THE MAKING OF THE LEAGUE
Thursday morning found Craig anxious, even gloomy, but with fight in every line of his face. I tried to cheer him in my clumsy way by chaffing him about his League. But he did not blaze up as he often did. It was a thing too near his heart for that. He only shrank a little from my stupid chaff and said—
‘Don’t, old chap; this is a good deal to me. I’ve tried for two years to get this, and if it falls through now, I shall find it hard to bear.’
Then I repented my light words and said, ‘Why! the thing will go sure enough: after that scene in the church they won’t go back.’
‘Poor fellows!’ he said as if to himself; ‘whisky is about the only excitement they have, and they find it pretty tough to give it up; and a lot of the men are against the total abstinence idea. It seems rot to them.’
‘It is pretty steep,’ I said. ‘Can’t you do without it?’
‘No; I fear not. There is nothing else for it. Some of them talk of compromise. They want to quit the saloon and drink quietly in their shacks. The moderate drinker may have his place in other countries, though I can’t see it. I haven’t thought that out, but here the only safe man is the man who quits it dead and fights it straight; anything else is sheerest humbug and nonsense.’
I had not gone in much for total abstinence up to this time, chiefly because its advocates seemed for the most part to be somewhat ill-balanced; but as I listened to Craig, I began to feel that perhaps there was a total abstinence side to the temperance question; and as to Black Rock, I could see how it must be one thing or the other.
We found Mrs. Mavor brave and bright. She shared Mr. Craig’s anxiety but not his gloom. Her courage was of that serene kind that refuses to believe defeat possible, and lifts the spirit into the triumph of final victory. Through the past week she had been carefully disposing her forces and winning recruits. And yet she never seemed to urge or persuade the men; but as evening after evening the miners dropped into the cosy room downstairs, with her talk and her songs she charmed them till they were wholly hers. She took for granted their loyalty, trusted them utterly, and so made it difficult for them to be other than true men.
That night Mrs. Mavor’s large storeroom, which had been fitted up with seats, was crowded with miners when Mr. Craig and I entered.