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

his guests had come for beyond it, and talked exclusively and exhaustively about the new possibilities for fruit-farming in England. Cruickshank fairly shook himself into his overcoat with irritation afterward. "It's the sort of thing we must except," he said, as they merged upon Pall Mall. It was not the sort of thing Lorne expected; but we know him unsophisticated and a stranger to the heart of the Empire, which beats through such impediment of accumulated tissue. Nor was it the sort of thing they got from Wallingham, the keen-eyed and probing, whose skill in adjusting conflicting interests could astonish even their expectation, and whose vision of the essentials of the future could lift even their enthusiasm. One would like to linger over their touch with Wallingham, that fusion of energy with energy, that straight, satisfying, accomplishing dart. There is more drama here; no doubt, than in all the pages that are to come. But I am explaining now how little, not how much, the Cruickshank deputation, and especially Lorne Murchison, had the opportunity of feeling and learning in London, in order to show how wonderful it was that Lorne felt and learned so widely. That, what he absorbed and took back with him is, after all, what we have to do with; his actual adventures are of no great importance.

The deputation to urge improved communications within the Empire had few points of contact with the great world, but its members were drawn into engagements of their own, more, indeed, than some of them could conveniently overtake. Mr Bates never saw his niece in the post-office, and regrets it to this day. The engagements arose partly out of business relations. Poulton who was a dyspeptic, complained that nothing could be got through in London without eating and drinking; for his part he would concede a point any time not to eat and drink, but you could not do it; you just had to suffer. Poulton was a principal in one of the railway companies that were competing to open up the country south of Hudson's Bay to the Pacific, but having dealt with that circumstance in the course of the day he desired only to be allowed to go to bed on bread and butter and a little stewed fruit. Bates, whose name was a nightmare to every other dry-goods man in Toronto, naturally had to see a good many of the wholesale people; he, too, complained of the number of courses and the variety of the wines, but only to disguise his gratification. McGill, of the Great Bear Line, had big proposals to make in connection with southern railway freights from Liverpool; and Cameron, for private reasons of magnitude, proposed to ascertain the real probability of a duty to foreigners on certain forms of manufactured leather--he turned out in Toronto a very good class of suitcase. Cruickshank had private connections to which they were all respectful. Nobody but Cruickshank found it expedient to look up the lost leader of the Canadian House of Commons, contributed to a cause still more completely lost in home politics; nobody but Cruickshank was likely to be asked to dine by a former Governor-General of the Dominion, an invitation which nobody but Cruickshank would be likely to refuse.

"It used to be a 'command' in Ottawa," said Cruickshank, who had got on badly with his sovereign's representative there, "but here it's only a privilege. There's no business in it, and I haven't time for pleasure."

The nobleman in question had, in effect, dropped back into the Lords. So far as the Empire was concerned, he was in the impressive rearguard, and this was a little company of fighting men.

The entertainments arising out of business were usually on a scale more or less sumptuous. They took place in big, well-known restaurants, and included a look at many of the people who seem to lend themselves so willingly to the great buzzing show that anybody can pay for in London, their names in the paper in the morning, their faces at Prince's in the evening, their personalities no doubt advantageously exposed in various places during the day. But there were others, humbler ones in Earl's Court Road or Maida Vale, where the members of the deputation had relatives whom it was natural to hunt up. Long years and many billows had rolled between, and more effective separations had arisen in the whole difference of life; still, it was natural to hunt them up, to seek in their eyes and their hands the old subtle bond of kin, and perhaps--such is our vanity in the new lands--to show them what the stock had come to overseas. They tended to be depressing these visits: the married sister was living in a small way; the first cousin seemed to have got into a rut; the uncle and aunt were failing, with a stooping, trembling, old-fashioned kind of decrepitude, a rigidity of body and mind, which somehow one didn't see much over home.

"England," said Poulton, the Canadian-born, "is a dangerous country to live in; you run such risks of growing old." They agreed, I fear, for more reasons than this that England was a good country to leave early; and you cannot blame them--there was not one of them who did not offer in his actual person proof of what he said. Their own dividing chance grew dramatic in their eyes.

"I was offered a clerkship with the Cunards the day before I sailed," said McGill. "Great Scott, if I'd taken that clerkship!" He saw all his glorious past, I suppose, in a suburban aspect.

"I was kicked out," said Cameron, "and it was the kindest attention my father ever paid me;" and Bates remarked that it was worth coming out second-class, as he did, to go back in the best cabin in the ship.

The appearance and opinions of those they had left behind them prompted them to this kind of congratulation, with just a thought of compunction at the back of it for their own better fortunes. In the further spectacle of England most of them saw the repository of singularly old-fashioned ideas the storehouse of a good deal of money; and the market for unlimited produce. They looked cautiously at imperial sentiment; they were full of the terms of their bargain and had, as they would have said, little use for schemes that did not commend themselves on a basis of common profit. Cruickshank was the biggest and the best of them; but even Cruickshank submitted the common formulas; submitted them and submitted to them.

Only Lorne Murchison among them looked higher and further; only he was alive to the inrush of the essential; he only lifted up his heart.


CHAPTER XVI

Lorne was thus an atom in the surge of London. The members of the deputation, as their business progressed, began to feel less like atoms and more like a body exerting an influence, however obscurely hid in a temperance hotel, upon the tide of international affairs; but their secretary had naturally no initiative that appeared, no importance that was taken account of. In these respects, no less than in the others, he justified Mr Cruickshank's selection. He did his work as unobtrusively as he did it admirably well; and for the rest he was just washed about, carried, hither and thither, generally on the tops of omnibuses, receptive, absorbent, mostly silent. He did try once or twice to talk to the bus drivers--he had been told it was a thing to do if you wanted to get hold of the point of view of a particular class; but the thick London idiom defeated him, and he found they grew surly when he asked them too often to repeat their replies. He felt a little surly himself after a while, when they asked him, as they nearly always did, if he wasn't an American. "Yes," he would say in the end, "but not the United States kind," resenting the necessity of explaining to the Briton beside him that there were other kinds. The imperial idea goes so quickly from the heart to the head. He felt compelled, nevertheless, to mitigate his denial to the bus drivers.

"I expect it's the next best thing." he would say, "but it's only the next best."

It was as if he felt charged to vindicate the race, the whole of Anglo-Saxondom, there in his supreme moment, his splendid position, on the top of an omnibus lumbering west out of Trafalgar Square.

One introduction of his own he had. Mrs Milburn had got it for him from the rector, Mr Emmett, to his wife's brother, Mr Charles Chafe, who had interests in Chiswick and a house in Warwick Gardens. Lorne put off presenting the letter--did not know, indeed, quite how to present it, till his stay in London was half over. Finally he presented himself with it, as the quickest way, at the office of Mr Chafe's works at Chiswick. He was cordially received, both there and in Warwick Gardens, where he met Mrs Chafe and the family, when he also met Mr Alfred Hesketh. Lorne went several times to the house in Warwick Gardens, and Hesketh--a nephew--was there on the very first occasion. It was an encounter interesting on both sides. He--Hesketh--was a young man with a good public school and a university behind him, where his very moderate degree, however, failed to represent the activity of his mind or the capacity of his energy. He had a little money of his own, and no present occupation; he belonged to the surplus. He was not content to belong to it; he cast about him a good deal for something to do. There was always the Bar, but only the best fellows get on there, and he was not quite one of the best fellows; he knew that. He had not money enough for politics or interest enough for the higher departments of the public service, nor had he those ready arts of expression that lead naturally into journalism. Anything involving further examinations he rejected on that account; and the future of glassware, in view of what they were doing in Germany, did not entice him to join his uncle in Chiswick. Still he was aware of enterprise, convinced that he had loafed long enough.

Lorne Murchison had never met anyone of Hesketh's age in Hesketh's condition before. Affluence and age he knew, in honourable retirement; poverty and youth he knew, embarked in the struggle; indolence and youth he also knew, as it cumbered the ground; but youth and a competence, equipped with education, industry, and vigour, searching vainly in fields empty of opportunity, was to him a new spectacle. He himself had intended to be a lawyer since he was fourteen. There never had been any impediment to his intention, any qualification to his desire. He was still under his father's roof, but that was for the general happiness; any time within the last eighteen months, if he had chosen to hurry fate, he might have selected another. He was younger than Hesketh by a year, yet we may say that he had arrived, while Hesketh was still fidgeting at the starting-point.

"Why don't you farm?" he asked once.

"Farming in England may pay in a quarter of a century, not before. I can't wait for it. Besides, why should I farm? Why didn't you?"

"Well," said Lorne, "in your case it seems about the only thing left. I? Oh it doesn't attract us over there. We're getting away from it--leaving it to the newcomers from this side. Curious circle, that: I wonder when our place gets overcrowded, where we shall go to plough?"

Hesketh's situation occupied them a good deal; but their great topic had a wider drift, embracing nothing less than the Empire, pausing nowhere