"He attacked my country. I think I could forgive him everything but
that."
It was an hour after Mr. and Mrs. Brokenshire had left me. I was half
crying by this time--that is, half crying in the way one cries from
rage, and yet laughing nervously, in flashes, at the same time. From the
weakness of sheer excitement I had dropped to one of the steps leading
down to the Cliff Walk, while Larry Strangways leaned on the stone post.
I had met him there as I was going out and he was coming toward the
house. We couldn't but stop to exchange a word, especially with his
knowledge of the situation. He took what I had to say with the light,
gleaming, non-committal smile which he brought to bear on everything. I
was glad of that because it kept him detached. I didn't want him any
nearer to me than he was.
"Attacked your country? Do you mean England?"
"No; Canada. England is my grandmother; but Canada's my mother. He said
you all despised her."
"Oh no, we don't. He was trying to put something over on you."
"Your 'No, we don't' lacks conviction; but I don't mind you. I shouldn't
mind him if I hadn't seen so much of it."
"So much of what?"
"Being looked down upon geographically. Of all the ways of being proud,"
I declared, indignantly, "that which depends on your merely accidental
position with regard to land and water strikes me as the most
poor-spirited. I can't imagine any one dragging himself down to it who
had another rag of a reason for self-respect. As a matter of fact, I
don't believe any one ever does. The people I've heard express
themselves on the subject--well, I'll give you an illustration: There
was a woman at Gibraltar--a major's wife, a big, red-faced woman. Her
name was Arbuthnot--her father was a dean or something--a big, red-faced
woman, with one of those screechy, twangy English voices that cut you
like a saw--you know there are some--a good many--and they don't know
it. Well, she was saying something sneering about Canadians. I was
sitting opposite--it was at a dinner-party--and so I leaned across the
table and asked her why she didn't like them. She said colonials were
such dreadful form. I held her with my eye"--I showed him how--"and made
myself small and demure as I said, 'But, dear lady, how clever of you!
Who would ever have supposed that you'd know that?' My sister Vic
pitched into me about it after we got home. She said the Arbuthnot
person didn't understand what I meant--nor any one else at the table,
they're so awfully thick-skinned--and that it's better to let them
alone. But that's the kind of person who--"
He tried to comfort me. "They'll come round in time. One of these days
England will see what she owes to her colonists and do them justice."
"Never!" I declared, vehemently. "It will be always the same--till we
knock the Empire to pieces. Then they'll respect us. Look at the Boer
War. Didn't our men sacrifice everything to go out that long
distance--and win battles--and lay down their lives--only to have the
English say afterward--especially the army people--that they were more
trouble than they were worth? It will be always the same. When we've
given our last penny and shed our last drop of blood they'll still tell
us we've been nothing but a nuisance. You may live to see it and
remember that I said so. If when Shakespeare wrote that it's sharper
than a serpent's tooth to have a thankless child he'd gone on to add
that it's the very dickens to have a picturesque, self-satisfied old
grandmother who thinks her children's children should give her
everything and take kicks instead of ha'pence for their pay, he'd have
been up to date. Mind you, we don't object to giving our last penny and
shedding our last drop of blood; we only hate being abused and sneered
at for doing it."
I warmed to my subject as I dabbed fiercely at my eyes.
"I'll tell you what the typical John Bull is like. He's like those
men--big, flabby men they generally are--who'll be brutes to you so long
as you're civil to them, but will climb down the minute you begin to hit
back. Look at the way they treat you Americans! They can't do enough for
you--because you snap your fingers in their faces and show them you
don't care a hang about them. They come over here, and give you
lectures, and marry your girls, and pocket your money, and adopt your
bad form as delightful originality--and respect you. Now that earls'
daughters are beginning to cast an eye on your millionaires--Mrs.
Rossiter told me that--they won't leave you a rag to your back. But with
us who've been faithful and loyal they're all the other way. I can
hardly tell you the small pin-pricking indignities to which my sisters
and I have been subjected for being Canadians. And they'll never change.
It will never be otherwise, no matter what we do, no matter what we
become, no matter if we give our bodies to be burned, as the Bible says.
It will never be otherwise--not till we imitate you and strike them in
the face. _Then_ you'll see how they'll come round."[1]
He still smiled, with an aloofness in which there was a beam of
sweetness. "I had no idea that you were such a little rebel."
"I'm not a rebel. I'm loyal to the King. That is, I'm loyal to the great
Anglo-Saxon ideal of which the King is the symbol--and I suppose he's as
good a symbol as any other, especially as he's already there. The
English are only partly Anglo-Saxon. 'Saxon and Norman and Dane are
they'--didn't Tennyson say that? Well, there's a lot that's Norman, and
a lot that's Dane, and a lot that's Scotch and Irish and rag-tag in
them. But they're saved by the pure Anglo-Saxon ideal in so far as they
hold to it--just as you'll be, with all your mixed bloods--and just as
we shall be ourselves. It's like salt in the meat, it's like grace in
the Christian religion--it's the thing that saves, and I'm loyal to
that. My father used to say that it's the fact that English and
Canadians and Australians are all devoted to the same principle that
holds us together as an Empire, and not the subservience of distant
lands to a Parliament sitting at Westminster. And so it is. We don't
always like each other; but that doesn't matter. What does matter is
that we should betray the fact that we don't like each other to
outsiders--and so give them a handle against us."
"You mean that J. Howard should be in a position to side with the
English in looking down on you as a Canadian?"
"Yes, and that the English should give him that position. He's an
American and an enemy--every American is an enemy to England _au fond_.
Oh yes, he is! You needn't deny it! It's something fundamental, deeper
down than anything you understand. Even those of you who like England
are hostile to her at heart and would be glad to see her in trouble. So,
I say, he's an American and an enemy, and yet they hand me, their child
and their friend, over to him to be trampled on. He's had opportunities
of judging how Canadians are regarded in England, he says--and he
assures me it's nothing to be proud of. That's it. I've had
opportunities too--and I have to admit that he's right. Don't you see?
That's what enrages me. As far as their liking us and our not liking
them is concerned, why, it's all in the family. So long as it's kept in
the family it's like the pick that Louise and Vic have always had on me.
I'm the youngest and the plainest--"
"Oh, you're the plainest, are you? What on earth are they like?"
"They're quite good-looking, and they're awfully chic. But that's in
parentheses. What I mean is that they're always hectoring me because I'm
not attractive--"
"Really?"
"I'm not fishing for compliments. I'm too busy and too angry for that. I
want to go on talking about what we're talking about."
"But I want to know why they said you were unattractive."
"Well, perhaps they didn't say it. What they have said is this, and it's
what Mrs. Rossiter says--she said it to-day--that I'm only attractive to
one man in five hundred--"
"But very attractive to him?"
"No; she didn't say that. She merely admitted that her brother Hugh was
that man--"
He interrupted with something I wished at the time he hadn't said, and
which I tried to ignore:
"He's the man in that five hundred--and I know another in another five
hundred, which makes two in a thousand. You'd soon get up to a high
percentage, when you think of all the men there are in the world."
As he had never hinted at anything of the kind before, it gave me--how
shall I put it?--I can only think of the word fright--it gave me a
little fright. It made me uneasy. It was nothing, really. It was spoken
with that gleaming smile of his which seemed to put distance between him
and me--between him and everything else that was serious--and yet
subconsciously I felt as one feels on hearing the first few notes, in an
opera or a symphony, of that arresting phrase which is to work up into a
great motive. I tried to get back to my original theme, rising to move
on as I did so.
"Good gracious!" I cried. "Isn't the world big enough for us all? Why
should we go about saying unkind and untrue things of one other, when
each of us is an essential part of a composite whole? Isn't it the foot
saying to the hand I have no need of thee, and the eye saying the same
thing to the nose? We've got something you haven't got, and you've got
something we haven't got. Why shouldn't we be appreciative toward each
other, and make our exchange with mutual respect as we do with trade
commodities?"
It was probably to urge me on to talk that he said, with a challenging
smile: "What have you Canadians got that we haven't? Why, we could buy
and sell you."
"Oh no, you couldn't; because our special contribution toward the
civilization of the American continent isn't a thing for sale. It can be
given; it can be inherited; it can be caught; but it can't be
purchased."
"Indeed? What is this elusive endowment?"
I answered frankly enough: "I don't know. It's there--and I can't tell
you what it is. Ever since I've been living among you I've felt how much
we resemble each other--what a difference. I think--mind you, I only
think--that what it consists in is a sense of the _comme il faut_. We're
simpler than you; and less intellectual; and poorer, of course; and
less, much less, self-analytical; and yet we've got a knowledge of
what's what that you couldn't command with money. None of the
Brokenshires have it at all, and, as far as I can see, none of their
friends. They command it with money, and the difference is like having a
copy of a work of art instead of the original. It gives them the air of
being--I'm using Mrs. Rossiter's word--of being produced. Now we
Canadians are not produced. We just come--but we come the right
way--without any hooting or tooting or beating of tin pans or
self-advertisement. We just are--and we say nothing about it. Let me
make an example of what Mrs. Rossiter was discussing this morning. There
are lots of pretty girls in my country--as many to the hundred as you
have here--but we don't make a fuss about them or talk as if we'd
ordered a special brand from the Creator. We grow them as you grow
flowers in a garden, at the mercy of the air and sunshine. You grow
yours like plants in a hothouse, to be exhibited in horticultural shows.
Please don't think I'm bragging--"
He laughed aloud. "Oh no!"
"Well, I'm not," I insisted. "You asked me a question and I'm trying to
answer it--and incidentally to justify my own existence, which J. Howard
has called into question. You've got lots to offer us, and many of us
come and take it thankfully. What we can offer to you is a simpler and
healthier and less self-conscious standard of life, with a great deal
less talk about it--with no talk about it at all, if you could get
yourselves down to that--and a willingness to be instead of an
everlasting striving to become. You won't recognize it or take it, of
course. No one ever does. Nations seem to me insane, and ruled by insane
governments. Don't the English need the Germans, and the Germans the
French, and the French the Austrians, and the Austrians the Russians,
and so on? Why on earth should the foot be jealous of the nose? But
there! You're simply making me say things--and laughing at me all the
while--so I'm off to take my walk. We'll get even with J. Howard and all
the first-class powers some day, and till then--_au revoir_."
I had waved my hand to him and gone some paces into the fog that had
begun to blow in when he called to me.
"Wait a minute. I've something to tell you."
I turned, without going back.
"I'm--I'm leaving."
I was so amazed that I retraced a step or two toward him. "What?"
His smile underwent a change. It grew frozen and steely instead of being
bright with a continuous play suggesting summer lightning, which had
been its usual quality.
"My time is up at the end of the month--and I've asked Mr. Rossiter not
to expect me to go on."
I was looking for something of the sort sooner or later, but now that it
had come I saw how lonely I should be.
"Oh! Where are you going? Have you got anything in particular?"
"I'm going as secretary to Stacy Grainger."
"I've some connection with that name," I said, absently, "though I can't
remember what it is."
"You've probably heard of him. He's a good deal in the public eye."
"Have you known him long?" I asked, for the sake of speaking, though I
was only thinking of myself.
"Never knew him at all." He came nearer to me. "I've a confession to
make, though it won't be of interest to you. All the while I've been
here, playing with little Broke Rossiter, I've been--don't laugh--I've
been contributing to the press--_moi qui vous parle_!"
"What about?"
"Oh, politics and finance and foreign policy and public things in
general. Always had a taste that way. Now it seems that something I
wrote for the _Providence Express_--people read it a good deal--has
attracted the attention of the great Stacy. Yes, he's great, too--J.
Howard's big rival for--"
I began to recall something I had heard. "Wasn't there a story about him
and Mr. Brokenshire and Mrs. Brokenshire?"
"That's the man. Well, he's noticed my stuff, and written to the
editor--and to me, and I'm to go to him."
I was still thinking of myself and the loss of his _camaraderie_. "I
hope he's going to pay you well."
"Oh, for me it will be wealth."
"It will probably be more than that. It will be the first long step up."
He nodded confidently. "I hope so."
I had again begun to move away when he stopped me the second time.
"Miss Adare, what's your first name? Mine's Lawrence, as you know."
If I laughed a little it was to conceal my discomfort at this abrupt
approach to the intimate.
"I'm rather sorry for my name," I said, apologetically. "You see my
father was one of those poetically loyal Canadians who rather overdo the
thing. My eldest sister should have been Victoria, because Victoria was
the queen. But the Duchess of Argyll was in Canada at that time--and
very nice to father and mother--and so the first of us had to be Louise.
He couldn't begin on the queens till there was a second one. That's poor
Vic; while I'm--I know you'll shout--I'm Alexandra. If there'd been a
fourth she'd have been a Mary; but poor mother died and the series
stopped."
He shook hands rather gravely. "Then I shall think of you as Alexandra."
"If you are going to think of me at all," I managed to say, with a
little _moue_, "put me down as Alix. That's what I've always been
called."
[Footnote 1: This was said before the Great War. It is now supposed that
when peace is made there will be a change in English opinion. With my
knowledge of my country--the British Empire--I permit myself to doubt
it. There is a proverb which begins, "When the devil was sick." I shall,
however, be glad if I am proved wrong.--Alexandra Adare.]