The Imperialist (33 page)

If they had followed her departure they would have been further confounded to see her walk not quite steadily away, shaken with fantastic laughter. They looked instead at one another, as if to find the solution of the mystery where indeed it lay, in themselves.

“She doesn’t even belong to his congregation,” said Christie. “Just a friend, she said.”

“I expect the friendship’s mostly upon her side,” remarked Mrs. Kilbannon. “She seemed frank enough about it. But I would see no necessity for encouraging her friendship on my own account, if I were in your place, Christie.”

“I think I’ll manage without it,” said Christie.

T
he South Fox fight was almost over. Three days only remained before the polling booths would be open, and the voters of the towns of Elgin and Clayfield and the surrounding townships would once again be invited to make their choice between a Liberal and a Conservative representative of the district in the Dominion House of Commons. The ground had never been more completely covered, every inch of advantage more stubbornly held, by either side, in the political history of the riding. There was no doubt of the hope that sat behind the deprecation in Walter Winter’s eye, nor of the anxiety that showed through the confidence freely expressed by the Liberal leaders. The issue would be no foregone conclusion, as it had been practically any time within the last eleven years; and as Horace Williams remarked to the select lot that met pretty frequently at the
Express
office for consultation and rally, they had “no use for any sort of carelessness.”

It was undeniably felt that the new idea, the great idea whose putative fatherhood in Canada certainly lay at the door of the Liberal party, had drawn in fewer supporters than might
have been expected. In England Wallingham, wearing it like a medal, seemed to be courting political excommunication with it, except that Wallingham was so hard to effectively curse. The ex-Minister deserved, clearly, any ban that could be put upon him. No sort of remonstrance could hold him from going about openly and persistently exhorting people to “think imperially,” a liberty which, as is well known, the Holy Cobdenite Church, supreme in those islands, expressly forbids. Wallingham appeared to think that by teaching and explaining he could help his fellow islanders to see further than the length of their fists, and exorcise from them the spirit, only a century and a quarter older and a trifle more sophisticated, that lost them the American colonies. But so far little had transpired to show that Wallingham was stronger than nature and destiny. There had been Wallingham meetings of remarkable enthusiasm; his supporters called them epoch-making, as if epochs were made of cheers. But the working man of Great Britain was declaring stolidly in the bye-elections against any favour to colonial produce at his expense, thereby showing himself one of those humble instruments that Providence uses for the downfall of arrogant empires. It will be thus, no doubt, that the working man will explain in the future his eminent usefulness to the Government of his country, and it will be in these terms that the cost of educating him by means of the ballot will be demonstrated. Meanwhile we may look on and cultivate philosophy; or we may make war upon the gods with Mr. Wallingham, which is, perhaps, the better part.

That, to turn from recrimination, was what they saw in Canada looking across; – the queerest thing of all was the recalcitrance of the farm labourer; they could only stare at that – and it may be that the spectacle was depressing to hopeful initiative. At all events, it was plain that the new policy was
suffering from a certain flatness on the further side. As a
ballon d’essai
it lacked buoyancy; and no doubt Mr. Farquharson was right in declaring that above all things it lacked actuality, business – the proposition, in good set terms, for men to turn over, to accept or reject. Nothing could be done with it, Mr. Farquharson averred, as a mere prospect; it was useful only to its enemies. We of the young countries must be invited to deeds, not theories, of which we have a restless impatience; and this particular theory, though of golden promise, was beginning to recoil to some extent, upon the cause which had been confident enough to adopt it before it could be translated into action and its hard equivalent. The Elgin
Mercury
probably overstated the matter when it said that the Grits were dead sick of the preference they would never get; but Horace Williams was quite within the mark when he advised Lorne to stick to old Reform principles – clean administration, generous railway policy, sympathetic labour legislation, and freeze himself a little on imperial love and attachment.

“They’re not so sweet on it in Ottawa as they were, by a long chalk,” he said. “Look at the Premier’s speech to the Chambers of Commerce in Montreal. Pretty plain statement that, of a few things the British Government needn’t expect.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Lorne. “He was talking to manufacturers, you know, a pretty skittish lot anywhere. It sounded independent, but if you look into it you won’t find it gave the cause away any.”

“The old man’s got to think of Quebec, where his fat little majority lives,” remarked Bingham, chairman of the most difficult subdivision in the town. “The Premier of this country drives a team, you know.”

“Yes,” said Lorne, “but he drives it tandem, and Johnny François is the second horse.”

“Maybe so,” returned Mr. Williams, “but the organ’s singing pretty small, too. Look at this.” He picked up the
Dominion
from the office table and read aloud: “‘If Great Britain wishes to do a deal with the colonies she will find them willing to meet her in a spirit of fairness and enthusiasm. But it is for her to decide, and Canada would be the last to force her bread down the throat of the British labourer at a higher price than he can afford to pay for it.’ What’s that, my boy? Is it high-mindedness? No, sir, it’s luke-warmness.”

“The
Dominion
makes me sick,” said young Murchison. “It’s so scared of the Tory source of the scheme in England that it’s handing the whole boom of the biggest chance this country ever had over to the Tories here. If anything will help us to lose it that will. No Conservative Government in Canada can put through a cent of preference on English goods when it comes to the touch, and they know it. They’re full of loyalty just now – baying the moon – but if anybody opens a window they’ll turn tail fast enough.”

“I guess the
Dominion
knows it, too,” said Mr. Williams. “When Great Britain is quite sure she’s ready to do business on preference lines it’s the Liberal party on this side she’ll have to talk to. No use showing ourselves too anxious, you know. Besides, it might do harm over there. We’re all right; we’re on record. Wallingham knows as well as we do the lines we’re open on – he’s heard them from Canadian Liberals more than once. When they get good and ready they can let us know.”

“Jolly them up with it at your meetings by all means,” advised Bingham, “but use it as a kind of superfluous taffy; don’t make it your main lay-out.”

The Reform Association of South Fox had no more energetic officer than Bingham, though as he sat on the edge of the editorial table chewing portions of the margin of that
afternoon’s
Express
, and drawling out maxims to the Liberal candidate, you might not have thought so. He was explaining that he had been in this business for years, and had never had a job that gave him so much trouble.

“We’ll win out,” he said, “but the canvass isn’t any Christmas joy – not this time. There’s Jim Whelan,” he told them. “We all know what Jim is – a Tory from way back, where they make ’em so they last, and a soaker from way back, too, one day on his job and two days sleepin’ off his whisky. Now we don’t need Jim Whelan’s vote, never did need it, but the boys have generally been able to see that one of those two days was election day. There’s no necessity for Jim’s putting in his paper – a character like that – no necessity at all – he’d much better be comfortable in bed. This time, I’m darned if the old boozer hasn’t sworn off! Tells the boys he’s on to their game, and there’s no liquor in this town that’s good enough to get him to lose his vote – wouldn’t get drunk on champagne. He’s held out for ten days already, and it looks like Winter’d take his cross all right on Thursday.”

“I guess I’d let him have it, Bingham,” said Lorne Murchison with a kind of tolerant deprecation, void of offence, the only manner in which he knew how to convey disapproval to the older man. “The boys in your division are a pretty tough lot, anyhow. We don’t want the other side getting hold of any monkey tricks.”

“It’s necessary to win this election, young man,” said Bingham, “lawfully. You won’t have any trouble with my bunch.”

It was not, as will be imagined, the first discussion, so late in the day, of the value of the preference trade argument to the Liberal campaign. They had all realized, after the first few weeks, that their young candidate was a trifle overbitten
with it, though remonstrance had been a good deal curbed by Murchison’s treatment of it. When he had brought it forward at the late fall fairs and in the lonely country schoolhouses, his talk had been so trenchant, so vivid and pictorial, that the gathered farmers listened with open mouths, like children, pathetically used with life, to a grown-up fairy tale. As Horace Williams said, if a dead horse could be made to go this one would have brought Murchison romping in. And Lorne had taken heed to the counsel of his party leaders. At joint meetings, which offered the enemy his best opportunity for travesty and derision, he had left it in the background of debate, devoting himself to arguments of more immediate utility. In the literature of the campaign it glowed with prospective benefit, but vaguely, like a halo of Liberal conception and possible achievement, waiting for the word from overseas. The
Express
still approved it, but not in headlines, and wished the fact to be widely understood that while the imperial idea was a very big idea, the Liberals of South Fox were going to win this election without any assistance from it.

Lorne submitted. After all, victory was the thing. There could be no conquest for the idea without the party triumph first. He submitted, but his heart rebelled. He looked over the subdivisional reports with Williams and Farquharson, and gave ear to their warning interpretations; but his heart was an optimist, and turned always to the splendid projection upon the future that was so incomparably the title to success of those who would unite to further it. His mind accepted the old working formulas for dealing with an average electorate, but to his eager apprehending heart it seemed unbelievable that the great imperial possibility, the dramatic chance for the race that hung even now, in the history of the world, between the rising and the setting of the sun, should fail to be perceived
and acknowledged as the paramount issue, the contingency which made the bye-election of South Fox an extraordinary and momentous affair. He believed in the Idea; he saw it, with Wallingham, not only a glorious prospect, but an educative force; and never had he a moment of such despondency that it confounded him upon his horizon in the faded colours of some old Elizabethan mirage.

The opera-house, the night of Mr. Murchison’s final address to the electors of South Fox, was packed from floor to ceiling, and a large and patient overflow made the best of the hearing accommodation of the corridors and the foyer. A Minister was to speak, Sir Matthew Tellier, who held the portfolio of Public Works; and for drawing a crowd in Elgin there was nothing to compare with a member of the Government. He was the sum of all ambition and the centre of all importance; he was held to have achieved in the loftiest sense, and probably because he deserved to; a kind of afflatus sat upon him. They paid him real deference and they flocked to hear him. Cruickshank was a second attraction; and Lorne himself, even at this stage of the proceedings, “drew” without abatement. They knew young Murchison well enough; he had gone in and out among them all his life; yet since he had come before them in this new capacity a curious interest had gathered about him. People looked at him as if he had developed something they did not understand, and perhaps he had; he was in touch with the Idea. They listened with an intense personal interest in him which, no doubt, went to obscure what he said: perhaps a less absorbing personality would have carried the Idea further. However, they did look and listen – that was the main point, and on their last opportunity they were in the opera-house in great numbers.

Lorne faced them with an enviable security; the friendliness of the meeting was in the air. The gathering was almost entirely of one political complexion: the Conservatives of the town would have been glad enough to turn out to hear Minister Tellier; but the Liberals were of no mind to gratify them at the cost of having to stand themselves, and were on hand early to assert a prior moral claim to chairs. In the seated throng Lorne could pick out the fine head of his father, and his mother’s face, bright with anticipation, beside. Advena was there, too, and Stella; and the boys would have a perch, not too conspicuous, somewhere in the gallery. Dr. Drummond was in the second row, and a couple of strange ladies with him: he was chuckling with uncommon humour at some remark of the younger one when Lorne noted him. Old Sandy MacQuhot was in a good place; had been since six o’clock, and Peter Macfarlane, too, for that matter, though Peter sat away back as beseemed a modest functionary whose business was with the book and the bell. Altogether, as Horace Williams leaned over to tell him, it was like a Knox Church sociable – he could feel completely at home; and though the audience was by no means confined to Knox Church, Lorne did feel at home. Dora Milburn’s countenance he might perhaps have missed, but Dora was absent by arrangement. Mr. Milburn, as the fight went on, had shown himself so increasingly bitter, to the point of writing letters in the
Mercury
attacking Wallingham and the Liberal leaders of South Fox, that his daughter felt an insurmountable delicacy in attending even Lorne’s “big meeting.” Alfred Hesketh meant to have gone, but it was ten by the Milburns’ drawing-room clock before he remembered. Miss Filkin actually did go, and brought home a great report of it. Miss Filkin would no more
have missed a Minister than she would a bishop, but she was the only one.