The Imperialist (2 page)

The Birthday I am thinking of, with Mrs. Murchison as a central figure in the kitchen, peeling potatoes for dinner, there was a lacrosse match of some importance, for the Fox County Championship and the Fox County Cup, as presented by the Member for the South Riding. Mrs. Murchison remains the central figure, nevertheless, with her family radiating from her, gathered to help or to hinder in one of those domestic crises which arose when the Murchisons were temporarily deprived of a “girl.” Everybody was subject to them in Elgin, everybody had to acknowledge and face them. Let a new mill be opened, and it didn’t matter what you paid her or how comfortable you made her, off she would go, and you might think yourself lucky if she gave a week’s warning. Hard times shut down the mills and brought her back again; but periods of prosperity were very apt to find the ladies of Elgin where I am compelled to introduce Mrs. Murchison – in the kitchen. “You’d better get up – the girl’s gone,” Lorne had stuck his head into his sister’s room to announce, while yet the bells were ringing and the rifles of the local volunteers were spitting out
the feu de joie
. “I’ve lit the fire an’ swep’ out the dining-room. You tell mother. Queen’s Birthday, too – I guess Lobelia’s about as mean as they’re made!” And the Murchisons had
descended to face the situation. Lorne had by then done his part, and gone out into the chromatic possibilities of the day; but the sense of injury he had communicated to Advena in her bed remained and expanded. Lobelia, it was felt, had scurvily manipulated the situation – her situation, it might have been put, if any Murchison had been in the temper for jesting. She had taken unjustifiable means to do a more unjustifiable thing, to secure for herself an improper and unlawful share of the day’s excitements, transferring her work, by the force of circumstances, to the shoulders of other people, since, as Mrs. Murchison remarked, somebody had to do it. Nor had she, her mistress testified, the excuse of fearing unreasonable con finement. “I told her she might go when she had done her dishes after dinner,” said Mrs. Murchison, “and then she had only to come back at six and get tea – what’s getting tea? I advised her to finish her ironing yesterday, so as to be free ofit to-day; and she said she would be very glad to. Now, I wonder if she
did
finish it!” and Mrs. Murchison put down her pan of potatoes with a thump to look in the family clothes-basket. “Not she! Five shirts and
all
the coloured things. I call it downright deceit!”

“I believe I know the reason she’ll
say,”
said Advena. “She objects to rag carpet in her bedroom. She told me so.”

“Rag carpet – upon my word!” Mrs. Murchison dropped her knife to exclaim. “It’s what her betters have to do with! I’ve known the day when that very piece of rag carpet – sixty balls there were in it, and every one I sewed with my own fingers – was the best I had for my spare room, with a bit of ingrain in the middle. Dear me!” she went on with a smile that lightened the whole situation, “how proud I was of that performance! She didn’t tell
me
she objected to rag carpet!”

“No, Mother,” Advena agreed, “she knew better.”

They were all there, in the kitchen, supporting their mother, and it seems an opportunity to name them. Advena, the eldest, stood by the long kitchen table washing the breakfast cups in “soft” soap and hot water. The soft soap – Mrs. Murchison had a barrelful boiled every spring in the back yard, an old colonial economy she hated to resign – made a fascinating brown lather with iridescent bubbles. Advena poured cupfuls of it from on high to see the foam rise, till her mother told her for mercy’s sake to get on with those dishes. She stood before a long low window, looking out into the garden, and the light, filtering through apple branches on her face, showed her strongly featured and intelligent for fourteen. Advena was named after one grandmother; when the next girl came Mrs. Murchison, to make an end of the matter, named it Abigail, after the other. She thought both names outlandish, and acted under protest, but hoped that now everybody would be satis fied. Lorne came after Advena, at the period of a
naive
fashion of christening the young sons of Canada in the name of her Governor-General. It was a simple way of attesting a loyal spirit, but with Mrs. Murchison more particular motives operated. The Marquis of Lorne was not only the deputy of the throne, he was the son-in-law of a good woman, of whom Mrs. Murchison thought more, and often said it, for being the woman she was than for being twenty times a Queen; and he had made a metrical translation of the Psalms, several of which were included in the revised psalter for the use of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, from which the whole of Knox Church sang to the praise of God every Sunday. These were circumstances that weighed with Mrs. Murchison, and she called her son after the Royal representative, feeling that she was doing well for him in a sense beyond the mere bestowal of a distinguished and a euphonious name, though
that, as she would have willingly acknowledged, was “well enough in its place.”

We must take this matter of names seriously; the Murchisons always did. Indeed, from the arrival of a new baby until the important Sunday of the christening, nothing was discussed with such eager zest and such sustained interest as the name he should get – there was a fascinating list at the back of the dictionary – and to the last minute it was problematical. In Stella’s case, Mrs. Murchison actually changed her mind on the way to the church; and Abby, who had sat through the sermon expecting Dorothy Maud, which she thought lovely, publicly cried with disappointment. Stella was the youngest, and Mrs. Murchison was thankful to have a girl at last whom she could name without regard to her own relations or anybody else’s. I have skipped about a good deal, but I have only left out two, the boys who came between Abby and Stella. In their names the contemporary observer need not be too acute to discover both an avowal and to some extent an enforcement of Mr. Murchison’s political views; neither an Alexander Mackenzie nor an Oliver Mowat could very well grow up into anything but a sound Liberal in that part of the world without feeling himself an unendurable paradox. To christen a baby like that was, in a manner, a challenge to public attention; the faint relaxation about the lips of Dr. Drummond – the best of Liberals himself, though he made a great show of keeping it out of the pulpit – recognized this, and the just perceptible stir of the congregation proved it. Sonorously he said it. “Oliver Mowat, I baptize thee in the Name of the Father –” The compliment should have all the impressiveness the rite could give it, while the Murchison brothers and sisters, a-row in the family pew, stood on one foot with excitement as to how Oliver Mowat would take the drops that defined him. The verdict
was, on the way home, that he behaved splendidly. Alexander Mackenzie, the year before, had roared.

He was weeping now, at the age of seven, silently, but very copiously, behind the wood-pile. His father had finally cuffed him for importunity; and the world was no place for a just boy, who asked nothing but his rights. Only the wood-pile, friendly mossy logs unsplit, stood inconscient and irresponsible for any share in his black circumstances; and his tears fell among the lichens of the stump he was bowed on till, observing them, he began to wonder whether he could cry enough to make a pond there, and was presently disappointed to find the source exhausted. The Murchisons were all imaginative.

The others, Oliver and Abby and Stella, still “tormented.” Poor Alec’s rights – to a present of pocket-money on the Queen’s Birthday – were common ones, and almost statutory. How their father, sitting comfortably with his pipe in the flickering May shadows under the golden pippin, reading the Toronto paper, could evade his liability in the matter was unfathomable to the Murchisons; it was certainly illiberal; they had a feeling that it was illegal. A little teasing was generally necessary, but the resistance to-day had begun to look ominous, and Alec, as we know, too temerarious, had retired in disorder to the wood-pile.

Oliver was wiping Advena’s dishes. He exercised himself ostentatiously upon a plate, standing in the door to be within earshot of his father.

“Eph Wheeler,” he informed his family, “Eph Wheeler, he’s got twenty-five cents, an’ a English sixpence, an’ a Yankee nickel. An’ Mr. Wheeler’s only a common working man, a lot poorer’n we are.”

Mr. Murchison removed his pipe from his lips, in order, apparently, to follow unimpeded the trend of the
Dominion’s
leading article. Oliver eyed him anxiously. “Do, father,” he continued in logical sequence. “Aw, do.”

“Make him, mother,” said Abby indignantly. “It’s the Queen’s
Birthday!”

“Time enough when the butter bill’s paid,” said Mrs. Murchison.

“Oh, the
butter
bill! Say, Father, aren’t you going to?”

“What?” asked John Murchison, and again took out his pipe, as if this were the first he had heard of the matter.

“Give us our fifteen cents each to celebrate with. You can’t do it under that,” Oliver added firmly. “Crackers are eight cents a packet this year, the small size.”

“Nonsense,” said Mr. Murchison. The reply was defin ite and final, and its ambiguity was merely due to the fact that their father disliked giving a plump refusal. “Nonsense” was easier to say, if not to hear, than “No.” Oliver considered for a moment, drew Abby to colloquy by the pump, and sought his brother behind the wood-pile. Then he returned to the charge.

“Look here, father,” he said,
“cash down
, we’ll take ten.”

John Murchison was a man of few words, but they were usually impregnated with meaning, especially in anger. “No more of this,” he said. “Celebrate fiddlesticks! Go and make yourselves of some use. You’ll get nothing from me, for I haven’t got it.” So saying, he went through the kitchen with a step that forbade him to be followed. His eldest son, arriving over the back yard fence in a state of heat, was just in time to hear him. Lorne’s apprehension of the situation was instant, and his face fell, but the depression plainly covered such splendid spirits that his brother asked resentfully, “Well, what’s the matter with
you?”

“Matter? Oh, not much. I’m going to see the Cayugas beat the Wanderers, that’s all; an’ Abe Mackinnon’s mother said he could ask me to come back to tea with them. Can I, Mother?”

“There’s no objection that I know of,” said Mrs. Murchison, shaking her apron free of stray potato-parings, “but you won’t get money for the lacrosse match or anything else from your father to-day,
I
can assure you. They didn’t do five dollars’ worth of business at the store all day yesterday, and he’s as cross as two sticks.”

“Oh, that’s all right.” Lorne jingled his pocket and Oliver took a fascinated step toward him. “I made thirty cents this morning, delivering papers for Fisher. His boy’s sick. I did the North Ward – took me over’n hour. Guess I can go all right, can’t I?”

“Why, yes, I suppose you can,” said his mother. The others were dumb. Oliver hunched his shoulders and kicked at the nearest thing that had paint on it. Abby clung to the pump handle and sobbed aloud. Lorne looked gloomily about him and went out. Making once more for the back fence, he encountered Alexander in the recognized family retreat. “Oh, my goodness!” he said, and stopped. In a very few minutes he was back in the kitchen, followed sheepishly by Alexander, whose grimy face expressed the hope that beat behind his little waistcoat.

“Say, you kids,” he announced, “Alec’s got four cents, an’ he says he’ll join up. This family’s going to celebrate all right. Come on down town.”

No one could say that the Murchisons were demonstrative. They said nothing, but they got their hats. Mrs. Murchison looked up from her occupation.

“Alec,” she said, “out of this house you don’t go till you’ve washed your face. Lorne, come here,” she added in a lower voice, producing a bunch of keys. “If you look in the right-hand corner of the top small drawer in my bureau you’ll find about twenty cents. Say nothing about it, and mind you don’t meddle with anything else. I guess the Queen isn’t going to owe it all to you.”

“W
e’ve seen changes, Mr. Murchison. Aye. We’ve seen changes.”

Dr. Drummond and Mr. Murchison stood together in the store door, over which the sign, “John Murchison: Hardware” had explained thirty years of varying commercial fortune. They had pretty well begun life together in Elgin. John Murchison was one of those who had listened to Mr. Drummond’s trial sermon, and had given his vote to “call” him to the charge. Since then there had been few Sundays when, morning and evening, Mr. Murchison had not been in his place at the top of his pew, where his dignified and intelligent head appeared with the isolated significance of a strong individuality. People looked twice at John Murchison in a crowd; so did his own children at home. Hearing some discussion of the selection of a Premier, Alec, looking earnestly at him once said, “Why don’t they tell Father to be it?” The young minister looked twice at him that morning of the trial sermon, and asked afterward who he was. A Scotchman, Mr. Drummond was told, not very long from the old country, who had bought the Playfair business on Main Street, and settled
in the “Plummer Place,” which already had a quarter of a cen tury’s standing in the annals of the town. The Playfair business was a respectable business to buy; the Plummer Place, though it stood in an unfashionable outskirt, was a respectable place to settle in; and the minister, in casting his lot in Elgin, envisaged John Murchison as part of it, thought of him confidently as a “dependance,” saw him among the future elders and office-bearers of the congregation, a man who would be punctual with his pew-rent, sage in his judgments, and whose views upon church attendance would be extended to his family.

So the two came, contemporaries, to add their labour and their lives to the building of this little outpost of Empire. It was the frankest transfer, without thought of return; they were there to spend and be spent within the circumference of the spot they had chosen, with no ambition beyond. In the course of nature, even their bones and their memories would enter into the fabric. The new country filled their eyes; the new town was their opportunity, its destiny their fate. They were altogether occupied with its affairs, and the affairs of the growing Dominion, yet obscure in the heart of each of them ran the undercurrent of the old allegiance. They had gone the length of their tether, but the tether was always there. Thus, before a congregation that always stood in the early days, had the minister every Sunday morning for thirty years besought the Almighty, with ardour and humility, on behalf of the Royal Family. It came in the long prayer, about the middle. Not in the perfunctory words of a ritual, but in the language of his choice, which varied according to what he believed to be the spiritual needs of the reigning House, and was at one period, touching certain of its members, though respectful, extremely candid. The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, “now in session,” also – was it ever forgotten once?
And even the Prime Minister, “and those who sit in council with him,” with just a hint of extra commendation if it happened to be Mr. Gladstone. The minister of Knox Church, Elgin, Ontario, Canada, kept his eye on them all. Remote as he was, and concerned with affairs of which they could know little, his sphere of duty could never revolve too far westward to embrace them, nor could his influence, under any circumstances, cease to be at their disposal. It was noted by some that after Mr. Drummond had got his “D.D.” from an American University he also prayed occasionally for the President of the neighbouring Republic; but this was rebutted by others, who pointed out that it happened only on the occurrence of assassinations, and held it reasonable enough. The cavillers mostly belonged to the congregation of St. Andrew’s, “Established” – a glum, old-fashioned lot indeed, who now and then dropped in of a Sunday evening to hear Mr. Drummond preach. (There wasn’t much to be said for the preaching at St. Andrew’s.) The Established folk went on calling the minister of Knox Church “Mr.” Drummond long after he was “Doctor” to his own congregation, on account of what they chose to consider the dubious source of the dignity; but the Knox Church people had their own theory to explain this hypercriticism, and would promptly turn the conversation to the merits of the sermon.