Hundreds and Thousands (25 page)

Miss Richardson of London has been lecturing on teaching children to make pictures. It is interesting. Slum children’s work was what she showed. They were lovely, done from the centre of the children’s being and belonging to themselves. It’s a big thing and very worth while, hoisting them up above convention and tough outsides and giving them the courage to look inside and try to express in paint what they see, the same thing that I am trying to do in my own work. The children are nearer that God-thing and handle it naturally. I come to it in fear and trembling, with a clumsy, self-conscious hand, saying too much, hanging on to the thing too hard for very fear of it fluttering away. It is so easily bruised and crushed. It wants to hover above, free, not strained, not caged like a captive bird, mad and moping, but free, coming and going between God and you.

My story has been selected by class vote as the one to be read at the closing assembly exercises of summer school. I was stricken with horror when I found I had to read it
myself,
and wished they’d chosen someone else’s, but now I don’t care any more because I want to do honour to the Indians. It’s an Indian story — just a simple, tender, old Indian mother. I want to make them love her and feel her Indianness like I want people to see and feel the “Cow Yard” in spite of no plot. Mrs. Shaw doesn’t like “Cow Yard” much. Says it’s plotless and “maybe she could help me fix it up.” I don’t want Mrs. S. to fix it. I don’t want it to have a darn magazine story plot and set people worrying to unravel it. I just want it to be the “Cow Yard” and make people
feel and smell and see and
love
it like I did as I wrote it — blessed old Heaven of refuge for a troubled child and a place of bursting joy for a happy one.

I did it. It wasn’t very awful except that the hall is terrible to speak in. It does horrible things with your voice so that it is a big effort. I had just two wants as I stood there reading: to make my voice carry and to make them see “Jenny” and “Bessy” and “Charlie Jo’s little Injun baby.” They gave me a lovely bunch of flowers and clapped when I went on and off. This evening we went to the house of one of the students. It was a simple, honest, happy affair. They’re a nice set of young things and we olders aren’t so bad and all get on together. We sang and played games and had supper with
very good
coffee and I drank two cups and can’t sleep. We’re going to meet at my studio on October 1st and everyone is supposed to bring a manuscript that they’ve written between now and then.

I haven’t one friend of my own age and generation. I wish I had. I don’t know if it’s my own fault. I haven’t a
single thing
in common with them. They’re all snarled up in grandchildren or W.A. or church teas or bridge or society. None of them like painting and they particularly dislike my kind of painting. It’s awkward, this oil and water mixing. I have lots more in common with the young generation, but there you are. Twenty can’t be expected to tolerate sixty in all things, and sixty gets bored stiff with twenty’s eternal love affairs. Oh God, why did you make me a pelican and sit me down in a wilderness? These old maids of fifty to sixty, how dull they are, so self-centred, and the married women
are absorbed in their husbands and families. Oh Lord, I thank Thee for the dogs and the monkey and the rat. I loafed all day. Next week I must step on the gas.

We three went on an excursion round Salt Spring Island. A perfect day. All were amiable and enjoyed every bit. Moon across the water on return was superb. It has been in my thoughts all day, silvery ringing space filled with every colour and glorious light, and such peace, the kind of “God” that passes all understanding.

Edythe and Fred came and chose three sketches to send to Gertrude Stein, Paris. Tommy rot I call it! Dear children, they are good to this old woman but I’m sure Gertrude won’t bother and she’d think my sketches mediocre.

Mr. Sught came and photographed some of my pictures. They looked punk old things as I pulled them out, hey ho! I must do some better canvases. Mr. Checkley came and saw about some sketches for the Willows fair. I guess that’s where my things belong — among the sheep and pigs at the agricultural fair. Anyhow I’d rather show among livestock than among the Arts and Crafts Society. Two American women phoned and did not
ask
if they might come to the studio, just said they were coming. Cheek, I call it, not to say, “By your leave.” Well that’s that, three things off my chest in one day, all a bit nasty. I do wish I could feel
satisfied
just once over my work. It’s so faulty and poor. I’m wanting to get out in the woods again.

The girls came to dinner. We had it on the balcony outside the studio. It was lovely, just we three girls, overlooking the garden. The gladioli and Hadley roses were gay in the round bed. We went down and looked round the garden and saw the roses and the pups. The girls weren’t in the hurry they usually are and there was slow restfulness. I like that. The perpetual scurrying to get away to the next thing wears one. Yesterday I sold a picture to Flora. She likes my work and thinks over-highly of it but I love her to have my things. I gave her another so she will have one woods and one calm sea. Flora is very fine in spirit and her life is not easy.

The pups, Caravana and Metchosen, are so cute and so different and so alike and so wise and so foolish all at once. Metchosen takes life with a joyous ease. Caravana has a more suspicious nature and takes life much harder. M. is all “he.” C. is all “she.”

The last week has been warm with superb nights and whispers of coming fall. I have been on the beach around 7 o’clock in the morning. It’s pearly across the sea, not many mountains showing. The cliff’s parched, colourless. I said to myself this morning, “What is it I want to meet out there?” It is light and space and inside them, well enveloped in the peace and glory of it, God. “I am pure being in whom all things be.” And yet we’re always hedging, scared to face squarely, scared to acknowledge the author of our being and go to meet Him and listen to what He has to say. I say to myself, “But I must hurry because the years crowd by so quickly I have little working time left.” Fool. Time is God’s. You will have just as long as He intends you to have, all the time and all the opportunity He wills. You and your work are not so important as you think. The only thing that
is
important is God, and the trying to see something of Him in everything.

Such a day! 7:30 a.m. on the beach cliff, painting — just a light empty sky, a strip of dark blue sea, a wave of mountains and wisp of dry grass. Brought the sketches home and started on a big one of it, not entirely satisfactory but in the right direction. After noon Mayo Tong, a Chinese cook boy, came to see pictures. He was delightful, so keenly interested and such an understanding person. His remarks and quaint criticisms were most illuminating. He studied each canvas and each sketch deeply. He knew at once the ones he liked. He fell at once for a Goldstream Flats tree thing. “
Why
do you like it?” I asked. “Because it is beautiful,” he said, “very, very beautiful and I can go long, far, into it.” I put up some of my old ones. “No!” he said. “It is nice but it is still and it is like it is. This one goes like wind coming through it.” One wood canvas he liked very much. He said, “I like tree places. That was a lonesome place.” He was very courteous and appreciative that I took time to show him things. A nice boy with lots of feeling, the fine sensitive feeling of the East for art. Then Delisle Parker and Mrs. Parker and Miss Dallas from Vancouver. Delisle, just back from Paris, was more than enthusiastic, dubbed some of the canvases and sketches “magnificent.” All can see the promise of something in this year’s work, something that lifted them and took them out. I am so happy about it. I pray for more wisdom and knowledge and humility and I thank God that my work should stir others and induce enthusiasm in them to make them run off intending to
work.
Then Flora came to tea, and people about dogs, and people about flats, and I’m tired but happy to think that artists from Paris who have been looking out into bigger worlds see something in mine in this small corner.

Mr. Parker, direct from Paris, opines that Emily Carr can hold her own with the painters
anywhere
and went from my studio all puffed up with the desire to work himself. Mrs. Parker told me, and she said herself that my new work brought tears to her eyes like solemn music does. That is all very extraordinary. Yet, as I was mounting sketches today I felt so many shortcomings and I believe more and more that one’s only real critic, the one that counts, is one’s own soul. The true part of one’s self knows how far you have fallen short. Oh Christ, keep my ideals
high
and help me to look up above praise or flattery.

I’m having a smash of people in the studio. Why? It’s sort of my job. People are kind to me and if my stuff gives them pleasure and helps them to see things a little I am happy.

Oh! Oh! OH! I’m tired. Had a big party, some twenty-five souls, mostly artists, visitors, two Paris, three Seattle, one New Haven, three New York, one missionary, and the rest locals, but with all so recently from the other cities it was quite interesting. I showed millions of mounted sketches and many canvases, and gave them good eats, and got so tired over the last few sticker-ons that I was almost crying. I showed pictures steadily for about two hours. They liked them and said all sorts of things, some silly, some true. It’s funny how little I care what they do say. All that “goo” trickles over me and runs down the other side and makes not one indentation. I do not think it is empty flattery. I think most of them
felt
something but it kind of nauseates me. I liked the little Chinaboy’s remarks much better, badly expressed but from his heart. Oh gee! I want to get away to the van, away from everybody, out with the thing itself, and just the restful beasts. Tonight when they were all cackling around, my soul just wanted to gather up my heels and
away. I ought to be ashamed and so very glad that the sketches spoke to people. I have mounted fourteen new ones.

Oh, I’m sure I wasn’t nice, not a bit nice to people tonight. They liked my evening and me in spite of me not because of me. I’m a cat.

People keep saying nice things about my party but the best of all was when Lizzie said
she
enjoyed it and
saw
something in my work for the first time. I was very tickled. Alice liked it too, but she had liked it once before, when I was getting it off for Edmonton. And now I’m off again to the van and keen as pepper to be at it again. I’ve had a big few days preparing beasts and paint, materials and food and clothes, and typewriter and stories to work on. And I shall forget all about the house and the tenants and bothers and settle down in the van and work. I am very blessed in having it. I have talked to a Jewess today. It was interesting — a different viewpoint. She is sure that Christ is coming very soon to earth. Surely this thing is stirring all peoples and religions.

It is beautiful, very calm. The forest fires fill the gaps and valleys with blue. The sky is high. The grass is parched and leaves continually fall down. Time is only bounded by light and dark and hunger. People have welcomed us back kindly. I had four accidents yesterday as a starter — just put a peach in my pocket and sat on it, left the fish I’d prepared at home, knocked the pickle bottle across my glasses and broke them, and broke the van window. The beasts are so happy and I’ve forgotten all about the
grunting tenant. What a grand list she will collect against my return though it doesn’t seem to me there are many headings left. She’s had moths, heat, floors, plumbing, garbage, rent, dates, door bell, window cleaning, blinds, walls, furniture, neighbours, garden, hot water and noises already — and some I’ve forgotten.

IT FALLS DARK EARLY
. Rain has threatened all day and is longed for by those who are fighting forest fires. Mr. S. has been out all day scraping moss off rocks to keep the fire from spreading. He is a most uncheerful anticipator of evil: knows the fires are going to sweep straight for his premises, knows his apple trees won’t bear, knows there is a dead sheep smelling and it will get worse and worse, knows my pups will fall into his cistern and be drowned one day and run over the next, and that all the hens have tuberculosis and that the ants will eat his house clean to sawdust!

I have made a sketch — fair. Oh goodness, it’s splendid off in the rough land behind here. The wild rose hips are scarlet and the bracken is turning brown russet. The grass is parched silvery, hardened and wired into ripples where the prevailing wind has run over it so perpetually it has stiflened and given up trying to straighten up. The grasshoppers click and tick across the grass, low and heavy, and there are wasps everywhere, and myriads of little sober-coloured birds eating thistledown.

I have sat over the fire. It has been dark some time, a wonderful, mysterious not-black dark. The trees are so inexplicably beautiful! I’ve been thinking about them, how in a way they are better than we humans. They are more obedient to God and recognize him clearer. They go straight ahead doing what God tells them; they
never pause or question; they grow, always moving in growth, always unfolding, never in a hurry, never behind, doing things in their season. God did not give them the right to choose good and evil like he did us so they don’t make as big a mess of things. That grand thing, that final choice, is our prerogative, the thing that makes us God’s sons and daughters and not just his creation. His spirit is among all the other things because it is everywhere. The woods are very full of it tonight. I think our mistake is trying to humanize the woods to make them conform to us, instead of going out to them in a spirit of recognition of the God spirit among them. Only when we realize our kinship in spirit will we get understanding.