The Imperialist (30 page)

“Of course it hasn’t,” Advena said.

“But we’re just as much obliged,” remarked Stella.

“A lot of our church people are going to stay at home election day,” declared Abby; “they won’t vote for Lorne, and they won’t vote against imperialism, so they’ll just sulk. Silly, I call it.”

“Good enough business for us,” said Alec.

“Well, what I want to know is,” said Mrs. Murchison, “whether you are coming to the church you were born and brought up in, Abby, or not, to-night? There’s the first bell.”

“I’m not going to any church,” said Abby. “I went this morning. I’m going home to my baby.”

“Your father and mother,” said Mrs. Murchison, “can go twice a day, and be none the worse for it. By the way, father, did you know old Mrs. Parr was dead? Died this morning at four o’clock. They telephoned for Dr. Drummond, and I think they had little to do, for he had been up with her half the night already, Mrs. Forsyth told me.”

“Did he go?” asked Mr. Murchison.

“He did not, for the very good reason that he knew nothing about it. Mrs. Forsyth answered the telephone, and told them he hadn’t been two hours in his bed, and she wouldn’t get him out again for an unconscious deathbed, and him with bronchitis on him and two sermons to preach to-day.”

“I’ll warrant Mrs. Forsyth caught it in the morning,” said John Murchison.

“That she did. The doctor was as cross as two sticks that she hadn’t had him out to answer the ’phone. ‘I just spoke up,’ she said, ‘and told him I didn’t see how he was going to do any good to the poor soul over a telephone wire.’ ‘It isn’t that,’ he said, ‘but I might have put them on to Peter Fratch for the funeral. We’ve never had an undertaker in the church before,’
he said; ‘he’s just come, and he ought to be supported. Now I expect it’s too late, they’ll have gone to Liscombe.’ He rang them up right away, but they had.”

“Dr. Drummond can’t stand Liscombe,” said Alec, as they all laughed a little at the Doctor’s foible, all except Advena, who laughed a great deal. She laughed wildly, then weakly. “I wouldn’t – think it a pleasure – to be buried by Liscombe myself!” she cried hysterically, and then laughed again until the tears ran down her face, and she lay back in her chair and moaned, still laughing.

Mr. and Mrs. Murchison, Alec, Stella, and Advena made up the family party; Oliver, for reasons of his own, would attend the River Avenue Methodist Church that evening. They slipped out presently into the crisp white winter night. The snow was banked on both sides of the street. Spreading garden fir-trees huddled together weighted down with it; ragged icicles hung from the eaves or lay in long broken fingers on the trodden paths. The snow snapped and tore under their feet; there was a glorious moon that observed every tattered weed sticking up through the whiteness, and etched it with its shadow. The town lay under the moon almost dramatic, almost mysterious, so withdrawn it was out of the cold, so turned in upon its own soul of the fireplace. It might have stood, in the snow and the silence, for a shell and a symbol of the humanity within, for angels or other strangers to mark with curiosity. Mr. and Mrs. Murchison were neither angels nor strangers; they looked at it and saw that the Peterson place was still standing empty, and that old Mr. Fisher hadn’t finished his new porch before zero weather came to stop him.

The young people were well ahead; Mrs. Murchison, on her husband’s arm, stepped along with the spring of an impetus undisclosed.

“Is it to be the Doctor to-night?” asked John Murchison. “He was so hoarse this morning I wouldn’t be surprised to see Finlay in the pulpit. They’re getting only morning services in East Elgin just now, while they’re changing the lighting arrangements.”

“Are they, indeed? Well, I hope they’ll change them and be done with it, for I can’t say I’m anxious for too much of their Mr. Finlay in Knox Church.”

“Oh you like the man well enough for a change, mother!” John assured her.

“I’ve nothing to say against his preaching. It’s the fellow himself. And I hope we won’t get him to-night, for, the way I feel now, if I see him gawking up the pulpit steps it’ll be as much as I can do to keep in my seat, and so I just tell you, John.”

“You’re a little out of patience with him, I see,” said Mr. Murchison.

“And it would be a good thing if more than me were out of patience with him. There’s such a thing as too much patience, I’ve noticed.”

“I dare say,” replied her husband, cheerfully.

“If Advena were any daughter of mine she’d have less patience with him.”

“She’s not much like you,” assented the father.

“I must say I like a girl to have a little spirit if a man has none. And before I’d have him coming to the house week after week the way he has, I’d see him far enough.”

“He might as well come there as anywhere,” Mr. Murchison replied, ambiguously. “I suppose he has now and then time on his hands?”

“Well, he won’t have it on his hands much longer.”

“He won’t, eh?”

“No, he won’t,” Mrs. Murchison almost shook the arms he was attached to. “John, I think you might show a little interest! The man’s going to be married.”

“You don’t say that?” John Murchison’s tone expressed not only astonishment but concern. Mrs. Murchison was almost mollified.

“But I do say it. His future wife is coming here to Elgin next month, she and her aunt, or her grandmother, or somebody, and they’re to stay at Dr. Drummond’s and be married as soon as possible.”

“Nonsense,” said Mr. Murchison, which was his way of expressing simple astonishment.

“There’s no nonsense about it. Advena told me herself this afternoon.”

“Did she seem put out about it?”

“She’s not a girl to show it,” Mrs. Murchison hedged, “if she was. I just looked at her. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s a piece of news. When did you hear it?’ I said. ‘Oh, I’ve known it all the winter!’ says my lady. What I wanted to say was that for an engaged man he had been pretty liberal with his visits, but she had such a queer look in her eyes I couldn’t express myself, somehow.”

“It was just as well left unsaid,” her husband told her, thoughtfully.

“I’m not so sure,” Mrs. Murchison retorted. “You’re a great man, John, for letting everything alone. When he’s been coming here regularly for more than a year, putting ideas into the girl’s head –”

“He seems to have told her how things were.”

“That’s all very well – if he had kept himself to himself at the same time.”

“Well, mother, you know you never thought much of the prospect.”

“No, I didn’t,” Mrs. Murchison said. “It wouldn’t be me that would be married to him, and I’ve always said so. But I’d got more or less used to it,” she confessed. “The man’s well enough in some ways. Dear knows there would be a pair of them – one’s as much of a muddler as the other! And anybody can see with half an eye that Advena likes him. It hasn’t turned out as I expected, that’s a fact, John, and I’m just very much annoyed.”

“I’m not best pleased about it myself,” said John Murchison, expressing, as usual, a very small proportion of the regret that he felt, “but I suppose they know their own business.”

Thus, in their different ways, did these elder ones also acknowledge their helplessness before the advancing event. They could talk of it in private and express their dissatisfaction with it, and that was all they could do. It would not be a matter much further turned over between them at best. They would be shy of any affair of sentiment in terms of speech, and from one that affected a member of the family self-respect would help to pull them the other way. Mrs. Murchison might remember it in the list of things which roused her vain indignation; John Murchison would put it away in the limbo of irremediables that were better forgotten. For the present they had reached the church door.

Mrs. Murchison saw with relief that Dr. Drummond occupied his own pulpit, but if her glance had gone the length of three pews behind her she would have discovered that Hugh Finlay made one of the congregation. Fortunately, perhaps, for her enjoyment of the service, she did not look round. Dr. Drummond was more observing, but his was a position of advantage. In the accustomed sea of faces two, heavy shadowed and obstinately facing fate, swam together
before Dr. Drummond, and after he had lifted his hands and closed his eyes for the long prayer he saw them still. So that these words occurred, near the end, in the long prayer –

“O Thou Searcher of hearts, who hast known man from the beginning, to whom his highest desires and his loftiest intentions are but as the desires and intentions of a little child, look with Thine own compassion, we beseech Thee, upon souls before Thee in any peculiar difficulty. Our mortal life is full of sin, it is also full of the misconception of virtue. Do Thou clear the understanding, O Lord, of such as would interpret Thy will to their own undoing; do Thou teach them that as happiness may reside in chastening, so chastening may reside in happiness. And though such stand fast to their hurt, do Thou grant to them in Thine own way, which may not be our way, a safe issue out of the dangers that beset them.”

Dr. Drummond had his own method of reconciling foreordination and free will. To Advena his supplication came with that mysterious double emphasis of chance words that fit. Her thought played upon them all through the sermon, rejecting and rejecting again their application and their argument and the spring of hope in them. She, too, knew that Finlay was in church, and, half timidly, she looked back for him, as the congregation filed out again into the winter streets. But he, furious, and more resolved than ever, had gone home by another way.

O
ctavius Milburn was not far beyond the facts when he said that the Elgin Chamber of Commerce was practically solid this time against the Liberal platform, though to what extent this state of things was due to his personal influence might be a matter of opinion. Mr. Milburn was President of the Chamber of Commerce, and his name stood for one of the most thriving of Elgin’s industries, but he was not a person of influence except as it might be represented in a draft on the Bank of British North America. He had never converted anybody to anything, and never would, possibly because the governing principle of his life was the terror of being converted to anything himself. If an important nonentity is an imaginable thing, perhaps it would stand for Mr. Milburn; and he found it a more valuable combination than it may appear, since his importance gave him position and opportunity, and his nonentity saved him from their risks. Certainly he had not imposed his view upon his fellow members – they would have blown it off like a feather – yet they found themselves much of his mind. Most of them were manufacturing men of the Conservative party, whose factories had been
nursed by high duties upon the goods of outsiders, and few even of the Liberals among them felt inclined to abandon this immediate safeguard for a benefit more or less remote, and more or less disputable. John Murchison thought otherwise, and put it in few words as usual. He said he was more concerned to see big prices in British markets for Canadian crops than he was to put big prices on ironware he couldn’t sell. He was more afraid of hard times among the farmers of Canada than he was of competition by the manufacturers of England. That is what he said when he was asked if it didn’t go against the grain a little to have to support a son who advocated low duties on British ranges; and when he was not asked he said nothing, disliking the discount that was naturally put upon his opinion. Parsons, of the Blanket Mills, bolted at the first hint of the new policy and justified it by reminding people that he always said he would if it ever looked like business.

“We give their woollen goods a pull of a third as it is,” he said, “which is just a third more than I approve of. I don’t propose to vote to make it any bigger – can’t afford it.”

He had some followers, but there were also some, like Young, of the Plough Works, and Windle, who made bicycles, who announced that there was no need to change their politics to defeat a measure that had no existence, and never would have. What sickened them, they declared, was to see young Murchison allowed to give it so much prominence as Liberal doctrine. The party had been strong enough to hold South Fox for the best part of the last twenty years on the old principles, and this British boot-licking feature wasn’t going to do it any good. It was fool politics in the opinion of Mr. Young and Mr. Windle.

Then remained the retail trades, the professions, and the farmers. Both sides could leave out of their counsels the
interests of the leisured class, since the leisured class in Elgin consisted almost entirely of persons who were too old to work, and therefore not influential. The landed proprietors were the farmers, when they weren’t, alas! the banks. As to the retail men, the prosperity of the stores of Main Street and Market Street was bound up about equally with that of Fox County and the Elgin factories. The lawyers and doctors, the odd surveyors and engineers, were inclined, by their greater detachment, to theories and prejudices, delightful luxuries where a certain rigidity of opinion is dictated by considerations of bread and butter. They made a factor debatable, but small. The farmers had everything to win, nothing to lose. The prospect offered them more for what they had to sell, and less for what they had to buy, and most of them were Liberals already; but the rest had to be convinced, and a political change of heart in a bosom of South Fox was as difficult as any other. Indus trial, commercial, professional, agricultural, Lorne Murchison scanned them all hopefully, but Walter Winter felt them his garnered sheaves.

It will be imagined how Mr. Winter, as a practical politician, rejoiced in the aspect of things. The fundamental change, with its incalculable chances to play upon, the opening of the gate to admit plain detriment in the first instance for the sake of benefit, easily beclouded, in the second, the effective arm, in the hands of a satirist, of sentiment in politics – and if there was a weapon Mr. Winter owned a weakness for it was satire – the whole situation, as he often confessed, suited him down to the ground. He professed himself, though no optimist under any circumstances, very well pleased. Only in one other place, he declared, would he have preferred to conduct a campaign at the present moment on the issue involved, though he would have to change his politics to do it there, and that place
was England. He cast an envious eye across the ocean at the trenchant argument of the dear loaf; he had no such straight road to the public stomach and grand arbitrator of the fate of empires. If the Liberals in England failed to turn out the Government over this business, they would lose in his eyes all the respect he ever had for them, which wasn’t much, he acknowledged. When his opponents twitted him with discrepancy here, since a bargain so bad for one side could hardly fail to favour the other, he poured all his contempt on the scheme as concocted by damned enthusiasts for the ruin of business men of both countries. Such persons, Mr. Winter said, if they could have their way, would be happy and satisfied; but in his opinion neither England nor the colonies could afford to please them as much as that. He professed loud contempt for the opinions of the Conservative party organs at Toronto, and stood boldly for his own views. That was what would happen, he declared, in every manufacturing division in the country, if the issue came to be fought in a general election. He was against the scheme, root and branch.