The Imperialist (39 page)

Meanwhile the theory of Empire coursed in his blood, fed by the revelation of the future of his country in every newspaper, by the calculated prophecies of American onlookers, and by the telegrams which repeated the trumpet notes of Wallingham’s war upon the mandarinate of Great Britain. It occupied him so that he began to measure and limit what he had to say about it, and to probe the casual eye for sympathy before he would give an inch of rope to his enthusiasm. He found it as hard as ever to understand that the public interest should be otherwise preoccupied, as it plainly was, that the party organ, terrified of Quebec, should shuffle away from the subject with perfunctory and non-committal reference, that among the men he met in the street, nobody’s blood seemed
stirred, whatever the day’s news was from England. He subscribed to the
Toronto Post
, the leading organ of the Tories, because of its fuller reports and more sympathetic treatment of the Idea, due to the fact that the Idea originated in a brain temporarily affiliated to the Conservative party. If the departure to imperial preference had any damage in it for Canadian interests, it would be for those which the
Post
made its special care; but the spirit of party draws the breath of expediency, and the
Post
flaunting the Union Jack every other day, put secondary manufactures aside for future discussion, and tickled the wheat-growers with the two-shilling advantage they were coming into at the hands of the English Conservatives, until Liberal leaders began to be a little anxious about a possible loss of wheat-growing votes. It was, as John Murchison said, a queer position for everybody concerned; queer enough, no doubt, to admit a Tory journal into the house on sufferance and as a special matter; but he had a disapproving look for it as it lay on the hall floor, and seldom was the first to open it.

Nevertheless Lorne found more satisfaction in talking imperialism with his father than with any one else. While the practical half of John Murchison was characteristically alive to the difficulties involved, the sentimental half of him was ready at any time to give out cautious sparks of sympathy with the splendour of Wallingham’s scheme; and he liked the feeling that a son of his should hark back in his allegiance to the old land. There was a kind of chivalry in the placing of certain forms of beauty – political honour and public devotion, which blossomed best, it seemed, over there – above the material ease and margin of the new country, and even above the grand chance it offered for a man to make his mark. Mr. Murchison was susceptible to this in any one, and responsive to it in his son.

As to the local party leaders, they had little more than a shrug for the subject. So far as they were concerned, there was no Empire and no Idea; Wallingham might as well not have been born. It seemed to Lorne that they maintained toward him personally a special reticence about it. Reticence indeed characterized their behaviour generally during the period between the abandonment of the suits and the arrangement of the second Liberal convention. They had little advice for him about his political attitude, little advice about anything. He noticed that his presence on one or two occasions seemed to embarrass them, and that his arrival would sometimes have a disintegrating effect upon a group in the post-office or at a street corner. He added it, without thinking, to his general heaviness; they held it a good deal against him, he supposed, to have reduced their proud standing majority to a beggarly two figures; he didn’t blame them.

I cannot think that the sum of these depressions alone would have been enough to overshadow so buoyant a soul as Lorne Murchison’s. The characteristics of him I have tried to convey were grafted on an excellent fund of common sense. He was well aware of the proportions of things; he had no despair of the Idea, nor would he despair should the Idea etherealize and fly away. Neither had he, for his personal honour, any morbid desires toward White Clam Shell or Finnigan’s cat. His luck had been a good deal better than it might have been; he recognized that as fully as any sensible young man could, and as for the Great Chance, and the queer grip it had on him, he would have argued that too if any one had approached him curiously about it. There I think we might doubt his conclusions. There is nothing subtler, more elusive to trace than the intercurrents of the emotions. Politics and love are thought of at opposite poles, and Wallingham perhaps would have laughed
to know that he owed an exalted allegiance in part to a half-broken heart. Yet the impulse that is beyond our calculation, the thing we know potential in the blood but not to be summoned or conditioned, lies always in the shadow of the ideal; and who can analyze that, and say, “Of this class is the will to believe in the integrity of the beloved and false; of that is the desire to lift a nation to the level of its mountain-ranges”? Both dispositions have a tendency to overwork the heart; and it is easy to imagine that they might interact. Lorne Murchison’s wish, which was indeed a burning longing and necessity, to believe in the Dora Milburn of his passion, had been under a strain since the night on which he brought her the pledge which she refused to wear. He had hardly been conscious of it in the beginning, but by constant suggestion it had grown into his knowledge, and for weeks he had taken poignant account of it. His election had brought him no nearer a settlement with her objection to letting the world know of their relations. The immediate announcement that it was to be disputed gave Dora another chance, and once again postponed the assurance that he longed for with a fever which was his own condemnation of her, if he could have read that sign. For months he had seen so little of her, had so altered his constant habit of going to the Milburns’, that his family talked of it, wondering among themselves; and Stella indulged in hopeful speculations. They did not wonder or speculate at the Milburns’. It was an axiom there that it is well to do nothing rashly.

Lorne, in the office on Market Street, had been replying to Mr. Fulke to the effect that the convention could hardly be much longer postponed, but that as yet he had no word of the date of it, when the telephone bell rang and Mr. Farquharson’s voice at the other end asked him to come over to the committee-room. “They’ve decided about it now, I imagine,” he told
his senior, putting on his hat; and something of the wonted fighting elation came upon him as he went down the stairs. He was right in his supposition. They had decided about it, and they were waiting, in a group that made every effort to look casual, to tell him when he arrived.

They had delegated what Horace Williams called “the job” to Mr. Farquharson, and he was actually struggling with the preliminaries of it, when Bingham, uncomfortable under the curious quietude of the young fellow’s attention, burst out with the whole thing.

“The fact is, Murchison, you can’t poll the vote. There’s no man in the Riding we’d be better pleased to send to the House; but we’ve got to win this election, and we can’t win it with you.”

“You think you can’t?” said Lorne.

“You see, old man,” Horace Williams put in, “you didn’t get rid of that save-the-Empire-or-die scheme of yours soon enough. People got to think you meant something by it.”

“I shall never get rid of it,” Lorne returned simply, and the others looked at one another.

“The popular idea seems to be,” said Mr. Farquharson judicially, “that you would not hesitate to put Canada to some material loss, or at least to postpone her development in various important directions, for the sake of the imperial connection.”

“Wasn’t that,” Lorne asked him, “what, six months ago, you were all prepared to do?”

“Oh, no,” said Bingham, with the air of repudiating for everybody concerned. “Not for a cent. We were willing at one time to work it for what it was worth, but it never was worth that, and if you’d had a little more experience, Murchison, you’d have realized it.”

“That’s right, Lorne,” contributed Horace Williams. “Experience – that’s all you want. You’ve got everything else, and a darned sight more. We’ll get you there, all in good time. But this time –”

“You want me to step down and out,” said Lorne.

“That’s for you to say,” Bingham told him. “We can nominate you again all right, but we’re afraid we can’t get you the convention. Young and Windle have been working like moles for the past ten days –”

“For Carter?” interrupted Lorne. “Carter, of course.”

They nodded. Carter stood the admitted fact.

“I’m sorry it’s Carter,” said Lorne thoughtfully. “However –” And he dropped, staring before him, into silence. The others eyed him from serious, underhung faces. Horace Williams, with an obvious effort, got up and clapped him on the shoulder.

“Brace up, old chap,” he said. “You made a blame good fight for us, and we’ll do the same for you another day.”

“However, gentlemen,” the young man gathered himself up to say, “I believe I understand the situation. You are my friends and this is your advice. We must save the seat. I’ll see Carter. If I can get anything out of him to make me think he’ll go straight on the scheme to save the Empire” – he smiled faintly – “when it comes to a vote, I’ll withdraw in his favour at the convention. Horace here will think up something for me – any old lie will do, I suppose? In any case, of course, I withdraw.”

He took his hat, and they all got up, startled a little at the quick and simple close of the difficult scene they had anticipated. Horace Williams offered his hand.

“Shake, Lorne,” he said, and the other two, coming nearer, followed his example.

“Why, yes,” said Lorne.

He left them with a brief excuse, and they stood together in a moment’s silence, three practical politicians who had delivered themselves from a dangerous network involving higher things.

“Dash these heart-to-heart talks,” said Bingham irritably, “it’s the only thing to do, but why the devil didn’t he want something out of it? I had that Registrarship in my inside pocket.”

“If anybody likes to kick me round the room,” remarked Horace Williams with depression, “I have no very strong objection.”

“And now,” Mr. Farquharson said with a sigh, “we understand it’s got to be Carter. I suppose I’m too old a man to do jockey for a three-year-old, but I own I’ve enjoyed the ride.”

Lorne Murchison went out into the companionship of Main Street, the new check in his fortunes hanging before him. We may imagine that it hung heavily; we may suppose that it cut off the view. As Bingham would have said, he was “up against it,” and that, when one is confidently treading the straight path to accomplishment, is a dazing experience. He was up against it, yet already he had recoiled far enough to consider it; already he was adapting his heart, his nerves, and his future to it. His heart took it greatly, told him he had not yet force enough for the business he had aspired to, but gave him a secret assurance. Another time he would find more strength and show more cunning; he would not disdain the tools of diplomacy and desirability, he would dream no more of short cuts in great political departures. His heart bowed to its sorry education and took counsel with him, bidding him be of good courage and push on. He was up against it, but he would
get round it, and there on the other side lay the same wide prospect, with the Idea shining high. At one point he faltered, but that was a matter of expediency rather than of courage. He searched and selected, as he went along the street, among phrases that would convey his disaster to Dora Milburn.

Just at that point, the turning to his own office, he felt it hard luck that Alfred Hesketh should meet and want a word with him. Hesketh had become tolerable only when other things were equal. Lorne had not seen him since the night of his election, when his felicitations had seemed to stand for very little one way or another. His manner now was more important, charged with other considerations. Lorne waited on the word, uncomfortably putting off the necessity of coming out with his misfortune.

“I haven’t come across you, Murchison, but you’ve had my sympathy, I needn’t say, all this time. A man can’t go into politics with gloves on, there’s no doubt about that. Though, mind you, I never for a moment believed that you let yourself in personally. I mean, I’ve held you all through, above the faintest suspicion.”

“Have you?” said Lorne. “Well, I suppose I ought to be grateful.”

“Oh, I have – I assure you! But give me a disputed election for the revelation of a rotten state of things – eh?”

“It does show up pretty low, doesn’t it?”

“However, upon my word, I don’t know whether it’s any better in England. At bottom we’ve got a lower class to deal with, you know. I’m beginning to have a great respect for the electorate of this country, Murchison – not necessarily the methods, but the rank and file of the people. They know what they want, and they’re going to have it.”

“Yes,” said Lorne, “I guess they are.”

“And that brings me to my news, old man. I’ve given the matter a lot of time and a lot of consideration, and I’ve decided that I can’t do better than drive in a stake for myself in this new country of yours.”

“It isn’t so very new,” Lorne told him, in rather dull response, “but I expect that’s a pretty good line to take. Why, yes – first rate.”

“As to the line,” Hesketh went on, weightily, leading the way through an encumbering group of farmers at a corner, “I’ve selected that, too. Traction-engines. Milburn has never built them yet, but he says the opportunity is ripe –”

“Milburn!” Lorne wheeled sharply.

“My future partner. He was planning extensions just as I came along, a fortunate moment, I hope it will prove, for us both. I’d like to go into it with you, some time when you have leisure – it’s a scheme of extraordinary promise. By the way, there’s an idea in it that ought to appeal to you – driving the force that’s to subdue this wilderness of yours.”

“When you’ve lived here for a while,” said Lorne, pain fully preoccupied, “you’ll think it quite civilized. So you’re going in with Milburn?”

“Oh, I’m proud of it already! I shall make a good Canadian, I trust. And as good an imperialist,” he added, “as is consistent with the claims of my adopted country.”