Opposite Contraries (10 page)

Dream. The sky and the earth are one. The light pours down, is lapped up by the greatest sea and absorbed by the receptive earth. All runs through, all the same to express the oneness and allness. Moving, living, being together, to surround everything with atmosphere, to show the direction of its thought and growth, to show that thing coming and going, breathing through the object’s life, to become a part of it yourself and feel its life and growth as your own life and growth, and the sunshine and the night passing through you also, and the lift and lilt of praise pouring through, filtering and rising up again like a mist.

[…]
Bess is coming West. I don’t know why.

[…]
Tomorrow I go to Vancouver to meet Bess. She wired [she] is going back Saturday and wants to save her time. I almost wired back “go to the devil” but concluded the message would not take the right inflection on the wire. I’m fed up with Bess’s antics, deceit and insincerity. Perhaps I’ll know more when I see her and feel different. I feel as if the parting of our ways has come.

Yesterday, asking me to meet Bess in Vancouver instead of her coming to me. It was a disappointment. I was looking forward to having her in my house and showing her my sketches. So many things I wanted to show and share, but I went by the 2:15 boat and writing strenuously all the way up to have my work ready for class next morning. There were two funny old ladies aboard, both very deaf. They each had an electric contraption to hear within neat boxlike cameras. I looked up just as the two fell into adjacent seats and one asked the other a question. One was old and one was very old. The very old prided herself on being 80% deaf and over 80 years old, and the old one belonged to the Salvation Army, I expect. When Old asked Very Old, V.O. made a mad scramble among shawls and parcels and produced her box. The Old, not to be outdone, fished out hers from her seat back, and they compared and tried each other’s and dumb showed and shouted and exchanged instruments and got so excited they missed instruments and put ears to mouths and mouths to ears and shook their heads and mouthed and finally put their instruments away and wrote. Seeing I was interesting, they included me, and our notes played merry-go-round. The last I saw of them, they were standing in the moil of embarkation. Their contraptions were put away, each stood alone in her own silent world.

Bess and a male cousin of Fred’s met me. Bess strokes me the wrong way and sparks flew like black cats at night. She was all in grey and very pleased with herself and made eyes at the cousin. We went to the hotel which was horribly hot, and Bess sent wires for half an hour while I got madder and madder every time I shifted my weary feet. When she came back, I was
cross and horrid and said when our time together was so short, why not have done that before I came, and she got a little nasty too and asked if I’d rather not hear the truth. I came up to here with her, and her eyes were rather sparky and looked straight like Woo’s when she is mad. Let’s get out of this beastly hotel, I said. It was stifling. Where can we go?

I suggested the park and we got a cab and did not say much. We each looked out of our windows — drove to the teahouse. It was glorious on the verandah under the great trees, and we eased up and she told me the whole story. It’s rather horrid seeing life messed up that way. I’m glad they are out in the open now. They ought to have done it sooner. They’ve been living falsely. I don’t feel that about Lawren. He was as frank with me as he could be, but I feel it about Fred and Bess. I feel as if I could never trust them again. I felt that the real friendship Bess and I had enjoyed was gone. I tried to be absolutely honest and frank with her. I told her that for many months I felt she had had no interest or part in my life. Nor had she let me into hers. Her eyes got cold and hard and sparky and horrid again. She asked me why I had asked in a letter to Lawren, “Is Bess sincere?” and I said I supposed it was because underneath I felt that she was living one life and acting another. We stood a long time by the stream entrance, looking hard at each other. I guess our paths spread apart now. I said we were apart now in the two great things — religion and art. And I asked if she and Lawren were going to work, and I wondered if the life would come back into his painting. I said it had grown dead and lifeless. It is still beautiful in colour and light but it did not live, and she did not like that. They are down in California getting divorces and consoling each other meantime. She prattled about higher love and non-sex and made me a little sick.

I was wrought up and exhausted when I got aboard. The door of the jolly old Eastern friendship has banged to, leaving them on one side and me the other. It’s a little sad.

It is all very perplexing this life we live — discerning between the straight and the crooked. A Jew lives next door. He is not a nice man. I have only had one encounter with him and that over the phone about our mutual interests in the dividing fence. The Jew was horrid. His gait and his face and his voice all ill bred. His garage is up against my fence. When I am dressing in the morning, he is backing his car out. From my high window I do not see his face but I see two ghastly white claw-like hands on the wheel. They are cruel horrid hands. He gives terrible loud drunken parties. They get drunk and scream and come out and in the door and talk loudly and bang car doors and wake us all up from midnight to three and four. Once a man from my house went over and remonstrated, and once I wrote a courteous letter asking him to be quieter as it was interfering with my business. After that he was worse. Now I’ve put it in the hands of the police. He has women there all the time, painted hussies, beautifully dressed. They are loud and vulgar. One spent the night there last night. She has amber hair and painted cheeks and lips. The voice came out of her mouth like gravel from a steam shovel. She bared herself, all but a little pair of bathing pants, and lay on the front verandah in the swing hammock, with the Japanese houseboy sitting beside her, smoking and filling her big tankard with beer. By and by she sat on the steps in a little white sports suit and turned the little skirt up to her waist. Her great bare thighs and legs and feet looked disgusting and the loud talk attracted all the
passers-by. What can one do? It’s sickening, unclean. Oh, how splendid it will be when there is no more sex. It should be beautiful but we’ve spoilt it, and it can be loathsome, sex not used for the propagation of the species but for lust.

I am impossible today so I try to keep by myself. Too mean a bag to mix. Oh, this autumn of years that has already turned to early winter. The worst thing about it is the weary drag of the body. Tired, tired. The work doesn’t abate, but the strength does. Beautiful souls can rise above it with souls stronger than flesh. I can’t. I [am] just an old earthly being. I do long for that rising quality, that yeast of spunk that won’t be drowned by aches. I’m just dough with no rising (unleavened bread), and when very heavy, this and that person blows drafts of cold on you and the dough sinks yet heavier. Then I just detest the entire world, I want to snap and yap like a mean chained pup. I don’t care if my teeth and claws are sharp. I’m glad. I want to be left alone and go in my kennel and sulk because everyone’s unreliable and mean and does you up and kicks you down. Joy doesn’t exist and everything [is] covered with dirt. Why can’t people be decent? This disgusting business of tumbling in and out of marriage. I’m not for squabbling couples. Life’s too short, and if there’s a reason, I say divorce. Drinking, women, or cruelty or beastliness I would not stand [for], but just to flop out of one pair of arms into another without even a good fight to warrant it like B and F disgusts me. It has all been a sort of a blow, a tumbling down of ideals and idols. I don’t feel any more interest in them and their philosophy of life, but there’s a blank space on the wall where the door was not only shut but plastered over
and made into a solid wall. No door to even unlock sometimes and peep in. I wonder if they will ever write to me. I doubt [it]. They are all wrapped up in their new mates and have no interest outside. Long alone, I became a boring nonentity to them in art. Then an active opposition in religion. There is not a thing left to bind. We’re like parsnip roots growing.

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. [. . .]
A lunatic, a prostitute and a Chinese artist — these are among my friends. I have rewritten the “Throat and a Monkey’s Hands.” Tried to get some construction, suspense and climax in it. It’s great fun. I
want
to make the thing hang together, make the creatures real and
make
people love them.

Heaven forgive me. How I hate tenants. Always trying to squeeze something out of you, always trying to make out they’re being done in or not getting their pound of flesh, always finding shortcomings in you and your house. Snivelling, whining, squeezing, hypocritical vermin. Susie the rat is a lady compared to most of ’em. Bristles burst out of every crevice of my vertebrae and I long to do one of Woo’s faces at them. Alice sits there and lets those cheap English tramp all over her. I spit like a cat at every tap of their beastly heels. I detest that type. Those cheap, bragging, swanking English are rennet wine to my life’s milk. They
sour and curdle me. Lie down, oh flesh. Get up, spirit. Hoist me above the miring clay.

I’ve had old Mrs. Rollins today. Eighty-two. Shall I be like that twenty years from now?
No,
I shan’t be nearly so nice or sweet. It’s too bad for folks to live alone. I feel and know it. You centre too much round yourself. She wasn’t tethered to her ego.

[…]
Written to Lawren just as if they were like they used to be. I wonder what Bess has done to him. Has she helped or hindered his work? None of my business.

[…]
Alice phoned and said great niece Betty B. was at the house with her mother and her baby, and I’d better come down. I had not seen Betty for years, not since she grew up. She’s very tall and bright and happy and proud of her baby. She kissed me. Una, her mother, sat by Alice’s fire. They all sat round it, even Campbell who doesn’t belong was there. When I went in the music stopped and there was no chair for me. I bowed to Una and said good evening and a horrible feeling ran round the circle. I knew I must not stay. I went down to the bedroom and saw the child (my great grandnephew) and talked a few minutes to Betty and called the pups and came away home again to the big empty lonesome house. Oh why? Eleven years ago Una said those bitter things. Even as she wrote them she did not know if I was already dead. I was undergoing a bad operation and she wrote that it was to be hoped I would die and not live to be a burden and a nuisance to the others. Why should her “dear Aunt Bet” be burdened with a hateful crosspatch to wait on? She supposed the trouble I was
being operated on for was one reason I’d been such a hateful crank all my life, etc. etc. Lizzie left the letter lying on my desk. It was addressed to Miss Carr, 646 Simcoe Street. It began “Dear Auntie” and was in my blotter. I read it thinking it was for me. Soon I saw but read on, stung to the quick. Una and I had never hit it off. We were too near of an age for aunt and niece. She was beautiful — I stupid — I was gifted but ordinary. I suppose that beast jealousy poked in. Well, I wrote to her and said I
was dead to her.
I did not meet her for over ten years. Lizzie and Alice adore her and count it all my fault. Is it? If any one wishes you dead, why live to them? Best be dead. I wish her no ill, I just want to leave her alone and forget her. Breaks like that don’t mend. Of course, Lizzie sides entirely with her and condemns my wickedness. If the Devil himself was pitted against me, she’d side with him. It has always been so. She is good to me because she is good and likes to do her duty. But she condemns me always; in all I do or say, she is on the other side. Oh God, why do you fix families so? Why make a nice family and then chuck in a misfit? Mother knew and she was the only being who ever did. She knew I was her ugly duck. When Dede would try and break my will and got mad because she couldn’t, that was what she hurled — Mother’s worry at leaving me because I was wayward and different to her other children. If we reincarnate again as children, oh I do hope I’ll belong and not be a sort of patch stuck on after the family’s made. If I’ve ever grumbled at the lonesomeness, they’ve said it’s because I’m selfish or something. Both their lives are cram full of souls. I don’t want a lot, but oh just a few right ones.

The downstairs folk had visitors today. I saw them come. Mr. and Mrs. dashed out onto the pavement and hugged and kissed them as they got out of the motor. Such genuine delight
and hubbub and happy talk and arms circling and tongues wagging. They left the blinds up a little tonight and all sat around the fire in good fellowship. Even the Jew next door has his ladies-in-the-sun. He is a bachelor but never alone in his home.

This being cast alone must be to teach me something. Sometimes I wonder if it was that ungovernable love that possessed me for so many years pouring out, pouring out wasted and unwanted ’til, ill and worn with the canker of it, I wrenched it out of my being and trampled on it. Threw it from me and grew cold and hard and dead. By and by the roots sprouted again and wanted to grow but there wasn’t any good earth for them to grow in. It was all built over in brick and stone and pavement. The poor little roots tried to get a hold but couldn’t. And strong winds blew (as it were) a little dust among the roots to keep them just alive, and the dust is the love of the blessed creatures, monkey and dogs and blessed little rat offering the rootlets of my love nourishment and shelter.