Opposite Contraries (6 page)

The woman in front and the woman behind have amalgamated and are swapping experiences — children, jam-making, travel and operations. Neither is interested in the other’s experiences but vastly so in her own. One is fatter than me and has great hands with fingers like bananas. Dead cabbages and cemeteries abound. It is not so flat. I’m sure I smell Canada. Ann Arbor —I never heard of Ann, so don’t know if she’s U.S. or Canada.

I’ve slept and cricked my neck something frightful. Dusk is falling and appetite rising. Bess and Fred and Lawren and the art show and talks almost in reach.

Gee whiz! Here’s something most important coming — brick buildings, low and long and many, and fine paved streets. Ford Motor Manufacturers! What a wonderful man Mr. Ford is, a real worth whiler on the earth. My word, Detroit is some place — workshops of different kinds for miles and miles. To think of all the multimillions of things they make and send out to the ends of the earth, makes you worse than giddy biliousness.[. . .]

Seven hours more.

Mr. Snoopia and his satellites have rifled my bags for duty and given their gracious permission to continue on my way in peace. Here’s Windsor, Ontario. Welcome, dear Canada! There’s no snow and a nice sky bright in the West and a big dog racing free with a boy. I only saw three dogs in the States — those miserable specimens straining on a leash in city parks.

Is it immigration or is there a subtle difference since we crossed the borderline? We are only just across. The air is lighter and clearer — the women and men who got on at Windsor are not so smart in clothes and carriage. Hello, there’s a picket fence; I did not see any in the U.S. (all wire or mostly nothing) and lots of trees, little planted ones and woods too and long rows of poplars. I thought the East was different to the West — now it seems the East and the West are the same and the other side of the line, the States, is different.[. . .]

London, Ontario. Had a mouthful of cool, clean Canadian air. I think of those lung charts at the Fair and feel mine are much prettier for it. Have been to the diner. Now we are slithering through black night and there is nothing further to be done than wait with occasional feeds of Whitman.[. . .]

[In Toronto]

[
…
] Bess gave a lovely party, mostly artists but all were doers of things and thinkers. The room was not only full of them but what they did was there too. I knew a lot of them before and those I didn’t I do now. They were all so awfully nice to me. I loved every one. It’s a rare thing to be in a company of doers instead of blown-out air cushions. At home I want to sneak off and yawn.
At this party I felt alive. Just one thing hurt — those spaces on the wall where my pictures hung
in the Group show. Such a feeling of dead failure! I felt that people were sorry for me because of my failure and I said to myself, “Old fool, drink this medicine. It is part of the game, bitter and necessary.” So I gulped it, grinning. I have accepted it. Somewhere, somehow, I shall find what I’m after. It may not be yet or even here; it may only be by crushing humiliation, but what I want is there and if I stick and am sincere it will come and can’t be prevented. Maybe I hoped there’d be a clue hidden among all those Chicago new and old ones. No one can help me much, not even Lawren. No one can grow for another, not one; no one can acquire for another, not one — the struggle is in one’s own soul.

[On the train from Toronto to Vancouver, via the United States]
[
…
]
How bored the people in the train are! Not one of them looks out. They shut themselves into their little compartments and try to take a tuck in time to get this passing from the East to the West over, to eat it past and sleep it past, remembering only the beginning and the end and not experiencing the glorious now of the middle.

Last Sunday evening Lawren Harris lectured in the Theosophy Hall on war. It was a splendid lecture but terrible, one of those dreadful things that we want to shirk, not face. He spoke fearlessly about the churches and their smugness, of mothers offering their sons as sacrifices, and the hideous propaganda of politics and commerce exploiting war with greed and money for their gods while we stupidly, indolently, sit blindfolded, swallowing the dope ladled out to us instead of thinking for ourselves. His lecture was mainly based on two recent books,
No Time Like the Present
by Storm Jameson and another I forget
the title of. The preparations for war are fearful beyond belief. It took some courage to get up and tell people all that awfulness.

The weak sunshine is throwing long, long shadows.
The Opposites have drawn their blinds and are spread out on their possessions, tossed like empty cans on garbage, filling their vacuum with sleep. Ah! One of their “goody” boxes has fallen and he has put his foot in it. This will be serious when she wakes, for I have observed she dominates.

I wish I was like a doll that can sit either way. I used to love to make mine sit with their back hair facing their laps and their hind-beforeness ridiculous. I loved to make my dolls look fools to get even with them for their coldness, particularly the wax or china ones. I loved the wood and rag much best. The wooden ones rolled their joints with such a glorious, live creak and the rag ones were warm and cuddly. But none of them could come up to a live kitten or puppy.

She’s found out about their goody box. He has excused himself and gone quickly out.

Valley City! How can it be that? It takes hills to make a valley. Oh, I see it is unflat before and behind, though not so much but that the tombstones can peep over. Poor deads, I wonder if that is the highest they ever get. One last burst of sunshine is over the fields, gilding them. Our smoke is rolling behind in golden billows. There’s a golden farm and a windmill and a golden cow and horse, but the richest of all in goldness and shameless shamming are the stacks of straw and chaff. The turkeys have gone to bed atop the barn roof, up above the icicles. How uncosy. It’s getting so near Christmas that perhaps they’ve lost heart and think any old roost will do, poor dears! I’d rather barn roof and icicles than roasting pan and gravy, myself. Life is full of opposite contraries.

Mrs. Opposite’s typewriter clacks furiously as if she must kill time at all costs. Maybe, like me, she’s writing thoughts. Certain sure she doesn’t catch them fresh out the window. But she may be full to the hat of canned ones, perfect fruit, well sterilized, pasteurized, hermetically sealed, labelled, sorted, carefully washed so that no bit has oozed out; while mine, being crude, unwashed and unsterilized, may mould and ferment, so that when I see them again they will have soured and I shall throw them out disgustedly like my pictures. Who judges? First thoughts are crude and immature, last ones sterile, dead. It is the sane, rational, middle thought that sits steady and keeps.

Now it’s night and our guardian angel, “black as the night,” is putting us to bed. He’s at it when you return from dinner and the scrap of space which is yours by right of purchase is made yours by right of privacy. The uninspiring bald of the front man’s head is shut out and the glassy stare of the behind woman’s eye is shut out, and the “opposites” are shut up in their space which must be very small for him and her and their boxes and bags and typewriter. The steel bangles she wears rattle, and I hear, “Can’t you get out of the way?” Poor soul, he couldn’t, except by evaporation. We are not mingling or a friendly cargo. There is no communication between sections. Each has shut themselves tight into themselves. When night comes the car is ossified into solidity, the accumulation of pent-up thoughts and air and energy, the heating friction of tight packed, the lack of air and the abundance of heat, the glare of the lights, the smells of humanity and the thoughts pushing through the density ahead and the disturbance; the wheels and the swaying wiggle and the smoke of our engine outside make a great, solid unrest. The
stops are too short to [do] more than fill one nostril and rest one foot on good Mother Earth before “all aboard” goes. There is one friendly, cheery soul aboard, the nigger waiter. He is so pleased when you tip him that you want to tip him again for being pleased and he hopes to see you again at dinner as if he really did. The porter is “lined with the same” and exhibits no tinge of a lighter hue, and here he is to make me up.

Mandan, North Dakota, and a breath of air. I went to buy a paper and handed the boy 25 cents I had got at dinner. “What kind is it?” he said and threw a shrewd eye over my coin and handed it back to me with, “Canadian — don’t work any more,” so I am newsless.

8 A.M. Montana, and the grandest kind of morning. The night was also grand. I was awake a lot. I think every star in the universe was out and was newly polished. The sky was high and blue and cold and unreachable. I’m glad I know now that that is not where we have to climb to find Heaven.

I like Montana, the going and coming of it and its up-and-downness. Lovely feelings sweep up and down the rolling hills getting tenser as they rise and terminate in definite rather defiant ridges against the sky. The sky itself does wonderful things, pretending to be the sea or to be under the earth, and to be unreachably high. It loves to wear blue and do itself up in little white pinafores and flowing scarves of many colours, and to tickle the tops of the mountains so that they forget about being rigid and defiant and seem to slide down the far side as meek as Moses. There’s lots of cattle, heavy, slow-moving, bestial, black or red, with white faces and shaggy coats. The foolish square calves pretend to be frightened of our train.
Bluffers! Haven’t they seen it every day since they were born? It’s just an excuse to shake the joy out of their heels.

Livingston, and my feet have touched Montana. I’ve smelt and tasted it, keen, invigorating. Things here are much propped up and reinforced. There are myriads of clothes-pins all on the lines. I suspect the nippy wind of this morning is not unusual. We have gone through the Bad Lands in the dark again.
It’s not quite honest to put their fascinating queernesses on the railway folders and always slither through in the dark.

Mrs. Opposite has four great coats and a sweater in her own right and then there are all his. They have evidently “squared” the porter — he lets them keep their things billowing over into the aisle. At night they have the inside of their compartment draped in sheets and get extra blankets provided. Mercy! I’m roasted with one in the bunk, no extra blankets and the window open. She wears steel bangles that clank. I think she’s all steel — like Rosie in “Tillie the Toiler.” There seems to be a sisterliness between her and the typewriter. It sure doesn’t get up to rebellious ruction like mine. She has just dropped her knitting needle — it too is steel.

Logan, Montana. I should not like to live here. The hills are clay-coloured rock with scrubby, undernourished trees. Lightning balls are on any houses of size.

One thing in the car is too friendly and interchangeable — the coughs and sneezes. They call to each other out of the compartments in a “hail fellow well met” way I do not like. There was a tiresome one kept up most of the night. I nearly took it some of my grapes for quincture but just as I was getting out of my bunk I wasn’t sure whether it was masculine or feminine, so I ate the grapes.

The mountains are higher now, barren and a little cruel. I feel in my bones there will be beastly black tunnels soon. Nearly every house has a dog — no kind, just a leg at each corner,
a head and tail back and front, but I bet inside they all have standard hearts.
It’s Sunday and children and elders are doing things, playing, riding, driving, looking over cattle. There are a few out in automobiles, and one complete family is setting out for church with their books under their arms, and conscious of their best. There are magpies and pheasants and rabbits, occasionally flocks of turkeys and beehives. Tomorrow we will reach the far West. Gee, my back aches!

I was in the diner when we came to those great plains before you get to Butte. We had been climbing for some time and were high up on queer mountains of odd-shaped boulders thrown together in masses. The train wound in and out among them groaning horribly as it took the curves. Down below was a vast, tawny plain with long winding roads and a few horses and cattle. Your eye went on and on and slowly climbed the low distant brown hills. I never saw anything like it before. It was not a space of peace but rather of awe. It seemed a great way before we saw queer built-up places and great mounds of slag, and scarred mountains with their bowels torn out and reservoirs and towns, and queer mining erections and cars of ore, all the ruin and wrack of man’s greed for the wealth of the earth. We circled the great plain and went on through sagebrush. There would be a wonderful wealth of material for a certain type of painter here. Stunted little black trees and black cattle are scattered among the hills, and you can’t tell which is one and which the other.

It has happened in the last half hour while I was asleep. I do not know it by the map but in my own self that the East is past and the West has come. As we came down from the hills the trees thickened.
Now it looks not unlike what we went through but it is different
and the last station was different and western. Mr. Opposite is having a turn at the typewriter. The sound is quite different under his pudgy fingers. She is arranging her suitcases. I miss the eastern sky — this one is low set and heavy.
Heavy fog has shut down and all we can see is the dim ground and tree roots — everything else is washed out.

I have been reading “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman. I am very tired. I think we of the West are heavier and duller than the Easterners. The air is denser and moister, the growth more dense and lush, the skies heavy and lowering. (My hair is all curly on the edges with damp.) Might not all this affect us too?