Dilling stared out of the window, too, but he did not see the lovers, the Armouries, the Laurier Avenue Bridge, the Arena, nor the warehouses flanked by the Russell Hotel. He saw a straggling little lumber village, gay with the costumes of Red Men, voyageurs, and the uniforms of sappers and miners, who were at work on the Canal. What a mammoth undertaking and how freighted with significance! By the building of a hundred and twenty-six miles of waterway that linked Kingston with the infant Bytown, English statesmen provided an expedient for adding to the impregnability of the British Empire!
“War,” he mused. “How it has stimulated the ingenuity of man! With sacrifice, with blood and tears, we carve a niche for ourselves out of the resistant rock, in the hope that there we will find peace, but immediately the task is finished, we set ourselves to fortify it against the hour of war.”
He pictured the Cave Dweller, bent over his crude instruments of destruction, clubs of bone and stone, which, in all probability, the modern man could scarcely lift. He considered the inventor of primitive projectiles. That was a long step toward the mechanism of modern homicide. One could lie, ambushed, behind a mound and use a sling, a boomerang, a blow-pipe or a javelin, and arrows . . . he gave a mental shudder and thanked God that he had not lived a hundred years ago. There was something about an Indian that made his flesh creep; a traditional antagonism that he did not try to overcome. The romance of the Red Man never gripped him. Like all unimaginative people, his prejudices were sharp and immutable.
He picked the word “blunderbuss” from a confusion of pictures that combined Gibraltar and Queenston Heights, and cumbrous cannon that were dangerous alike to friend and foe, and repeated,
“War! Always fashioning some new tool to strengthen the hand of Death. They spent a million pounds on a ‘military measure’ to safeguard the Colony from invasion on the South . . . and behold, the Rideau Canal!”
He started when Marjorie thrust parcels into his arms, and observed that at last they had arrived.
Azalea met them at the station. She had opened their tiny house, and with the assistance of Mrs. Plum had put it in order.
Hers had been an exceptionally uneventful summer, and she had looked forward to the Dillings’ return with an impatience that astonished her.
From the last of June until the first of September, Ottawa is like a City of the Dead. Despite the fact that these are the pleasantest weeks of the year, the town is deserted by every one who can get away, even though the exodus extends no farther than Chelsea, on the other side of the river. But Azalea hadn’t even got so far, this summer. Her time had been pretty fully occupied carrying out commissions for more fortunate friends. Lady Denby who had gone to the sea, asked her to superintend the installation of the winter’s coal. Mrs. Long preferring the irresponsibility of Banff to the responsibility of presiding over her country home and a succession of unappreciated house-parties, decided that this was an excellent opportunity for papering some of the obscurer portions of her town residence, and ‘knew that Azalea wouldn’t mind overseeing the work’. She interviewed a cook for Mrs. Blaine, hunted up a photograph of Sir Mortimer Fanshawe taken on the golf links (before he had acquired the game) and excellent as a pictorial feature for a sporting supplement. She shopped, exchanged articles, paid bills that had been forgotten, and found herself generally confronted with the res angusta domi of a woman without an income. She did not grumble. At the same time, she could imagine a hundred happier ways of spending a summer.