“Bishop Feild,” I said.
“Ah, a Bishop Feild graduate,” Lady Squires said. “Sir Richard and I went to Methodist College. Met there, in fact.”
“Ehhm — not … not quite a graduate,” I said, blushing. I was hoping she would tactfully change the subject, but she stared at me expectantly. I told her I had had to quit school and get a job to help support my family, of whom I was the oldest child.
“How far did you get?” Sir Richard said.
“I left in the middle of the fifth form,” I said.
“In the middle?” Sir Richard said. “I never left in the middle of anything in my entire life. Even when they forced me to resign as prime minister, I sat as an independent. In the middle, eh? You haven’t made a habit of doing that, I hope.”
“Oh, no,” I said.
“Where are your people from, Mr. Smallwood?” Lady Squires said. I told her: Gambo, Greenspond, Prince Edward Island.
“Hmmm,” she said, as if she had made her token attempts at conversation, had got just the sort of uninteresting responses that she had expected and would speak no more.
“But you know,” I said eagerly, “I am distantly related to Benjamin Franklin Smallwood, chief of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.” This was one of my father’s far-fetched but impossible-to-disprove stories.
“Oh, how fascinating,” she said and looked at me with genuine surprise and interest. “And so you, you have some Choctaw blood in you, do you?”
“Yes,” I said, “I must have.”
“Isn’t that marvellous?” she said.
“I’m not sure everyone would think so,” said Sir Richard. “Might want to keep it to yourself from now on.”
Lady Squires waved her hand at him. She said she thought that we could learn a lot from Indians about “spiritualism” and
that the greatest disaster in Newfoundland history had been the extinction of the Beothuk Indians.
“I am convinced,” she said, “that there are people among us who are part Beothuk. There must have been some — er — intermingling between the Beothuks and the settlers, don’t you think? There may be people who don’t even know that they are one-thirty-second or one-sixty-fourth Beothuk, who knows? It’s not impossible.” I wondered how she would take the news that she was part Beothuk.
“Do you believe in spiritualism, Mr. Smallwood?”
She was not speaking of religion as I knew it.
“No, Lady Squires, I suppose I don’t,” I said apologetically, “at least, not in the way I think you mean.”
“Good for you, Smallwood,” Sir Richard said, “that makes two of us.” I felt I was making progress. It was the first time he had not put Mr. in front of Smallwood.
“Hmmmm,” Lady Squires said. “Still, sometimes the presence of a non-believer at a seance can be more of a help than a hindrance. It gets the spirit’s back up, so to speak, and the spirit appears just to prove the non-believer wrong.”
“Smallwood won’t be able to join your seance, Helena,” Sir Richard said. “He and I will be talking politics after dinner in the study.”
“Well, don’t worry, we won’t disturb you,” she said.
I spoke to Lady Squires after dinner while Sir Richard changed. She wanted to be a practitioner of “something spiritual,” she said, but as yet had been unable to find her “
métier
.” She had been tutored by masters, mentors, gurus, adepts, in person, by correspondence, in Newfoundland, while wintering in London. (Despite having grown up in Little Bay Islands, she declared Newfoundland winters to be unbearable.) She had turned to spiritualism after Sir Richard’s fall from power in 1923, though she still attended her Methodist church on Sunday mornings and said there was nothing in spiritualism that flouted her religion.
“I play hostess,” she said, “to a steady succession of itinerant mediums; readers of minds, palms, tarot cards, yarrow sticks and tea leaves; crystal-ball gazers; astrologers; even escape artists and magicians. People in places off the beaten track tend to be more receptive to such people, and you can’t get much farther off the beaten track than Newfoundland. It seems there is always some touring spiritualist in town, Madam This and Swami That, and more often than not, I invite them to stay here. I organize advertising and publicity for them, accompany them to their performances and throw receptions for them afterwards. We’re having a seance tonight. It’s a pity you can’t join us.”
Sir Richard reappeared wearing a long, paisley-patterned, green smoking-jacket monogrammed
SRS
on one lapel. I followed him through a broad hallway, where a chandelier hung like a great cluster of tear-drops from the ceiling, into a large windowless room with mahogany wainscoting and a plush red carpet. There was a great open fireplace, facing which were two high-backed wicker chairs. He showed me to one, then took from the mantelpiece a silver cigar box, which he opened and held out to me. I chose a cigar, hoping I did not look like I was doing so for the first time in my life, which I was. As he lit it for me, I could not keep my hands from shaking. Then he chose one for himself and, lighting that, settled himself in the other chair.
“So,” Sir Richard said, “you’ve joined the Liberal Party and put socialism behind you.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” I began, “but — ”
“I don’t doubt that you believe in socialism, Smallwood,” he said, “or think you do, at least. When I was your age, I was entertaining notions even more far-fetched.”
It turned out he knew more about socialism than I did, more, in fact, than most of the socialists I had met. And he did not seem to have acquired this knowledge just in case socialism caught on, just so he would know what he was up against. You would think by his manner that only after agonizing over the choice had he
decided that, rather than help advance the cause of socialism, he would become rich, and was still following with interest the progress of the option he had declined.
“I like making money more than I like having money,” he said, “though having money is important, too.”
“Because it gives you power over people?” I said.
He shrugged. “Socialism is just another way of getting power,” he said, “which is what everybody really wants, isn’t it?”
I disagreed, saying that I thought what everybody really wanted was freedom.
“No,” he said, “it’s power. Power is what
you
want, though I’ll never get you to admit it. You picked socialism because you thought it was your best way of getting ahead. Also, you want to be remembered, it’s written all over you, not that it’s anything to be ashamed of. I want to be remembered, too. But you, Smallwood, you can’t do it by making money because you don’t know how. That’s written all over you, too, I’m afraid. You’re not an artist, you’re not a scientist, you’re not an intellectual. All that’s left to you is politics. But even in politics, most doors are closed to you because you’re poor. And so you picked socialism, the politics of poverty. Nothing terrfies you more than the thought of dying without having made your mark. Am I right?”
“I’d like to be remembered for doing something good,” I said. “Most people would.”
“Tell me something,” he said, “and be as honest as you can. Could you die happy knowing that your one heroic act, your one great accomplishment, would never be acknowledged, or worse yet, would be attributed to someone else? Imagine it, Smallwood. You’ve performed some great act of heroism, but no one knows it and no one ever will. It’s one thing to sacrifice yourself for the cause, it’s another thing to do it anonymously. Who would you rather be, Sergeant York or the Unknown Soldier?”
I responded with a vigorous denial that I was a socialist because I was out to make a name for myself. The distinguishing
characteristic of the true socialist, I said, was selflessness. I told him his mansion was an Ozymandias-like monument to human vanity that would not endure. I told him people would still be reading Shelley’s poem long after the last cent of the Squires fortune had been spent. I was ready to walk out.
“Exactly my point,” he said, taking no apparent offence at my remarks. “You’d rather be Shelley than me because Shelley did something that will never be forgotten.”
“So did Genghis Khan,” I said. “So did Herod. So did Pontius Pilate. That’s not the way I want to be remembered.”
He smiled and shook his head. His patronizing indulgence, his unshakeable unwillingness to take offence at anything I said, maddened me. It was as though I was simply not of sufficient importance to offend him.
“There’s no such thing as selflessness,” he said. “Or if there is, I’ve never seen it. Martyrs expect an eternal reward for the sacrifice they make. An atheist willing to sacrifice his life anonymously for the benefit of others and able not to be smug about it, that would be the closest thing to selflessness that you could come. But I’ve never met anyone like that, have you?
We talked for hours, with him doing most of it and me lamely interrupting him from time to time. I was out of my depth and knew it and felt that I was clinging to my beliefs by faith alone, as if he were some intellectually superior devil whose arguments, though I knew them to be sophistry, were far more compelling than mine.
He said he had all his life gone through the motions of religion, but he did not really believe any of it. His greatest fear, he said, was that he would wind up an old man, afraid of a death that he knew was not far off, and afraid that, in his panic, he would have a fit of repentance and start begging a non-existent god’s forgiveness for things he did not think were wrong and was not really sorry for.
“That’s what I’m afraid of most,” he said, “winding up on my hands and knees, recanting, praying to God on the off chance He might exist.”
I was impressed by this admission. I had great sympathy for anyone as terrified as I was of having a conversion forced upon him, under any circumstances.
We talked politics for hours that night. We talked on many other nights, though Sir Richard never had me in when there were other guests. Either he and I and (rarely) Lady Squires dined alone, or he would simply have me over for an after-dinner brandy and cigar when his other guests had left. More often than not, I had not eaten, but I would mimic his postprandial satedness, my stomach growling from hunger as Sir Richard puffed reflectively on his cigar.
He took no pains to hide the fact that he did not want his friends to know we were associates. On the contrary, he told me not to ascend his steps when the porch light was lit, this being our signal that the last guest had yet to leave, as if class were determined by nature and I would no more presume to be his equal or be offended by his behaviour towards me than I would mind his pointing out that I was five foot six. I was in no position to object, but it took a great effort to hide my resentment as I stood in the shadows of a tree across the street, hoping the ’Stab would not see me and mistake my intentions, shivering in late fall in my little jacket.
My father dismissed the Squireses as “not even St. John’s born, baymen, titled baymen, but baymen all the same,” who, he was delighted to hear from me, would sometimes drop or add an aitch in conversation and at whose dinner parties the subject of their birthplaces was not often raised.
One night in his study, Sir Richard said an election would be called within the year and he needed someone to do the “legwork” for the Liberal Party in the newly created Humber district on the southwest and lower-west coasts. I told him, invoking my walk across the island, that legwork was my specialty and that I would do what he asked if he would support my nomination as the Liberal candidate in Humber district when the election was called.
“Do a good job there this winter,” Sir Richard said, “and the nomination’s yours.”
I was in awe of him from that moment on. I had never been on the receiving end of such largesse. He had given me the Humber district nomination as if it were nothing but a trifle. He affected an aristocratic manner, as though his knighthood had been self-conferred, and yet there was something appealing about him. I still believed I put no value on refinement and sophistication, but the fact that he had worked to acquire these qualities, rather than having been born to them, made, I thought, a world of difference.
I visited almost every settlement in Humber district, no matter how small. Most of the people there had never voted, had not the faintest idea what a political party was or what difference it would make to them if one party instead of another was elected. Only in Corner Brook and a few other larger towns was I able to do some real campaigning. I spoke to lodges, church groups, unions, urging them to vote for the Liberal Party and implying, but never stating outright, that in Humber district, I would be the Liberal candidate.
From Corner Brook, I wired to Sir Richard that Humber district was ripe for the taking and I was eagerly awaiting his official endorsement of my candidacy, then made my way to a boarding-house.
On waking the next morning and going downstairs, I was handed by the proprietor a telegram from Sir Richard that read: HAVE CONSIDERED THE POSITION OF THE HUMBER CONSTITUENCY CAREFULLY AND HAVE COME TO THE CONCLUSION THAT AS THE LIBERAL PARTY HAS VIRTUALLY CREATED THIS DISTRICT IT IS MY DUTY TO OFFER MYSELF AS THE LIBERAL CANDIDATE STOP WOULD APPRECIATE IT IF YOU WOULD MANAGE MY CAMPAIGN STOP SRS.
I could not remember ever feeling so betrayed, or so foolish. I had been recruited from the ranks of the disposable months in
advance for the very purpose I had served. He had known all along that he would run in Humber, the district where people were least likely to remember his first stint as prime minister, since it had not been a district then. When Sir Richard had received my letter of self-recommendation from out of the blue, it must have seemed to him a godsend. I pictured him composing the telegram back home in St. John’s and reading it aloud to an amused Lady Squires.
I left the boarding-house and walked for several hours, concocting various improbable revenge schemes, fantasizing about answering his telegram with one of my own, announcing my intention to run against him as an independent, which the Tory candidate encouraged me to do, hoping I would split the Liberal vote. I almost convinced myself that over the winter I had so endeared myself to the people of Humber district that I could pull off such an upset. But even if I did, what future would there be for me in politics? There was no question of a man with my pink past ever running as a Tory, and the Liberals would never forgive me if I ran against Sir Richard, no matter how badly I lost. I wired back to St. John’s: NOT FOR ANYONE ELSE WOULD I DO THIS BUT I WILL FOR YOU STOP SMALLWOOD.