Hundreds and Thousands (22 page)

The wind kicked up all the horrible ructions it knew how last night. I thought the van would up and fly away on its flaps. The buckets and pans rolled round. Everything inside blew out and outside things blew in till in and out were all mixed up. I sketched on the beach — results indifferent. We tucked into the van but at midnight the gusts were very fierce and I got into boots and came out and unhooked the flaps and lashed things together a bit and it was better. Rain threatens.

It’s fine here. Nobody pesters you. The great wide beach is yours for the taking, its lapping waves and its piles of drift all yours. The roses on the bank, bursting in a riot of cool pink from the piles of deep green leaves, toss out the most heavenly perfume. I love to pass the corner where the spring gurgles up out of the black earth. The roses are so busy there drowning the old skunk cabbages’ smells and the birds are applauding us with wing-flappings and such shoutings. A lovely little couple were down pecking in the black earth. I watched them. He, rusty red about the head, a regular Scotchman. She, quiet grey and very ladylike. They were obviously very attached, keeping close and chatting, not polite he-and-she-manners talk like some married couples, but companionable babble.

There are times out here when one just looks and times when one just listens, and others when one just feels or smells, and there are times when one does all of them at once and others when one is just vacant and nothing works. I believe these times are good too, not to be worried over as savouring of laziness but regarded as times of preparation for development, like a field lying open and fallow and bare.

Oh, the birds! They are as birdy and as busy as they can be in May. Before it is light they are at their singing. Then there’s breakfast and the all-day-long job of feeding and teaching the young. Maybe that is why they do get up so early, to have a little quiet to themselves and have time for their devotions. I do not think of birds as saying anything but only as tossing off the overflow of their joy in being in the few notes that are peculiarly their own. The bird doesn’t need many notes because he doesn’t know many emotions. When his feelings are bad he does not express them but hides them away somewhere off in the silence. He’s noisy and
ecstatic over living. Over dying he is silent and secretive. I know now why birds, those perpetual campers, sing after rain.

The rain pours. I have put us in and pulled us out until I feel like a worn concertina. If it does it again, I shall ignore it and drown. This is our lazy old April’s postscript in May. Fool, fool, fool, that is what I called myself to leave a comfortable home to be drowned and frozen, to cope with wet wood and primitive stove and the bucksaw and water lugged from the spring, this pattering through puddles in a cotton nightgown and rainboots and pleading with the wet wood while hunger and hot-drink longings gnaw your vitals. But, at last, the fire began to burn the sticks, the kettle began to boil, the sun began to shine and I began a new chapter.

The only dry thing in the whole camp is the water bucket. It’s wonderful how one learns to manage to combat and yet work with the elements. I think of Mrs. Noah a great deal: “And Noah went into the Ark and shut the door.” When I cosy the creatures into their boxes and take the hot water bottle and shut the door of the Elephant, I feel very safe and able to sauce the elements sitting up in the bunk looking over the sullen grey sea and the old wrecked automobile sitting on the beach among the drift and the drowned daisies who never opened all day yesterday, hiding their golden eyes with cold red fingers, the briar roses sullen and not thinking any more about putting on their lovely pink dresses, and the blackthorn bushes not white round bundles of blossoms but sodden drab lumps. But it’s cosy in the van,
the rain hitting hard just a few inches above your head and you able to say “Fooled!” as you hear its thwarted trickle down the van sides, and four comfortable snores coming out of the four dog boxes, and Woo’s puff, puff and the soft little tearing of paper, Susie’s old maidish preparations for the nests she’s always building and never filling. Yes, the van is cosy when it rains.

The Morleys spent all day and it was very nice. We ate and talked and I read them “Cow Yard” and “Balance” and “No Man’s Land,” and they liked them, and out it came, the longing that everyone has to write to express that seething inside that so wants to find an outlet. It is not pride or notoriety or fame people are really after; it’s the great longing to grow and to find out what is in oneself and
do
something to bring it into expression.

Camp life is one steady wrestle — with the elements, with inadequate means. One says, “When I have leisure in camp I will do this and that,” but the leisure never comes. Indians, those superb campers, had leisure in abundance because they understood; they did not combat. If the wind wanted to come in, they let it and shifted themselves out of its way. If the tide served, they went, if not, they waited. No fussy, hurrying clock to watch, only the steady old sun. If the sun said, “Too hot to work,” the Indian did not work. Time was no object and waiting enjoyable. There was no friction so there was peace and they went with nature and nature is quite comfortable if you don’t thwart her. My stinging nettle patch is perfectly sweet-tempered if I don’t annoy her. I go and come through it with never a bite. I’m not afraid of her.

Oh, this inertia! I don’t
want
to work. It blows and blusters and is much nicer sitting in the van than anywhere. I’ve reconstructed the shelf-table, made a nice little pulpit table with part of the shelf and evened and strengthened the shelf that’s left. I love things firm and steady. Now they are. I wish I was as firm and steady. All I’ve done today is make a good camp stew and learn a piece of poetry,
viz.

When He appoints thee, go thou forth —
     It matters not
If south or north,
     Bleak waste or sunny plot.
Nor think, if haply He thou seek’st be late,
     He does thee wrong.
To stile or gate
     Lean thou thy head, and long!
It may be that to spy thee He is mounting
     Upon a tower,
Or in thy counting
     Thou hast mista’en the hour.
But, if He comes not, neither do thou go
     Till Vesper chime,
Belike thou then shall know
     He hath been with thee all the time.
       (
Specula
by Thomas Edward Brown)

Oh mercy, how it blows! This place is all superlatives. It blows extremely hard or rains extremely hard or suns until you’re
melted or all at once until you’re giddy. The slop about one’s feet is awful. It lies round the van splashing up as you walk — disgusting slop, cold and penetrating. Under the fire is a well of water; the fire sits on a tin tray on top. Sometimes I think I must move on, and dread the expense and bother.

Somehow theosophy makes me shudder now. It was reading H. Blavatsky that did it, her intolerance and particularly her attitude to Christianity. Theosophists say that one of their objects is study of comparative religions and on top of that claim theosophy is the
only
way. It’s that pedantic know-it-allness that irritates me. I’m a beast.

Instead of trying to force our personality on to our subject, we should be quite quiet and unassertive and let the subject swallow us and absorb us into it, and not be so darn smart of our importance. The woods are marvellous after the sun has dipped and quit tickling them. Then they get down to sober realities, the cake without the icing. They are themselves, then, like people alone and thinking instead of persons in a throng trying to sparkle and taking on reflection from others. Dear trees, we don’t stop half enough to love and admire them.

IT IS AS I SAID
: go with nature and she’s easy and delicious. The swamp round the van was awful and my feet in torment, rebelling at rubber or wet stockings. So off they came and barefoot I paddled through big and little puddles. It’s the most wonderful feel. The grass is so soft. The daisies tickle and leave pink and white petals on your naked feet. They never cling to your boots. The earth, even the squelching black mud, kisses your feet as you pass through and the sun is far warmer than shoes. Legs are not so happy. They don’t touch the reality, only the air, but they’ll
get to love the air too. To think how I’ve fussed over wet feet for two weeks, bucking instead of accompanying!

Oh, the misery of living in this slop! The water lies all round the van. I can’t stand it. My feet are hideously sensitive to cold, to wet, to unevenness, more sensitive than my hands. Even with thick shoes I feel
everything.
When I had a toe amputated I suffered tortures. The doctor remarked on the extreme liveness of my feet nerves. Underfoot things can do things to my whole being — exquisite pain and exquisite pleasure. There you are. Much easier to have old cowhocks and squelch round in the mire when life is so full of mire. Tomorrow I go into town and command the hauler to drag me up the hill on to the Metchosen Road, high above all the slop. I’ve seen a lovely place. There won’t be beach and open expanse but there will be shelter and the holiness beneath trees, and
dry
grass. So, I moved the stove in under the tent and am warmed with thoughts of dryness. My frog is croaking right in my left ear and a pheasant and a robin are calling. Woo is cuddled up in the sweet briar bush. How do those soft little hands of hers avoid the thorns? I believe we must have been intended to go naked. Rain-soaked clothes don’t connect with a common-sense creator and a perfect universe. Drat Eve’s modesty complex.

Here we are, all settled in Mr. Strathdee’s field, dry and happy. The move was awful. I’d have given the van away, with a kiss thrown in, to anyone who’d have dragged her out of the hole. Friday morning I waited, all packed, in great discomfort from
9:30 (the appointed hour) until 11:30. Then the haulers came and drove round and round the briar bushes, mud and slosh splashing to Heaven, but they couldn’t get near the van and nothing would work in the bog. Then I ran hither and thither hunting a man to help but there weren’t any, so the hauler hauled me and the beasts and junk up and sat us in the field and went to town for help. We sat and sat until 4 p.m. from 12 noon. As I sat there in my wicker easy chair with the two beds, three chairs, stove, buckets, pots, food boxes and all the animals round me, a funny little body grinned along the fence. Every step she grinned harder. Somehow the grin ran along the top fence rail seeming to go along and continue because after she was long past her head was turned behind so that the grin ran back again and met you from the other way. It was such a kindly, enveloping grin! She was a neat little person with glasses on, and carrying many bags, and not any more young. She went past and into the back gate of Mr. Strathdee’s place and went through his house and came down the path to my corner. She hadn’t heard about me coming to his place and she said, “Are ye having a wee bit picnic, dear?” and she smiled some more in a kind, welcoming way. It did tickle me to think of one solitary soul taking all that clutter along for “a wee bit picnic” all alone. She works in a hotel and comes out Saturdays to tidy up “Brother.” She washed and scrubbed; smoke poured out the chimney and mats shook out the doors. Then she trotted off through the woods to see “Sister” who lives in the other direction, stopping at my camp to give me quite a good helping of their family history and to admire the “nice wee doggies” and the “nice wee monkey.” Saturday is her one day off so she sets out at 9 a.m. and gets the 11:30 p.m. bus home. Tidies “Brother” and tidies “Sister” by way of rest!

When the old Elephant came lumbering up the hill, I was glad after all that she was mine, but I was very tired and a fair price would have bought her and quit me of camping for ever. But I fell to. Then when I was tucked in bed my spirits hoisted a bit and this morning was so shady and sweet and calm, all the troubles were gone and I wouldn’t sell the van for a mint.

I am circled by trees. They are full of chatter, the wind and the birds helping them. Through the sighing of the wind they tell their sorrows. Through the chortle of the birds they tell their joy. The birds are not so intimate here as down in the swamp. There they flew low and sought earth things and dug for worms. Here their concerns are in the high trees. My spirit has gone up with the birds. On the Flats it was too concerned with the mud. I hate to leave camp in the mornings, it is so delicious under the gracious great pines. In the afternoon, when the sun has dodged down and blares forth and gets glaring, red hot and bold, I like to get off into the calm woods. When he has gone, leaving just a trail of glory across the sky which the pines stand black against, it gets wonderful again and presently an enormous motherly moon comes out of the east and washes everything and all the sweet cool smells come out of things, not the sunshine smells of day that are like the perfumes and cosmetic smells of fine ladies but the after-bath smells, cleanliness, fine soap and powder of sweet, well-kept babies. And when you put the van lamp out and lie in the cool airy quiet, you want to think of lovely things. Only sleep is in such a hurry. She has fallen already on the dogs and the monkey and even the rat, and the moonbeams and sleep whisper together, and there you are, helpless as when you lie on
an operating table and the doctor is putting you under. You’ve got to give in; it’s no use kicking, so you wonder where you are going and what you’re going to see. You wake up once or twice to peep but it only spoils things and looses the thread, so that when morning bustles in your “wake” and “sleep” are all mixed up and vague.

THERE’S THE BIG
, hard, cryable disappointments and then there’s the horrid little jolts not worth defacing your eyes and nose about, but accumulative, making in the aggregate a tougher, harder, bigger thing to swallow than the big individual troubles that made you cry.

The folk round here kept singing the praises of a certain widow. They just about wept as they told you about all the knocks life had dealt out to her. Her husband had died on her tragically, her son ditto, and now her son’s dog. She was, they said, so brave and heroic in her affliction. I began to admire this woman and to want to know her and when it came to the dog’s death, and she seventy years old and so emptied of all she loved, I looked over my outfit and decided the lonely widow should have Maybbe who is such an affectionate, companionable creature. I pictured the widow woman and Maybbe all of a-cuddle in the winter evening and the woman saying, “What a comfort this creature is in my loneliness,” and the dog creeping further and further into the woman’s heart, wriggling into that empty ache till their love was all tangled up together. So I set out to call on the widow and feel the way to offer my gift graciously. I did not take Maybbe with me because her pups are nearly here and she looks awful, but I took Tantrum and Pout. I would say, “She’s the mother of these two and she’s having more this week but as soon as they’re weaned
you shall have her. She’s such a companionable creature and I shall be so glad to know she has a lovely home.”