Opposite Contraries (11 page)

Life was completely beastly. I turned the Sunday
Colonist
with its noxious fumes of death and destruction pouring from every page and looked out at the high blue sky and autumning foliage. No peace on earth, no goodwill towards men. My own heart was bitter towards many.

Will she go tomorrow? I told her to, gave her a month’s notice and a reminder in the month’s middle. It’s horrid living over top of a woman like that. She wants everything and to pay for nothing. She wants to impress me with her importance. She
brags of her breeding but she has none — not even as much as an earwig. It says in the insect book earwigs are quite noble. They brood their young, not to hatch them with their warmth but to protect them against enemies. She’s beastly to her child. He’s coarse and rude because she doesn’t teach him. She resents him because she must support him. In the morning you hear her smack, smack, and he roar, roar. At half past eight the child stumps coarsely down the pavement. He is only three. His arms thrust themselves into the sleeves of his homemade jacket. No mother’s hand adjusting, pulling the cuff of his jersey down, adjusting the shoulder and tweaking the tail like real mothers do. He is fed, spanked and sent. I’d hate to be her child. “I am a widow,” she moaned, trying to jew down the prices when she came. “A widow with child.”

Oh me. Oh dearie dearie me. Sore and trembling all over. Worse with the conflict and hatefulness. It was just dreadful. Her month was up yesterday but she did not get out. This morn I said (left a note under the door) that another month’s rent began today unless her things were removed, for I’d a notion she wanted her half day, Saturday, and so I could have allowed her if she’d been decent and the rent paid. The van came and I told the man her rent must be paid before her things went. She rushed out in a passion, hurling insults etc. I kept on saying, “Be still, be still,” but stayed firm. Then I phoned the police and they told me to keep back stuff. I went to the bin at the back and took the garbage can — the only useful and decent thing in her little flat — and was making off with the clothes basket full of rubbish when she tore upstairs after me, seized it and began shaking me
in a passion. “Give my things back,” she shrieked. I told her I had the police authority. All I wanted was the rent. I did not want her things. I took the old bucket on top and slipped it over her head, saying, “Take them then. The police will come. I shall leave it to them.” She did look foolish struggling with the basket and bucket on her head and the screams pouring from under it. “I’ll smash everything in the house,” she thundered. So I phoned, the police sent out a big, strong man and advised her not to. Then he told me to pick anything to the value of what she owed. “I don’t want anything she’s got, I only want my rent.” However, he suggested a standing lamp, a poor wooden thing, and I said, “I have her garbage can.” With that, she flew into a fearful spasm of rage and vituperation. “And I want my keys,” I said. He made her hand them over, front and back door. She said she wouldn’t give them up ’til she was ready, but he made her and told me to take the lamp away and lock it up. Well, I will strive to forget her as hard as I can. Clean up her dirt and be thankful to be rid of the creature.

They have just left. I was in the front and she turned like a fool and kissed her hand to me about six times grinning like a maniac. I wonder if she is crazy.

Alice shakes her head and says, “I wish you had not.” I did not hurt the reptile and it
was
fun. If my sister had done that, I’d have loved her for it and not said, “I wish you had not.” I’m always sympathetic and sorry when people do their means. I’ve tried dutifully hard to do right by that awful white woman and I do think that there are limits to what one should allow in their houses. If one gets just a little bit . . .

[…]
Been forlorn in heart all day and can’t say why. The big house seems so empty,
is
so empty. Space talks, so all those empty rooms keep up the chatter every time you pass them, reminding you they are empty, and all the “feels” of all the people who were ever in them float round, in and out of the doors and windows of them. People always leave “feels” in a place they occupy — live, eat, think in. It ought to make one mighty careful. What thoughts go on like that, what ones they entertain. Yesterday I was hanging clothes on the drying rack and such a commotion around my feet. I called Pout and Tantrum to order severely, for they’d just come in from the garden and I did think they could have worked their beans off there. But when I looked, it was Wopper, Wop who I gave away five or six weeks ago and the woman “lost.” It took her all that while to find me again. She went off in a motor and she never went on the street and didn’t know her way about and it was miles off she went, but she came back Thursday, rough and poor in coat, ravenous, eczemic, lame in one leg, dull eyed and desperately tired and hungry. When I saw it was Wop, I gave her a great hunk of birthday cake (Lizzie’s) and joy! We rejoiced. The dog has known suffering in that five weeks. I bathed her and fixed up the eczema and fed her and got the travelling coop with clean bedding, and she crept in and slept and rested all day, dog tired all right. She did not even want to come when I took the others out, just seemed as if she’d found her place. So sad yet content to be home. Gee, what love and fidelity. A nervous shy little dog at the mercy of anybody’s kick, living on any garbage she could rustle, out in the cold and wet and wind, sleeping where she could. She must have gone miles, yet always remembering. I shall never part with her again. She’s back for life and she knows it.

In the middle of last night, I lay hearing creaks and rattles present beside me in bed. A soft little “creepy furry” up against me close. Now, why sit up like a fool and flip it across the bed with a startled hand, even if it had been a mouse? But I did, and before my hand had completed the flip, I knew it was Susie the white rat [who] crept up in the still black of the night just to see her beloved was sleeping. Soon as the realization came to me, I took the little soft warm thing and cuddled her up. Loving little white Susie. She was truly very triumphant and gay, and what a joy it is for the creatures to find one down on their level. She went round and round my neck, tried to make a nest in my hair, licked my face and crept into my palms for little spells. Then I dropped off to be roused by Susie squirming between my palms for it was night and not her sleeping time. She’d done that all day, now she was for investigation. I was afraid of turning in my sleep and crushing her so I got up and took her down to the studio, and tonight I shut the door. But I love Susie. Our two “reals” meeting. Nothing to do with white fur and pink skin and ticking red heart pumps but the tickle of life that is in us.

[…]
The lost dog’s eyes change every day. Less of the dulled, weary, frightened torment remains. She loves to have a bandage put on her lame leg. It makes her feel important and cared for, apart from, partly, the ease of support. She cannot bear to have me out of sight. She is throwing out little tendrils like a creeping vine and thrusting them through my cracks so it will be impossible to shift her off to another body because she’s mine, and to tear her off, I’d tear myself. So there we are. Too many dogs for one house, but not too many for one heart.

[…]
I went to have my new coat fitted. Charlie Wo, a Chinese tailor, is making it. The shop is dark as a rat hole. Old Charlie Wo and Mrs. Charlie Wo and Miss Charlie Wo swarmed into the tiny shop, crusted with pins and tape and buttons and chalk, and Mr. Charlie Wo did things with chewing gum, pins and string, but no one paid any attention to him. I stood under a dim light and looked into a dim mirror up pretty near the ceiling, and the Wo family all talked together in Chinese over me. Then one would jab a pin in some part of me and both the others would screech. Pa was boss, Ma had more sense, and daughter most English. When I made a suggestion, the girl told Ma, Ma told Pa, then Pa responded to Ma, who responded to the girl, who retold the information to me. Quite some job getting a fitting.

A happy day. Harry Adaskin of the Hart House Quartet came to lunch and we talked more than we ate. [. . .]
I feel lots better about Lawren and Bess. His view of it is big and broad and fine and made me feel ashamed, for the whole affair had cut and seared. I shall write them now, I think. Before, I did not seem to know what to say.

[…]
I went to the Empire Theatre to hear Clem Davis on the Second Coming of Christ this morning. And I went to the same place with Lee Nan, the Chinaman, to see a Chinese movie talkie last Wednesday. There you are! Life’s a mix. I suppose my every experience on earth is an ingredient, some substantial and some only flavourings that scarcely show, but the beating
of them all together will make one compounded article. God has the receipt. We can only guess how much of each ingredient should go in, and according as we add more of this or that, will our cake be good or bad.

I heard a real love story last night. Sex and materiality left out. Big, wide, unselfish love, very beautiful, a love outside of our word “love.”

I am going to put it into words made of letters. Our mind clambers round the forming of the symbols of speech. Maybe the formed letters catch something the ear misses, or by forming the crude symbols, the mind finds out through the eye a little more of the meaning. This thing has been between us all our lives, seems like, without reason on her side or mine. The cat in her and the cat in me spit at each other. I love her, I admire her, I revere her. What she feels for me, I can’t say. I never found the way into her heart to find out. It’s such bosh to say another thinks thus and so. How does anybody
know
what anybody else feels inside? It’s guesswork entirely. No matter what she
really
thought about me and felt for me, I know from her point of Christianity that she’d have to love me as a part of her Christian duty. I’ve been tempted many times to feel her love for me ended right there. When I am sick, she is kind to me — she is to everyone. She loves to dominate the sick and would go to the limits of unselfish attention for “sick duty.” When I am well, she treats me as a fool, an outcast from her point of view, to her ideas of Christianity. I do not attend her church. Other churches are only
back and side doors of Heaven. Hers leads smack up to the gold front stairs and are the only totally respectable ones. She never gives me credit for decent feelings in anything, contests all I say, sides with the opposing party every time against me, says I’m hateful, always hateful, says I’m stupid, clicks her tongue and shakes her head continuously at my stupidity because I am deaf and has no patience and no sympathy, sides with anyone who gives me a kick, jeers at my tastes, outlook, abilities etc. Now why??? Has she reason??? Am I that thing she thinks is me at all? Is there no good thing in me at all? Am I utterly selfish, utterly stupid, utterly hateful, utterly mean? Oh Lord. I do not feel concerted by her opinions of me and I spit back, that horrid cat in me humps and hisses, because no matter how loving and kind you may feel when you go in, she always sticks darts in you and twists them and riles those things you never meant to come out, and [you] go out the door on the run before you say more because you do not want to quarrel with her. I love her and she’s sick. She’s the first person I ever remember quarrelling with. She loved Alice deeply. So did I. Alice was the halfway between us two. When she bickered too hard, I kicked over the traces. She knew exactly how to aggravate. Then, when you threw all sanity and reason to the winds and hit and tore and scratched, she put on the saint and quoted scripture. Oh why, oh why, oh why, oh why?

There I go; back to
kind, generous, lovely
things she has done for me and call myself a beast and a snake. Sometimes it was hard to accept things because they were so seasoned with sharpness and hatefulness, but you really loved her too much to hurt her by refusing and you took them and felt like a sewer for lowness. I remember [when I was] a baby I bit her arm. Mother tied me up to the verandah. It was dark, and she tied me with a strip of soft
flannel, put the dog pan down, told me to bite anything that came and shut the door. I was terrified of dark. It was dreadful. I could hear them just the other side of the kitchen door. Chops were sizzling for supper, I remember the smell. Another time I scratched her hand. I can feel the burning shame now at those two or three nail marks on the back of her hand. How vile I was and yet how supremely she could aggravate and go off with that saintly air and a test thrown back at you. How she knew just how to set the match that burnt you with flame. Poor soul, poor dear soul, and she’s sick and we can’t do a thing to help her, she keeps us so distant and littles up her hurt. Even as I write she came again, kindly solicitous for my indisposition. I really believe she does love me, not like she loves Alice and not for myself but because I’m a “Carr” and family affection is story and claimed. There’s an ache of longing after her when she goes. I wonder if she feels it too and why nothing on earth seeming could smash that steel armour of reserve. How would it have been, I wonder, if I’d been born four years first instead of her? I wonder how we’d have felt reversed in ages. Would she have seemed foolish and stupid to me as I looked down those four years? Would I have seemed so wise looking up as she does to me? She has a much clearer mind than mine. I respect her judgement when she gives me the chance and doesn’t annihilate me by saying, “You’re rubbish.”