The Imperialist/Chapter VI

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.