“I think that has been exaggerated,” I said. “In fact, we always try
to avoid crowding and jostling as far as possible. It is generally
understood, as a matter of politeness, that the first place in the
line is given to the clergy, the Board of Trade, and the heads of the
universities.”
“Is it conceivable!” said the gentleman in grey. “One moment, please,
till I make a note. ‘All clergy--I think you said _all_, did you
not?--drunk at seven in the morning.’ Deplorable! But here we are at the
Union Station--commodious, is it not? Justly admired, in fact, all over
the known world. Observe,” he continued as we alighted from the train
and made our way into the station, “the upstairs and the downstairs,
connected by flights of stairs; quite unique and most convenient: if
you don’t meet your friends downstairs all you have to do is to look
upstairs. If they are not there, you simply come down again. But stop,
you are going to walk up the street? I’ll go with you.”
At the outer door of the station--just as I had remembered it--stood a
group of hotel bus-men and porters.
But how changed!
They were like men blasted by a great sorrow. One, with his back turned,
was leaning against a post, his head buried on his arm.
“Prince George Hotel,” he groaned at intervals. “Prince George Hotel.”
Another was bending over a little handrail, his head sunk, his arms
almost trailing to the ground.
“_King Edward_,” he sobbed, “_King Edward_.”
A third, seated on a stool, looked feebly up, with tears visible in his
eyes.
“Walker House,” he moaned. “First-class accommodation for--” then he
broke down and cried.
“Take this handbag,” I said to one of the men, “to the _Prince George_.”
The man ceased his groaning for a moment and turned to me with something
like passion.
“Why do you come to _us_?” he protested. “Why not go to one of the
others. Go to _him_,” he added, as he stirred with his foot a miserable
being who lay huddled on the ground and murmured at intervals,
“_Queen’s_! Queen’s Hotel.”
But my new friend, who stood at my elbow, came to my rescue.
“Take his bags,” he said, “you’ve got to. You know the by-law. Take it
or I’ll call a policeman. You know _me_. My name’s Narrowpath. I’m on
the council.”
The man touched his hat and took the bag with a murmured apology.
“Come along,” said my companion, whom I now perceived to be a person of
dignity and civic importance. “I’ll walk up with you, and show you the
city as we go.”
We had hardly got well upon the street before I realized the enormous
change that total prohibition had effected. Everywhere were the bright
smiling faces of working people, laughing and singing at their tasks,
and, early though it was, cracking jokes and asking one another riddles
as they worked.
I noticed one man, evidently a city employe, in a rough white suit,
busily cleaning the street with a broom and singing to himself: “How
does the little busy bee improve the shining hour.” Another employe, who
was handling a little hose, was singing, “Little drops of water, little
grains of sand, Tra, la, la, la, _la_ la, Prohibition’s grand.”
“Why do they sing?” I asked. “Are they crazy?”
“Sing?” said Mr Narrowpath. “They can’t help it. They haven’t had a
drink of whisky for four months.”
A coal cart went by with a driver, no longer grimy and smudged, but
neatly dressed with a high white collar and a white silk tie.
My companion pointed at him as he passed.
“Hasn’t had a glass of beer for four months,” he said.
“Notice the difference. That man’s work is now a pleasure to him. He
used to spend all his evenings sitting round in the back parlours of the
saloons beside the stove. Now what do you think he does?”
“I have no idea.”
“Loads up his cart with coal and goes for a drive--out in the country.
Ah, sir, you who live still under the curse of the whisky traffic little
know what a pleasure work itself becomes when drink and all that goes
with it is eliminated. Do you see that man, on the other side of the
street, with the tool bag?”
“Yes,” I said, “a plumber, is he not?”
“Exactly, a plumber. Used to drink heavily--couldn’t keep a job more
than a week. Now, you can’t drag him from his work. Came to my house to
fix a pipe under the kitchen sink--wouldn’t quit at six o’clock. Got
in under the sink and begged to be allowed to stay--said he hated to
go home. We had to drag him out with a rope. But here we are at your
hotel.”
We entered.
But how changed the place seemed.
Our feet echoed on the flagstones of the deserted rotunda.
At the office desk sat a clerk, silent and melancholy, reading the
Bible. He put a marker in the book and closed it, murmuring “Leviticus
Two.”
Then he turned to us.
“Can I have a room,” I asked, “on the first floor?”
A tear welled up into the clerk’s eye.
“You can have the whole first floor,” he said, and he added, with a half
sob, “and the second, too, if you like.”
I could not help contrasting his manner with what it was in the old
days, when the mere mention of a room used to throw him into a fit of
passion, and when he used to tell me that I could have a cot on the roof
till Tuesday, and after that, perhaps, a bed in the stable.
Things had changed indeed.
“Can I get breakfast in the grill room?” I inquired of the melancholy
clerk.
He shook his head sadly.
“There is no grill room,” he answered. “What would you like?”
“Oh, some sort of eggs,” I said, “and--”
The clerk reached down below his desk and handed me a hard-boiled egg
with the shell off.
“Here’s your egg,” he said. “And there’s ice water there at the end of
the desk.”
He sat back in his chair and went on reading.
“You don’t understand,” said Mr Narrowpath, who still stood at my elbow.
“All that elaborate grill room breakfast business was just a mere relic
of the drinking days--sheer waste of time and loss of efficiency. Go on
and eat your egg. Eaten it? Now, don’t you feel efficient? What more do
you want? Comfort, you say? My dear sir! more men have been ruined by
comfort--Great heavens, comfort! The most dangerous, deadly drug that
ever undermined the human race. But, here, drink your water. Now you’re
ready to go and do your business, if you have any.”
“But,” I protested, “it’s still only half-past seven in the morning--no
offices will be open--”
“Open!” exclaimed Mr. Narrowpath. “Why! they all open at daybreak now.”
I had, it is true, a certain amount of business before me, though of
no very intricate or elaborate kind--a few simple arrangements with the
head of a publishing house such as it falls to my lot to make every now
and then. Yet in the old and unregenerate days it used to take all day
to do it: the wicked thing that we used to call a comfortable breakfast
in the hotel grill room somehow carried one on to about ten o’clock
in the morning. Breakfast brought with it the need of a cigar for
digestion’s sake and with that, for very restfulness, a certain perusal
of the _Toronto Globe_, properly corrected and rectified by a look
through the _Toronto Mail_. After that it had been my practice to stroll
along to my publishers’ office at about eleven-thirty, transact my
business, over a cigar, with the genial gentleman at the head of it, and
then accept his invitation to lunch, with the feeling that a man who has
put in a hard and strenuous morning’s work is entitled to a few hours of
relaxation.
I am inclined to think that in those reprehensible bygone times, many
other people did their business in this same way.
“I don’t think,” I said to Mr. Narrowpath musingly, “that my publisher
will be up as early as this. He’s a comfortable sort of man.”
“Nonsense!” said Mr. Narrowpath. “Not at work at half-past seven! In
Toronto! The thing’s absurd. Where is the office? Richmond Street? Come
along, I’ll go with you. I’ve always a great liking for attending to
other people’s business.”
“I see you have,” I said.
“It’s our way here,” said Mr. Narrowpath with a wave of his hand. “Every
man’s business, as we see it, is everybody else’s business. Come along,
you’ll be surprised how quickly your business will be done.”
Mr. Narrowpath was right.
My publishers’ office, as we entered it, seemed a changed place.
Activity and efficiency were stamped all over it. My good friend the
publisher was not only there, but there with his coat off, inordinately
busy, bawling orders--evidently meant for a printing room--through
a speaking tube. “Yes,” he was shouting, “put WHISKY in black letter
capitals, old English, double size, set it up to look attractive, with
the legend MADE IN TORONTO in long clear type underneath--”
“Excuse me,” he said, as he broke off for a moment. “We’ve a lot of
stuff going through the press this morning--a big distillery catalogue
that we are rushing through. We’re doing all we can, Mr. Narrowpath,”
he continued, speaking with the deference due to a member of the City
Council, “to boom Toronto as a Whisky Centre.”
“Quite right, quite right!” said my companion, rubbing his hands.
“And now, professor,” added the publisher, speaking with rapidity, “your
contract is all here--only needs signing. I won’t keep you more than a
moment--write your name here. Miss Sniggins will you please witness this
so help you God how’s everything in Montreal good morning.”
“Pretty quick, wasn’t it?” said Mr. Narrowpath, as we stood in the
street again.
“Wonderful!” I said, feeling almost dazed. “Why, I shall be able to
catch the morning train back again to Montreal--”
“Precisely. Just what everybody finds. Business done in no time. Men who
used to spend whole days here clear out now in fifteen minutes. I knew a
man whose business efficiency has so increased under our new regime that
he says he wouldn’t spend more than five minutes in Toronto if he were
paid to.”
“But what is this?” I asked as we were brought to a pause in our walk
at a street crossing by a great block of vehicles. “What are all these
drays? Surely, those look like barrels of whisky!”
“So they are,” said Mr. Narrowpath proudly. “_Export_ whisky. Fine
sight, isn’t it? Must be what?--twenty--twenty-five--loads of it. This
place, sir, mark my words, is going to prove, with its new energy and
enterprise, one of the greatest seats of the distillery business, in
fact, _the_ whisky capital of the North--”
“But I thought,” I interrupted, much puzzled, “that whisky was
prohibited here since last September?”
“Export whisky--_export_, my dear sir,” corrected Mr. Narrowpath. “We
don’t interfere, we have never, so far as I know, proposed to interfere
with any man’s right to make and export whisky. That, sir, is a plain
matter of business; morality doesn’t enter into it.”
“I see,” I answered. “But will you please tell me what is the meaning
of this other crowd of drays coming in the opposite direction? Surely,
those are beer barrels, are they not?”
“In a sense they are,” admitted Mr. Narrowpath. “That is, they are
_import_ beer. It comes in from some other province. It was, I imagine,
made in this city (our breweries, sir, are second to none), but the sin
of _selling_ it”--here Mr. Narrowpath raised his hat from his head and
stood for a moment in a reverential attitude--“rests on the heads of
others.”
The press of vehicles had now thinned out and we moved on, my guide
still explaining in some detail the distinction between business
principles and moral principles, between whisky as a curse and whisky as
a source of profit, which I found myself unable to comprehend.
At length I ventured to interrupt.
“Yet it seems almost a pity,” I said, “that with all this beer and
whisky around an unregenerate sinner like myself should be prohibited
from getting a drink.”
“A drink!” exclaimed Mr. Narrowpath. “Well, I should say so. Come right
in here. You can have anything you want.”
We stepped through a street door into a large, long room.
“Why,” I exclaimed in surprise, “this is a bar!”
“Nonsense!” said my friend. “The _bar_ in this province is forbidden.
We’ve done with the foul thing for ever. This is an Import Shipping
Company’s Delivery Office.”
“But this long counter--”
“It’s not a counter, it’s a desk.”
“And that bar-tender in his white jacket--”
“Tut! Tut! He’s not a bar-tender. He’s an Import Goods Delivery Clerk.”
“What’ll you have, gentlemen,” said the Import Clerk, polishing a glass
as he spoke.
“Two whisky and sodas,” said my friend, “long ones.”
The Import Clerk mixed the drinks and set them on the desk.