Читать книгу Candid Chronicles: Leaves from the Note Book of a Canadian Journalist - Hector Willoughby Charlesworth - Страница 10

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It is perhaps an ironical circumstance that I, who have for much of my life been identified with the theatre and other fields of art, and have with my pen consistently assailed the restrictive tendencies of evangelical religionists, should have been born in a Methodist parsonage. It came about in this wise. I have spoken of one of my great aunts, Harriet Burrell, who became an ardent Methodist. She married an eminent divine of that persuasion, the Rev. Thomas Campbell, D.D., who in later life was for a few years professor (of Exegetics, I assume) at Victoria College, while it was still at Cobourg. I was very young when he died, but I am told that he devoted a great deal of unrewarded energy to trying to prove that this world was created in six days of twenty-four hours. In other words, he was a scholarly fundamentalist—now an extinct species. There are still many fundamentalists but they are not scholars. His son, the Rev. Thomas Campbell, afterwards left Methodism and became Bishop of the Reformed Episcopal Church of the United States. My own recollection of the father was that he was a kind little man, who let me play with the fossils he had accumulated to prove his theories of creation. My father and mother had married in 1871, and in September 1872, when I was expected to arrive on this earth, Dr. Campbell was a Methodist minister at Hamilton. My father was preparing to leave Hamilton and establish a business at Windsor, Ont., so my parents were boarding; and my great aunt Harriet was good enough to offer my mother the ample accommodations of the parsonage for the great event of her young life. So to this day I do not like to hear people speak savagely of Methodists though I must confess that they are often an irritant.

My earliest consciousness of the little boy that was I, is of looking through the gap in a fence at two women with long dark robes and large white head-dresses who were busy among a wilderness of vines cutting great clusters of purple grapes, and chatting in a strange language. One looked up and smiled at me; and after a laughing word to the other, brought me a bunch of grapes, and tried to make me talk. I know now that they were sisters of a French convent near our home in Windsor. The time must have been the autumn of 1875 when I was three years old.

Windsor in the early seventies was by all accounts a lively and picturesque community—not unlike New Orleans in social complexity. It had a considerable negro population of escaped slaves, who had come to Canada by the famous "underground railway" conducted in the fifties by abolitionists. French Canadians, the earliest settlers, were numerous, as they still are; and there was an active and numerous English-speaking commercial class who had made a great deal of money during the Civil War. I recall being terrified of negroes, but delighted with the French boy "Evareece" (Evariste) who was my father's factotum—always merry and a great hand with children. Associated with these early memories is constant sense of moving water. This was, of course, the Detroit River, where my mother used to take her three babies for an airing on the ferries. I also recall a jolly gentleman with red whiskers, who lived next door and used to look over the fence at me and say, "Bless his little heart and body!" This early acquaintance was destined to have important developments for me; for the rosy gentleman who loved children was Tom Davey, the leading theatrical manager of Detroit, a noted figure in his time and father of a still more noted daughter, Minnie Maddern Fiske (born Davey). Twenty years later, I told Mrs. Fiske, who had become a noted star, of my early memory of her father, and it cemented a friendship that has lasted through three decades. Minnie Maddern, whose mother was an actress, was even then on the stage, and my mother in after years told me of how Tom Davey took her to Detroit to see his little girl, then a child of tender years, play Arthur to the King John of the famous tragedian, John McCullough.

The friendship of Tom Davey was worth possessing, apart from his own charming personality, for my father and mother were at all times welcome in his theatre, where all the renowned actors played. At that time every prominent merchant in Windsor maintained a neatly equipped room for the convenience of shoppers who came over from Detroit and to avoid customs duties disposed their purchases about their persons. My father dealt in fine shoes and had a factory for the manufacture of special orders; and Davey used to bring many an actor and actress across the river to deal with him. This special order business, conducted for the most part on a smuggling basis, was my father's undoing as will presently be disclosed. Among the celebrities whom Davey brought to procure long boots suitable for Shakespearian roles was Lawrence Barrett, the tragedian; and there were dealings with many lesser lights. Thus the country youth who had never seen a really fine play until he was twenty became, before he was thirty, a devotee and habitué of the playhouse. I picked up incidentally from Davey a knowledge of the technique of acting which he imparted to me when I as a very young man took up dramatic criticism. Another of my friends in Windsor was Col. Arthur Rankin, whose son McKee Rankin was already becoming famous as an actor. Col. Rankin, who had represented Essex in the old Legislature of Canada, was credited with having fought six duels, and once sent a challenge to Sir John Macdonald, which was ignored. He was one of the early advocates of game preservation and a great sportsman, as indeed were all the well-to-do Windsorites, for wild turkey and quail were at that time abundant in the Essex peninsula, especially on the tract that has since been set apart as Rondeau Park.

Though my father arrived in Windsor only at the end of 1872, he threw himself headlong into politics, which were at that time in a fevered condition owing to the famous "Pacific Scandal", which seems a trivial affair enough in the light of immensely greater scandals which have since occurred in Ottawa politics. He was an ardent supporter of Sir John A. Macdonald, the statesman chiefly assailed. In the legislative elections of 1875, he was one of those who succeeded in electing the Conservative John C. Patterson, afterwards Lieutenant-Governor of Manitoba, for the riding of North Essex. It was a hotly contested battle, and though the Conservatives triumphed in Essex, the party went down to defeat in the country as a whole, and the five years of the Alexander Mackenzie régime began. My father's ardour led to his selection as President of the Windsor Conservative Association. He also entered Windsor Council for an electoral district in which many of the voters were ex-slaves. Those were the days of open voting and when the negroes when asked how they wished to vote, "Massa Chollesworth" was the usual answer. But political partizanship is always a hazardous thing for a business man.

I have spoken of the special-order phase of my father's shoe business. He was not a practical shoemaker, but merely a salesman and organizer. He had picked up an expert to run his little factory; and when an order came for a pair of actor's boots lined with peach-colored silk, or to be made of some special kind of leather not obtainable in Windsor, this foreman would cross the river to Detroit and buy the necessary materials. No one ever thought of declaring small purchases of that kind. As time went on this foreman, though a valuable mechanic, took to liquor and became exceedingly truculent. One day in 1876 my father incautiously dismissed him, and the fellow at once reported to the Customs Department that my father had been engaged in smuggling for three years. It was technically true, though the items were mere bagatelles; but my father was a marked man because he was an active Conservative and the Mackenzie régime was rabidly Reform. The Customs Collector was himself one of my father's closest personal friends; and it was with tears in his eyes that he broke the news to him that he had been instructed to seize and confiscate his business. There was no redress, but on the Collector's representations my father was allowed $500 cash for the enterprise in which he had sunk all he had, and the energy of three of the best years of his life. It is hardly to be wondered at that all his life the word "Grit" was more or less anathema to him; and that later when he was teaching me to ride he would point to some man who looked especially awkward and ill at ease in the saddle and say: "Look at that fellow; anyone could tell from the way he sits that he's a Grit."

Luck came his way, however, for at Toronto an enterprising manufacturer had decided to establish one of the earliest Canadian experiments in chain stores in order to market his product. My father was appointed manager of the new enterprise. It was his duty to select the points at which it was advisable to open new stores or acquire existing business establishments. The chain store system, though it looks very profitable on the surface, has always been extremely hazardous both in Canada and the United States. At all times it requires sufficient capital to provide amply for each individual enterprise, and much depends on the efficiency and honesty of the local manager. It can only be successfully operated under the modern system of a quick cash turnover; whereas fifty years ago all Canadian retail business was conducted on the credit system. The profits in one town were absorbed by the losses in another; and under the credit system cash did not come in quickly enough to meet the expenses of the parent manufacturing plant at Toronto. This was, I think, the invariable experience of men who experimented with the chain store idea prior to the adoption of the cash system. The originator of this project carried on as long as he could, and finally threw up the sponge and fled to Australia. The retail stores were disposed of and the manufacturing plant was carried on by others until, finally in the early eighties, my father obtained sufficient backing to take it over in his own name.

I remember vividly my first arrival in Toronto one bright autumn day in 1876, when I had just turned four years old. It was in the old, domed train-shed, which still forms part of the Union Station, and I have still the picture of my father, a tall, slender, boyish-looking man of twenty-nine running along the platform to help my mother down with her babies. It was so far as I know the occasion of my first ride in a hack; and the vehicle drew up in front of a little house on the south side of a hot road on which the yellow sand lay deeply rutted. This was on Bloor Street East on the northern fringe of what was then the city of Toronto. It seemed strange to me to be told that while I stayed in my own front yard I was in Toronto, but that if I broke rules and crossed the road I would be in another place, Yorkville, one of the many villages which have gone to make up the modern Toronto.

Not long after we moved across the road into Yorkville to occupy what seemed to my childish eyes then a very large, square, roughcast house, surrounded by shade trees and nearly opposite Church Street. It was subsequently removed when the late Robert Simpson decided to build a home there. Next door was the home of John O. Heward, member of a well-known family. A little further along toward Yonge Street, was the home of Senator McMaster (now Moulton College), and the old Hubertus home. To the east across a delightful lane, where ragged lady and golden rod bloomed, was the residence of Sir Frank Smith, and beyond that the residence of Robert Wilkes, the leading wholesale jeweller of the time, who was almost as prominent in the counsels of the Reform party as was Sir Frank in those of the Tories.

It was in connection with Mr. Wilkes that I have my first recollections of tragedy. The Wilkes children were many, and were the playmates of the Charlesworth brood. One summer holiday my father had taken my brother and myself to Port Hope to see our grandmother. Returning on the night train we saw several of the Wilkes children come aboard at Whitby Junction. We spoke to them but they seemed dazed and looked as though they had been crying. To our dismay they passed on down the aisle without answering our greeting. As my father was paying the hackman who drove us home to Yorkville, the latter said: "That was pretty sad about Mr. Wilkes down at Sturgeon Point to-day," and then we learned that he had been drowned together with his only son and one of his daughters. It had been a chain of calamities: the boy had gotten beyond his depth; and his sister had rushed to his rescue and found herself helpless; then the father went to their aid, and all three perished. The drowning of Robert Wilkes caused very widespread grief, for he was very eminent, not merely as a business man and a Liberal politician, but as a leader of Methodism; and I still recall the picture of the mute grief-stricken little girls on the train who had been the eye-witnesses of the tragedy.

The corners of Bloor and Yonge Streets are now for the most part of the day the busiest traffic intersection in Toronto and probably in Canada, but in my childhood they were very quaint. The Hon. Frank Smith's little horse-cars used to come up Yonge Street to that point, and there the horses would be changed to the other end for the down trip. In winter the heating was provided by pea-straw strewn on the floor. Just north of Bloor Street was an old inn with a courtyard, very like the pictures in some of Dickens's novels. It was called the "Red Lion", and it had a swinging sign with a fiery red animal painted thereon, supposed to represent the King of Beasts. Yorkville was indeed a single parish in which nearly all the leading residents knew each other.

On leaving Windsor my father promised my mother to give up active participation in politics, and he kept his word; though he always remained an enthusiastic Tory. My own earliest recollection of a political campaign is of the election of September, 1878, when the N. P. (National Policy) was the issue, and Macdonald defeated Mackenzie. I was confused over the distinction between the letters "N.P." and "M.P." which I heard on all sides. Yorkville was in the Prime Minister's (Mackenzie's) constituency, and politics naturally seethed there. My father came in at dinner time on election day jubilant because Alfred Boultbee, the Conservative candidate had carried Yorkville against Mackenzie, but subsequent returns showed that Mackenzie had defeated him in the rural districts. This was his only consolation, for he had gone down to defeat in the country, and his subsequent treatment by his own party proved one of the shabbiest episodes in Canadian politics. He had been in the habit of saying on the platform that the Tories were by nature deceitful and incurably "wicked", but he soon learned that, however deceitful and wicked, they could outshine opponents in the rare virtue of gratitude. Twenty years later I used frequently to see the former Prime Minister on the streets, and no man ever wore a more mournful countenance.

I never learned why my father and mother, in selecting an Anglican Church to ally themselves with, chose the Church of the Redeemer, then a frame building on the north side of Bloor Street, set in what had been the "Potters Field" or pauper burying ground, instead of St. Paul's, the pretty little stone church which lay just across the street. It may have been that since we resided on the north side of the street we properly belonged to the parish of the Church of the Redeemer as a Yorkville institution; and that St. Paul's lying in Toronto, over the way, had the right to the south side as its territory. But I rather think the explanation lay in the fact that Canon Givens of St. Paul's was aging, whereas the Rev. Septimus Jones of the Church of the Redeemer was an active, vigorous man, with a family of whom everyone was taught from childhood to be a parish worker. At any rate the Rev. Mr. Jones and his family became our very first friends; and James Edmund Jones, K.C., Police Magistrate of Toronto, is my very oldest surviving male acquaintance.

The Rev. Septimus Jones was a man of distinguished personality, whose rare business ability was always strongly manifested in the deliberations of the Synod. He was one of the leaders of the Evangelical or Low Church wing, though his utterances were always moderate. He was a devotee of music, and liked to lock himself in his study and play the violin; and he had been one of the choristers of the Philharmonic Society as re-organized under Dr. Torrington in 1873. When the safety bicycle came he took to its use, and actually rode to Hamilton one day when in his seventieth year. He had a dry, pungent wit, which was never used to hurt anybody's feelings. At Sunday school it used to delight the children when he would tell of having seen, as a little boy in England seated on the shoulder of his father, the coronation of Queen Victoria; and of the cloaked gentleman with a large arched nose who rode beside the carriage of the young Queen, and seemed in very truth her guardian. This was the great Duke of Wellington.

It was through Mr. Jones's efforts that the stone edifice now known as the Church of the Redeemer at the corner of Bloor Street and Avenue Road was erected; and presently we moved into that vicinity to be near it. More than ever we were in the heart of a parish for almost every second person thereabout attended the church and all were pleasant, agreeable neighbours. Within a very few years, owing to the growth of Toronto and the movement of its people northward, the Church of the Redeemer became the leading evangelical church of the diocese, holding a very close connection with Wycliffe College as a training ground for divinity students. Naturally as a child I heard much of the great battle between High Church and Low Church, then at its height, and saw something of its leading figures.

The environs of the University of Toronto, when we moved to the neighbourhood of Avenue Road in 1880, were very different from now. A large tract now covered by the buildings of Victoria College, Annesley Hall, and the Domestic Science edifice was rented out by the bursar of the University as a cow pasture; for many residents in the vicinity kept their own cows, which was considered the safer course for families with young children, in those days when typhoid fever was rife. As a boy of nine or ten it was my duty to bring our cow home with me on my way from school. When I lost the key of the pasture, I had to go trembling to the bursar's office to procure a new one. I wonder how the present business staff of the University would take it if their duties included the conduct of a cow pasture. Below the knoll where Victoria College stands was a marshy patch where dragon flies of myriad hues were to be seen on summer days. The Torontonians of to-day are little aware of how much of the city is built on marsh land, once traversed by many small streams. A military map of 1828 shows a veritable network of them, and building contractors laying the foundations of large buildings often discover this disagreeable fact. A stream once ran under what are now the foundations of Massey Hall, though this was long before my time. I distinctly remember as a little boy in the seventies a stagnant pond which submerged the valley in which Hart House stands in its chaste beauty. It was a disgusting place, but was drained before 1880; long after, a stream ran through the valley beside the present site of the Royal Ontario Museum, and dispersed itself I know not where. I am not very old, but the city of to-day except for a few landmarks would be quite unrecognizable to a returning stranger who revisited it after forty years' absence.

The quiet parochial life of Yorkville and the college district was even then shot through with the spirit of growth, and there were prophets seemingly rash who predicted that Toronto would some day be a city of 200,000. But to most people this seemed ridiculous commercial optimism. Whenever I read one of Booth Tarkington's later novels like The Magnificent Ambersons and The Midlander, which have as their underlying motif the growth and mutability of cities, I am reminded of the processes which have taken place in Toronto within my own experience; and which have extinguished the old professional and academic aristocracy of my boyhood.

To our own household, glimpses of a wilder and less parochial life came to us from a woman still celebrated in the annals of Winnipeg, Fort William, and Port Arthur,—the late Victoria MacVicar. I have spoken of the relatives of my great grandfather left behind in the West when with his wife and baby son he made his way from the Red River Settlement to Montreal. The parents of Victoria MacVicar were among these. She was my grandfather's first cousin, though many years younger. Her elder brother, John MacVicar, is said to have been the first white child born within the Arctic circle, at some Hudson's Bay Company post the name of which I have forgotten. Subsequently the MacVicars settled at Prince Arthur's Landing, now Port Arthur, and owned the land on the waterfront which is now occupied by the Canadian Pacific Railway, and Victoria became the business woman of the family.

On her many visits to Toronto "Vic" MacVicar, as my mother called her, was always welcome to make our home her own; she was a wonderful hand with children. The tales she had to tell of Indians, and of her childhood in Fort Garry and other Western outposts, were fascinating. One of her stories of a narrow escape from the Sioux, then on the warpath, made the chills run down our spines. Mother used to say, "Vic keeps the family tree"; and in one way or another she seemed to be connected with almost everybody in the Canadian West. We heard much from her of her friend Donald Smith, afterwards Lord Strathcona, and of Major Boulton of Boulton's Scouts, whose life she had helped to save in 1870. I think her stories of a wonderful chain of relationships must have been true. Two or three years ago my friend W. J. Healy, Provincial Librarian of Manitoba, collected the narratives of the older survivors of early days in the West for his book Women of Red River, and several of his informants mention Victoria MacVicar as a relative.

She came into especial prominence in connection with Louis Riel's first rising in 1870. The picture she gave us of Riel was quite different from the villainous conception we all had of him in the East after his second rising in 1885, for which he was tried and hanged. They had been boy and girl together, and at one time Riel was in love with her. She spoke of him as a dreamy, handsome, clever youth, half mad with ambition. I think history bears out this view. Riel seems to have gotten an idea of creating a kingdom of his own in the Canadian West similar to that which Aaron Burr failed to establish in the region of the Southern Mississippi. At any rate, Victoria MacVicar had a great deal of influence over Riel; and when he started his rebellion in 1870 she was sent for to come from Fort William and see what she could do with him. She found that he had imprisoned a large number of white residents of Fort Garry and was threatening them with death as a reprisal for the accidental killing of a crazy follower of his. After several interviews she did finally induce Riel to release all but Thomas Scott, whom to his own misfortune, he ordered to be shot. It was memory of the murder of Scott that closed the door to a reprieve for him in 1885 after his second rising, when Blake, Laurier, and other prominent statesmen of the East were demanding it. Riel was at first adamant in the case of Major Boulton. She regarded Boulton as doomed, and as a last recourse sent for a woman whose son had been killed. The latter's persuasion, added to her own, won the day.

Victoria MacVicar told us that after the release had been arranged, Riel said, "Victoria, I want you to stay and breakfast with me." Whereat she rushed from the room with the words, "I will never break bread with a rebel." If true it seems to me a tasteless and indiscreet outburst, though characteristically feminine. But Riel was gentleman enough to keep his word, and she honoured him for that. Probably he knew that she was an intense loyalist who from childhood had taken very seriously the fact that she was named after Princess Victoria, while the latter was heiress apparent.

Victoria MacVicar's visits to us were frequent during the whole period of the second Riel affair, which with the trial and subsequent agitation lasted long. It troubled her that this friend of childhood was to be hanged. She was an ardent spiritualist, like so many persons who have lived in the wilds; and related a singular story of psychic occurrences on the occasion in the autumn of 1885 when he was executed at Regina. She was at that time visiting Chicago, and early on the morning of the fatal day visited a medium to learn whether he was really to hang or whether a reprieve had arrived at the last moment. While the interview was in progress, she avowed that the face of the medium, who had gone into a trance as part of the usual ritual, changed horribly. Then she heard a sound like the pulling of a bolt, and the medium said, "Your friend has passed into the beyond." But she did not get a message from Riel, which I assume was what she sought. My mother warned us children that this was all nonsense, the work of Victoria's too vivid imagination. But it was blood-curdling to hear her relate it with absolute conviction. She was a tall raw-boned Scotswoman with a weather-beaten countenance, roughened by Western winds. But she had grey piercing eyes and a fine voice that made any tale of hers astonishingly graphic.

With all her mysticism she was a wonderfully competent woman of affairs. The mission which brought her so frequently to Toronto was a three-cornered dispute over the expropriation by the C.P.R. of her holdings at Prince Arthur's Landing—a dispute in which the Ontario Ministry of Crown Lands was also involved, in the matter of water-lot rights. Single-handed she battled with officials of both railway and government, and was, if I remember rightly, her own lawyer in most of the negotiations. And she finally got a cash settlement of $90,000. Her end was rather sad. After she obtained this settlement, she commissioned my father to choose for her a matched team of black roadster horses. They were beautiful animals, but too spirited for a woman driver. One day while she was driving on the waterfront of Port Arthur they ran away, and she never fully recovered from the injuries she then sustained—a tragedy for so active and vital a being.