The Imperialist Read online

  He was weeping now, at the age of seven, silently, but very copiously, behind the wood-pile. His father had finally cuffed him for importunity; and the world was no place for a just boy, who asked nothing but his rights. Only the wood-pile, friendly mossy logs unsplit, stood inconscient and irresponsible for any share in his black circumstances; and his tears fell among the lichens of the stump he was bowed on till, observing them, he began to wonder whether he could cry enough to make a pond there, and was presently disappointed to find the source exhausted. The Murchisons were all imaginative.

  The others, Oliver and Abby and Stella, still “tormented.” Poor Alec’s rights – to a present of pocket-money on the Queen’s Birthday – were common ones, and almost statutory. How their father, sitting comfortably with his pipe in the flickering May shadows under the golden pippin, reading the Toronto paper, could evade his liability in the matter was unfathomable to the Murchisons; it was certainly illiberal; they had a feeling that it was illegal. A little teasing was generally necessary, but the resistance to-day had begun to look ominous, and Alec, as we know, too temerarious, had retired in disorder to the wood-pile.

  Oliver was wiping Advena’s dishes. He exercised himself ostentatiously upon a plate, standing in the door to be within earshot of his father.

  “Eph Wheeler,” he informed his family, “Eph Wheeler, he’s got twenty-five cents, an’ a English sixpence, an’ a Yankee nickel. An’ Mr. Wheeler’s only a common working man, a lot poorer’n we are.”

  Mr. Murchison removed his pipe from his lips, in order, apparently, to follow unimpeded the trend of the Dominion’s leading article. Oliver eyed him anxiously. “Do, father,” he continued in logical sequence. “Aw, do.”

  “Make him, mother,” said Abby indignantly. “It’s the Queen’s Birthday!”

  “Time enough when the butter bill’s paid,” said Mrs. Murchison.

  “Oh, the butter bill! Say, Father, aren’t you going to?”

  “What?” asked John Murchison, and again took out his pipe, as if this were the first he had heard of the matter.

  “Give us our fifteen cents each to celebrate with. You can’t do it under that,” Oliver added firmly. “Crackers are eight cents a packet this year, the small size.”

  “Nonsense,” said Mr. Murchison. The reply was defin ite and final, and its ambiguity was merely due to the fact that their father disliked giving a plump refusal. “Nonsense” was easier to say, if not to hear, than “No.” Oliver considered for a moment, drew Abby to colloquy by the pump, and sought his brother behind the wood-pile. Then he returned to the charge.

  “Look here, father,” he said, “cash down, we’ll take ten.”

  John Murchison was a man of few words, but they were usually impregnated with meaning, especially in anger. “No more of this,” he said. “Celebrate fiddlesticks! Go and make yourselves of some use. You’ll get nothing from me, for I haven’t got it.” So saying, he went through the kitchen with a step that forbade him to be followed. His eldest son, arriving over the back yard fence in a state of heat, was just in time to hear him. Lorne’s apprehension of the situation was instant, and his face fell, but the depression plainly covered such splendid spirits that his brother asked resentfully, “Well, what’s the matter with you?”

  “Matter? Oh, not much. I’m going to see the Cayugas beat the Wanderers, that’s all; an’ Abe Mackinnon’s mother said he could ask me to come back to tea with them. Can I, Mother?”

  “There’s no objection that I know of,” said Mrs. Murchison, shaking her apron free of stray potato-parings, “but you won’t get money for the lacrosse match or anything else from your father to-day, I can assure you. They didn’t do five dollars’ worth of business at the store all day yesterday, and he’s as cross as two sticks.”

  “Oh, that’s all right.” Lorne jingled his pocket and Oliver took a fascinated step toward him. “I made thirty cents this morning, delivering papers for Fisher. His boy’s sick. I did the North Ward – took me over’n hour. Guess I can go all right, can’t I?”

  “Why, yes, I suppose you can,” said his mother. The others were dumb. Oliver hunched his shoulders and kicked at the nearest thing that had paint on it. Abby clung to the pump handle and sobbed aloud. Lorne looked gloomily about him and went out. Making once more for the back fence, he encountered Alexander in the recognized family retreat. “Oh, my goodness!” he said, and stopped. In a very few minutes he was back in the kitchen, followed sheepishly by Alexander, whose grimy face expressed the hope that beat behind his little waistcoat.

  “Say, you kids,” he announced, “Alec’s got four cents, an’ he says he’ll join up. This family’s going to celebrate all right. Come on down town.”

  No one could say that the Murchisons were demonstrative. They said nothing, but they got their hats. Mrs. Murchison looked up from her occupation.

  “Alec,” she said, “out of this house you don’t go till you’ve washed your face. Lorne, come here,” she added in a lower voice, producing a bunch of keys. “If you look in the right-hand corner of the top small drawer in my bureau you’ll find about twenty cents. Say nothing about it, and mind you don’t meddle with anything else. I guess the Queen isn’t going to owe it all to you.”

  TWO

  “We’ve seen changes, Mr. Murchison. Aye. We’ve seen changes.”

  Dr. Drummond and Mr. Murchison stood together in the store door, over which the sign, “John Murchison: Hardware” had explained thirty years of varying commercial fortune. They had pretty well begun life together in Elgin. John Murchison was one of those who had listened to Mr. Drummond’s trial sermon, and had given his vote to “call” him to the charge. Since then there had been few Sundays when, morning and evening, Mr. Murchison had not been in his place at the top of his pew, where his dignified and intelligent head appeared with the isolated significance of a strong individuality. People looked twice at John Murchison in a crowd; so did his own children at home. Hearing some discussion of the selection of a Premier, Alec, looking earnestly at him once said, “Why don’t they tell Father to be it?” The young minister looked twice at him that morning of the trial sermon, and asked afterward who he was. A Scotchman, Mr. Drummond was told, not very long from the old country, who had bought the Playfair business on Main Street, and settled in the “Plummer Place,” which already had a quarter of a cen tury’s standing in the annals of the town. The Playfair business was a respectable business to buy; the Plummer Place, though it stood in an unfashionable outskirt, was a respectable place to settle in; and the minister, in casting his lot in Elgin, envisaged John Murchison as part of it, thought of him confidently as a “dependance,” saw him among the future elders and office-bearers of the congregation, a man who would be punctual with his pew-rent, sage in his judgments, and whose views upon church attendance would be extended to his family.

  So the two came, contemporaries, to add their labour and their lives to the building of this little outpost of Empire. It was the frankest transfer, without thought of return; they were there to spend and be spent within the circumference of the spot they had chosen, with no ambition beyond. In the course of nature, even their bones and their memories would enter into the fabric. The new country filled their eyes; the new town was their opportunity, its destiny their fate. They were altogether occupied with its affairs, and the affairs of the growing Dominion, yet obscure in the heart of each of them ran the undercurrent of the old allegiance. They had gone the length of their tether, but the tether was always there. Thus, before a congregation that always stood in the early days, had the minister every Sunday morning for thirty years besought the Almighty, with ardour and humility, on behalf of the Royal Family. It came in the long prayer, about the middle. Not in the perfunctory words of a ritual, but in the language of his choice, which varied according to what he believed to be the spiritual needs of the reigning House, and was at one period, touching certain of its members, though respectful, extremely candid. The General Assembly of the Church
of Scotland, “now in session,” also – was it ever forgotten once? And even the Prime Minister, “and those who sit in council with him,” with just a hint of extra commendation if it happened to be Mr. Gladstone. The minister of Knox Church, Elgin, Ontario, Canada, kept his eye on them all. Remote as he was, and concerned with affairs of which they could know little, his sphere of duty could never revolve too far westward to embrace them, nor could his influence, under any circumstances, cease to be at their disposal. It was noted by some that after Mr. Drummond had got his “D.D.” from an American University he also prayed occasionally for the President of the neighbouring Republic; but this was rebutted by others, who pointed out that it happened only on the occurrence of assassinations, and held it reasonable enough. The cavillers mostly belonged to the congregation of St. Andrew’s, “Established” – a glum, old-fashioned lot indeed, who now and then dropped in of a Sunday evening to hear Mr. Drummond preach. (There wasn’t much to be said for the preaching at St. Andrew’s.) The Established folk went on calling the minister of Knox Church “Mr.” Drummond long after he was “Doctor” to his own congregation, on account of what they chose to consider the dubious source of the dignity; but the Knox Church people had their own theory to explain this hypercriticism, and would promptly turn the conversation to the merits of the sermon.

  Twenty-five years it was, in point, this Monday morning when the Doctor – not being Established we need not hesitate, besides by this time nobody did – stood with Mr. Murchison in the store door and talked about having seen changes. He had preached his anniversary sermon the night before to a full church, when, laying his hand upon his people’s heart, he had himself to repress tears. He was aware of another strand completed in their mutual bond; the sermon had been a moral, an emotional, and an oratorical success; and in the expansion of the following morning Dr. Drummond had remembered that he had promised his housekeeper a new gas cooking-range, and that it was high time he should drop into Murchison’s to inquire about it. Mrs. Forsyth had mentioned at breakfast that they had ranges with exactly the improvement she wanted at Thompson’s, but the minister was deaf to the hint. Thompson was a Congregationalist, and, improvement or no improvement, it wasn’t likely that Dr. Drummond was going “outside the congregation” for anything he required. It would have been on a par with a wandering tendency in his flock, upon which he systematically frowned. He was as great an autocrat in this as the rector of any country parish in England undermined by Dissent; but his sense of obligation worked unfailingly both ways.

  John Murchison had not said much about the sermon; it wasn’t his way, and Dr. Drummond knew it. “You gave us a good sermon last night, Doctor;” not much more than that, and “I noticed the Milburns there; we don’t often get Episcopalians;” and again, “The Wilcoxes” – Thomas Wilcox, wholesale grocer, was the chief prop of St. Andrew’s – “were sitting just in front of us. We overtook them going home, and Wilcox explained how much they liked the music. ‘Glad to see you,’ I said. ‘Glad to see you for any reason,’” Mr. Murchison’s eye twinkled. “But they had a great deal to say about ‘the music.’” It was not an effusive form of felicitation; the minister would have liked it less if it had been, felt less justified, perhaps, in remembering about the range on that particular morning. As it was, he was able to take it with perfect dignity and good humour, and to enjoy the point against the Wilcoxes with that laugh of his that did everybody good to hear; so hearty it was, so rich in the grain of the voice, so full of the zest and flavour of the joke. The range had been selected, and their talk of changes had begun with it, Mr. Murchison pointing out the new idea in the boiler, and Dr. Drummond remembering his first kitchen stove that burned wood and stood on its four legs, with nothing behind but the stove pipe, and if you wanted a boiler you took off the front lids and put it on, and how remarkable even that had seemed to his eyes, fresh from the conservative kitchen notions of the old country. He had come, unhappily, a widower to the domestic improvements on the other side of the Atlantic. “Often I used to think,” he said to Mr. Murchison, “if my poor wife could have seen that stove how delighted she would have been! But I doubt this would have been too much for her altogether!”

  “That stove!” answered Mr. Murchison. “Well I remember it. I sold it myself to your predecessor, Mr. Wishart, for thirty dollars – the last purchase he ever made, poor man. It was great business for me – I had only two others in the store like it. One of them old Milburn bought – the father of this man, d’ye mind him? – the other stayed by me a matter of seven years. I carried a light stock in those days.”

  It was no longer a light stock. The two men involuntarily glanced round them for the satisfaction of the contrast Murchison evoked, though neither of them, from motives of vague delicacy, felt inclined to dwell upon it. John Murchison had the shyness of an artist in his commercial success, and the minister possibly felt that his relation toward the prosperity of a member had in some degree the embarrassment of a tax-gatherer’s. The stock was indeed heavy now. You had to go upstairs to see the ranges, where they stood in rows, and every one of them bore somewhere upon it, in raised black letters, John Murchison’s name. Through the windows came the iterating ring on the iron from the foundry in Chestnut Street which fed the shop, with an overflow that found its way from one end of the country to the other. Finicking visitors to Elgin found this wearing, but to John Murchison it was the music that honours the conqueror of circumstances. The ground floor was given up to the small wares of the business, chiefly imported; two or three young men, steady and knowledgeable-looking, moved about in their shirt sleeves among shelves and packing cases. One of them was our friend Alec; our other friend Oliver looked after the books at the foundry. Their father did everything deliberately; but presently, in his own good time, his commercial letter paper would be headed, with regard to these two, “John Murchison and Sons.” It had long announced that the business was “Wholesale and Retail.”

  Dr. Drummond and Mr. Murchison, considering the changes in Elgin from the store door, did it at their leisure, the merchant with his thumbs thrust comfortably in the armholes of his waistcoat, the minister, with that familiar trick of his, balancing on one foot and suddenly throwing his slight weight forward on the other. “A bundle of nerves” people called the Doctor; to stand still would have been a penance to him; even as he swayed backward and forward in talking his hand must be busy at the seals on his watch chain and his shrewd glance travelling over a dozen things you would never dream so clever a man would take notice of. It was a prospect of moderate commercial activity they looked out upon, a street of mellow shop-fronts, on both sides, of varying height and importance, wearing that air of marking a period, a definite stop in growth, that so often co-exists with quite a reasonable degree of activity and independence in colonial towns. One could almost say, standing there in the door at Murchison’s, where the line of legitimate enterprise had been over-passed and where its intention had been none too sanguine – on the one hand in the faded and pretentious red brick building with the false third story, occupied by Cleary, which must have been let at a loss to dry-goods or anything else; on the other hand in the solid “Gregory block,” opposite the market, where rents were as certain as the dividends of the Bank of British North America.

  Main Street expressed the idea that, for the purpose of growing and doing business, it had always found the days long enough. Drays passed through it to the Grand Trunk station, but they passed one at a time; a certain number of people went up and down about their affairs, but they were never in a hurry; a street car jogged by every ten minutes or so, but nobody ran after it. There was a decent procedure; and it was felt that Bofield – he was dry-goods, too – in putting in an elevator was just a little unnecessarily in advance of the times. Bofield had only two stories, like everybody else, and a very easy staircase, up which people often declared they preferred to walk rather than wait in the elevator for a young man to finish serving and work it. These, of course, were t
he sophisticated people of Elgin; country folk, on a market day, would wait a quarter of an hour for the young man, and think nothing of it; and I imagine Bofield found his account in the elevator, though he did complain sometimes that such persons went up and down on frivolous pretexts or to amuse the baby. As a matter of fact, Elgin had begun as the centre of “trading” for the farmers of Fox County, and had soon over-supplied that limit in demand; so that when other interests added themselves to the activity of the town there was still plenty of room for the business they brought. Main Street was really, therefore, not a fair index; nobody in Elgin would have admitted it. Its appearance and demeanour would never have suggested that it was now the chief artery of a thriving manufacturing town, with a collegiate institute, eleven churches, two newspapers, and an asylum for the deaf and dumb, to say nothing of a fire department unsurpassed for organization and achievement in the Province of Ontario. Only at twelve noon it might be partly realized, when the prolonged “toots” of seven factory whistles at once let off, so to speak, the hour. Elgin liked the demonstration; it was held to be cheerful and unmistakable, an indication of “go-ahead” proclivities which spoke for itself. It occurred while yet Dr. Drummond and Mr. Murchison stood together in the store door.