Hundreds and Thousands (26 page)

Only 7 o’clock when I shut myself in tonight and yet it was dark — practically no sun today. Did a morning sketch and finished yesterday afternoon’s. The morning one promised well and fulfilled ill. Little “Wee Bit Picnic” lunched with me, queer little dodger, all fixed up fancy when she comes down the road, till she gets to work on “Brother’s” house-keeping deficiencies. Off come her stockings and everything that will take off and she puts on an apron made of three legs of men’s overalls — one goes cross ways over her middle and the other pair dangle. When I invite her she refuses and excuses and finally succumbs and comes as she always intended to. She adores Woo who makes faces at her and then turns her back. She has two subjects of conversation, “Brother” and the inadvisability of marrying an “out of work” or anyone who can’t keep you as well as you can keep yourself. She was full of the beautiful things an old man left her whose room she attended to at the Empress for three years — seventeen dress
shirts, my dear! But he was a very thin old man and “Brother” is so wide the shirts refuse to enclose him. I wondered if the three jean legs that formed the apron were part of the legacy.

It blew terribly last night. Writing won’t come these days. I seem too tired at night to apply myself, am reading quite a lot and the days fly. I think the most splendid thing would be to paint so simply that the common ordinary people would understand and see something of God in your expressing. The educated look for technique and pattern, colour quality, composition. Spirit touches them little and it’s the only thing that counts.

All the elements have had a hand in today — rain, shine, wind. You have to jump all ways at once to accommodate them. Oh my! Oh me! Life in a caravan in pouring rain with two dogs, two puppies, one monkey and one white rat along! No good imagining a fire for breakfast. I did it on canned heat in a bean tin. The peak of things was when I discovered I’d left my mackinaw out in the rain all night.

Only 7:00 p.m. and I’m already tucked in bed. The night is rough and bitter. Everything is closed down and the creatures, like myself, all have an extra blanket. I’ve typed nearly all day — “The Praying Chair.” I think it rather quaint but I don’t know; to others it may be silly. It’s my own awful longing to possess a dog and of course it’s very real to me. How that longing has been fulfilled and what a lot my dogs have meant to me! Sometimes I think I’m not half grateful enough to the creatures. I wonder if my book with little sidelights on their lives will make animals any dearer
or any clearer to anybody. I couldn’t imagine a world without the love and the interest of them. They put up with you when nobody else will. In your very most hateful moods they still love you.

It is glorious weather again with a moon at nights. Sketching full blast. Worked half the day, taking my lunch into the woods. High and blue sky, straggle of distant pines and stumps and dry grass in the foreground, and all soused in light and vibrating with glow. Product not marvellous but I have learned quite a bit and saw somewhat. The whole place is full of subjects. By that I mean that things speak all over the place. You have to go and look here and there as you go. It’s no good putting down a stroke till something speaks; then get busy. Form is fine, and colour and design and subject matter but that which does not speak to the heart is worthless. It is the intensity of feeling you have about a thing that counts.

When I tried to see things theosophically I was looking through the glasses of cold, hard, inevitable fate, serene perhaps but cold, unjoyous and unmoving. Seeing things the Christ way, things are dipped in love. It warms and humanizes them. “I am come that ye might have life and have it more abundantly.” God as cold, inexorable law is terrible. God as love is joyous.

Time is racing swiftly. Before one knows it the van will be folded down and winter here. So? There are good things for the winter too — canvases to work out of the sketches, illustrations for the animal stories. My animal stories come slowly and I am truly disheartened with them; they are so crude and lame and badly put.

Dear old van! There’s something very cosy about her and very peaceful about the environment. The black-faced, fool sheep and the pups and I have it all to ourselves, and a few little birds. The skies are grand and high, and the pines poke their noses up among the clouds without a quiver.

Heat and cold chase one another like pups playing — yesterday ovenish, today cold storage. This morning a sketch of “nothing in particular,” one of the most difficult to perform. Afternoon a beautiful subject, the overshadowing of one monstrous tree. I worked honestly both whiles, not using my own determinings; led to both subjects and giving myself over to them. Yesterday a dreadful douse of visitors which was far more exhausting and upsetting than the most violent work. They are beginning to want me home I can see.

Oh, perfect in the pauses when the wind forgets and the sun remembers! Summer is past but the full ripeness and maturity holds still as if it were pausing in fullness before disintegration sets in. The fruits of the earth are garnered. The season’s development holds.

There was a fierce storm a few nights back. Twigs and boughs snapped off my old pine and struck the van in passing with reports like pistols. The canvas did not break but it sounded like a drum and I did not know which minute a great bough, dead and hanging from the tree, would come through the frail top and — perhaps, who knows? I popped out the lamps, for if a tree fell it would be worse to have fire added to it, and slept in my blanket chemise so if I was pinned and had to yowl for help I’d be found decent and having made full preparation. Nothing happened but it was some fierce storm everyone says.

Goodbye, dear place! Tomorrow we leave the dear gracious trees and face grouchy tenants. It’s been a lovely free month. Twenty-one sketches, lots of thinking, and six stories pulled into shape. It rains a little tonight. Tomorrow I shall eat at an ordinary table in a roofed house. I wonder if the pines will miss me. I have loved them.

To sit on a perfectly decent chair with four steady legs on a wooden floor, to eat at a solid table with four even legs, to have a plaster ceiling instead of a sky quivering with movement and light, to turn the tap and apply a match instead of adjusting the stove pipe to meet the wind and collecting sticks from the woods and axing and bucksawing a bit and blinking the smoke out of one’s eyes and blacking one’s hands (but oh, the lovely smoky smell and taste), to spread out in a wide bed and look over dim house roofs and chimneys (I remember the moon through the pine trees), to have a whole room to oneself instead of sharing a little van with monkey, dogs and rat! Ah well, there you are — some like one, some the other, but God’s a little closer out there and the earth and sky and trees are very sweet. The house shuts these things out a little.

Things can be altogether abominable and they are today. The short story class were all to meet at my house on October 1st. Only ten came and it was a hopelessly stupid evening. Two sloppy love stories were read. The words flowed easily but there wasn’t any stuff in them. It was an utterly profitless evening and ended in Woo biting Mrs. Shaw’s leg. I scarcely blame the monkey;
the woman was stupid and all the people teased Woo till she was almost crazy, and me too. My Indian story was returned from
Maclean’s Magazine
without thanks. I longed for the van and Mr. Strathdee’s peaceful field and the wise, tender old pines and the all-over peace of outdoors.

Tired into a smash. Two old girls did it, ages eighty-four and eighty-seven. Spent the day, lunch and tea and dinner. Poor old wearisomes, comparing their cataracts and rheumatisms, their loneliness and children, bragging about their servants and past English gardens, bewailing the immorality of the world and comparing their churches. I gave them nice soft victuals with nothing seedy to get under their plates and we had lunch in the glorious sun in the garden. One of them slipped off to sleep with her head thrown back over her chair like a towel hanging to dry, and her mouth open. One had bobbed hair with pink scalp very visible and her face a network of wrinkles — such ugly ones, pockets and bags and ditches. The other had iron grey hair drawn back into an onion and a wonderfully smooth face with pink cheeks. Goodness, I don’t feel twenty years younger than they are. I feel old, old, old and stiff and tired, except when I paint; then I’m no age. At night, folded close in the blackness among the trees it was not lonesome by the roadside in the old van. In town it is different, in the great, still house. Empty rooms are around, except those filled with impossibles — souls that never touch mine, greater strangers than the strange; no common interests or doings or thoughts; thin partitions dividing our bodies, immense adamant walls separating our souls.

THE WORLD IS SO
messy at present everyone is depressed. I don’t fit anywhere, so I’m out of everything and I ache and ache. I don’t fit in the family and I don’t fit in the church and I don’t fit in my own house as a landlady. It’s dreadful — like a game of Musical Chairs. I’m always out, never get a seat in time; the music always stops first.

I’ve written reams of horrid letters to picture galleries that
won’t
return my exhibits. National Gallery had three for
three years,
Toronto Watercolour had three for
two years.
Why should one have to beg and beg to get their own belongings? I wrote Brown straight from the shoulder. He’ll ignore it like always, as if I did not exist, weren’t worth a glance even from his eye.

Abominations are thick as bee stings in a hive — the horrid tenant below, the miserable woman who lost my dog, the creature I met in the street the other night who took me by the shoulders and
shook
me because I was trying to fend her dog off mine, the insurance company who have swindled me out of cash by misrepresentation of their men — all these and more heaped in a pile and me straddled atop trying to forget them all, but they will stick out teeth and claws and gnaw and pinch and scratch and it’s hard to sit steady on the pile, so tight they smother and shrivel and die! Every time you bounce up with a new burst of mad they take a fresh breath and draw strength and attack again. Out with you into the rain and wind and get blown on, old girl; you’re mired.

The wind is down on all fours pounding. The poor withered leaves do not know which way to turn; they are balked in every direction. They had no idea they would see so much of the world before they found a grave in some crevice and retired back to
their elements, giving back to earth exactly what they had drawn from her. That’s the plan, I guess, always giving back exactly what we have absorbed so that nothing is lost. But every time things turn over they accumulate interest. From my bedroom window I see the sea waves too. They are perplexed at being driven in four adverse ways at once and stand on end surging up in rebellious white foam with the wind tied up in its fabric, hanging on to it, imprisoning it in salt wet prisons. When the storm is over it will release it, mild and chastened.

Mrs. Lawson is dead.

Death, serene, beautiful, compelling awe and veneration. The fragile outer petals of a little old lady, all the troublesome old problems of weariness, stiffness and aches dissolved away. A kiss of peace pressed on the loose broken petals ready to drop and to fade away like other flowers that surround her little worn old hands, hands that raised the large family through which she spread her own self and caught herself back again in the joy and pride of her grandchildren. Goodbye, little lady! I do not think you mind being gone. You only dreaded the going a little as we all must — that first footstep out “where neither ground is for the feet, nor path to follow.”

There was a tea party today at the Arts and Crafts Society exhibition. I was invited among some ten artists and club members. The whole affair ached with horridness. The show had just opened and a straggle of the type that always go on opening days were there, faded people who have time to kill, people with no
particular job and of no particular age, belonging to no particular “set.” They simpered over their catalogues and smeared an asinine glance over the pictures, spent much longer looking for its name in the catalogue than examining the work of art when found. If anybody spotted an artist near his or her own picture they darted across and went into mild hysterics and spat out adjectives.

Tea was spread on three or four rickety card tables strung together so close to a row of chairs along the wall that your person was horridly squeezed. Deep breathers throbbed the tables with each respiration. There was a grand deal of talk about seating (no two women together, nor two men) and every time a late comer came, and most of them were late, everyone had to seize their cup and plate because people had to be re-sorted and everything got knocked over. There wasn’t
one
of us young or vital, no spirit, no poetry, no youth, just prosey flesh picking with tired hands from meagre plates of sparsely buttered bread and dice of uninteresting cake. Oh, the pity! We represented (more or less) Victoria’s art! Oh, that is not art! I do not think there can be any such thing as
societies
for art. Those are “snarling” societies (I myself no better than the rest). The fellowship of art is out among the angels in wide space and high skies, things one cannot word and can only feel dimly.

THE RAIN HAS
come wholeheartedly. It is invigorating to hear it pelting against the shingles a few inches above your head in the attic bedroom. Except the near houses everything is smudged out. Half of Victoria has been re-roofed this fall. I guess all that half is purring. Only one corner of mine was done and I purr even over that. These days make one feel domestic and inclined to clean out
woodboxes and cupboards and straighten things and cosy up. The house sort of wraps you round. It would be nice to hibernate, to hug yourself and dream and rest your brain and your stomach and your whole being. That’s the worst of us. We streak along full stretch, top speed. Trees and beasts and every other thing rests. In old days the farmers and farm women used to enjoy recreation and ease, more or less, in winter. Oh, why have we all gone so against nature I do wonder?