The Imperialist (16 page)

“Electric cars and telephones! Oh, I didn’t say we hadn’t the products,” and she laughed. “But the thing itself, the precious thing, that never comes just by wishing, does it? The art of indifference, the art of choice –”

“If you had refinements in the beginning what would the end be?” he demanded. “Anaemia.”

“Oh, I don’t quarrel with the logic of it. I only point out the fact. To do that is to acquiesce, really. I acquiesce; I have to. But one may long for the more delicate appreciations that seem to flower where life has gone on longer.”

“I imagine,” Finlay said, “that to wish truly and ardently for such things is to possess them. If you didn’t possess them you wouldn’t desire them! As they say, as they say –”

“As they say?”

“About love. Some novelist does. To be conscious in any way toward it is to be fatally infected.”

“What novelist?” Advena asked, with shining interest.

“Some novelist. I – I can’t have invented it,” he replied, somewhat confounded. He got up and walked to the window, where it stood open upon the verandah. “I don’t write novels,” he said.

“Perhaps you live them,” suggested Advena. “I mean, of course,” she added, laughing, “the highest class of fiction.”

“Heaven forbid!”

“Why Heaven forbid? You are sensitive to life, and a great deal of it comes into your scope. You can’t see a thing truly without feeling it; you can’t feel it without living it. I don’t
write novels either, but I experience – whole publishers’ lists.”

“That means,” he said, smiling, “that your vision is up to date. You see the things, the kind of things that you read of next day. The modern moral sophistications –?”

“Don’t make me out boastful,” she replied; “I often do.”

“Mine would be old-fashioned, I am afraid. Old stores of pain” – he looked out upon the lawn, white where the chestnut blossoms were dropping, and his eyes were just wistful enough to stir her adoration – “and of heroism that is quite dateless in the history of the human heart. At least one likes to hope so.”

“I somehow think,” she ventured timidly, “that yours would be classic.”

Finlay withdrew his glance abruptly from the falling blossoms as if they had tempted him to an expansion he could not justify. He was impatient always of the personal note, and in his intercourse with Miss Murchison he seemed of late to be constantly sounding it.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, almost irritably. “I only meant that I see the obvious things, while you seem to have an eye for the subtle. There’s reward, I suppose, in seeing anything. But about those more delicate appreciations of societies longer evolved, I sometimes think that you don’t half realize, in a country like this, how much there is to make up.”

“Is there anything really to make up?” she asked.

“Oh, so much! Freedom from old habits, inherited problems: look at the absurd difficulty they have in England in handling such a matter as education! Here you can’t even conceive it – the schools have been on logical lines from the beginning, or almost. Political activity over there is half strangled at this moment by the secular arm of religion; here it doesn’t even impede the circulation! Conceive any Church, or the united
Churches, for the matter of that, asking a place in the conduct of the common schools of Ontario! How would the people take it? With anger, or with laughter, but certainly with sense. ‘By all means let the ministers serve education on the School Boards,’ they would say, ‘by election like other people’ – an opportunity, by the way, which has just been offered to me. I’m nominated for East Elgin in place of Leverett, the tanner, who is leaving the town. I shall do my best to get in, too; there are several matters that want seeing to over there. The girls’ playground, for one thing, is practically under water in the spring.”

“You should get in without the least difficulty. Oh, yes, there is something in a fresh start: we’re on the straight road as a nation, in most respects; we haven’t any picturesque old prescribed lanes to travel. So you think that makes up?”

“It’s one thing. You might put down space – elbow-room.”

“An empty horizon,” Advena murmured.

“For faith and the future. An empty horizon is better than none. England has filled hers up. She has now – these,” and he nodded at a window open to the yellow west. Advena looked with him.

“Oh, if you have a creative imagination,” she said, “like Wallingham’s. But even then your visions must be only political, economic, material. You can’t conceive the – flowers – that will come out of all that. And if you could, it wouldn’t be like having them.”

“And the scope of the individual, his chance of self-respect, unhampered by the traditions of class, which either deaden it or irritate it in England! His chance of significance and success! And the splendid, buoyant, unused air to breathe, and the simplicity of life, and the plenty of things!”

“I am to be consoled because apples are cheap.”

“You are to be consoled for a hundred reasons. Doesn’t it console you to feel under your very feet the forces that are working to the immense amelioration of a not altogether undeserving people?”

“No,” said Advena, rebelliously; and indeed he had been a trifle didactic to her grievance. They laughed together, and then with a look at her in which observation seemed suddenly to awake, Finlay said –

“And those things aren’t all, or nearly all. I sometimes think that the human spirit, as it is set free in these wide un blemished spaces, may be something more pure and sensitive, more sincerely curious about what is good and beautiful –”

He broke off, still gazing at her, as if she had been an idea and no more. How much more she was she showed him by a vivid and beautiful blush.

“I am glad you are so well satisfied,” she said, and then, as if her words had carried beyond their intention, she blushed again.

Upon which Hugh Finlay saw his idea incarnate.

I
f it were fair or adequate to so quote, I should be very much tempted to draw the history of Lorne Murchison’s sojourn in England from his letters home. He put his whole heart into these, his discoveries and his recognitions and his young enthusiasm, all his claimed inheritance, all that he found to criticize and to love. His mother said, half jealously when she read them, that he seemed tremendously taken up with the old country; and of course she expressed the thing exactly, as she always did: he was tremendously taken up with it. The old country fell into the lines of his imagination, from the towers of Westminster to the shops in the Strand; from the Right Hon. Fawcett Wallingham, who laid great issues before the public, to the man who sang melancholy hymns to the same public up and down the benevolent streets. It was naturally London that filled his view; his business was in London and his time was short; the country he saw from the train, whence it made a low cloudy frame for London, with decorations of hedges and sheep. How he saw London, how he carried away all he did in the time and under the circumstances, may be thought a mystery; there are doubtless people who would
consider his opportunities too limited to gather anything essential. Cruickshank was the only one of the deputation who had been “over” before; and they all followed him unquestioningly to the temperance hotel of his preference in Bloomsbury, where bedrooms were three and six and tea was understood as a solid meal and the last in the day. Bates would have voted for the Metropole, and McGill had been advised that you saw a good deal of life at the Cecil, but they bowed to Cruickshank’s experience. None of them were total abstainers, but neither had any of them the wine habit; they were not inconvenienced, therefore, in taking advantage of the cheapness with which total abstinence made itself attractive, and they took it, though they were substantial men. As one of them put it, they weren’t over there to make a splash, a thing that was pretty hard to do in London, anyhow; and home comforts came before anything. The conviction about the splash was perhaps a little the teaching of circumstances. They were influential fellows at home, who had lived for years in the atmosphere of appreciation that surrounds success; their movements were observed in the newspapers; their names stood for wide interests, big concerns. They had known the satisfaction of a positive importance, not only in their community but in their country; and they had come to England invested as well with the weight that is attached to a public mission. It may very well be that they looked for some echo of what they were accustomed to, and were a little dashed not to find it – to find the merest published announcement of their arrival, and their introduction by Lord Selkirk to the Colonial Secretary; and no heads turned in the temperance hotel when they came into the dining-room. It may very well be. It is even more certain, how ever, that they took the lesson as they found it, with the quick eye for things as they are which seems to come of
looking at things as they will be, and with just that humorous comment about the splash. It would be misleading to say that they were humbled; I doubt whether they even felt their relativity, whether they ever dropped consciously, there in the Bloomsbury hotel, into their places in the great scale of London. Observing the scale, recognizing it, they held themselves unaffected by it; they kept, in a curious, positive way, the integrity of what they were and what they had come for; they maintained their point of view. So much must be conceded. The Empire produces a family resemblance, but here and there, when oceans intervene, a different mould of the spirit.

Wallingham certainly invited them to dinner one Sunday, in a body, an occasion which gave one or two of them some anxiety until they found that it was not to be adorned by the ladies of the family. Tricorne was there, President of the Board of Trade, and Fleming, who held the purse-strings of the United Kingdom, two Ministers whom Wallingham had asked because they were supposed to have open minds – open, that is to say, for purposes of assimilation. Wallingham considered, and rightly, that he had done very well for the deputation in getting these two. There were other “colleagues” whose attendance he would have liked to compel; but one of them, deep in the country, was devoting his weekends to his new French motor, and the other to the proofs of a book upon Neglected Periods of Mahomedan History, and both were at the breaking strain with overwork. Wallingham asked the deputation to dinner. Lord Selkirk, who took them to Wallingham, dined them too, and invited them to one of those garden parties for the sumptuous scale of which he was so justly famed; the occasion we have already heard about, upon which royalty was present in two generations. They travelled to it by special train, a circumstance which made them grave, receptive, and
even slightly ceremonious with one another. Lord Selkirk, with royalty on his hands, naturally could not give them much of his time, and they moved about in a cluster, avoiding the ladies’ trains and advising one another that it was a good thing the High Commissioner was a man of large private means; it wasn’t everybody that could afford to take the job. Yet they were not wholly detached from the occasion; they looked at it, after they had taken it in, with an air half amused, half proprietary. All this had, in a manner, come out of Canada, and Canada was theirs. One of them – Bates it was – responding to a lady who was effusive about the strawberries, even took the modestly depreciatory attitude of the host. “They’re a fair size for this country, ma’am, but if you want berries with a flavour we’ll do better for you in the Niagara district.”

It must be added that Cruickshank lunched with Wallingham at his club, and with Tricorne at his; and on both occasions the quiet and attentive young secretary went with him, for purposes of reference, his pocket bulging with memoranda. The young secretary felt a little embarrassed to justify his presence at Tricorne’s lunch, as the Right Honourable gentleman seemed to have forgotten what his guests had come for beyond it, and talked exclusively and exhaustively about the new possibilities for fruit-farming in England. Cruickshank fairly shook himself into his overcoat with irritation afterwards. “It’s the sort of thing we must expect,” he said, as they merged upon Pall Mall. It was not the sort of thing Lorne expected; but we know him unsophisticated and a stranger to the heart of the Empire, which beats through such impediment of accumulated tissue. Nor was it the sort of thing they got from Wallingham, the keen-eyed and probing, whose skill in adjusting conflicting interests could astonish even their expectation, and whose vision of the essentials of the future
could lift even their enthusiasm. One would like to linger over their touch with Wallingham, that fusion of energy with energy, that straight, satisfying, accomplishing dart. There is more drama here, no doubt, than in all the pages that are to come. But I am explaining now how little, not how much, the Cruickshank deputation, and especially Lorne Murchison, had the opportunity of feeling and learning in London, in order to show how wonderful it was that Lorne felt and learned so widely. That, what he absorbed and took back with him is, after all, what we have to do with; his actual adventures are of no great importance.

The deputation to urge improved communications within the Empire had few points of contact with the great world, but its members were drawn into engagements of their own, more, indeed, than some of them could conveniently overtake. Mr. Bates never saw his niece in the post-office, and regrets it to this day. The engagements arose partly out of business relations. Poulton, who was a dyspeptic, complained that nothing could be got through in London without eating and drinking; for his part he would concede a point any time not to eat and drink, but you could not do it; you just had to suffer. Poulton was a principal in one of the railway companies that were competing to open up the country south of Hudson’s Bay to the Pacific, but having dealt with that circumstance in the course of the day he desired only to be allowed to go to bed on bread and butter and a little stewed fruit. Bates, whose name was a nightmare to every other dry-goods man in Toronto, naturally had to see a good many of the wholesale people; he, too, complained of the number of courses and the variety of the wines, but only to disguise his gratification. McGill, of the Great Bear Line, had big proposals to make in connection with southern railway freights from Liverpool: and
Cameron, for private reasons of magnitude, proposed to ascertain the real probability of a duty to foreigners on certain forms of manufactured leather – he turned out in Toronto a very good class of suit-case. Cruickshank had private connections to which they were all respectful. Nobody but Cruickshank found it expedient to look up the lost leader of the Canadian House of Commons, contributed to a cause still more completely lost in home politics; nobody but Cruickshank was likely to be asked to dine by a former Governor-General of the Dominion, an invitation which nobody but Cruickshank would be likely to refuse.