The Imperialist - Sara Jeannette Duncan (general ebook reader .txt) 📗

these sharp features; Elgin market square, indeed, was the biography of Fox County and, in little, the history of the whole Province. The heart of it was there, the enduring heart of the new country already old in acquiescence. It was the deep root of the race in the land, twisted and unlovely, but holding the promise of all. Something like that Lorne Murchison felt about it as he stood for a moment in the passage I have mentioned and looked across the road. The spectacle never failed to cheer him; he was uniformly in gayer spirits, better satisfied with life and more consciously equal to what he had to do, on days when the square was full than on days when it was empty. This morning he had an elation of his own; it touched everything with more vivid reality. The familiar picture stirred a joy in him in tune with his private happiness; its undernote came to him with a pang as keen. The sense of kinship surged in his heart; these were his people, this his lot as well as theirs. For the first time he saw it in detachment. Till now he had regarded it with the friendly eyes of a participator who looked no further. Today he did look further: the whole world invited his eyes, offering him a great piece of luck to look through. The opportunity was in his hand which, if he could seize and hold, would lift and carry him on. He was as much aware of its potential significance as anyone could be, and what leapt in his veins till he could have laughed aloud was the splendid conviction of resource. Already in the door of the passage he had achieved, from that point he looked at the scene before him with an impulse of loyalty and devotion. A tenderness seized him for the farmers of Fox County, a throb of enthusiasm for the idea they represented, which had become for him suddenly moving and pictorial. At that moment his country came subjectively into his possession; great and helpless it came into his inheritance as it comes into the inheritance of every man who can take it, by deed of imagination and energy and love. He held this microcosm of it, as one might say, in his hand and looked at it ardently; then he took his way across the road.

A tall thickly built young fellow detached himself from a group, smiling broadly at the sight of Murchison, and started to meet him.

"Hello, Lorne," he said. He had smiled all the way anticipating the encounter. He was obviously in clothes which he did not put on every day, but the seriousness of this was counteracted by his hard felt hat, which he wore at an angle that disregarded convention.

"Hello, Elmore! You back?"

"That's about it."

"You don't say! Back to stay?"

"Far's I can see. Young Alf's made up his mind to learn the dentist business, and the old folks are backin' him; so I don't see but I've got to stop on and run the show. Father's gettin' up in years now."

"Why, yes. I suppose he must be. It's a good while since you went West. Well, what sort of a country have they got out Swan River way? Booming right along?"

"Boom nothing. I don't mean to say there's anything the matter with the country; there ain't; but you've got to get up just as early in the mornings out there as y'do anywhere, far's I noticed. An' it's a lonesome life. Now I AM back I don't know but little old Ontario's good enough for me. 'N I hear you've taken up the law, Lorne. Y'always had a partiality for it, d'y' remember, up there to the Collegiate? I used to think it'd be fine to travel with samples, those days. But you were dead gone on the law. 'N by all reports it pans out pretty well don't it?"

The young men had taken their way among the shifting crowd together. Lorne Murchison, although there was something too large about him for the town's essential stamp, made by contrast, as he threaded the desultory groups of country people, a type of the conventional and the formed; his companion glanced at him now and then with admiration. The values of carriage and of clothes are relative: in Fifth Avenue Lorne would have looked countrified, in Piccadilly colonial. Districts are imaginable, perhaps not in this world, where the frequenters of even those fashionable thoroughfares would attract glances of curiosity by their failure to achieve the common standard in such things. Lorne Murchison, to dismiss the matter, was well up to the standard of Elgin, though he wore his straw hat quite on the back of his head and buried both hands in his trousers pockets. His eye was full of pleasant easy familiarity with the things he saw, and ready to see larger things; it had that beam of active inquiry, curious but never amazed that marks the man likely to expand his horizons. Meanwhile he was on capital terms with his little world, which seemed to take pleasure in hailing him by his Christian name; even morose Jim Webster, who had failed three times in groceries, said "Morning, Lorne" with a look of toleration. He moved alertly; the poise of his head was sanguine; the sun shone on him; the timidest soul came nearer to him. He and Elmore Crow, who walked beside him, had gone through the lower forms of the Elgin Collegiate Institute together, that really "public" kind of school which has so much to do with reassorting the classes of a new country. The Collegiate Institute took in raw material and turned out teachers, more teachers than anything. The teachers taught, chiefly in rural districts where they could save money, and with the money they saved changed themselves into doctors, Fellows of the University, mining engineers. The Collegiate Institute was a potential melting-pot: you went in as your simple opportunities had made you; how you shaped coming out depended upon what was hidden in the core of you. You could not in any case be the same as your father before you; education in a new country is too powerful a stimulant for that, working upon material too plastic and too hypothetical; it is not yet a normal force, with an operation to be reckoned on with confidence. It is indeed the touchstone for character in a new people, for character acquired as apart from that inherited; it sometimes reveals surprises. Neither Lorne Murchison nor Elmore Crow illustrates this point very nearly. Lorne would have gone into the law in any case, since his father was able to send him, and Elmore would inevitably have gone back to the crops since he was early defeated by any other possibility. Nevertheless, as they walk together in my mind along the Elgin market square, the Elgin Collegiate Institute rises infallibly behind them, a directing influence and a responsible parent. Lorne was telling his great news.

"You don't say!" remarked Elmore in response to it. "Lumbago is it? Pa's subject to that too; gets an attack most springs. Mr Fulke'll have to lay right up--it's the only thing."

"I'm afraid he will. And Warner never appeared in court in his life."

"What d'ye keep Warner for, then?"

"Oh, he does the conveyancing. He's a good conveyancer, but he isn't any pleader and doesn't pretend to be. And it's too late to transfer the case; nobody could get to the bottom of it as we have in the time. So it falls on me."

"Caesar, his ghost! How d'ye feel about it, Lorne? I'd be scared green. Y'don't TALK nervous. Now I bet you get there with both feet."

"I hope to get there," the young lawyer answered; and as he spoke a concentration came into his face which drove the elation and everything else that was boyish out of it. "It's bigger business than I could have expected for another five years. I'm sorry for the old man, though--HE'S nervous, if you like. They can hardly keep him in bed. Isn't that somebody beckoning to you?"

Elmore looked everywhere except in the right direction among the carts. If you had been "to the Collegiate," relatives among the carts selling squashes were embarrassing.

"There," his companion indicated.

"It's Mother," replied Mr Crow, with elaborate unconcern; "but I don't suppose she's in anything of a hurry. I'll just go along with you far's the post-office." He kept his glance carefully from the spot at which he was signalled, and a hint of copper colour crawled up the back of his neck.

"Oh, but she is. Come along, Elmore; I can go that way."

"It'll be longer for you."

"Not a bit." Lorne cast a shrewd glance at his companion. "And as we're passing, you might just introduce me to your mother; see?"

"She won't expect it, Lorne."

"That's all right, my son. She won't refuse to meet a friend of yours." He led the way as he spoke to the point of vantage occupied by Mrs Crow, followed, with plain reluctance, by her son. She was a frail-looking old woman, with a knitted shawl pinned tightly across her chest, and her bonnet, in the course of commercial activity, pushed so far back as to be almost falling off.

"You might smarten yourself with that change, Elmore," she addressed him, ignoring his companion. "There's folks coming back for it. Two-dollar bill, wa'n't it? Fifty cents--seventy-five--dollar'n a half. That's a Yankee dime, an' you kin march straight back with it. They don't pass but for nine cents, as you're old enough to know. Keep twenty-five cents for your dinner--you'll get most for the money at the Barker House--an' bring me back another quarter. Better go an' get your victuals now--it's gone twelve--while they're hot."

Elmore took his instructions without visible demur; and then, as Lorne had not seen fit to detach himself, performed the ceremony of introduction. As he performed it he drew one foot back and bowed himself, which seemed obscurely to facilitate it. The suspicion faded out of Mrs Crow's tired old sharp eyes under the formula, and she said she was pleased to make our friend's acquaintance.

"Mr Murchison's changed some since the old days at the Collegiate," Elmore explained, "but he ain't any different under his coat. He's practisin' the law."

"Lawyers," Mrs Crow observed, "are folks I like to keep away from."

"Quite right, too," responded Lorne, unabashed. "And so you've got my friend here back on the farm, Mrs Crow?"

"Well, yes, he's back on the farm, an' when he's wore out his Winnipeg clothes and his big ideas, we're lookin' to make him some use." Mrs Crow's intention, though barbed, was humorous, and her son grinned broadly.

"There's more money in the law," he remarked "once you get a start. Here's Mr Murchison goin' to run the Ormiston case; his old man's down sick, an' I guess it depends on Lorne now whether Ormiston gets off or goes to penitentiary."

Mrs Crow's face tied itself up into criticism as she looked our young man up and down. "Depends upon you, does it?" she commented. "Well, all I've got to say is it's a mighty young dependence. Coming on next week, ain't it? You won't be much older by then. Yes'm," she turned to business, "I don't say but what it's high for rhubarb, but there ain't another bunch in the market, and won't be for a week yet."

Under cover of this discussion Lorne bade the Crows good morning, retreating in the rear of the lady who found the rhubarb high. Mrs Crow's drop of acid combined with