Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 392
Neither Dannie nor the Slugger needed to hear any more. Their minds had seized the same idea. “Excuse us a few minutes, father,” Dannie said. And within a few minutes they were seated in Mr. Sheppardson’s office. This time they held all the cards in the pack.
Mr. Sheppardson never doubted them. He knew a fact when he heard it. “Quite so, exactly so,” he repeated, “oh, absolutely so. No question of any further discussion. Indeed,” he said, “this puts a rather different face on every side of the matter, among other things on the whole question of Mrs. Fordeck’s maintenance . . .”
“Hasn’t she got—” Dannie began.
“Practically nothing. A small, a very small, annuity of her own, very small. She has no interest in the estates; they go to a cousin. And, of course, the property left by her late husband — I should say, by her present husband — is all gone long ago, the greater part of it, in fact, in legal expenses. You see, the property, such as it was, was in Ohio and we had the greatest fight to prove that Fordeck was dead, that is, dead in Ohio. Several times they brought him in alive on appeal while admitting that he might be dead in Africa or dead for the purposes of interstate commerce. The distinction was very interesting — and expensive,” added Mr. Sheppardson, musingly.
“What did you do?” asked Dannie.
“We managed it at last through the kindness of the Governor of Bechuanaland, Sir Harry Hoppit, who happened to have financial connections through our firm; in fact we have advanced him funds. He got for us, by a legal fiction, the conviction of a native in a Magistrates’ Court for the murder of Harry Fordeck. That, of course, settled the matter but it involved” — Mr. Sheppardson paused— “The native’s family,” he said, “were compensated.”
“Then Mrs. Fordeck received the money?”
“And spent it.”
Then they were all silent.
“Of course,” said Mr. Sheppardson, “she will now have Fordeck. He has a certain earning power.”
“That’s right,” they said.
“He’s only sixty-six,” said Mr. Sheppardson.
“That’s all,” they said.
And they all had the same vision of two drudging worn-out lives moving on to their end, hopeless.
Then messages began to run up and down the skeins of destiny all the way to ancient Syracuse.
Dannie spoke first.
“Look,” he said, “I’m thinking of something,” and Pethick said, “I know it — so am I.”
“What I mean is this: She’d have got twenty thousand dollars anyway and instead of that she’s going to be right up against it. I’m going to give it to her myself, not directly in my own name but through Mr. Sheppardson.”
Mr. Sheppardson rose and shook Dannie’s hand; there were tears in his eyes.
“That’s very noble,” he said, “very noble. I shall be only too glad to arrange it.”
“Wait a minute,” said the Slugger. “Just hold on. You needn’t do that, Dannie. You’ll need all you’ve got to start your old man up again. I’ll give it.”
“This is touching — touching—” said Mr. Sheppardson; he saw business and his eyes grew moist.
“You need it, too, for yours,” protested Dannie. “Don’t be a chump.”
Something like anger developed, till Dannie said, “What does it matter anyway, Peth? Why, Haddock Park — I mean Ohio Gardens — is worth ten times that all by itself. We’ll both give it.”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” said Mr. Sheppardson with an uplifted hand, “this is indeed magnanimous. Let me write it down.”
“All right,” they said.
“I will see,” said Mr. Sheppardson, “that she never knows where it came from. Indeed, I am only too glad to associate myself in any way as a third in such an enterprise . . .” (And the shade of the Tyrant of Syracuse heard him with approval.)
Dannie and Pethick left.
Mr. Sheppardson used to say afterwards that there were tears in his eyes, that he even thought, before he had had time to reflect, of charging no commission on the transaction.
But Dannie and Pethick had stepped out into a changed world — how bright it seemed, this glorious autumn day. And when they got back to their office the very joy of their faces brought a new cheeriness to the countenances of their fathers.
Charles Edward Dament sad? — broken? — Oh, no! — just a first impression. Nothing could break a man like that. Already he was recovering his old-time spirit with every moment.
“Watch me get busy sending out messages for that dinner,” said Dannie, and he added, “Darned if I won’t try the telephone. I believe it’s quicker.”
And in less than ten minutes he was actually talking to the caterer.
It was a memorable dinner — just as Dannie had planned and dreamed it — all except the cheques. There was no need for that as they all took the money for granted. And Dannie’s father, back with the old crowd was his old self again — and so were the Canon and the Bishop and Colonel Strong, all their old selves, with old wine and old jokes, and old reminiscences and not a remark that hadn’t at least twenty years retrospect behind it.
Mr. Sheppardson arrived later. He had been with Mrs. Fordeck. Everything was arranged. Mr. Sheppardson said that she had guessed his uneasy secret at once, her husband still alive and their generous provision. It had brought tears to her eyes.
“A wonderful woman,” said Mr. Sheppardson, “such resilience. She’s making plans already. She proposes to pick up Harry at once and start for Bechuanaland. I shall have to communicate with Sir Harry Hoppit.” He added musingly, however, “We needn’t trouble about that,” and he fell to on the walnuts and the wine.
BOOM TIMES
THE MIRAGE OF a Better World
A Word of Preface
Some readers may be kind enough to recall a sketch which I published in a magazine two or three years ago called, My Remarkable Uncle, which afterward became the title piece of a book of sketches. I now take the same distinguished actual person and remove him from the cramped environment of truth to the larger atmosphere of fiction. After the opening page he parts company with his origin, and the people who surround him are, individually, fiction, although, I hope, living pictures of the time and place.
I have given to the story the sub-title The Mirage of a Better World for reasons made obvious in the text, but still more obvious if I mention them now. I have always been greatly impressed with the alternate sunshine and shadow that fall, or used to fall, in places newly opened, in the world that was, to which people flocked as to a promised land, as they did to the Manitoba of 1880. This promised land for the time being transformed them all into a life better than what we have, and into characters better and more distinctive than the everyday people about us but no better than the everyday people ought to be. The mirage of hope and the illusion of fancy faded out to give way to the sad reality of failure just as the fading mirage in the sky leaves, in the place of the vanished oasis, nothing but the waterless sand of the desert. Yet the real mirage over the desert is true; it is not a mere confusion of light and shadow that the eye of misery converts to a picture of hope. It is the reflection of an actuality of green trees and pleasant waters, miles and miles away — if you will — and even inverted in their outline in the sky — but none the less attainable for those who will walk bravely forward, animated by illusion itself.
It seems to me also that this alternation of sunshine and shadow, so plainly to be seen in the boom times and bad times of a new Eldorado, characterizes also all the economic side of our collective human life. We see it in the alternating prosperity and depression of big business of which the “peaks” and “crashes” of the stock exchange are only the outward signs of the tumult within, like the glow from the crater of a volcano that reveals the subterranean fires. Most of all does this appear in the strange and elusive war prosperity, the good times that by some devil’s contrivance come with the onslaught of war to mock the failure of peace. In these things is to be sought, I believe, the solution of the unsolved problem of wealth and want. To me the boom is not the exception but the reality. It is a vision of what ought to be happening all the time. The boom in Winnipeg in 1880 ought to be booming still.
So, too, with the cheery good times of big business that come only to slip away again; and most of all with the war prosperity that chases away idleness and unemployment like shadows of the night and calls out the higher self of inspired people living among us unseen. In that sense each of us should be at war for ever.
All such things are better seen on a smaller scale than on a large. There is a deep meaning in these contrasts with the problem of poverty or prosperity after the war. To such people I especially try to appeal in this picture of BOOM TIMES.
END OF PREFACE
When Edward Philip Philiphaugh arrived from England at his brother’s farm in a lost corner of Ontario in the late summer of 1878, he seemed, to the children of the family, like a wonderful being, dropped from the sky. The elder brother had settled there with his wife and children a few years earlier. He had left England first to settle in South Africa, and had been eaten out by locusts. He had then moved to Kansas but had been eaten out by grasshoppers. A grasshopper is a locust. On the Ontario farm there were no grasshoppers; only just mortgages and broken machinery and thin cattle.
The farm was thirty-five miles from a railway. They lived on it in an isolation unknown, in these days of radio, anywhere in the world. There were no newspapers. Nobody came and went. There was nowhere to come and go. In the solitude of dark winter nights the stillness was that of eternity.
Into this isolation broke Edward Philip. He had just come from a year’s travel round the Mediterranean, a man of twenty-eight or thirty, but seeming a more than adult man, bronzed and self-confident, with a square beard like a Plantagenet king. He arrived in the dusk of a late summer evening in a two-horse wagon, filled with English leather portmanteaus and bundles of double-barreled guns, fishing rods and malacca canes — things that he called his “kit.”
That night at supper the children listened wide-eyed to “Uncle Edward,” with visions of Algiers, of the African slave market, of the Golden Horn, and the Pyramids. Lizzie, the hired girl, stood open-mouthed, and when she heard him say, “So, I said to the Prince of Wales” . . . she dropped the plates with a crash . . . “Uncle Edward,” said the children, “do you know the Prince of Wales?” He answered quite simply, “Oh, very well indeed,” as if that was nothing.
“Uncle Edward,” said the oldest boy, Jim, who was fifteen, “I’d like to be a soldier . . .” and his uncle said, “Then I must write to Lord Hartington at the War Office, and ask him to put you into Sandhurst . . .”
Now it happened that in that year, 1878, there was a general election in Canada. E.P. — as everybody began to call him — was in it up to the neck in less than no time. He picked up the history and politics of Upper Canada in a day, and in a week knew everybody in the countryside. He spoke at every meeting, but his strong point was the personal contact of electioneering, of bar-room treats. This gave full scope for his marvellous talent for flattery and make-believe.
“Why, let me see” — he would say to some tattered country specimen beside him glass in hand— “surely, if your name is Framley, you must be a relation of my dear friend General Sir Charles Framley of the Horse Artillery.” “Mebbe,” the flattered specimen would answer. “I guess, mebbe; I ain’t kept track very good of my folks in the old country.” “Dear me! I must tell Sir Charles that I’ve seen you. He’ll be so pleased.” In this way in a fortnight E.P. had conferred honours and distinctions on half the township of Georgina. They lived in a recaptured atmosphere of generals, admirals and earls. Vote? How else could they vote than conservative, men of family like them?
It goes without saying that in politics, then and always, E.P. was on the conservative, the aristocratic side, but along with that was hail-fellow-well-met with the humblest. This was instinct. A democrat can’t condescend. He’s down already. But when a conservative stoops, he conquers.
He was not only a conservative but an imperialist in a large way. He made full use, then and always, of the British Empire as if he had a share in all of it, and might at any time be leaving for any part of it.
“Are you likely to be long in Georgina Township?” an innocent questioner would ask.
“That will depend a good deal,” he answered impressively, “on what I hear from West Africa.” Most of them never heard anything from West Africa.
This made his presence in any one place a favour and a distinction.
But for his electioneering E.P. had not only his impressive line of talk but also a quite opposite way of telling Gargantuan stories that would make the country crowd in the bar roar and wheeze and slap their thighs, as for instance, when they heard the story of how the old Earl of Kinraith had called his wife an “auld Highland cow,” and she had answered, “Aweel, it’s better than an auld steer.”
It was an old-fashioned election, all carried on in the open air in bright September weather with flags, placards and torchlight processions. The hustings were big wooden platforms, with a rail around. Committee men in plug hats sat on the platform. Farmers stood in a crowd in front — no women.
A liberal speaker spoke from a platform with banners all around it — DESMOND AND LIBERTY — DOWN WITH THE TORY PARTY. “What has the Tory party ever done for this country?” he shouted, shaking his fist in the air. “Tramped it down, tramped down the plain people under foot . . . We never had a thing unless we wrested it from them . . . We’ve got them out of power. I say let’s keep them out . . . They’re against the people . . . my father and my uncle carried their muskets in the rebellion of forty years ago . . . I was fifteen . . . I wanted to go . . . They wouldn’t let me . . . They went with the ‘rebels . . .’ That is what the Tories called them . . . ‘rebels . . .’ They went . . . and my uncle never came back . . . they hanged him there in front of the courthouse in Toronto . . . hanged him with the Tories to jibe and laugh, and a holiday for the school children to go and see a rebel hanged . . . that’s Tories for you . . . let them into power again and that’s what they would do again.”
On the other hustings stood Edward Philip Philiphaugh, set and firm, the embodiment of resolution, his gaze direct in front of him. All about him were Union Jacks and banners with STRONG AND LOYALTY — and — GOD SAVE THE QUEEN.
His voice went clear over the heads of the crowd.
“You ask me what has the Tory party done for Canada? There is your answer in those waving flags whose crosses chronicle the union of the British people. There, in that loyalty that stands fast and firm against each and every phase of sedition. I will not talk in paltry figures of trade and taxes. I scorn them. I appeal here to all in whose veins run the blood, in whose hearts beat the life — of the mother country . . . I see here before me men whose names connect with some of the oldest families of Great Britain . . . my friend Framley, a cousin, I believe, of Sir Charles Framley, one of England’s greatest soldiers . . . Major Wyndham, a close relation, a possible successor to, the Earl of Egremont . . . my friend Donald McLeish who stands here as one of the McLeishes of McLeish . . . to shout Scots wha’ hae!
(tumult — applause)
. . . “Here on my heart — ,” he drew out a photograph and held it up— “I carry — I always carry — a photograph of our beloved Queen. That is my politics, it is your politics, electors of North York.”
(applause — tumult)
So there came an evening with the village all lit with torchlights, when a committee man stepped out before the Tory crowd in front of the Mansion House, and said:
“Gentlemen of North York, I beg to inform you that the official count of votes elects to Parliament at Ottawa, Dr. John Strong of Aurora by a majority of two thousand votes — gentlemen, God Save the Queen!” They sang it from a thousand throats— “Send . . . her . . . victorious . . . Happy . . . and . . . glorious!”
A few nights after the election E.P. was summoned to a general meeting of the Conservative Committee of the Ridings of York County. The chairman spoke:
“Mr. Philiphaugh, I want to express to you on behalf of the Conservative party of the County of York an appreciation of your co-operation in the election of Dr. Strong . . .
“. . . Mr. Philiphaugh, we want to keep you here. I have heard some of our people saying that you think of moving on to Manitobah. But I’m glad to say that we are here to give you an appointment that will keep you safe from going to starve among the grasshoppers!
(Laughter— “Ya, Ya! That’s right!”)
“Hitherto we’ve had no salaried organizer in the Ridings of York County and the Association is prepared to offer you such a post and to offer it on terms that show we’re in earnest and pay a man according to his real worth. Mr. Philiphaugh, on behalf of these gentlemen of the Committee, I offer you a salary of $1,000 a year as organizer of the Conservative Party in York County.”
(Applause— “Hurrah for E.P.! — Hurrah!”)
“For he’s a jolly good fellow!”
E.P. spoke:
“Gentlemen: — When I tell Sir John A. Macdonald, our leader, of your generous offer, I am sure he will be as deeply touched as I am. And when I send word, as I hope you will allow me to do, to Lord Beaconsfield, of the loyalty and allegiance of the County of York, I am sure that he will see fit to place your names before Her Majesty for such honour as she may see fit to bestow. But, gentlemen, for me, my lot is cast, as you yourselves would say Alea jacta est! . . . nulla vestigia retrorsum . . .”
(Dubious voices— “Hear! Hear!”)
“The Star of the Empire glitters in the West . . . I see in Manitobah . . .
(voices — grasshoppers — grasshoppers)
