The groups moved up the white stairs slowly between the ranks of Highlanders, whose uniforms took on a vividity in the clarified light. The Prince in Guard's uniform, with his suite in blue and gold and khaki and red behind him, stood on the big white stage of the stair-head to receive them. It was a scene that had all the tone and all the circumstances of an Eastern levée.
But it was a levée with a fleck of humour, also.
As he turned to leave, the Prince noticed beside him a handsome armchair upholstered in royal blue. It was a strange, lonely chair in that desert of gallery and standing humanity. It was a chair that needed explaining.
In characteristic fashion the Prince bent down to it to find an explanation. The crowd, knowing all about that chair and understanding his puzzlement, began to laugh. It laughed outright and with sympathetic humour when, abruptly handing his Guards' cap to one of his staff, he solemnly sat down in it for a second instead of going his way.
The chair was the chair his father and grandfather had sat in when they came to Winnipeg. Silver medallions on it gave testimony to facts. The Prince had not time to adopt a fully considered sitting, but he was not going to leave the building until he, too, had registered his claim to it.
In the big Campus that fronts the University of Manitoba, and ranked by thousands in a hollow square, were the veterans in khaki and civies who had fought as comrades of the Prince in the war. To these he went next.
It was a lengthy ceremony, for there were many to inspect. There were Canadian Highlanders and riflemen in the square, as well as veterans dating back to the time of the North-West Rebellion of '85. And there was also the regimental goat of the 5th West Canadians, a big, husky fellow, who endeavoured to take control of the ceremony with his horns, as befitted a veteran who sported four service chevrons and a wound stripe.
Here, too, the crowd was the most stirring and remarkable feature of the ceremony. It began with an almost European placidity of decorum, standing quietly behind the wooden railing on three sides of the Campus, and as quietly filling the seats in and about the glowingly draped grand stand before the University building. As the ceremony proceeded, however, the crowd behind the stand pressed forward, getting out on to the field. Soldiers linked arms to keep it back, soldiers with bayonets were drawn from the ranks of veterans to give additional weight, wise men mounted the stand and strove to stem the forward pressure with logic. But that crowd was filled with much the same spirit that made the sea so difficult a thing to reason with in King Canute's day. Neither soldiers nor words of the wise could check it. It flowed forward into the Campus, a sea of men and women, shop girls not caring a fig if they _were_ "late back" and had a half-day docked, children who swarmed amid Olympian legs, babies in mothers' arms, whose presence in that crush was a matter of real terror to us less hardened British--an impetuous mass of young and old, masculine and feminine life that cared nothing for hard elbows and torn clothes as long as it got close to the Prince.