The Imperialist (28 page)

She was waiting for them on the parlour sofa when Crow brought them in out of the nipping early dark of December, Elmore staying behind in the yard with the horses. She sat on the sofa in her best black dress with the bead trimming on the neck and sleeves, a good deal pushed up and wrinkled across the bosom, which had done all that would ever be required of it when it gave Elmore and Abe their start in life. Her wiry hands were crossed in her lap in the moment of waiting: you could tell by the look of them that they were not often crossed there. They were strenuous hands; the whole worn figure was strenuous, and the narrow set mouth, and the eyes which had looked after so many matters for so long, and even the way the hair was drawn back into a knot in a fashion that would have given a phrenologist his opportunity. It was a different Mrs. Crow from the one that sat in the midst of her poultry and garden-stuff in the Elgin market square; but it was even more the same Mrs. Crow, the sum of a certain measure of opportunity and service, an imperial figure in her bead trimming, if the truth were known.

The room was heated to express the geniality that was harder to put in words. The window was shut; there was a smell of varnish and whatever was inside the “suite” of which Mrs. Crow occupied the sofa. Enlarged photographs – very much enlarged – of Mr. and Mrs. Crow hung upon the walls, and one other of a young girl done in that process which tells you at once that she was an only daughter and that she is dead. There had been other bereavements; they were written upon the silver coffin-plates which, framed and glazed, also contributed to the decoration of the room; but you would have had to look close, and you might feel a delicacy.

Mrs. Crow made her greetings with precision, and sat down again upon the sofa for a few minutes’ conversation.

“I’m telling them,” said her husband, “that the sleighin’s just held out for them. If it ’ud been to-morrow they’d have had to come on wheels. Pretty soft travellin’ as it was, some places, I guess.”

“Snow’s come early this year,” said Mrs. Crow. “It was an open fall, too.”

“It has certainly,” Mr. Farquharson backed her up. “About as early as I remember it. I don’t know how much you got out here; we had a good foot in Elgin.”

“’Bout the same, ’bout the same,” Mr. Crow deliberated, “but it’s been layin’ light all along over Clayfield way – ain’t had a pair of runners out, them folks.”

“Makes a more cheerful winter, Mrs. Crow, don’t you think, when it comes early?” remarked Lorne. “Or would you rather not get it till after Christmas?”

“I don’t know as it matters much, out here in the country. We don’t get a great many folks passin’, best of times. An’ it’s more of a job to take care of the stock.”

“That’s so,” Mr. Crow told them. “Chores come heavier
when there’s snow on the ground, a great sight, especially if there’s drifts.”

And for an instant, with his knotted hands hanging between his knees, he pondered this unvarying aspect of his yearly experience. They all pondered it, sympathetic.

“Well, now, Mr. Farquharson,” Mrs. Crow turned to him. “An’ how reely
be
ye? We’ve heard better, an’ worse, an’ middlin’ – there’s ben such contradictory reports.”

“Oh, very well, Mrs. Crow! Never better. I’m going to give a lot more trouble yet. I can’t do it in politics, that’s the worst of it. But here’s the man that’s going to do it for me. Here’s the man!”

The Crows looked at the pretendant, as in duty bound, but not any longer than they could help.

“Why, I guess you were at school with Elmore?” said Crow, as if the idea had just struck him.

“He may be right peart, for all that,” said Elmore’s mother, and Elmore, himself, entering with two leading Liberals of Jordanville, effected a diversion, under cover of which Mrs. Crow escaped, to superintend, with Bella, the last touches to the supper in the kitchen.

Politics in and about Jordanville were accepted as a purely masculine interest. If you had asked Mrs. Crow to take a hand in them she would have thanked you with sarcasm, and said she thought she had about enough to do as it was. The school-house, on the night of such a meeting as this, was recognized to be no place for ladies. It was a man’s affair, left to the men, and the appearance there of the other sex would have been greeted with remark and levity. Elgin, as we know, was more sophisticated in every way, plenty of ladies attended political meetings in the Drill Shed, where seats as likely as not would be reserved for them; plenty of handkerchiefs waved
there for the encouragement of the hero of the evening. They did not kiss him; British phlegm, so far, had stayed that demonstration at the southern border.

The ladies of Elgin, however, drew the line somewhere, drew it at country meetings. Mrs. Farquharson went with her husband because, since his state of health had handed him over to her more than ever, she saw it a part of her wifely duty. His retirement had been decided upon for the spring, but she would be on hand to retire him at any earlier moment should the necessity arise. “We’ll be the only female creatures there, my dear,” she had said to Dora on the way out, and Hesketh had praised them both for public spirit. He didn’t know, he said, how anybody would get elected in England without the ladies, especially in the villages, where the people were obliged to listen respectfully.

“I wonder you can afford to throw away all the influence you get in the rural districts with soup and blankets,” he said; “but this is an extravagant country in many ways.” Dora kept silence, not being sure of the social prestige bound up with the distribution of soup and blankets, but Mrs. Farquharson set him sharply right.

“I guess we’d rather do without our influence if it came to that,” she said.

Hesketh listened with deference to her account of the rural district which had as yet produced no Ladies Bountiful, made mental notes of several points, and placed her privately as a woman of more than ordinary intelligence. I have always claimed for Hesketh an open mind; he was filling it now, to its capacity, with care and satisfaction.

The school-room was full and waiting when they arrived. Jordanville had been well billed, and the posters held, in addition to the conspicuous names of Farquharson and Murchison,
that of Mr. Alfred Hesketh (of London, England). There was a “send-off” to give to the retiring member, there was a critical inspection to make of the new candidate, and there was Mr. Alfred Hesketh, of London, England, and whatever he might signify. They were big, quiet, expectant fellows, with less sophistication and polemic than their American counterparts, less stolid aggressiveness than their parallels in England, if they have parallels there. They stood, indeed, for the development between the two; they came of the new country but not of the new light; they were democrats who had never thrown off the monarch – what harm did he do there overseas? They had the air of being prosperous, but not prosperous enough for theories and doctrines. The Liberal vote of South Fox had yet to be split by Socialism or Labour. Life was a decent rough business that required all their attention; there was time enough for sleep but not much for speculation. They sat leaning forward with their hats dropped between their knees, more with the air of big schoolboys expecting an entertainment than responsible electors come together to approve their party’s choice. They had the uncomplaining bucolic look, but they wore it with a difference; the difference, by this time, was enough to mark them of another nation. Most of them had driven to the meeting; it was not an adjournment from the public-house. Nor did the air hold any hint of beer. Where it had an alcoholic drift the flavour was of whisky; but the stimulant of the occasion had been tea or cider, and the room was full of patient good-will.

The preliminaries were gone through with promptness; the Chair had supped with the speakers, and Mr. Crow had given him a friendly hint that the boys wouldn’t be expecting much in the way of trimmings from
him
. Stamping and clapping from the back benches greeted Mr. Farquharson. It
diminished, grew more subdued, as it reached the front. The young fellows were mostly at the back, and the power of demonstration had somehow ebbed in the old ones. The retiring member addressed his constituents for half an hour. He was standing before them as their representative for the last time, and it was natural to look back and note the milestones behind, the changes for the better with which he could fairly claim association. They were matters of Federal business chiefly, beyond the immediate horizon of Jordanville, but Farquharson made them a personal interest for that hour at all events, and there were one or two points of educational policy which he could illustrate by their own school-house. He approached them, as he had always done, on the level of mutual friendly interest, and in the hope of doing mutual friendly business. “You know and I know,” he said more than once; they and he knew a number of things together.

He was afraid, he said, that if the doctors hadn’t chased him out of politics, he never would have gone. Now, however, that they gave him no choice, he was glad to think that though times had been pretty good for the farmers of South Fox all through the eleven years of his appearance in the political arena, he was leaving it at a moment when they promised to be better still. Already, he was sure, they were familiar with the main heads of that attractive prospect, and, agreeable as the subject, great as the policy was to him, he would leave it to be further unfolded by the gentleman whom they all hoped to enlist in the cause, as his successor for this constituency, Mr. Lorne Murchison, and by his friend from the old country, Mr. Alfred Hesketh. He, Farquharson, would not take the words out of the mouth of these gentlemen, much as he envied them the opportunity of uttering them. The French Academy, he told them, that illustrious body of literary and scientific
men, had a custom, on the death of a member and the selection of his successor, of appointing one of their number to eulogize the new-comer. The person upon whom the task would most appropriately fall, did circumstances permit, would be the departing academician. In this case, he was happy to say, circumstances did permit – his political funeral was still far enough off to enable him to express his profound confidence in and his hearty admiration of the young and vigorous political heir whom the Liberals of South Fox had selected to stand in his shoes. Mr. Farquharson proceeded to give his grounds for this confidence and admiration, reminding the Jordanville electors that they had met Mr. Murchison as a Liberal standard-bearer in the last general election, when he, Farquharson, had to acknowledge very valuable services on Mr. Murchison’s part. The retiring member then thanked his audience for the kind attention and support they had given him for so many years, made a final cheerful joke about a Pagan divinity known as Anno Domini, and took his seat.

They applauded him, and it was plain that they regretted him, the tried friend, the man there was never any doubt about, whose convictions they had repeated, and whose speeches in Parliament they had read with a kind of proprietorship for so long. The Chair had to wait, before introducing Mr. Alfred Hesketh, until the back benchers had got through with a double rendering of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” which bolder spirits, from the anteroom where the little girls kept their hats and comforters, interspersed with whoops. Hesketh, it had been arranged, should speak next, and Lorne last.

Mr. Hesketh left his wooden chair with smiling ease, the ease which is intended to level distinctions and put everybody concerned on the best of terms. He said that though he was no stranger to the work of political campaigns, this was the
first time that he had had the privilege of addressing a colonial audience. “I consider,” said he handsomely, “that it is a privilege.” He clasped his hands behind his back and threw out his chest.

“Opinions have differed in England as to the value of the colonies, and the consequence of colonials. I say here with pride that I have ever been among those who insist that the value is very high and the consequence very great. The fault is common to humanity, but we are, I fear, in England, too prone to be led away by appearances, and to forget that under a rough unpolished exterior may beat virtues which are the brightest ornaments of civilization, that in the virgin fields of the possessions which the good swords of our ancestors wrung for us from the Algonquins and the – and the other savages – may be hidden the most glorious period of the British race.”

Mr. Hesketh paused and coughed. His audience neglected the opportunity for applause, but he had their undivided attention. They were looking at him and listening to him, these Canadian farmers, with curious interest in his attitude, his appearance, his inflection, his whole personality as it offered itself to them – it was a thing new and strange. Far out in the North-West, where the emigrant trains had been unloading all the summer, Hesketh’s would have been a voice from home; but here, in long-settled Ontario, men had forgotten the sound of it, with many other things. They listened in silence, weighing with folded arms, appraising with chin in hand; they were slow, equitable men.

“If we in England,” Hesketh proceeded, “required a lesson – as perhaps we did – in the importance of the colonies, we had it, need I remind you? in the course of the late protracted campaign in South Africa. Then did the mother country indeed prove the loyalty and devotion of her colonial
sons. Then were envious nations compelled to see the spectacle of Canadians and Australians rallying about the common flag, eager to attest their affection for it with their life-blood, and to demonstrate that they, too, were worthy to add deeds to British traditions and victories to the British cause.”

Still no mark of appreciation. Hesketh began to think them an unhandsome lot. He stood bravely, however, by the note he had sounded. He dilated on the pleasure and satisfaction it had been to the people of England to receive this mark of attachment from far-away dominions and dependencies, on the cementing of the bonds of brotherhood by the blood of the fallen, on the impossibility that the mother country should ever forget such voluntary sacrifices for her sake, when, unexpectedly and irrelevantly, from the direction of the cloakroom, came the expressive comment – “Yah!”