Hundreds and Thousands (42 page)

I am proud of our ancestry and our family. Today we have been through Father’s and Mother’s desks. Alice’s eyes hurt, so I read. There was Grandfather’s and Grandmother’s letters to our father when he was a young man, and there was his sisters’ and brothers’ and cousins’ and nephews’ letters to him. Every one of theirs expressed great love for the young man out on his own, seeing the world, great anxiety for his welfare, and concern over the dangers of the wild life and place he was exposed to. But every one of them had some expression of gratitude for some kind thought or remembrance or help he had given to them. They seemed mostly to be poor, and he was always sending them money, and newspapers to the old men, and letters when he could. Apparently they had to know someone going who could take a packet and the vessels were most uncertain and trips perilous. But you felt they loved him, and he was good to
them, and that he was high-principled and honourable, and that they were sure of him. Then there were all the letters about Dick’s death down in Santa Barbara, away from all his people, fighting tuberculosis. What long letters they write about him! One man, his closest friend writes, “He was the most honourable young man I have ever known — a beautiful character, loved very greatly by all he contacted.” They mentioned innumerable good things of his, done so quietly they would never be known. There were letters written to Dede and Lizzie mentioning their extreme kindness and hospitality in the old home and garden, particularly to strangers and missionaries. There were letters telling of the helpful through-and-through sweetness of Tallie, and her patience in her sufferings, and always cheer and kindness for others. And there are all the letters we have just answered about Lizzie, her unselfishness to humanity and Christ’s work. The last two days has been steeped in reading of these dear souls, and long letters of Mother’s and Father’s, and of little Lizzie to her mother and father, a shy sensitive lovely soul, reverently offering a little note with a card or drawing done by her little young hands, thanking them for her lessons. Such a conscientious little person! I never knew she was so sweet a little girl.

We were rather surprised to find our forefathers so earnestly religious. Perhaps people know others really better after death than before because the shyness and self-consciousness is absent. When Father died, he was worth about $50,000, hard and honourably earned. He stood on his own feet and owed no man. I wonder what soured him, drove him into his shell and hardened him over? He had much physical suffering — perhaps it was that. Mother was a dear affectionate wife. I always thought him hard
and selfish to her, an autocrat, but it seems he was loving too, and quite religious, and very honourable.

Visitors have been to my studio. Do people mean those things they say? Does the work warrant it? One man said no work had moved him so much except Van Gogh’s. Another said that the vitality of it was astounding. A woman said that they went away feeling uplifted as if they’d been in a different world. I don’t know. Sometimes I feel
almost
as if it was good and sometimes not. One man called me long distance from Vancouver on passing through from Japan to New York. “I wanted to hear your voice,” he said. “You know, I believe in you.” When people say that it makes you taller. You’ve simply got to put your best foot forward. I want the woods and sky and sea, the whole outdoors. The cottage is too comfortable, too shut in. Rheumatic joints plead for inactivity, only my soul strains on its leash.

Flora took Lizzie’s big begonia to live with her today. Now all the life is gone from her sitting-room. It was a great plant with handsome leaves. It spread itself in front of the window and made a screen. Lizzie loved it, fed and watered it, admired it and upheld it when I used to growl that it kept out too much light. When she was gone it gloomed the room, shedding loneliness. The other plants Alice and I took to our homes but the big begonia was too big for our houses. Alice watered it and there it sat for one month all alone. Flora was glad to have it and we were glad to see it go. The sitting-room is dead now. None of the things that breathe are there. Everything in it has stopped. The
windows are shut and no air moves round. The door bell on its old curly wire spring sits quite steady. The walls give no echoes. Taps don’t drip. No clocks tick. No fires crackle. “Finished” seems to be written on everything, on our babyhood and girl-hood and womanhood, on our disappointments and happinesses, tendernesses and bitternesses, joys and sorrows. Dreams have been born there and have flown out of the windows again, dreams that only the dreamers knew, some that grew up and became fact, some that were still-born. I wish the dear old house could fold up and fly away. It is so tired. Lizzie cared for it very tenderly and kept it so very decent and in order. It is such a lady of an old house, rather prim. The tops of the windows are curved like surprised eyebrows and the door wide and hospitable. I never have been up in the attic. A wide ladder went up through the broom closet. The top ended in blackness and terror. I was so scared of the dark! It took awful heart beatings and resolution to go down cellar. There was an electric light, but you had to go down into the black and grope to find it. How enormous the upstairs seemed before there was any electric light, and we went to bed with candles — a weanty little glow a few inches round! The nippy cold smell of upstairs on winter nights. If by any chance I was left
alone
in the house, I always opened all the doors and windows, or went out in the garden among the trees and shrubs, so much more companionable than sofas and tables and chairs full of nobody. Dear old house, if we could only give a great puff, Alice and I, now we have finished with you, and blow you into nothing — not sit and watch you rot. The house was something special to Lizzie. We took from it. Lizzie coaxed and petted it, denying herself things so it could be kept decent — painting a floor and stingeing on a hat, upholding its
tax honour, wreathing it about with flowers, upholding the dignity of the front gate, and keeping the lawn well barbered.

How easy it is to rip three months off the face of the calendar and what a lot of things they represent! Lizzie has gone, even her things are tidied away, and her grave smoothed and seeded down. The old house is empty and the agents working to sell it. Summer has come and gone. Alice’s school has reopened and the new-born pups I took in from camp, three inches and a squeal, are now half dogs. I was ready to leave on Saturday, but a friend was ill and I wanted to know how things were with her, so I came Sunday. There were five dogs to bring, and Woo. I bustled for two hours and then a grand calm the rest of the day — sleep, write, read, look. The sheep grass is silver-yellow and lies flat on the earth. If you part it the new green is underneath. At 5 o’clock this morning the van was filled with chill murk. I used the torch to see the clock. Outside, the moon and dawn were at grips. The moon was very high and superior, but dawn was pushing with a soft intensity. The rawness was aching my bones. I lighted the stove and got a hot bottle. I cosied down, waking at eight with the sun roaring over my bed, and the dogs wanting out.

It is 3 o’clock in the morning and
bitterly
cold. The creatures were so restless I got up and put the oil stove on to take the chill from the air. The lamp smells to Heaven. There is a magnificent moon and the sky peppered with stars, and a holy hush. The monkey has been restless all night. “Oo-oo-oo” punctuates the clock at irregular intervals.

DID GOOD WORK
this morning. Did poor work this afternoon. I am looking for something indescribable, so light it can be crushed by a heavy thought, so tender even our enthusiasm can wilt it, as mysterious as tears.

WIND HAS COME UP
; rain clouds are skulking round. Have worked hard — two sketches in woods, with a bite in between. The woods are brim full of thoughts. You just sit and roll your eye and everywhere is a subject thought, something saying something. Trick is to adjust one’s ear trumpet. Don’t try to word it. Don’t force it to come to you — your way — but try and adapt yourself
its
way. Let it lead you. Don’t put a leash on it and drag it.

The pines are wonderful, a regular straight-from-the-shoulder tree. From root to sky no twist, no deviation. They know no crookedness, from trunk to branch-top hurled straight out, with needles straight as sewing needles. Other trees ramble and twist, changing colour, clothed or naked, smooth or knobbly, but the pine tree is perpetually decent. In spring she dances a bit more. How her lines do twirl and whirl in tender green tips! She loves you to touch her, answering in intoxicating perfume stronger than any words. I’d rather live in a pine land than anywhere else. There is a delicious, honourable straightness to them.

It pours in a ladylike, drizzlish manner. Everything looks drab. I don’t mind usual rain but this is beastly revolting stuff. I am going home tomorrow morning.

I painted
well
today, working on the summer sketches, reliving them — loving them. I think I have gone further this year, have lifted a little. I see things a little more as a whole, a little more complete. I am always watching for fear of getting feeble and
passé
in my work. I don’t want to trickle out. I want to pour till the pail is empty, the last bit going out in a gush, not in drops. I must get the sketches cleaned and clarified. Some I do not need to touch. I have said what I thought and moiling over them would bungle the point, where there is one. But others I can see the thought sticking half through and it needs a little push and pull and squeeze. It’s muddlesome, a bit. I wonder will I ever attain the “serene throb,” that superlative something coming from perfect mechanics with a pure and complete thought behind it, where the thing breathes and you hold your breath as if you had spent it all, had poured it into the creation. Sometimes when you are working, part of you seems chained like a bird I saw in England once, tied by a thread on its leg to a bush. It fluttered terribly, and I went to see what was wrong. The string cut through the leg as I came and the bird fluttered harder. The leg was left on the bush with the string, and the bird was free. Has one always to lose something, a very part of them, to gain freedom? Perhaps death is like that, the soul tearing itself free from the body.

A man told me recently that my painting was like music to him. A woman said yesterday my writing was more like poetry than stories. Now this is silly. Why shouldn’t pictures be pictures and stories be stories? Ruth Humphrey liked my stories “Mrs.
Drake” and “D’Sonoqua’s Cats” very much. “Unnamed” she found wanting. I feel myself that it is wrong and yet I feel that there is something more subtle way back in it, where the wild crow contacts the humans, than perhaps there is in the other two stories which are straight experiences. “Mrs. Drake” more or less satisfies me. It was the easiest. “D’Sonoqua” brings in the supernatural element and the forest, but “Unnamed” touches something too delicate to define and I have overpowered it by the brutality of the man. I will lay it by but there is something there I must dig out. This morning I began “White Currants.” I want it to be so dainty, so ephemeral that it just melts as you look at it like a snow-flake.

ALICE SAT OPPOSITE
the lawyer and I at the side. The baize covered table was spread with papers. Some of them had seals on. Some were peculiar paper with the look of money and divided up by little perforated fences. The lawyer said, “I have divided the bonds as evenly as possible.” He gave us each a statement to read and went and stood at the window while we read. He asked if it was satisfactory and gave us his fountain pen and we signed. Then he put part of the queer money-like paper by Alice and part by me and told us to go to our two banks and each get a box and put them in. So Lizzie’s estate was divided. I wanted to cry dreadfully. My throat hurt and I expect Alice’s did too. It was like Lizzie’s strength and blood lying there on the table. It was her life’s work. Oh no! Not that. That is all saved up in people’s muscles and bones, in crippled children, and old folk’s aches that she eased. That money was only the earthy side of the thing. Alice had to go home to those pestiferous kids. I bought an armful of lovely flowers and went to the cemetery and cried. I had
the flowers all fixed and the car was coming, but I went back and cried some more and took the next car. Life will be some easier for Alice and me because of what Lizzie left us, but an ache goes with it.

I finished “White Currants.” It appeals to me rather because I suppose it is true of that corner of the garden. I can see it so clearly and the boy “Drummie” who came sometimes — just a felt presence, not a seen one. I so often have wondered who and why he was. I don’t remember anything he did or said — only the jog trot of my own fat legs which was the jog of the two white horses. The whole thing was “white currant clear.” I never told a soul. I would never have dreamt of telling even Alice. She would not have understood then any more than she did tonight when I read “Mrs. Drake” to her. Once or twice she laughed when she remembered one of the incidents, a superior unhearty laugh that somehow hurt. I could never read “White Currants” to her or to anybody, I think. Why do I
want to
write this foolishness? Just to hide it away? It hurts getting it out and then it hurts when it is out and people see it. The whole show is silly! Life’s silly. I’m silly and it’s silly to mind being silly.

I fought against starting a canvas for weeks. I wanted to but I was afraid; did not know where to begin. First I’d say, “No, you can’t begin a canvas till you’ve cleaned up and mounted the summer sketches.” So I finished them. Then it was this and then that, sewing, gardening and seeing people, and all the time the new canvas lay on my chest as clean as the day it was stretched. Today I said, “It shall be,” and still I hovered round dallying. Even when everything was ready I had to eat a pear and smoke a
cigarette and do things I did not have to do. Finally I did get out the sketches and sat before them and thought. The canvas was an upright and the subject a horizontal. There were three clamps fixing it to the easel. Back and forth through the picture room I went measuring other canvases, and then … I spiritually kicked myself, got up and unclamped the three clamps, turned the canvas, and suddenly seized the charcoal and swung in. Most of the day was gone by then, but no sooner did I put touch to canvas than the joy of it came back and I spent one happy hour. I do not understand this great obstinacy, wanting and won’t all in the same moment. Seems as though I am chained up and have to wait to be loosed, as though I got stage fright, scared of my own self, of my blindness and ignorance. If there were only someone to kick me or someone to be an example (I’d probably hate them), but it is so dull kicking and prodding your own self. When I’d broken the ice and made a start I was excited at once.