Opposite Contraries (15 page)

We went to the laundry then, meeting others on the way. Harold told me who they were and what they did, and we all grinned and shook hands. The man of most apparent importance was ironing towels electrically. Harold pointed to the linen and begged me to notice what beautiful ironing it was. Nobody seemed in a hurry. It was as if aeons of time was before them. The laundry was slack because it had been wet and the clothes were not dry. Opposite the laundry was the bad ward. A man was waving and gesticulating frantically behind a barred window like a beast in a cage and there were strange unearthly noises. We hurried round to the front again. It was about ten to four and time to prepare for early supper and for visitors to be off. But I left Harold happily standing by Mr. McLeod. He does not fear and hate him like he did.

[…] Sketching in the big woods is wonderful. [. . .] There are themes everywhere, something sublime, something ridiculous, or joyous, or calm, or mysterious. Tender youthfulness laughing at gnarled oldness. Moss and ferns, and leaves and twigs, light and air, depth and
colour chattering, dancing a mad joy-dance, but only apparently tied up in stillness and silence. You must be still in order to hear and see
. It is you that must be still to hear and see. It is you must go underground to smell those live and perfect smells. It is you must be still so they can come and make merry in your stillness.

Pout and Carabana bred today. This mating business is very marvellous. Two creatures agreeing together, fiercely determined to carry on life to perpetuate the species. It is a godlike, beautiful, sacred thing, and we have lowered it to the ground, coarsened it and made it shameful almost. Mrs. M. has the most irritating repertoire of dog and cat stories. Sentimental, mawkish, shoving the beast up with a human concept of life and mussing up all the blind, sweet animal instinct that is so refreshing in the beasts with a foolish half human. All evening she poured this [drivel] into my ear and rammed poor photos of animals into my eye which was already full of sleep. I longed to stamp and shout “shut up,” and she so kind to me in so many ways. I vowed secretly never to tell a cat or dog story to anyone the rest of my life. I wonder if I have ever bored folks that way about my creatures. The animals are so far above silly sentiment, it robs them of their dignity. [. . .]

[…]
I must have bored people horribly with my tales of animals. I shall never tell any again. I will try to be like the Virgin Mary and keep things and ponder them in my heart. There is a load to be learned from the creatures.

A dreary procession of turkeys is mincing down the road. [. . .]

[…]
From life: There was a father and mother, son and daughter. The father had a government position and drank. The mother had servants and knew nothing of practical housekeeping. The girl fell deeply in love with a Roman Catholic. The father and mother were bitterly opposed. Pap said, “You never enter this house again if you marry Catholic.” Beyond religion there was no objection to the young man. The mother gave in — sentimental. War came. The girl’s lover and brother went. The lover was killed on the girl’s birthday. The brother got leave and came home. The last night of his leave, he and his sister climbed a hill. He said to the girl, “This time I got through. Next time I shall not come back. Don’t be an old maid, Sis. They need a man around. Marry.” He mentioned a man who had long courted her. The son said to the father, “I shall not come back this time. You must stop drinking.” The boy was killed. The father stopped drinking and the girl married the man she did not love. Parents and young couple lived together. Son and daughter were born to the young couple. Old man and son-in-law have not spoken for years, though living in the same house. Grandmother, daughter and daughter’s daughter are closely knit. Between the three males is antipathy and hate. Do duty marriages pay? Was it right of the brother to decide the sister’s fate? No one has the right to impose his desires on another before they die.
[. . .]

[Incorrectly dated September 29th in
Hundreds and Thousands
]
[…]
It seems to be a mistake for more than one generation to live in one house; parents and their children ok, but no grandparents
or grandchildren. They belong to someone else. It takes more than nice people to make a nice family. One bell does not make a chime. One family [can] scrap and wrangle, insult each other and cuss each other’s particularities and yet remain a loving devoted family. Another can always be insincerely polite and mawkish and not family at all, just a bunch of scraps.

[…] How curious that one should care so.
It seems as if it is harder to have one’s thoughts slighted than objects. My sisters are the most unselfish people in the whole world over their worldly goods and the stupidest over encouragement or interest in — well, that sort of thing, nameless and vital. It is too silly to come to let it have power to hurt so.
[…]

[…]
Vana is in whelp. I wonder does she know what is coming to her? Does some instinct prepare her for motherhood, or does it break upon her with bewildering surprise through the senses when her puppies’ cries come? When she tastes them and smells them as well as sees the helpless creatures, does she recognize them as part of herself to be looked to like a sore paw? Or has she some higher sense, urging her to nourish and protect to keep the game of life going on? She evidently has no fear of what is coming, no worry, perhaps a little bulky discomfort and weight but no mental anxiety at all. Her mate evinces no interest whatsoever in the coming event. His instinct to keep life going left weeks ago, his responsibility in the affair is over. There will be no link of affection between sire and dam through the pups. There is no “we” in animal life. It is “I.”

I dreamed last night that I was lying on my back and my left hand was upon my pillow with the fingers open and palm up. Near me lay a man on his back. Presently he put the palm of his hand on the palm of mine, and he said to me, “Ask Jesus Christ about it.” What was I to ask Jesus Christ? The words have come back and back all day to me.
[…]

[…]
Three of Clem Davies’s churchgoers died in one week. Dr. Davies gave a memorial sermon lumping the three in one. It was a beautiful sermon. When Clem talks about death, one almost wants to die. You can feel it like a bursting from a chrysalis. [. . .] Seems to me our attitude towards God should be about the same as the animals’ attitude to us. We are stewards of God to care for His creatures. They take God through us. They only know the material; dim-dim way back perhaps they sense the spirit. The wild ones must. They have no intermediary as [do] the creatures that know man. He is their all. They speak to man in wordless sounds. Pray to him, praise him, love him, thank him. We do not know God’s language, either. To us it is wordless, but God knows our meanings even when we don’t word them. [. . .]

How thoughts come and go. Suddenly in an impossible place, one that you want to keep [comes to you], but when the time comes to pin it down and think it out some more, it has scampered away. I had a beauty during the hymn, and the moment Clem started off, it skedaddled and rooted around the rubbish pile behind my brain; [try] as I will I can’t find it. Thoughts are things, they say. Does that mean they are running around half-made somewhere out there just beyond our ken? Clem expounded on
the Sermon on the Mount and was fine. If only I could remember it all afterwards. It is like good food you taste. It is sweet, you chew out the sweet, roll it round your mouth and swallow it to make room for the next mouthful. It feels good when it has gone down, too. You feel better for it and stronger, but you do not taste it any more like when it was in your mouth. It is still working, but in a different way. Perhaps the good sermons of Dr. Davies are like that. The words have gone down beyond the ears into your mind. They are not words any longer. They have finished mouth and taste and went on into the digestion. You can’t keep the words any more than you could keep the food lying in your mouth, but all through the week they are working through the system, sustaining life and building up the body. Perhaps it does not matter so much remembering the words — when one thinks back into the woods, they are not remembering the particular trees, they are calling to remembrance the
spirit
of the woods. Oh, there’s the thought I had this morning! “The spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,” and God created the breath of life with them. That was the thing that made the whole difference. When we create a picture we too must use our God-given power to breathe into it the breath of life. We can only do this by drawing it from God, letting God breathe through us into it. This is a wonderful thought. When the breath of life passes through a thing, it moves. Growth is always moving. A little thing becomes a big thing. We do not see it happen but it has happened.

Clem Davies says, “Holiness means wholeness.” I take it that if a picture was a complete thought, if it was carried out with perfect unity, every part so articulated that it helped to carry out the whole idea — fitted into it our place in the idea or
ideal, satisfying not only the idea but the soul also — then that picture would be [a]
Holy Thing,
a whole satisfying thing that would immediately inspire reverence in the beholder.

Life, life, how difficult! The horrible doubts that come, that brood over you and eat into the very marrow, turning the whole world into an ache!
It was not their matrimonial split-ups that undid our friendship. It was this other. I wonder if they know it. Letters between us are a farce.
This morning’s mail brought an envelope full of theosophical literature. Once it interested me, now it sends me into a rage of revolt. I burnt the whole thing. I thought they had something, Lawren, Bess, Fred, something I wanted. I tried to see things in their light, to see my painting through theosophy. All the time, in the back of my soul, I was sore at their attitude to Christ, their jeering at some parts of the Bible. [. . .]

Real success must be this — to feel down in your own soul that the thing you have striven for has been accomplished. To this must be added the appreciation of the thing done by those you love and whose appreciation you value
as being understood and right. The folks who gush don’t count, the superficial observer does not count, the toady does not count, the poor-sighted person does not count, the person solely material does not count, the one who finds fault from criticizing jealous motive does not count. Who does count?
The person who counts is the person who has nothing to gain, who lets himself go out to meet the thing you have been striving to create,
to whom the workmanship is secondary, the spirit first;
the nameless something that carries beyond, what your finger cannot point to,
that repeats and insists to your soul and uses no words, is found in all places.

After approximately six months, an answer to my letter to Fred and Yvonne. The first reading I smothered liberally with mad sauce. They had ignored my effort [to] welcome Yvonne with my heart as an artist and as Fred’s wife. For so long I had tried so hard to mind my own business and go on loving them all for themselves, irrespective of who they were hitched up with, because I do love them all. But the second reading I steadied down more. Fred has certainly had deep waters to plough through. He has [stuck] with it and faced things out and his newspaper job is exacting and exhausting. Lawren and Bess wrote me for Christmas, enclosing a snap of themselves; they were in full motion, arm in arm, racing across a park-like place, both laughing. They looked silly. They always stress how happy and free they are. I wonder if they ever think back — but it is none of my business whether they are expressing real mirth or hysteria. They are trying to pretend they are happy, irresponsible children. How long will they fool themselves? Or are they really pure-hearted beings on a slightly higher level than the rest?

Nineteen thirty-five has two hours more to run. Then 1936 and what? What will the poor old world get up to?
If Bible prophecy and its fulfilment are right, momentous things may happen. Everyone looks at everyone else questioningly, but nobody voices it except the rabid British Israelites; the people who go to meetings only half believe, even the professed adherents. Lizzie believes in it and I do. We go to meetings and read literature but we don’t discuss it. She and I do not discuss religion. She demands her own angle and no other will she tolerate. The intolerance of her attitude annoys me. I may be wrong-angled but I believe people can come to the same essential end by different
routes. Perhaps I’m none too broad but what seems to matter most, according to my lights, is sincerity. I have investigated several paths. Lawren would think this insincerity — being led away — but from each different angle, Christian Science, Unity, Church of England, etc. I have definitely learned something. Dr. Clem’s rendering of scripture delights me more than any I have known, I think. His direct simplicity of interpretation opens up new ideas all the time. The orthodox church set stories at Clem; sometimes they hurt him but he goes right on. I believe in his sincerity. I think he is doing a great work and I think all the time he is mellowing. God bless Clem. Nothing could be more humbly, earnestly sweet than his serving Communion.

I was awful mad with B. so I wrote a real polite letter but sharp and cold with hot spots. Then I felt much better; addressed it, everything but stamp and lick. Read Miss B.’s to me over again, waited twelve hours, wrote another, burned the first and posted [the] second. I annoy folks very much by snapping my jaws down. If they only knew how it clears the black out of your heart to spit it out, they’d be glad to take it and clean you up and be squared up each to each again. If they take your “lip” nicely (where they know in their hearts they have done you dirty), it makes you feel awful kindly and nice to them, love
them far more than if you’d never let out at them but littled it up to sour and stick. [. . .]