At three o'clock, in the wide Winnipeg station, there gathered on the
platform beside Lady Merton's car a merry and motley group of people. A
Chief Justice from Alberta, one of the Senators for Manitoba, a rich
lumberman from British Columbia, a Toronto manufacturer--owner of the
model farm which the party was to inspect, two or three ladies, among
them a little English girl with fine eyes, whom Philip Gaddesden at once
marked for approval; and a tall, dark-complexioned man with hollow
cheeks, large ears, and a long chin, who was introduced, with particular
emphasis, to Elizabeth by Anderson, as "Mr. Félix Mariette"--Member of
Parliament, apparently, for some constituency in the Province of Quebec.
The small crowd of persons collected, all eminent in the Canadian world,
and some beyond it, examined their hostess of the afternoon with a
kindly amusement. Elizabeth had sent round letters; Anderson, who was
well known, it appeared, in Winnipeg, had done a good deal of
telephoning. And by the letters and the telephoning this group of busy
people had allowed itself to be gathered; simply because Elizabeth was
her father's daughter, and it was worth while to put such people in the
right way, and to send them home with some rational notions of the
country they had come to see.
And she, who at home never went out of her way to make a new
acquaintance, was here the centre of the situation, grasping the
identities of all these strangers with wonderful quickness, flitting
about from one to another, making friends with them all, and
constraining Philip to do the same. Anderson followed her closely,
evidently feeling a responsibility for the party only second to her own.
He found time, however, to whisper to Mariette, as they were all about
to mount the car:
"Eh bien?"
"Mais oui--très gracieuse!" said the other, but without a smile, and
with a shrug of the shoulders. _He_ was only there to please Anderson.
What did the aristocratic Englishwoman on tour--with all her little
Jingoisms and Imperialisms about her--matter to him, or he to her?
While the stream of guests was slowly making its way into the car, while
Yerkes at the further end, resplendent in a buttonhole and a white cap
and apron, was watching the scene, and the special engine, like an
impatient horse, was puffing and hissing to be off, a man, who had
entered the cloak-room of the station to deposit a bundle just as the
car-party arrived, approached the cloak-room door from the inside, and
looked through the glazed upper half. His stealthy movements and his
strange appearance passed unnoticed. There was a noisy emigrant party in
the cloak-room, taking out luggage deposited the night before; they were
absorbed in their own affairs, and in some wrangle with the officials
which involved a good deal of lost temper on both sides.
The man was old and grey. His face, large-featured and originally comely
in outline, wore the unmistakable look of the outcast. His eyes were
bloodshot, his mouth trembled, so did his limbs as he stood peering by
the door. His clothes were squalid, and both they and his person
diffused the odours of the drinking bar from which he had just come. The
porter in charge of the cloak-room had run a hostile eye over him as he
deposited his bundle. But now no one observed him; while he, gathered up
and concentrated, like some old wolf upon a trail, followed every
movement of the party entering the Gaddesden car.
George Anderson and his French Canadian friend left the platform last.
As Anderson reached the door of the car he turned back to speak to
Mariette, and his face and figure were clearly visible to the watcher
behind the barred cloak-room door. A gleam of savage excitement passed
over the old man's face; his limbs trembled more violently.
Through the side windows of the car the party could be seen distributing
themselves over the comfortable seats, laughing and talking in groups.
In the dining-room, the white tablecloth spread for tea, with the china
and silver upon it, made a pleasant show. And now two high officials of
the railway came hurrying up, one to shake hands with Lady Merton and
see that all was right, the other to accompany the party.
Elizabeth Merton came out in her white dress, and leant over the
railing, talking, with smiles, to the official left behind. He raised
his hat, the car moved slowly off, and in the group immediately behind
Lady Merton the handsome face and thick fair hair of George Anderson
showed conspicuous as long as the special train remained in sight.
The old man raised himself and noiselessly went out upon the platform.
Outside the station he fell in with a younger man, who had been
apparently waiting for him; a strong, picturesque fellow, with the skin
and countenance of a half-breed.
"Well?" said the younger, impatiently. "Thought you was goin' to take a
bunk there."
"Couldn't get out before. It's all right."
"Don't care if it is," said the other sulkily. "Don't care a damn button
not for you nor anythin' you're after! But you give me my two dollars
sharp, and don't keep me another half-hour waitin'. That's what I
reckoned for, an' I'm goin' to have it." He held out his hand.
The old man fumbled slowly in an inner pocket of his filthy overcoat.
"You say the car's going on to-night?"
"It is, old bloke, and Mr. George Anderson same train--number
ninety-seven--as ever is. Car shunted at Calgary to-morrow night. So
none of your nonsense--fork out! I had a lot o' trouble gettin' you
the tip."
The old man put some silver into his palm with shaking fingers. The
youth, who was a bartender from a small saloon in the neighbourhood of
the station, looked at him with contempt.
"Wonder when you was sober last? Think you'd better clean yourself a
bit, or they'll not let you on the train."
"Who told you I wanted to go on the train?" said the old man sharply.
"I'm staying at Winnipeg."
"Oh! you are, are you?" said the other mockingly. "We shouldn't cry our
eyes out if you _was_ sayin' good-bye. Ta-ta!" And with the dollars in
his hand, head downwards, he went off like the wind.
The old man waited till the lad was out of sight, then went back into
the station and bought an emigrant ticket to Calgary for the night
train. He emerged again, and walked up the main street of Winnipeg,
which on this bright afternoon was crowded with people and traffic. He
passed the door of a solicitor's office, where a small sum of money, the
proceeds of a legacy, had been paid him the day before, and he finally
made his way into the free library of Winnipeg, and took down a file of
the _Winnipeg Chronicle_.
He turned some pages laboriously, yet not vaguely. His eyes were dim and
his hands palsied, but he knew what he was looking for. He found it at
last, and sat pondering it--the paragraph which, when he had hit upon it
by chance in the same place twenty-four hours earlier, had changed the
whole current of his thoughts.
"Donaldminster, Sask., May 6th.--We are delighted to hear from this
prosperous and go-ahead town that, with regard to the vacant seat the
Liberals of the city have secured as a candidate Mr. George Anderson,
who achieved such an important success last year for the C.P.R. by his
settlement on their behalf of the dangerous strike which had arisen in
the Rocky Mountains section of the line, and which threatened not only
to affect all the construction camps in the district but to spread to
the railway workers proper and to the whole Winnipeg section. Mr.
Anderson seems to have a remarkable hold on the railway men, and he is
besides a speaker of great force. He is said to have addressed
twenty-three meetings, and to have scarcely eaten or slept for a
fortnight. He was shrewd and fair in negotiation, as well as eloquent in
speech. The result was an amicable settlement, satisfactory to all
parties. And the farmers of the West owe Mr. Anderson a good deal. So
does the C.P.R. For if the strike had broken out last October, just as
the movement of the fall crops eastward was at its height, the farmers
and the railway, and Canada in general would have been at its mercy. We
wish Mr. Anderson a prosperous election (it is said, indeed, that he is
not to be opposed) and every success in his political career. He is, we
believe, Canadian born--sprung from a farm in Manitoba--so that he has
grown up with the Northwest, and shares all its hopes and ambitions."
The old man, with both elbows on the table, crouched over the
newspaper, incoherent pictures of the past coursing through his mind,
which was still dazed and stupid from the drink of the night before.
Meanwhile, the special train sped along the noble Red River and out into
the country. All over the prairie the wheat was up in a smooth green
carpet, broken here and there by the fields of timothy and clover, or
the patches of summer fallow, or the white homestead buildings. The June
sun shone down upon the teeming earth, and a mirage, born of sun and
moisture, spread along the edge of the horizon, so that Elizabeth, the
lake-lover, could only imagine in her bewilderment that Lake Winnipeg or
Lake Manitoba had come dancing south and east to meet her, so clearly
did the houses and trees, far away behind them, and on either side, seem
to be standing at the edge of blue water, in which the white clouds
overhead were mirrored, and reed-beds stretched along the shore. But as
the train receded, the mirage followed them; the dream-water lapped up
the trees and the fields, and even the line they had just passed over
seemed to be standing in water.
How foreign to an English eye was the flat, hedgeless landscape! with
its vast satin-smooth fields of bluish-green wheat; its farmhouses with
their ploughed fireguards and shelter-belts of young trees; its rare
villages, each stretching in one long straggling line of wooden houses
along the level earth; its scattered, treeless lakes, from which the
duck rose as the train passed! Was it this mere foreignness, this
likeness in difference, that made it strike so sharply, with such a
pleasant pungency on Elizabeth's senses? Or was it something else--some
perception of an opening future, not only for Canada but for herself,
mingling with the broad light, the keen air, the lovely strangeness of
the scene?
Yet she scarcely spoke to Arthur Delaine, with whom one might have
supposed this hidden feeling connected. She was indeed aware of him all
the time. She watched him secretly; watching herself, too, in the
characteristic modern way. But outwardly she was absorbed in talking
with the guests.
The Chief Justice, roundly modelled, with a pink ball of a face set in
white hair, had been half a century in Canada, and had watched the
Northwest grow from babyhood. He had passed his seventieth year, but
Elizabeth noticed in the old men of Canada a strained expectancy, a
buoyant hope, scarcely inferior to that of the younger generation. There
was in Sir Michael's talk no hint of a Nunc Dimittis; rather a
passionate regret that life was ebbing, and the veil falling over a
national spectacle so enthralling, so dramatic.
"Before this century is out we shall be a people of eighty millions, and
within measurable time this plain of a thousand miles from here to the
Rockies will be as thickly peopled as the plain of Lombardy."
"Well, and what then?" said a harsh voice in a French accent,
interrupting the Chief Justice.
Arthur Delaine's face, turning towards the speaker, suddenly lightened,
as though its owner said, "Ah! precisely."
"The plain of Lombardy is not a Paradise," continued Mariette, with a
laugh that had in it a touch of impatience.
"Not far off it," murmured Delaine, as he looked out on the vast field
of wheat they were passing--a field two miles long, flat and green and
bare as a billiard-table--and remembered the chestnuts and the looping
vines, the patches of silky corn and spiky maize, and all the
interlacing richness and broidering of the Italian plain. His soul
rebelled against this naked new earth, and its bare new fortunes. All
very well for those who must live in it and make it. "Yet is there
better than it!"--lands steeped in a magic that has been woven for them
by the mere life of immemorial generations.
He murmured this to Elizabeth, who smiled.
"Their shroud?" she said, to tease him. "But Canada has on her wedding
garment!"
Again he asked himself what had come to her. She looked years younger
than when he had parted from her in England. The delicious thought shot
through him that his advent might have something to do with it.
He stooped towards her.
"Willy-nilly, your friends must like Canada!" he said, in her ear; "if
it makes you so happy."
He had no art of compliment, but the words were simple and sincere, and
Elizabeth grew suddenly rosy, to her own great annoyance. Before she
could reply, however, the Chief Justice had insisted on bringing her
back into the general conversation.
"Come and keep the peace, Lady Merton! Here is my friend Mariette
playing the devil's advocate as usual. Anderson tells me you are
inclined to think well of us; so perhaps you ought to hear it."
Mariette smiled and bowed a trifle sombrely. He was plain and gaunt, but
he had the air of a _grand seigneur_, and was in fact a member of one of
the old seigneurial families of Quebec.
"I have been enquiring of Sir Michael, madam, whether he is quite happy
in his mind as to these Yankees that are now pouring into the new
provinces. He, like everyone else, prophesies great things for Canada;
but suppose it is an American Canada?"
"Let them come," said Anderson, with a touch of scorn. "Excellent stuff!
We can absorb them. We are doing it fast."
"Can you? They are pouring all over the new districts as fast as the
survey is completed and the railways planned. They bring capital, which
your Englishman doesn't. They bring knowledge of the prairie and the
climate, which your Englishmen haven't got. As for capital, America is
doing everything; financing the railways, the mines, buying up the
lands, and leasing the forests. British Columbia is only nominally
yours; American capital and business have got their grip firm on the
very vitals of the province."
"Perfectly true!"--put in the lumberman from Vancouver--"They have
three-fourths of the forests in their hands."
"No matter!" said Anderson, kindling. "There was a moment of
danger--twenty years ago. It is gone. Canada will no more be American
than she will be Catholic--with apologies to Mariette. These Yankees
come in--they turn Englishmen in six months--they celebrate Dominion Day
on the first of July, and Independence Day, for old sake's sake, on the
fourth; and their children will be as loyal as Toronto."
"Aye, and as dull!" said Mariette fiercely.
The conversation dissolved in protesting laughter. The Chief Justice,
Anderson, and the lumberman fell upon another subject. Philip and the
pretty English girl were flirting on the platform outside, Mariette
dropped into a seat beside Elizabeth.
"You know my friend, Mr. Anderson, madam?"
"I made acquaintance with him on the journey yesterday. He has been most
kind to us."
"He is a very remarkable man. When he gets into the House, he will be
heard of. He will perhaps make his mark on Canada."
"You and he are old friends?"
"Since our student days. I was of course at the French College--and he
at McGill. But we saw a great deal of each other. He used to come home
with me in his holidays."
"He told me something of his early life."
"Did he? It is a sad history, and I fear we--my family, that is, who are
so attached to him--have only made it sadder. Three years ago he was
engaged to my sister. Then the Archbishop forbade mixed marriages. My
sister broke it off, and now she is a nun in the Ursuline Convent
at Quebec."
"Oh, poor things!" cried Elizabeth, her eye on Anderson's distant face.
"My sister is quite happy," said Mariette sharply. "She did her duty.
But my poor friend suffered. However, now he has got over it. And I hope
he will marry. He is very dear to me, though we have not a single
opinion in the world in common."
Elizabeth kept him talking. The picture of Anderson drawn for her by the
admiring but always critical affection of his friend, touched and
stirred her. His influence at college, the efforts by which he had
placed his brothers in the world, the sensitive and generous temperament
which had won him friends among the French Canadian students, he
remaining all the time English of the English; the tendency to
melancholy--a personal and private melancholy--which mingled in him with
a passionate enthusiasm for Canada, and Canada's future; Mariette drew
these things for her, in a stately yet pungent French that affected her
strangely, as though the French of Saint Simon--or something like
it--breathed again from a Canadian mouth. Anderson meanwhile was
standing outside with the Chief Justice. She threw a glance at him now
and then, wondering about his love affair. Had he really got over
it?--or was that M. Mariette's delusion? She liked, on the contrary, to
think of him as constant and broken-hearted!
* * * * *
The car stopped, as it seemed, on the green prairie, thirty miles from
Winnipeg. Elizabeth was given up to the owner of the great farm--one of
the rich men of Canada for whom experiment in the public interest
becomes a passion; and Anderson walked on her other hand.
Delaine endured a wearisome half-hour. He got no speech with Elizabeth,
and prize cattle were his abomination. When the half-hour was done, he
slipped away, unnoticed, from the party. He had marked a small lake or
"slough" at the rear of the house, with wide reed-beds and a clump of
cottonwood. He betook himself to the cottonwood, took out his pocket
Homer and a notebook, and fell to his task. He was in the
thirteenth book:
[Greek: ôs d hot anêr dorpoio lilaietai, ô te pauêmar neion an helkêton
boe oinope pêkton arotron]
"As when a man longeth for supper, for whom, the livelong day, two
wine-coloured oxen have dragged the fitted plough through the fallow,
and joyful to such an one is the going down of the sun that sends him to
his meal, for his knees tremble as he goes--so welcome to Odysseus was
the setting of the sun": ...
He lost himself in familiar joy--the joy of the Greek itself, of the
images of the Greek life. He walked with the Greek ploughman, he smelt
the Greek earth, his thoughts caressed the dark oxen under the yoke.
These for him had savour and delight; the wide Canadian fields had none.
Philip Gaddesden meanwhile could not be induced to leave the car. While
the others were going through the splendid stables and cowsheds, kept
like a queen's parlour, he and the pretty girl were playing at
bob-cherry in the saloon, to the scandal of Yerkes, who, with the honour
of the car and the C.P.R. and Canada itself on his shoulders, could not
bear that any of his charges should shuffle out of the main item in the
official programme.
But Elizabeth, as before, saw everything transfigured; the splendid
Shire horses; the famous bull, progenitor of a coming race; the sheds
full of glistening cows and mottled calves. These smooth, sleek
creatures, housed there for the profit of Canada and her farm life,
seemed to Elizabeth no less poetic than the cattle of Helios to Delaine.
She loved the horses, and the patient, sweet-breathed kine; she found
even a sympathetic mind for the pigs.
Presently when her host, the owner, left her to explain some of his
experiments to the rest of the party, she fell to Anderson alone. And as
she strolled at his side, Anderson found the June afternoon pass with
extraordinary rapidity. Yet he was not really as forthcoming or as frank
as he had been the day before. The more he liked his companion, the more
he was conscious of differences between them which his pride
exaggerated. He himself had never crossed the Atlantic; but he
understood that she and her people were "swells"--well-born in the
English sense, and rich. Secretly he credited them with those defects of
English society of which the New World talks--its vulgar standards and
prejudices. There was not a sign of them certainly in Lady Merton's
conversation. But it is easy to be gracious in a new country; and the
brother was sometimes inclined to give himself airs. Anderson drew in
his tentacles a little; ready indeed to be wroth with himself that he
had talked so much of his own affairs to this little lady the day
before. What possible interest could she have taken in them!
All the same, he could not tear himself from her side. Whenever Delaine
left his seat by the lake, and strolled round the corner of the wood to
reconnoitre, the result was always the same. If Anderson and Lady
Merton were in sight at all, near or far, they were together. He
returned, disconsolate, to Homer and the reeds.
As they went back to Winnipeg, some chance word revealed to Elizabeth
that Anderson also was taking the night train for Calgary.
"Oh! then to-morrow you will come and talk to us!" cried Elizabeth,
delighted.
Her cordial look, the pretty gesture of her head, evoked in Anderson a
start of pleasure. He was not, however, the only spectator of them.
Arthur Delaine, standing by, thought for the first time in his life that
Elizabeth's manner was really a little excessive.
The car left Winnipeg that night for the Rockies. An old man, in a
crowded emigrant car, with a bundle under his arm, watched the arrival
of the Gaddesden party. He saw Anderson accost them on the platform, and
then make his way to his own coach just ahead of them.
The train sped westwards through the Manitoba farms and villages.
Anderson slept intermittently, haunted by various important affairs that
were on his mind, and by recollections of the afternoon. Meanwhile, in
the front of the train, the paragraph from the _Winnipeg Chronicle_ lay
carefully folded in an old tramp's waistcoat pocket.