Hundreds and Thousands (38 page)

Someone has asked me if I will write a splurge to go into the catalogue of a post-mortem show of her mother’s paintings. Oh, yes, I will. It’s tommy-rot, but I will. But I won’t lie. If the bouquets are garden flowers and homely they shall be sweet, wholesome posies from my own garden.

B.B.’s body was brought home today. Lizzie wanted to go over for the funeral but we advised her not. She’s a strong one on funerals. She enjoys the flowers and the hymns punctuated with sniffs, and the coffin on its perambulator trundling up the aisle, and counting the followers and noting their places in the procession, and driving to the cemetery after the hearse, and hearing the earth
thud, thud on the coffin and coming home again and telling all about it and repeating tidbits of the death-bed sayings. She does not say “dead” or “died” but “passed away” or “gone.” It’s all a very melancholy, lugubrious affair but, on the whole, satisfactory to attend and to discuss after and to say “dreadful” over. Sometimes, when I have heard her describing death scenes and sayings quoted mostly from her parson I have felt I’d like to die quite alone. I saw Father die. Just as he was doing it the Bishop came and he prayed. Father did not like the Bishop. Alice and I were kneeling at the horse-hair sofa with our faces hidden.

“Millie, will you come to tea — 6:30 and spend the evening tomorrow? I made a nice pudding.”

“Thursday? Sure. Thank you.”

(Tomorrow) 5:30 — furious ring at telephone.

“Millie, what time are you coming to tea?”

“You said 6:30.”

“No, I did not! Well, that’s all right but be sure to come on time.”

6:15: Millie arrives, tea nowhere near ready.

“Hello!”

“Hello!”

“Millie, hang your things in the hall;
don’t
come in here with them; don’t hang them too near the telephone; don’t hang them too near the stove, and, Millie, put your rubbers
out
side.”

“I want a drink of water.”

“Well, go into the Owens’ flat, but don’t be long. Tea will be ready soon, so don’t stay.”

Table set prettily — chop cooked to a turn — pudding in centre of table.

“Sit here, Millie. No, don’t sit there… .” Shafts of long frowning at dog on sofa. “Don’t let the dog muss the pillows.”

Follows a long grace in a sanctimonious, guttural mutter. I like grace, believe in grace but I can’t stick
her
grace. I look round at her bent white head and eyes screwed to lean dashes, at the chop on my plate and the flowers, taking plenty of time and some to spare before her slow, apologetic “Amen.” She’d have liked longer grace.

“Why don’t you eat all the chop?”

“I have — all but the bone.”

“Why don’t you give the dog the bone? … on the
verandah;
don’t give it in here.”

Then comes the particularly messy, uninteresting sweet.

“Have some more?”

“No, thanks.”

“Oh, why don’t you have some more? Won’t you have some more?”

“No, thanks.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want it.”

“Well, have some more of the fruit part.”

“NO!”

“Well, you need not be so rude and horrid. If you asked me in your house to have more pudding… .”

“Well, I would not pester you. I’d think you meant No when you said No.”

“Well, you are horribly rude.”

“You do pester so!”

“Well, why don’t you want more?”

“Oh, darn the pudding! I do
not want
more.”

“Well, you’re rude and horrid.”

Meal concluded — the pudding remnant is served on to a dish.

“Millie, take this pudding up to Alice if you are going.”

Alice: “What’s that mess?”

“Leavings of Lizzie’s pudding.”

Alice: “I hate left-over puddings.”

“So do I. I hate that particular pudding, anyhow.”

“Give it to your dog.”

“Not good for him. Give it to yours.”

“Won’t eat it.”

“Let’s pitch it out.”

Plop! It’s in the garbage. Ssss! the dish is under the tap.

I have decided that I want a radio so that I can hear the news, keep up with the times, get to know music. Physically my whole nature revolts. When I go to houses where they are turned on full blast I feel as if I’d go mad. Inexplicable torment all over. I thought I ought to get used to them and one was put in my house on trial this morning. I feel as if bees had swarmed in my nervous system. Nerves all jangling. Such a feeling of angry resentment at that horrid metallic voice. After a second I have to clap it off. Can’t stand it. Maybe it’s my imperfect hearing? It’s one of the wonders of the age, simply marvellous. I know that but I
hate
it. All the time I am wondering how anything could be so wonderful. I remember how I marvelled over the telephone when that came out. But somehow that is the real voice of your friend. The other is a beastly, mechanized strident thing, all the life whipped out and the cruel hardness of the machine and the new, hard,
modern people whipped in. A terrifying unreality, as if man had ceased to be human, all his flesh and blood and feelings gone. Not a human mouth and throat, not a human heart and feelings at the back of them; just mechanical noises like steam whistles tearing, cutting through the air, and the sounds of lovely instruments harshened to cracking point. I spent the evening at a house last week where they had a beautiful, tip-top radio. It was turned on most of the evening in the next room; unconsciously every-one’s voices were pitted against it. Oh, if I could have thrown it out the door! By 8 o’clock I was so nervously exhausted I could have cried. I am sorry about this feeling of mine and ashamed to own the agony it is for me to live with a radio. It is not affectation. It’s a strange nervous loathing, as if the power of the thing was using me to pass through, like drawing a nutmeg grater across a piece of satin, ruckling it up and catching the threads.

The young man placed the machine on the table. I was in the other room when it began to sputter, and the silence of the cottage ripped. I wanted to shout, “Take the brute away! The quiet of this cottage is mine. How dare the whole world mob it! Go away! Go away! I can’t bear it.” There she sits like a black baby coffin full of tinned voices, of horrid sounds and pip, pip, squeal, squeal, and the awful roarings, unearthly, cruel.

The radio and I are getting reconciled, that is in some measure. The newscasts are fine, Clem Davies fine, organ concerts fine. Choruses, jazz and opera turn me sick — loud, quick noise and the sputter of static wrack me. The man came today and I paid for the radio ($11.95) and now it is mine and I am linked up with
the world. The world comes into my room, kicks the silence about, smashes it into smithereens, builds little cobweb bridges so your thoughts can cross to Germany and Russia, to France.

Humphrey came last night with an armful of breeches, sweaters, bathing suits, etc., which he invited me to trade for some of my old sketches, cast-offs he spied the other night. So we swapped derelict clothes for derelict pictures. His pants and coats will be converted into useful rag mats. I hope he will get something from my old tattered thoughts.

Yesterday a boy child sang a solo. He was small and sensitive, perfectly natural and so sweet. The little song was,

Light the lights, lamplighter,
Light the candles, grandmother,
Light the stars, Gabriel.

Why did one suddenly splash over big tears down on your gloves and feel like a fool? There was a big orchestra of young people from Vancouver. They were so lovely, so young and fresh. I liked looking at them better than their music. They had won lots of championships. Clem gave them his sermon time, and half the collection.

Been working on two canvases, one of dense undergrowth, the other of sky. I am keen as pepper. It is good to feel keen and not like
a boiled onion. Why can’t one always? The sky study should be exultant, leading up with vibrating light, and full of movement.

The trouble with our painting lies largely with our trying to impose our ideas and our technique on the picture instead of allowing our subject to
impose itself on us,
asserting ourselves instead of making ourselves a blank and letting the subject express on that blank that which it will. When you are out in nature she works for you. In the studio your imagination steps in, your sense of design, what
you
want. That is why the first sketch done on the spot smacks of something bigger and more vital than the fixed-up product of the studio. In the one we dominate, in the other nature does. If the spirit has climbed up honestly from solid fact to solid fact, good. If she has floated idly without experiencing, bad.

A dense undergrowthy thing — two great moss-grown stumps. It must be
organized chaos
with the elimination of unnecessaries, massing of individuals into group movements, space swinging into space, movement meeting movement, balance, borrowing and paying back, a density and immensity that is so obvious in our Western woods. I want my work to be typically Western.

Nobody mentions the war clouds hanging so low and heavy over everything. They listen to radio, read newspapers and make no comment. They switch off the radio and cast aside the papers and are quiet for a little, perhaps staring into the fire. Then they shut the ugly thing out of their minds and plunge into something that will turn their thoughts.
What
are people thinking
about these days, I wonder. Perhaps we do not know ourselves, we are just drowning under perplexities.

It is many days now since I last wrote because I have had no thoughts in particular. I have seen and heard and done things but nothing has said anything in particular, nothing made me skip other jobs and write it off my chest. A teacher of English is going to swap some crits of my poor writings for a sketch. The mechanics of my construction and wording are very bad, commonplace and small. Will she help? Can anyone help anyone else? We all stand so totally alone like standard rose trees blossoming at the top. The suckers that come up round our base spring from our wild, ungrafted roots. That which is grafted into our juice produces the good bloom. The other is only wild growth.

I admire cows enormously. They are so patient, chewing, chewing, chewing instead of gobbling up the new spring grass, grabbing, grabbing furiously, always after more. I’d like to be a cowish artist, gather (in sketches) and chew (in studio). I do not produce good, rich milk, only lick and crop more and more. Cud-chewing rasps me.

It is time to stir among this lethargic mass of brain debris before it corrodes. The neighbourhood is pleasing to me. I pine for the old 646 Simcoe Street not at all. These folk live more. The men dig, the women wash, clothes-line pulleys screech their freight in and out, wheelbarrows groan up and down Beckley Street with their beach-drift loads. There are good-natured mongrel dogs and well-favoured cats. How gloriously the children play,
fluttering and squalling like sea-gulls over the rough, open ground in front! Hopscotch is very much in vogue. Every house and cottage has a garden of some sort, mostly utility. There are daffodils and wallflowers, but the brown earth is better acquainted with onions and potatoes and beets. There are no lawns to speak of. At this month rows of sticks with seed-packets crucified on them head and tail the garden beds.

Phyllis next door is a joy. She and her brother have built a house in their apple tree opposite my kitchen window. Our hands are always a-flutter waving to each other. She tells me I am the nicest lady she has ever known (as though her six years were aeons of ages), and that I am not so fat as some of the ladies in the funny papers. She’s an enormous waggletongue, chattering all day long, happy chatter. She’s rushing pell-mell in and out of the kitchen door, down the steps and up the ladder into the playhouse she and her brother have made in the old apple tree. It has an oil-cloth roof, sack sides, and its floor is a table perched in the prong of the apple tree high up. The “smoke” Persian rushes out of the kitchen, down the other steps, up the apple tree just the way the child does, just a swoop of grey movement, down and up again in a lovely curve. Then I call from my kitchen, “Hello, Mrs. Bird,” and she calls back, “Where’s the monkey?” and I say, “How’s the measles?” and she says, “They are all gone now.” She has a horse, too. It’s an old trestle with a hearth brush tacked on for a tail, but no head — that appendage is unnecessary; Phyllis is its brain. There is a saddle and a bridle — a rope with two loops and wooden strips for stirrups. Phyllis is attired as a cowboy with a rope lariat and, of course, a whip which the stick legs get plenty of. The horse is carefully brushed down, its own tail being used for the purpose, and tethered to a wallflower bush. Other days
Phyllis is a Highlander. She has a Scotch cap and khaki jacket and a huge red lard pail for a drum. Again, she is a lady with a fur cap, a black satin skirt trimmed with red crepe paper frills, and shawls and feminine gewgaws, mink, drapery, and two hideous rag dolls, a boy and a girl, who claim to be twins and have very scant clothing as though the mother had only expected one. Next day, Phyllis is just a little girl catching bumble bees in a bottle. She bursts out of the kitchen with a jam jar, unscrews the lid, climbs the plum tree, shakes the glorious foamy-white blossoms, and then the triumphant screech, “I got a bee!”

This neighbourhood is all peaceful little streets with peaceful little gardens, well tilled, and homely men and women, and happy, unspoiled children playing their games. Every garden has wall-flowers and sweet alyssum and just a few sweet old flowers — the rest is vegetable. Every yard has wash and a cat and an apple tree. The wild bit of Armadale is bursting out in tender leafage and the birds do a great deal of discussing there. Wild lilies of the valley are shooting up umbrella-like leaves to hide the blossoms they are going to get. The salmonberry bushes are dotted with deep pink blooms. Skies are fine these days. White clouds dance over the blue dome. Oh, that dome! The blue is so much more than blue, the illusive depth boring into Heaven’s floor. Nothing stands still these days. It is growing and moving double-quick. Trying to keep up takes one’s breath. Everything is absorbed in reproducing its kind, always with the hope of producing something bigger and better than itself and yet picturing itself in the new thing it’s making. As soon as every single thing becomes adult its desire
is always the same, to keep the thing going. Unmated things are never quite complete. They lack experience.