The Imperialist (3 page)

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 the 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.

“I must be getting on,” said the minister, looking at his watch. “And what news have you of Lorne?”

“Well, he seems to have got through all right.”

“What – you’ve heard already, then?”

“He telegraphed from Toronto on Saturday night.” Mr. Murchison stroked his chin, the better to retain his satisfaction. “Waste of money – the post would have brought it this morning – but it pleased his mother. Yes, he’s through his Law Schools examination, and at the top, too, as far as I can make out.”

“Dear me, and you never mentioned it!” Dr. Drummond spoke with the resigned impatience of a familiar grievance. It was certainly a trying characteristic of John Murchison that he never cared about communicating anything that might seem to ask for congratulation. “Well, well! I’m very glad to hear it.”

“It slipped my mind,” said Mr. Murchison. “Yes, he’s full-fledged ‘barrister and solicitor’ now; he can plead your case or draw you up a deed with the best of them. Lorne’s made a fair record, so far. We’ve no reason to be ashamed of him.”

“That you have not.” Personal sentiments between these two Scotchmen were rather indicated than indulged. “He’s
going in with Fulke and Warner, I suppose – you’ve got that fixed up?”

“Pretty well. Old man Warner was in this morning to talk it over. He says they look to Lorne to bring them in touch with the new generation. It’s a pity he lost that son of his.”

“Oh, a great pity. But since they had to go outside the firm they couldn’t have done better; they couldn’t have done better. I hope Lorne will bring them a bit of Knox Church business too; there’s no reason why Bob Mackintosh should have it all. They’ll be glad to see him back at the Hampden Debating Society. He’s a great light there, is Lorne; and the Young Liberals, I hear, are wanting him for chairman this year.”

“There’s some talk of it. But time enough – time enough for that! He’ll do first-rate if he gets the law to practise, let alone the making of it.”

“Maybe so; he’s young yet. Well, good-morning to you. I’ll just step over the way to the
Express
office and get a proof out of them of that sermon of mine. I noticed their reporter fellow – what’s his name? – Rawlins with his pencil out last night, and I’ve no faith in Rawlins.”

“Better cast an eye over it,” responded Mr. Murchison, cordially, and stood for a moment or two longer in the door watching the crisp, significant little figure of the minister as he stepped briskly over the crossing to the newspaper office. There Dr. Drummond sat down, before he explained his errand, and wrote a paragraph.

“We are pleased to learn,” it ran, “that Mr. Lorne Murchison, eldest son of Mr. John Murchison, of this town, has passed at the capital of the Province his final examination in Law, distinguishing himself by coming out at the top of the list. It will be remembered that Mr. Murchison, upon entering
the Law Schools, also carried off a valuable scholarship. We are glad to be able to announce that Mr. Murchison, junior, will embark upon his profession in his native town, where he will enter the well-known firm of Fulke and Warner.”

The editor, Mr. Horace Williams, had gone to dinner, and Rawlins was out, so Dr. Drummond had to leave it with the press foreman. Mr. Williams read it appreciatively on his return, and sent it down with the following addition –

“This is doing it as well as it can be done. Elgin congratulates Mr. L. Murchison upon having produced these results, and herself upon having produced Mr. L. Murchison.”

F
rom the day she stepped into it Mrs. Murchison knew that the Plummer Place was going to be the bane of her existence. This may have been partly because Mr. Murchison had bought it, since a circumstance welded like that into one’s life is very apt to assume the character of a bane, unless one’s temperament leads one to philosophy, which Mrs. Murchison’s didn’t. But there were other reasons more difficult to traverse; it was plainly true that the place did require a tremendous amount of “looking after,” as such things were measured in Elgin, far more looking after than the Murchisons could afford to give it. They could never have afforded, in the beginning, to possess it, had it not been sold, under mortgage, at a dramatic sacrifice. The house was a dignified old affair, built of wood and painted white, with wide green verandahs compassing the four sides of it, as they often did in days when the builder had only to turn his hand to the forest. It stood on the very edge of the town; wheatfields in the summer billowed up to its fences, and cornstacks in the autumn camped around it like a besieging army. The plank sidewalk finished there; after that you took the road, or, if you were so inclined, the
river, into which you could throw a stone from the orchard of the Plummer Place. The house stood roomily and shadily in ornamental grounds, with a lawn in front of it and a shrubbery at each side, an orchard behind, and a vegetable garden, the whole intersected by winding gravel walks, of which Mrs. Murchison was wont to say that a man might do nothing but weed them and have his hands full. In the middle of the lawn was a fountain, an empty basin with a plaster Triton, most difficult to keep looking respectable and pathetic in his frayed air of exile from some garden of Italy sloping to the sea. There was also a barn with stabling, a loft, and big carriage doors opening on a lane to the street. The originating Plummer, Mrs. Murchison often said, must have been a person of large ideas, and she hoped he had the money to live up to them. The Murchisons at one time kept a cow in the barn, till a succession of “girls” left on account of the milking, and the lane was useful as an approach to the back yard by the teams that brought the cordwood in the winter. It was trying enough for a person with the instinct of order to find herself surrounded by out-of-door circumstances which she simply could not control, but Mrs. Murchison often declared that she could put up with the grounds if it had stopped there. It did not stop there. Though I was compelled to introduce Mrs. Murchison in the kitchen, she had a drawing-room in which she might have received the Lieutenant Governor, with French windows and a cut-glass chandelier, and a library with an Italian marble mantelpiece. She had an ice-house and wine cellar, and a string of bells in the kitchen that connected with every room in the house; it was a negligible misfortune that not one of them was in order. She had far too much, as she declared, for any one pair of hands and a growing family, and if the ceiling was not dropping in the drawing-room, the cornice was
cracked in the library, or the gas was leaking in the dining-room, or the verandah wanted re-flooring if any one coming to the house was not to put his foot through it; and as to the barn, if it was dropping to pieces it would just have to drop. The barn was definitely outside the radius of possible amelioration – it passed gradually, visibly, into decrepitude, and Mrs. Murchison often wished she could afford to pull it down.