The Imperialist | Page 8

remember it. I sold it
myself to your predecessor, Mr Wishart, for thirty dollars--the last
purchase he ever made, poor man. It was great business for me--I had
only two others in the store like it. One of them old Milburn
bought--the father of this man, d'ye mind him?--the other stayed by me

a matter of seven years. I carried a light stock in those days."
It was no longer a light stock. The two men involuntarily glanced round
them for the satisfaction of the contrast Murchison evoked, though
neither of them, from motives of vague delicacy, felt inclined to dwell
upon it. John Murchison had the shyness of an artist in his commercial
success, and the minister possibly felt that his relation toward the
prosperity of a member had in some degree the embarrassment of a
tax-gatherer's. The stock was indeed heavy now. You had to go upstairs
to see the ranges, where they stood in rows, and every one of them bore
somewhere upon it, in raised black letters, John Murchison's name.
Through the windows came the iterating ring on the iron from the
foundry in Chestnut Street which fed the shop, with an overflow that
found its way from one end of the country to the other. Finicking
visitors to Elgin found this wearing, but to John Murchison it was the
music that honours the conqueror of circumstances. The ground floor
was given up to the small wares of the business, chiefly imported; two
or three young men, steady and knowledgeable-looking, moved about
in their shirt sleeves among shelves and packing-cases. One of them
was our friend Alec; our other friend Oliver looked after the books at
the foundry. Their father did everything deliberately; but presently, in
his own good time, his commercial letter paper would be headed, with
regard to these two, "John Murchison and Sons." It had long announced
that the business was "Wholesale and Retail."
Dr Drummond and Mr Murchison, considering the changes in Elgin
from the store door, did it at their leisure, the merchant with his thumbs
thrust comfortably in the armholes of his waistcoat, the minister, with
that familiar trick of his, balancing on one foot and suddenly throwing
his slight weight forward on the other. "A bundle of nerves," people
called the Doctor: to stand still would have been a penance to him;
even as he swayed backward and forward in talking, his hand must be
busy at the seals on his watch chain and his shrewd glance travelling
over a dozen things you would never dream so clever a man would take
notice of. It was a prospect of moderate commercial activity they
looked out upon, a street of mellow shopfronts on both sides, of
varying height and importance, wearing that air of marking a period, a

definite stop in growth, that so often coexists with quite a reasonable
degree of activity and independence in colonial towns. One could
almost say, standing there in the door at Murchison's, where the line of
legitimate enterprise had been overpassed and where its intention had
been none too sanguine--on the one hand in the faded, and pretentious
red brick building with the false third storey, occupied by Cleary which
must have been let at a loss to dry-goods or anything else; on the other
hand in the solid "Gregory block," opposite the market, where rents
were as certain as the dividends of the Bank of British North America.
Main Street expressed the idea that, for the purpose of growing and
doing business, it had always found the days long enough. Drays
passed through it to the Grand Trunk station, but they passed one at a
time; a certain number of people went up and down about their affairs,
but they were never in a hurry; a street car jogged by every ten minutes
or so, but nobody ran after it. There was a decent procedure; and it was
felt that Bofield--he was dry-goods, too--in putting in an elevator was
just a little unnecessarily in advance of the times. Bofield had only two
storeys, like everybody else, and a very easy staircase, up which people
often declared they preferred to walk rather than wait in the elevator for
a young man to finish serving and work it. These, of course, were the
sophisticated people of Elgin; countryfolk, on a market day, would wait
a quarter of an hour for the young man and think nothing of it; and I
imagine Bofield found his account in the elevator, though he did
complain sometimes that such persons went up and down on frivolous
pretexts or to amuse the baby. As a matter of fact, Elgin had begun as
the centre of "trading" for the farmers of Fox County, and had soon
over-supplied that limit in demand; so