Octavius Milburn would not, I think, have objected to being considered,
with relation to his own line in life, a representative man. He would
have been wary to claim it, but if the stranger had arrived unaided
at this view of him, he would have been inclined to think well of the
stranger’s power of induction. That is what he was--a man of averages,
balances, the safe level, no more disposed to an extravagant opinion
than to wear one side whisker longer than the other. You would take him
any day, especially on Sunday in a silk hat, for the correct medium:
by his careful walk with the spring in it, his shrewd glance with
the caution in it, his look of being prepared to account for himself,
categorically, from head to foot. He was fond of explaining, in
connection with an offer once made him to embark his capital in Chicago,
that he preferred a fair living under his own flag to a fortune under
the Stars and Stripes. There we have the turn of his mind, convertible
into the language of bookkeeping, a balance struck, with the profit on
the side of the flag, the patriotic equivalent in good sound terms of
dollars and cents. With this position understood, he was prepared to
take you up on any point of comparison between the status and privileges
of a subject and a citizen--the political MORALE of a monarchy and a
republic--the advantage of life on this and the other side of the line.
There was nothing he liked better to expatiate upon, with that
valuable proof of his own sincerity always at hand for reference
and illustration. His ideal was life in a practical, go-ahead,
self-governing colony, far enough from England actually to be disabused
of her inherited anachronisms and make your own tariff, near enough
politically to keep your securities up by virtue of her protection. He
was extremely satisfied with his own country; one saw in his talk the
phenomenon of patriotism in double bloom, flower within flower. I have
mentioned his side whiskers: he preserved that facial decoration of
the Prince Consort; and the large steel engraving that represents Queen
Victoria in a flowing habit and the Prince in a double-breasted frock
coat and a stock, on horseback, hung over the mantelpiece in his
drawing-room. If the outer patriotism was a little vague, the inner had
vigour enough. Canada was a great place. Mr Milburn had been born in the
country, and had never “gone over” to England; Canada was good enough
for him. He was born, one might say, in the manufacturing interest, and
inherited the complacent and Conservative political views of a tenderly
nourished industry. Mr Milburn was of those who were building up the
country; with sufficient protection he was prepared to go on doing it
long and loyally; meanwhile he admired the structure from all points of
view. As President of the Elgin Chamber of Commerce, he was enabled once
a year to produce no end of gratifying figures; he was fond of wearing
on such occasions the national emblem in a little enamelled maple leaf;
and his portrait and biography occupied a full page in a sumptuous
work entitled Canadians of Today, sold by subscription, where he was
described as the “Father of the Elgin Boiler.”
Mr and Mrs Milburn were in the drawing-room to receive their young
guests, a circumstance which alone imparted a distinction to the
entertainment. At such parties the appearance of the heads of the house
was by no means invariable; frequently they went to bed. The simple
explanation was that the young people could stand late hours and be none
the worse next day; their elders had to be more careful if they wanted
to get down to business. Moreover, as in all new societies, between the
older and the younger generation there was a great gulf fixed, across
which intercourse was difficult. The sons and daughters, born to
different circumstances, evolved their own conventions, the old people
used the ways and manners of narrower days; one paralysed the other. It
might be gathered from the slight tone of patronage in the address
of youth to age that the advantage lay with the former; but
polite conversation, at best, was sustained with discomfort. Such
considerations, however, were far from operating with the Milburns.
Mrs Milburn would have said that they were characteristic of quite a
different class of people; and so they were.
No one would have supposed, from the way in which the family disposed
itself in the drawing-room, that Miss Filkin had only just finished
making the claret cup, or that Dora had been cutting sandwiches till
the last minute, or that Mrs Milburn had been obliged to have a distinct
understanding with the maid--Mrs Milburn’s servants were all “maids,”
even the charwoman, who had buried three husbands--on the subject of
wearing a cap when she answered the door. Mrs Milburn sat on a chair
she had worked herself, occupied with something in the new stitch; Dora
performed lightly at the piano; Miss Filkin dipped into Selections
from the Poets of the Century, placed as remotely as possible from the
others; Mr Milburn, with his legs crossed, turned and folded a Toronto
evening paper. Mrs Milburn had somewhat objected to the evening paper
in the drawing-room. “Won’t you look at a magazine, Octavius?” she said;
but Mr Milburn advanced the argument that it removed “any appearance
of stiffness,” and prevailed. It was impossible to imagine a group more
disengaged from the absurd fuss that precedes a party among some classes
of people; indeed, when Mr Lorne Murchison arrived--like the unfortunate
Mrs Leveret and Mrs Delarue, he was the first--they looked almost
surprised to see him.
Lorne told his mother afterward that he thought, in that embarrassing
circumstance, of Mrs Leveret and Mrs Delarue, and they laughed
consumedly together over his discomforture; but what he felt at the
moment was not the humour of the situation. To be the very first and
solitary arrival is nowhere esteemed the happiest fortune, but in
Elgin a kind of ridiculous humiliation attached to it, a greed for the
entertainment, a painful unsophistication. A young man of Elgin
would walk up and down in the snow for a quarter of an hour with the
thermometer at zero to escape the ignominy of it; Lorne Murchison would
have so walked. Our young man was potentially capable of not minding,
by next morning he didn’t mind; but immediately he was fast tied in the
cobwebs of the common prescription, and he made his way to each of the
points of the compass of the Milburns’ drawing-room to shake hands,
burning to the ears. Before he subsided into a chair near Mr Milburn he
grasped the collar of his dress coat on each side and drew it forward,
a trick he had with his gown in court, a nervous and mechanical
action. Dora, who continued to play, watched him over the piano with
an amusement not untinged with malice. She was a tall fair girl, with
several kinds of cleverness. She did her hair quite beautifully, and she
had a remarkable, effective, useful reticence. Her father declared
that Dora took in a great deal more than she ever gave out--an
accomplishment, in Mr Milburn’s eyes, on the soundest basis. She looked
remarkably pretty and had remarkably good style, and as she proceeded
with her mazurka she was thinking, “He has never been asked here before:
how perfectly silly he must feel coming so early!” Presently as Lorne
grew absorbed in talk and forgot his unhappy chance, she further
reflected, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him till now in evening
dress; it does make him a good figure.” This went on behind a faultless
coiffure and an expression almost classical in its detachment; but if
Miss Milburn could have thought on a level with her looks I, for one,
would hesitate to take any liberty with her meditations.
However, the bell began to ring with the briefest intermissions, the
maid in the cap to make constant journeys. She opened the door with a
welcoming smile, having practically no deportment to go with the cap:
human nature does not freeze readily anywhere. Dora had to leave the
piano: Miss Filkin decided that when fifteen had come she would change
her chair. Fifteen soon came, the young ladies mostly in light silks
or muslins cut square, not low, in the neck, with half-sleeves. This
moderation was prescribed in Elgin, where evening dress was more a
matter of material than of cut, a thing in itself symbolical if it were
desirable to consider social evolution here. For middle-aged ladies high
necks and long sleeves were usual; and Mrs Milburn might almost have
been expected to appear thus, in a nicely made black broche, perhaps. It
was recognized as like Mrs Milburn, in keeping with her unbending ideas,
to wear a dress cut as square as any young lady’s, with just a little
lace let in, of a lavender stripe. The young men were nearly all in the
tailor’s convention for their sex the world over, with here and there
a short coat that also went to church; but there some departures from
orthodoxy in the matter of collars and ties, and where white bows were
achieved, I fear none of the wearers would have dreamed of defending
them from the charge of being ready-made.
It was a clear, cold January night and everybody, as usual, walked to
the party; the snow creaked and ground underfoot, one could hear the
arriving steps in the drawing-room. They stamped and scraped to get rid
of it in the porch, and hurried through the hall, muffled figures in
overshoes, to emerge from an upstairs bedroom radiant, putting a last
touch to hair and button hole, smelling of the fresh winter air. Such
gatherings usually consisted entirely of bachelors and maidens, with
one or two exceptions so recently yoked together that they had not yet
changed the plane of existence; married people, by general consent,
left these amusements to the unculled. They had, as I have hinted,
more serious preoccupations, “something else to do”; nobody thought of
inviting them. Nobody, that is, but Mrs Milburn and a few others of her
way of thinking, who saw more elegance and more propriety in a mixture.
On this occasion she had asked her own clergyman, the pleasant-faced
rector of St Stephen’s, and Mrs Emmett, who wore that pathetic
expression of fragile wives and mothers who have also a congregation
at their skirts. Walter Winter was there, too. Mr Winter had the
distinction of having contested South Fox in the Conservative interest
three time unsuccessfully. Undeterred, he went on contesting things:
invariably beaten, he invariably came up smiling and ready to try
again. His imperturbability was a valuable asset; he never lost heart or
dreamed of retiring from the arena, nor did he ever cease to impress
his party as being their most useful and acceptable representative.
His business history was chequered and his exact financial equivalent
uncertain, but he had tremendously the air of a man of affairs; as
the phrase went, he was full of politics, the plain repository of deep
things. He had a shrewd eye, a double chin, and a bluff, crisp, jovial
manner of talking as he lay back in an armchair with his legs crossed
and played with his watch chain, an important way of nodding assent,
a weighty shake of denial. Voting on purely party lines, the town had
later rewarded his invincible expectation by electing him Mayor, and
then provided itself with unlimited entertainment by putting in a
Liberal majority on his council, the reports of the weekly sittings
being constantly considered as good as a cake walk. South Fox, as people
said, was not a healthy locality for Conservatives. Yet Walter Winter
wore a look of remarkable hardiness. He had also tremendously the air
of a dark horse, the result both of natural selection and careful
cultivation. Even his political enemies took it kindly when he “got in”
for Mayor, and offered him amused congratulations. He made a personal
claim on their cordiality, which was not the least of his political
resources. Nature had fitted him to public uses; the impression
overflowed the ranks of his own supporters and softened asperity among
his opponents. Illustration lies, at this moment close to us. They had
not been in the same room a quarter of an hour before he was in deep
and affectionate converse with Lorne Murchison, whose party we know,
and whose political weight was increasing, as this influence often does,
with a rapidity out of proportion with his professional and general
significance.
“It’s a pity now,” said Mr Winter, with genial interest, “you can’t get
that Ormiston defence into your own hands. Very useful thing for you.”
The younger man shifted a little uncomfortably in his seat. It is one
thing to entertain a private vision and another to see it materialized
on other lips.
“Oh I’d like it well enough,” he said, “but it’s out of the question, of
course. I’m too small potatoes.”
“There’s a lot of feeling for old Ormiston. Folks out there on the
Reserve don’t know how to show it enough.”
“They’ve shown it a great deal too much. We don’t want to win on
‘feeling,’ or have it said either. And we were as near as possible
having to take the case to the Hamilton Assizes.”
“I guess you were--I guess you were.” Mr Winter’s suddenly increased
gravity expressed his appreciation of the danger. “I saw Lister of the
Bank the day they heard from Toronto--rule refused. Never saw a man more
put out. Seems they considered the thing as good as settled. General
opinion was it would go to Hamilton, sure. Well I don’t know how you
pulled it off, but it was a smart piece of work, sir.”
Lorne encountered Mr Winter’s frank smile with an expression of crude
and rather stolid discomfort. It had a base of indignation, corrected by
a concession to the common idea that most events, with an issue pendent,
were the result of a smart piece of work: a kind of awkward shrug was in
it. He had no desire to be unpleasant to Walter Winter--on the contrary.
Nevertheless, an uncompromising line came on each side of his mouth with
his reply.
“As far as I know,” he said, “the application was dismissed on its
demerits.”
“Of course it was,” said Mr Winter good-humouredly. “You don’t need to
tell me that. Well, now, this looks like dancing. Miss Filkin, I see, is
going to oblige on the piano. Now I wonder whether I’m going to get Miss
Dora to give me a waltz or not.”
Chairs and table were in effect being pushed back, and folding doors
opened which disclosed another room prepared for this relaxation. Miss
Filkin began to oblige vigorously on the piano, Miss Dora granted Mr
Winter’s request, which he made with elaborate humour as an impudent old
bachelor whom “the boys” would presently take outside and kill. Lorne
watched him make it, envying him his assurance; and Miss Milburn was
aware that he watched and aware that he envied. The room filled with
gaiety and movement: Mr Milburn, sidling dramatically along the wall to
escape the rotatory couples, admonished Mr Murchison to get a partner.
He withdrew himself from the observation of Miss Dora and Mr Winter, and
approached a young lady on a sofa, who said “With very great pleasure.”
When the dance was over he re-established the young lady on the sofa
and fanned her with energy. Looking across the room, he saw that
Walter Winter, seated beside Dora, was fanning himself. He thought
it disgusting and, for some reason which he did not pause to explore,
exactly like Winter. He had met Miss Milburn once or twice before
without seeing her in any special way: here, at home, the centre of the
little conventions that at once protected and revealed her, conventions
bound up in the impressive figures of her mother and her aunt, she had
a new interest, and all the attraction of that which is not easily come
by. It is also possible that although Lorne had met her before, she
had not met him; she was meeting him now for the first time, as she
sat directly opposite and talked very gracefully to Walter Winter.
Addressing Walter Winter, Lorne was the object of her pretty remarks.
While Mr Winter had her superficial attention, he was the bland medium
which handed her on. Her consciousness was fixed on young Mr Murchison,
quite occupied with him: she could not imagine why they had not asked
him long ago; he wasn’t exactly “swell,” but you could see he was
somebody. So already she figured the potential distinction in the set
of his shoulders and the carriage of his head. It might have been
translated in simple terms of integrity and force by anyone who looked
for those things. Miss Milburn was incapable of such detail, but she saw
truly enough in the mass.
Lorne, on the opposite sofa, looked at her across the town’s traditions
of Milburn exclusiveness. Oddly enough, at this moment when he might
have considered that he had overcome them, they seemed to gather force,
exactly in his line of vision. He had never before been so near Dora
Milburn, and he had never before perceived her so remote. He had a sense
of her distance beyond those few yards of carpet quite incompatible
with the fact. It weighed upon him, but until she sent him a sudden
unexpected smile he did not know how heavily. It was a dissipating
smile; nothing remained before it. Lorne carefully restored his
partner’s fan, bowed before her, and went straight across the room.