The Imperialist (10 page)

Advena Murchison thought him the probable antitype of an Oxford don. She had never seen an Oxford don, but Mr. Finlay wore the characteristics these schoolmen were dressed in by novelists; and Advena noted with delight the ingenuity of fate in casting such a person into the pulpit of the Presbyterian Church in a young country. She had her perception of comedy in life; till Finlay came she had found nothing so interesting. With his arrival, however, other preoccupations fell into their proper places.

Finlay, indeed, it may be confessed at once, he, and not his message, was her engrossment from the beginning. The message she took with reverent gentleness; but her passionate interest was for the nature upon which it travelled, and never for the briefest instant did she confuse these emotions. Those who write, we are told, transcribe themselves in spite of themselves; it is more true of those who preach, for they are also candid by profession, and when they are not there is the eye and the voice to help to betray them. Hugh Finlay, in the pulpit, made himself manifest in all the things that matter to Advena Murchison in the pew; and from the pew to the pulpit her love went back with certainty, clear in its authority and
worshipping the ground of its justification. When she bowed her head it was he whom she heard in the language of his invocations; his doctrine rode, for her, on a spirit of wide and sweet philosophy; in his contemplation of the Deity she saw the man. He had those lips at once mobile, governed and patient, upon which genius chooses oftenest to rest. As to this, Advena’s convictions were so private as to be hidden from herself; she never admitted that she thought Finlay had it, and in the supreme difficulty of proving anything else we may wisely accept her view. But he had something, the subtle Celt; he had horizons, lifted lines beyond the common vision, and an eye rapt and a heart intrepid; and though for a long time he was unconscious of it, he must have adventured there with a happier confidence because of her companionship.

From the first Advena knew no faltering or fluttering, none of the baser nervous betrayals. It was all one great delight to her, her discovery and her knowledge and her love of him. It came to her almost in a logical development; it found her grave, calm, and receptive. She had even a private formula of gratitude that the thing which happened to everybody, and happened to so many people irrelevantly, should arrive with her in such a glorious, defensible, demonstrable sequence. Toward him it gave her a kind of glad secret advantage; he was loved and he was unaware. She watched his academic awkwardness in church with the inward tender smile of the eternal habile feminine, and when they met she could have laughed and wept over his straitened sentences and his difficult manner, knowing how little significant they were. With his eyes upon her and his words offered to her intelligence, she found herself treating his shy formality as the convention it was, a kind of make-believe which she would politely and kindly play up to until he should happily forget it and they
could enter upon simpler relations. She had to play up to it for a long time, but her love made her wonderfully clever and patient; and of course the day came when she had her reward. Knowing him as she did, she remembered the day and the difference it made.

It was toward the end of an afternoon in early April; the discoloured snow still lay huddled in the bleaker fence corners. Wide puddles stood along the roadsides, reflecting the twigs and branches of the naked maples; last year’s leaves were thick and wet underfoot, and a soft damp wind was blowing. Advena was on her way home and Finlay overtook her. He passed her at first, with a hurried silent lifting of his hat; then perhaps the deserted street gave a suggestion of unfriendliness to his act, or some freshness in her voice stayed him. At all events, he waited and joined her, with a word or two about their going in the same direction; and they walked along together. He offered her his companionship, but he had nothing to say; the silence in which they pursued their way was no doubt to him just the embarrassing condition he usually had to contend with. To her it seemed pregnant, auspicious; it drew something from the low grey lights of the wet spring afternoon and the unbound heart-lifting wind; she had a passionate prevision that the steps they took together would lead somehow to freedom. They went on in that strange bound way, and the day drew away from them till they turned a sudden corner, when it lay all along the yellow sky across the river, behind a fringe of winter woods, stayed in the moment of its retreat on the edge of the unvexed landscape. They stopped involuntarily to look, and she saw a smile come up from some depth in him.

“Ah, well,” he said, as if to himself, “it’s something to be in a country where the sun still goes down with a thought of the primeval.”

“I think I prefer the sophistication of chimney-pots,” she replied. “I’ve always longed to see a sunset in London, with the fog breaking over Westminster.”

“Then you don’t care about them for themselves, sunsets?” he asked, with the simplest absence of mind.

she said, and this time he looked at her.

“How does it go on?” he said.

“Oh, I don’t know. Only those two lines stay with me. I feel it that way, too. It’s the seal upon an act of violence, isn’t it, a sunset? Something taken from us against our will. It’s a hateful reminder, in the midst of our delightful volitions, of how arbitrary every condition of life is.”

“The conditions of business are always arbitrary. Life is a business – we have to work at ourselves till it is over. So much cut off and ended it is,” he said, glancing at the sky again. “If space is the area of life and time is its opportunity, there goes a measure of opportunity.”

“I wonder,” said Advena, “where it goes?”

“Into the void behind time?” he suggested, smiling straight at her.

“Into the texture of the future,” she answered, smiling back.

“We might bring it to bear very intelligently on the future, at any rate,” he returned. “The world is wrapped in destiny, and but revolves to roll it out.”

“I don’t remember that,” she said curiously.

“No, you couldn’t,” he laughed outright. “I haven’t thought it good enough to publish.”

“And it isn’t the sort of thing,” she ventured gaily, “you could put in a sermon.”

“No, it isn’t.” They came to a corner of the street which led to Mr. Finlay’s boarding-house. It stretched narrowly to the north and there was a good deal more snow on each side of it. They lingered together for a moment talking, seizing the new joy in it, which was simply the joy of his sudden liberation with her, consciously pushing away the moment of parting; and Finlay’s eyes rested once again on the evening sky beyond the river.

“I believe you are right, and I am a moralizer,” he said. “There
is
pain over there. One thinks a sunset beautiful and impressive, but one doesn’t look at it long.”

Then they separated, and he took the road to the north, which was still snowbound, while she went on into the chilly yellow west, with the odd sweet illusion that a summer day was dawning.

T
he office of Messrs. Fulke, Warner, & Murchison was in Market Street, exactly over Scott’s drug store. Scott, with his globular blue and red and green vessels in the window and his soda-water fountain inside, was on the ground floor; the passage leading upstairs separated him from Mickie, boots and shoes; and beyond Mickie, Elgin’s leading tobacconist shared his place of business with a barber. The last two contributed most to the gaiety of Market Street; the barber with the ribanded pole, which stuck out at an angle; the tobacconist with a nobly-featured squaw in chocolate effigy, who held her draperies under her chin with one hand and outstretched a packet of cigars with the other.

The passage staircase between Scott’s and Mickie’s had a hardened look, and bore witness to the habit of expectoration; ladies, going up to Dr. Simmons, held their skirts up and the corners of their mouths down. Dr. Simmons was the dentist: you turned to the right. The passage itself turned to the left, and after passing two doors bearing the law firm’s designation in black letters on ground glass, it conducted you with abruptness to the office of a bicycle agent, and left you there.
For greater emphasis the name of the firm of Messrs. Fulke, Warner, & Murchison was painted on the windows also; it could be seen from any part of the market square, which lay, with the town hall in the middle, immediately below. During four days in the week the market square was empty. Odds and ends of straw and paper blew about it; an occasional pedestrian crossed it diagonally for the short cut to the post-office; the town hall rose in the middle, and defied you to take your mind off the ugliness of municipal institutions. On the other days it was a scene of activity. Farmers’ wagons, with the shafts turned in, were ranged round three sides of it; on a big day they would form into parallel lanes and cut the square into sections as well. The produce of all Fox County filled the wagons, varying agreeably as the year went round. Bags of potatoes leaned against the side-walk, apples brimmed in bushel measures, ducks dropped their twisted necks over the cart wheels; the town hall, in this play of colour, stood redeemed. The produce was mostly left to the women to sell. On the fourth side of the square loads of hay and cordwood demanded the master mind, but small matters of fruit, vegetables, and poultry submitted to feminine judgment. The men “unhitched,” and went away on their own business; it was the wives you accosted, as they sat in the middle, with their knees drawn up and their skirts tucked close, vigilant in rusty bonnets, if you wished to buy. Among them circulated the housewives of Elgin, pricing and comparing and acquiring; you could see it all from Dr. Simmons’ window, sitting in his chair that screwed up and down. There was a little difficulty always about getting things home; only very ordinary people carried their own marketing. Trifling articles, like eggs or radishes, might be smuggled into a brown wicker basket with covers, but it did not consort with elegance to “trapse” home with
anything that looked inconvenient or had legs sticking out of it. So that arrangements of mutual obligation had to be made: the good woman from whom Mrs. Jones had bought her tomatoes would take charge of the spring chickens Mrs. Jones had bought from another good woman just as soon as not, and deliver them at Mrs. Jones’s residence, as under any circumstances she was “going round that way.”

It was a scene of activity but not of excitement, or in any sense of joy. The matter was of too hard an importance; it made too much difference on both sides whether potatoes were twelve or fifteen cents a peck. The dealers were laconic and the buyers anxious; country neighbours exchanged the time of day, but under the pressure of affairs. Now and then a lady of Elgin stopped to gossip with another; the countrywomen looked on, curious, grim, and a little contemptuous of so much demonstration and so many words. Life on an Elgin market day was a serious presentment even when the sun shone, and at times when it rained or snowed the aesthetic seemed a wholly unjustifiable point of view. It was not misery, it was even a difficult kind of prosperity, but the margin was small and the struggle plain. Plain, too, it was that here was no enterprise of yesterday, no fresh broken ground of dramatic promise, but a narrow inheritance of the opportunity to live which generations had grasped before. There were bones in the village graveyards of Fox County to father all these sharp features; Elgin market square, indeed, was the biography of Fox County, and, in little, the history of the whole Province. The heart of it was there, the enduring heart of the new country already old in acquiescence. It was the deep root of the race in the land, twisted and unlovely, but holding the promise of all. Something like that Lorne Murchison felt about it as he stood for a moment in the passage I have mentioned and looked
across the road. The spectacle never failed to cheer him; he was uniformly in gayer spirits, better satisfied with life and more consciously equal to what he had to do, on days when the square was full than on days when it was empty. This morning he had an elation of his own; it touched everything with more vivid reality. The familiar picture stirred a joy in him in tune with his private happiness; its under-note came to him with a pang as keen. The sense of kinship surged in his heart; these were his people, this his lot as well as theirs. For the first time he saw it in detachment. Till now he had regarded it with the friendly eyes of a participator who looked no further. To-day he did look further: the whole world invited his eyes, offering him a great piece of luck to look through. The opportunity was in his hand, which, if he could seize and hold, would lift and carry him on. He was as much aware of its potential significance as any one could be, and what leapt in his veins till he could have laughed aloud was the splendid conviction of resource. Already in the door of the passage he had achieved; and from that point he looked at the scene before him with an impulse of loyalty and devotion. A tenderness seized him for the farmers of Fox County, a throb of enthusiasm for the idea they represented, which had become for him suddenly moving and pictorial. At that moment his country came subjectively into his possession; great and helpless it came into his inheritance as it comes into the inheritance of every man who can take it, by deed of imagination and energy and love. He held this microcosm of it, as one might say, in his hand and looked at it ardently; then he took his way across the road.

A tall thickly-built young fellow detached himself from a group, smiling broadly at the sight of Murchison, and started to meet him.

“Hello, Lorne,” he said. He had smiled all the way, anticipating the encounter. He was obviously in clothes which he did not put on every day, but the seriousness of this was counteracted by his hard felt hat, which he wore at an angle that disregarded convention.

“Hello, Elmore! You back?”

“That’s about it.”

“You don’t say! Back to stay?”

“Far’s I can see. Young Alf’s made up his mind to learn the dentist business, and the old folks are backin’ him; so I don’t see but I’ve got to stop on and run the show. Father’s gettin’ up in years now.”