"No PUNCH," he said.

"None at all," agreed all the battle horses.

"I"ll tell you," said the Campaign secretary, Mr. Bughouse, a voluble man, with wandering eyes-"the trouble is he has no magnetism, no personal magnetism."

"I see," I said.

"Now, you take this man, Shortis, that the Liberals have got hold of," continued Mr. Bughouse, "he"s full of MAGNETISM. He appeals."

All the other Committee men nodded.

"That"s so," they murmured, "magnetism, Our man hasn"t a darned ounce of it."

"I met Shortis the other night in the street," went on Mr. Bughouse, "and he said, "Come on up to my room in the hotel." "Oh," I said, "I can"t very well." "Nonsense," he said, "You"re on the other side but what does that matter?" Well, we went up to his room, and there he had whiskey, and gin, and lager,-everything. "Now," he says, "name your drink-what is it?" There he was, right in his room, breaking the law without caring a darn about it. Well, you know the voters like that kind of thing. It appeals to them."

"Well," said another of the Committee men,-I think it was the one called Mr. Dope, "I wouldn"t mind that so much. But the chief trouble about our man, to my mind, is that he can"t speak."

"He can"t?" I exclaimed.

All the Committee shook their heads.

"Not for sour apples!" a.s.serted Mr. Dope positively. "Now, in this riding that won"t do. Our people here are used to first cla.s.s speaking, they expect it. I suppose there has been better speaking in this Const.i.tuency than anywhere else in the whole dominion. Not lately, perhaps; not in the last few elections. But I can remember, and so can some of the boys here, the election when Sir John A. spoke here, when the old Mackenzie government went out."

He looked around at the circle. Several nodded.

"Remember it as well," a.s.sented Mr. Mudd, "as if it were yesterday."

"Well, sir," continued Mr. Dope, "I"ll never forget Sir John A. speaking here in the Odd Fellows" Hall, eh?"

The Committee men nodded and gurgled in corroboration.

"My! but he was PLASTERED. We had him over at Pete Robinson"s hotel all afternoon, and I tell you he was plastered for fair. We ALL were. I remember I was so pickled myself I could hardly help Sir John up the steps of the platform. So were you, Mudd, do you remember?"

"I certainly was!" said Mr. Mudd proudly. Committee men who would scorn to drink lager beer in 1919, take a great pride, I have observed, in having been pickled in 1878.

"Yes, sir," continued Mr. Dope, "you certainly were pickled. I remember just as well as anything, when they opened the doors and let the crowd in: all the boys had been bowling up and were pretty well soused. You never saw such a crowd. Old Dr. Greenway (boys, you remember the old Doc) was in the chair, and he was pretty well spifflocated. Well, sir, Sir John A. got up in that hall and he made the finest, most moving speech I ever listened to. Do you remember when he called old Trelawney an ash-barrel? And when he made that appeal for a union of hearts and said that the sight of McGuire (the Liberal candidate) made him sick? I tell you those were great days. You don"t get speaking like that now; and you don"t get audiences like that now either. Not the same calibre."

All the Committee shook their heads.

"Well, anyway, boys," said the Chairman, as he lighted a fresh cigar, "to-morrow will decide, one way or the other. We"ve certainly worked hard enough,"-here he pa.s.sed the box of cigars round to the others-"I haven"t been in bed before two any night since the work started."

"Neither have I," said another of the workers. "I was just saying to the wife when I got up this morning that I begin to feel as if I never wanted to see the sight of a card again."

"Well, I don"t regret the work," said the Secretary, "so long as we carry the riding. You see," he added in explanation to me, "we"re up against a pretty hard proposition here. This riding really is Liberal: they"ve got the majority of voters though we HAVE once or twice swung it Conservative. But whether we can carry it with a man like Grouch is hard to say. One thing is certain, boys, if he DOES carry it, he doesn"t owe it to himself."

All the battle horses agreed on this. A little after that we dispersed.

And twenty-four hours later the vote was taken and to my intense surprise the riding was carried by Grouch the Conservative candidate.

I say, to MY surprise. But apparently not to anybody else.

For it appeared this (was in conversations after the election) that Grouch was a man of extraordinary magnetism. He had, so they said, "punch." Shortis, the Liberal, it seemed, lacked punch absolutely. Even his own supporters admitted that he had no personality whatever. Some wondered how he had the nerve to run.

But my own theory of how the election was carried is quite different.

I feel certain that all the Conservative voters despised their candidate so much that they voted Liberal. And all the Liberals voted Conservative.

That carried the riding.

Meantime Grouch left the const.i.tuency by the first train next day for Ottawa. Except for paying taxes on his house, he will not be back in the town till they dissolve parliament again.

5.-The Lost Illusions of Mr. Sims

In the club to which I belong, in a quiet corner where the sunlight falls in sideways, there may be seen sitting of an afternoon my good friend of thirty years" standing, Mr. Edward Sims. Being somewhat afflicted with gout, he generally sits with one foot up on a chair. On a bra.s.s table beside him are such things as Mr. Sims needs. But they are few. Wealthy as he is, the needs of Mr. Sims reach scarcely further than Martini c.o.c.ktails and Egyptian cigarettes. Such poor comforts as these, brought by a deferential waiter, with, let us say, a folded newspaper at five o"clock, suffice for all his wants. Here sits Mr. Sims till the shadows fall in the street outside, when a limousine motor trundles up to the club and rolls him home.

And here of an afternoon Mr. Sims talks to me of his college days when he was young. The last thirty years of his life have moved in so gentle a current upon so smooth a surface that they have been without adventure. It is the stormy period of his youth that preoccupies my friend as he sits looking from the window of the club at the waving leaves in the summer time and the driving snow in the winter.

I am of that habit of mind that makes me p.r.o.ne to listen. And for this, perhaps, Mr. Sims selects me as the recipient of the stories of his college days. It is, it seems, the fixed belief of my good friend that when he was young he belonged at college to a particularly nefarious crowd or group that exists in his mind under the name of the "old gang." The same a.s.sociation, or corporate body or whatever it should be called, is also designated by Mr. Sims, the "old crowd," or more simply and affectionately "the boys." In the recollection of my good friend this "old gang" were of a devilishness since lost off the earth. Work they wouldn"t. Sleep they despised. While indoors they played poker in a blue haze of tobacco smoke with beer in jugs and mugs all round them. All night they were out of doors on the sidewalk with linked arms, singing songs in chorus and jeering at the city police.

Yet in spite of life such as this, which might appear to an outsider wearing to the intellect, the "old gang" as recollected by Mr. Sims were of a mental brilliancy that eclipses everything previous or subsequent. McGregor of the Cla.s.s of "85 graduated with a gold medal in Philosophy after drinking twelve bottles of lager before sitting down to his final examination. Ned Purvis, the football half-back, went straight from the football field after a hard game with his ankle out of joint, drank half a bottle of Bourbon Rye and then wrote an examination in Greek poetry that drew tears from the President of the college.

Mr. Sims is perhaps all the more p.r.o.ne to talk of these early days insomuch that, since his youth, life, in the mere material sense, has used him all too kindly. At an early age, indeed at about the very time of his graduation, Mr. Sims came into money,-not money in the large and frenzied sense of a speculative fortune, begetting care and breeding anxiety, but in the warm and comfortable inheritance of a family brewery, about as old and as well-established as the Const.i.tution of the United States. In this brewery, even to-day, Mr. Sims, I believe, spends a certain part, though no great part, of his time. He is carried to it, I understand, in his limousine in the sunnier hours of the morning; for an hour or so each day he moves about among the warm smell of the barley and the quiet hum of the machinery murmuring among its dust.

There is, too, somewhere in the upper part of the city a huge, silent residence, where a noiseless butler adjusts Mr. Sims"s leg on a chair and serves him his dinner in isolated luxury.

But the residence, and the brewery, and with them the current of Mr. Sims"s life move of themselves.

Thus has care pa.s.sed Mr. Sims by, leaving him stranded in a club chair with his heavy foot and stick beside him.

Mr. Sims is a bachelor. Nor is he likely now to marry: but this through no lack of veneration or respect for the s.e.x. It arises, apparently, from the fact that when Mr. Sims was young, during his college days, the beauty and charm of the girls who dwelt in his college town was such as to render all later women mere feeble suggestions of what might have been. There was, as there always is, one girl in particular. I have not heard my friend speak much of her. But I gather that Kate Dashaway was the kind of girl who might have made a fit mate even for the sort of intellectual giant that flourished at Mr. Sims"s college. She was not only beautiful. All the girls remembered by Mr. Sims were that. But she was in addition "a good head" and "a good sport," two of the highest qualities that, in Mr. Sims"s view, can crown the female s.e.x. She had, he said, no "nonsense" about her, by which term Mr. Sims indicated religion. She drank lager beer, played tennis as well as any man in the college, and smoked cigarettes a whole generation in advance of the age.

Mr. Sims, so I gather, never proposed to her, nor came within a measurable distance of doing so. A man so p.r.o.ne, as is my friend, to spend his time in modest admiration of the prowess of others is apt to lag behind. Miss Dashaway remains to Mr. Sims, as all else does, a retrospect and a regret.

But the chief peculiarities of the old gang-as they exist in the mind of Mr. Sims-is the awful fate that has overwhelmed them. It is not merely that they are scattered to the four corners of the continent. That might have been expected. But, apparently, the most awful moral ruin has fallen upon them. That, at least, is the abiding belief of Mr. Sims.

"Do you ever hear anything of McGregor now?" I ask him sometimes.

"No," he says, shaking his head quietly. "I understand he went all to the devil."

"How was that?"

"Booze," says Mr. Sims. There is a quiet finality about the word that ends all discussion.

"Poor old Curly!" says Mr. Sims, in speaking of another of his cla.s.smates. "I guess he"s pretty well down and out these days."

"What"s the trouble?" I say.

Mr. Sims moves his eyes sideways as he sits. It is easier than moving his head.

"Booze," he says.