Hetty Dorval

ETHEL WILSON
was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in 1888. She was taken to England at the age of two after her mother died. Seven years later her father died, and in 1898 she came to Vancouver to live with her maternal grandmother. She received her teacher’s certificate from the Vancouver Normal School in 1907 and taught in many local elementary schools until her marriage in 1921.

In the 1930s Wilson published a few short stories and began a series of family reminiscences which were later transformed into
The Innocent Traveller
. Her first published novel,
Hetty Dorval
, appeared in 1947, and her fiction career ended fourteen years later with the publication of her story collection,
Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories
. Through her compassionate and often ironic narration, Wilson explores in her fiction the moral lives of her characters.

For her contribution to Canadian literature, Wilson was awarded the Canada Council Medal in 1961 and the Lorne Pierce Medal of the Royal Society of Canada in 1964. Her husband died in 1966, and she spent her later years in seclusion and ill-health.

Ethel Wilson died in Vancouver in 1980.

General Editor: David Staines

ADVISORY BOARD

Alice Munro

W.H. New

Guy Vanderhaeghe

This story, the characters, and the names are all imaginary. They have no known existence.

I have taken some liberties with topography, and with the Thompson River, whose colour changes strikingly with the seasons.

E.W.

Vancouver
British Columbia
June, 1946

T
he day that Mrs. Dorval’s furniture arrived in Lytton, Ernestine and I had gone to the station to see the train come in. It was a hot day. The heat of the sun burned down from above, it beat up from the ground and was reflected from the hot hills. Mr. Miles, the station agent, was in his shirt-sleeves; the station dog lay and panted, got up, moved away, lay down and panted again; and the usual Indians stood leaning against the corners of the wooden station (we called it “the deepo”) in their usual curious incurious fashion, not looking as though they felt the heat or anything else. The Indians always looked as though they had nothing to do, and perhaps they had nothing to do. Ernestine and I had nothing much to do, but school was out and supper wasn’t ready and so we had drifted over to the station. Neither of our mothers liked us to do this every day; but we were not absolutely forbidden.

When the train clanked in, a number of the stifling passengers got out seeking coolness in the bright glaring heat of the station platform. Ernestine and I watched these passengers with experienced eyes and saw that there was no one interesting
to us. We did not find grown-ups interesting, but were always on the look-out for other children or for dogs. And sure enough there at the end of the train was a large dog, perhaps a Newfoundland, hot in his hot coat. The train men had got him out of a freight car, and then they heaved and pushed and lifted out a huge crated object that might be a piano, and then they got out packing case after packing case.

Directly the great dog stood upon the platform, looking sadly and nobly about him, a woman moved up to him and said casually, “Well, Sailor,” and you might almost say the dog smiled. His thick bell-rope of a tail swung and he moved up to the woman who patted him lightly but gave her full attention to the crates and packing cases that the train hands and station hands deposited upon the platform. Ernestine and I had seen this woman before in the Lytton main street, but she was really the kind of woman that you don’t notice. You might see her in a village, or in a big city, or in a street-car, or on a train, and you would never notice. Nevertheless, we now saw that she had authority. She was dressed in dark grey. Her hair was dark grey too, and was taken straight back from her plain strong face. Suddenly she began to be interesting to Ernestine and to me, because she belonged to Sailor the dog and to all the new packing cases.

We did not need to ask, because, before you could count fifty, word had travelled along the platform, perhaps from the station agent or perhaps from the express company, to us and through us, and even to the leaning inscrutable Indians, that the dog Sailor and all these packing cases belonged to a Mrs. Dorval and that Mrs. Dorval had taken that square bungalow all alone above the river, just to the east of Lytton. So as Ernestine and I had nothing better to do, we trailed along the dusty road behind the waggon that took the first load out. The
horses toiled up the winding trail, sending up clouds of fine clay dust, and we idled far enough behind to be out of the worst of it. Mrs. Dorval rode with the teamster. The trucks were out that day and one was broken down, so they had to use the team. The toiling waggon topped three or four little slopes before it reached the square bungalow above the river. Only the knowledge that we were to see something new in Lytton, and the niceness of having something to tell our families that would cause us to be important made Ernestine and me keep on walking in the dust and heat behind the waggon, because the declining sun, still just above the high near hills, was very hot indeed. You couldn’t walk on the side of the road very well because there was nothing but sage and tumbleweed, and that made walking difficult, although it was easy enough to ride horseback there.

The sun dipped behind the hills across the river and the windows of the bungalow ceased blazing with evening sunlight. At once you felt the cool air as if it were the earth’s cool breath. Anybody looking out of the front windows of Mrs. Dorval’s bungalow could look down on to the racing Thompson River. Perhaps the water was emerald, perhaps it was sapphire. It is both. It is neither. It is a brilliant river, blue-green with lacings of white foam and spray as the water hurls itself violently along in rapids against hidden or projecting rocks, a rapid, racing, calling river. The hills rise high and lost on each side of the banks. These hills are traversed hardly at all. There is no reason to climb, to scale the top, to look down. In the sunlight the dun-coloured gorges of the blue-green river look yellow and ochreous, and in some places there are outcroppings of rock that are nearly rose red. Large dark and solitary pine trees give landmark and meaning. Here and there in a gully an army of these dark pointed pine trees marches up
an ancient waterway of the hill-side, static. How do they grow on stone? A figure of man or of beast crawling distant across the great folds and crevasses of these sprawling hills would make you stop, look, point with surprise, and question. One is accustomed to their being empty of life. As evening comes on, the hills grow dove grey and purple; they take on a variety of surprising shapes and shades, and the oblique shafts of sunlight disclose new hills and valleys which in daylight merge into one and are not seen. It is the sage-brush that covers nearly everything, that helps to transform everything, and that in the mutations of sunlight and moonlight helps to change the known hills to the unfamiliar. Because the hills are so desolate, strange and still, without movement, the strong brilliant water in headlong motion at their base holds your eyes with its tumult. If the person in Mrs. Dorval’s bungalow feels any fear of this desolate scene, or if the person is subject in solitude to moods of depression or despair, then that person had better take her piano and her dog Sailor and her packing cases and go by train or by the Cariboo highway to some comfortable town full of people. No one can travel by the Thompson River at Lytton; it is too turbulent and too thickly sown with rapids.

Ernestine and I stood and watched the woman in grey deal with the first waggon-load of furniture and belongings, and with a subsequent load. She dealt with the teamster and his helper with such speed and capableness that never at any moment was there that look of lost untidiness begotten of a welter of unrelated and unarranged objects. Ernestine and I began to admire this woman whom an hour or so ago we had neglected to notice. Time passed, the sky darkened, and lights appeared in the valley down by the Bridge. The dry noise of crickets became vociferous and imperative. I understood a tension in Ernestine, for we felt that our experience was not
complete. We were going to be late for supper. We were due for a wigging when we got home, she from her mother, and I from our friend Mrs. Dunne with whom I was boarded. But Ernestine’s mother and my Mrs. Dunne were both human, and if we arrived home with the account of words spoken and information gained, our distinction might atone. “Yes, my daughter was speaking to Mrs. Dorval only last evening!” Sailor ambled up and obligingly nosed our skinny legs. He was lovely. We were pleased and flattered; it was almost as if Mrs. Dorval herself had noticed us. We stooped and fondled him lavishly. Ernestine was not shy, so she led the trundling Sailor by his collar back to the woman in grey.

“Here is Sailor, Mrs. Dorval,” she said.

The woman in grey did not stop to smile or thank Ernestine for her empty courtesy. She said without pausing, “All right. I am not Mrs. Dorval,” and continued taking things into the house. It was rather humiliating that a small group of silent Indian children saw this happen. Charley Joe and Joe Charley and some of their brothers and sisters had stopped on their way to the rancheree farther up the river. They would stand there until there was nothing left to see, and then they would move slowly away, impelled one by the other. Goodness knows what they would tell the other Indians in their log and earth houses when they reached home. You never knew. Ernestine and I turned in the dusk, rather confused, and walked away until we passed the first crest and the road led downwards. Then we saw the lights of Lytton and together we started to run, and recovered ourselves. The river was dark now, but even in the darkness we saw the white wave crests curling and tumbling in the rapids near us as we ran, and the noise of the water was louder than ever in the darkness. The smell of the sage came strong.