40 My prairie argosy

There are gay, amusing moments I like to remember, from that first visit to Saskatchewan. A brilliant but woefully absentminded minister used to visit the house—so absent-minded it was said he had forgotten his own wedding day, which so upset the bride she put it off for ever. He used to stride up and down the little room reciting De Profundis by the chapter, and, by way of real substance, passages of Greek. Needless to say, his sermons were above the heads bowed to hear him in the district church. But what a grand man he was for words! said the good folk. Blest if you could make out a thing he said, so fine was his learning.

When he did emerge from his abstractions he was very gay, and, to me, a fountain of inspiration that fired my mind with even greater curiosity. For the first time in my life I had the privilege of sharing ideas with a man whose thought was profound, groping, painfully serious, not merely erudite.

He had the humility peculiar to great minds, which made him a comfortable mentor; made it easy to ask even foolish questions. But the fearful thing I learned from him was an irrefutable confirmation of something I had suspected, but dared not believe, by my own inference: that most people did not think, and perhaps could not think, but seized upon popularized concepts as lazy women seize upon a delicatessen shop to save themselves the planning of a meal.

Naturally, such a mind as his, plagued with scientific groping, could not stay in the Church, where no suspicion of the Christian premiss is possible. He was forced to resign, and later held a chair at Cambridge University.

Thanks to this encounter, as soon as I was back in Winnipeg I fixed upon a different type of reading. History went by the board, while I wallowed in The Soul of Man Under Socialism; Tolstoi’s The Kingdom of God is Within You, and, more important in its lasting effect, the ancient Dialogues of Plato.

In all my vexed reading nothing had so deeply moved me as the closing paragraphs of Socrates’ defence:

‘But, my friends, I think that it is a much harder thing to escape from wickedness than from death. And now I, who am old and slow, have been overtaken by the slower pursuer: and my accusers, who are clever and swift, have been overtaken by the swifter pursuer, which is wickedness. And now I shall go hence, sentenced by truth to receive the penalty of wickedness and evil. And I abide by this award as well as they.

‘You have done this thing, thinking that you will be relieved from having to give an account of your lives. But I say that it will be very different from that. For if you think that you will restrain men from reproaching you for your evil lives, by putting them to death, you are very much mistaken.

‘And now the time has come, and we must go hence; I to die, and you to live. Whether life or death is better, is known to God, and to God only.’

Reading these things over and over in the chill of my ugly little bedroom, I used to whip myself into angry despair at the stupidities of existence; at the blind, who lead the blind, and perforce, would not see. It was not until years later that I found anything written that affected me so deeply. Not until Johan Bojer sounded the same luminous courage through the character of Peer, whose life is symbolic of man’s evolving consciousness.

‘And it came to me that in himself man must create the divine in heaven and in earth. And I began to feel an unspeakable compassion for all men upon earth—yet, in the last resource, I was proud to be one of them. I understood how blind fate can strip us, and yet something will remain in us at the last that nothing in heaven or earth can vanquish.

‘Our bodies are doomed to die, and our spirit to be extinguished, yet still we hear within us the spark, the germ of eternity, of harmony, and light for the world and for God. And I knew now what I had hungered after in my best years, neither knowledge, nor honour, nor riches, nor to be a priest, or a great creator in steel; but to build temples; not chapels for prayers, or churches for penitent sinners, but a temple for the Human Spirit, where we could lift up our souls in an anthem as a gift to heaven.’

But, although the sudden passion for the ancients undoubtedly made me a trying companion for the girls in the neighbourhood, I had my humorous adventures. Shortly after my return from Sister Anna’s I saw an advertisement in the Winnipeg Free Press. The tailoring and alteration department of a certain fashionable establishment wanted experienced power operators.

Well, thought I, ‘flies’ were not quite the same as my lady’s trousseau, but they required proficiency with the machine. I applied for the job, and, on the strength of experience, got it.

I was put on stitching suits, a critical operation in a tailored garment, but a straight seam is a straight seam, whether in a tent or a riding habit. However, I had one comical argument with the tailor.

Why on earth did I reverse the time-honoured process of seaming from the right? For a moment I wondered what he meant, then I saw that every one else sent the material under the machine head, an utter impossibility in the making of tents.

‘Why not?’ said I, bold as brass. ‘The result is the same, and the material doesn’t wrinkle so badly.’

‘Oh, is that it?’ He looked at me quizzically. ‘Perhaps you’re right!’

That was the beginning of an amusing tangle. Mr. Frank (which is, of course, not his name) developed the habit of perching on the end of the machine at odd moments, ostensibly to watch the progress of some garment, though, to be sure, no one would have guessed it from the course of his remarks. He was a sophisticated, handsome man, just come from New York to stylize the department. He looked like a swashbuckler masquerading as a fashion plate. He had a curt way of speaking, suited to the swashbuckler, and a mechanical smile that served the trade.

That he chose my table for a resting-place can be readily excused. The five or six other operators were either middle-aged or hopelessly drab—like the freckled finisher, whose tow-coloured hair was a hard fist on her neck, and whose blouse and skirt were never on speaking terms.

Then, too, it chanced that it was handier to use me as a dummy for a thirty-six dress of jacket than the plaster model, and, I dare say, after a man has stuck pins down your back, across your breast and thighs, he just naturally develops a proprietary feeling. At any rate, the poor dear began to worry about me. It was a pity for a nice little thing like me to work for her living, said he. A terrible shame, really. There were much more agreeable ways of—well, being independent.

Not being an utter dunce, and wanting very much to keep the best job I had ever had, I affected a pleasant stupidity. The gentleman retaliated by putting the screws on me. Not in person—oh dear no! That would have been too crude. But the head fitter, a pompous female, who loved fault-finding, began pouncing upon everything I did; always discreetly hinting that Mr. Frank was disappointed in me. Sadly disappointed. Really, I should have to do better!

So one fine night I waited until the girls were gone, and then said my piece. I was quitting to save Mr. Frank the pain of dismissing me.

Which fetched a nice little storm, to be sure, an argument that seemed to get nowhere. I could not walk out: he refused to sanction it; without his sanction, I would not get my wages. I was a dear little fool, and should go home and use my head. Yes, that was the thing to do, go home, like a nice little girl, and get over my temper. And come back with my wits about me—what was there so glorious about sewing suits for a living?

To be quite truthful, I wondered about that in not the best of spirits as I tramped home through the snow. What was there glorious in any of the tiresome drudgery that kept one barely living? What indeed was there glorious in living such a life at all? Millions of harassed creatures like myself were scurrying to and from stupid tasks that went on and on, irrespective of who performed them; millions of meaningless lives, trapped in a meaningless round.

And then I came to Central Park, where the poplars rimmed with hoar frost stood like the shining ghost of fairyland, and the job I had tossed away, and the flattering independence I could not accept, were alike forgotten. This thing, at least, was mine: a quick responsiveness to transient grace; a singing of the heart that made the earth my own.

Cousin Gudrun was the only one to whom I confessed this silly episode, and on her suggestion I decided to work at home hereafter, and occasionally to go out on a job she recommended. There was something to be said for such an arrangement. I could work when I pleased, and had much more time to read. It brought me in touch with all sorts of queer characters; earned me many a choice morsel of gossip, for women seemed to shed their reticence with their petticoats, to bare their souls at the first touch of a tape-line.

Standing forth in all their weaknesses, perhaps they feel called upon to confess the sins of the flesh and the sorrows of disillusionment. There was a lady who, quite unprovoked, assured me she never would have taken a lover if her husband had not been such a glum brute; and a quaint old maid who for twenty years wore the same shade of blue because that was the colour Henry had loved on her when she was a girl. Henry was dead all these years.

There was a fat woman who boasted of having once been no weight at all. ‘My dear, when I was first married, my husband used to span my waist with his hands!’ But children were such a complication: with each baby she took on pounds and pounds! Married women, who started off by bemoaning the cost of serge and herring-bone, and finished up at the taxes, the expense of modern plumbing, and the destructive habits of husbands who smoked in bed. And there were young shopgirls, who sang an old familiar strain, and sometimes threw in a reckless chorus.

But it was during a week’s plain sewing in an old house on McDermot Street that I ran into fresh and irremediable disaster. If there were any possibility of forgetting that hot, sultry day, the shrilling cry of a newsboy precluded it.

‘Sinking of the Titanic! Giant Steamer Sinking!’ he shouted.

The very nice old lady for whom I was making batiste lingerie waddled away on her fat little feet to buy the paper. And, in the midst of her tearful hopes that the passengers might be rescued, the telephone rang for me.

Cousin Louise, a young clever musician, wanted me to fill in on some sort of programme that was part of the YMCA celebration to be held that night in old Elm Park. Some one had failed her, and she knew that I perpetrated reading now and then in the church hall. I hated all picnics, but after a stifling day devoted to the moist charms of a much too vital old lady, the thought of fresh air was too tempting to refuse.

How often and how fervently I have wished that I had been aboard the Titanic, and not on a street car heading for Elm Park! It was there that I met a young man who completely upset all my senses, the only man I have ever loved as every good novelist would have his heroines love, without rhyme or reason, to the exclusion of everything else under the sun. An Irishman, with all the Irish virtues and vices: irascibility, tenderness, imagination, and a love of good literature that was quite sincere. That, of course, finished the matter. But I had met many young men who were literary—very few Icelanders are not—and many who were much more intellectual; many young men, for whom I had an abiding friendship that still persists. This was something different, as I was soon to discover, to my lasting regret.

I cannot pretend that the charming creature returned this foolish affection, but he gave a fairly convincing performance to that effect. I suspect there were moments when he wanted to believe something of the sort. But he was an awful snob: he was ashamed of my nationality, ashamed of the place I called home; ashamed of my work.

Yet, with all this, and much more at fault, he kept tormenting himself with my company. He had my picture taken, to send to his parents in Belfast, along with some ridiculous essay I had written on heaven knows what.

He used to send me endearing little tokens, some bit of verse he knew I would love; a picture, or a book, and then finished up by being frightfully rude. How did we keep clean, he wondered, in a little semi-modern cottage? How on earth could I have so many superior qualities, coming from such an environment?

He was a minister’s son, of which he was secretly proud, although he had left home because he hated his father for his narrow bigotry. The pious parent had spanked the children regularly every Friday night; never in anger, but to fulfil the holy injunction of the chastening rod. Huddled in their little beds, the children would wait in terror for the slow steps of the father, coming nearer and nearer to administer the justice of God.

He hated these memories, and all they represented, yet they gave him a distinction which he felt was utterly lacking in my immigrant heritage. It used to amuse me, in spite of the hurt to my feelings, and sometimes I was tempted to confess that ministers were thick as fleas in my suspect ancestry; that, under stress, I could dig up several knightly honours, one supremely great scholar, and more poets than did any family good; that, at the moment, my cousin was Governor of Iceland, and all my kin over there battling with force and intelligence to secure the full autonomy of their country.

But no child of mamma’s would have dared say such things. He was the product of his own training, and I found no fault with that. It was a queer attachment, that struck its first serious snag when he took me to task for speaking to a friend on the street one summer day—a young woman for whom I had the sincerest respect; the sort of girl one hears eulogized in the pulpit. All her life was devoted to the care of her mother and an ailing sister. She was a not unhandsome girl, but inclined to be dowdy, although her clothes were good for she held a responsible secretarial position.

What in the world made me select such hopeless companions, my Irishman demanded, and out flew my Icelandic claws. To question my personal habits, whether hygienic or otherwise, was one thing; to deride my friends, quite another!

That was the beginning of many squabbles, many queer jealousies, and much heart-ache. I came to the conclusion that we had better take civilized leave of each other. I wanted to remember the happier side of this curious alliance. To which he agreed, and I, at least, should have been spared further disillusionment if he had kept to that.

But he came back, which, to my quaint old-world reasoning, was unquestionable proof of devotion. He came back long enough to inflict the sort of wound which lies at the back of the mind like a two-edged sword.

His way of final leave-taking was, to me, an added insult. We were to have gone to some theatre. I remember I had made myself a little cinnamon-coloured frock, edged with hand-painted borders of green and rose. There I sat, watching the clock. In the morning he sent a letter, which I did not read for some time. When mamma brought the wretched thing I quietly escaped and, for the one and only time in my life, lost consciousness from sheer emotion.

It was good to find myself in mamma’s kind arms, to lie there, saying nothing, and having nothing said. After a bit, we went into the kitchen and drank some coffee, then I finished a blouse I was making for some one. In the evening I went to the old Province Theatre, had a good cry, and came away obsessed with only one thought: no matter what my own feelings, I wanted to think well of him, to nurse no distorted ill will—for who can command the affections, or dictate the whims of the heart?

Resolutions have their merits, but what a chilly comfort in a world that has suddenly lost all meaning. Everywhere I went, everything I looked at, reminded me of what I most wished to forget. Worst of all, I dared not read, for all my treasured preferences were bound up with intimate memories.

In the end, I conceived the notion of writing to my aunt in Duluth. I knew that she had always hoped that some one of her nieces would follow in her footsteps. Perhaps I might cultivate a taste for nursing. At any rate, I should get away from Winnipeg, and possibly come to understand my relative as she deserved.