The Land of Afternoon: A Satire

by Gilbert Knox

The Dillings had come to Ottawa joyously, eager to accept its invitation and to become identified with its interests. They were less flattered by the call than elated by it. Neither of them expected merely to skim the pleasures offered by life in the Capital; they were acutely alive to their responsibilities, and were ready to assume them. They hoped to gain something from the great city, it is true, but equally did they long to give. Everyone who was privileged to live in Ottawa must, they imagined, have something of value to contribute to their country, and the Dillings welcomed the opportunity to serve rather than be served.

But when Marjorie thought of Pinto Plains, of its gay simplicity and warm friendliness, the three months that marked her absence from it, stretched themselves out like years. On the other hand, when she considered how little progress she had made in adapting herself to the formal ways of the Capital, they shrunk into so many days; hours, indeed. So far as happy transplanting was concerned, she might even now be stepping off the train, a stranger.

Raymond Dilling, a country schoolmaster still in his thirties, had strong predilections towards politics, and saw in this move a coveted opportunity for the furtherance of his ambitions. Yet the idealist who shared his mortal envelope believed with Spencer: “None can be happy until all are happy; none can be free until all are free,” and he fought sternly to crush a budding and dangerous individualism. With a little less ambition and response to the altruistic urge—public service—he would have remained a country schoolmaster to the end of his days. As it was, he heard the evocation of Destiny for higher things, read law as an avenue to what seemed to him the primrose path of politics, and grasped the hand of opportunity before it was definitely thrust towards him. He lived in the West during its most provocative period—provocative, that is, for a man of imagination—but he never caught the true spirit of the land, he never felt his soul respond to the lure of its fecundity, its spaciousness, its poignant beauty. The sun always set for him behind the grain elevators, and it never occurred to him to lift his eyes to the eternal hills . . .

Dilling was scarcely conscious of his soul. Had he been, he would have set about supplying it with what he conceived to be its requirements. Of his mind, on the other hand, he was acutely aware, and he fed it freely on Shakespeare, Milton, and the King James’ Bible, copies of which were always to be found on the parlour table save between the hours of six and seven in the morning, when he held them in his abnormally long, thin hands. By following the example of those two great figures, Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate, Dilling hoped to acquire a similarly spacious vocabulary and oratorical persuasiveness.

He was a bit of a dreamer, too, believing in Party as the expression of the British theory of Government. He was simply dazed when he heard the ante-bellum ideas of group government, the talk of Economic Democracy and the Gospel of the I.W.W., which was merely Prudhon’s epigram—“La Propriété c’est vol,” writ large.

He had secured nomination for Parliament through the finesse of the Hon. Godfrey Gough, who recognised his dialectical supremacy over that of any other man in the West. Gough was the âme damnée of the vested interests, and so clever was his advocacy that it captivated Dilling into whole-hearted support of their political stratagems, and made it easy for him to bring them into alignment with his conscience. But he did so without hope of pecuniary reward. He was honest. During his entire career, he held temptation by the throat, as it were, determined that no selfish advantage or gain should deflect him from unremitting endeavour for the Nation’s good. No parliamentary success attained, nor honours received, should be less than a meed for a faithful adherence to high principles.

He had never talked much with politicians, but he had been talked to by them. On these occasions, it was not apparent to him that they were striving to maintain politics on its lowest plane, rather than to achieve the ideal commonwealth that is supposed to be the end and aim of their profession. He read into their speeches and conversations the doctrine with which he, himself, was impregnated, and the thought of working side by side with these men, aroused in him an emotion akin to consecration . . .

For years Marjorie had pictured Ottawa much as she had pictured Bagdad—The City of Mystery and a Thousand Delights—a place of gracious boulevards and noble architecture, where highly intelligent people occupied themselves with the performance of inspired tasks. And she thought of it as the Heart of the Great Dominion, as necessary to the national body as the human heart is essential to the physical body, transmitting the tide of national life to the very finger-tips of civilisation.

And often, down in the secret places of her self, she had even a more solemn thought—that Ottawa was the Chalice of a Nation’s Hopes, and that merely to look upon it would produce an effect like that of entering some Holy Temple. Sin and sadness would disappear, and even the most degenerate must be led there to spiritual refreshment and transfiguration.

Nor did she stand alone; most of her friends were of the same opinion. They linked themselves to the Capital as closely as they were able, and informed themselves minutely concerning its activities, by careful study of the daily press. They read the Parliamentary news first—this was a sacred duty; they wrote papers on politicians and politics for their clubs, and spoke with a certain reverent intimacy of the People in the Public Eye. But most of all they enjoyed the social notes, the description of the gowns, and the tidbits of gossip that crept into the columns of their papers! Even the accidents, the obscure births and deaths that occurred in Ottawa, were invested with a stupendous importance in their eyes.