The Imperialist (7 page)

Lorne Murchison, however, was invited to the dance. The invitation reached him through the post: coming home from office early on Saturday he produced it from his pocket. Mrs. Murchison and Abby sat on the verandah enjoying the Indian summer afternoon; the horse-chestnuts dropped crashing among the fallen leaves, the roadside maples blazed, the quiet streets ran into smoky purple, and one belated robin hopped about the lawn. Mrs. Murchison had just remarked that she didn’t know why, at this time of year, you always felt as if you were waiting for something.

“Well, I hope you feel honoured,” remarked Abby. Not one of them would have thought that Lorne should feel especially
honoured; but the insincerity was so obvious that it didn’t matter. Mrs. Murchison, cocking her head to read the card, tried hard not to look pleased.

“‘Mrs. Milburn. At Home,’” she read. “‘Dancing.’ Well, she might
be
at home dancing, for all me! Why couldn’t she just write you a little friendly note, or let Dora do it? It’s that Ormiston case,” she went on shrewdly. “They know you’re taking a lot of trouble about it. And the least they could do, too.”

Lorne sat down on the edge of the verandah with his hands in his trousers pockets, and stuck his long legs out in front of him. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “They have the name of being nifty, but I haven’t got anything against the Milburns.”

“Name!” ejaculated Mrs. Murchison. “How long ago was it the Episcopalians began that sewing circle business for the destitute clergy of Saskatchewan?”

“Mother!” put in Abby, with deprecation.

“Well, I won’t be certain about the clergy, but I tell you it had to do with Saskatchewan, for that I remember! And anyhow, the first meeting was held at the Milburns’ – members lent their drawing-rooms. Well, Mrs. Leveret and Mrs. Delarue went to the meeting – they were very thick just then, the Leverets and the Delarues. They were so pleased to be going that they got there about five minutes too soon, and they were the first to come. Well, they rang the bell and in they went. The girl showed them into the front drawing-room and asked them to sit down. And there in the back drawing-room sat Mrs. Milburn and Miss Filkin,
and never spoke to them!
Their own denomination, mind you, too! And there they might have been sitting still if Mrs. Leveret hadn’t had the spirit to get up and march out. No, thank you. No Milburns for me.”

Lorne watched his mother with twinkling eyes till she finished.

“Well, mother, after that, if it was going to be a sewing circle I think I’d send an excuse,” he said, “but maybe they won’t be so mean at a dance.”

O
ctavius Milburn would not, I think, have objected to being considered, with relation to his own line in life, a representative man. He would have been wary to claim it, but if the stranger had arrived unaided at this view of him, he would have been inclined to think well of the stranger’s power of induction. That is what he was – a man of averages, balances, the safe level, no more disposed to an extravagant opinion than to wear one side whisker longer than the other. You would take him any day, especially on Sunday in a silk hat, for the correct medium: by his careful walk with the spring in it, his shrewd glance with the caution in it, his look of being prepared to account for himself, categorically, from head to foot. He was fond of explaining, in connection with an offer once made him to embark his capital in Chicago, that he preferred a fair living under his own flag to a fortune under the Stars and Stripes. There we have the turn of his mind, convertible into the language of book-keeping, a balance struck, with a profit on the side of the flag, the patriotic equivalent in good sound terms of dollars and cents. With this position
understood, he was prepared to take you up on any point of comparison between the status and privileges of a subject and a citizen – the political
morale
of a monarchy and a republic – the advantage of life on this and the other side of the line. There was nothing he liked better to expatiate upon, with that valuable proof of his own sincerity always at hand for reference and illustration. His ideal was life in a practical, go-ahead, self-governing colony, far enough from England actually to be disabused of her inherited anachronisms and make your own tariff, near enough politically to keep your securities up by virtue of her protection. He was extremely satisfied with his own country; one saw in his talk the phenomenon of patriotism in double bloom, flower within flower. I have mentioned his side whiskers: he preserved that facial decoration of the Prince Consort; and the large steel engraving that represents Queen Victoria in a flowing habit and the Prince in a double-breasted frock coat and a stock, on horseback, hung over the mantelpiece in his drawing-room. If the outer patriotism was a little vague, the inner had vigour enough. Canada was a great place. Mr. Milburn had been born in the country, and had never “gone over” to England; Canada was good enough for him. He was born, one might say, in the manufacturing interest, and inherited the complacent and Conservative political views of a tenderly-nourished industry. Mr. Milburn was of those who were building up the country; with sufficient protection he was prepared to go on doing it long and loyally; meanwhile he admired the structure from all points of view. As President of the Elgin Chamber of Commerce, he was enabled once a year to produce no end of gratifying figures; he was fond of wearing on such occasions the national emblem in a little enamelled maple leaf; and his portrait and biography occupied a full page in a sumptuous work entitled
Canadians of To-Day
, sold by subscription, wherein he was described as the “Father of the Elgin Boiler.”

Mr. and Mrs. Milburn were in the drawing-room to receive their young guests, a circumstance which alone imparted a distinction to the entertainment. At such parties the appearance of the heads of the house was by no means invariable; frequently they went to bed. The simple explanation was that the young people could stand late hours and be none the worse next day; their elders had to be more careful if they wanted to get down to business. Moreover, as in all new societies, between the older and the younger generation there was a great gulf fixed, across which intercourse was difficult. The sons and daughters, born to different circumstances, evolved their own conventions, the old people used the ways and manners of narrower days; one paralysed the other. It might be gathered from the slight tone of patronage in the address of youth to age that the advantage lay with the former; but polite conversation, at best, was sustained with discomfort. Such considerations, however, were far from operating with the Milburns. Mrs. Milburn would have said that they were characteristic of quite a different class of people; and so they were.

No one would have supposed, from the way in which the family disposed itself in the drawing-room, that Miss Filkin had only just finished making the claret-cup; or that Dora had been cutting sandwiches till the last minute, or that Mrs. Milburn had been obliged to have a distinct understanding with the maid – Mrs. Milburn’s servants were all “maids,” even the charwoman, who had buried three husbands – on the subject of wearing a cap when she answered the door. Mrs. Milburn sat on a chair she had worked herself, occupied with something in the new stitch; Dora performed lightly at the
piano; Miss Filkin dipped into
Selections from the Poets of the Century
, placed as remotely as possible from the others; Mr. Milburn, with his legs crossed, turned and folded a Toronto evening paper. Mrs. Milburn had somewhat objected to the evening paper in the drawing-room. “Won’t you look at a magazine, Octavius?” she said; but Mr. Milburn advanced the argument that it removed “any appearance of stiffness,” and prevailed. It was impossible to imagine a group more disengaged from the absurd fuss that precedes a party among some classes of people; indeed, when Mr. Lorne Murchison arrived – like the unfortunate Mrs. Leveret and Mrs. Delarue, he was the first – they looked almost surprised to see him.

Lorne told his mother afterwards that he thought, in that embarrassing circumstance, of Mrs. Leveret and Mrs. Delarue, and they laughed consumedly together over his discomfiture; but what he felt at the moment was not the humour of the situation. To be the very first and solitary arrival is nowhere esteemed the happiest fortune, but in Elgin a kind of ridiculous humiliation attached to it, a greed for the entertainment, a painful unsophistication. A young man of Elgin would walk up and down in the snow for a quarter of an hour with the thermometer at zero to escape the ignominy of it; Lorne Murchison would have so walked. Our young man was potentially capable of not minding, by next morning he didn’t mind; but immediately he was fast tied in the cobwebs of the common prescription, and he made his way to each of the points of the compass of the Milburns’ drawing-room to shake hands, burning to the ears. Before he subsided into a chair near Mr. Milburn he grasped the collar of his dress coat on each side and drew it forward, a trick he had with his gown in court, a nervous and mechanical action. Dora, who continued to play, watched him over the piano with an amusement not
untinged with malice. She was a tall fair girl, with several kinds of cleverness. She did her hair quite beautifully, and she had a remarkable, effective, useful reticence. Her father declared that Dora took in a great deal more than she ever gave out – an accomplishment, in Mr. Milburn’s eyes, on the soundest basis. She looked remarkably pretty and had remarkably good style, and as she proceeded with her mazurka she was thinking, “He has never been asked here before: how perfectly silly he must feel coming so early!” Presently as Lorne grew absorbed in talk and forgot his unhappy chance, she further reflected, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him till now in evening dress; it does make him a good figure.” This went on behind a faultless coiffure and an expression almost classical in its detachment; but if Miss Milburn could have thought on a level with her looks, I, for one, would hesitate to take any liberty with her meditations.

However, the bell began to ring with the briefest intermissions, the maid in the cap to make constant journeys. She opened the door with a welcoming smile, having practically no deportment to go with the cap; human nature does not freeze readily anywhere. Dora had to leave the piano; Miss Filkin decided that when fifteen had come she would change her chair. Fifteen soon came, the young ladies mostly in light silks or muslins cut square, not low, in the neck, with half sleeves. This moderation was prescribed in Elgin, where evening dress was more a matter of material than of cut, a thing in itself symbolical if it were desirable to consider social evolution here. For middle-aged ladies high necks and long sleeves were usual; and Mrs. Milburn might almost have been expected to appear thus, in a nicely-made black
broché
, perhaps. It was recognized as like Mrs. Milburn, in keeping with her unbending ideas, to wear a dress cut as square as any young lady’s, with just a little lace let
in, of a lavender stripe. The young men were nearly all in the tailor’s convention for their sex the world over, with here and there a short coat that also went to church; but there were some departures from orthodoxy in the matter of collars and ties, and where white bows were achieved, I fear none of the wearers would have dreamed of defending them from the charge of being ready-made.

It was a clear, cold January night, and everybody, as usual, walked to the party; the snow creaked and ground underfoot, one could hear the arriving steps in the drawing-room. They stamped and scraped to get rid of it in the porch, and hurried through the hall, muffled figures in overshoes, to emerge from an upstairs bedroom radiant, putting a last touch to hair or button hole, smelling of the fresh winter air. Such gatherings usually consisted entirely of bachelors and maidens, with one or two exceptions so recently yoked together that they had not yet changed the plane of existence; married people, by general consent, left these amusements to the unculled. They had, as I have hinted, more serious pre-occupations, “something else to do;” nobody thought of inviting them. Nobody, that is, but Mrs. Milburn and a few others of her way of thinking, who saw more elegance and more propriety in a mixture. On this occasion she had asked her own clergyman, the pleasant-faced rector of St. Stephen’s, and Mrs. Emmett, who wore that pathetic expression of fragile wives and mothers who have also a congregation at their skirts. Walter Winter was there, too. Mr. Winter had the distinction of having contested South Fox in the Conservative interest three times unsuccessfully. Undeterred, he went on contesting things: invariably beaten, he invariably came up smiling and ready to try again. His imperturbability was a valuable asset; he never lost heart or dreamed of retiring from the arena, nor did he ever cease to
impress his party as being their most useful and acceptable representative. His business history was chequered and his exact financial equivalent uncertain, but he had tremendously the air of a man of affairs; as the phrase went, he was full of politics, the plain repository of deep things. He had a shrewd eye, a double chin, and a bluff, crisp, jovial manner of talking as he lay back in an arm-chair with his legs crossed and played with his watch chain, an important way of nodding assent, a weighty shake of denial. Voting on purely party lines, the town had lately rewarded his invincible expectation by electing him Mayor, and then provided itself with unlimited entertainment by putting in a Liberal majority on his council, the reports of the weekly sittings being constantly considered as good as a cake-walk. South Fox, as people said, was not a healthy locality for Conservatives. Yet Walter Winter wore a look of remarkable hardiness. He had also tremendously the air of a dark horse, the result both of natural selection and careful cultivation. Even his political enemies took it kindly when he “got in” for Mayor, and offered him amused congratulations. He made a personal claim on their cordiality, which was not the least of his political resources. Nature had fitted him to public uses; the impression overflowed the ranks of his own supporters and softened asperity among his opponents. Illus tration lies, at this moment, close to us. They had not been in the same room a quarter of an hour before he was in deep and affectionate converse with Lorne Murchison, whose party we know, and whose political weight was increasing, as this influence often does, with a rapidity out of proportion with his professional and general significance.