Frenzied Fiction Part 28

A tear welled up into the clerk's eye.

"You can have the whole first floor," he said, and he added, with a half sob, "and the second, too, if you like."

I could not help contrasting his manner with what it was in the old days, when the mere mention of a room used to throw him into a fit of pa.s.sion, and when he used to tell me that I could have a cot on the roof till Tuesday, and after that, perhaps, a bed in the stable.

Things had changed indeed.

"Can I get breakfast in the grill room?" I inquired of the melancholy clerk.

He shook his head sadly.

"There is no grill room," he answered. "What would you like?"

"Oh, some sort of eggs," I said, "and--"

The clerk reached down below his desk and handed me a hard-boiled egg with the sh.e.l.l off.

"Here's your egg," he said. "And there's ice water there at the end of the desk."

He sat back in his chair and went on reading.

"You don't understand," said Mr Narrowpath, who still stood at my elbow.

"All that elaborate grill room breakfast business was just a mere relic of the drinking days--sheer waste of time and loss of efficiency. Go on and eat your egg. Eaten it? Now, don't you feel efficient? What more do you want? Comfort, you say? My dear sir! more men have been ruined by comfort--Great heavens, comfort! The most dangerous, deadly drug that ever undermined the human race. But, here, drink your water. Now you're ready to go and do your business, if you have any."

"But," I protested, "it's still only half-past seven in the morning--no offices will be open--"

"Open!" exclaimed Mr. Narrowpath. "Why! they all open at daybreak now."

I had, it is true, a certain amount of business before me, though of no very intricate or elaborate kind--a few simple arrangements with the head of a publis.h.i.+ng house such as it falls to my lot to make every now and then. Yet in the old and unregenerate days it used to take all day to do it: the wicked thing that we used to call a comfortable breakfast in the hotel grill room somehow carried one on to about ten o'clock in the morning. Breakfast brought with it the need of a cigar for digestion's sake and with that, for very restfulness, a certain perusal of the _Toronto Globe_, properly corrected and rectified by a look through the _Toronto Mail_. After that it had been my practice to stroll along to my publishers' office at about eleven-thirty, transact my business, over a cigar, with the genial gentleman at the head of it, and then accept his invitation to lunch, with the feeling that a man who has put in a hard and strenuous morning's work is ent.i.tled to a few hours of relaxation.

I am inclined to think that in those reprehensible bygone times, many other people did their business in this same way.

"I don't think," I said to Mr. Narrowpath musingly, "that my publisher will be up as early as this. He's a comfortable sort of man."

"Nonsense!" said Mr. Narrowpath. "Not at work at half-past seven! In Toronto! The thing's absurd. Where is the office? Richmond Street? Come along, I'll go with you. I've always a great liking for attending to other people's business."

"I see you have," I said.

"It's our way here," said Mr. Narrowpath with a wave of his hand. "Every man's business, as we see it, is everybody else's business. Come along, you'll be surprised how quickly your business will be done."

Mr. Narrowpath was right.

My publishers' office, as we entered it, seemed a changed place.

Activity and efficiency were stamped all over it. My good friend the publisher was not only there, but there with his coat off, inordinately busy, bawling orders--evidently meant for a printing room--through a speaking tube. "Yes," he was shouting, "put WHISKY in black letter capitals, old English, double size, set it up to look attractive, with the legend MADE IN TORONTO in long clear type underneath--"

"Excuse me," he said, as he broke off for a moment. "We've a lot of stuff going through the press this morning--a big distillery catalogue that we are rus.h.i.+ng through. We're doing all we can, Mr. Narrowpath,"

he continued, speaking with the deference due to a member of the City Council, "to boom Toronto as a Whisky Centre."

"Quite right, quite right!" said my companion, rubbing his hands.

"And now, professor," added the publisher, speaking with rapidity, "your contract is all here--only needs signing. I won't keep you more than a moment--write your name here. Miss Sniggins will you please witness this so help you G.o.d how's everything in Montreal good morning."

"Pretty quick, wasn't it?" said Mr. Narrowpath, as we stood in the street again.

"Wonderful!" I said, feeling almost dazed. "Why, I shall be able to catch the morning train back again to Montreal--"

"Precisely. Just what everybody finds. Business done in no time. Men who used to spend whole days here clear out now in fifteen minutes. I knew a man whose business efficiency has so increased under our new regime that he says he wouldn't spend more than five minutes in Toronto if he were paid to."

"But what is this?" I asked as we were brought to a pause in our walk at a street crossing by a great block of vehicles. "What are all these drays? Surely, those look like barrels of whisky!"

"So they are," said Mr. Narrowpath proudly. "_Export_ whisky. Fine sight, isn't it? Must be what?--twenty--twenty-five--loads of it. This place, sir, mark my words, is going to prove, with its new energy and enterprise, one of the greatest seats of the distillery business, in fact, _the_ whisky capital of the North--"

"But I thought," I interrupted, much puzzled, "that whisky was prohibited here since last September?"

"Export whisky--_export_, my dear sir," corrected Mr. Narrowpath. "We don't interfere, we have never, so far as I know, proposed to interfere with any man's right to make and export whisky. That, sir, is a plain matter of business; morality doesn't enter into it."

"I see," I answered. "But will you please tell me what is the meaning of this other crowd of drays coming in the opposite direction? Surely, those are beer barrels, are they not?"

"In a sense they are," admitted Mr. Narrowpath. "That is, they are _import_ beer. It comes in from some other province. It was, I imagine, made in this city (our breweries, sir, are second to none), but the sin of _selling_ it"--here Mr. Narrowpath raised his hat from his head and stood for a moment in a reverential att.i.tude--"rests on the heads of others."

The press of vehicles had now thinned out and we moved on, my guide still explaining in some detail the distinction between business principles and moral principles, between whisky as a curse and whisky as a source of profit, which I found myself unable to comprehend.

At length I ventured to interrupt.

"Yet it seems almost a pity," I said, "that with all this beer and whisky around an unregenerate sinner like myself should be prohibited from getting a drink."

"A drink!" exclaimed Mr. Narrowpath. "Well, I should say so. Come right in here. You can have anything you want."

We stepped through a street door into a large, long room.

"Why," I exclaimed in surprise, "this is a bar!"

"Nonsense!" said my friend. "The _bar_ in this province is forbidden.

We've done with the foul thing for ever. This is an Import s.h.i.+pping Company's Delivery Office."

"But this long counter--"

"It's not a counter, it's a desk."

"And that bar-tender in his white jacket--"

"Tut! Tut! He's not a bar-tender. He's an Import Goods Delivery Clerk."

"What'll you have, gentlemen," said the Import Clerk, polis.h.i.+ng a gla.s.s as he spoke.

"Two whisky and sodas," said my friend, "long ones."

The Import Clerk mixed the drinks and set them on the desk.