Читать книгу The Master of The Mill - Frederick Philip Grove - Страница 4

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Reliving a past life is a different thing from merely reflecting upon it. So, when, a few days later, things began to crystallize in his mind, the senator rose again from his arm-chair to go to the window and to stare at the mill; his deeply-cut features had been working for some time, even during dinner, which was taken late in this house, with three maids, two footmen, and a butler ministering to the needs of the three members of the household. For no reason whatever the old man had led the way to the smallest of the four drawing-rooms--the 'blue room'--where they had then been sitting for an hour.

As he rose, his eyes had a faraway look in them, as if, mentally, he were in another world--as indeed he was. He was in the world of 1888 when he, though in his thirties, had still been held down by his father in a quite subordinate position in the old, wooden mill.

As always, when he reached the window, he stared out through the glass. But the mill was blurred; it was raining outside; and a gusty wind blew over the lake, so that the reflection of the structure on the water was shattered and broken into a million luminous shards, all blurred by the rain. The mill itself seemed to stand behind a veil; which was appropriate enough; for on April 14, 1888, it had been no more than a dream, suggested by him to his father and eagerly taken up by Rudyard Clark.

At the site of the old portage between two landings where canoes and scow-boats had once had to unload in order to carry their trade goods around the rapids of the North River, there had grown up, by 1888, a small village, the village of Langholm, the sole reason for the existence of which consisted in the rambling, wooden mill at the foot of the rapids.

At the time, the village was formed of one long street, Main Street, which sloped steeply from east to west, lined with two or three stores, butcher shop, drugstore, and a so-called general store which carried everything from shoe-laces to furniture and plough-shares; with a blacksmith shop, a lumber yard, a small real-estate and insurance office thrown in. At its extreme lower end, on its north side, stood a diminutive, one-roomed building, painted white: the office of the mill. At the upper end of Main Street, three or four short side-streets ran at right angles, formed by the houses of the merchants and that of the owner of the mill, Rudyard Clark.

Since, at the foot of the rapids, the river made a swing to the north, the mill lay northwest of the village: a ramshackle compound of structures, all of them low: warehouses filled with flour; granaries filled with wheat; and, of course, the two mill-units properly speaking which roared with the rickety machinery driven by undershot wheels, for the varying volume of water pouring down the rapids forbade the use of the more efficient overshot wheel.

Across the river, near its north bank, and still farther west, stood the station, only a little over ten years old; for it was not till 1875 that the railway had come in; and it had only been three years ago, in 1885, that it had linked the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards. Below the mill, between it and the station, a narrow steel bridge connected the banks.

Over that bridge a messenger came that morning, making for the little office of the mill and bearing a telegram. He delivered it to the single occupant of the office, a man in his thirties named Samuel Clark, son of Rudyard Clark--the same who now, as a senator of Canada, stood there in his extreme old age, looking at the pyramid of the mill blurred by the driving rain and the wind-tossed darkness.

This Samuel Clark, overawed by his father, had, in his early days, attended college at Winnipeg where he had taken a degree in engineering. But his gruff, autocratic father, though secretly proud of his son's academic accomplishments, had promptly set him to work, under Rogers, his foreman, who had successively put him through his paces in every department of the mill, as a common workman, till he had learned the small-scale milling business from the ground up,--though occupied most of the time with dreams and often fuming in revolt against his father. After several years of such labour he had been put in charge of the office where, in addition to him, a man by name of William Swann was employed as a part-time bookkeeper. There, his father told him to 'go to it' and, according to his dreams, solicit orders by mail. In this he had been amazingly successful, for, with the opening of the west for settlement, the east had prospered and expanded.

As, standing in the window of the great hall, he saw himself in that office, he felt strangely moved. He had been young then; and now he was old. He had been ardent, ambitious, and callow; he had been rebellious; for, till he had proved himself to be an efficient salesman, drawing modest emoluments in the form of commissions, his father had used his labour, his ability, his inventiveness as if they had been his own; he had paid him no salary but had handed him an occasional five-dollar bill, perhaps twice a month. When the young man had protested, he had been told that he was being fed and lodged, and that his fourteen-dollar suits were being paid for. These suits, too large, for the Clarks were small men, had formed an additional item in his indictment of the father, for he had hated them.

He had been a dreamer.

The eyes of the old man narrowed, losing their focus, thereby blurring still further the picture of what had come of those dreams: that colossal mill at the foot of the lake.

His efforts at selling the output of the mill by mail had, at first, been slow and up-hill work; but at last they had borne fruit. Here was that telegram: an order from an Ontario firm of bakers--so large that he did not dare to hand the waiting messenger his acceptance without having asked his father whether he could fill it. He rose and reached for his hat to cross over to the mill.

That mill was no longer what his grandfather Douglas had made it. In his day it had been a purely local affair, buying wheat from the straggling and struggling farmers in the bush, grinding it, and selling it at a slight advance to the people of the town; its main income, however, had come from chopping feed and cleaning seed. But when the great Interoceanic Railway had been built, touching the little village as a tangent touches a curve, for it had remained north of the river, it had brought a change, first in outlook, then in fact. A year later, Rudyard Clark, Sam's father, had built the first addition; and from 1880 on warehouses and granaries had gone up in a planless, haphazard way, makeshift after makeshift, every one designed to enlarge capacity for the moment, without plan or thought of a greater future.

The first vision had been Sam's; just as the vision of the dam had been his; and slowly he had imposed it upon his father: the vision of a mill capable of being enlarged as needed without destroying the architectural and technical unity of the whole. When, in the course of time, Rudyard Clark had carried it out, however, he had never given his son the slightest acknowledgement; in fact, he had kept him jealously away from any participation in his counsels.

That morning, as Sam approached the central part of the wooden compound, the original mill which his grandfather had built, he saw, with impatience and irritation, that a farm wagon piled with bags was drawn up along the loading platform. His father was standing in the open slide-door, small, spare, naturally grey and, like the mill and everything near it, dusted white with flour. His right hand was raised to the door-post; his left, resting on his hip. In dealing with farmers, Rudyard Clark had a quick, testy, absent-minded way which, people said, did not help his trade. Yet Sam slowed down; if he intruded, the old man, fifty-odd, might flare up and treat him like a child.

But when Rudyard saw his son, he dropped his hand from the door-post and flung it out sideways, with a decisive gesture. "No," he said in the tone of finality without raising his grating voice. "Not at that price. I don't care to buy retail anyway."

Sam concluded that his approach at this precise moment was not unwelcome. The farmer had apparently had a few bags of grain ground into meal, at five cents a hundredweight, a sort of business for which Rudyard no longer made any bid; and incidentally he had offered the miller last year's wheat crop, at 'the market'. But Rudyard never bought wheat locally at 'the market'. If the farmer sold through the regular channels, brokerage and transportation had to come out of the market price; and the farmer had to wait for his money. Under the pretext that he disliked to interfere with those regular channels, Rudyard made it a point to exact a profitable discount.

But there was something else. It was quite true that Sam's father did not care to buy retail. Farms in this country of rock and forest were small; their crops ran to two or three hundred bushels; since he had found a market in the east, Rudyard had begun to buy by the carload. Sam had seen him watching the great grain trains go by, from the prairies where wheat was beginning to be grown on the large scale: trains of a hundred cars each, every one of them filled with wheat. The West was revealing itself as the last great wheat area of the world; millions of acres awaited the settler. These trains would multiply till there was a steady stream of them: another idea which Sam had implanted in his father. All this grain, this potential wealth, would pour past the little Langholm mill: Langholm might become a sort of gateway between East and West. Behind the father's restless, flickering eyes a new dream had germinated: stop that wheat at Langholm; buy all the West could produce; grind it; sell it to the East, to Europe even; levy a toll on every bushel. What, in comparison, did the local trade amount to? Not that Sam cared about the profits. It was a dream.

In the way of the realization of that dream stood one obstacle: could the mill ever grow to handle that wheat? Could it grow to handle even an appreciable fraction of it?

"Well," the farmer said, frustrated and resentful, "getting high and mighty around this shebang, are you? Might feel the pinch one day if we farmers cease to bring in our chopping."

"I'll risk that," Rudyard said to the upper air with a sneer. "That sort of trade costs more in bookkeeping than it's worth."

"I guess you know your own business," the farmer said, clicking his tongue to his horses.

"I ought to," said Rudyard, unmoved, and turned to his son.

When Sam handed him the telegram, the old man, having glanced at it, said with a sudden alacrity, "Wait. I'll see." And with quick strides he entered the vast white dimness of the mill.

Sam, one elbow propped on the loading platform, stood looking into the wide valley to the east the whole bottom of which, the flood plain, was russet with the stems of dwarf red willows and dusted over with the yellow pollen of the catkins; for it was April.

A minute later his father reappeared out of the cavelike structure. "All right," he said. "Wire your acceptance. We'll work double shift till June."

The vision faded, a thought remained. It was his father who had seized the opportunity; but it was his grandfather Douglas who had created it. Had he known what he was doing? Or was it mere chance that, coming from a little Ontario town, coming, in the last resort, from Devonshire, he had set up his business in this wilderness?

It was only at the time into which the old senator had glanced just now that the supreme wisdom of the choice had become apparent. Douglas himself had prospered in a modest way only by dint of hard work and an unlimited capacity for going without.

Of the few score settlers of his day not half a dozen were left. Most of them, having wasted substance and effort, had 'pulled out' after two or three years. Those that remained in 1888 did so because they lacked even the means of moving their chattels.

But Rudyard, Douglas's only son, had reaped where his father had sown. The supreme wisdom of that choice rested on the fact that the railway, originally surveyed along a line twenty miles north, had, by the pencil stroke of a chief engineer, changed its route so as to utilize the valley of the North River which, apart from the Langholm rapids, had a singularly level course.

Had Douglas foreseen that? Or would he, had he lived, have been as much surprised as Rudyard had been when his son pointed out those stupendous calculations which were to change the old wooden mill with all its additions into that colossal industrial enterprise which had its ramifications throughout a continent and its markets overseas?

For, so the old senator at the window pursued his thought with a sinking of the heart, the acceptance of that order of Friday, April 14, 1888, had had to be cancelled on Monday, April 24.

Most opportunely, the whole mill, with all its additions, grain-bins, warehouses, repair shops, and milling units, had, during the night from Sunday to Monday, been burned to the ground.

And that had cleared the way for the building of the first four and of all the subsequent units of the new mill; for the building of the great dam, repeatedly raised; for the erection of the grain elevators holding hundreds of thousands of bushels of wheat; for the construction of the great office pile, the 'Flour Building' on Main Street and of the equally towering Palace Hotel opposite; as well as for the mushroom growth of the village of Langholm into a city.

Incomprehensibly, on the day after the fire, Rudyard Clark had done what he had never done before: he had handed his son a cheque for $200 and told him to take a month's holiday. At the time of this retrospect the senator knew, of course, that this had been a stratagem to get him out of the way.