The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

  Sir Richard

  I FINALLY MADE UP my mind that socialism in any form could not prevail in Newfoundland. The next best thing, it seemed to me, or at any rate the closest thing to socialism that Newfoundlanders would accept, was Liberalism. So in 1928, I joined the Liberal Party. I wrote its newly re-elected leader, Sir Richard Squires, outlined my credentials, highlighting my time in New York and my walk across the island, and pledged him my full support, saying I would be willing to do anything he wanted to help him win the next election. The next thing I knew, Sir Richard was inviting me to dinner at his house.

  Sir Richard had been prime minister from 1919 to 1923, when four of his own cabinet ministers resigned in protest over his corruption-ridden record, to which he responded by resigning the prime ministership to sit as an independent. Shortly afterwards, two years after his knighthood, he was arrested for bribery, patronage, embezzlement of public funds and a host of other charges.

  “I appeared in front of a judge, but I did not spend one second in confinement,” said Sir Richard. “I was instantly released on bail and the grand jury dismissed the charges for lack of evidence. I was exonerated, completely exonerated.”

  The next year he was again arrested, and this time convicted, for tax evasion, for which he was fined and placed on probation. He was still on probation when he won back the Liberal leadership in 1927.

  I was uncharacteristically nervous as the day of my meeting with Sir Richard drew near. The prospect of meeting the quality, as my father called them, had never bothered me before. No longer armed, however, with my contempt for affluence, no longer the aloof, sceptical, ironical spectator of an elitist class-ridden society whose overthrow and replacement by socialism was inevitable, I now realized that it was important that I make a good impression with the mainstream, that it mattered what people like Sir Richard thought of me. My bedragglement, which among socialists had been a badge of honour, a kind of sartorial credential, was now an embarrassment to me. I still fancied that I would, from now on, be using Liberal means to accomplish socialist ends, but I was more than ever keenly self-conscious, aware of how ridiculous I looked to others, wearing day after day the same suit of Harris tweed, the same patched and re-patched Norfolk jacket I had worn in New York. Courtesy of cousin Walter, I was sporting an incongruously new pair of shoes, and I had recently bought, second-hand, a hat, into the lining of which I had to stuff old socks to make it fit.

  There was a stone wall around Sir Richard’s house on Rennie’s Mill Road and, at the front, a massive iron gate that closed in the middle to form the letters SRS, the R split in half when the gates were open. The grounds, which had been hidden by the wall, were a descending tier of impeccably kept, if modestly sized, greenways flanked by statues, incongruous fawns and cherubs. The cobbled driveway went round a large fountain, in the centre of which loomed a sword-wielding marble angel with a warring, belligerent expression, its back to the house and its wings protectively outspread.

  I walked awe-struck up the steps between the pillars and, after turning round on the portico several times to gawk at the angel, was about to knock on the front door when it was opened by a fellow in full livery — ruffled breeches to the knees, below that silk stockings, buckled shoes. Above the waist he wore a scarlet doublet with a row of bright brass buttons down the front. If he was taken aback at the shabbiness of my appearance, he did not let it show. He seemed aware that a generic someone was at the door, but that was all.

  “I’m hear to see Sir Richard Squires,” I said, uncertain if that was how I should refer to him. The fellow did not so much look at me as slightly away from me, as though the better to hear what I was saying.

  “Who may I say is calling?” he said, as if this were a mere courtesy he was obliged to perform before sending me away. His English accent sounded put on, though perhaps he had merely been so long away from home that he was losing it.

  “Mr. Joseph Smallwood,” I said.

  “Please wait here,” he said. Seconds later, from somewhere inside the house, I heard him repeat my message word for word, drawing out the “all” in Smallwood as though for comic effect, as if he were telling his listener they would not want to miss seeing what the man who bore the grand-sounding title of Mr. Joseph Smallwood looked like. Then he returned and asked me to step into the front porch, which I did, whereupon he left me without a word of explanation.

  Seconds later, two people I recognized from newspaper photos to be Sir Richard and Lady Squires leaned out over the banister of the winding staircase I was facing and looked down at me.

  “Forgive us, Mr. Smallwood,” Sir Richard said, while Lady Squires whispered something to him, “but you look like someone just escaped from, or soon to be admitted to, the San. You can’t be too careful these days, you know.”

  “I’m in perfect health, sir,” I said, shouting down the voice inside me that was urging me to reply in kind.

  “Indeed,” said Lady Squires. “In that case, it must be the rest of mankind that is sorely afflicted, for I have never in all my days seen anyone still drawing breath who looked like you.”

  “I’ve always been skinny, Lady Squires,” I said.

  “My husband is skinny, Mr. Smallwood,” Lady Squires said. “There is, to the best of my knowledge, no word for what you are.”

  “Contagion free, are you?” Sir Richard said. “Consumption free? We have your word as a gentleman on that?” Lady Squires looked at him as if it were about as plausible to ask for my word as a gentleman as to presume me to be a member of the royal family.

  “Yes, sir,” I said, feeling myself turning crimson red from shame, as though my father, along with every socialist I had ever known, was listening.

  “Very well then, Cantwell, show him in,” Sir Richard said. Cantwell reappeared from inside the nearest room.

  And so I had dinner with Sir Richard and Lady Squires. Lady Squires, who like Sir Richard was nearing fifty, was unusually dressed, in a full-length, robe-like, maroon-coloured garment, and wore around her neck a variety of charms and amulets, half a dozen of them, medallions, stones, badge-like leather ovals and circles that she fingered while she ate. The weight of them flattened her dress and brought out the rounded contours of her shoulders and her breasts. She was quite plump, with light blue darting eyes that belied her affected mannerisms, such as every few seconds putting down her knife and fork to rest her chin on her folded hands.

  Sir Richard was angular-faced, hawk-nosed, somewhat like me, I fancied, and sported a modest moustache. He was, as his wife had said, somewhat skinny, and he ate as though he did not see the point of food, pushing a lamb chop about on his plate and stirring his peas and carrots and potatoes as if he were searching for something among them. It occurred to me that about now, Clara would have put Ramsay to bed and be sitting down to her customarily solitary supper of damper dogs and baked beans.

  “Where did you go to school, Mr. Smallwood?” Sir Richard said.

  “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 argument
s, 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.