The Imperialist (18 page)

“England isn’t superannuated yet, Murchison.”

“Not yet. Please God she never will be. But she isn’t as young as she was, and it does seem to me –”

“What seems to you?”

“Well, I’m no economist, and I don’t know how far to trust my impressions, and you needn’t tell me I’m a rank outsider, for I know that; but coming here as an outsider, it does seem to me that it’s from the outside that any sort of helpful change in the conditions of this country has got to come.
England still has military initiative, though it’s hard to see how she’s going to keep that unless she does something to stop the degeneration of the class she draws her army from; but what other kind do we hear about? Company promoting, beekeeping, asparagus growing, poultry farming for ladies, the opening of a new Oriental Tea-Pot in Regent Street, with samisen-players between four and six, and Japanese attendants, who take the change on their hands and knees. London’s one great stomach – how many eating places have we passed in the last ten minutes? The place seems all taken up with inventing new ways of making rich people more comfortable and better amused – I’m fed up with the sight of shiny carriages with cockaded flunkeys on ’em, wooden smart, rolling about with an elderly woman and a parasol and a dog. England seems to have fallen back on itself, got content to spend the money there is in the country already; and about the only line of commercial activity the stranger sees is the onslaught on that accumulation. London isn’t the headquarters for big new developing enterprises any more. If you take out Westminster and Wallingham, London is a collection of traditions and great houses, and newspaper offices, and shops. That sort of thing can’t go on for ever. Already capital is drawing away to conditions it can find a profit in – steel works in Canada, woollen factories in Australia, jute mills in India. Do you know where the boots came from that shod the troops in South Africa? Cawnpore. The money will go, you know, and that’s a fact; the money will go, and the people will go, anyhow. It’s only a case of whether England sends them with blessing and profit and greater glory, or whether she lets them slip away in spite of her.”

“I dare say it will,” replied Hesketh; “I’ve got precious little, but what there is I’d take out fast enough, if I saw a
decent chance of investing it. I sometimes think of trying my luck in the States. Two or three fellows in my year went over there and aren’t making half a bad thing of it.”

“Oh, come,” said Lorne, half swinging round upon the other, with his hands in his pockets, “it isn’t exactly the time, is it, to talk about chucking the Empire?”

“Well, no, it isn’t,” Hesketh admitted. “One might do better to wait, I dare say. At all events, till we see what the country says to Wallingham.”

They walked on for a moment or two in silence; then Lorne broke out again.

“I suppose it’s unreasonable, but there’s nothing I hate so much as to hear Englishmen talk of settling in the United States.”

“It’s risky, I admit. And I’ve never heard anybody yet say it was comfortable.”

“In a few years, fifty maybe, it won’t matter. Things will have taken their direction by then; but now it’s a question of the lead. The Americans think they’ve got it, and unless we get imperial federation of course they have. It’s their plain intention to capture England commercially.”

“We’re a long way from that,” said Hesketh.

“Yes, but it’s in the line of fate. Industrial energy is deserting this country; and you have no large movement, no counter-advance, to make against the increasing forces that are driving this way from over there – nothing to oppose to assault. England is in a state of siege, and doesn’t seem to know it. She’s so great – Hesketh, it’s pathetic! – she offers an undefended shore to attack, and a stupid confidence, a kindly blindness, above all to Americans, whom she patronizes in the gate.”

“I believe we do patronize them,” said Hesketh. “It’s rotten bad form.”

“Oh, form! I may be mad, but one seems to see in politics over here a lack of definition and purpose, a tendency to cling to the abstract and to precedent – ‘the mainstay of the mandarin’ one of the papers calls it; that’s a good word – that give one the feeling that this kingdom is beginning to be aware of some influence stronger than its own. It lies, of course, in the great West, where the corn and the cattle grow; and between Winnipeg and Chicago choose quickly, England!”

His companion laughed. “Oh, I’m with you,” he said, “but you take a pessimistic view of this country, Murchison.”

“It depends on what you call pessimism,” Lorne rejoined. “I see England down the future the heart of the Empire, the conscience of the world, and the Mecca of the race.”

T
he Cruickshank deputation returned across that North Atlantic which it was their desire to see so much more than ever the track of the flag, toward the middle of July. The shiny carriages were still rolling about in great numbers when they left; London’s air of luxury had thickened with the advancing season and hung heavily in the streets; people had begun to picnic in the Park on Sundays. They had been from the beginning a source of wonder and of depression to Lorne Murchison, the people in the Park, those, I mean, who walked and sat and stood there for the refreshment of their lives, for whom the place has a lyrical value as real as it is unconscious. He noted them ranged on formal benches, quiet, respectable, absorptive, or gathered heavily, shoulder to shoulder, docile under the tutelage of policemen, listening to any one who would lift a voice to speak to them. London, beating on all borders, hemmed them in; England outside seemed hardly to contain for them a wider space. Lorne, with his soul full of free airs and forest depths, never failed to respond to a note in the Park that left him heavy-hearted, longing for an automatic distributing system for the Empire.
When he saw them bring their spirit-lamps and kettles and sit down in little companies on four square yards of turf, under the blackened branches, in the roar of the traffic, he went back to Bloomsbury to pack his trunk, glad that it was not his lot to live with that enduring spectacle.

They were all glad, every one of them, to turn their faces to the West again. The unready conception of things, the political concentration upon parish affairs, the cumbrous social machinery, oppressed them with its dull anachronism in a marching world; the problems of sluggish over-population clouded their eager outlook. These conditions might have been their inheritance. Perhaps Lorne Murchison was the only one who thanked Heaven consciously that it was not so; but there was no man among them whose pulse did not mark a heart rejoiced as he paced the deck of the Allan liner the first morning out of Liverpool, because he had leave to refuse them. None dreamed of staying, of “settling,” though such a course was practicable to any of them except Lorne. They were all rich enough to take the advantages that money brings in England, the comfort, the importance, the state; they had only to add their wealth to the sumptuous side of the dramatic contrast. I doubt whether the idea even presented itself. It is the American who takes up his appreciative residence in England. He comes as a foreigner, observant, amused, having disclaimed responsibility for a hundred years. His detachment is as complete as it would be in Italy, with the added pleasure of easy comprehension. But homecomers from Greater Britain have never been cut off, still feel their uneasy share in all that is, and draw a long breath of relief as they turn again to their life in the lands where they found wider scope and different opportunities, and that new quality in the blood which made them different men.

The deputation had accomplished a good deal; less, Cruickshank said, than he had hoped, but more than he had expected. They had obtained the promise of concessions for Atlantic services, both mail and certain classes of freight, by being able to demonstrate a generous policy on their own side. Pacific communications the home Government were more chary of, there were matters to be fought out with Australia. The Pacific was further away, as Cruickshank said, and you naturally can’t get fellows who have never been there to see the country under the Selkirks and south of the Bay – any of them except Wallingham, who had never been there either, but whose imagination took views of the falcon. They were reinforced by news of a shipping combination in Montreal to lower freights to South Africa against the Americans; it wasn’t news to them, some of them were in it; but it was to the public, and it helped the sentiment of their aim, the feather on the arrow. They had secured something, both financially and morally; what best pleased them, perhaps, was the extent to which they got their scheme discussed. Here Lorne had been invaluable; Murchison had done more with the newspapers, they agreed, than any of them with Cabinet Ministers. The journalist everywhere is perhaps more accessible to ideas, more susceptible to enthusiasm, than his fellows, and Lorne was charged with the object of his deputation in its most communicable, most captivating form. At all events, he came to excellent understanding, whether of agreement of opposition, with the newspaper men he met – Cruickshank knew a good many of them, and these occasions were more fruitful than the official ones – and there is no doubt that the guarded approval of certain leading columns had fewer ifs and buts and other qualifications in consequence, while the disapproval of others was marked by a kind of unwilling sympathy and a
freely accorded respect. Lorne found London editors surprisingly unbiased, London newspapers surprisingly untrammelled. They seemed to him to suffer from no dictated views, no interests in the background or special local circumstances. They had open minds, most of them, and when a cloud appeared it was seldom more than a prejudice. It was only his impression, and perhaps it would not stand cynical inquiry; but he had a grateful conviction that the English Press occupied in the main a lofty and impartial ground of opinion, from which it desired only a view of the facts in their proportion. On his return he confided it to Horace Williams, who scoffed, and ran the national politics of the
Express
in the local interests of Fox County as hard as ever; but it had fallen in with Lorne’s beautiful beliefs about England, and he clung to it for years.

The Williamses had come over the second evening following Lorne’s arrival, after tea. Rawlins had gone to the station, just to see that the
Express
would make no mistake in announcing that Mr. L. Murchison had “Returned to the Paternal Roof,” and the
Express
had announced it, with due congratulation. Family feeling demanded that for the first twenty-four hours he should be left to his immediate circle, but people had been dropping in all the next day at the office, and now came the Williamses, “trapesing,” as Mrs. Murchison said, across the grass, though she was too content to make it more than a private grievance, to where they all sat on the verandah.

“What I don’t understand,” Horace Williams said to Mr. Murchison, “was why you didn’t give him a blow on the whistle. You and Milburn and a few others might have got up quite a toot. You don’t get the secretary to a deputation for tying up the Empire home every day.”

“You did that for him in the
Express,”
said John Murchison, smiling as he pressed down, with an accustomed thumb, the tobacco into his pipe.

“Oh, we said nothing at all! Wait till he’s returned for South Fox,” Williams responded jocularly.

“Why not the Imperial Council – of the future – at Westminster, while you’re about it?” remarked Lorne, flipping a pebble back upon the gravel path.

“That will keep, my son. But one of these days, mark my words, Mr. L. Murchison will travel to Elgin Station with flags on his engine, and he’ll be very much surprised to find the band there, and a large number of his fellow citizens, all able-bodied shouting men, and every factory whistle in Elgin let off at once, to say nothing of kids with tin ones. And if the Murchison Stove and Furnace Works siren stands out of that occasion I’ll break in and pull it myself.”

“It won’t stand out,” Stella assured him. “I’ll attend to it. Don’t you worry.”

“I suppose you had a lovely time, Mr. Murchison?” said Mrs. Williams, gently tilting to and fro in a rocking chair, with her pretty feet in their American shoes well in evidence. It is a fact, or perhaps a parable, that should be interesting to political economists, the adaptability of Canadian feet to American shoes; but fortunately it is not our present business. Though I must add that the “rocker” was also American, and the hammock in which Stella reposed came from New York, and upon John Murchison’s knee, with the local journal, lay a pink evening paper published in Buffalo.

“Better than I can tell you, Mrs. Williams, in all sorts of ways. But it’s good to be back, too. Very good!” Lorne threw up his head and drew in the pleasant evening air of midsummer
with infinite relish, while his eye travelled contentedly past the chestnuts on the lawn, down the vista of the quiet tree-bordered street. It lay empty in the solace of the evening, a blue hill crossed it in the distance, and gave it an unfettered look, the wind stirred in the maples. A pair of schoolgirls strolled up and down bareheaded; now and then a buggy passed.

“There’s room here,” he said.

“Find it kind of crowded up over there?” asked Mr. Williams. “Worse than New York?”

“Oh, yes. Crowded in a patient sort of way – it’s enough to break your heart – that you don’t see in New York! The poor of New York – well, they’ve got the idea of not being poor. In England they’re resigned, they’ve got callous. My goodness! the fellows out of work over there – you can
see
they’re used to it, see it in the way they slope along and the look in their eyes, poor dumb dogs. They don’t understand it, but they’ve just got to take it! Crowded? Rather!”

“We don’t say ‘rather’ in this country, mister,” observed Stella.

“Well, you can say it now, kiddie.”

They laughed at the little passage – the traveller’s importation of one or two Briticisms had been the subject of skirmish before – but silence fell among them for a moment afterward. They all had in the blood the remembrance of what Lorne had seen.