Opposite Contraries (17 page)

[…]
I know a man and a woman married; the man is the finer character. I know him best. The woman has always treated me nicely, but I do not think so much of her. I dream of them often. For unknown reasons, always in dreams the man appears. Poor sort of person and the woman superior and most friendly, why?

A new widow came to see me, one who had loved her man. She had aged years in days. Her eyes had cried all the colour from them. There were big furrows across her forehead, dug by sorrow. She is not an old woman. How her husband’s death has hurt, and yet she looked so beautiful, more lovely than ever. I saw her a clarified beauty, still and holy. I never loved her as much. Women do love their men and lean on them. It must be awful to go flat. The ridge pole of your tent down and you smothered below, and can’t see out or breathe. I have looked a bit at married couples and wondered. Some really do mind. Life is broken in half. Others have ado to hide their relief.
[…]

[…]
I think Christian Science, New Thought, Truth Centres etc. make people impersonal, smug and unsympathetic. They make one shut up tight, draw into themselves, ossify. Yet it would be horrible to have a help that hung around you like a necklace. It would be nice, though, to feel they felt you were a live being. Nice if they offered to help in the tiny ways not included in the salary [or] list of duties…I am restless and empty.

[…]
I am detestable. I go up to chat with Alice and come home depressed, flat. The slumicky, smashed-upness of everything gives me jim-jams and I’m so dreadfully ashamed of myself. I hate the back door that always sticks and is open all night and the broken steps and table outside it and the load of wood in front of the front door and the toilet seat brazenly squatting in front of the front door and the smelly dog-torn couches and the darkness of the trees shading windows and the smoky paint and torn wallpaper and the front back and side doors all in a row, the lurid beforeness of the whole place, and I despise myself for the deep detestation of having to go and make my home there when Alice’s got so much to cope with. I
want
to live with her and I
want
to help, if only it did not have to be in that uncomfortable, ramshackle place. Hard to heat, hard to keep, and Alice stubbornly determined that it shall be, just as it is, forever and ever. No alteration, no improvement; to her blind eyes it’s perfect. It’s unreasonable for me to hate it so. I wonder why I do. I don’t feel as if I could ever work there. I feel as if it means the end of my life — giving up everything. Perhaps now I’ve written it I will see how contemptible I am and be shamed. And anyhow, the time is not yet. As long as Alice can keep on alone, she will and will want to. Why do I sauce myself with dread ahead? Perhaps the operation will keep her sight as at present and blindness may not come.

Alice went into hospital to have her eye operated on tomorrow.
Una came down. That’s a comfort.

[…] I have been sent more ridiculous press notices. People are frequently comparing my work with Van Gogh. Poor Van Gogh! Well, I
suppose they have to say something. Some say I am great and some that I am not modern. I don’t think these young journalists know what or where or how I am. I am glad that all seem to agree that I am pre-eminently Canadian.
Some of the men artists resent me being a woman. Think it’s
infra dig
for the men to have my work recognized —“a darn woman’s.” It’s all quite fun.
I hope I do not get bloated and self-satisfied. [. . .]

[…] Ruth has gone. I did not know how blue I’d be without her. She has meant an awful lot these past months
and I’m afraid her last hearing of [me] was a bare bag-beast. I ought to have given her a last joyous send-off. The phone was awful and I could not hear. Oh, Lor’! Crazy fool. Those flowers have upset me. Just ready to do anything, probably to take it out in an attack of bad temper on someone. There is nothing nice in me.
Must hurry and get to another Indian village. It is marvellous how they help to keep one in place. There is something about the great calm of them.

[…]
They are burying Lola Dawn today. She died of spinal meningitis. The bright sprite of Beckley Street. When I went out on my porch, her baby hand waved across, always laughing and waving her hand. The two grandfathers and the two grandmothers have come, and lots of aunts and uncles. They have been about for two days.

His mother and father are dumpy, the father deaf. Her father is a dear. It’s been a dreadful two days for them all. When they can’t bear the congested house they come out on the porch and breathe, and all the men smoke. Her papa smokes a cigar and
has a pipe, and the brothers and uncles smoke cigarettes. The porch is so small, the tiny garden strip in front must have been heaped with ashes of smokers. Neighbours have been in and out with bunches of flowers from their gardens. The young mother looks so white. They are all very tender with her. Her husband’s arm is always going around her. When she can’t bear the thinking about the dreadful ache of Lola Dawn, she goes upstairs and he follows. The curtainless window is open wide. I can see her head on his shoulder, crying. How does she feel about it? How does he feel? He is tubercular, he should not give tainted lives [to] the world to suffer to die. Does he think of that? Does she? It is good Lola Dawn died, perhaps. She just had that little two years’ job teaching those young parents of hers. Perhaps that was Lola Dawn’s job. They have a baby boy, not walking. What will be his fate?

Now they are back from the cemetery. Such a crowd of them. All very quiet — in and out, in and out — sitting on the verandah rail, scattering ashes on the garden. What a long day. At last the grandparents are going. Her father holds her close; he puts an envelope in her hand. She keeps his hand, crying. He holds her like a little girl. He has such a dear kind face. He puts her down, goes down one step and turns and kisses her hand and goes to his car. He pats the son-in-law. The father’s mother, a plain dumpy lady, kisses her son. The little deaf father shuffles away unnoticed. He does not want to bother people to shout goodbyes at him. The uncles and aunts kiss and pat. They are all sorry. They go out the gate and get into the motors. Someone has left a car behind for the poor sore parents.

When the guests are all away, they go back into the house, down the hall, and he takes her in his arms. The little lady next
door has kept the baby all day. She runs in and the two women cry together. Then she goes back; the baby is still in her house.

The couple put their things on and lock the house and come away in the motor to be alone and quiet and to face up to life without Lola Dawn.

[…] Perhaps if one had felt the pangs of motherhood in one’s own body one could understand better. Until people have been fathers or mothers they can hardly understand the fullness of life.
It was the life-long building up and tying down to another’s will, not being free, that bothered me. Perhaps somewhere else we will have to go through maternity before we become complete. Yet the mother women often seem to turn into stupid cows running after their calves, instead of gently mildly leading and impressing their calves enough with their maternal wisdom that they are content to follow.

Dreams — how delicious and irresponsible; such wild leaps in the dark and always a safe landing, everything so unquestioningly right in spite of times and sizes and distances and people being out of scale or out of period now with another.
[…]

[…]
Why do we think of God so much and mention Him so seldom, and then shamefacedly? Ruth is modern. She thinks God
is old-fashioned stuff. I don’t know what she believes in, she is careful to hide all that from me, but I feel antagonism and bitterness toward spirituality or sentiment. She is a kind woman and generous, but I am always knocking up against something I don’t understand that repels me. Why does she put up with me as a friend? I know a lot of women over old for marriage. They would love to be happy yet they feel gypped because they aren’t. They think too much of themselves to marry anybody, but a god and gods are rare and difficult of cultivation.

Lawren and Bess Harris came to Victoria from Mexico and paid me a three-and-half hour visit.[. . .] He spoke little. I felt that they were both taken aback to see me aged and feeble. For days on end I have had a steady headache and feel very, very tired and old.
I did write Bess I’d had a stroke. She wrote back a long description of her magnificent petunias. Everyone on earth is self-absorbed these days.

Lawren and Bess came in today. Lawren pulled out a lot of canvasses but his crits were not illuminating, although they were full of admiration and appreciation.
His second marriage has seemed to me to weaken him. He refers to Bess’s criticisms all the time, and I have never felt her crits much worth while. She uses theosophical
jargon. But he looks to wife No. 2 to word his criticisms.
He seemed to pick on some small, unimportant detail and never to discuss the subject from its basic angle. Trivialities. [. . .]
I could have discussed things better with him if it had not been for the presence of Bess. His discussions were with her rather than with me and were about incidentals like highlight and a twig or two which he thought superfluous. His visits have been slightly disappointing from a growth standpoint. Some years back perhaps I’d have felt more exhilarated by them.
[…] Perhaps the best thing I got out of this visit with the Harrises was a calm looking with impartial eyes at what Lawren pulled out of my racks, things I had almost forgotten that stirred my newer and older thoughts together in my mind and made me try to amalgamate them.
It is prejudice in my mind because I know Bess sham-acted to her friends in the old days. I have never trusted her since. I always doubt her sincerity.

Paul pervades the house. Paul, Paul, Paul. Typical of the present-day youth, self-satisfied but not self-contained. Spilling with careless slop over others’ lives, indifferent as to who is splashed, who is flooded out; what is easiest for him at the moment is all that matters to him. Typical of present-day youth. A. waiting on him hand and foot. With a splish of talk, he says, “I will make my bed. I will keep my room.” And the bed goes unmade and the room unaired and smelly and messy. Disgusting cooking smells creep up to my flat. Fish, onions, things Alice hates herself but cooks for Paul. His every whim is her law. “Precious” is her name for him. Her starved sentimentality is glutting on him. There is no repelling of her caresses. She and I never kiss and
mawk. I think it is since Lizzie’s death we gave up kissing. I got so angry and hurt at the cold dead cheek she presented without warmth or care when she came in and out of Beckley Street that I believe it was my suggestion we should drop kissing. It takes more than a pair of smacks to make a kiss. I won’t do it any more than I will keep up one-sided correspondence. In hospital when she thought I might die she began kissing me again, and I hated it. Sick kisses revolt me. I said “Don’t,” and perhaps it was cruel. As a child, how hot with love I was, and then I had three ghastly, smashed, mortal wounds I could not stand up against. I let love die, deliberately starved it out — that was bad I know and yet shamming love — giving Judas kisses — is worse. Judas did not hate Jesus, only he loved himself more and he was selfish. He used a kiss as the easiest way out.

The act of kissing is nothing if there is not impulsion from the heart behind it. The griffons’ great love-filled eyes look upon me, and I seize the little shaggy heads and kiss them real kisses. I want to kiss the silent moving loveliness of flowers; in their immobility they are more reciprocating than a cold human whose unresponsiveness repels. Possibly the whole business of kissing from a human standpoint is self-conscious and self-consciousness upsets the whole works.
[. . .]

[…]
This beastly game of critic all the fools play these days makes me sick. They cannot do
anything
themselves [but] give advice about how a thing should be done. The longer I live, the more I see that what Whitman and others say is true. There is only one critic for every man to heed — himself, his own soul. The average critic criticizes to [feed] his own conceit. He is
afraid you would think he did not know if he said nothing, so he says too much. He finds fault to feed his own conceit.

When I was young I loved the old (not old men, who I never did like). Old women I was very fond of. I did not flinch at dipping into their hollow cheeks during one of their smothering kisses, smelling their old dry skin, my face circled by long tremulous hands, their wavering voices, squeaky love and the dull eyes peering into yours. Now that I am in that place myself, the very ancient are too ancient to care; squeezings and kissings are like third lumps of sugar to a cup of tea fully sweet with two. I do not invite and rarely give kisses.

It seemed important enough to me, and the most important building, my father’s wholesale business down on Wharf Street. It was a deep warehouse with a deep smell. There was a black shield at the front with gold lettering that read: Wholesale Importers and Commission Merchants. Father’s little office was near the front door; he had a wicker armchair and sat at a table desk covered with green baize. There was a cupboard of pigeonholes at the back of the table, and beside was Father’s safe, on top of which was a letter press, an iron thing with a cross handle with two iron knobs which Father screwed down after he had laid one of his neatly written letters in it and somehow or other the letter was duplicated. The window was shuttered halfway up so you could not look out into Wharf Street, which would have
been interesting because of the great drays with fine horses passing back and forth. On the other side of Wharf Street in front of father’s store was a railing fence to help people from falling over into a great hollow place of bushes and wild land. Beyond that was the harbour and wharf. On the left of the wharf was the Customs House, square and brick. Mr. Gregory and his wife lived under the steps of the Custom House, and Mr. Gregory had a beautiful garden. Their rooms and the garden were below the street level, and the back ran down to a wall of brick, and the water slapped on the wall and I liked it. Sometimes we went to see Mrs. Gregory. Their living rooms opened on each side of a wide hallway which ran from the Gregorys’ front door under the main entrance to the Customs office to a runway right into the sea. I thought the Gregorys owned the Customs House and that they lived down there so that they could walk right into their garden and take a boat out the front hall if they wished, but later I learned they were the janitors.