The City of Comrades

by Basil King

I talked to Cantyre on the telephone immediately on returning to my hotel. He said that, though in my rooms there were some odds and ends of mail matter which he hadn’t yet forwarded, there was no telegram or Canadian letter. Having called up Annette, I got a repetition of the meager information Miss Barry had given me, though I learned in addition that the funeral was to take place on the following day, which would be Christmas Eve. Her father had already gone to Montreal to take part in the ceremony. The embarrassment of her tone in saying she was surprised that I had received no announcement told me that she was not surprised. It was the last touch to the certainty that I had been omitted with intention.

After that, for a time, my grief gave place to rage. The punishment was so much greater than the crime that my heart cried out against its injustice. Had I stayed down in the depths where I was I should have accepted it phlegmatically; but having made the effort to rise, and made it with some success....

I acquitted my mother and my sister of any share in the injury done to me. My mother was the tenderest little creature God ever made, but she had always been under the domination of my father, and had now come under that of her sons. Never having asserted herself, she would hardly begin to do it at this date, though she might weep her heart out in secret. I knew my sister would put in a good word for me, but as the youngest of the family and a girl she would easily be overruled.

Jack might be mercifully inclined, but he would do as Jerry insisted. Jerry—who as Sir Gerald Melbury would now cut a great swath as head of the family—Jerry would be my father over again. He would be my father over again, only on a smaller scale. My father was tyrannical by instinct; Jerry would be so by imitation. My father believed his word to be law because he didn’t know how to do anything else; Jerry would believe his word to be law in order to be like my father. My father wouldn’t forgive me because I had outraged his affections; Jerry wouldn’t forgive me because my father hadn’t done it first. As far as he could bring it about, my future would be locked and sealed with my father’s death, not because he, Jerry, would be so shocked at my way of life, but because the laws of the Medes and Persians alter not.

Nothing remained for me, then, but to grin and bear it, and bide my time. That I had friends of my own was to me a source of that kind of consolation which is largely pride. Cantyre and the Coningsbys, Regina Barry and her mother—came closer to me now than any one with whom I had ties of blood. “Our relatives,” George Sand writes somewhere, “are the friends given us by Nature; our friends are the relatives given us by God.”

As relatives given me by God I regarded Lovey and Christian and Colonel Straight and Pyn and Beady Lamont and all that band of humble, helpful pals to whom I was knit in the bonds of the “robust love” which was the atmosphere of brave old Walt Whitman’s City of Friends. There was no pose among them, nor condemnation, nor severity. Forgiveness was exercised there till seventy times seven. They forbore one another in love, and endeavored to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace to a degree of which Some One would have said that He had not found the like, no, not in Israel.

My family were all of Israel, and of the strictest sect. They fasted twice in the week, so to speak; in theory, if not in practice, they gave tithes of all that they possessed; they could sincerely thank God that they were not as such men as composed the Down and Out; and yet it was precisely among those who smote their breasts and didn’t dare so much as to lift up their eyes unto heaven that I found the sympathy that raised me to my feet and bade me be a man. No wonder, then, that that evening I kept poor old Lovey near me, that I took him down to the café, where there were only men, and made him dine with me, and told him of my bereavement.

“Is he, now?” he said, drawing a melancholy face. “No one can’t live forever, can they? He’d have been an old, aged man, I expect.”

I told him my father’s age.

“Ah, well, at that time of life they gits carried off. Too bad you didn’t know in time for the funeral. Ye’d ’ave liked to see him laid away safe underground, wouldn’t ye, Slim? I ’ope he was in some good benefit club, like, that’ll take care of the expenses of burial. Awful dear, coffins is; but I suppose your family has a plot in some churchyard.”