Читать книгу There are Victories - Charles Yale Harrison - Страница 14

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Francis Steele—Uncle Francis as he was known in the Throop ménage—was Mrs. Throop’s oldest brother. He was a man of spotless repute: upright, God-fearing, a lay pillar of the Church. His Grace, the Bishop of Montreal, continually referred to him as “a worthy man, a very worthy man, indeed,” and the Throops were excessively and particularly proud of the fact that the fame of Uncle Francis had spread to Rome, where the Holy Father had been apprised of Mr. Steele’s benefactions. In business—his business was timberlands in Northern Quebec and Ontario—Steele was cautious, prudent and at all times realistic, which, he was fond of remarking, was as it should be. Although he was quick to seize upon all modern ideas in his business, in the matter of personal appearance he was reactionary. Until the day he died he clung to the mutton-chop whiskers of the Eighteen-Eighties, the square brown bowler hat and suit to match. His picture, which often appeared in the newspapers, revealed a high forehead and benevolent expression.

Two years before the time when Ruth left the convent, he had made a pilgrimage to Rome where he had knelt before His Holiness and kissed the papal ring. He never tired of telling of his experiences in Rome and of a Sunday when he dined at the Throops’ (he was a bachelor) he recounted the glories of the Holy City in all their minute details: St. Peter’s, the Swiss Guards, the distinctive apparel of the cardinals and the papal secretaries. It was usually tea time before he reached the part where he had genuflected before the Holy Father.

“Apparently Monsignor Bruchesi had sent word ahead of my coming,” he said, “for when I knelt before His Holiness, he looked straight into my eyes, sir—straight into my eyes, and I could have sworn that he recognized me. Perhaps it was my pictures in the Star. Well, there I was kneeling before the Pope and suddenly he smiled.”

This remark was always received in the most solemn silence, everyone being agreed that when a pope smiled it was no matter for idle levity. Satisfied with the effect his story was creating, Steele would continue:

“Of course I did not smile but simply bowed my head and leaned forward just a trifle to kiss the ring. You may think I am exaggerating, but I am not, as I put my lips to the ring, he pressed it”—Steele uttered the word he as though it were capitalized,—“firmly against my mouth. A sort of gesture of recognition, I should say.”

At this point in his narrative Steele brought his hands together, fingers tip to tip, and closed his eyes. Apart from his sideburn whiskers his hands were the most noticeable part of his person. The fingers were inordinately long and tapered toward meticulously manicured nails; they were the sort of fingers which most people associate with pianists. They were strangely lustrous as if they had an inner light which gave life to their pallor. As the family listened in respectful silence he continued:

“That wasn’t all that happened in Rome. Did you ever hear of the flagellants?” As no one replied, he remarked: “Ah, there are Catholics. Of course that sort of thing couldn’t go on in Canada, or England, for that matter. But just the same, it was splendid to see Catholics who take their religion seriously; not like the Americans, for example, who are simply trying to make Catholicism bigger and better as they do in most things.”

By this time the supper of cold cuts and a bottle of imported English ale was ready.

The story of Steele’s pilgrimage to Rome seldom varied and there was a sort of ritual about it. It was always told in the drawing room with the narrator standing with legs apart before the fireplace whether it was winter or summer, while before him the Throops, the Major, Ruth, and her mother, sat in rapt and respectful attitudes. And, indeed, Steele merited respect and the awe of his relatives, not only because of his pilgrimage to Rome and his audience with the Pope, but also because of his great wealth and power. His connections with the Steeles of London made it possible to secure positions in the Grand Trunk Railway offices for the host of lesser and importuning Steeles and Throops in Montreal. It was a known fact in Montreal that when one said Steele one meant Grand Trunk.

To Ruth, even now that she was sixteen and looked at life with the mild skepticism which marks that age in some matters, her uncle seemed too utterly important and grand to be true. His pontifical manner, his reputation as a millionaire, the Steele tradition (never very clearly defined), and his public benefactions, caused him to appear in the eyes of his niece as a species of lay archbishop. True, he lacked the white woolen pallium with its four purple crosses, but then his graying sideburn whiskers, his squarish bowler hat and his grand manner set him apart from men made of more common clay. In the circumscribed provincial world in which Ruth lived, Steele was the personification of all that really mattered. To her he was the Church, morality, the British Empire (of which Canada was the pivotal point), economic security, the representative of the English-speaking race, as distinct from the teeming French-Canadians who spawned east of St. Lawrence Boulevard.

During the summer the Throops used his estate on the Gaspé peninsula which jutted into the clear waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence; in the wintertime there were theater parties and concerts at His Majesty’s Theatre, and when he was abroad there were presents sent from foreign cities: shawls from Paisley, combs from Madrid, perfumes from Paris, printed music from Berlin, and on Ruth’s birthday he called in the afternoon with a little chamois bag which contained five hundred dollars in gold—jingling gold coins which he had just gotten from the St. James Street office of the Bank of Montreal, “as sound as the Bank of England.” He was always present at her birthdays and even when she was in the convent he had deposited a substantial check to the account (which he had opened on the day when she was born) of Ruth Courtney, in trust. At the parties he drank the very mild punch, made a fuss about the bringing of the birthday cake (there was always a joke about the number of candles, he deliberately made errors in counting them) and was the last to leave.

In St. James Street, where he conducted his business in pulp and paper, Steele was held in high esteem. He was shrewd, to be sure, but he was always ready to do a favor and if he sometimes wiped out a competitor, this, too, was to be expected. He was, as the British like to say, a man’s man. At five o’clock, after a day’s work, he stood up against the St. Regis bar and drank his gin and bitters with members of the banking and commercial fraternity. Here the talk was of timberland options, the grain and stock markets and the silver mines of Northern Ontario. Among the smartly dressed younger men of the street, Steele’s antiquated attire set him apart and stamped him as a businessman of the old school; safe, conservative and reliable.

But his mode of dress was a mere idiosyncrasy. He enjoyed a roistering supper at the Knights of Columbus and detested the mournful philosophy of the Canadian Protestants; he favored Sunday amusements, baseball and lacrosse (although as late as 1912 he deplored baseball as a Yankee importation). At a stag dinner he was gay, and towards the end, when the brandy was being served, he could tell a spicy story with the best of the youngsters.

“Nothing dirty, mind you. I’m dead set against smut for smut’s sake.”

He was fond of the story which concerned a method of distinguishing the spelling of the feminine Frances from the masculine Francis “which happens to be my own name,” he explained. “The looped ‘e’ reminds one of the young lady while the perpendicular ‘i’ is properly reminiscent of the young fellow.”

But such levity occurred on rare occasions and was promptly forgotten the following day. On St. James Street, at the Bishop’s residence, he was circumspect, dignified, and in proper fear of the Lord.