The Imperialist (17 page)

“It used to be a ‘command’ in Ottawa,” said Cruickshank, who had got on badly with his sovereign’s representative there, “but here it’s only a privilege. There’s no business in it, and I haven’t time for pleasure.”

The nobleman in question had, in effect, dropped back into the Lords. So far as the Empire was concerned, he was in the impressive rearguard, and this was a little company of fighting men.

The entertainments arising out of business were usually on a scale more or less sumptuous. They took place in big, well-known restaurants, and included a look at many of the people who seem to lend themselves so willingly to the great buzzing show that anybody can pay for in London, their names in the paper in the morning, their faces at Prince’s in the evening, their personalities no doubt advantageously exposed in various places during the day. But there were others, humbler ones in Earl’s Court Road or Maida Vale, where the members of the deputation had relatives whom it was natural to hunt up. Long years and many billows had rolled between, and more effective separations had arisen in the whole difference of life; still, it was natural to hunt them up, to seek in
their eyes and their hands the old subtle bond of kin, and perhaps – such is our vanity in the new lands – to show them what the stock had come to overseas. They tended to be depressing, these visits: the married sister was living in a small way; the first cousin seemed to have got into a rut; the uncle and aunt were failing, with a stooping, trembling, old-fashioned kind of decrepitude, a rigidity of body and mind, which somehow one didn’t see much over home.

“England,” said Poulton, the Canadian born, “is a dangerous country to live in; you run such risks of growing old.” They agreed, I fear, for more reasons than this that England was a good country to leave early; and you cannot blame them – there was not one of them who did not offer in his actual person proof of what he said. Their own dividing chance grew dramatic in their eyes.

“I was offered a clerkship with the Cunards the day before I sailed,” said McGill. “Great Scott, if I’d taken that clerkship!” He saw all his glorious past, I suppose, in a suburban aspect.

“I was kicked out,” said Cameron, “and it was the kindest attention my father ever paid me;” and Bates remarked that it was worth coming out second-class, as he did, to go back in the best cabin in the ship.

The appearance and opinions of those they had left behind them prompted them to this kind of congratulation, with just a thought of compunction at the back of it for their own better fortunes. In the further spectacle of England most of them saw the repository of singularly old-fashioned ideas, the storehouse of a good deal of money, and the market for unlimited produce. They looked cautiously at imperial sentiment; they were full of the terms of their bargain, and had, as they would have said, little use for schemes that did not commend
themselves on a basis of common profit. Cruickshank was the biggest and the best of them; but even Cruickshank submitted the common formulas; submitted them and submitted to them.

Only Lorne Murchison among them looked higher and further, only he was alive to the inrush of the essential; he only lifted up his heart.

L
orne was thus an atom in the surge of London. The members of the deputation, as their business progressed, began to feel less like atoms and more like a body exerting an influence, however obscurely hid in a temperance hotel, upon the tide of international affairs; but their secretary had naturally no initiative that appeared, no importance that was taken account of. In these respects, no less than in the others, he justified Mr. Cruickshank’s selection. He did his work as unobtrusively as he did it admirably well; and for the rest he was just washed about, carried hither and thither, generally on the tops of omnibuses, receptive, absorbent, mostly silent. He did try once or twice to talk to the ’bus drivers – he had been told it was a thing to do if you wanted to get hold of the point of view of a particular class; but the thick London idiom defeated him, and he found they grew surly when he asked them too often to repeat their replies. He felt a little surly himself after a while, when they asked him, as they nearly always did, if he wasn’t an American. “Yes,” he would say in the end, “but not the United States kind,” resenting the necessity of explaining to the Briton beside him that
there were other kinds. The imperial idea goes so quickly from the heart to the head. He felt compelled, nevertheless, to mitigate his denial to the ’bus drivers.

“I expect it’s the next best thing,” he would say, “but it’s only the next best.”

It was as if he felt charged to vindicate the race, the whole of Anglo-Saxondom, there in his supreme moment, his splendid position, on the top of an omnibus lumbering west out of Trafalgar Square.

One introduction of his own he had. Mrs. Milburn had got it for him from the rector, Mr. Emmett, to his wife’s brother, Mr. Charles Chafe, who had interests in Chiswick and a house in Warwick Gardens. Lorne put off presenting the letter – did not know, indeed, quite how to present it, till his stay in London was half over. Finally he presented himself with it, as the quickest way, at the office of Mr. Chafe’s works at Chiswick. He was cordially received, both there and in Warwick Gardens, where he met Mr. Alfred Hesketh. Lorne went several times to the house in Warwick Gardens, and Hesketh – a nephew – was there on the very first occasion. It was an encounter interesting on both sides. He – Hesketh – was a young man with a good public school and a university behind him, where his very moderate degree, however, failed to represent the activity of his mind or the capacity of his energy. He had a little money of his own, and no present occupation; he belonged to the surplus. He was not content to belong to it; he cast about him a good deal for something to do. There was always the Bar, but only the best fellows get on there, and he was not quite one of the best fellows; he knew that. He had not money enough for politics or interest enough for the higher departments of the public service, nor had he those ready arts of expression that lead naturally into journalism. Anything
involving further examinations he rejected on that account; and the future of glassware, in view of what they were doing in Germany, did not entice him to join his uncle in Chiswick. Still he was aware of enterprise, convinced that he had loafed long enough.

Lorne Murchison had never met any one of Hesketh’s age in Hesketh’s condition before. Affluence and age he knew, in honourable retirement; poverty and youth he knew, em barked in the struggle; indolence and youth he also knew, as it cumbered the ground; but youth and a competence, equipped with education, industry, and vigour, searching vainly in fields empty of opportunity, was to him a new spectacle. He himself had intended to be a lawyer since he was fourteen. There never had been any impediment to his intention, any qualification to his desire. He was still under his father’s roof, but that was for the general happiness; any time within the last eighteen months, if he had chosen to hurry fate, he might have selected another. He was younger than Hesketh by a year, yet we may say that he had arrived, while Hesketh was still fidgeting at the starting-point.

“Why don’t you farm?” he asked once.

“Farming in England may pay in a quarter of a century, not before. I can’t wait for it. Besides, why should I farm? Why didn’t you?”

“Well,” said Lorne, “in your case it seems about the only thing left. I? Oh, it doesn’t attract us over there. We’re getting away from it – leaving it to the new-comers from this side. Curious circle, that. I wonder, when our place gets overcrowded, where we shall go to plough?”

Hesketh’s situation occupied them a good deal; but their great topic had a wider drift, embracing nothing less than the Empire, pausing nowhere short of the flag. The imperial idea
was very much at the moment in the public mind; it hung heavily, like a banner, in every newspaper, it was filtering through the slow British consciousness, solidifying as it travelled. In the end it might be expected to arrive at a shape in which the British consciousness must either assimilate it or cast it forth. They were saying in the suburbs that they wanted it explained; at Hatfield they were saying, some of them, with folded arms, that it was self-evident; other members of the great house, swinging their arms, called it blackness of darkness and ruin, so had a prophet divided it against itself. Wallingham, still in the Cabinet, was going up and down the country trying not to explain too much. There was division in the Cabinet, sore travail among private members. The conception being ministerial, the Opposition applied itself to the task of abortion, fearing the worst if it should be presented to the country fully formed and featured, the smiling offspring of progress and imagination. Travellers to Greater Britain returned waving joyous torches in the insular fog; they shed a brilliance and an infectious enthusiasm, but there were not enough to do more than make the fog visible. Many persons found such torches irritating. They pointed out that as England had groped to her present greatness she might be trusted to feel her way further. “Free trade,” they said, “has made us what we are. Put out these lights!”

Mr. Chafe was one of these. He was a cautious, heavy fellow, full of Burgundy and distrust. The basis of the imperial idea inspired him with suspicion and hostility. He could accept the American tariff on English manufactures; that was a plain position, simple damage, a blow full in the face, not to be dodged. But the offer of better business in the English colonies in exchange for a duty on the corn and meat of foreign countries – he could see too deep for that. The colonials might
or might not be good customers: he knew how many decanters he sold in the United States, in spite of the tariff. He saw that the tax on food-stuffs was being commended to the working man with the argument of higher wages. Higher wages, with the competition of foreign labour, spelt only one word to English manufacturers, and that was ruin. The bugbear of higher wages, immediate, threatening, near, the terror of the last thirty years, closed the prospect for Charles Chafe; he could see nothing beyond. He did not say so, but to him the prosperity of the British manufacturer was bound up in the indigence of the operative. Thriving workmen, doing well, and looking to do better, rose before him in terms of menace, though their prosperity might be rooted in his own. “Give them cheap food and keep them poor,” was the sum of his advice. His opinions had the emphasis of the unexpected, the unnatural: he was one of the people whom Wallingham’s scheme in its legitimate development of a tariff on foreign manufactures might be expected to enrich. This fact, which he constantly insisted on, did give them weight; it made him look like a cunning fellow not to be caught with chaff. He and his business had survived free trade – though he would not say this either – and he preferred to go on surviving it rather than take the chances of any zollverein. The name of the thing was enough for him, a word made in Germany, thick and mucky, like their tumblers. As to the colonies – Mr. Chafe had been told of a certain spider who devoured her young ones. He reversed the figure, and it stood, in the imperial connection, for all the argument he wanted.

Alfred Hesketh had lived always in the hearing of such doctrine; it had stood to him for political gospel by mere force of repetition. But he was young, with the curiosity and enterprise and impatience of dogma of youth; he belonged by
temperament and situation to those plastic thousands in whom Wallingham hoped to find the leaven that should leaven the whole lump. His own blood stirred with the desire to accomplish, to carry further; and as the scope of the philanthropist did not attract him, he was vaguely conscious of having been born too late in England. The new political appeal of the colonies, clashing suddenly upon old insular harmonies, brought him a sense of wider fields and chances; his own case he freely translated into his country’s, and offered an open mind to politics that would help either of them. He looked at the new countries with interest, an interest evoked by their sudden dramatic leap into the forefront of public concern. He looked at them with what nature intended to be the eye of a practical business man. He looked at Lorne Murchison, too, and listened to him, with steady, critical attention. Lorne seemed in a way to sum it all up in his person, all the better opportunity a man had out there; and he handled large matters of the future with a confidence and a grip that quickened the circulation. Hesketh’s open mind gradually became filled with the imperial view as he had the capacity to take it; and we need not be surprised if Lorne Murchison, gazing in the same direction, supposed that they saw the same thing.

Hesketh confessed, declared, that Murchison had brought him round; and Lorne surveyed this achievement with a thrill of the happiest triumph. Hesketh stood, to him, a product of that best which he was so occupied in admiring and pursuing. Perhaps he more properly represented the second best; but we must allow something for the confusion of early impressions. Hesketh had lived always in the presence of ideals disengaged in England as nowhere else in the world; in Oxford, Lorne knew, they clustered thick. There is no doubt that his manners were good, and his ideas unimpeachable in the letter, the
young Canadian read the rest into him and loved him for what he might have been.

“As an Englishman,” said Hesketh one evening as they walked together back from the Chafes’ along Knightsbridge, talking of the policy urged by the Colonial representatives at the last Conference, “I could wish the idea were more our own – that we were pressing it on the colonies instead of the colonies pressing it on us.”

“Doesn’t there come a time in the history of most families,” Lorne replied, “when the old folks look to the sons and daughters to keep them in touch with the times? Why shouldn’t a vigorous policy of Empire be conceived by its younger nations – who have the ultimate resources to carry it out? We’ve got them and we know it – the iron and the coal and the gold, and the wheat-bearing areas. I dare say it makes us seem cheeky, but I tell you the last argument lies in the soil and what you can get out of it. What has this country got in comparison? A market of forty million people, whom she can’t feed, and is less and less able to find work for. Do you call that a resource? I call it an impediment – a penalty. It’s something to exploit, for the immediate profit in it, something to bargain with; but even as a market it can’t preponderate always, and I can’t see why it should make such tremendous claims.”