“We’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 century’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 judgements, 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.
Twenty-five years it was, in point, this Monday morning when the
Doctor--not being Established we need not hesitate, besides by this time
nobody did--stood with Mr Murchison in the store door and talked about
having seen changes. He had preached his anniversary sermon the night
before to a full church when, laying his hand upon his people’s
heart, he had himself to repress tears. He was aware of another
strand completed in their mutual bond: the sermon had been a moral,
an emotional, and an oratorical success; and in the expansion of the
following morning Dr Drummond had remembered that he had promised his
housekeeper a new gas cooking-range, and that it was high time he should
drop into Murchison’s to inquire about it. Mrs Forsyth had mentioned at
breakfast that they had ranges with exactly the improvement she wanted
at Thompson’s, but the minister was deaf to the hint. Thompson was a
Congregationalist and, improvement or no improvement, it wasn’t likely
that Dr Drummond was going “outside the congregation” for anything he
required. It would have been on a par with a wandering tendency in his
flock, upon which he systematically frowned. He was as great an autocrat
in this as the rector of any country parish in England undermined by
Dissent; but his sense of obligation worked unfailingly both ways.
John Murchison had not said much about the sermon; it wasn’t his way,
and Dr Drummond knew it. “You gave us a good sermon last night, Doctor”;
not much more than that, and “I noticed the Milburns there; we don’t
often get Episcopalians”; and again, “The Wilcoxes”--Thomas Wilcox,
wholesale grocer, was the chief prop of St Andrew’s--“were sitting just
in front of us. We overtook them going home, and Wilcox explained how
much they liked the music. ‘Glad to see you,’ I said. ‘Glad to see you
for any reason,’” Mr Murchison’s eye twinkled. “But they had a
great deal to say about ‘the music.’” It was not an effusive form of
felicitation; the minister would have liked it less if it had been,
felt less justified, perhaps, in remembering about the range on that
particular morning. As it was, he was able to take it with perfect
dignity and good humour, and to enjoy the point against the Wilcoxes
with that laugh of his that did everybody good to hear; so hearty it
was, so rich in the grain of the voice, so full of the zest and flavour
of the joke. The range had been selected, and their talk of changes had
begun with it, Mr Murchison pointing out the new idea in the boiler and
Dr Drummond remembering his first kitchen stove that burned wood and
stood on its four legs, with nothing behind but the stove pipe, and if
you wanted a boiler you took off the front lids and put it on, and how
remarkable even that had seemed to his eyes, fresh from the conservative
kitchen notions of the old country. He had come, unhappily, a widower
to the domestic improvements on the other side of the Atlantic. “Often
I used to think,” he said to Mr Murchison, “if my poor wife could have
seen that stove how delighted she would have been! But I doubt this
would have been too much for her altogether!”
“That stove!” answered Mr Murchison. “Well I remember it. I sold it
myself to your predecessor, Mr Wishart, for thirty dollars--the last
purchase he ever made, poor man. It was great business for me--I
had only two others in the store like it. One of them old Milburn
bought--the father of this man, d’ye mind him?--the other stayed by me a
matter of seven years. I carried a light stock in those days.”
It was no longer a light stock. The two men involuntarily glanced round
them for the satisfaction of the contrast Murchison evoked, though
neither of them, from motives of vague delicacy, felt inclined to dwell
upon it. John Murchison had the shyness of an artist in his commercial
success, and the minister possibly felt that his relation toward
the prosperity of a member had in some degree the embarrassment of a
tax-gatherer’s. The stock was indeed heavy now. You had to go upstairs
to see the ranges, where they stood in rows, and every one of them
bore somewhere upon it, in raised black letters, John Murchison’s name.
Through the windows came the iterating ring on the iron from the foundry
in Chestnut Street which fed the shop, with an overflow that found its
way from one end of the country to the other. Finicking visitors to
Elgin found this wearing, but to John Murchison it was the music that
honours the conqueror of circumstances. The ground floor was given up
to the small wares of the business, chiefly imported; two or three
young men, steady and knowledgeable-looking, moved about in their shirt
sleeves among shelves and packing-cases. One of them was our friend
Alec; our other friend Oliver looked after the books at the foundry.
Their father did everything deliberately; but presently, in his own good
time, his commercial letter paper would be headed, with regard to these
two, “John Murchison and Sons.” It had long announced that the business
was “Wholesale and Retail.”
Dr Drummond and Mr Murchison, considering the changes in Elgin from the
store door, did it at their leisure, the merchant with his thumbs thrust
comfortably in the armholes of his waistcoat, the minister, with that
familiar trick of his, balancing on one foot and suddenly throwing his
slight weight forward on the other. “A bundle of nerves,” people called
the Doctor: to stand still would have been a penance to him; even as
he swayed backward and forward in talking, his hand must be busy at the
seals on his watch chain and his shrewd glance travelling over a dozen
things you would never dream so clever a man would take notice of. It
was a prospect of moderate commercial activity they looked out upon,
a street of mellow shopfronts on both sides, of varying height and
importance, wearing that air of marking a period, a definite stop
in growth, that so often coexists with quite a reasonable degree of
activity and independence in colonial towns. One could almost say,
standing there in the door at Murchison’s, where the line of legitimate
enterprise had been overpassed and where its intention had been none
too sanguine--on the one hand in the faded, and pretentious red brick
building with the false third storey, occupied by Cleary which must have
been let at a loss to dry-goods or anything else; on the other hand
in the solid “Gregory block,” opposite the market, where rents were as
certain as the dividends of the Bank of British North America.
Main Street expressed the idea that, for the purpose of growing and
doing business, it had always found the days long enough. Drays passed
through it to the Grand Trunk station, but they passed one at a time; a
certain number of people went up and down about their affairs, but they
were never in a hurry; a street car jogged by every ten minutes or so,
but nobody ran after it. There was a decent procedure; and it was felt
that Bofield--he was dry-goods, too--in putting in an elevator was just
a little unnecessarily in advance of the times. Bofield had only two
storeys, like everybody else, and a very easy staircase, up which people
often declared they preferred to walk rather than wait in the elevator
for a young man to finish serving and work it. These, of course, were
the sophisticated people of Elgin; countryfolk, on a market day, would
wait a quarter of an hour for the young man and think nothing of it;
and I imagine Bofield found his account in the elevator, though he
did complain sometimes that such persons went up and down on frivolous
pretexts or to amuse the baby. As a matter of fact, Elgin had begun
as the centre of “trading” for the farmers of Fox County, and had soon
over-supplied that limit in demand; so that when other interests added
themselves to the activity of the town there was still plenty of room
for the business they brought. Main Street was really, therefore, not a
fair index; nobody in Elgin would have admitted it. Its appearance and
demeanour would never have suggested that it was now the chief artery
of a thriving manufacturing town, with a collegiate institute, eleven
churches, two newspapers, and an asylum for the deaf and dumb, to
say nothing of a fire department unsurpassed for organization and
achievement in the Province of Ontario. Only at twelve noon it might be
partly realized when the prolonged “toots” of seven factory whistles at
once let off, so to speak, the hour. Elgin liked the demonstration; it
was held to be cheerful and unmistakable, an indication of “go-ahead”
proclivities which spoke for itself. It occurred while yet Dr Drummond
and Mr Murchison stood together in the store door.
“I must be getting on,” said the minister, looking at his watch. “And
what news have you of Lorne?”
“Well, he seems to have got through all right.”
“What--you’ve heard already, then?”
“He telegraphed from Toronto on Saturday night.” Mr Murchison stroked
his chin, the better to retain his satisfaction. “Waste of money--the
post would have brought it this morning--but it pleased his mother. Yes,
he’s through his Law Schools examination, and at the top, too, as far as
I can make out.”
“Dear me, and you never mentioned it!” Dr Drummond spoke with the
resigned impatience of a familiar grievance. It was certainly a trying
characteristic of John Murchison that he never cared about communicating
anything that might seem to ask for congratulation. “Well, well! I’m
very glad to hear it.”
“It slipped my mind,” said Mr Murchison. “Yes, he’s full-fledged
‘barrister and solicitor’ now; he can plead your case or draw you up a
deed with the best of them. Lorne’s made a fair record, so far. We’ve no
reason to be ashamed of him.”
“That you have not.” Personal sentiments between these two Scotchmen
were indicated rather than indulged. “He’s going in with Fulke and
Warner, I suppose--you’ve got that fixed up?”
“Pretty well. Old man Warner was in this morning to talk it over. He
says they look to Lorne to bring them in touch with the new generation.
It’s a pity he lost that son of his.”
“Oh, a great pity. But since they had to go outside the firm they
couldn’t have done better; they couldn’t have done better. I hope Lorne
will bring them a bit of Knox Church business too; there’s no reason why
Bob Mackintosh should have it all. They’ll be glad to see him back at
the Hampden Debating Society. He’s a great light there, is Lorne; and
the Young Liberals, I hear are wanting him for chairman this year.”
“There’s some talk of it. But time enough--time enough for that! He’ll
do first-rate if he gets the law to practise, let alone the making of
it.”
“Maybe so; he’s young yet. Well, good morning to you. I’ll just step
over the way to the Express office and get a proof out of them of
that sermon of mine. I noticed their reporter fellow--what’s his
name?--Rawlins, with his pencil out last night, and I’ve no faith in
Rawlins.”
“Better cast an eye over it,” responded Mr Murchison cordially, and
stood for a moment or two longer in the door watching the crisp,
significant little figure of the minister as he stepped briskly over the
crossing to the newspaper office. There Dr Drummond sat down, before he
explained his errand, and wrote a paragraph.
“We are pleased to learn,” it ran “that Mr Lorne Murchison, eldest son
of Mr John Murchison, of this town, has passed at the capital of the
Province his final examination in Law, distinguishing himself by coming
out at the top of the list. It will be remembered that Mr Murchison,
upon entering the Law Schools, also carried off a valuable scholarship.
We are glad to be able to announce that Mr Murchison, Junior, will
embark upon his profession in his native town, where he will enter the
well-known firm of Fulke and Warner.”
The editor, Mr Horace Williams, had gone to dinner, and Rawlins was out
so Dr Drummond had to leave it with the press foreman. Mr Williams read
it appreciatively on his return, and sent it down with the following
addition:
“This is doing it as well as it can be done. Elgin congratulates Mr L.
Murchison upon having produced these results, and herself upon having
produced Mr L. Murchison.”