Hundreds and Thousands (14 page)

SUCH SEWINGS
, carpentering, basement cleanings, shoppings! I got my ticket and moneys, silly little bank notes smaller by half than ours, and had my coat cleaned and boots soled and bought a hat warranted to be uncrushable, unspottable, uncomfortable and entirely travel proof. I’ve made a beautiful dress, a passable petticoat and two impossible bloomers, and had my shoes poked out in bay-windows over my worst corns, and made a comfortable pen in the basement for the dogs during my absence. Nobody wants Susie to care for, poor lamb, and she’s so easy and loving and sweet. I don’t think I’d better take her along, though I’d like to. The ticket man has written things all over my envelopes of tickets and things in a hand so small it will take three telescopes and a microscope to read it all. I always get a giddy head when they shoot rates, fares, prices, time tables, and directions at me. I earnestly pray the sea will be calm because I cross to Seattle on the little Iroquois boat.

It’s one grand and perfect day for a starter. I left at 9 a.m. for Port Angelus. Won’t get to Seattle till 4 p.m. We (me and the gulls)
have the deck to ourselves. Gulls don’t wear trousers; their naked legs stick right out of their waistcoats. They are mostly young, with spotty pinafores and smudged faces showing their grownupness is on the way. The old ones look so smooth and white and adult, the unwinking clear grey of their eyes fearlessly splendid. The whole round of the upper back deck is a solid row of sitting gulls, hitchhikers, and no two of them have the same expression. The rail is too rounded for the comfort of their heel-less webbed feet and they keep slithering and changing places in the row and squawking about it. As soon as they are settled a steward flaps something and then it’s all to do over again.

I don’t know if I feel more like a princess or a convict, I’m being taken such care of. Archie, the ticket-agent, has encircled me with care-keepers and looker-out-fors; must have thought I looked a bit old and unstarched for travelling. He saw me off himself, wrapping me in the Purser’s care.

It’s awful to see the ticket man flip the yards of tickets that cost so much into his pocket and give you a mere scrap of paper in return, though it is nice to be relieved of its responsibility. I simplified my rather intricate system of keep-safes to one central pocket attached round my waist with a corset lace, pinned to my petticoat with a stout safety and covered decorously by my skirt. I hope I shan’t lose things. I have everything tied on and the untieables poked down my front till I look like a pouter pigeon. But I am so lost a person things just wilfully hide.

It is raining at Paradise, Montana, and the clock has jumped nearly an hour. It’s pretty — rolling hills and farms. There is a funny kind of pine tree that changes to a gold colour — so astonishing. I like
Montana. It would be lovely to ride and ride and ride on a dear companionable pony, on and on and on. The hills look like soft shaded velvet.

Wonderful skies towards dusk — deep, billowing clouds walloping across the sky. There is snow on some of the mountains, newly fallen. The little towns look so old and battered, and forlorn and forsaken. Very little life is visible and many houses are broken-windowed or boarded up. Oh, it is a vast, lonesome country, lean and unprofitable, with bitter cold and torturing heat, a place to teach me courage and endurance. I wonder if I have ever experienced it in a past incarnation or shall I yet in another? Night has shut down just before we come to the grandest part and dark will be on the Bad Lands that I wanted to see.

Here’s yesterday’s tomorrow and we are rushing on and on and on, eating up space, passing through what are queernesses to my Western eyes. Occasionally, a minute of keen, pure air that cuts like a knife as one clings close to the car step for fear of getting left. Mercy! What would one do? I guess
our
West is just grand. What these people have to put up with, being fried and frozen, parched, blown to chaff! Even the telephone poles are blown bent. The little water is brackish and there are ugly scars of burnt along the grass. Just one thing I love — its space. The sky sweeps round in noble curves and deigns to come down, down even below the earth. At first I thought it was the sea in the distance, but no, it’s just the sky swooped down below the brown, rolling hummocks, making you feel the earth is floating in the air, wrapped about in it. If you could be under the earth it would be there too.

Last night the train bumped scandalously as though we were being hooked on and off the engine every few blocks. At every bump some monster shouted, “Wake,” and I waked and stared straight at the sky with its high bright moon and clouds rolling and stretching out sublimely, and here and there a patch of blue with a star winking in it. The quiet brown earth, solid and sullen, seemed as if the liveness of the sky was trying to wake it up and couldn’t, as if it was disheartened and sad. Poor earth, what does it want? For it can’t stop growth. But the blizzards and the hail strike it, its crops are tortured by thirst, the farmer throws down his implements and leaves it to itself. Surely something will wake it all some day. After aeons of time it will come into its own and the empty, forlorn houses will have curtains and smoking chimneys, and its yawning weariness will be all cheered up and sing. I watch and watch till I fall asleep. It’s all so new and interesting. I like being alone; things talk plainer so.

There is a cackling woman opposite
en route
to bury Mamma in Wisconsin. She doesn’t seem depressed though she wonders if she will feel just like taking in the Chicago Fair the day after. Her heart is gummed shut around her superlative husband and her super-superlative daughter whom she left behind, but she sure brought along a waggling tongue. I don’t wonder she has stomach trouble; her tongue
must
neglect her organs — it’s so busy elsewhere.

There are no hummocks now. The earth is flat, not a bump except for an occasional pile of chaff, the thresher’s leavings. I wish I could express that sky and space.

Oh, it gets worse and worse! It has gone so flat and thin looking. It’s new ploughed mostly, and black or dead brown. Out there in the miles of flatness is a cemetery. I did not know the earth
could look so thin and poor and hard. Our engine smoke rolls low over it, crushed down. I think I’ll read Whitman to cheer up on.

Chicago tomorrow and the pictures! What will they teach me? Oh, I pray I may be receptive to what there is for me. I have just read Fred Housser’s letter thanking me for the sketch I sent. It came as I left home. I read it once and put it away quickly for fear of growing vain and smug. I’d so hate to be that. I have so much to learn and fall so short. I do hope the Chicago pictures give me a boost. It’s so long since I’ve seen other people’s thoughts, and my own seem wearily me-ish.

This morning it is clear and glorious — flat country, with prosperous looking farms and satisfied cattle, pigs and chickens, and vast fields of cornstalks and windmills and decent fencing, and old-fashioned houses with one-peak gables and fat barns. I suppose it’s Wisconsin. There is sun and haze and a nip of frost.

I’m here, and oh, the awfulest blow, the pictures aren’t! They closed on the 30th! Oh my, oh me, I did so badly want to see them! I feel like going straight home and bawling. I’m going to wash and then go up and beat my head on the stone doors of the Art Institute.

It’s true — there’s nothing to be done about it. It closed only last night. I left an order for a catalogue. They had none but will send one on when more are printed. I feel as if someone had hit me and
I want to cry horribly. Now I suppose I must see the Fair, though I haven’t much heart for it. It doesn’t seem to matter.

Spent about six hours of weary tramping from building to building and did not get one kick. The workers looked so utterly jaded and weary of the sham, for it is a sham right through, tawdry make-believes. The real things, the flowers, bushes, trees and shrubs, can’t stand it. They are dried up and dead and knocking their bare, crackling limbs on the hollow plaster walls. Nobody laughs. They try to force souvenirs on you and turn peevish when you don’t buy. I came home wet and cold to the Y.W. and sat in my room and snivelled dismally in self-pity.

Why, why, why must I always stand alone in my work, away from other artists, away from seeing other worthwhile work? Now I’ll take my brine-pickled eyes to sleep. Maybe tomorrow they’ll be clear enough to see something else besides that gallery door slammed on my nose.

I received a letter from Lawren. Knowing I was
en route
and the show over, he’d telegraphed, but too late. He told me to go see the director but it was no use. I did but he was hedged in by a hedge of old secretaries, regular cacti, their spikes spearing every move. I footed it to the Field Museum. The Natural History is grand, so beautifully mounted, intensely interesting. The museum is gigantic. If only one was provided with legion eyes and could toss one in every hall to do its work, collecting them as you came out, how grand it would be!

Hall of Science overwhelming; very excellent and noble but disgusting. All diseases exposed, microbes and medicine. I sat down to rest and found a movie of the first operation under anaesthetics. When the victim began to writhe I fled. Next I got mixed up in the bladder diseases, then tuberculosis. Pigs’ lungs, cows’ lungs, rats’ lungs hanging in a row made me sick. Then came the microbe family and the toxins. Finally I arrived at human embryology. Should I or shouldn’t I? I went in and it was beautiful. The little unborn babies in bottles were beautiful — such character and pathos and reality; no two alike. They looked so wise and unearthly! Yes, I loved the babies.

It doesn’t matter about the pictures really, not a bit. What I am looking for I must work out for myself. It is between God and me. Laziness made me desire to look at the pictures of others, to try and pick up short-cut recipes that others have used to get what they desired to express instead of going straight to the thing itself, to stand before it meek and silent, feeling deeper and deeper and more intensely till its life throbs and vibrates through you, till the inaudible words of the earth, God’s words, speak to you and tell you what to do, how to express.

Chicago is as windy as Victoria. Went to Marshall Field’s. Huge place, floor after floor. When you roll up your eyes from the shop’s middle the landings go clean to Heaven and then some. I did a little shopping. They tried my corsets on right in the eye of all Chicago (over my clothes of course) and I was embarrassed. The shop women are very courteous and helpful, the young girls so bright and attractive and anxious to help, and “please” and “thank you” when they hand the parcel and wish you goodbye
and hope you’ll enjoy your purchase. I hope, indeed, I shall enjoy the corset but am doubtful.

Now for more fairing. I’ll tidy up that job before I do up Chicago.

I’ve finished the Fair, that is I think I’ve got all I want. The nights are so bitter and cold, it’s time it closed. First I went to the Aquarium and that was enchanting. It is not in the Fair grounds and is real — solid, alive, beautiful. The fish are magnificently staged and their colour and shape and markings and grace are subtle and superb. They have dignity and intelligence and marvellous beauty. It is real joy to watch their movements. The place is all dim and mysterious, long corridors with tanks sunk in the walls, beautifully lighted from above. No two fish, even of the same species, have the same expression. It’s wonderful to contemplate that infinite variety of creation.

Out into the bitter blast again and into the Fair. I went here and there. Every nose was redder than the next, except the ones that were purple. The little sham lake puddles were all aboil like angry little oceans, and the fountains slopped over and blew against the disgusted passers. Flag ropers flapped, sign post directors creaked and groaned, and the dead trees rattled their bones and shivered, but not so badly as the poor souls in the Morocco Village. They looked the acme of all misery, done up in blankets and coarse overshirts, clinging feebly to life and tightly to their prices, and how folks haggled! The Chinese place was the same, and the Belgian. In the
Christian Science Monitor
hall they were snug and warm. In the Hall of Religion I heard a first-rate talk by a Mormon on their beliefs. He was so convincing and sincere I nearly
turned Mormon. Then I saw Firestone tires created from start to finish, and the outside of Byrd’s ship and his Husky dogs in kennels, and medieval monsters in caves with horrid smoke and abominable bellowings, heads and tails that moved and eyes that glittered electrically. I did not think much of that lurid show.

Then I came to the Streets of Paris and paid 10c. and went in. It was pretty and well got up and realistic but the undercurrent was dirty and I was glad to go out. I was sorry for the half-naked, shivering girls and hated the vulgar, coarse men who exhibited them. The wind must have tortured their nakedness. They were blue and wretched under the paint. Then, last, I crossed over, paid 25c. and saw the babies in the incubators. They looked cute and cosy, the only warm life in all that three miles or whatever-it-is of bitter blasts, kings and queens in their own right, completely indifferent to the passing show. I could almost willingly have shrunk myself into an incubator and started life all over again.

My one extravagance is a taxi home. When you are not sure of the way and your feet are aching blobs, it’s glorious to wave a yellow cab like Cinderella and her pumpkin and be whirled off to the spread wing of the old Y.W.C.A.

Too late for breakfast so had it round the corner, better and cheaper. Bitter wind still persists and the sky heavy. Inside you suffocate; outside you freeze. What is one to do? Stand in the doorways and be batted by both? It is not hard getting round; the trafic is not dense and the police kind and courteous. I have not boarded a streetcar yet. Somehow I shrink when they come near and go on footing it. I must be very animal and earthy because I love the earth; it’s so dependable. I can’t trust machines. All
machinery to me is terrifying, with an inexorable determination about it, cruel and bloodless. Yet I’ve heard men who love engines talk about them as if they were human. “Why,” said Bert Fish, who ran the lighthouse at Friendly Cove, patting his well-kept engine lovingly, “She’s like a baby. She tells me at once when anything is wrong. There’s a different sound that tells you at once.” I wish I could feel that way. I wonder how many incarnations it will take to grow strong and wise and get away from one’s cabbage state.