Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 393
“I see in Manitobah a great future. I look forward to the time when two million people will be settled on the western prairies—”
(laughter— “They’ll freeze — Ya — Ya”)
“ — a great future — a great vision — it is my destiny to go.”
(applause — handshaking — tumultuous talk.)
E.P. left next morning taking his nephew Jim with him as his private secretary. Jim couldn’t even spell but that didn’t matter; it was only to last till Lord Hartington was to give him a commission in the British Army.
To get to Winnipeg they went up the Lakes and across Minnesota. It was the only way then. They hit Winnipeg just on the rise of the boom, and E.P. came at once into his own and rode on the crest of the wave. There is something that appeals in the rush and movement of a “boom” town — a Winnipeg of the 80’s, a Carson City of the 60’s. Life comes to a focus; it is all here and now, all present, no past and no outside — just a clatter of hammers and saws, rounds of drinks and rolls of money. In such an atmosphere every man seems a remarkable fellow, a man of exception; individuality separates out and character blossoms like a rose. And before the eyes of each as he hammers, and works and talks, is the mirage of the wonder that is to come — the mirage of what might be — of what the world is meant to be — always coming, but it never comes.
E.P. came into his own. In less than no time he was in everything and knew everybody, conferring titles and honours up and down Portage Avenue.
His activities were wide. He was president of a bank (that never opened), head of a brewery (for brewing the Red River), and, above all, secretary-treasurer of the Winnipeg Arctic Ocean and Siberian Railway that had a charter authorizing it to build a road to the Arctic Ocean, when it got ready. They had no track, but they printed stationery and passes, and in return E.P. received passes over all North America.
He knew everybody, but in particular he gathered to himself, round the saloons, a particular set of adherents, men of that queer class that turns up in a place like the Winnipeg of 1880 — dead broke, but gentlemen, and not worrying. There was Captain Desmond Despard. He had been at a “public” school, at it — and out of it. He had been “sent down” from Oxford, and “sent up” from Sandhurst. He used whiskey like milk. But he was a well-educated man; at any rate everybody in the bars agreed on that. “Nothing like education, Jim,” he would say. “E.P. should send you home to a public school. Look at me; would I be where I’ve got to if I hadn’t been at a public school?” And he would quote a line — the first line — of Virgil. It was the only line he knew but it had taken him half round the world.
Then there was little Count Fosdari — Count Fosco di Fosdari. As soon as E.P. knew he was a real count, one of the family of the Fosdaris of Fosforetto, he annexed him. Fosdari was “good medicine.”
All these friends he put on the boards of his new companies. They were always in and out of his huge wooden office building, half finished — always half finished, because the minute it began to look finished he added more to it. Fosdari was a director of the Winnipeg Arctic Ocean and Siberian Railway with his name on the letter-head right under that of the Marquis of Madeira. Captain Despard was president of the brewery. Jim was private secretary to everything.
But naturally E.P.’s main hold was on politics. They elected him right away into the Manitoba Legislature. He made a speech on the hustings in which he said, “I will not talk in terms of paltry figures of trade and taxes. I scorn them.” And he showed his photograph of the Queen. It made a great impression. He made the same speech in the Manitoba Assembly. His public policy was for spending all the money they could get, on everything they could think of to spend it on. His specialty was vision — mirage. “I can foresee a time, Mr. Speaker, in no distant future, when there will be three million people on these western plains.” He had started it at two, but moved it up. He wanted at once to float a huge loan in London, and sink it right there. There was talk after this of making him Prime Minister.
E.P. bought a huge house beside the river and filled it with pictures that he said were portraits of his ancestors. One of them, such a fine old portrait that it was nothing but black soot round a dark face, E.P. said was the Marquis of Madeira, the founder of his family. In this great house he instituted a roaring hospitality that never stopped. In it was installed a heavy English butler, Meadows, with a British army medal. “A Crimean veteran,” E.P. explained. He wasn’t really a veteran, because he hadn’t been in the army, and E.P. had bought the medal in a second-hand shop, and his name wasn’t Meadows. But that didn’t matter; it was not a matter of what was but of what should have been. It was a sort of mirage of an “interior.”
Then there was Harris, the footman, a young man chosen for his gentlemanly voice and extraordinary manners. As Harris went out with a tray, E.P. would whisper behind his hand to his guests, “An illegitimate son of the Prince of Wales.” Harris’s mother hadn’t known this. But any one could see that if the Prince of Wales had had an illegitimate son, Harris would be just the kind of illegitimate son the Prince of Wales would have wished to have.
There was a huge cook “Jennings”; not Mrs. Jennings or Jessie Jennings but just “Jennings.” And housemaids called by their surnames — Parker and Anderson. It made a great hit with plain people not used to it, to hear E.P. say, “Anderson, kindly tell Parker—” and so on. Their names weren’t really that. Parker had been Dulcie McGinnis and Anderson had been Phoebe McLean.
The house was run, as E.P. said, on system. Jennings brought her book to E.P. and E.P. gave it to Jim. And Jim gave it back to Jennings. Anyway it didn’t matter what things cost.
Everything was done on that sort of scale, more and more. Presently even the ancestors weren’t good enough. E.P. invented a Portuguese dukedom and conferred it, by a sort of reversion, on Jim, as of the senior branch of the family, ahead of himself, an affectation of inferiority known only to nobility.
To visitors he would show them round the ancestors.
“Strange to think that two deaths would make that boy a Portuguese duke!”
E.P. met Agnes Dacres, — the Honorable Mrs. De Carteret Dacres — at one of those huge fashionable receptions that had become the fashion, quite the rage, that is to say, the fashion to be fashionable, in the Winnipeg of the Boom. The mirage that coloured all the world of business and money was extending to the world of social life. Everybody suddenly became of high family, of high official position, or closely related to some one of high family or of high official position. So at such receptions people crushed round drinking cups of tea standing up, and drinking champagne and rye whiskey leaning beside sideboards and introducing first cousins of earls to sisters of bishops. “Mrs. McGruder, do let me introduce the Hon. Charles Dewdrop; Captain Dewdrop, you know, is one of the Dewdrops of Devonshire. Your father, of course, was Major General McGruder of Mississippi, wasn’t he? Your cousin? Oh, yes, your cousin . . . a niece of the Earl of Gallaway; oh . . . how do you do?”
And they didn’t say it in stage whispers — not a bit — they bandied it all round quite openly — Dukes, Generals, Ministers of the Crown — the whole place was a galaxy — and everybody willing to believe it — and everybody so happy in it. Here was a new social world all made of mirage, of the colours of the rainbow — as easy as that. And with it all, was a closer reach towards truth than the ordinary drab of social life. Give and take and you’ve got everything.
In such a social world E.P. came into his own. At the receptions he was always to be seen at a sideboard, the men packed around him, listening to one of his Gargantuan stories, and the ladies all dying to catch what he was saying. E.P. would stand against the bar saying: “Well, there we were at Algiers, all standing round at the big reception, a divan, given by the Dey of Algiers to the Navy. There was the Dey, all in uniform, a tremendously fat fellow, stomach like this — diplomats and officers — that sort of thing. Well, in came old Admiral Mannering — I mean to say, simply spiflicated! — and the Vizier said, ‘Let me present you to the Dey.’ And the Admiral said, ‘Day? day! By gad, he looks like nine months!’ ”
(roars of laughter)
“Ya! ha! ya! ha!” and the story went all over Winnipeg.
It was at such a reception that somebody (either Colonel the Honorable Osborne Thisthewaite, or Señor Desdichado, the Consul-General for Mexico — anyway, somebody) dragged E.P. through the crowded reception given by Mrs. Pleasington, a niece of the Governor of Bombay, and said, “Do let me introduce you to Mrs. Dacres, a cousin of the Duke of Somerset.” E.P., with a bow of deference fit for Versailles, said, “I’m so glad to meet you. I used to know your cousin, the Duke of Somerset so well.” And she said, “Oh, how delightful. Do you know I haven’t heard a word from any of the Somersets for weeks and weeks.” Neither she had. So they moved together to drink champagne at a sideboard, caught up in the mirage of make-believe as superior to truth, as fireflies are to gas light.
Mrs. Dacres had arrived in Winnipeg a little before, and was living in shabby lodgings — the Honorable Mrs. De Carteret Dacres — with her little daughter Evelyn. Evelyn was fourteen and Mrs. Dacres was — well, the very least you can be if you have a daughter of fourteen. Mrs. Dacres was as impecunious as she was pretty and as charming as she was both. And she had the same mirage of family and money as Edward Philiphaugh, and when she talked her talk was based on the peerage. She was “honorable” because she said she was honorable. People let it go at that. Her husband had died in India and when she spoke of India she spoke of “cantonments” and “syces” and Simla and of how India was such a small place that of course everybody knew everybody. She left out the other three hundred million. So people thought her husband had been in the army. But in reality he had been with an export tea firm in Calcutta. Sometimes she shifted him to the Zulu war because that was recent. Her talk was so vague that you could never quite locate him. Some people understood that he had got the Victoria Cross in Afghanistan — Winnipeg was full of Victoria Crosses in 1880. Mrs. Dacres never said these things. But they came out somehow in conversation with her over the teacups. If people believed them then she couldn’t help it. And in reality she faced and fought poverty with the bravery of a heroine.
Now the truth was that Mrs. Dacres’ late husband far from being rich had been poor, and worse. For he had put all his money and his savings into the Gujahar Swindle that is still remembered in odd corners of England. This was when a company was floated by the Majarajah of Gujahar to grow tea. The British Government was to — should have, was certain to — back the enterprise. It didn’t. No tea was grown and the Gujahar loan went the way of Turkish bonds. Dacres of Calcutta had put in all his money. He had done more. He had put in, without her knowledge, all his wife’s money, the little bit of money that every girl in England of that kind and class used to have. That was how he came to die. He died — they found him dead — the evening the news came out. Mrs. Dacres never spoke of it; and in any case the worst of it, the last part, they never told her. She thought it was apoplexy. But perhaps she knew. That was why, in Winnipeg, she never mentioned Gujahar.
Her little girl, Evelyn — she liked to call her “my baby” — was, as said, fourteen years old, but Mrs. Dacres got her down to twelve in general conversation. Evelyn was just as pretty as her mother, and as fickle as a summer breeze. She couldn’t help it, because she just had to be whatever you wanted her to be. If a curate talked to her of the love of God, she looked as sad as a saint, because she felt like a saint. But if you wanted her to be a kitten she’d turn into one.
“So Lord Decimer came over,” Mrs. Dacres was saying to Evelyn, “and patted you on the head . . .” She was speaking in their shabby sitting room, knitting with some wool which, as her friends understood, the Duchess of Bedford had sent her. She only knitted things not to disappoint the Duchess. She knitted and as in a mirage, she was saying, “So Lord Decimer . . .”
“Mother,” said Evelyn, “did we really know all those people in India?”
“Who, dear?”
“Lord Decimer and the Prince of Wales and . . .”
“My dear child! What a question! Why you must remember yourself how I took you into the House of Lords — no, let me see; perhaps you don’t. You were only three. But, my dear Evelyn, when you ran into the Prince with your hoop and he was so . . .”
“But, mother, I don’t remember any of it.”
“No, perhaps not. Let me see; you were only two.”
“But, mother, at two? I couldn’t have run a hoop at two.”
The bell rang from below and Evelyn went down and back. “It’s the grocery man, mother, he’s brought back the cheque you gave him yesterday. He said the bank wouldn’t take it.” Mrs. Dacres looked at the cheque.
“How silly of me! I’m always doing that . . .”
She went over to a desk and took out about eight blank cheque books, thought a little and selected one and wrote a new cheque.
“There, tell him I’m so sorry — I’d written it on the wrong bank . . .”
“But, mother,” persisted Evelyn when she came back, “I don’t remember living in those big houses in England. I only remember such a little house in a village.”
“But of course, dear . . . I adore little houses — so simple. Look at this. They never could get me to London. I remember the dear old Count Chateau de Chateaubriand saying, ‘Mais, pourquoi, madame’ . . . perfect French . . . just like that ‘pourquoi, madame’ . . .” Another tradesman’s cheque came up. Mrs. Dacres made apologies again. It was so stupid of her. She had written 1890 instead of 1880. People who wait and wait for remittances from home do these things. “But stop,” said Mrs. Dacres, “it must be dinner time—” she looked at her watch and murmured, “That tiresome jeweler . . . Yes, it must be dinner time. You’re having dinner at the Smith’s, aren’t you? No, dear, I shan’t have any. I’m not a bit hungry!”
So when the Honorable Mrs. Dacres went out to tea all her friends talked about Philip Philiphaugh and she thought him wonderful.
She bought a newspaper every day just to see what it said about him. A newspaper in Winnipeg cost ten cents.
So one day the Honorable Mrs. Dacres found herself in Philip Philiphaugh’s combined offices that carried on their front in gigantic letters the sign boards of the Saskatchewan, Manitoba Real Estate Company — The Peace River Development Company, and the Winnipeg Arctic Ocean and Siberian Railway. All these enterprises were at their height, with outer offices and inner offices going full swing, with every luxury in furniture and fittings that the Winnipeg of 1880 could contrive, and with Count Fosco di Fosdari, speaking Italian in all of them, and with doorkeepers to show people in and out, all English army veterans with one leg each.
Charmingly Mrs. Dacres bent over the counter and extended her card: The Honorable Mrs. Dacres. It worked as magic. The great man appeared in a moment. “Do please come in, Mrs. Dacres — do take a chair. You must excuse a rather ramshackle office; our mahogany furniture is all delayed at sea. Lord Beresford cabled that he can do simply nothing about it.”
“My little girl, Evelyn,” murmured Mrs. Dacres. “I like to call her my baby still, but she is really eleven.” “Oh, charming!” exclaimed Philiphaugh, “but dear me, who is it she reminds me of — why, of course, the little Princess of Saxe-Schlitz-in-Main.” “Why, she is like her, and yet I never noticed it before,” echoed Mrs. Dacres. “Do let me call Count Fosdari,” went on Edward Philip. Then, opening the door, he called, “Fate venire, si piace, il Conte Fosdari” — which was good medicine for the outer office.
E.P. took for granted that the Hon. Mrs. Dacres wanted to invest. He showed her on the wall a huge map of the Peace River country. It seemed that Lord Salisbury had cabled over for half of it. But some was left; also a good deal of the Arctic and all Siberia. A mirage seemed to colour the room as he spoke.
Mrs. Dacres took out a cheque book — one on London — she had another with her on Bombay. Evelyn looked at her, a straight direct look, and she felt guilty. She wondered — nearly broke off — and then the mirage grew rosier still when Philip Philiphaugh said, “Oh, please don’t bother with a cheque. We’ll just call it an open account. Your profits will pay it off in no time. But don’t you think after all, a thousand pounds is too small — just a bagatelle. Suppose we say fifty thousand dollars . . . and if you wish to draw out some money in advance of profit, the Count (here the Count bowed double, twice) will arrange at once . . .” And with that E.P. threw a little more Italian at the Count.
E.P. showed Mrs. Dacres through the offices with great dignity, Count Fosdari lingering behind with Evelyn. He had made a bee-line to her at once, and was showing her a picture of his father’s castle, and chattering Italian.
The Honorable Mrs. Dacres walked home, still in her mirage, with a thousand other mirages walking the Winnipeg streets, and greeting one another as they passed.
And Philiphaugh? Why had he done it? Why does any person do it? Why does a boy show off before a girl?
Mrs. Dacres spent that afternoon buying furs on Portage Avenue. Till now she had said she thought them vulgar.
But other banking transactions were going on that day in Winnipeg of a very different kind. In the private room in one of the real banks, one with a head office in Montreal, the manager talked with the manager of another real bank with a head office in Toronto. They had papers and books in front of them.
“It isn’t banking!” he said. “Man, man, look at these accounts! Here’s a loan company. What are their assets? Loans to a real estate company. What are their assets? Shares in the loan company. Here’s another real estate company? Where does it get its funds? From the Brewery that bought the real estate. Look at this — Winnipeg Arctic and Siberian Railway.”
“Donald,” said the other, “you lent them fifty thousand . . .”
