The Imperialist

CHAPTER XX

Alfred Hesketh had, after all, written to young Murchison about his immediate intention of sailing for Canada and visiting Elgin; the letter arrived a day or two later. It was brief and businesslike, but it gave Lorne to understand that since his departure the imperial idea had been steadily fermenting, not only in the national mind, but particularly in Hesketh’s; that it produced in his case a condition only to be properly treated by personal experience. Hesketh was coming over to prove whatever advantage there was in seeing for yourself. That he was coming with the right bias Lorne might infer, he said, from the fact that he had waited a fortnight to get his passage by the only big line to New York that stood out for our mercantile supremacy against American combination.

“He needn’t bother to bring any bias,” Lorne remarked when he had read this, “but he’ll have to pay a lot of extra luggage on the one he takes back with him.”

He felt a little irritation at being offered the testimony of the Cunard ticket. Back on his native soil, its independence ran again like sap in him: nobody wanted a present of good will; the matter stood on its merits.

He was glad, nevertheless, that Hesketh was coming, gratified that it would now be his turn to show prospects, and turn figures into facts, and make plain the imperial profit from the further side. Hesketh was such an intelligent fellow, there would be the keenest sort of pleasure in demonstrating things, big things, to him, little things, too, ways of living, differences of habit. Already in the happy exercise of his hospitable instinct he saw how Hesketh would get on with his mother, with Stella, with Dr Drummond. He saw Hesketh interested, domiciled, remaining—the ranch life this side of the Rockies, Lorne thought, would tempt him, or something new and sound in Winnipeg. He kept his eye open for chances, and noted one or two likely things. “We want labour mostly,” he said to Advena, “but nobody is refused leave to land because he has a little money.”

“I should think not, indeed,” remarked Mrs Murchison, who was present. “I often wish your father and I had had a little more when we began. That whole Gregory block was going for three thousand dollars then. I wonder what it’s worth now?”

“Yes, but you and Father are worth more, too,” remarked Stella acutely.

“In fact, all the elder members of the family have approximated in value, Stella,” said her brother, “and you may too, in time.”

“I’ll take my chance with the country,” she retorted. They were all permeated with the question of the day; even Stella, after holding haughtily aloof for some time, had been obliged to get into step, as she described it, with the silly old Empire. Whatever it was in England, here it was a family affair; I mean in the town of Elgin, in the shops and the offices, up and down the tree-bordered streets as men went to and from their business, atomic creatures building the reef of the future, but conscious, and wanting to know what they were about. Political parties had long declared themselves, the Hampden Debating Society had had several grand field nights. Prospective lifelong friendships, male and female in every form of “the Collegiate,” had been put to this touchstone, sometimes with shattering effect. If you would not serve with Wallingham the greatness of Britain you were held to favour going over to the United States; there was no middle course. It became a personal matter in the ward schools and small boys pursued small boys with hateful cries of “Annexationist!” The subject even trickled about the apple-barrels and potato-bags of the market square. Here it should have raged, pregnant as it was with bucolic blessing; but our agricultural friends expect nothing readily except adverse weather, least of all a measure of economic benefit to themselves. Those of Fox County thought it looked very well, but it was pretty sure to work out some other way. Elmore Crow failed heavily to catch a light even from Lorne Murchison.

“You keep your hair on, Lorne,” he advised. “We ain’t going to get such big changes yet. An’ if we do the blooming syndicates ‘ll spoil ‘em for us.”

There were even dissentients among the farmers. The voice of one was raised who had lived laborious years, and many of them in the hope of seeing his butter and cheese go unimpeded across the American line. It must be said, however, that still less attention was paid to him, and it was generally conceded that he would die without the sight.

It was the great topic. The day Wallingham went his defiant furthest in the House and every colonial newspaper set it up in acclaiming headlines, Horace Williams, enterprising fellow, remembered that Lorne had seen the great man under circumstances that would probably pan out, and send round Rawlins. Rawlins was to get something that would do to call “Wallingham in the Bosom of his Family,” and as much as Lorne cared to pour into him about his own view of the probable issue. Rawlins failed to get the interview, came back to say that Lorne didn’t seem to think himself a big enough boy for that, but he did not return empty-handed. Mr Murchison sent Mr Williams the promise of some contributions upon the question of the hour, which he had no objection to sign and which Horace should have for the good of the cause. Horace duly had them, the Express duly published them, and they were copied in full by the Dominion and several other leading journals, with an amount of comment which everyone but Mrs Murchison thought remarkable.

“I don’t pretend to understand it,” she said, “but anybody can see that he knows what he’s talking about.” John Murchison read them with a critical eye and a pursed-out lip.

“He takes too much for granted.”

“What does he take for granted?” asked Mrs Murchison.

“Other folks being like himself,” said the father.

That, no doubt, was succinct and true; nevertheless, the articles had competence as well as confidence. The writer treated facts with restraint and conditions with sympathy. He summoned ideas from the obscurity of men’s minds, and marshalled them in the light, so that many recognized what they had been trying to think. He wrote with homeliness as well as force, wishing much more to make the issue recognizable than to create fine phrases, with the result that one or two of his sentences passed into the language of the discussion which, as any of its standard-bearers would have told you, had little use for rhetoric. The articles were competent: if you listened to Horace Williams you would have been obliged to accept them as the last, or latest, word of economic truth, though it must be left to history to endorse Mr Williams. It was their enthusiasm, however, that gave them the wing on which they travelled. People naturally took different views, even of this quality. “Young Murchison’s working the imperial idea for all it’s worth,” was Walter Winter’s; and Octavius Milburn humorously summed up the series as “tall talk.”

Alfred Hesketh came, it was felt, rather opportunely into the midst of this. Plenty of people, the whole of Market Square and East Elgin, a good part, too, probably, of the Town Ward, were unaware of his arrival; but for the little world he penetrated he was clothed with all the interest of the great contingency. His decorous head in the Emmetts’ pew on Sunday morning stood for a symbol as well as for a stranger. The nation was on the eve of a great far-reaching transaction with the mother country, and thrilling with the terms of the bargain. Hesketh was regarded by people in Elgin who knew who he was with the mingled cordiality and distrust that might have met a principal. They did not perhaps say it, but it was in their minds. “There’s one of them,” was what they thought when they met him in the street. At any other time he would have been just an Englishman; now he was invested with the very romance of destiny. The perception was obscure, but it was there. Hesketh, on the other hand, found these good people a very well-dressed, well-conditioned, decent lot, rather sallower than he expected, perhaps, who seemed to live in a fair-sized town in a great deal of comfort, and was wholly unconscious of anything special in his relation to them or theirs to him.

He met Lorne just outside the office of Warner, Fulke, and Murchison the following day. They greeted heartily. “Now this IS good!” said Lorne, and he thought so. Hesketh confided his first impression. “It’s not unlike an English country town,” he said, “only the streets are wider, and the people don’t look so much in earnest.”

“Oh, they’re just as much in earnest some of the time,” Lorne laughed, “but maybe not all the time!”

The sun shone crisply round them; there was a brisk October market; on the other side of the road Elmore Crow dangled his long legs over a cart flap and chewed a cheroot. Elgin was abroad, doing business on its wide margin of opportunity. Lorne cast a backward glance at conditions he had seen.

“I know what you mean,” he said. “Sharp of you to spot it so soon, old chap! You’re staying with the English Church minister, aren’t you—Mr Emmett? Some connection of yours, aren’t they?”

“Mrs Emmett is Chafe’s sister—Mrs Chafe, you know, is my aunt,” Hesketh reminded him. “I say, Murchison, I left old Chafe wilder than ever. Wallingham’s committee keep sending him leaflets and things. They take it for granted he’s on the right side, since his interests are. The other day they asked him for a subscription! The old boy sent his reply to the Daily News and carried it about for a week. I think that gave him real satisfaction; but he hates the things by post.”

Lorne laughed delightedly. “I expect he’s snowed under with them. I sent him my own valuable views last week.”

“I’m afraid they’ll only stiffen him. That got to be his great argument after you left, the fact that you fellows over here want it. He doesn’t approve of a bargain if the other side sees a profit. Curiously enough, his foremen and people out in Chiswick are all for it. I was talking to one of them just before I left—‘Stands to reason, sir,’ he said, ‘we don’t want to pay more for a loaf than we do now. But we’ll do it, sir, if it means downing them Germans; he said.”

Lorne’s eyebrows half-perceptibly twitched. “They do ‘sir’ you a lot over there, don’t they?” he said. “It was as much as I could do to get at what a fellow of that sort meant, tumbling over the ‘sirs’ he propped it up with. Well, all kinds of people, all kinds of argument, I suppose, when it comes to trying to get ‘em solid! But I was going to say we are all hoping you’ll give us a part of your time while you’re in Elgin. My family are looking forward to meeting you. Come along and let me introduce you to my father now—he’s only round the corner.”

“By all means!” said Hesketh, and they fell into step together. As Lorne said, it was only a short distance, but far enough to communicate a briskness, an alertness, from the step of one young man to that of the other. “I wish it were five miles,” Hesketh said, all his stall-fed muscles responding to the new call of his heart and lungs. “Any good walks about here? I asked Emmett, but he didn’t know—supposed you could walk to Clayfield if you didn’t take the car. He seems to have lost his legs. I suppose parsons do.”

“Not all of them,” said Lorne. “There’s a fellow that has a church over in East Elgin, Finlay his name is, that beats the record of anything around here. He just about ranges the county in the course of a week.”

“The place is too big for one parish, no doubt,” Hesketh remarked.

“Oh, he’s a Presbyterian! The Episcopalians haven’t got any hold to speak of over there. Here we are,” said Lorne, and turned in at the door. The old wooden sign was long gone. “John Murchison and Sons” glittered instead in the plate-glass windows, but Hesketh did not see it.

“Why do you think he’ll be in here?” he asked, on young Murchison’s heels.

“Because he always is when he isn’t over at the shop,” replied Lorne. “It’s his place of business—his store, you know. There he is! Hard luck—he’s got a customer. We’ll have to wait.”

He went on ahead with his impetuous step; he did not perceive the instant’s paralysis that seemed to overtake Hesketh’s, whose foot dragged, however, no longer than that. It was an initiation; he had been told he might expect some. He checked his impulse to be amused, and guarded his look round, not to show unseemly curiosity. His face, when he was introduced to Alec, who was sorting some odd dozens of tablespoons, was neutral and pleasant. He reflected afterward that he had been quite equal to the occasion. He thought, too, that he had shown some adaptability. Alec was not a person of fluent discourse, and when he had inquired whether Hesketh was going to make a long stay, the conversation might have languished but for this.

“Is that Birmingham?” he asked, nodding kindly at the spoons.

“Came to us through a house in Liverpool,” Alec responded. “I expect you had a stormy crossing, Mr Hesketh.”

“It was a bit choppy. We had the fiddles on most of the time,” Hesketh replied. “Most of the time. Now, how do you find the bicycle trade over here? Languishing, as it is with us?”

“Oh, it keeps up pretty well,” said Alec, “but we sell more spoons. ‘N’ what do you think of this country, far as you’ve seen it?”

“Oh, come now, it’s a little soon to ask, isn’t it? Yes—I suppose bicycles go out of fashion, and spoons never do. I was thinking,” added Hesketh, casting his eyes over a serried rank, “of buying a bicycle.”

Alec had turned to put the spoons in their place on the shelves. “Better take your friend across to Cox’s,” he advised Lorne over his shoulder. “He’ll be able to get a motorbike there,” a suggestion which gave Mr Hesketh to reflect later that if that was the general idea of doing business it must be an easy country to make money in.

The customer was satisfied at last, and Mr Murchison walked sociably to the door with him; it was the secretary of the local Oddfellows’ Lodge, who had come in about a furnace.

“Now’s our chance,” said Lorne. “Father, this is Mr Hesketh, from London—my father, Hesketh. He can tell you all you want to know about Canada—this part of it, anyway. Over thirty years, isn’t it, Father, since you came out?”

“Glad to meet you,” said John Murchison, “glad to meet you, Mr Hesketh. We’ve heard much about you.”

“You must have been quite among the pioneers of Elgin, Mr Murchison,” said Hesketh as they shook hands. Alec hadn’t seemed to think of that; Hesketh put it down to the counter.

“Not quite,” said John. “We’ll say among the early arrivals.”

“Have you ever been back in your native Scotland?” asked Hesketh.

“Aye, twice.”

“But you prefer the land of your adoption?”

“I do. But I think by now it’ll be kin,” said Mr Murchison. “It was good to see the heather again, but a man lives best where he’s taken root.”

“Yes, yes. You seem to do a large business here, Mr Murchison.”

“Pretty well for the size of the place. You must get Lorne to take you over Elgin. It’s a fair sample of our rising manufacturing towns.”

“I hope he will. I understand you manufacture to some extent yourself?”

“We make our own stoves and a few odd things.”

“You don’t send any across the Atlantic yet?” queried Hesketh jocularly.

“Not yet. No, sir!”

Then did Mr Hesketh show himself in true sympathy with the novel and independent conditions of the commonwealth he found himself in.

“I beg you won’t use that form with me,” he said, “I know it isn’t the custom of the country, and I am a friend of your son’s, you see.”

The iron merchant looked at him, just an instant’s regard, in which astonishment struggled with the usual deliberation. Then his considering hand went to his chin.

“I see. I must remember,” he said.

The son, Lorne, glanced in the pause beyond John Murchison’s broad shoulders, through the store door and out into the moderate commerce of Main Street, which had carried the significance and the success of his father’s life. His eye came back and moved over the contents of the place, taking stock of it, one might say, and adjusting the balance with pride. He had said very little since they had been in the store. Now he turned to Hesketh quietly.

“I wouldn’t bother about that if I were you,” he said. “My father spoke quite—colloquially.”

“Oh!” said Hesketh.

They parted on the pavement outside. “I hope you understand,” said Lorne, with an effort at heartiness, “how glad my parents will be to have you if you find yourself able to spare us any of your time?”

“Thanks very much,” said Hesketh; “I shall certainly give myself the pleasure of calling as soon as possible.”