If it were fair or adequate to so quote, I should be very much tempted
to draw the history of Lorne Murchison’s sojourn in England from his
letters home. He put his whole heart into these, his discoveries and his
recognitions and his young enthusiasm, all his claimed inheritance, all
that he found to criticize and to love. His mother said, half-jealously
when she read them, that he seemed tremendously taken up with the old
country; and of course she expressed the thing exactly, as she always
did: he was tremendously taken up with it. The old country fell into the
lines of his imagination, from the towers of Westminster to the shops
in the Strand; from the Right Hon. Fawcett Wallingham, who laid great
issues before the public, to the man who sang melancholy hymns to the
same public up and down the benevolent streets. It was naturally London
that filled his view; his business was in London and his time was short;
the country he saw from the train, whence it made a low cloudy frame for
London, with decorations of hedges and sheep. How he saw London, how he
carried away all he did in the time and under the circumstances, may
be thought a mystery; there are doubtless people who would consider his
opportunities too limited to gather anything essential. Cruickshank was
the only one of the deputation who had been “over” before; and they all
followed him unquestioningly to the temperance hotel of his preference
in Bloomsbury, where bedrooms were three and six and tea was understood
as a solid meal and the last in the day. Bates would have voted for the
Metropole, and McGill had been advised that you saw a good deal of life
at the Cecil, but they bowed to Cruickshank’s experience. None of them
were total abstainers, but neither had any of them the wine habit; they
were not inconvenienced, therefore, in taking advantage of the cheapness
with which total abstinence made itself attractive, and they took it,
though they were substantial men. As one of them put it, they weren’t
over there to make a splash, a thing that was pretty hard to do in
London, anyhow; and home comforts came before anything. The conviction
about the splash was perhaps a little the teaching of circumstances.
They were influential fellows at home, who had lived for years in the
atmosphere of appreciation that surrounds success; their movements were
observed in the newspapers; their names stood for wide interests, big
concerns. They had known the satisfaction of a positive importance,
not only in their community but in their country; and they had come to
England invested as well with the weight that is attached to a public
mission. It may very well be that they looked for some echo of what they
were accustomed to, and were a little dashed not to find it--to find the
merest published announcement of their arrival, and their introduction
by Lord Selkirk to the Colonial Secretary; and no heads turned in the
temperance hotel when they came into the dining-room. It may very well
be. It is even more certain, however that they took the lesson as they
found it, with the quick eye for things as they are which seems to
come of looking at things as they will be, and with just that humorous
comment about the splash. It would be misleading to say that they were
humbled; I doubt whether they even felt their relativity, whether they
ever dropped consciously, there in the Bloomsbury hotel, into their
places in the great scale of London. Observing the scale, recognizing
it, they held themselves unaffected by it; they kept, in a curious,
positive way, the integrity of what they were and what they had come
for; they maintained their point of view. So much must be conceded. The
Empire produces a family resemblance, but here and there, when oceans
intervene, a different mould of the spirit.
Wallingham certainly invited them to dinner one Sunday, in a body, an
occasion which gave one or two of them some anxiety until they found
that it was not to be adorned by the ladies of the family. Tricorne
was there, President of the Board of Trade, and Fleming, who held the
purse-strings of the United Kingdom, two Ministers whom Wallingham had
asked because they were supposed to have open minds--open, that is to
say, for purposes of assimilation. Wallingham considered, and rightly,
that he had done very well for the deputation in getting these two.
There were other “colleagues” whose attendance he would have liked to
compel; but one of them, deep in the country, was devoting his weekends
to his new French motor, and the other to the proofs of a book upon
Neglected Periods of Mahommedan History, and both were at the breaking
strain with overwork. Wallingham asked the deputation to dinner. Lord
Selkirk, who took them to Wallingham, dined them too, and invited them
to one of those garden parties for the sumptuous scale of which he was
so justly famed; the occasion we have already heard about, upon which
royalty was present in two generations. They travelled to it by special
train, a circumstance which made them grave, receptive, and even
slightly ceremonious with one another. Lord Selkirk, with royalty on his
hands, naturally could not give them much of his time, and they moved
about in a cluster, avoiding the ladies’ trains and advising one another
that it was a good thing the High Commissioner was a man of large
private means; it wasn’t everybody that could afford to take the job.
Yet they were not wholly detached from the occasion; they looked at it,
after they had taken it in, with an air half-amused, half-proprietary.
All this had, in a manner, come out of Canada, and Canada was theirs.
One of them--Bates it was--responding to a lady who was effusive about
the strawberries, even took the modestly depreciatory attitude of the
host. “They’re a fair size for this country, ma’am, but if you want
berries with a flavour we’ll do better for you in the Niagara district.”
It must be added that Cruickshank lunched with Wallingham at his club,
and with Tricorne at his; and on both occasions the quiet and attentive
young secretary went with him, for purposes of reference, his pocket
bulging with memoranda. The young secretary felt a little embarrassed
to justify his presence at Tricorne’s lunch, as the Right Honourable
gentleman seemed to have forgotten what his guests had come for beyond
it, and talked exclusively and exhaustively about the new possibilities
for fruit-farming in England. Cruickshank fairly shook himself into
his overcoat with irritation afterward. “It’s the sort of thing we must
except,” he said, as they merged upon Pall Mall. It was not the sort of
thing Lorne expected; but we know him unsophisticated and a stranger
to the heart of the Empire, which beats through such impediment
of accumulated tissue. Nor was it the sort of thing they got from
Wallingham, the keen-eyed and probing, whose skill in adjusting
conflicting interests could astonish even their expectation, and whose
vision of the essentials of the future could lift even their enthusiasm.
One would like to linger over their touch with Wallingham, that fusion
of energy with energy, that straight, satisfying, accomplishing dart.
There is more drama here; no doubt, than in all the pages that are to
come. But I am explaining now how little, not how much, the Cruickshank
deputation, and especially Lorne Murchison, had the opportunity of
feeling and learning in London, in order to show how wonderful it was
that Lorne felt and learned so widely. That, what he absorbed and
took back with him is, after all, what we have to do with; his actual
adventures are of no great importance.
The deputation to urge improved communications within the Empire had few
points of contact with the great world, but its members were drawn
into engagements of their own, more, indeed, than some of them could
conveniently overtake. Mr Bates never saw his niece in the post-office,
and regrets it to this day. The engagements arose partly out of business
relations. Poulton who was a dyspeptic, complained that nothing could be
got through in London without eating and drinking; for his part he would
concede a point any time not to eat and drink, but you could not do it;
you just had to suffer. Poulton was a principal in one of the railway
companies that were competing to open up the country south of Hudson’s
Bay to the Pacific, but having dealt with that circumstance in the
course of the day he desired only to be allowed to go to bed on bread
and butter and a little stewed fruit. Bates, whose name was a nightmare
to every other dry-goods man in Toronto, naturally had to see a good
many of the wholesale people; he, too, complained of the number
of courses and the variety of the wines, but only to disguise his
gratification. McGill, of the Great Bear Line, had big proposals to
make in connection with southern railway freights from Liverpool; and
Cameron, for private reasons of magnitude, proposed to ascertain
the real probability of a duty to foreigners on certain forms of
manufactured leather--he turned out in Toronto a very good class of
suitcase. Cruickshank had private connections to which they were all
respectful. Nobody but Cruickshank found it expedient to look up the
lost leader of the Canadian House of Commons, contributed to a cause
still more completely lost in home politics; nobody but Cruickshank was
likely to be asked to dine by a former Governor-General of the Dominion,
an invitation which nobody but Cruickshank would be likely to refuse.
“It used to be a ‘command’ in Ottawa,” said Cruickshank, who had got on
badly with his sovereign’s representative there, “but here it’s only a
privilege. There’s no business in it, and I haven’t time for pleasure.”
The nobleman in question had, in effect, dropped back into the Lords. So
far as the Empire was concerned, he was in the impressive rearguard, and
this was a little company of fighting men.
The entertainments arising out of business were usually on a scale more
or less sumptuous. They took place in big, well-known restaurants, and
included a look at many of the people who seem to lend themselves so
willingly to the great buzzing show that anybody can pay for in London,
their names in the paper in the morning, their faces at Prince’s in the
evening, their personalities no doubt advantageously exposed in various
places during the day. But there were others, humbler ones in Earl’s
Court Road or Maida Vale, where the members of the deputation had
relatives whom it was natural to hunt up. Long years and many billows
had rolled between, and more effective separations had arisen in the
whole difference of life; still, it was natural to hunt them up, to
seek in their eyes and their hands the old subtle bond of kin, and
perhaps--such is our vanity in the new lands--to show them what the
stock had come to overseas. They tended to be depressing these visits:
the married sister was living in a small way; the first cousin seemed to
have got into a rut; the uncle and aunt were failing, with a stooping,
trembling, old-fashioned kind of decrepitude, a rigidity of body and
mind, which somehow one didn’t see much over home.
“England,” said Poulton, the Canadian-born, “is a dangerous country to
live in; you run such risks of growing old.” They agreed, I fear, for
more reasons than this that England was a good country to leave early;
and you cannot blame them--there was not one of them who did not offer
in his actual person proof of what he said. Their own dividing chance
grew dramatic in their eyes.
“I was offered a clerkship with the Cunards the day before I sailed,”
said McGill. “Great Scott, if I’d taken that clerkship!” He saw all his
glorious past, I suppose, in a suburban aspect.
“I was kicked out,” said Cameron, “and it was the kindest attention my
father ever paid me;” and Bates remarked that it was worth coming out
second-class, as he did, to go back in the best cabin in the ship.
The appearance and opinions of those they had left behind them prompted
them to this kind of congratulation, with just a thought of compunction
at the back of it for their own better fortunes. In the further
spectacle of England most of them saw the repository of singularly
old-fashioned ideas the storehouse of a good deal of money; and the
market for unlimited produce. They looked cautiously at imperial
sentiment; they were full of the terms of their bargain and had, as they
would have said, little use for schemes that did not commend themselves
on a basis of common profit. Cruickshank was the biggest and the best of
them; but even Cruickshank submitted the common formulas; submitted them
and submitted to them.
Only Lorne Murchison among them looked higher and further; only he was
alive to the inrush of the essential; he only lifted up his heart.