Hundreds and Thousands (24 page)

QUITE A DOWNPOUR
but what care we, snugged up all cosy under the old tin hen. The rain comes in insignificant little titters on the canvas top with an occasional heavy ha-ha as the big accumulated drops roll off the pine boughs. Susie cavorts round in glee and all the rest snore cosily. I am a lucky woman, I have a brick in a biscuit
tin at my feet, and a lovely afternoon’s writing before me, and the mystery of the solemn wood to look into. It’s a very nice wood but wickedly full of mosquitoes. Perhaps they belong to the mystery. Doubtless they, with their poisonous little pricks, have their place and undoubtedly they enjoy us. Three baby fir trees sit on the edge of the solemn wood and look as out of place as children at a grown-ups’ party. Ghost flowers grow in the woods — beauties. I shall take a big clump home. They are mystery flowers.

THE WIND’S BEEN
dreadful for two days and two nights. The tent blew down. I was flitting round all night. My smallest pup was very sick. I think the cold wind caught him. He cried and cried. I got in and out of bed, first to locate which pup was wailing and then to wrap him in a woolly and take him into bed. But he wailed in pain. I put bacon fat on his chest, and eucalyptus. Then a great gust came and the tent nearly dragged the van over, so I went out and wrestled with it. In bed and out of bed, in the van and out, what I had on blowing scandalously, what I had off heaped round, and all in the way. The monkey let out unearthly screeches and Susie tore paper. The dogs in their cosy boxes saw no cause for complaint and snored. That was reassuring.

More maddening wind and another sick puppy that wailed all night to the accompaniment of the wind. I just loathe to see it suffering yet at times it looks quite fine. I’ve done everything I know, which is not much when it comes to such youngsters. I hate to leave it and go out and I hate to sit and hear it wail and I hate to destroy it unless it has to be. These tearing ice blasts sweep
across the earth piercing everything. In the lulls it’s quite warm. The sun dodges back and forth peeping through rain clouds. The whole universe is aggravating.

I wonder what I have learnt on this trip? I guess it’s a matter of infinitesimal daily gain (as long as we are honest over it). We should not expect to drink immense swallows of knowledge but just go out with our eyes and soul open. Clamber, clamber. One does not always plant one’s feet daintily when one is covering rough ground.

I am not glad and not sorry to move on. The summer parch is on the earth.

No word from the East. What’s the matter with those people? It’s over a month since I asked for the return of the manuscript. I guess they had it about three. I try not to think of them but I do because they’ve become part of my life and it’s hard sorting them out and standing square on my own old running shoes irrespective of their opinion and criticisms, and it’s good for me. Their crits don’t help any more. They’re drifting in art and not pushing on. Just because Lawren is not working others think they can’t. The group’s collapsed and the new group hasn’t taken hold. Maybe it’s up to us Westerns to wriggle up a bit. No mistake, the times
are
depressing. People simply can’t afford the price of transportation to shows. I can’t and I work with no idea of exhibit but just to squeak ahead a little.

HOPES AND DOLDRUMS 1934–35

The roof seems low and heavy and the walls squeezing us. Yet the house is enormous after the van. But the van was so much nearer the big outside, just a canvas and a rib or two and then the world. And the earth was more yours than this little taxed scrap which is under your name. I left two little pups out in the solemn wood. It’s nice to see my own family again. Yes, it’s good to be home.

Mr. Hatch wrote acknowledging the two paper sketches I sent him. He found their vigour and profoundness appealing. Said few people
understand
them. Now I can’t see
what
there is to be understood. They are just woodsy statements, no secrets or obscurities beyond the fact that all life is a mystery. Perhaps folk would like a numbered bit on the back: 1. a tree, 2. a root, 3. a grass, 4. a fool looking. Oh, life, life, how queer you are!

MY NEW SKETCHES
thrill me a bit, sort of exhilarate me when I look at them, and a joy to work on. The job is to keep them up, up, up, to keep the praise in them bursting, rising, passing through the material and going beyond and carrying you with it.

The days are glorious and splendid, and just beyond are all the horrors peeping and jibbering. What can one do? Live in the present day by moment but ready to face squarely what shall come when it does, meantime making the best of the flying moments, using them. I went to hear Mr. Springett from Toronto yesterday. He did as they all do, ran round and round and did not find a finish. That’s all any of them can do, Church, Christian Science, Oxford Group, all the million and one different kinds, various as the flowers of the earth, bearing their different seeds and fruits and scattering them, all with something right in them and some wrong too, pushing and growing to get up above the dirt.

WENT TO HEAR
Mr. Springett again. He certainly is fine and quite alive. When he starts to speak people sit up. His great hulk heaves itself out of his chair and sort of hurls itself into an open spot on the platform, not behind the reading desk like the other speakers — that would cramp him. Besides he has a bay in front and needs room for his physical as well as his spiritual parson’s collar (celluloid I think) round his massive neck, but his chins and things are inside, not hanging over. It’s more like a fence than a collar, a tight thing fitted to the throat. This circlet is big enough for a waist belt, big to let all the thoughts that roll up from his heart pour through. He is never still a moment and evidently knows all near objects are in danger for he moves the water jug and the glass and the vase of flowers at his feet and the chair to safe distances, and all the time he is talking hard and unbuttoning his coat and taking his watch out of his pocket and putting it safe and far over on the reading desk. His legs take on a wide straddle and then his arms begin working. They fly up, up unintentionally and big cuffs shoot out from his sleeves and catch on
his coat sleeves. This little restriction pulls him up and he wrestles furiously and smashes them back up his sleeves and buttons up his coat again as if he feared they’d burst out that way and all the time his words are pouring out and you can, in a way, feel them striking on people’s hearts like water hissing on hot metal. And after an immense outpouring he stops short and says, “And there it is,” and leaves it with folk to digest. Then he forgets his cuffs and unbuttons his coat, but before long it all happens over again. People are all het up at the finish and say to each other, “Isn’t he fine? Wasn’t it wonderful?” And then they go home and eat and sleep and the next day and all the days after it gets weaker and weaker. We’re such desperate hypocrites. If we actually believed in our hearts’ cores it was
all true,
we’d burst because of its immensity, and everything else would be nothing. We’re not really honest or else we’re too little to compass it. And everybody says everyone else’s way is all wrong and one longs to know. Are all ways wrong or all ways right?

My sketches have zip to them but they don’t strike bottom yet. They move some but I want them to swell and roll back and forth into space, pausing here and there to fill out the song, catch the rhythm, to go down into the deep places and pause there and to rise up into the high ones, exulting. Let the movement be slow and savour of solidity at the base and rise quivering to the tree tops and to the sky, always rising to meet it joyously and tremulously. The objects before one are not enough, nor colour, nor form, nor design, nor composition. If spirit does not breathe through, it is lifeless, dead, voiceless. And the spirit must be felt so intensely that it has power to call others in passing, for it must pass, not stop in the pictures but be perpetually moving through, carrying on and inducing a thirst for more and a desire to rise.

For years I have been “pillared” and “pillowed” on the criticisms and ideals of the East. Now they are torn away and I stand
alone
on my own perfectly good feet. Now I take my own soul as my critic. I ask no man but push with my own power, look with my own eyes, feeling into and praying always. My only shame is indolence or slovenly smattering over surface appearance instead of quietly and soberly digging and boring beneath.

Little book, I started to take a summer school course in short story writing so perhaps I can improve in my treatment of you. I’d like to make little daily incidents ring clean cut and clear as a bell, dress ’em up in gowns simple and yet exquisite like Paris gowns. I have not much confidence in the instructress but anyhow she knows heaps more than I and it’s fun to work along with others. It’s so long since I worked other than like the proverbial pelican in the wilderness, not since art school days.

I am enjoying the short story course at summer school. It’s nice to be among the young things and sharpen myself up against their keen brains. I’m the veteran antique among twenty-two. The desks are built for young things. My big front can hardly squeeze in. I touch back and front. I sit up in the front row because of being deaf. It was horrid when our first things were read out loud. I came first. Mrs. Shaw asked if I’d read my own or prefer her to. I grabbed at her offer. It was so funny to sit and listen to my thoughts coming out of another’s mouth, the first time I’d ever done so. We had to write something that had happened, an incident, between
the first and second morning of our course. I struck a humorous note and the young things clapped and grinned at times and it helped to start them off with more courage. Some of them were very good but most were frightfully serious. They haven’t grown high enough yet to see over the top of life’s fence and note the funny things on the other side. One of them asked if I was the painter and grabbed my hand and shook it and asked why I was wasting my time there when I could do the other. Lots of them are school teachers; they sit stiff, their mouths shut tight. There are time-killers and some middle-aged, bravely trying to keep up, and the teacher’s son, brought by Mother and a little afraid to let go and expose his depths to the maternal eye.

The wide corridors bustle with youth and fifteen little nuns glide in and out, catching the convent school up to date. There isn’t much giddy giggling like old days. There’s rather a hard times’ sober pushing to acquire more knowledge as bait to hook a job.

That’s that. A garden party for the short story class (summer school) — between twenty-five and thirty. Every man jack came. The tea was good but
very
simple, only hot biscuits and sponge cake layer with whipped cream and tea. Afterwards I passed round a basket of apples from the tree. The day was obligingly warm and windless so that the cool under the apple tree was welcome. The pups were in good form and the monkey, and the pale green apples bobbed up and down over the tea table. I had blue linen cloths and lots of benches and chairs. Then we ambled upstairs to the studio and there was an awful half-hour when
they all stood at the end of the room like a lot of cornered rats, pop-eyed and shocked at the sketches. Nobody knew what to say so there was that awful silence in which one tosses sketch after sketch on the easel hooks with nervous haste and wants to sink through the floor. Then someone breaks the silence with a horrid, “What’s that
supposed
to be?” and somebody else says, “Do explain them to us,” and someone else gasps, “Just
where
is that?” and you want to slap all their faces, burn up
all
your stuff and then dig a deep hole, tumble into it and claw the earth over yourself. The world’s queer.

Horrid things are in the paper today. Austria up to ructions. Somebody assassinated. Europe trembling and everyone saying, “What’s coming?” God alone knows. Gee whiz, I’m tired, mentally and physically.

It’s a long week since I told you anything, little book. Here’s a secret first. Others might say it was silly. For the second time a soul has kissed my hand because of a picture of mine — once a man, once a woman. It makes one feel queer, half ashamed and very happy, that some thought you have expressed in paint has touched somebody. Today I sold a sketch and gave another, though of my very most recent. They always pick the newest and leave the old frowses. One’s glad, in a way, that the recentest should be approved above the older. It looks like progress. One would rather like to keep one’s latest, but there’s always the hope that there’ll be better ones than the latest by and by, so scoot them off before they grow too drab. I’m thirsting to be at it again but the story course has me tied by the arms and legs for another
week yet. I’ve written an Indian story, “The Hully-up Paper.” The class liked it.