The High Heart Part 6

"Yes, sir; with a fowling-piece; but not with a howitzer. The one is too big; the other is too small."

I was about to drop him a little courtesy when I saw him wink. It was a grotesque, amusing wink that quivered and twisted till it finally closed the left eye. If he had been a less handsome man the effect would have been less absurd.

I made my courtesy the deeper, bending my head and lowering my eyes so as to spare him the knowledge that I saw.

CHAPTER III

"He attacked my country. I think I could forgive him everything but that."

It was an hour after Mr. and Mrs. Brokenshire had left me. I was half crying by this time--that is, half crying in the way one cries from rage, and yet laughing nervously, in flashes, at the same time. From the weakness of sheer excitement I had dropped to one of the steps leading down to the Cliff Walk, while Larry Strangways leaned on the stone post.

I had met him there as I was going out and he was coming toward the house. We couldn't but stop to exchange a word, especially with his knowledge of the situation. He took what I had to say with the light, gleaming, non-committal smile which he brought to bear on everything. I was glad of that because it kept him detached. I didn't want him any nearer to me than he was.

"Attacked your country? Do you mean England?"

"No; Canada. England is my grandmother; but Canada's my mother. He said you all despised her."

"Oh no, we don't. He was trying to put something over on you."

"Your 'No, we don't' lacks conviction; but I don't mind you. I shouldn't mind him if I hadn't seen so much of it."

"So much of what?"

"Being looked down upon geographically. Of all the ways of being proud,"

I declared, indignantly, "that which depends on your merely accidental position with regard to land and water strikes me as the most poor-spirited. I can't imagine any one dragging himself down to it who had another rag of a reason for self-respect. As a matter of fact, I don't believe any one ever does. The people I've heard express themselves on the subject--well, I'll give you an ill.u.s.tration: There was a woman at Gibraltar--a major's wife, a big, red-faced woman. Her name was Arbuthnot--her father was a dean or something--a big, red-faced woman, with one of those screechy, tw.a.n.gy English voices that cut you like a saw--you know there are some--a good many--and they don't know it. Well, she was saying something sneering about Canadians. I was sitting opposite--it was at a dinner-party--and so I leaned across the table and asked her why she didn't like them. She said colonials were such dreadful form. I held her with my eye"--I showed him how--"and made myself small and demure as I said, 'But, dear lady, how clever of you!

Who would ever have supposed that you'd know that?' My sister Vic pitched into me about it after we got home. She said the Arbuthnot person didn't understand what I meant--nor any one else at the table, they're so awfully thick-skinned--and that it's better to let them alone. But that's the kind of person who--"

He tried to comfort me. "They'll come round in time. One of these days England will see what she owes to her colonists and do them justice."

"Never!" I declared, vehemently. "It will be always the same--till we knock the Empire to pieces. Then they'll respect us. Look at the Boer War. Didn't our men sacrifice everything to go out that long distance--and win battles--and lay down their lives--only to have the English say afterward--especially the army people--that they were more trouble than they were worth? It will be always the same. When we've given our last penny and shed our last drop of blood they'll still tell us we've been nothing but a nuisance. You may live to see it and remember that I said so. If when Shakespeare wrote that it's sharper than a serpent's tooth to have a thankless child he'd gone on to add that it's the very d.i.c.kens to have a picturesque, self-satisfied old grandmother who thinks her children's children should give her everything and take kicks instead of ha'pence for their pay, he'd have been up to date. Mind you, we don't object to giving our last penny and shedding our last drop of blood; we only hate being abused and sneered at for doing it."

I warmed to my subject as I dabbed fiercely at my eyes.

"I'll tell you what the typical John Bull is like. He's like those men--big, flabby men they generally are--who'll be brutes to you so long as you're civil to them, but will climb down the minute you begin to hit back. Look at the way they treat you Americans! They can't do enough for you--because you snap your fingers in their faces and show them you don't care a hang about them. They come over here, and give you lectures, and marry your girls, and pocket your money, and adopt your bad form as delightful originality--and respect you. Now that earls'

daughters are beginning to cast an eye on your millionaires--Mrs.

Rossiter told me that--they won't leave you a rag to your back. But with us who've been faithful and loyal they're all the other way. I can hardly tell you the small pin-p.r.i.c.king indignities to which my sisters and I have been subjected for being Canadians. And they'll never change.

It will never be otherwise, no matter what we do, no matter what we become, no matter if we give our bodies to be burned, as the Bible says.

It will never be otherwise--not till we imitate you and strike them in the face. _Then_ you'll see how they'll come round."[1]

He still smiled, with an aloofness in which there was a beam of sweetness. "I had no idea that you were such a little rebel."

"I'm not a rebel. I'm loyal to the King. That is, I'm loyal to the great Anglo-Saxon ideal of which the King is the symbol--and I suppose he's as good a symbol as any other, especially as he's already there. The English are only partly Anglo-Saxon. 'Saxon and Norman and Dane are they'--didn't Tennyson say that? Well, there's a lot that's Norman, and a lot that's Dane, and a lot that's Scotch and Irish and rag-tag in them. But they're saved by the pure Anglo-Saxon ideal in so far as they hold to it--just as you'll be, with all your mixed bloods--and just as we shall be ourselves. It's like salt in the meat, it's like grace in the Christian religion--it's the thing that saves, and I'm loyal to that. My father used to say that it's the fact that English and Canadians and Australians are all devoted to the same principle that holds us together as an Empire, and not the subservience of distant lands to a Parliament sitting at Westminster. And so it is. We don't always like each other; but that doesn't matter. What does matter is that we should betray the fact that we don't like each other to outsiders--and so give them a handle against us."

"You mean that J. Howard should be in a position to side with the English in looking down on you as a Canadian?"

"Yes, and that the English should give him that position. He's an American and an enemy--every American is an enemy to England _au fond_.

Oh yes, he is! You needn't deny it! It's something fundamental, deeper down than anything you understand. Even those of you who like England are hostile to her at heart and would be glad to see her in trouble. So, I say, he's an American and an enemy, and yet they hand me, their child and their friend, over to him to be trampled on. He's had opportunities of judging how Canadians are regarded in England, he says--and he a.s.sures me it's nothing to be proud of. That's it. I've had opportunities too--and I have to admit that he's right. Don't you see?

That's what enrages me. As far as their liking us and our not liking them is concerned, why, it's all in the family. So long as it's kept in the family it's like the pick that Louise and Vic have always had on me.

I'm the youngest and the plainest--"

"Oh, you're the plainest, are you? What on earth are they like?"

"They're quite good-looking, and they're awfully chic. But that's in parentheses. What I mean is that they're always hectoring me because I'm not attractive--"

"Really?"

"I'm not fishing for compliments. I'm too busy and too angry for that. I want to go on talking about what we're talking about."

"But I want to know why they said you were unattractive."

"Well, perhaps they didn't say it. What they have said is this, and it's what Mrs. Rossiter says--she said it to-day--that I'm only attractive to one man in five hundred--"

"But very attractive to him?"

"No; she didn't say that. She merely admitted that her brother Hugh was that man--"

He interrupted with something I wished at the time he hadn't said, and which I tried to ignore:

"He's the man in that five hundred--and I know another in another five hundred, which makes two in a thousand. You'd soon get up to a high percentage, when you think of all the men there are in the world."

As he had never hinted at anything of the kind before, it gave me--how shall I put it?--I can only think of the word fright--it gave me a little fright. It made me uneasy. It was nothing, really. It was spoken with that gleaming smile of his which seemed to put distance between him and me--between him and everything else that was serious--and yet subconsciously I felt as one feels on hearing the first few notes, in an opera or a symphony, of that arresting phrase which is to work up into a great motive. I tried to get back to my original theme, rising to move on as I did so.

"Good gracious!" I cried. "Isn't the world big enough for us all? Why should we go about saying unkind and untrue things of one other, when each of us is an essential part of a composite whole? Isn't it the foot saying to the hand I have no need of thee, and the eye saying the same thing to the nose? We've got something you haven't got, and you've got something we haven't got. Why shouldn't we be appreciative toward each other, and make our exchange with mutual respect as we do with trade commodities?"

It was probably to urge me on to talk that he said, with a challenging smile: "What have you Canadians got that we haven't? Why, we could buy and sell you."

"Oh no, you couldn't; because our special contribution toward the civilization of the American continent isn't a thing for sale. It can be given; it can be inherited; it can be caught; but it can't be purchased."

"Indeed? What is this elusive endowment?"

I answered frankly enough: "I don't know. It's there--and I can't tell you what it is. Ever since I've been living among you I've felt how much we resemble each other--what a difference. I think--mind you, I only think--that what it consists in is a sense of the _comme il faut_. We're simpler than you; and less intellectual; and poorer, of course; and less, much less, self-a.n.a.lytical; and yet we've got a knowledge of what's what that you couldn't command with money. None of the Brokenshires have it at all, and, as far as I can see, none of their friends. They command it with money, and the difference is like having a copy of a work of art instead of the original. It gives them the air of being--I'm using Mrs. Rossiter's word--of being produced. Now we Canadians are not produced. We just come--but we come the right way--without any hooting or tooting or beating of tin pans or self-advertis.e.m.e.nt. We just are--and we say nothing about it. Let me make an example of what Mrs. Rossiter was discussing this morning. There are lots of pretty girls in my country--as many to the hundred as you have here--but we don't make a fuss about them or talk as if we'd ordered a special brand from the Creator. We grow them as you grow flowers in a garden, at the mercy of the air and sunshine. You grow yours like plants in a hothouse, to be exhibited in horticultural shows.

Please don't think I'm bragging--"

He laughed aloud. "Oh no!"

"Well, I'm not," I insisted. "You asked me a question and I'm trying to answer it--and incidentally to justify my own existence, which J. Howard has called into question. You've got lots to offer us, and many of us come and take it thankfully. What we can offer to you is a simpler and healthier and less self-conscious standard of life, with a great deal less talk about it--with no talk about it at all, if you could get yourselves down to that--and a willingness to be instead of an everlasting striving to become. You won't recognize it or take it, of course. No one ever does. Nations seem to me insane, and ruled by insane governments. Don't the English need the Germans, and the Germans the French, and the French the Austrians, and the Austrians the Russians, and so on? Why on earth should the foot be jealous of the nose? But there! You're simply making me say things--and laughing at me all the while--so I'm off to take my walk. We'll get even with J. Howard and all the first-cla.s.s powers some day, and till then--_au revoir_."

I had waved my hand to him and gone some paces into the fog that had begun to blow in when he called to me.

"Wait a minute. I've something to tell you."

I turned, without going back.

"I'm--I'm leaving."

I was so amazed that I retraced a step or two toward him. "What?"