I don't know whether you know Mariposa. If not, it is of no consequence,
for if you know Canada at all, you are probably well acquainted with a
dozen towns just like it.
There it lies in the sunlight, sloping up from the little lake that
spreads out at the foot of the hillside on which the town is built.
There is a wharf beside the lake, and lying alongside of it a steamer
that is tied to the wharf with two ropes of about the same size as they
use on the Lusitania. The steamer goes nowhere in particular, for the
lake is landlocked and there is no navigation for the Mariposa Belle
except to "run trips" on the first of July and the Queen's Birthday, and
to take excursions of the Knights of Pythias and the Sons of Temperance
to and from the Local Option Townships.
In point of geography the lake is called Lake Wissanotti and the river
running out of it the Ossawippi, just as the main street of Mariposa is
called Missinaba Street and the county Missinaba County. But these
names do not really matter. Nobody uses them. People simply speak of the
"lake" and the "river" and the "main street," much in the same way
as they always call the Continental Hotel, "Pete Robinson's" and the
Pharmaceutical Hall, "Eliot's Drug Store." But I suppose this is just
the same in every one else's town as in mine, so I need lay no stress on
it.
The town, I say, has one broad street that runs up from the lake,
commonly called the Main Street. There is no doubt about its width. When
Mariposa was laid out there was none of that shortsightedness which is
seen in the cramped dimensions of Wall Street and Piccadilly. Missinaba
Street is so wide that if you were to roll Jeff Thorpe's barber shop
over on its face it wouldn't reach half way across. Up and down the Main
Street are telegraph poles of cedar of colossal thickness, standing at a
variety of angles and carrying rather more wires than are commonly seen
at a transatlantic cable station.
On the Main Street itself are a number of buildings of extraordinary
importance,--Smith's Hotel and the Continental and the Mariposa House,
and the two banks (the Commercial and the Exchange), to say nothing of
McCarthy's Block (erected in 1878), and Glover's Hardware Store with the
Oddfellows' Hall above it. Then on the "cross" street that intersects
Missinaba Street at the main corner there is the Post Office and the
Fire Hall and the Young Men's Christian Association and the office of
the Mariposa Newspacket,--in fact, to the eye of discernment a perfect
jostle of public institutions comparable only to Threadneedle Street or
Lower Broadway. On all the side streets there are maple trees and
broad sidewalks, trim gardens with upright calla lilies, houses with
verandahs, which are here and there being replaced by residences with
piazzas.
To the careless eye the scene on the Main Street of a summer afternoon
is one of deep and unbroken peace. The empty street sleeps in the
sunshine. There is a horse and buggy tied to the hitching post in front
of Glover's hardware store. There is, usually and commonly, the burly
figure of Mr. Smith, proprietor of Smith's Hotel, standing in his
chequered waistcoat on the steps of his hostelry, and perhaps, further
up the street, Lawyer Macartney going for his afternoon mail, or the
Rev. Mr. Drone, the Rural Dean of the Church of England Church, going
home to get his fishing rod after a mothers' auxiliary meeting.
But this quiet is mere appearance. In reality, and to those who know it,
the place is a perfect hive of activity. Why, at Netley's butcher shop
(established in 1882) there are no less than four men working on the
sausage machines in the basement; at the Newspacket office there are
as many more job-printing; there is a long distance telephone with
four distracting girls on high stools wearing steel caps and talking
incessantly; in the offices in McCarthy's block are dentists and lawyers
with their coats off, ready to work at any moment; and from the big
planing factory down beside the lake where the railroad siding is, you
may hear all through the hours of the summer afternoon the long-drawn
music of the running saw.
Busy--well, I should think so! Ask any of its inhabitants if Mariposa
isn't a busy, hustling, thriving town. Ask Mullins, the manager of the
Exchange Bank, who comes hustling over to his office from the Mariposa
House every day at 10.30 and has scarcely time all morning to go out and
take a drink with the manager of the Commercial; or ask--well, for
the matter of that, ask any of them if they ever knew a more rushing
go-a-head town than Mariposa.
Of course if you come to the place fresh from New York, you are
deceived. Your standard of vision is all astray, You do think the place
is quiet. You do imagine that Mr. Smith is asleep merely because he
closes his eyes as he stands. But live in Mariposa for six months or a
year and then you will begin to understand it better; the buildings get
higher and higher; the Mariposa House grows more and more luxurious;
McCarthy's block towers to the sky; the 'buses roar and hum to the
station; the trains shriek; the traffic multiplies; the people move
faster and faster; a dense crowd swirls to and fro in the post-office
and the five and ten cent store--and amusements! well, now! lacrosse,
baseball, excursions, dances, the Fireman's Ball every winter and the
Catholic picnic every summer; and music--the town band in the park every
Wednesday evening, and the Oddfellows' brass band on the street every
other Friday; the Mariposa Quartette, the Salvation Army--why, after a
few months' residence you begin to realize that the place is a mere mad
round of gaiety.
In point of population, if one must come down to figures, the Canadian
census puts the numbers every time at something round five thousand. But
it is very generally understood in Mariposa that the census is largely
the outcome of malicious jealousy. It is usual that after the census the
editor of the Mariposa Newspacket makes a careful reestimate (based
on the data of relative non-payment of subscriptions), and brings the
population up to 6,000. After that the Mariposa Times-Herald makes
an estimate that runs the figures up to 6,500. Then Mr. Gingham,
the undertaker, who collects the vital statistics for the provincial
government, makes an estimate from the number of what he calls the
"demised" as compared with the less interesting persons who are still
alive, and brings the population to 7,000. After that somebody else
works it out that it's 7,500; then the man behind the bar of the
Mariposa House offers to bet the whole room that there are 9,000 people
in Mariposa. That settles it, and the population is well on the way to
10,000, when down swoops the federal census taker on his next round and
the town has to begin all over again.
Still, it is a thriving town and there is no doubt of it. Even the
transcontinental railways, as any townsman will tell you, run through
Mariposa. It is true that the trains mostly go through at night and
don't stop. But in the wakeful silence of the summer night you may hear
the long whistle of the through train for the west as it tears through
Mariposa, rattling over the switches and past the semaphores and
ending in a long, sullen roar as it takes the trestle bridge over the
Ossawippi. Or, better still, on a winter evening about eight o'clock you
will see the long row of the Pullmans and diners of the night express
going north to the mining country, the windows flashing with brilliant
light, and within them a vista of cut glass and snow-white table linen,
smiling negroes and millionaires with napkins at their chins whirling
past in the driving snowstorm.
I can tell you the people of Mariposa are proud of the trains, even if
they don't stop! The joy of being on the main line lifts the Mariposa
people above the level of their neighbours in such places as Tecumseh
and Nichols Corners into the cosmopolitan atmosphere of through traffic
and the larger life. Of course, they have their own train, too--the
Mariposa Local, made up right there in the station yard, and running
south to the city a hundred miles away. That, of course, is a real
train, with a box stove on end in the passenger car, fed with cordwood
upside down, and with seventeen flat cars of pine lumber set between the
passenger car and the locomotive so as to give the train its full impact
when shunting.
Outside of Mariposa there are farms that begin well but get thinner and
meaner as you go on, and end sooner or later in bush and swamp and the
rock of the north country. And beyond that again, as the background of
it all, though it's far away, you are somehow aware of the great pine
woods of the lumber country reaching endlessly into the north.
Not that the little town is always gay or always bright in the sunshine.
There never was such a place for changing its character with the season.
Dark enough and dull it seems of a winter night, the wooden sidewalks
creaking with the frost, and the lights burning dim behind the shop
windows. In olden times the lights were coal oil lamps; now, of course,
they are, or are supposed to be, electricity, brought from the power
house on the lower Ossawippi nineteen miles away. But, somehow, though
it starts off as electricity from the Ossawippi rapids, by the time it
gets to Mariposa and filters into the little bulbs behind the frosty
windows of the shops, it has turned into coal oil again, as yellow and
bleared as ever.
After the winter, the snow melts and the ice goes out of the lake, the
sun shines high and the shanty-men come down from the lumber woods and
lie round drunk on the sidewalk outside of Smith's Hotel--and that's
spring time. Mariposa is then a fierce, dangerous lumber town,
calculated to terrorize the soul of a newcomer who does not
understand that this also is only an appearance and that presently the
rough-looking shanty-men will change their clothes and turn back again
into farmers.
Then the sun shines warmer and the maple trees come out and Lawyer
Macartney puts on his tennis trousers, and that's summer time. The
little town changes to a sort of summer resort. There are visitors up
from the city. Every one of the seven cottages along the lake is full.
The Mariposa Belle churns the waters of the Wissanotti into foam as she
sails out from the wharf, in a cloud of flags, the band playing and the
daughters and sisters of the Knights of Pythias dancing gaily on the
deck.
That changes too. The days shorten. The visitors disappear. The golden
rod beside the meadow droops and withers on its stem. The maples blaze
in glory and die. The evening closes dark and chill, and in the gloom
of the main corner of Mariposa the Salvation Army around a naphtha lamp
lift up the confession of their sins--and that is autumn. Thus the year
runs its round, moving and changing in Mariposa, much as it does in
other places.
If, then, you feel that you know the town well enough to be admitted
into the inner life and movement of it, walk down this June afternoon
half way down the Main Street--or, if you like, half way up from the
wharf--to where Mr. Smith is standing at the door of his hostelry. You
will feel as you draw near that it is no ordinary man that you approach.
It is not alone the huge bulk of Mr. Smith (two hundred and eighty
pounds as tested on Netley's scales). It is not merely his costume,
though the chequered waistcoat of dark blue with a flowered pattern
forms, with his shepherd's plaid trousers, his grey spats and
patent-leather boots, a colour scheme of no mean order. Nor is it
merely Mr. Smith's finely mottled face. The face, no doubt, is a notable
one,--solemn, inexpressible, unreadable, the face of the heaven-born
hotel keeper. It is more than that. It is the strange dominating
personality of the man that somehow holds you captive. I know nothing in
history to compare with the position of Mr. Smith among those who drink
over his bar, except, though in a lesser degree, the relation of the
Emperor Napoleon to the Imperial Guard.
When you meet Mr. Smith first you think he looks like an over-dressed
pirate. Then you begin to think him a character. You wonder at his
enormous bulk. Then the utter hopelessness of knowing what Smith is
thinking by merely looking at his features gets on your mind and makes
the Mona Lisa seem an open book and the ordinary human countenance as
superficial as a puddle in the sunlight. After you have had a drink
in Mr. Smith's bar, and he has called you by your Christian name, you
realize that you are dealing with one of the greatest minds in the hotel
business.
Take, for instance, the big sign that sticks out into the street above
Mr. Smith's head as he stands. What is on it? "JOS. SMITH, PROP."
Nothing more, and yet the thing was a flash of genius. Other men who had
had the hotel before Mr. Smith had called it by such feeble names as
the Royal Hotel and the Queen's and the Alexandria. Every one of them
failed. When Mr. Smith took over the hotel he simply put up the sign
with "JOS. SMITH, PROP.," and then stood underneath in the sunshine as
a living proof that a man who weighs nearly three hundred pounds is the
natural king of the hotel business.
But on this particular afternoon, in spite of the sunshine and deep
peace, there was something as near to profound concern and anxiety as
the features of Mr. Smith were ever known to express.
The moment was indeed an anxious one. Mr. Smith was awaiting a telegram
from his legal adviser who had that day journeyed to the county town
to represent the proprietor's interest before the assembled License
Commissioners. If you know anything of the hotel business at all,
you will understand that as beside the decisions of the License
Commissioners of Missinaba County, the opinions of the Lords of the
Privy Council are mere trifles.
The matter in question was very grave. The Mariposa Court had just
fined Mr. Smith for the second time for selling liquors after hours. The
Commissioners, therefore, were entitled to cancel the license.
Mr. Smith knew his fault and acknowledged it. He had broken the law. How
he had come to do so, it passed his imagination to recall. Crime always
seems impossible in retrospect. By what sheer madness of the moment
could he have shut up the bar on the night in question, and shut Judge
Pepperleigh, the district judge in Missinaba County, outside of it? The
more so inasmuch as the closing up of the bar under the rigid license
law of the province was a matter that the proprietor never trusted to
any hands but his own. Punctually every night at 11 o'clock Mr. Smith
strolled from the desk of the "rotunda" to the door of the bar. If it
seemed properly full of people and all was bright and cheerful, then
he closed it. If not, he kept it open a few minutes longer till he had
enough people inside to warrant closing. But never, never unless he was
assured that Pepperleigh, the judge of the court, and Macartney, the
prosecuting attorney, were both safely in the bar, or the bar parlour,
did the proprietor venture to close up. Yet on this fatal night
Pepperleigh and Macartney had been shut out--actually left on the street
without a drink, and compelled to hammer and beat at the street door of
the bar to gain admittance.
This was the kind of thing not to be tolerated. Either a hotel must be
run decently or quit. An information was laid next day and Mr. Smith
convicted in four minutes,--his lawyers practically refusing to plead.
The Mariposa court, when the presiding judge was cold sober, and it
had the force of public opinion behind it, was a terrible engine of
retributive justice.
So no wonder that Mr. Smith awaited with anxiety the message of his
legal adviser.
He looked alternately up the street and down it again, hauled out his
watch from the depths of his embroidered pocket, and examined the hour
hand and the minute hand and the second hand with frowning scrutiny.
Then wearily, and as one mindful that a hotel man is ever the servant of
the public, he turned back into the hotel.
"Billy," he said to the desk clerk, "if a wire comes bring it into the
bar parlour."
The voice of Mr. Smith is of a deep guttural such as Plancon or Edouard
de Reske might have obtained had they had the advantages of the hotel
business. And with that, Mr. Smith, as was his custom in off moments,
joined his guests in the back room. His appearance, to the untrained
eye, was merely that of an extremely stout hotelkeeper walking from the
rotunda to the back bar. In reality, Mr. Smith was on the eve of one of
the most brilliant and daring strokes ever effected in the history of
licensed liquor. When I say that it was out of the agitation of this
situation that Smith's Ladies' and Gent's Cafe originated, anybody who
knows Mariposa will understand the magnitude of the moment.
Mr. Smith, then, moved slowly from the doorway of the hotel through the
"rotunda," or more simply the front room with the desk and the cigar
case in it, and so to the bar and thence to the little room or back bar
behind it. In this room, as I have said, the brightest minds of Mariposa
might commonly be found in the quieter part of a summer afternoon.
To-day there was a group of four who looked up as Mr. Smith entered,
somewhat sympathetically, and evidently aware of the perplexities of the
moment.
Henry Mullins and George Duff, the two bank managers, were both present.
Mullins is a rather short, rather round, smooth-shaven man of less than
forty, wearing one of those round banking suits of pepper and salt, with
a round banking hat of hard straw, and with the kind of gold tie-pin and
heavy watch-chain and seals necessary to inspire confidence in matters
of foreign exchange. Duff is just as round and just as short, and
equally smoothly shaven, while his seals and straw hat are calculated to
prove that the Commercial is just as sound a bank as the Exchange. From
the technical point of view of the banking business, neither of them had
any objection to being in Smith's Hotel or to taking a drink as long
as the other was present. This, of course, was one of the cardinal
principles of Mariposa banking.
Then there was Mr. Diston, the high school teacher, commonly known as
the "one who drank." None of the other teachers ever entered a hotel
unless accompanied by a lady or protected by a child. But as Mr.
Diston was known to drink beer on occasions and to go in and out of the
Mariposa House and Smith's Hotel, he was looked upon as a man whose life
was a mere wreck. Whenever the School Board raised the salaries of the
other teachers, fifty or sixty dollars per annum at one lift, it was
well understood that public morality wouldn't permit of an increase for
Mr. Diston.
Still more noticeable, perhaps, was the quiet, sallow looking man
dressed in black, with black gloves and with black silk hat heavily
craped and placed hollow-side-up on a chair. This was Mr. Golgotha
Gingham, the undertaker of Mariposa, and his dress was due to the fact
that he had just come from what he called an "interment." Mr. Gingham
had the true spirit of his profession, and such words as "funeral"
or "coffin" or "hearse" never passed his lips. He spoke always of
"interments," of "caskets," and "coaches," using terms that were
calculated rather to bring out the majesty and sublimity of death than
to parade its horrors.
To be present at the hotel was in accord with Mr. Gingham's general
conception of his business. No man had ever grasped the true principles
of undertaking more thoroughly than Mr. Gingham. I have often heard him
explain that to associate with the living, uninteresting though they
appear, is the only way to secure the custom of the dead.
"Get to know people really well while they are alive," said Mr. Gingham;
"be friends with them, close friends and then when they die you don't
need to worry. You'll get the order every time."
So, naturally, as the moment was one of sympathy, it was Mr. Gingham who
spoke first.
"What'll you do, Josh," he said, "if the Commissioners go against you?"
"Boys," said Mr. Smith, "I don't rightly know. If I have to quit, the
next move is to the city. But I don't reckon that I will have to quit.
I've got an idee that I think's good every time."
"Could you run a hotel in the city?" asked Mullins.
"I could," said Mr. Smith. "I'll tell you. There's big things doin'
in the hotel business right now, big chances if you go into it right.
Hotels in the city is branching out. Why, you take the dining-room
side of it," continued Mr. Smith, looking round at the group, "there's
thousands in it. The old plan's all gone. Folks won't eat now in an
ordinary dining-room with a high ceiling and windows. You have to get
'em down underground in a room with no windows and lots of sawdust round
and waiters that can't speak English. I seen them places last time I was
in the city. They call 'em Rats' Coolers. And for light meals they want
a Caff, a real French Caff, and for folks that come in late another
place that they call a Girl Room that don't shut up at all. If I go to
the city that's the kind of place I mean to run. What's yours, Gol? It's
on the house?"
And it was just at the moment when Mr. Smith said this that Billy, the
desk-clerk, entered the room with the telegram in his hand.
But stop--it is impossible for you to understand the anxiety with which
Mr. Smith and his associates awaited the news from the Commissioners,
without first realizing the astounding progress of Mr. Smith in the
three past years, and the pinnacle of public eminence to which he had
attained.
Mr. Smith had come down from the lumber country of the Spanish River,
where the divide is toward the Hudson Bay,--"back north" as they called
it in Mariposa.
He had been, it was said, a cook in the lumber shanties. To this day Mr.
Smith can fry an egg on both sides with a lightness of touch that is the
despair of his own "help."
After that, he had run a river driver's boarding-house.
After that, he had taken a food contract for a gang of railroad navvies
on the transcontinental.
After that, of course, the whole world was open to him.
He came down to Mariposa and bought out the "inside" of what had been
the Royal Hotel.
Those who are educated understand that by the "inside" of a hotel is
meant everything except the four outer walls of it--the fittings, the
furniture, the bar, Billy the desk-clerk, the three dining-room girls,
and above all the license granted by King Edward VII., and ratified
further by King George, for the sale of intoxicating liquors.
Till then the Royal had been a mere nothing. As "Smith's Hotel" it broke
into a blaze of effulgence.
From the first, Mr. Smith, as a proprietor, was a wild, rapturous
success.
He had all the qualifications.
He weighed two hundred and eighty pounds.
He could haul two drunken men out of the bar each by the scruff of the
neck without the faintest anger or excitement.
He carried money enough in his trousers pockets to start a bank, and
spent it on anything, bet it on anything, and gave it away in handfuls.
He was never drunk, and, as a point of chivalry to his customers, never
quite sober. Anybody was free of the hotel who cared to come in. Anybody
who didn't like it could go out. Drinks of all kinds cost five cents,
or six for a quarter. Meals and beds were practically free. Any persons
foolish enough to go to the desk and pay for them, Mr. Smith charged
according to the expression of their faces.
At first the loafers and the shanty men settled down on the place in a
shower. But that was not the "trade" that Mr. Smith wanted. He knew
how to get rid of them. An army of charwomen, turned into the hotel,
scrubbed it from top to bottom. A vacuum cleaner, the first seen in
Mariposa, hissed and screamed in the corridors. Forty brass beds were
imported from the city, not, of course, for the guests to sleep in, but
to keep them out. A bar-tender with a starched coat and wicker sleeves
was put behind the bar.
The loafers were put out of business. The place had become too "high
toned" for them.
To get the high class trade, Mr. Smith set himself to dress the part.
He wore wide cut coats of filmy serge, light as gossamer; chequered
waistcoats with a pattern for every day in the week; fedora hats light
as autumn leaves; four-in-hand ties of saffron and myrtle green with a
diamond pin the size of a hazel nut. On his fingers there were as many
gems as would grace a native prince of India; across his waistcoat lay
a gold watch-chain in huge square links and in his pocket a gold watch
that weighed a pound and a half and marked minutes, seconds and quarter
seconds. Just to look at Josh Smith's watch brought at least ten men to
the bar every evening.
Every morning Mr. Smith was shaved by Jefferson Thorpe, across the way.
All that art could do, all that Florida water could effect, was lavished
on his person.
Mr. Smith became a local character. Mariposa was at his feet. All the
reputable business-men drank at Mr. Smith's bar, and in the little
parlour behind it you might find at any time a group of the brightest
intellects in the town.
Not but what there was opposition at first. The clergy, for example,
who accepted the Mariposa House and the Continental as a necessary and
useful evil, looked askance at the blazing lights and the surging crowd
of Mr. Smith's saloon. They preached against him. When the Rev. Dean
Drone led off with a sermon on the text "Lord be merciful even unto this
publican Matthew Six," it was generally understood as an invitation to
strike Mr. Smith dead. In the same way the sermon at the Presbyterian
church the week after was on the text "Lo what now doeth Abiram in the
land of Melchisideck Kings Eight and Nine?" and it was perfectly plain
that what was meant was, "Lo, what is Josh Smith doing in Mariposa?"
But this opposition had been countered by a wide and sagacious
philanthropy. I think Mr. Smith first got the idea of that on the night
when the steam merry-go-round came to Mariposa. Just below the hostelry,
on an empty lot, it whirled and whistled, steaming forth its tunes on
the summer evening while the children crowded round it in hundreds. Down
the street strolled Mr. Smith, wearing a soft fedora to indicate that it
was evening.
"What d'you charge for a ride, boss?" said Mr. Smith.
"Two for a nickel," said the man.
"Take that," said Mr. Smith, handing out a ten-dollar bill from a roll
of money, "and ride the little folks free all evening."
That night the merry-go-round whirled madly till after midnight,
freighted to capacity with Mariposa children, while up in Smith's Hotel,
parents, friends and admirers, as the news spread, were standing four
deep along the bar. They sold forty dollars' worth of lager alone that
night, and Mr. Smith learned, if he had not already suspected it, the
blessedness of giving.
The uses of philanthropy went further. Mr. Smith subscribed to
everything, joined everything, gave to everything. He became an
Oddfellow, a Forester, A Knight of Pythias and a Workman. He gave a
hundred dollars to the Mariposa Hospital and a hundred dollars to the
Young Men's Christian Association.
He subscribed to the Ball Club, the Lacrosse Club, the Curling Club,
to anything, in fact, and especially to all those things which needed
premises to meet in and grew thirsty in their discussions.
As a consequence the Oddfellows held their annual banquet at Smith's
Hotel and the Oyster Supper of the Knights of Pythias was celebrated in
Mr. Smith's dining-room.
Even more effective, perhaps, were Mr. Smith's secret benefactions,
the kind of giving done by stealth of which not a soul in town knew
anything, often, for a week after it was done. It was in this way that
Mr. Smith put the new font in Dean Drone's church, and handed over a
hundred dollars to Judge Pepperleigh for the unrestrained use of the
Conservative party.
So it came about that, little by little, the antagonism had died down.
Smith's Hotel became an accepted institution in Mariposa. Even the
temperance people were proud of Mr. Smith as a sort of character who
added distinction to the town. There were moments, in the earlier quiet
of the morning, when Dean Drone would go so far as to step in to the
"rotunda" and collect a subscription. As for the Salvation Army, they
ran in and out all the time unreproved.
On only one point difficulty still remained. That was the closing of
the bar. Mr. Smith could never bring his mind to it,--not as a matter of
profit, but as a point of honour. It was too much for him to feel that
Judge Pepperleigh might be out on the sidewalk thirsty at midnight, that
the night hands of the Times-Herald on Wednesday might be compelled
to go home dry. On this point Mr. Smith's moral code was simplicity
itself,--do what is right and take the consequences. So the bar stayed
open.
Every town, I suppose, has its meaner spirits. In every genial
bosom some snake is warmed,--or, as Mr. Smith put it to Golgotha
Gingham--"there are some fellers even in this town skunks enough to
inform."
At first the Mariposa court quashed all indictments. The presiding
judge, with his spectacles on and a pile of books in front of him,
threatened the informer with the penitentiary. The whole bar of Mariposa
was with Mr. Smith. But by sheer iteration the informations had proved
successful. Judge Pepperleigh learned that Mr. Smith had subscribed a
hundred dollars for the Liberal party and at once fined him for keeping
open after hours. That made one conviction. On the top of this had come
the untoward incident just mentioned and that made two. Beyond that
was the deluge. This then was the exact situation when Billy, the desk
clerk, entered the back bar with the telegram in his hand.
"Here's your wire, sir," he said.
"What does it say?" said Mr. Smith.
He always dealt with written documents with a fine air of detachment. I
don't suppose there were ten people in Mariposa who knew that Mr. Smith
couldn't read.
Billy opened the message and read, "Commissioners give you three months
to close down."
"Let me read it," said Mr. Smith, "that's right, three months to close
down."
There was dead silence when the message was read. Everybody waited for
Mr. Smith to speak. Mr. Gingham instinctively assumed the professional
air of hopeless melancholy.
As it was afterwards recorded, Mr. Smith stood and "studied" with the
tray in his hand for at least four minutes. Then he spoke.
"Boys," he said, "I'll be darned if I close down till I'm ready to close
down. I've got an idee. You wait and I'll show you."
And beyond that, not another word did Mr. Smith say on the subject.
But within forty-eight hours the whole town knew that something was
doing. The hotel swarmed with carpenters, bricklayers and painters.
There was an architect up from the city with a bundle of blue prints
in his hand. There was an engineer taking the street level with a
theodolite, and a gang of navvies with shovels digging like fury as if
to dig out the back foundations of the hotel.
"That'll fool 'em," said Mr. Smith.
Half the town was gathered round the hotel crazy with excitement. But
not a word would the proprietor say. Great dray loads of square timber,
and two-by-eight pine joists kept arriving from the planing mill. There
was a pile of matched spruce sixteen feet high lying by the sidewalk.
Then the excavation deepened and the dirt flew, and the beams went up
and the joists across, and all the day from dawn till dusk the hammers
of the carpenters clattered away, working overtime at time and a half.
"It don't matter what it costs," said Mr. Smith; "get it done."
Rapidly the structure took form. It extended down the side street,
joining the hotel at a right angle. Spacious and graceful it looked as
it reared its uprights into the air.
Already you could see the place where the row of windows was to come, a
veritable palace of glass, it must be, so wide and commodious were they.
Below it, you could see the basement shaping itself, with a low ceiling
like a vault and big beams running across, dressed, smoothed, and ready
for staining. Already in the street there were seven crates of red and
white awning.
And even then nobody knew what it was, and it was not till the
seventeenth day that Mr. Smith, in the privacy of the back bar, broke
the silence and explained.
"I tell you, boys," he says, "it's a caff--like what they have in the
city--a ladies' and gent's caff, and that underneath (what's yours, Mr.
Mullins?) is a Rats' Cooler. And when I get her started, I'll hire a
French Chief to do the cooking, and for the winter I will put in a 'girl
room,' like what they have in the city hotels. And I'd like to see who's
going to close her up then."
Within two more weeks the plan was in operation. Not only was the caff
built but the very hotel was transformed. Awnings had broken out in a
red and white cloud upon its face, its every window carried a box of
hanging plants, and above in glory floated the Union Jack. The very
stationery was changed. The place was now Smith's Summer Pavilion. It
was advertised in the city as Smith's Tourists' Emporium, and Smith's
Northern Health Resort. Mr. Smith got the editor of the Times-Herald to
write up a circular all about ozone and the Mariposa pine woods, with
illustrations of the maskinonge (piscis mariposis) of Lake Wissanotti.
The Saturday after that circular hit the city in July, there were men
with fishing rods and landing nets pouring in on every train, almost
too fast to register. And if, in the face of that, a few little drops of
whiskey were sold over the bar, who thought of it?
But the caff! that, of course, was the crowning glory of the thing, that
and the Rats' Cooler below.
Light and cool, with swinging windows open to the air, tables with
marble tops, palms, waiters in white coats--it was the standing marvel
of Mariposa. Not a soul in the town except Mr. Smith, who knew it by
instinct, ever guessed that waiters and palms and marble tables can be
rented over the long distance telephone.
Mr. Smith was as good as his word. He got a French Chief with an
aristocratic saturnine countenance, and a moustache and imperial that
recalled the late Napoleon III. No one knew where Mr. Smith got him.
Some people in the town said he was a French marquis. Others said he was
a count and explained the difference.
No one in Mariposa had ever seen anything like the caff. All down the
side of it were the grill fires, with great pewter dish covers that went
up and down on a chain, and you could walk along the row and actually
pick out your own cutlet and then see the French marquis throw it on
to the broiling iron; you could watch a buckwheat pancake whirled
into existence under your eyes and see fowls' legs devilled, peppered,
grilled, and tormented till they lost all semblance of the original
Mariposa chicken.
Mr. Smith, of course, was in his glory.
"What have you got to-day, Alf?" he would say, as he strolled over to
the marquis. The name of the Chief was, I believe Alphonse, but "Alf"
was near enough for Mr. Smith.
The marquis would extend to the proprietor the menu, "Voila, m'sieu, la
carte du jour."
Mr. Smith, by the way, encouraged the use of the French language in
the caff. He viewed it, of course, solely in its relation to the hotel
business, and, I think, regarded it as a recent invention.
"It's comin' in all the time in the city," he said, "and y'aint expected
to understand it."
Mr. Smith would take the carte between his finger and thumb and stare
at it. It was all covered with such devices as Potage la Mariposa--Filet
Mignon a la proprietaire--Cotellete a la Smith, and so on.
But the greatest thing about the caff were the prices. Therein lay, as
everybody saw at once, the hopeless simplicity of Mr. Smith.
The prices stood fast at 25 cents a meal. You could come in and eat all
they had in the caff for a quarter.
"No, sir," Mr. Smith said stoutly, "I ain't going to try to raise no
prices on the public. The hotel's always been a quarter and the caff's a
quarter."
Full? Full of people?
Well, I should think so! From the time the caff opened at 11 till it
closed at 8.30, you could hardly find a table. Tourists, visitors,
travellers, and half the people of Mariposa crowded at the little
tables; crockery rattling, glasses tinkling on trays, corks popping, the
waiters in their white coats flying to and fro, Alphonse whirling the
cutlets and pancakes into the air, and in and through it all, Mr.
Smith, in a white flannel suit and a broad crimson sash about his waist.
Crowded and gay from morning to night, and even noisy in its hilarity.
Noisy, yes; but if you wanted deep quiet and cool, if you wanted to step
from the glare of a Canadian August to the deep shadow of an enchanted
glade,--walk down below into the Rats' Cooler. There you had it; dark
old beams (who could believe they were put there a month ago?), great
casks set on end with legends such as Amontillado Fino done in gilt on
a black ground, tall steins filled with German beer soft as moss, and a
German waiter noiseless as moving foam. He who entered the Rats'
Cooler at three of a summer afternoon was buried there for the day. Mr.
Golgotha Gingham spent anything from four to seven hours there of every
day. In his mind the place had all the quiet charm of an interment, with
none of its sorrows.
But at night, when Mr. Smith and Billy, the desk clerk, opened up the
cash register and figured out the combined losses of the caff and the
Rats' Cooler, Mr. Smith would say:
"Billy, just wait till I get the license renood, and I'll close up this
damn caff so tight they'll never know what hit her. What did that lamb
cost? Fifty cents a pound, was it? I figure it, Billy, that every one of
them hogs eats about a dollar's worth a grub for every twenty-five cents
they pay on it. As for Alf--by gosh, I'm through with him."
But that, of course, was only a confidential matter as between Mr. Smith
and Billy.
I don't know at what precise period it was that the idea of a petition
to the License Commissioners first got about the town. No one seemed to
know just who suggested it. But certain it was that public opinion
began to swing strongly towards the support of Mr. Smith. I think it was
perhaps on the day after the big fish dinner that Alphonse cooked for
the Mariposa Canoe Club (at twenty cents a head) that the feeling began
to find open expression. People said it was a shame that a man like Josh
Smith should be run out of Mariposa by three license commissioners. Who
were the license commissioners, anyway? Why, look at the license system
they had in Sweden; yes, and in Finland and in South America. Or, for
the matter of that, look at the French and Italians, who drink all day
and all night. Aren't they all right? Aren't they a musical people? Take
Napoleon, and Victor Hugo; drunk half the time, and yet look what they
did.
I quote these arguments not for their own sake, but merely to indicate
the changing temper of public opinion in Mariposa. Men would sit in the
caff at lunch perhaps for an hour and a half and talk about the license
question in general, and then go down into the Rats' Cooler and talk
about it for two hours more.
It was amazing the way the light broke in in the case of particular
individuals, often the most unlikely, and quelled their opposition.
Take, for example, the editor of the Newspacket. I suppose there wasn't
a greater temperance advocate in town. Yet Alphonse queered him with an
Omelette a la License in one meal.
Or take Pepperleigh himself, the judge of the Mariposa court. He was
put to the bad with a game pie,--pate normand aux fines herbes--the
real thing, as good as a trip to Paris in itself. After eating it,
Pepperleigh had the common sense to realize that it was sheer madness to
destroy a hotel that could cook a thing like that.
In the same way, the secretary of the School Board was silenced with a
stuffed duck a la Ossawippi.
Three members of the town council were converted with a Dindon farci a
la Josh Smith.
And then, finally, Mr. Diston persuaded Dean Drone to come, and as soon
as Mr. Smith and Alphonse saw him they landed him with a fried flounder
that even the apostles would have appreciated.
After that, every one knew that the license question was practically
settled. The petition was all over the town. It was printed in duplicate
at the Newspacket and you could see it lying on the counter of every
shop in Mariposa. Some of the people signed it twenty or thirty times.
It was the right kind of document too. It began--"Whereas in the bounty
of providence the earth putteth forth her luscious fruits and her
vineyards for the delight and enjoyment of mankind--" It made you
thirsty just to read it. Any man who read that petition over was wild to
get to the Rats' Cooler.
When it was all signed up they had nearly three thousand names on it.
Then Nivens, the lawyer, and Mr. Gingham (as a provincial official) took
it down to the county town, and by three o'clock that afternoon the
news had gone out from the long distance telephone office that Smith's
license was renewed for three years.
Rejoicings! Well, I should think so! Everybody was down wanting to
shake hands with Mr. Smith. They told him that he had done more to boom
Mariposa than any ten men in town. Some of them said he ought to run
for the town council, and others wanted to make him the Conservative
candidate for the next Dominion election. The caff was a mere babel
of voices, and even the Rats' Cooler was almost floated away from its
moorings.
And in the middle of it all, Mr. Smith found time to say to Billy,
the desk clerk: "Take the cash registers out of the caff and the Rats'
Cooler and start counting up the books."
And Billy said: "Will I write the letters for the palms and the tables
and the stuff to go back?"