“The high mucky-mucks insist that it should be called a ‘salon,’ with the weight on the first syllable, but that’s just French for saloon. I always said saloon, and after a while she gave up correcting me. They get together there every Friday at four and they drink tea and talk politics or the theayter till half past five. Very select. Frank Schalopki’s string orchestra plays in the background, and now and again Ida Van Cortland, the actress, puts in an appearance when she’s in town. They accept actresses – married ones. Very open-minded.
“I built the house where all that goes on. There was an architect, a Toronto man, who drew the plans, but I was able to correct a lot of his mistakes. You know – doors that opened into one another, and parts of it that you couldn’t heat, do what you might. He wasn’t pleased to be shown up, but I argued him down, and Mrs. Long-Pott-Ott was on my side. She had a very practical streak, even if she didn’t recognize that her maid, Ola Millard, had been at school with her. Ola used to laugh sometimes, because Louida Beemer had flown so high that she ate what she called her dinner at half-past six at night, when everybody else had et theirs at noon, and had a hot supper at half past five, and she never sat down to it without first making a toilet, which was what she called changing her duds. But for all of that, she was a sensible woman and knew value and good work, and I did my best for her.
“You wouldn’t believe what the ordinary sort of builder would get up to, in those days. One of the great tricks was to finish the doors and joiner’s work in some trash-pine or fir and often not half-seasoned – and then the painter would do it up with a special paint of lead and oil and cinnabar, and it was supposed to look like mahogany, till the heat came on in winter and the balsam began to leak out of it. Dragon’s-blood finish, they called it. Trumpery!
“That was not for William McOmish. Best wood, best workmanship clear through. Didn’t come cheap, of course. The Long-Pott-Ott house came out way over estimate. But what could you expect? The architect found out about my skill with stairs, so he put in a real beauty, standing free of the wall and curved, and when he showed me the drawing I knew he expected me to be flummoxed. ‘Oh yes,’ I said, cool as a cucumber, ‘but this isn’t just your . job, is it? I’ll look at my table of tangents and have it worked out for you in the morning. All those kite-winders call for some careful calculation. And the rail? Secret dovetailing will do it, I reckon. I’ll attend to that myself, to be sure it’s right.’ By golly, you could have knocked him down with a feather. He’d never met a craftsman like me. Consequence of that, I got my way about the horseshoe window in the front parlour. He didn’t want it. Said it was vulgar, but that was jealousy. Mrs. Long-Pott-Ott wanted it, because nobody else she’d ever heard of had one and she said it was a Moorish touch. So in it went, and it became my trademark in every house I built after. You see the one here, in my house, till they come for me.
“After that house there was no holding me. Everybody wanted me. But I didn’t want everybody. I’d only build for people I respected and who respected me. They didn’t need an architect. I could do better than any architect they were likely to find. I did some lovely work. Made wood and brick do things nobody’d ever imagined they could do. There were some in that saloon who said my work was over-ornamented, but what did I care for them? They weren’t the kind of people who build houses. They were the kind of people who infest other people’s houses when they’re built.
(7)
“I CAN LOOK back over a remarkable career. Not only did I build – I advised other builders. Would you believe it, Gil, I was the only man around who knew how to cast a stair? Even a miserable staircase – you know, one of those things that goes up with walls on both sides. They’d struggle and mess around, and in the end they had one riser too high at the top, or the pitch was so steep it was like a ladder, or the treads were too narrow – that’s fatal to old folks, you know – you’d never believe the trouble they could get into with that simple calculation. Because they were just carpenters, you see. It would be crazy to call them builders, let alone master builders, like me. And I put it to ’em, you bet. ‘If you want me to plan your stairs, it’ll cost you twenty-five dollars,” I’d say, and they’d shrink back as if I’d stabbed ’em. But if they didn’t want a stair that was a disgrace, they had to pay up. I’ve made a hundred dollars in a month, just that way, in my time.
“But every career has to have a pinnacle, and mine came when the Wesleyan Methodists decided they had to step out in front of the Anglicans and the R.C.s and have the finest church in town. The Wesleyans had always been looked down on as poor folks, but times had changed, and they had some of the solidest people in town in their congregation and they wanted a big, fine church. So of course they got an architect.
“I must say he did a pretty good job. The design was in a style he called Mauro-Gothic. The Gothic part meant that he put in arches and pillars everywhere, though the pillars didn’t hold anything up, and the arches were just for show. And he had an atrium, and he had a belfry, and he had an apse, and a jagged thing up one side of the belfry that he said was Saracenic.”
As Mr. McOmish speaks I see the church. Time has given it a charm of its own, though it is a nightmare of needless ornament. All the styles the architect had mixed up in this Mulligan Stew of a building have blended at last; it is a Victorian Methodist Church, and could not be anything else. It looks as if it would defy an atom bomb, and it would cost a fortune to dismantle it. As it appears before me, I see that the Heritage Foundation has put a plaque on it, declaring it to be an architectural treasure. From purse-proud temple to architectural horror to national treasure in a little over a century; a truly Canadian story.
“That architect was a learned man, as architects go, but he was not dealing with learned people but powerful people. So he came to grief. They let him have his way with the outside, but the inside was another matter. They wanted it with a raked floor, for one thing, and he said that was wrong in a church. He wanted a central aisle, and they said, What for? Do you think we are going to have any processions? None of that Romish stuff here. He wanted the Communion Table right in the middle of the apse, and that was intolerable; the pulpit had to be the focus of the church and no nonsense about it. The pulpit, from which God’s Holy Word is expounded to His people. What about tradition, he said, and they said, What tradition? This is our tradition coming right from John Wesley, and we know what we want. He had put the choir at the back of the church in a gallery – in a gallery, can you believe it – with the organ up there too, and the elders of the church just laughed. Listen, they said; our daughters sing in that choir and we want to see ’em doing it. And we’re not paying through the nose for a big Casavant organ with a harp stop and a euphonium stop and even a contraption that makes a noise like a drum and the dear knows what else, to have it hidden in a gallery.
“He sulked, of course, and kind of hinted that they were ignorant. You can guess how that went down with the elders, any one of whom could have bought him up and never noticed the cost. And in the end it was a proper Protestant church, with the pulpit in the middle of the business end, backed by a beautiful set of organ pipes – decorative, of course, because all the real whistles were behind it, made of metal and wood – and the choir in front of it in curved pews, so the congregation could get a good look at ’em and price their hats, and the organ sunk in front of ’em, so that you caught sight of the organist’s head over a red curtain. And then came the real Donnybrook.
“It was just about a piece of carving, that ran over the top of the organ pipes, and made a kind of canopy over the pulpit, to conceal the lights that shone down on the preacher. The architect had designed it to be of carved oak – I was to carve it – and he wanted Ad Majoram Dei Gloriam on it on a background of carved leafage.
“Latin! You could have heard the screams and shrieks clear to Hamilton! Latin! In a Wesleyan Methodist Church! You’d have thought the Pope was going to move in the very first Sunday. It only meant To The Greater Glory of God
, of course, but it said it the wrong way. There was a terrible rumpus, and the architect quit.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” they said, but when they had cooled down in the same skins they got hot in they realized that the interior of the church wasn’t finished and they had no architect! Of course the level heads knew what had to be done. They had to call on me to finish the job, and do it properly.
“He’d grabbed up all his plans, and skedaddled, but that didn’t bother me. Not a particle. I could make plans just as well as he could, and in two weeks I had an interior that was just what they wanted. Just what I wanted, too.
“You see, I was the great stair man, and I’d always wanted to build one of those pulpits with a curved stair on either side, so the preacher could have a choice. Go up one and come down the other when he’d finished his sermon. Real style and not a Papist hint about it. They bit. They didn’t know how expensive those free-standing curved staircases could be. But I had ’em where I wanted ’em, because I’d changed the wording on that piece of carving over the pulpit so it read: The Lord Is In His Holy Temple: Let All The Earth Keep Silence Before Him. Very choice and doctrinally correct.
“That’s what I built. The finest mahogany, the real thing – no pine daubed with cinnabar – and the rails of those curved stairs were secret dovetailing such as you’ve never seen – because you weren’t meant to see it. And that piece of carving! I declare it took me a month, because it all had to be in the most almighty-twisted Gothic lettering you ever saw, and so overhung with leafage you couldn’t hardly read it. I even put a wooden dove, right over the preacher’s head, among the leaves. There were mockers who said it looked as if the dove might drop a mess right down on his pate, but they were properly scorned as what they were – mockers. It was a marvel.
“And the first service in the new church was the highest point in my career. I was there, in a frock coat, and at the proper time I offered the plans – not really the plans, which weighed about a hundredweight all told, but a few plans bound in morocco leather – to the preacher, and he blessed them, and made a very handsome tribute to me, as a great Christian builder. I had to have a powerful injection of my medicine that day, I can tell you, or I might have dropped down in a swoon from the sheer glory of it.”
Yes, the scene appears before me even as he speaks, and I can see that William McOmish’s eyes are wild, the pupils so small that they seem like black pinpoints, and he sways a little. He feels the glory of the moment, the people in the packed church think, but Virginia McOmish, and the Misses Malvina, Caroline and Minerva McOmish, who are sitting near, know better and one might almost say that their eyes express fear, as the Old Devil yields up the plans, and returns to the pew, unsteady and breathing thickly.
I have not seen Virginia McOmish since the courtship scenes and as I look at her now I wonder how anyone can ever have thought her pretty. But I look again and see that her features are good, even delicate; it is her expression that chills, so cold, so minatory has it become. In the pew behind her sits her lame sister, Cynthia Boutell; same features and the same expression exaggerated. She looks, as her brother-in-law often says, as if she could chew nails. Beside her sits her husband, the unsatisfactory Dan; he looks a jolly man, who has spent a good deal of time on his moustache. He wears a large Masonic ring and is running to fat. Of the three McOmish girls Malvina is handsome, for she has her mother’s fine features; Caroline is not at all handsome, for she has carroty hair and a pudding face, but her expression is sweet and diffident; Minerva, the youngest, is plump and pretty but must not be exposed to excitement as she suffers from petit mal, and might do something embarrassing.
Sunday dinner after the great service of inauguration shows me in brief what is wrong with the McOmish family. They walk home, William in glory, for he has been congratulated again and again on the steps of the church – his church! As soon as they reach their home, which is the spacious, hideous house that I have already seen, stripped of its furnishings and without fire, as Gil and Mr. McOmish talk their way through a long winter’s night, Virginia goes to her bedroom, to take off her hat, an uncompromising black straw. William follows her, steps behind her as she looks in the mirror, and attempts to kiss her.
“Oh, don’t maul me,” she says, and twitches away from him. I see jealousy in her face. His face shows humiliation and anger, as he walks away, and down the stairs, where not one of his daughters has a word to say to him. Caroline feels that she should say something, some word of praise for the great church, but the three girls have been so rigorously indoctrinated by their mother and Aunt Boutell, that she cannot do so. When you think what Ma has to go through, day after day, it would be disloyal to show any warmth toward Pa. Nor does Pa invite warmth, however much he may desire it.
Rhodri Gilmartin is joining the McOmish family for Sunday dinner. He is the unwillingly accepted suitor of Malvina. Neither of the other girls has a beau, so they unite to make great sport of Rhodri, and I see that it is not pretty sport. Jealousy, and a hinting, sniffing, smirking suggestion that there is something not quite nice about the whole business of being engaged, lie behind the sport. When dinner is over – roast pork, boiled potatoes, applesauce with the pork, squash pie, and what would now be called doughnuts (but which the McOmishes call fried cakes) consumed in silence and washed down with strong tea – Malvina and Rhodri are permitted to retire to the parlour. They sit on the sofa together and converse discreetly, because they are aware from various scrapings and sniggerings that Caroline and Minerva have pulled a chair up outside the door of the parlour, and are peeking at them through the transom. To see – what? Nobody would ever say what it was, but it might be something that God has somehow made necessary, but of which God certainly has no reason to be proud.
(8)
THE GREAT CHURCH having been built, the great church must now be paid for. Of course several rich men of the congregation had pledged money before the first sod was turned, but the pledges would not cover a third of what the great church had cost. That gave no concern to anyone. Of course the church must have a mortgage for, as the Reverend Wilbur Woolarton Woodside very wisely said, a church without a mortgage is a church without a soul. Without a mortgage to be paid off, how could the congregation be spurred to organize all the bazaars, fowl suppers, home-talent concerts, and other affairs that would raise money, and also generate Christian enthusiasm? If people cannot be goaded into doing something for the church, they may quite probably lose their zeal for the church. As the pastor put it, they might be at ease in Zion, and nineteenth-century Protestantism had no use for ease. Not a particle. Stress and struggle was what was needed to keep people alive in their faith. A mortgage; pointed toward that great day in the distant future when the mortgage would be paid off, and a great service organized so that the congregation might see the mortgage burned, by the minister and his elders. They would, in a few months, inaugurate a new fund to build a Church House, for young people’s meetings, Sabbath Day school, and a round of bazaars, fowl suppers, and home-talent concerts which had formerly taken place in the church basement. People must be kept at the job of raising money, or they may forget Christ.
Just at the moment, however, a lot of bills have to be paid and of course those bills must be shaved as close as can be contrived. William McOmish, that great man, has built a splendid edifice, but as the elders and the minister remind him, it has run way over the estimate. But there never was an estimate, says William. He didn’t take any stock in estimates, which were always wrong. He simply did the best work possible, cost what it might. Was anything else fit for God’s service? Certainly not, reply the elders, some of whom are bankers, but we have to keep our feet on the ground. So how about reducing some of these bills for timber, and decoration, and lighting, and a furnace, and that huge bell – first-class bell, of course, but who would have thought a bell could come to so much – and of course the vengeful bill the offended architect has rendered for his part of the planning? How about it? Surely Mr.
McOmish, a bred-in-the-bone Wesleyan, can do something?
What William can do is sharply limited by what his suppliers will do, and several of those suppliers are not Wesleyans, and want all their money. It comes out that he has even bought some fine mahogany from a Catholic firm, and what could you expect from such want of prudence as that?
Pride is a costly possession. That is doubtless why the Bible is so rough on pride, and why it is first among the Deadly Sins. William is too proud to stick out for full payment. He won’t give it to the elders to say that he has to have money to keep his business going. That sort of close reckoning is mean, and nobody has ever said, or ever will say, that William McOmish is mean.
So he cuts what he can, and that means, in the end, that he cuts his profit to next to nothing at all, and all his fine carving, and concealed dovetailing, and superfine finishing are for the greater glory of God and, as a minor matter, for the ruin of William McOmish. The nights pass when he figures and figures – and he is too gifted a figurer not to know what lies ahead. Ruin. Lesser men, who cannot figure so brilliantly as he, but who will not reduce their bills, will not suffer, or not suffer extremely, but he knows he is finished. No; never finished. He can build again, and perhaps build better. But he will have to have credit at banks, and he detests credit, which puts him in the power of little men whom he despises.