Campbell's Kingdom (5 page)

The secretary showed me out. As I made for the stairs I checked at the sight of the door opposite me. The Roger Fergus Oil Development Company. On a sudden impulse I opened the door and went in. There was a counter and beyond the counter a rather stuffy office with one typewriter and the walls massed with files. There was an electric fire and some unwashed cups on a dusty desk. A door led off it with the name Roger Fergus on it. The door was open and I got a view of a bare desk and a table on which stood nothing but a telephone. The door of the neighbouring office slammed and a girl's voice behind me said, ‘Can I help you?'

‘I'm looking for Mr Fergus,' I explained.

‘Old Mr Fergus?' She shook her head. ‘He hasn't been coming to the office for a long time now. He's been ill.'

‘Oh.' I hesitated.

‘Is your business urgent? Because his son, Mr Henry Fergus—'

‘No,' I said. ‘It wasn't really business—more a social call. He was a great friend of my grandfather, Stuart Campbell.'

Her eyes lit up in her rather pale face. ‘I met Mr Campbell once.' She smiled. ‘He was a wonderful old man—quite a character. There was an awful lot about him in the papers when he died.' She hesitated and then said, ‘I'll ring Mr Fergus's home. I'm sure he'd like to see you if he's well enough. He had a stroke, you know. He's paralysed all down one side and he tires very easily.'

But apparently it was all right. He would see me if I went straight over. ‘But the nurse says you're not to stay more than five minutes. The Fergus Farm is a little way out of town on the far side of the Bow River. The cab drivers all know it.'

I thanked her and went down the stairs, past the photographs of oil wells and the clatter of the ticker tape and the typewriters on the second floor. The notice board at the entrance, listing the companies occupying the building, caught my eye. The second floor was occupied by Henry Fergus, Stockbrokers. I wondered vaguely how the Calgary stock exchange was able to support a business that appeared to be as large as most London stockbroker's offices.

The Fergus home was a low, sprawling ranch-house building. As we swung up past the stables I saw several fine blacks being taken out for exercise, their blankets marked with the monogram RF. What appeared to be a small covered wagon stood in the yard, its canopy bearing the name The RF Ranch. ‘That's the old man's chuck wagon,' my driver said. ‘Always enters a team for the chuck wagon races at the Stampede. He's got a big ranch down in the Porcupine Hills. He started in when the Turner Valley field was opening up. Been making dough ever since.' The corners of his mouth turned down and he grinned. ‘Still, we all come to the same end, I guess. They say he won't last much longer.'

It was a manservant who let me in and I was taken through into a great lounge hall full of trophies, prizes taken by cattle and horses at shows up and down the country. A nurse took charge of me and I was shown into a sombre study with the temperature of a hot house. There were few books. The walls were lined with photographs—photographs of oil rigs, drilling crews, oil fires, a panorama of snow-covered mountains, horses, cattle, cowhands, chuck wagon races, cattle shows. And there were drilling bits, odd pieces of metal, trophies of a dozen different money-making discoveries. All these I took in at a glance and then my gaze came to rest on the man seated in a wheel-chair. He was a big man, broad shouldered with massive, gnarled hands and a great shock of white hair. He had a fine face with bushy, tufty eyebrows and a way of craning his neck forward like a bird. His skin had been tanned and wrinkled by weather, but now transparency was evident in the tan and the effect was of dry, wrinkled parchment. ‘So you're Stuart's grandson.' He spoke out of one corner of his mouth; the other twisted by paralysis. ‘Sit down. He often spoke of you. Had great hopes that one day you'd be managing an oilfield for him. Damned old fool.' His voice was surprisingly gentle.

‘Five minutes, that's all,' the nurse said and went out.

‘Like a drink?' He reached down with his long arm to a cupboard under the nearest pedestal of the desk. ‘She doesn't know I've got it,' he said, nodding towards the door through which the nurse had passed. ‘Not supposed to have it. Henry smuggles it in for me. That's my son. Hopes it'll kill me off,' he added with a malicious twinkle. He poured out two Scotches neat. ‘Your health, young feller.'

‘And yours, sir,' I said.

‘I haven't got any.' He waved his left hand vaguely. ‘They're all hanging around waiting for me to die. That's what happens when you've made a fortune.' He craned forward, peering at me from under his eyebrows. ‘You're from the Old Country, aren't you? What brought you out to Canada? Think you're going to drill a discovery well up in the Kingdom?'

‘There doesn't seem much chance of that,' I said. ‘Acheson just showed me the report on that survey.'

‘Ah, yes. A pity. And Bladen was so enthusiastic. Good boy, Bladen. Fine pilot. Half Indian, you know. Seems he's not so good as a surveyor.' His voice had dropped almost to a mutter. But he rallied himself and said, ‘Well now, what's the purpose of this visit?'

‘You were a friend of my grandfather's,' I said. ‘I wanted to meet you.'

‘Fine.' He peered at me. ‘Any financial propositions up your sleeve?'

‘No,' I said. ‘It never occurred to me—'

‘That's okay.' He gave me a twisted smile. ‘When you're old and rich you get kinda suspicious about people's motives. Now then, tell me about yourself.'

I started to tell him about Fothergill's visit to my digs in London, and then suddenly I was telling him the whole story, about Maclean-Hervey's verdict and my decision to emigrate. When I had finished his eyes, which had been closed, flicked open. ‘Fine pair we are,' he said and he managed a contorted grin that somehow made me realise that he was still something of a boy at heart. ‘So now they're going to drown the Kingdom and you're here to attend the obsequies. Well, maybe it's for the best. It brought Stuart nothing but trouble.' He gave a little sigh and closed his eyes.

I liked him and because of that I felt I had to get the financial obligations settled. ‘I've seen Acheson,' I said. ‘He'll settle up with you for the amount you advanced to the company. But I'm afraid the purchase price they're prepared to pay won't cover the survey.'

He fixed his grey eyes on me. ‘I thought this wasn't a business visit,' he barked. ‘To hell with the money. You don't have to worry about that. You're under no obligation as far as I'm concerned. Do you understand? If you want to throw good money after bad and drill a well, you can go ahead.'

I laughed. ‘I'm not in a position to drill a well,' I said. ‘In any case, you're the only person who could do that. You own the mineral rights.'

‘Yes. I'd forgotten that.' He took my glass and returned it with the bottle and his own glass to the cupboard. Then he leaned back and closed his eyes. ‘The mineral rights.' His voice was a barely audible murmur. ‘I wonder why Bladen was so keen; as keen as Stuart.' His left shoulder twitched in the slightest of shrugs. ‘I'd like to have seen one more discovery well brought in before I died. I'd like to have been able to thumb my nose just once more at all the know-alls in the big companies. There's oil in the Rocky Mountains.' He gave a tired laugh. ‘Well, there it is. Winnick is a straight guy. He wouldn't pull anything on me. You'd best go home, young feller. You want friends around you when you die. It's a lonely business anyway.'

The nurse came in and said my time was up. I got to my feet. He held out his left hand to me. ‘Good luck,' he said. ‘I'm glad you came. If your doctor feller's right, we'll maybe meet again soon. We'll have a good chat then with all eternity ahead of us.' His eyes were smiling; his lips were tired and twisted.

I went out to my taxi and drove back to the hotel, the memory of that fine old shell of a man lingering with me.

I went up to my room and sat staring at Winnick's report and thinking of the old man who had been my grandfather's friend. I could understand him wanting that one final justification of his existence, wanting to prove the experts wrong. I needed the same thing. I needed it desperately. But there was the report and he himself had said Winnick was straight. I think I had already made up my mind to sign the deed of sale. I might have done it there and then and in that event I should not now be writing this story with the snow-capped peaks all around me and winter closing in. Probably I should have been quietly buried away under the frozen sods of Canada. But I was hungry and I pushed the papers into my suitcase and went down to get some lunch. Instead of pocketing the key I handed it in automatically at the desk. By such a trivial act can one's whole future be changed, for when I came out of the dining-room I had to go to the desk to get it and at the desk was a short, stockily built man in an airman's jacket with a friendly face under a sweat-stained stetson. He was checking out and as I stood behind him, waiting, he said to the clerk, ‘If a feller by the name of Jack Harbin asks for me, tell him I've gone back to Jasper. He can ring me at my home.'

‘Okay, Jeff,' the clerk said. ‘I'll tell him.'

Jasper! Jasper was in the Yellowhead Pass, the Canadian National's gateway into the Rockies and the Fraser River valley. The Kingdom was barely fifty miles from Jasper as the crow flies. ‘Excuse me. Are you going by car?' The words were out before I had time to think it over.

‘Yeah.' He looked me over and then his face crinkled into a friendly smile. ‘Want a ride?'

‘Have you got room for me?'

‘Sure. You can have the front seat and the whole of the back. You're from the Old Country, I guess.' He held out his hand. ‘I'm Jeff Hart.'

‘My name's Wetheral,' I said as I gripped his hand. ‘Bruce Wetheral.'

‘Okay, Bruce. Make it snappy then. I got to be in Edmonton by tea time.'

It was all done on the spur of the moment. I didn't have time to think of Acheson until I was in the big station wagon trundling north out of Calgary, and then I didn't care. I was moving one step nearer the Kingdom and I was content to let it go at that. The sound of the wheels was lost in the drift of powdery snow that whirled past the windshield and ahead of me the ranchlands rolled away to the horizon. I lay back and relaxed in the warmth of the heater and the steady drone of the engine, listening to Jeff Hart's gentle, lazy voice giving me a verbal introduction to the province of Alberta.

We reached Edmonton just before six and got a room at the Macdonald. I had moved into another world. Where Calgary was static, an established, respectable town, Edmonton was on the move. The place bustled with life, an exciting, exotic life that had washed up from as far away as Texas and down from the Yukon and the North West Territories. It flooded through the lobbies of the hotels and out into the streets and cafés—oil men, trappers, prospectors, bush fliers, lumber men, scientists and surveyors. This was the jumping-off place for the Arctic, the first outpost of civilisation on the Alaskan Highway. It had atmosphere, the atmosphere of a frontier town on which an oil boom had been superimposed.

We left after lunch next day and just about four that afternoon we topped a rise on the Jasper road and I got my first glimpse of the Rockies, a solid wall of snow and ice and cold, grey rock, extending north and south as far as the eye could see. The sun was shining bleakly and in the bitter cold the crystal wall glittered and sparkled frostily. And over the top of that first rampart rose peaks of ice and black, wind-torn rock.

‘Quite a sight, eh?' Jeff yawned. ‘You're seeing them at the right time. They get to look kinda dusty by end of summer.

We ran down to the stone-strewn bed of the Athabaska and passed the check point that marked the entrance to Jasper National Park. The mountains closed in on us, bleak, wind-torn peaks that poked snouts of grey rock and white snow above the dark timber that covered the lower slopes. Below us the river ran cold and milky from the glaciers. There was tarnished snow on the road now and a nip in the air. Though the sun still shone in a blue sky its warmth seemed unable to penetrate this glacial valley.

But though the place looked gloomy with its dark timbers and grey rock and the dead white of the snow, I felt the excitement of having reached a milestone on the long road I had come. I could see the railway now, twin black lines ruled through the snow climbing in great banking curves to the Yellowhead Pass. This way my grandfather had come, riding with a caravan of ox carts because he was too poor to travel on the newly opened railroad.

‘Do you know a man called Johnnie Carstairs?' I asked my companion.

‘Sure. He wrangles a bunch of horses and acts as packer for the visitors in the summer.'

Jeff Hart dropped me at the hotel. I couldn't face any food and went straight up to my room. I felt tired and short of breath. Looking in the mirror I was shocked to see how gaunt my face was, the skin white and transparent so that the veins showed through it. The stubble of my beard, by contrast, appeared a metallic blue. I lay down on the bed, lit a cigarette and pulled from my pocket the only map I had so far been able to acquire—the Esso road map for Alberta and British Columbia. It was already creased and torn for I had acquired it at Canada House in London and all the way over I had been constantly referring to it.

I knew it almost by heart. Through the double glass of the window I could just see the peak of Mount Edith Cavell, a solitary pinnacle of ice and snow. Like a cold finger it pointed into the chill blue of the sky, a warning that my legacy was no soft one. Campbell's Kingdom was little more than 60 miles due west as the crow flies. Lying there, feeling the utter exhaustion of my body, I wondered whether I should ever get there.