At this theatreAll next weekMAGGIE MAYandWALTER CURRANinIS IT WORTH IT
And after that I can imagine the audience dispersing, and the now educated children going off to their homes and one saying as he enters—
"Gee, I seen a great picture show at school to-day."
"Yes?" says his mother, "and what was it?"
"Oh, it was all about a gink that went round the cabarets trying to sell an invention what he'd got but nobody wouldn't look at it till at last one dame gave him three oyster boats, see? and so he and a lot of other guys loaded them up and hiked off across the ocean."
"And where did he go to?"
"Africa. And he and the other guys had a great stand in with the natives and he'd have sold his invention all right but one old dame got him alone in a hut and poisoned him and took it off him."
That, I think, is about the way the film would run. When it is finished I must get President Shurman, or whoever it was, to come and see it.
To avoid all error as to the point of view, let me say in commencing that I am a Liberal Conservative, or, if you will, a Conservative Liberal with a strong dash of sympathy with the Socialist idea, a friend of Labour, and a believer in Progressive Radicalism. I do not desire office but would take a seat in the Canadian Senate at five minutes notice.
I believe there are ever so many people of exactly this way of thinking.
Let me say further than in writing of "politics" I am only dealing with the lights and shadows that flicker over the surface, and am not trying to discuss, still less to decry, the deep and vital issues that lie below.
Yet I will say that vital though the issues may be below the surface, there is more clap-trap, insincerity and humbug on the surface of politics than over any equal area on the face of any institution.
The candidate, as such, is a humbug. The voters, as voters—not as fathers, brothers or sons—are humbugs. The committees are humbugs. And the speeches to the extent of about ninety per cent are pure buncombe. But, oddly enough, out of the silly babel of talk that accompanies popular government, we get, after all, pretty good government—infinitely better than the government of an autocratic king. Between democracy and despotic kingship lies all the difference between genial humbug and black sin.
For the candidate for popular office I have nothing but sympathy and sorrow. It has been my fortune to walk round at the heels of half a dozen of them in different little Canadian towns, watching the candidate try in vain to brighten up his face at the glad sight of a party voter.
One, in particular, I remember. Nature had meant him to be a sour man, a hard man, a man with but little joy in the company of his fellows. Fate had made him a candidate for the House of Commons. So he was doing his best to belie his nature.
"Hullo, William!" he would call out as a man passed driving a horse and buggy, "got the little sorrel out for a spin, eh?"
Then he would turn to me and say in a low rasping voice—
"There goes about the biggest skunk in this whole constituency."
A few minutes later he would wave his hand over a little hedge in friendly salutation to a man working in a garden.
"Hullo, Jasper! That's a fine lot of corn you've got there."
Jasper replied in a growl. And when we were well past the house the candidate would say between his teeth—
"That's about the meanest whelp in the riding."
Our conversation all down the street was of that pattern.
"Good morning, Edward! Giving the potatoes a dose of Paris green, eh?"
And in an undertone—
"I wish to Heaven he'd take a dose of it himself."
And so on from house to house.
I counted up, from one end of the street to the other, that there were living in it seven skunks, fourteen low whelps, eight mean hounds and two dirty skinflints. And all of these merely among the Conservative voters. It made me wish to be a Liberal. Especially as the Liberal voters, by the law of the perversity of human affairs, always seemed to be the finer lot. As they were NOT voting for our candidate, they were able to meet him in a fair and friendly way, whereas William and Jasper and Edward and our "bunch" were always surly and hardly deigned to give more than a growl in answer to the candidate's greeting, without even looking up at him.
But a Liberal voter would stop him in the street and shake hands and say in a frank, cordial way.
"Mr. Grouch, I'm sorry indeed that I can't vote for you, and I'd like to be able to wish you success, but of course you know I'm on the other side and always have been and can't change now."
Whereupon the Candidate would say. "That's all right, John, I don't expect you to. I can respect a man's convictions all right, I guess."
So they would part excellent friends, the Candidate saying as we moved off:
"That man, John Winter, is one of the straightest men in this whole county."
Then he would add—
"Now we'll just go into this house for a minute. There's a dirty pup in here that's one of our supporters."
My opinion of our own supporters went lower every day, and my opinion of the Liberal voters higher, till it so happened that I went one day to an old friend of mine who was working on the Liberal side. I asked him how he liked it.
"Oh, well enough!" he said, "as a sort of game. But in this constituency you've got all the decent voters; our voters are the lowest bunch of skunks I ever struck."
Just then a man passed in a buggy, and looked sourly at my friend the Liberal worker.
"Hullo, John!" he called, with a manufactured hilarity, "got the little mare out for a turn, eh?"
John grunted.
"There's one of them," said my friend, "the lowest pup in this county, John Winter."
"Come along," said the Candidate to me one morning, "I want you to meet my committee."
"You'll find them," he said confidingly, as we started down the street towards the committee rooms, "an awful bunch of mutts."
"Too bad," I said, "what's wrong with them?"
"Oh, I don't know—they're just a pack of simps. They don't seem to have any PUNCH in them. The one you'll meet first is the chairman—he's about the worst dub of the lot; I never saw a man with so little force in my life. He's got no magnetism, that's what's wrong with him—no magnetism."
A few minutes later the Candidate was introducing me to a roomful of heavy looking Committee men. Committee men in politics, I notice, have always a heavy bovine look. They are generally in a sort of daze, or doped from smoking free cigars.
"Now I want to introduce you first," said the Candidate, "to our chairman, Mr. Frog. Mr. Frog is our old battle horse in this constituency. And this is our campaign secretary Mr. Bughouse, and Mr. Dope, and Mr. Mudd, et cetera."
Those may not have been their names.
It is merely what the names sounded like when one was looking into their faces.
The Candidate introduced them all as battle horses, battle axes, battle leaders, standard bearers, flag-holders, and so forth. If he had introduced them as hat-racks or cigar holders, it would have been nearer the mark.
Presently the Candidate went out and I was left with the battle-axes.
"What do you think of our chances?" I asked.
The battle-axes shook their heads with dubious looks.
"Pretty raw deal," said the Chairman, "the Convention wishing HIM on us." He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the departed Candidate.
"What's wrong with him?" I asked.
Mr. Frog shook his head again.
"No PUNCH," he said.
"None at all," agreed all the battle horses.
"I'll tell you," said the Campaign secretary, Mr. Bughouse, a voluble man, with wandering eyes—"the trouble is he has no magnetism, no personal magnetism."
"I see," I said.
"Now, you take this man, Shortis, that the Liberals have got hold of," continued Mr. Bughouse, "he's full of MAGNETISM. He appeals."
All the other Committee men nodded.
"That's so," they murmured, "magnetism, Our man hasn't a darned ounce of it."
"I met Shortis the other night in the street," went on Mr. Bughouse, "and he said, 'Come on up to my room in the hotel.' 'Oh,' I said, 'I can't very well.' 'Nonsense,' he said, 'You're on the other side but what does that matter?' Well, we went up to his room, and there he had whiskey, and gin, and lager,—everything. 'Now,' he says, 'name your drink—what is it?' There he was, right in his room, breaking the law without caring a darn about it. Well, you know the voters like that kind of thing. It appeals to them."
"Well," said another of the Committee men,—I think it was the one called Mr. Dope, "I wouldn't mind that so much. But the chief trouble about our man, to my mind, is that he can't speak."
"He can't?" I exclaimed.
All the Committee shook their heads.
"Not for sour apples!" asserted Mr. Dope positively. "Now, in this riding that won't do. Our people here are used to first class speaking, they expect it. I suppose there has been better speaking in this Constituency than anywhere else in the whole dominion. Not lately, perhaps; not in the last few elections. But I can remember, and so can some of the boys here, the election when Sir John A. spoke here, when the old Mackenzie government went out."
He looked around at the circle. Several nodded.
"Remember it as well," assented Mr. Mudd, "as if it were yesterday."
"Well, sir," continued Mr. Dope, "I'll never forget Sir John A. speaking here in the Odd Fellows' Hall, eh?"
The Committee men nodded and gurgled in corroboration.
"My! but he was PLASTERED. We had him over at Pete Robinson's hotel all afternoon, and I tell you he was plastered for fair. We ALL were. I remember I was so pickled myself I could hardly help Sir John up the steps of the platform. So were you, Mudd, do you remember?"
"I certainly was!" said Mr. Mudd proudly. Committee men who would scorn to drink lager beer in 1919, take a great pride, I have observed, in having been pickled in 1878.
"Yes, sir," continued Mr. Dope, "you certainly were pickled. I remember just as well as anything, when they opened the doors and let the crowd in: all the boys had been bowling up and were pretty well soused. You never saw such a crowd. Old Dr. Greenway (boys, you remember the old Doc) was in the chair, and he was pretty well spifflocated. Well, sir, Sir John A. got up in that hall and he made the finest, most moving speech I ever listened to. Do you remember when he called old Trelawney an ash-barrel? And when he made that appeal for a union of hearts and said that the sight of McGuire (the Liberal candidate) made him sick? I tell you those were great days. You don't get speaking like that now; and you don't get audiences like that now either. Not the same calibre."
All the Committee shook their heads.
"Well, anyway, boys," said the Chairman, as he lighted a fresh cigar, "to-morrow will decide, one way or the other. We've certainly worked hard enough,"—here he passed the box of cigars round to the others—"I haven't been in bed before two any night since the work started."
"Neither have I," said another of the workers. "I was just saying to the wife when I got up this morning that I begin to feel as if I never wanted to see the sight of a card again."
"Well, I don't regret the work," said the Secretary, "so long as we carry the riding. You see," he added in explanation to me, "we're up against a pretty hard proposition here. This riding really is Liberal: they've got the majority of voters though we HAVE once or twice swung it Conservative. But whether we can carry it with a man like Grouch is hard to say. One thing is certain, boys, if he DOES carry it, he doesn't owe it to himself."
All the battle horses agreed on this. A little after that we dispersed.
And twenty-four hours later the vote was taken and to my intense surprise the riding was carried by Grouch the Conservative candidate.
I say, to MY surprise. But apparently not to anybody else.
For it appeared this (was in conversations after the election) that Grouch was a man of extraordinary magnetism. He had, so they said, "punch." Shortis, the Liberal, it seemed, lacked punch absolutely. Even his own supporters admitted that he had no personality whatever. Some wondered how he had the nerve to run.
But my own theory of how the election was carried is quite different.
I feel certain that all the Conservative voters despised their candidate so much that they voted Liberal. And all the Liberals voted Conservative.
That carried the riding.
Meantime Grouch left the constituency by the first train next day for Ottawa. Except for paying taxes on his house, he will not be back in the town till they dissolve parliament again.
In the club to which I belong, in a quiet corner where the sunlight falls in sideways, there may be seen sitting of an afternoon my good friend of thirty years' standing, Mr. Edward Sims. Being somewhat afflicted with gout, he generally sits with one foot up on a chair. On a brass table beside him are such things as Mr. Sims needs. But they are few. Wealthy as he is, the needs of Mr. Sims reach scarcely further than Martini cocktails and Egyptian cigarettes. Such poor comforts as these, brought by a deferential waiter, with, let us say, a folded newspaper at five o'clock, suffice for all his wants. Here sits Mr. Sims till the shadows fall in the street outside, when a limousine motor trundles up to the club and rolls him home.
And here of an afternoon Mr. Sims talks to me of his college days when he was young. The last thirty years of his life have moved in so gentle a current upon so smooth a surface that they have been without adventure. It is the stormy period of his youth that preoccupies my friend as he sits looking from the window of the club at the waving leaves in the summer time and the driving snow in the winter.
I am of that habit of mind that makes me prone to listen. And for this, perhaps, Mr. Sims selects me as the recipient of the stories of his college days. It is, it seems, the fixed belief of my good friend that when he was young he belonged at college to a particularly nefarious crowd or group that exists in his mind under the name of the "old gang." The same association, or corporate body or whatever it should be called, is also designated by Mr. Sims, the "old crowd," or more simply and affectionately "the boys." In the recollection of my good friend this "old gang" were of a devilishness since lost off the earth. Work they wouldn't. Sleep they despised. While indoors they played poker in a blue haze of tobacco smoke with beer in jugs and mugs all round them. All night they were out of doors on the sidewalk with linked arms, singing songs in chorus and jeering at the city police.
Yet in spite of life such as this, which might appear to an outsider wearing to the intellect, the "old gang" as recollected by Mr. Sims were of a mental brilliancy that eclipses everything previous or subsequent. McGregor of the Class of '85 graduated with a gold medal in Philosophy after drinking twelve bottles of lager before sitting down to his final examination. Ned Purvis, the football half-back, went straight from the football field after a hard game with his ankle out of joint, drank half a bottle of Bourbon Rye and then wrote an examination in Greek poetry that drew tears from the President of the college.
Mr. Sims is perhaps all the more prone to talk of these early days insomuch that, since his youth, life, in the mere material sense, has used him all too kindly. At an early age, indeed at about the very time of his graduation, Mr. Sims came into money,—not money in the large and frenzied sense of a speculative fortune, begetting care and breeding anxiety, but in the warm and comfortable inheritance of a family brewery, about as old and as well-established as the Constitution of the United States. In this brewery, even to-day, Mr. Sims, I believe, spends a certain part, though no great part, of his time. He is carried to it, I understand, in his limousine in the sunnier hours of the morning; for an hour or so each day he moves about among the warm smell of the barley and the quiet hum of the machinery murmuring among its dust.
There is, too, somewhere in the upper part of the city a huge, silent residence, where a noiseless butler adjusts Mr. Sims's leg on a chair and serves him his dinner in isolated luxury.
But the residence, and the brewery, and with them the current of Mr. Sims's life move of themselves.
Thus has care passed Mr. Sims by, leaving him stranded in a club chair with his heavy foot and stick beside him.
Mr. Sims is a bachelor. Nor is he likely now to marry: but this through no lack of veneration or respect for the sex. It arises, apparently, from the fact that when Mr. Sims was young, during his college days, the beauty and charm of the girls who dwelt in his college town was such as to render all later women mere feeble suggestions of what might have been. There was, as there always is, one girl in particular. I have not heard my friend speak much of her. But I gather that Kate Dashaway was the kind of girl who might have made a fit mate even for the sort of intellectual giant that flourished at Mr. Sims's college. She was not only beautiful. All the girls remembered by Mr. Sims were that. But she was in addition "a good head" and "a good sport," two of the highest qualities that, in Mr. Sims's view, can crown the female sex. She had, he said, no "nonsense" about her, by which term Mr. Sims indicated religion. She drank lager beer, played tennis as well as any man in the college, and smoked cigarettes a whole generation in advance of the age.
Mr. Sims, so I gather, never proposed to her, nor came within a measurable distance of doing so. A man so prone, as is my friend, to spend his time in modest admiration of the prowess of others is apt to lag behind. Miss Dashaway remains to Mr. Sims, as all else does, a retrospect and a regret.
But the chief peculiarities of the old gang—as they exist in the mind of Mr. Sims—is the awful fate that has overwhelmed them. It is not merely that they are scattered to the four corners of the continent. That might have been expected. But, apparently, the most awful moral ruin has fallen upon them. That, at least, is the abiding belief of Mr. Sims.
"Do you ever hear anything of McGregor now?" I ask him sometimes.
"No," he says, shaking his head quietly. "I understand he went all to the devil."
"How was that?"
"Booze," says Mr. Sims. There is a quiet finality about the word that ends all discussion.
"Poor old Curly!" says Mr. Sims, in speaking of another of his classmates. "I guess he's pretty well down and out these days."
"What's the trouble?" I say.
Mr. Sims moves his eyes sideways as he sits. It is easier than moving his head.
"Booze," he says.
Even apparent success in life does not save Mr. Sims's friends.
"I see," I said one day, "that they have just made Arthur Stewart a Chief Justice out west."
"Poor old Artie," murmured Mr. Sims. "He'll have a hard time holding it down. I imagine he's pretty well tanked up all the time these days."
When Mr. Sims has not heard of any of his associates for a certain lapse of years, he decides to himself that they are down and out. It is a form of writing them off. There is a melancholy satisfaction in it. As the years go by Mr. Sims is coming to regard himself and a few others as the lonely survivors of a great flood. All the rest, brilliant as they once were, are presumed to be "boozed," "tanked," "burnt out," "bust-up," and otherwise consumed.
After having heard for so many years the reminiscences of my good friend about the old gang, it seemed almost incredible that one of them should step into actual living being before my eyes. Yet so it happened.
I found Mr. Sims at the club one day, about to lunch there, a thing contrary to his wont. And with him was a friend, a sallow, insignificant man in the middle fifties, with ragged, sandy hair, wearing thin.
"Shake hands with Tommy Vidal," said Mr. Sims proudly.
If he had said, "Shake hands with Aristotle," he couldn't have spoken with greater pride.
This then was Tommy Vidal, the intellectual giant of whom I had heard a hundred times. Tommy had, at college, so Mr. Sims had often assured me, the brightest mind known since the age of Pericles. He took the prize in Latin poetry absolutely "without opening a book." Latin to Tommy Vidal had been, by a kind of natural gift, born in him. In Latin he was "a whale." Indeed in everything. He had passed his graduation examination with first class honours; "plastered." He had to be held in his seat, so it was recorded, while he wrote.
Tommy, it seemed, had just "blown in" to town that morning. It was characteristic of Mr. Sims's idea of the old gang that the only way in which any of them were supposed to enter a town was to "blow in."
"When did you say you 'blew in,' Tommy?" he asked about half a dozen times during our lunch. In reality, the reckless, devil-may-care fellow Vidal had "blown in" to bring his second daughter to a boarding school—a thing no doubt contemplated months ahead. But Mr. Sims insisted in regarding Tommy's movements as purely fortuitous, the sport of chance. He varied his question by asking "When do you expect to 'blow out' Tommy?" Tommy's answers he forgot at once.
We sat and talked after lunch, and it pained me to notice that Tommy Vidal was restless and anxious to get away. Mr. Sims offered him cigars, thick as ropes and black as night, but he refused them. It appeared that he had long since given up smoking. It affected his eyes, he said. The deferential waiter brought brandy and curacoa in long thin glasses. But Mr. Vidal shook his head. He hadn't had a drink, he said, for twenty years. He found it affected his hearing. Coffee, too, he refused. It affected, so it seemed, his sense of smell. He sat beside us, ill at ease, and anxious, as I could see, to get back to his second daughter and her schoolmistresses. Mr. Sims, who is geniality itself in his heart, but has no great powers in conversation, would ask Tommy if he remembered how he acted as Antigone in the college play, and was "plastered" from the second act on. Mr. Vidal had no recollection of it, but wondered if there was any good book-store in town where he could buy his daughter an Algebra. He rose when he decently could and left us. As Mr. Sims saw it, he "blew out."
Mr. Sims is kindliness itself in his judgments. He passed no word of censure on his departed friend. But a week or so later he mentioned to me in conversation that Tommy Vidal had "turned into a kind of stiff." The vocabulary of Mr. Sims holds no term of deeper condemnation than the word "stiff." To be a "stiff" is the last form of degradation.
It is strange that when a thing happens once, it forthwith happens twice or even more. For years no member of the "old gang" had come in touch with Mr. Sims. Yet the visit of Tommy Vidal was followed at no great distance of time by the "blowing in" of Ned Purvis.
"Well, well!" said Mr. Sims, as he opened one afternoon a telegram that the deferential waiter brought upon a tray. "This beats all! Old Ned Purvis wires that he's going to blow in to town to-night at seven."
Forthwith Mr. Sims fell to ordering dinner for the three of us in a private room, with enough of an assortment of gin cocktails and Scotch highballs to run a distillery, and enough Vichy water and imported soda for a bath. "I know old Ned!" he said as he added item after item to the list.
At seven o'clock the waiter whispered, as in deep confidence, that there was a gentleman below for Mr. Sims.
It so happened that on that evening my friend's foot was in bad shape, and rested on a chair. At his request I went from the lounge room of the club downstairs to welcome the new arrival.
Purvis I knew all about. My friend had spoken of him a thousand times. He had played half-back on the football team—a big hulking brute of a fellow. In fact, he was, as pictured by Mr. Sims, a perfect colossus. And he played football—as did all Mr. Sims's college chums—"plastered." "Old Ned," so Mr. Sims would relate, "was pretty well 'soused' when the game started: but we put a hose at him at half-time and got him into pretty good shape." All men in any keen athletic contest, as remembered by Mr. Sims, were pretty well "tanked up." For the lighter, nimbler games such as tennis, they were reported "spifflocated" and in that shape performed prodigies of agility.
"You'll know Ned," said Mr. Sims, "by his big shoulders." I went downstairs.
The reception room below was empty, except for one man, a little, gentle-looking man with spectacles. He wore black clothes with a waistcoat reaching to the throat, a white tie and a collar buttoned on backwards. Ned Purvis was a clergyman! His great hulking shoulders had gone the way of all my good friend's reminiscences.
I brought him upstairs.
For a moment, in the half light of the room, Mr. Sims was still deceived.
"Well, Ned!" he began heartily, with a struggle to rise from his chair—then he saw the collar and tie of the Rev. Mr. Purvis, and the full horror of the thing dawned upon him. Nor did the three gin cocktails, which Mr. Sims had had stationed ready for the reunion, greatly help its geniality. Yet it had been a maxim, in the recollections of Mr. Sims, that when any of the boys blew in anywhere the bringing of drinks must be instantaneous and uproarious.
Our dinner that night was very quiet.
Mr. Purvis drank only water. That, with a little salad, made his meal. He had a meeting to address that evening at eight, a meeting of women—"dear women" he called them—who had recently affiliated their society with the work that some of the dear women in Mr. Purvis's own town were carrying on. The work, as described, boded no good for breweries. Mr. Purvis's wife, so it seemed, was with him and would also "take the platform."
As best we could we made conversation.
"I didn't know that you were married," said Mr. Sims.
"Yes," said Mr. Purvis, "married, and with five dear boys and three dear girls." The eight of them, he told us, were a great blessing. So, too, was his wife—a great social worker, it seemed, in the cause of women's rights and a marvellous platform speaker in the temperance crusade.
"By the way, Mr. Sims," said Mr. Purvis (they had called one another "Mr." after the first five minutes), "you may remember my wife. I think perhaps you knew her in our college days. She was a Miss Dashaway."
Mr. Sims bowed his head over his plate, as another of his lost illusions vanished into thin air.
After Mr. Purvis had gone, my friend spoke out his mind—once and once only, and more in regret than anger.
"I'm afraid," he said, "that old Ned has turned into a SISSY."
It was only to be expected that the visits of later friends—the "boys" who happened to "blow in"—were disappointments. Art Hamilton, who came next, and who had been one of the most brilliant men of the Class of '86 had turned somehow into a "complete mutt." Jake Todd, who used to write so brilliantly in the college paper, as recollected by Mr. Sims, was now the editor of a big New York daily. Good things might have been expected of him, but it transpired that he had undergone "wizening of the brain." In fact, a number of Mr. Sims's former friends had suffered from this cruel disease, consisting apparently of a shrinkage or contraction of the cerebellum.
Mr. Sims spoke little of his disappointments. But I knew that he thought much about them. They set him wondering. There were changes here that to the thoughtful mind called for investigation.
So I was not surprised when he informed me that it was his intention to visit "the old place" and have a look at it. The "old place," called also the "old shop," indicated, as I knew, Mr. Sims's college, the original scene of the exploits of the old gang. In the thirty years since he had graduated, though separated from it only by two hundred miles, Mr. Sims had never revisited it. So is it always with the most faithful of the sons of learning. The illumination of the inner eye is better than the crude light of reality. College reunions are but for the noisy lip service of the shallow and the interested. The deeper affection glows in the absent heart.
My friend invited me to "come along." We would, he said, "blow in" upon the place and have a look at it.
It was in the fullness of the spring time that we went, when the leaves are out on the college campus, and when Commencement draws near, and when all the college, even the students, are busy.
Mr. Sims, I noted when I joined him at the train, was dressed as for the occasion. He wore a round straw hat with a coloured ribbon, and light grey suit, and a necktie with the garish colours of the college itself. Thus dressed, he leaned as lightly as his foot allowed him upon a yellow stick, and dreamed himself again an undergraduate.
I had thought the purpose of his visit a mere curiosity bred in his disappointment. It appeared that I was wrong. On the train Mr. Sims unfolded to me that his idea in "blowing in" upon his college was one of benefaction. He had it in his mind, he said, to do something for the "old place," no less a thing than to endow a chair. He explained to me, modestly as was his wont, the origin of his idea. The brewing business, it appeared, was rapidly reaching a stage when it would have to be wound up. The movement of prohibition would necessitate, said Mr. Sims, the closing of the plant. The prospect, in the financial sense, occasioned my friend but little excitement. I was given to understand that prohibition, in the case of Mr. Sims's brewery, had long since been "written off" or "written up" or at least written somewhere where it didn't matter. And the movement itself Mr. Sims does not regard as permanent. Prohibition, he says, is bound to be washed out by a "turn of the tide"; in fact, he speaks of this returning wave of moral regeneration much as Martin Luther might have spoken of the Protestant Reformation. But for the time being the brewery will close. Mr. Sims had thought deeply, it seemed, about putting his surplus funds into the manufacture of commercial alcohol, itself a noble profession. For some time his mind has wavered between that and endowing a chair of philosophy. There is, and always has been, a sort of natural connection between the drinking of beer and deep quiet thought. Mr. Sims, as a brewer, felt that philosophy was the proper thing.
We left the train, walked through the little town and entered the university gates.
"Gee!" said Mr. Sims, pausing a moment and leaning on his stick, "were the gates only as big as that?"
We began to walk up the avenue.
"I thought there were more trees to it than these," said Mr. Sims.
"Yes," I answered. "You often said that the avenue was a quarter of a mile long."
"So the thing used to be," he murmured.
Then Mr. Sims looked at the campus. "A dinky looking little spot," he said.
"Didn't you say," I asked, "that the Arts Building was built of white marble?"
"Always thought it was," he answered. "Looks like rough cast from here, doesn't it."
"We'll have to go in and see the President, I suppose," continued Mr. Sims. He said it with regret. Something of his undergraduate soul had returned to his body. Although he had never seen the President (this one) in his life, and had only read of his appointment some five years before in the newspapers, Mr. Sims was afraid of him.
"Now, I tell you," he went on. "We'll just make a break in and then a quick get-away. Don't let's get anchored in there, see? If the old fellow gets talking, he'll go on for ever. I remember the way it used to be when a fellow had to go in to see Prexy in my time. The old guy would start mooning away and quoting Latin and keep us there half the morning."
At this moment two shabby-looking, insignificant men who had evidently come out from one of the buildings, passed us on the sidewalk.
"I wonder who those guys are," said Mr. Sims. "Look like bums, don't they?"
I shook my head. Some instinct told me that they were professors. But I didn't say so.
My friend continued his instructions.
"When the President asks us to lunch," he said, "I'll say that we're lunching with a friend down town, see? Then we'll make a break and get out. If he says he wants to introduce us to the Faculty or anything like that, then you say that we have to get the twelve-thirty to New York, see? I'm not going to say anything about a chair in philosophy to-day. I want to read it up first some night so as to be able to talk about it."
To all of this I agreed.
From a janitor we inquired where to find the President.
"In the Administration Building, eh?" said Mr. Sims. "That's a new one on me. The building on the right, eh? Thank you."
"See the President?" said a young lady in an ante-office. "I'm not sure whether you can see him just now. Have you an appointment?"
Mr. Sims drew out a card. "Give him that" he said. On the card he had scribbled "Graduate of 1887."
In a few minutes we were shown into another room where there was a young man, evidently the President's secretary, and a number of people waiting.
"Will you kindly sit down," murmured the young man, in a consulting-room voice, "and wait? The President is engaged just now."
We waited. Through the inner door leading to the President people went and came. Mr. Sims, speaking in whispers, continued to caution me on the quickness of our get-away.
Presently the young man touched him on the shoulder.
"The President will see you now," he whispered.
We entered the room. The "old guy" rose to meet us, Mr. Sims's card in his hand. But he was not old. He was at least ten years younger than either of us. He was, in fact, what Mr. Sims and I would almost have called a boy. In dress and manner he looked as spruce and busy as the sales manager of a shoe factory.
"Delighted to see you, gentlemen," he said, shaking hands effusively. "We are always pleased to see our old graduates, Mr. Samson—No, I beg pardon, Mr. Sims—class of '97, I see—No, I beg your pardon, Class of '67, I read it wrongly—"
I heard Mr. Sims murmuring something that seemed to contain the words "a look around."
"Yes, yes, exactly," said the President. "A look round, you'll find a great deal to interest you in looking about the place, I'm sure, Mr. Samson, great changes. I'm extremely sorry I can't offer to take you round myself," here he snapped a gold watch open and shut, "the truth is I have to catch the twelve-thirty to New York—so sorry."
Then he shook our hands again, very warmly.
In another moment we were outside the door. The get-away was accomplished.
We walked out of the building and towards the avenue.
As we passed the portals of the Arts Building, a noisy, rackety crowd of boys—evidently, to our eyes, schoolboys —came out, jostling and shouting. They swarmed past us, accidentally, no doubt, body-checking Mr. Sims, whose straw hat was knocked off and rolled on the sidewalk. A janitor picked it up for him as the crowd of boys passed.
"What pack of young bums are those?" asked Mr. Sims. "You oughtn't to let young roughs like that come into the buildings. Are they here from some school or something?"
"No sir," said the janitor. "They're students."
"Students?" repeated Mr. Sims. "And what are they shouting like that for?"
"There's a notice up that their professor is ill, and so the class is cancelled, sir."
"Class!" said Mr. Sims. "Are those a class?"
"Yes, sir," said the janitor. "That's the Senior Class in Philosophy."
Mr. Sims said nothing. He seemed to limp more than his custom as we passed down the avenue.
On the way home on the train he talked much of crude alcohol and the possibilities of its commercial manufacture.
So far as I know, his only benefaction up to date has been the two dollars that he gave to a hackman to drive us away from the college.
We lived far back in the country, such as it used to be in Canada, before the days of telephones and motor cars, with long lonely roads and snake fences buried in deep snow, and with cedar swamps where the sleighs could hardly pass two abreast. Here and there, on a winter night, one saw the light in a farm house, distant and dim.
Over it all was a great silence such as people who live in the cities can never know.
And on us, as on the other families of that lonely countryside, there sometimes fell the sudden alarm of illness, and the hurrying drive through the snow at night to fetch the doctor from the village, seven miles away.
My elder brother and I—there was a long tribe of us, as with all country families—would hitch up the horse by the light of the stable lantern, eager with haste and sick with fear, counting the time till the doctor could be there.
Then out into the driving snow, urging the horse that knew by instinct that something was amiss, and so mile after mile, till we rounded the corner into the single street of the silent village.
Late, late at night it was—eleven o'clock, perhaps—and the village dark and deep in sleep, except where the light showed red against the blinds of the "Surgery" of the doctor's rough-cast house behind the spruce trees.
"Doctor," we cried, as we burst in, "hurry and come. Jim's ill—"
I can see him still as he sat there in his surgery, the burly doctor, rugged and strong for all the sixty winters that he carried. There he sat playing chess—always he seemed to be playing chess—with his son, a medical student, burly and rugged already as himself.
"Shut the door, shut the door!" he called. "Come in, boys; here, let me brush that snow off you—it's my move Charlie, remember—now, what the devil's the matter?"
Then we would pant out our hurried exclamations, both together.
"Bah!" he growled, "ill nothing! Mere belly ache, I guess."
That was his term, his favorite word, for an undiagnosed disease—"belly ache." They call it supergastral aesthesia now. In a city house, it sounds better. Yet how we hung upon the doctor's good old Saxon term, yearning and hoping that it might be that.
But even as he growled the doctor had taken down a lantern from a hook, thrown on a huge, battered fur coat that doubled his size, and was putting medicines—a very shopful it seemed—into a leather case.
"Your horse is done up," he said. "We'll put my mare in. Come and give me a hand, Charlie."
He was his own hostler and stable-man, he and his burly son. Yet how quickly and quietly he moved, the lantern swinging on his arm, as he buckled the straps. "What kind of a damn fool tug is this you've got?" he would say.
Then, in a moment, as it seemed, out into the wind and snow again, the great figure of the doctor almost filling the seat of the cutter, the two of us crushed in beside him, with responsibility, the unbearable burden, gone from us, and renewed comfort in our hearts.
Little is said on the way: our heads are bent against the storm: the long stride of the doctor's mare eats up the flying road.
Then as we near the farm house and see the light in the sick-room window, fear clutches our hearts again.
"You boys unhitch," says the doctor. "I'll go right in."
Presently, when we enter the house, we find that he is in the sick-room—the door closed. No word of comfort has come forth. He has sent out for hot blankets. The stoves are to be kept burning. We must sit up. We may be needed. That is all.
And there in that still room through the long night, he fights single-handed against Death. Behind him is no human help, no consultation, no wisdom of the colleges to call in; only his own unaided strength, and his own firm purpose and that strange instinct in the fight for a flickering life, that some higher power than that of colleges has planted deep within his soul.
So we watch through the night hours, in dull misery and fear, a phantom at the window pane: so must we wait till the slow morning shows dim and pale at the windows.
Then he comes out from the room. His face is furrowed with the fatigue of his long vigil. But as he speaks the tone of his voice is as that of one who has fought and conquered.
"There—he'll do now. Give him this when he wakes."
Then a great joy sweeps over us as the phantom flees away, and we shudder back into the warm sunshine of life, while the sound of the doctor's retreating sleighbells makes music to our ears.
And once it was not so. The morning dawned and he did not come from the darkened room: only there came to our listening ears at times the sound of a sob or moan, and the doctor's voice, firm and low, but with all hope gone from it.
And when at last he came, his face seemed old and sad as we had never seen it. He paused a moment on the threshold and we heard him say, "I have done all that I can." Then he beckoned us into the darkened room, and, for the first time, we knew Death.
All that is forty years ago.
They tell me that, since then, the practice of medicine has been vastly improved. There are specialists now, I understand, for every conceivable illness and for every subdivision of it. If I fall ill, there is a whole battery of modern science to be turned upon me in a moment. There are X-rays ready to penetrate me in all directions. I may have any and every treatment—hypnotic, therapeutic or thaumaturgic—for which I am able to pay.
But, oh, my friends, when it shall come to be my lot to be ill and stricken—in the last and real sense, with the Great Fear upon me, and the Dark Phantom at the pane—then let some one go, fast and eager—though it be only in the paths of an expiring memory—fast and eager, through the driving snow to bring him to my bedside. Let me hear the sound of his hurrying sleighbells as he comes, and his strong voice without the door—and, if that may not be, then let me seem at least to feel the clasp of his firm hand to guide me without fear to the Land of Shadows, where he has gone before.