The City of Comrades

by Basil King

She fell back again into her corner of the chair, withdrawing her hand. I, too, fell back into my corner, staring out through the wind-shield. Knowing that by not saying no she was really saying yes, I was obliged not only to get possession of the fact, but to control my sense of it.

I may say at once that it was the first sudden shock of my life. Every other trial had come to me by degrees—I had more or less seen it on the way and had been ready to meet it. This was something I had hardly ever thought of. That it might happen some time had been vaguely in the back of my mind, of course; but I had never considered it as an event of the day and hour. Now that it had occurred, my mental heavens seemed to fall.

I have told you so little of my family life that you hardly realize the degree to which my father was its center and support. My memory cannot go back to the time when he was not an important man, not only in the estimation of his children, but in that of the entire country. One of the youngest of that group of men who in the ’sixties and ’seventies took the scattered colonies of Great Britain lying north of the border of the United States and welded them into a gigantic, prosperous whole, he had outlived all but the sturdiest of his contemporaries. With Macdonald, Mount Stephen, Strathcona and a few others he had had the vision of a new white man’s empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Arctic, and through good times and evil he had never let it go. That there were evil times as well as good ones is a matter of history; but however dark the moment, my father was one of those who never lost for a fraction of an instant his belief in ultimate success. In helping to build up the vast financial system of the Canadian Pacific Railway there was no door, in Europe or America, where money could be borrowed at which he did not knock. There were days when the prospect was so hopeless and the treasury so empty that he was obliged to pledge everything he possessed, and after that to use nothing but his honor and his name. The winning out is one of the fairy-tales of the modern world. He had begun to reap his reward just as my memory of him opens. Of his days of struggle I knew only by hearsay. By the time I was five he was already a man of considerable wealth, honored throughout the Dominion, honored in Great Britain, and one of the eight or ten Canadian baronets created by the Queen.

I see him as tall, spare, and vigorous, with thin, clear-cut, clean-shaven features, a piercing eye, and a mouth that sagged at the corners not from dejection, but from determination. Spartan in his own life, he required his children to be Spartan in theirs. Though with our added means our manner of living increased in dignity, it gained little in the way of luxury; and many were the shifts to which my brothers and I were pushed to indulge the follies of young men.

My brothers did this no more than experimentally, covering their tracks and returning to right ways before their digressions could be noticed. I was invariably caught, coming in for some dramatic moments with my father, which increased in tension with the years. I have often wondered what his own youth could have been that he had so little mercy on what was at first not much worse than high spirits and boisterousness. Though I am far from blaming any one but myself for my ultimately going wrong, I have sometimes thought that a gentler handling might have led me aright when sheer repression only made me obstinate. That gentler handling my mother would have given me had not my father felt that it was weak. This knowledge only added to my perversity, the result being a state of continuous rebellion on my part and permanent displeasure on his.

“You’re getting in worse and worse with the old man,” my brother Jack warned me a few months before I left Montreal for good. “I heard him telling mother that if you didn’t turn over a new leaf he’d cut you out of his will.”

The information that he had so cut me out was the last form of appeal he ever made to me. I didn’t believe he meant it otherwise than as a bluff—a stroke of the pen could have reinstated me; but merely as a bluff it angered me. It implied that I might be induced to do for money what I hadn’t done for love or duty, and I was foolish enough to consider it part of my manhood to prove that any one who so judged me was mistaken. In that phase of my misguided life there was a kind of crazy, Cordelia-like attempt to show my father that it was not because of his money that I cared for him—or didn’t care for him; but all I succeeded in doing was to rouse the resentment of a man who had hardly ever been defied.

But I had repented of that kind of bravado long before I had repented of anything else. My letter to him in October had been quite sincere. To be cut out of his will had never meant anything to me but the loss of his affection. I was sorry for that loss, sorrier than any words I have could tell you. But when he wrote to me, in answer to my October letter, I knew from his tone that I had definitely killed whatever had once existed between him and me, and that all that was left for me was to bury it. I had been trying to bury it for the past eight weeks, and I do not deny that the effort was a bitter one.

You must understand that I had now come in for a set of emotions that had not belonged to me before I went to the Down and Out. I can explain it only on the ground that months of abstinence from anything that could inflame the senses or disturb the poise of the mind had induced a sanity of judgment to which I had been a stranger. In this new light I was really a prodigal son—not from any hope of a ring on my hand or the fatted calf, but genuinely from affection for the parents I had wronged.

To have this impulse to arise and go to my father thrown back on itself was the hardest thing in my experience. Somehow I had kept the conviction that if ever I repented that door would be open to my return. It had not really occurred to me that they wouldn’t say at home, “It is meet that we should make merry and be glad.” That my brothers might refuse to join in the chorus was a possibility. That my sister might not be over-enthusiastic in doing so I should be able to understand. But that my father and mother.... Throughout my stay in Atlantic City I had been saying to myself, “Well, if I’ve thrust a sword into your hearts, old dears, you’ve jolly well thrust one into mine; and so we’re quits.”