So Dean knew that if he carried out thoroughly the work entrusted to him, Larssen would stand by his spoken promise. He resolved to obey orders as faithfully and as intelligently as he possibly could. He did not write home what form his new work was taking. In his letters to Daisy he explained simply that he was being sent to Canada on a confidential mission, at a big increase of salary, and that he was having a regal time of it. At Quebec and Montreal and Ottawa and Winnipeg he scoured the shops to find presents which would carry to her a realisation of his new position.
Dean began to feel his importance growing rapidly as he journeyed across the Atlantic and around the principal cities of Canada. He thought he realised the meaning of "business" as it was viewed by the men up above, the men at the roll-top desks. He saw now that it was not hard, plugging work that earned them their big salaries. In a short fortnight he had begun to look a little contemptuously on the grinders and plodders. Why couldn't they realise how little their patient, plodding service could ever bring them? But some men, he reflected, were born to be merely clerks all their days. He was different—out of the common ruck. He could see largely, like Lars Larssen did. He was a man of importance.
Canada pressed a broad thumb on his plastic mind without his conscious knowledge. Canada with her young, red-blooded vigour swept into him like a tidal wave of open sea into a sluggish, marshy creek. Canada thrust her vastness and her limitless potentialities at him with a careless hand, as though to say: "Here's opportunity for the taking." Canada taught him in ten days what at home he would never have learnt in a lifetime: that London is not the British Empire.
The clerk who lives out his life in the rabbit-warren of the city of London by day, and in a cheap, pretentious, red-brick suburb by night, believes firmly that outside London not much matters. He lumps together the Canadian, the South African, the Australian, and the New Zealander under the slighting category of "colonials." He imagines them bowing themselves humbly before the majesty of the Londoner, taking their cues from London and reverencing it as the fount of all wisdom and might and wealth.
There is no one more "provincial" than the Cockney born and bred.
After ten days of Canada, Dean with his chameleon mind felt himself almost a Canadian. He was beginning to pity the limitations of the Londoner. He considered himself raised above that level.
Winnipeg, the new "wheat pit" of North America, impressed him most strongly. He could feel the bursting strength of the young city—a David amongst cities. He could feel it growing under his feet to its kingdom of the granary of Britain. The epic of the wheat pulsed its stately poetry into him—thrilled him with the majestic chords of its mighty song.
He had a half-idea that Lars Larssen's big scheme was in some way connected with the epic of the wheat, and it gave him fresh importance to think that he was serving such a man in so confidential a position.
He tried a little gamble in "May wheat" with a Winnipeg bucket-shop, plunging what was to him the important sum of twenty dollars. Luck was with him full-tide. From the moment he bought, May wheat shot upwards, and in a few days he had closed the deal with fifty dollars to his credit.
That evening he wandered around the city with money jingling in his trouser-pockets. He bought himself a good seat at a music-hall, and at the bar boldly ordered cocktails with weird names of which the contents were wonderful mysteries to him.