Two Solitudes (58 page)

When he reached his compartment he was sweating profusely and his hand stuck to the lining of his pocket as he fished for coins to tip the red-cap. He was tired, worried and overheated, and because the train was air-conditioned he was sure he was going to catch cold. If the Americans kept on with this mania for comfort, he thought, they would ruin the health of their whole nation inside another twenty-five years.

He mopped his forehead with a large silk handkerchief and stumbled through to the dining car. As soon as he had eaten, he returned to his compartment and locked himself in. He took off his jacket and waistcoat and put on a thick woolen dressing-gown made of the McQueen plaid. He removed his shoes and thrust his feet into a pair of felt-lined slippers, put the magazines on the seat beside him and tried to relax.

Last week a cabinet minister had telephoned from Ottawa to ask if he would consent to serve in his department if the worst happened. The thought of working for the government was revolting to McQueen, but if the worst came to the worst, he supposed he would have to do his duty. There was no doubt about it, they were worried sick in Ottawa, and so was he. Every time he read a newspaper he felt personally badgered by what was happening in Europe. He simply couldn't believe there would be a war. And yet…

On top of everything, it was worse than too bad of Heather to choose a time like the present to make trouble for her mother. She was showing no more sense of responsibility than a servant. McQueen's ponderous jaw hardened. He could not understand the lack of common decency and ordinary loyalty in young people these days. Everywhere he looked, he saw signs of decay. He wouldn't be surprised…

Well, McQueen decided, this nonsense was going to be stopped, for if Heather married someone like Paul Tallard anything might come of it. So he was a writer, was he? McQueen would very much like to see what he had ever written. Probably some modernistic nonsense about socialism and sex that no decent publisher would touch.

What Heather needed was a stable husband to make her toe the line. If she married this Paul Tallard, they would both sponge on her mother. It stood to reason the fellow was no good if he hadn't a decent job at this age. The moment they got their hands on the Methuen house they would sell it to some contractor and the contractor would demolish it. Then he would build a ten-story apartment house on the lot. Another house on the same level as his own, a thirty-room stone mansion with a conservatory and sixteen gargoyles, had
been demolished last spring, and the mahogany panelling of its dining room had been sold to a funeral parlour. That was what happened nowadays if you let your standards down. He had worked hard all his life. And for what? To be able to associate on equal terms with people like the Methuens.

McQueen got up and wiped his forehead vigorously with a towel, then took a muffler from his bag and wrapped it around his neck. He felt much better now. He wouldn't be surprised if he escaped the cold after all.

He sat down and crossed his legs. There was nothing to worry about once you figured things out. He would stop this nonsense, all right. Paul Tallard might be a socialist, but he couldn't marry without money and he couldn't get it unless he had a job. Janet would see that Heather's allowance was stopped if she tried any nonsense. But then–McQueen chuckled at his own sagacity–Paul Tallard was going to have a job! McQueen intended to be perfectly fair. He would do the best he could for the boy. There was a job in British Columbia and he might consider himself very lucky to get it. If he worked hard enough, he might even think of getting married in ten years. But not to Heather! Oh, no! Once they were separated by three-quarters of a continent, Heather would soon come to her senses. Later on in life she would thank him for what he had done for her. He and Janet had been agreed on that.

McQueen picked up the newspaper and began to read. After five minutes he dropped it on the floor. Things were getting to be a nightmare. You gave a scoundrel like Hitler an inch and he tried to take everything. If a major war broke out it wouldn't matter where a man's money was. The government would get it somehow.

It particularly exasperated McQueen not to know what was going to happen, not to be positive. He had been positive enough a year ago. He had maintained after Munich that Mr. Chamberlain had shown Hitler the meaning of true states manship. But now? Last week Chislett had told him in confidence that if war broke out the government had no intention of making it attractive to business. Things were certainly bad if a man like Chislett forgot himself sufficiently to make a remark like that. It was the kind of phrase that could be given a nasty twist if the wrong people got hold of it. Well, if war did come, McQueen was prepared to thank God that the Prime Minister was an able man who knew how to keep his mouth shut.

Looking for something less disturbing to read, McQueen picked up the weekly. On the first two pages he was informed that the true cause of the world crisis was the selfish decadence of capitalists. They had made a mess out of their own affairs. They had sold Manchuria, Abyssinia and Czechoslovakia down the river, and now they were hoist with their own petard.

In a rage, McQueen hurled the magazine across the compartment. The Mounted Police ought to keep that sort of perjury out of Canada. So he was decadent, was he? So he was supporting Hitler and Mussolini against the Bolsheviks? He'd like to see the socialist who would dare make a statement like that in a court of law. He had worked hard all his life, had saved his money, had never got drunk or gone with women. If anyone was to blame, blame the socialists. Hitler was a socialist himself. He had always said so, and he defied anyone to refute him.

His sense of outrage mounted. Let Hitler make another move! Just let him dare! Deep in his core, McQueen felt the reverberations of fighting ancestors.

 

FORTY-NINE

On Monday morning McQueen reached his office before nine-thirty, and without taking time to glance at his letters, he ordered his secretary to get Paul Tallard on the telephone and tell him to present himself at his office at eleven forty-five.

Since the death of Miss Drew four years ago, McQueen had never been satisfied with the way his office functioned. He had hired three different secretaries and had fired them all. His present one was a silent-mannered, prematurely bald man who was understood to have had a bad time during the depression. He was better than the others, but McQueen did not think much of him.

He picked up the
Gazette
, glanced over the headlines and saw that the news had become even worse. He was about to drop the paper into the wastebasket when the secretary returned.

“Well, Hudson–what is it now?”

“I spoke to Mr. Tallard, sir. He–he told me he was busy and wouldn't come.”

McQueen gave Hudson a blank stare. “Did you make yourself clear who it was wanted to see him?”

“I certainly did, Mr. McQueen. His manner was very brusque, if I may say so.”

McQueen grunted. “Call him again. When you get him on the wire, connect me at once.”

Hudson departed noiselessly, sliding out the door on the balls of his feet. McQueen grunted again. He wouldn't even trust Hudson to mail a letter without specific orders. It was what he had always said, the people who had been unemployed in the depression had so little confidence left they were no good for anything.

The call came through and he picked up the telephone. He talked in his blandest voice for a full minute, then frowned as he received nothing but a monosyllable in reply. He became so irritated it required all his conscious force to keep his voice solicitous as he repeated his proposition. Another few minutes went by, and during that time Hudson entered on tip-toe with a memorandum in his hand. McQueen motioned him to lay it on the desk. “A book on Canada? My dear boy…wouldn't it be well for you to see a little of the country first?”

As he listened to Paul's answer, McQueen's eyes picked out the words on the memo. Paul went on talking, but McQueen was no longer listening to him. The words on the memo stated that Sir Rupert Irons had died fifteen minutes ago.

McQueen heard his own voice saying, “You're being very foolish, of course. I suppose you know what you're doing. You can be assured I'll report exactly what you've said to Mrs. Methuen tonight.”

He slammed the receiver down, picked up the memo in both hands and stared at it again, then snapped at Hudson, “Get me Mr. Masterman at once. Get me Mr. Chislett. Get me Mr. Buchanan. Oh yes–get me Sir Roderick Horson too. He's in Nassau in the Bahamas. Get him at once.”

McQueen lunched that day in the Mount Royal Club. Afterwards he sat in a deep chair and brooded over the obituary picture in the afternoon paper. In spite of the world crisis, the press had gone into mourning for Sir Rupert Irons. The square head, square jaw, square mouth, square shoulders and the small biting eyes had almost crowded Hitler off the front page. Much of the second page was occupied with the list of Irons' innumerable services to the nation, and the unbelievably large number of companies he had controlled.

It was hard for McQueen to credit it. For more than a
quarter of a century Irons had stood in Saint James Street as four-square as the Duke of Wellington. Now his empire was passing without a tremor to the oligarchy which had served under his guidance during his life. By Jove, McQueen thought, there was a lesson here! A lesson in the meaning of soundness: Irons' affairs were in such perfect order that his death had not affected the market by so much as half a point.

Contemplating the picture, McQueen made clucking noises with his tongue. They were all going! MacIntosh had died last February, General Methuen had passed on in the spring. Masterman was beginning to look very seedy and Chislett had been on his last legs for years. But for Irons to go! Well, he would at least escape the war, if the war came. McQueen read all the paper had to say about the life and death of Sir Rupert Irons, and was forced to admit that when his own time came the spread given him would not be as large. There was no doubt about it, Irons had personified an era. He had been the great master in soundness. The country would never be the same without him.

As McQueen was to be a pall-bearer at the funeral, he was kept very busy during the next two days. He barely remembered to call Janet and inform her of his conversation with Paul. A funeral of this dimension seemed to McQueen something far greater than the mere burial of a friend. Each great city had some special way of demonstrating its communal spirit and showing its face to the world. London used the Lord Mayor's Show, New York the procession of a hero up Broadway, the French section of Montreal the parade on the day of Saint-Jean Baptiste. But in McQueen's opinion, his own Montreal reserved itself for an occasion more personal and significant. Only on the death of one of their own number did the real controllers of the nation, the businessmen who were as
unobtrusive as a hierarchy, gather in force before the public eye.

McQueen could never remember a funeral which required so many arrangements as this one. Irons had no family or relations, and he had complicated matters by his last coherent wish. He had expressed the desire that the service be held not in his customary church, but in a small one in the factory district where he had lived as a boy. He had also required that a particular minister be summoned from Toronto to conduct the service. McQueen fussed considerably over these details, which seemed completely unnecessary to him. It was exactly like Irons to surprise everybody, right up to the last. The church he had selected was not only small and poor, it was so located that the mourners would have to walk nearly two miles before they could decently step out of the cortège. McQueen wouldn't be surprised but what Irons had thought of that. He wondered if Chislett would be up to it. Chislett had not walked a hundred yards since he had bought his first Rolls-Royce in 1912.

 

Hours before the service began, a crowd had gathered on the street opposite the church. As the mourners entered the vestry, each spoke his name to reporters stationed at the door, who wrote it hurriedly in notebooks for publication in the press the following day. English Montreal had turned out everyone from ten-thousand-a-year men up, and many had made the trip from Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa and Winnipeg. The directors of four-fifths of the nation's major banks and corporations were there. They sat gravely together in reserved pews. The coffin was to be borne by men who between them controlled (now that Irons was dead) more than four billion dollars, paying the ultimate homage to the man who had made and controlled more money than any one of them.

The service began. The minister's voice, deeply overtoned with centuries of Presbyterianism, rolled over the heads of the directors, bankers, insurance presidents, railroad heads, stockbrokers, brewers, distillers, justices, corporation lawyers, the board of governors of the university, the Committee of Art, headmasters, the boardmen of the charitable societies, executives, stock-holders, four politicians, three aldermen, two cabinet ministers–and the others.

The Scriptures, the minister said resolutely, had left no doubt that it was easier for a camel to pass through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. But the Lord, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, had never said it was impossible. Sir Rupert Irons had known this. No man who ever lived had been more fully aware than Sir Rupert of the spiritual dangers attendant on great wealth. It was for this reason that he had avoided all ostentation in his life, that he had furnished his home with the barest of necessities, that he had never taken a holiday, in order to reserve his powers for the fuller service to mankind that his wealth had demanded. It was for this reason that he had always praised poverty as the best school of virtue. Few had known poverty more fully than Sir Rupert Irons in the days of his youth. Few had done so much by way of the thousands–nay, the hundreds of thousands–of positions created through his nation-wide enterprises, to alleviate the poverty of others. Recognizing that he lived in a commercial age, he had in all humility regarded himself as God's trustee, a faithful steward such as Joseph had been to the rich man of Egypt.