him on:
As we pass the quaint farmsteads half buried in the snow, we note here and there the characteristic figure of a habitant, half buried in the snow, seated in his one-horse sleigh or calèche, his rough country horse, or cheval, half buried. . . .
That’s all right: bury him and be done with it. It is strange that the guide books are unable to learn that human beings nowadays are all alike everywhere. A Chinaman from Shanghai and a pygmy from equatorial Africa and a high-school teacher from Oklahoma are all the same. They all see the same movies, hear the same radio, and they all lost money when the stock market crashed. The picturesque differences are now all gone. Turks wear American shoes, Americans wear Hindu pajamas, Hindus wear English shirts, and English students wear Turkish trousers. The picturesque peasant belongs back in the days of Voltaire, but to-day, when the Eskimo smokes cigars in his snug igloo and the Patagonian football team plays home-and-home games with the French Penal Settlement at Devil’s Island, what’s the good of pretending any more?
But at last, after passing through all the scenery and history and geology and local colour, the guide book finds itself arriving at a real city: let us say the city of Montreal. Here at last is something like life and animation, taxicabs, noise, restaurants, beefsteaks, life. But can the Guide Book see it? No.
As we disentrain ourselves at Montreal we realize that we are at the very spot where the intrepid Jacques Cartier stood in amazement within the great stockaded fort of Hochelaga (1535), or where the gallant company of the Sieur de Maisoneuve prepared in 1645 the fortified town beside the great river which was to witness the surrender of Vaudreuil to General Amherst in 1760, which thus prepared the way for its capture in 1775 by the American General Montgomery, who little thought that the same scene would witness the building of the Grand Trunk Railway in 1856 which culminated in the World War of 1914.
After which, having insinuated the history of the city in this painless fashion into the visitor, the guide book goes on to give him the really up-to-date information about the city of to-day. Thus:
The chief points of interest in the present city are the site of old Hochelaga (exact position unknown), the grave of the Sieur de Maisoneuve (the location of which is disputed) and the burial places of Hiawatha, Pocahontas and other early pioneers. . . .
I suppose there must be people to whom this kind of information seems good and this aspect of travel congenial. There must be, otherwise the little guide books and the illustrated travel booklets would cease to live. Presumably there are people who come home from their vacation tours and carry on conversations something like this:
“You were in Montreal on your vacation, were you not?”
“Yes, the city was founded by Maisoneuve in 1645.”
“Was it indeed? And what is its altitude above the sea?”
“Its mean altitude above high tide is 40 feet but the ground on which the city stands rises to a magnificent elevation, or mountain, which attains the height of 600 feet.”
“Does it indeed? And has this elevation a name?”
“It has. It is known as Mount Royal, a name conferred upon it by the first discoverer, Jacques or Jim Cartier.”
“Really, and what is the annual rainfall?”
“Well, the annual rainfall — if you include the precipitation of snow — —”
“Oh, yes, I do; of course — —”
“ — In that case it would be about fifty inches.”
“Indeed! What a fascinating vacation you must have had!”
“We did. I recall one very old habitant, a peasant . . .”
Instead of the mournful and misleading information about history and the peasantry, how much better if the Guide Book would drop on the side a few little items of real and useful information, as:
The exact site of the old French town may be said to lie in a straight line between Molson’s Brewery (now running) and Dow’s Brewery (still brewing). The house occupied by General Montgomery in 1775 is easily found by its proximity to the principal offices of the Quebec Liquor Commission. . . .
But wait, stop — an idea occurs to me. Let me rewrite the Guide Book to the Province of Quebec as it should be written with a view to attract, instruct and delight the tourist from the United States.
REVISED EDITION
GUIDE TO THE PROVINCE OF
QUEBEC
The Province of Quebec, licensed to sell beer, wine and spirits, has an area of 706,000 square miles. Its magnificent extent reaches from the border of New York State to the shore of the Frozen Seas. The most northerly licence is that at Oopchoopchik in Labrador. But it is not necessary to travel so far as that.
The great glory of the province is the broad stream of the river St. Lawrence. On its noble bosom ply the magnificent passenger steamers of the Canada Steamships Company, the bars on which usually open at seven o’clock. There is no finer sight for the American tourist than to sit on the forward deck (the bar deck) of one of these palatial vessels and to watch the magnificent panorama of historic scenery which is unfolded to the eye as the ascent of the river is made.
Here on our right hand as we come up from the sea the magnificent stream of the Saguenay pours its foaming waters through the gateway of frowning rock as it joins the St. Lawrence. Clinging to the very crest of the rock, like an eagle upon its nest, is a tiny hotel, licensed to sell wine, beer and other malt liquors.
Ascending the river further, we pass the famous falls of the Montmorency, from which the soda water is made. Pouring over the cliff in a cascade over 200 feet high, the water is churned into soda at the foot. Nothing is needed but to mix with this soda a small quantity — or a large — of the Scotch whisky, freely imported for private orders under the laws of the province. The result is a delicious beverage, sparkling and refreshing, which may be placed beside us on a little table on the deck, while we smoke our Havana cigar, with one foot up on a camp-stool.
Our attention is next turned — though not completely — to the historic and picturesque Island of Orléans. Here are the quaint villages, the little spires, and the stone houses of the old French civilization, unchanged since its first foundation under Louis XIV. Through our field glasses we can see the thrifty French Canadian farmer busily engaged in distilling whisky blanc, or white whisky made from wheat.
In front of us now rises the impressive outline of the Quebec Bridge, its huge span crossing the river from summit to summit, and here before us there appears the grey old city of Quebec, standing on its rocky stronghold, the sentinel of New France. Our eye detects at once the dominating outline of the Château Frontenac Hotel, the bar of which commands a splendid view of the river. Here lie the great ocean steamers of the Canadian Pacific Railway. They do not draw as much water as the steamers of the White Star and the Cunard lines that enter New York harbour. But they draw far more beer.
We are now so close in that we are right beside one of these leviathans of the deep and can hear one of the white-coated stewards cracking ice. As we pass by another of these ocean greyhounds, we catch a glimpse through the windows of the smoking-room of ale being sold for eight pence a bottle.
The ancient City of Quebec well repays our brief visit of inspection. Here is the gateway where brave General Montgomery met his death on the wild December night when he tried to storm the city gates. Here is the entrance to the Hotel St. Louis. Here is the famous Convent of the Ursalines where Montcalm died. Here is the Hotel du Canada.
Our stay in the mother city of America is all too short. We would fain climb the heights to reach the broad plateau or plain of Abraham, where the destiny of America was settled at a blow. There are no licences now anywhere near the Plains of Abraham.
