Hetty Dorval (2 page)

I felt sorrier for Ernestine than for myself because no one likes to be snubbed. And she loved dogs so dearly that when she was fifteen she waded into the Fraser River just below the Bridge, and swam out a few strokes to save a little dog, and was carried away by the current and was drowned. It was terrible. The little dog was drowned too.

E
very town that stands at a confluence of rivers has something over and above other towns. This is true whether the town is little or big. Lytton was so small that relatively it was a village. But relative to the surrounding solitudes it was a town. Roads converged there. The railroad passed through it, trains stopped there, it was fed by this system and it fed the surrounding solitudes for a long radius, especially northwards into the hills.

But what gives Lytton its especial character, lying there at the fringe of the sage-brush carpet in a fold of the hills at the edge of the dry belt and the coast area, is that just beside the town the clear turbulent Thompson River joins the vaster opaque Fraser. The Fraser River, which begins as a sparkling stream in the far northern mountains, describes a huge curve in northern British Columbia, and, increased in volume by innumerable rills and streams and by large and important tributary rivers, grows in size and reputation and changes its character and colour on its journey south.

Long before the Fraser reaches Lytton it has cut its way through different soils and rocks and has taken to itself tons
of silt, and now moves on, a wide deceptive flow of sullen opaque and fawn-coloured water. Evidences of boil and whirlpool show the river to be dangerous. At Lytton it is refreshed and enlarged by the blue-green racing urgent Thompson River. This river in the course of its double journey from north and east spreads itself into lakes and gathers itself together again into a river, until as it approaches Lytton it manifests all its special beauty and brilliance.

At the point where the Thompson, flowing rapidly westwards from Kamloops, pours itself into the Fraser, flowing widely and sullenly southwards from the Lillooet country, is the Bridge. The Bridge springs from a single strong gesture across the confluence of the rivers and feeds the roads and trails that lead into the northern hills which are covered with sage, and are dotted here and there with extravagantly noble pine trees. The way to my own home lay across the Bridge.

Ever since I could remember, it was my joy and the joy of all of us to stand on this strong iron bridge and look down at the line where the expanse of emerald and sapphire dancing water joins and is quite lost in the sullen Fraser. It is a marriage, where, as often in marriage, one overcomes the other, and one is lost in the other. The Fraser receives all the startling colour of the Thompson River and overcomes it, and flows on unchanged to look upon, but greater in size and quality than before. Ernestine and I used to say, “Let’s go down to the Bridge,” and there we would stand and lean on the railing and look down upon the hypnotizing waters. We would look up at the broad sweep of brown Fraser and the broad or steep banks curving northwards, at the small distant high fields of bright green alfalfa showing the work of man, and at the road following in hairpin curves the east bank of the river, leading up towards and beyond distant Lillooet. Then we would hear
wheels or hooves and feel vibration on the bridge, and turn idly to see a conveyance creaking by driven by silent Indians. An old squaw drove, or a young boy, and the seats were piled with dark silent children brightly and darkly clad. Or perhaps a rancher driving in. We would turn and again look down at the bright water being lost in the brown, and as we talked and laid our little plans of vast importance for that day and the next, the sight of the cleaving joining waters and the sound of their never-ending roar and the feel of the frequent Lytton wind that blew down the channels of both the rivers were part and parcel of us, and conditioned, as they say, our feeling.

My family did not live in Lytton. Our ranch was about fifteen miles out of town as you turned off the winding road that led north following the course of the Fraser to and beyond Lillooet. We raised stock and alfalfa and some other kinds of feed, we had some dairy cows, and we had a water-wheel near the house with abundant water always, and that made it easier for us to live nicely. It made it easier, too, for us to keep chickens, a few hundred, and to have an excellent kitchen garden and an orchard. The irrigation, once set in motion, almost looked after itself. But my father and mother had a hard and hard-working life, just the same. When they were lucky, my father kept two hired men and more of course in summer and my mother kept a good girl in the house; but even then they worked hard from morning till night with little respite. According to economic conditions in the big outside world, ripples spread into this hinterland in the sage-brush, and therefore one hired man left after the other to better himself at the Coast, the girl went down to Vancouver to work in a restaurant, and my mother and father were left to cope as best they could with the uncertain help of nearby Indians. They had established a claim, years before, on the families of
Charley Joe and Joe Charley at the rancheree near Lytton, and these unpredictable and uncapable youths came and went. And then perhaps some hired help came back again.

I had no particular pride in the industry and gallantry of my parents. I took it for granted. Both Father and Mother set and maintained the family standards in an exacting loneliness where it would have been easy to be slipshod and lazy and soon engulfed in broken fences, unclean outhouses, dingy walls and curtains, and the everlasting always waiting encroachment of the sage-brush. But my ridiculous pride was that my mother had been at the Sorbonne. What the Sorbonne signified I did not quite know, but I knew that my mother had, through this Sorbonne-ness, perhaps, a quality that other women known to me did not possess. Mother had not told me about the Sorbonne, although she seemed to know about Paris. Mrs. Dunne in Lytton had told me. She said, “I always think it is so wonderful of a woman like your mother, who’s been at the Sorbonne …” So then I asked Mother, and she told me a lot. Life, for me, could not have been bettered, what with the ranch, and such parents as mine, excursions into regions fed by books, my pony Maxey and the dogs, the rides into Lytton, and my friendships with Ernestine and the other Lytton children.

I suppose that Mother and Father debated more than I knew, but the result was that when I was old enough to ride the fifteen miles on Maxey alone (and we all knew the familiar road and country like the flat of our hands) I was sent to board with Mrs. Dunne in Lytton. I rode in on Sunday afternoons and went straight to Mrs. Dunne’s, or over to Ernestine’s, or if it was church-time and there was a service I tied Maxey to a fence post, beside other waiting horses, loosened his saddle a bit, and slipped into church, sitting wherever
I chose. People were always friendly; there was always a beckoning finger and a nod that meant “Sit here with us.” Then during the week I went to the public school, and twice a week I went after school to the small Convent-Hospital west of Lytton where there was a nun from Paris; she taught me French, both talking and out of a book. The book was called
Chardenal
and was useful, but the hour’s talk with Sister Marie-Cécile was good French and good discipline. Sister Marie-Cécile hoped, I think, that she might gently win me to Paradise, but I was a wary and stubborn young Protestant. These hours at the Convent were the direct if long-delayed result of the Sorbonne. On Friday afternoon I would saddle Maxey, who ate his head off at Mr. Rossignol’s stable most of the week, and ride back to the ranch, bearing home all the school news, town news, church news, store news, and carrying special orders or presents tied to the horn of my saddle or in a good roll behind me. Maxey was, of course, bridle-wise. It was a lovely ride home, as you can imagine, all along the Lillooet road, reining off into the sage-brush if a car came along in a cloud of dust, and always with accustomed country eyes roving the expanse that unfolded itself at each bend of the river and road, noting whose cattle those were yonder, the promenading hawks, in spring the bluebirds, in summer the ground-hogs changing suddenly from little vertical statues to scurrying dust-coloured vanishing points; in autumn reining in and standing still to watch a flying crying skein of wild geese, sometimes a coyote at close range – quite a pretty little beast. And then at the end of the ride the dogs barking a welcome, and Mother and Father and hugs, Maxey to be stabled and fed, and a great big supper ready.

On the Friday after Ernestine and I had watched the settling in of Mrs. Dorval – if it
was
Mrs. Dorval or had we
dreamed the name? – I told Father and Mother all that I knew and of course they were interested because a newcomer in a place the size of Lytton or in the sparsely settled neighbourhood was real news. I had learned just a little more, because Ernestine’s father had a law office in Lytton and he must have known something about Mrs. Dorval coming, because he was trying to get a lady’s saddle horse and perhaps another saddle horse too; he was trying through Mr. Rossignol who had the livery stable and the truck, and Mr. Rossignol said he might have to go as far as Guichon’s up at Quilchena beyond Merritt before he could get just exactly the kind of horses that Ernestine’s father wanted for Mrs. Dorval. This, in a horse country, made Mrs. Dorval more interesting than ever.

Following the small snub which the very much occupied woman who was not Mrs. Dorval had given to Ernestine and through Ernestine to me, we affected not to be very much interested in the new household. We did not go up again to the bungalow. There was nothing to take us up there as it was on the way to nowhere, and those children who had been up reported nothing except that there were curtains with flowers on in some of the windows, that Charley Joe and Joe Charley were working in the garden and mending the little fence, and that they seemed to be working hard. We saw the woman who was not Mrs. Dorval once or twice in Mattson’s grocery store, where she gave quite large orders. But Mr. Mattson’s impression was that she ordered all kinds of things from the stores in Vancouver, and it is true that many, many parcels of all sizes arrived by express. Ernestine’s mother extorted from Ernestine’s father the fact that the name of the woman in the grey dress was certainly not Mrs. Dorval. It was Mrs. Broom, which somehow changed her.

I
t must have been September, and late September at that on account of what I saw that day when I was riding back to Lytton from the ranch. This time I had stayed at home only over Friday night, as Ernestine’s cousins were coming down from Ashcroft early on the Sunday. There were two boys and a girl and their father and mother. We were going to have an all-day picnic up the river, and the fathers were going to do a little fishing. You could fish all day in the Thompson rapids, dropping your fly or a grasshopper just behind a large rock where the green water was for a moment still, and you thought there was a chance of a fish lurking and getting its wind back, if fishes do, but you would not get a strike. Nothing but the tug tug of the current as your fly drifted down. But there were some other spots near Lytton where the river made pools and the fishing was often good. It was the pleasantest thing you could think of, there in the shade of a clump of bushes, with the expectation of a good picnic lunch, or lying comfortably full of food, and watching Ernestine’s father and uncle casting and casting, or just letting their lines sink. I liked Ernestine’s cousins, too, and we always had a good time. It was
an excitement whenever one of those picnics was planned, and I always came in from the ranch a day earlier so as not to miss it. It happened therefore that I was riding back on a Saturday afternoon instead of Sunday, quite late because I had stretched out my Saturday at home until Mother said I really must start or it would be dark when I got to Lytton. Mother and Father were not nervous at all about me and my long ride in, but Mother had a strong feeling about my not being out alone after dark. Mrs. Dunne was very careful about this too, and Mother had no misgivings once I was in Lytton.

I remember that Mother made me take my old buckskin jacket with the fringed edges in case it was nippy that evening, because the weather had just turned colder. When I first got that jacket it was a beauty. It had been made by the Indians up at Lillooet, and Father had got me the prettiest he could find, with beads in a pattern of deer, and plenty of fringe. If anyone ever adored a garment, I adored my buckskin jacket. It had grown a little small for me and quite dirty, but Mother laughed and said that gave it style. We all had buckskin jackets.

I must have ridden about ten miles or so, and was just rounding the corner of a bluff when I saw another rider, coming down the hill amongst the sage-brush. I had never seen the horse before; it was a beautiful horse. And certainly I had never seen the rider; indeed, you wouldn’t see anyone like her in all our part of that western country. She seemed to be young and she had a good seat. She rode on one of those small English saddles – which other people didn’t – and sat erect but easy; and no one near us wore that kind of riding clothes. It came to me with a hop, skip and a jump that this must be Mrs. Dorval and that must be the horse that Mr. Rossignol had been trying to get, up Quilchena way. If I kept on at my pace – I was loping along easily – and if Mrs. Dorval kept on riding
carefully and slowly down the sage-dotted hill-side, we should just meet on the road. I felt very awkward, remembering the snub that Ernestine and I got at the bungalow, and I thought, “Now if Mrs. Dorval is snubby like Mrs. Broom this is going to be terrible, because I’ve had no experience and I don’t know what to do.” And although it was quite exciting to see Mrs. Dorval, because I had no doubt but that this was she, I would rather have had a grown-up with me, who would have known what to say and whether to go on or to drop behind or what. I slowed Maxey to a walk and hoped to goodness that Mrs. Dorval wouldn’t even see me and that she would go on by herself in front of me all the way to Lytton. But that was absurd, because no rider could possibly help seeing another rider in all that solitude.