Episodes Before Thirty/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
The Islington Jersey Dairy, Messrs. Cooper and Blackwood, started business with a retail office in College Street, a number of milk carts bearing our names in black lettering upon a yellow background, and the supply farm at Islington, a lovely little hamlet on the shores of Lake Ontario, some six miles west of the city. We sold rich Jersey milk, we sold eggs and butter too. I gave picnics at our pretty little farm for customers I knew socially. The upper floors of the building in College Street we furnished, letting bedrooms at a dollar a week to young Englishmen, clerks in offices, and others. I engaged an old, motherly Englishwoman, Mrs. 'Iggins, with a face like a rosy apple, to "do" for us—she made the beds and cooked the breakfast—while her pretty daughter, in cap and apron, was our dairymaid. The plan did not work smoothly—the dairymaid was too pretty, perhaps; Mrs. Higgins too voluble. Complaints came from all sides; the lodgers, wildish young fellows in a free and easy country, made more promises than payments. One wanted a stove, another a carpet in his bedroom, another complained about his bed. I had my first experience of drink and immorality going on under my very eyes. . . . Trouble—though mercifully of another kind—spread then to the customers. The milk began to go sour; it was too rich; it wouldn't keep; the telephone rang all day long. Cooper, an experienced dairy-farmer, was at his wits' end; every device for scouring the bottles, for cooling the milk before bringing it twice a day to the city, failed. At dinner parties my hostess would draw me tactfully aside. "The milk, I'm afraid, Mr. Blackwood," she would murmur softly, "was sour again this morning. Will you speak about it?"
I spoke about it—daily—but Alfred Cooper's only com ment was, "Say, have you got a bit more capital? That's what we really want."
That sour milk became a veritable nightmare that never left me. I had enough of milk. Yet, later in life, I found myself "in milk" again, but that time it was dried milk, a profitable business to the owners, though it brought me nothing. I worked six years at it for a bare living wage. But, at any rate, it couldn't turn sour. It was a powder.
Alfred Cooper was a delightful fellow. I think some detail of how our partnership came to be may bear the telling. It points a moral if it does not adorn a tale. It may, again, prove useful to other young Englishmen in Canada similarly waiting with money to invest; but on the other hand it may not, since there can be few, I imagine, as green as I was then, owing to a strange upbringing, or as ignorant of even the simplest worldly practices. Of the evangelical training responsible for this criminal ignorance I will speak later.
Cooper, then, was a delightful fellow, fitting my ideal of a type I had read about--the fearless, iron-muscled colonial white man who fought Indians. The way we met was quite simply calculated--by a clerk in the bank where my English allowance of £100 a year was paid by my father. The clerk and I made friends--naturally; and one day--also naturally--he suggested a Sunday walk to Islington, some six miles down the lake shore. We could get tea at a farm he knew. We did. The praises of the Cooper family, who owned it, had already been sung. I was enchanted. So, doubtless, was the clerk.
The farm was a small one--perhaps eight acres; and Cooper lived on it in poverty with his aged mother and unmarried sister. It was charmingly situated, the fields running down to the water, pine copses dotting the meadows to the north, and the little village church standing at one corner near the road. Mrs. Cooper, in cap and apron, dropping every "h" that came her way, described to me how she and her husband had emigrated from England sixty years before, in the days of sailing ships. Her husband's grave in the churchyard we could see from the window while we sat at tea--an unusually sumptuous tea for a farmhouse--and it was evident that she was more alive to the memories of half a century ago in the "old country," than to the plans of her ambitious son in the new colony.
The son came to tea too, but a little late, having obviously brushed himself up a bit for his visitor from England. He was about forty years of age, tall, well-built, keen-faced, with steel-blue eyes and a hatchet nose, and his body was just that combination of leanness, strength and nervous alertness which made one think of a wolf. He was extremely polite, not to say flattering, to me. I thought him delightful, his idyllic farm still more delightful; he was so eager, vigorous and hardy, a typical pioneer, slaving from dawn to sunset to win a living from the soil in order to support the family. I trusted him, admired him immensely. Having been duly prepared for the picture on our walk out, I was not disappointed. He spoke very frankly of the desperate work he and his sister were forced to do; also of what he might do, and what could be made of the farm, if only he had a little capital. I liked him; he liked me; the clerk liked us both.
He showed me round the farm after tea, and his few Jersey cows came up and nosed his hand. The elderly sister, a weaker repetition of himself, joined us. She, too, slaved from morning till night. The old mother, diminutive, quiet, brave, devoted to her children yet with her heart in the old country she would never see again, completed a charming picture in my mind. I was invited to come again.
Another picture, still more alluring, was set before me during the walk back, the picture of what a "little capital" could do with that tiny farm. The dairy business that could be worked up made me feel a rich man before the Toronto spires became visible. The desire to put capital into the Islington Jersey Dairy became the one hope of my life. Would Cooper agree? Would he accept me as a partner? The suggestion came from myself. The clerk, of course, had never dreamed of such a thing. They might welcome me, the clerk thought. Very kindly, he said he would sound Cooper about it and let me know....
The scheme seemed such a perfect solution of my problem of earning a living, that I was afraid up to the last moment something must happen to prevent it. Cooper would die, or change his mind, or one of my influential business friends would warn me not to do it. I was so jealous of interference that I sought no advice. Without so much as a scratch of the pen between us the enterprise started. So heartily did I like and trust my partner that when, later, wiser friends inquired about my contract with him, it infuriated me. "Contract! A contract with Alfred Cooper!"
We did a roaring trade at first. Our Jersey milk was beyond all question the best in the town. It was honest, unwatered milk, and our cream, without any preservative added, was so prized that we soon had more orders than we could fill. Why our milk and cream soured so readily, losing us trade rapidly later, is a mystery to me to this day.
Within a few weeks of our starting business, Cooper convinced me that a model dairy building on the farm would be a desirable improvement; it would save labour in various ways; it was built. The farm belonged to his mother, not to him; he kept the building when our collapse followed. Next, his sister really must have someone to help her, and that someone was provided at high wages. Business was good, so good in fact that we could not supply orders. Extra milk must therefore be bought from neighbouring farmers. This was done, the contracts being made by Cooper. I never asked to see them. The bills were paid every month without question on my part. More grazing fields, with enough artificial food to feed at least a hundred cows in addition, these too had to be paid for. As for the appetites of our forty animals, I marvelled at them long before I became sus picious. Yet when, after much insisting, I saw one of the farmer's bills for extra milk, it left me, naturally, no wiser than before, and certainly not a whit more comforted, for the less our trade became, the more milk, apparently, those farmers sold us!
Six months later the firm of Cooper and Blackwood dissolved partnership, Blackwood having got the experience and Cooper having got--something quite as useful, but more marketable. Cooper's I.O.U. for five hundred dollars, now stuck in an old scrap-book somewhere, made me realize a little later how lucky it was that I had only a limited amount to lose.
Yet, though it seemed the end of the world to me, my capital lost, my enterprise a failure, I recall the curious sense of relief with which I saw the last cow knocked down to some bidder from up-country. From the very beginning I had hated the entire business. I did not know a Jersey from a Shorthorn, so to speak. I knew nothing about farming, still less about dairy-farming. The year spent at Edinburgh University to learn the agricultural trade had been wasted, for, instead, I attended what interested me far more--the post-mortems, operations, lectures on pathology, and the dissecting room. My notebooks of Professor Wallace's lectures, crammed as they were, with entries about soil, rotation of crops, and drainage, represented no genuine practical knowledge. I knew nothing. My father sent me out to Canada to farm. I went. I farmed. Cooper and Blackwood is carved upon the gravestone. But the gravestone cost £2,000, my share of the forced sale being about £600. My Canadian experience, anyhow, can be summed up in advice, which is, of course, a bromide now: let any emigrant young Englishman earn his own living for at least five years in any colony before a penny of capital is given him to invest.
It was with this £600 I soon after went into partnership with another man, but this time an honest one. We bought a small hotel in the heart of Toronto. It also lasted about six months. When the crash came we lived together from May to October on a small island in a thirty-mile lake of the Ontario hinterland; we shared a long slice of difficult life together subsequently in New York; we shared the horrors of East 19th Street together. He failed me only once, missing a train a few years later by a couple of minutes. It was the Emigrant Sleeper to Duluth on Lake Superior, en route for the Rainy River Gold Fields, where four of us had made sudden plans to try our fortunes. I was on a New York paper at the time, and had secured passes over the first fifteen hundred miles. As the train drew out of the Central Station I saw my friend racing down the platform, a minute too late! From that day to this I have never set eyes on him again. It was an abrupt end to a friendship cemented by hard times, and my disappointment at losing his companionship was rather bitter at the time.