42 I settle in my own country
Histories no end. But I had not my aunt’s passion for delivering babies. A messy business at best, for which I had no taste or talent. I decided on a much more ordinary career. I had met a breezy young man from Montana who thought he could put up with me for better and for worse, despite my confession about the faithless son of Erin. What’s an Irishman, more or less, to a Norseman!
In June 1913 I married George Salverson in the old Lutheran manse in Winnipeg. A good way to end all my foolish fancies, and assume a time-honoured business of commonplace existence.
What a time we had, to be sure! George was twenty-seven years old, but, even so, it was something of a battle for him to free himself from home ties. Ever since he was a boy of twelve he had been the main support of his family. He had bought his mother a comfortable house; his sisters were married; his youngest brother was quite able to take care of their mother; yet it shocked them terribly that George should contemplate such a step.
His father, who, since quitting the sea, had served no worthy purpose, was suffering with cancer. All the money George had in the world he paid out for an operation. He arranged that the house should be sold whenever his brother deemed it advisable, and the proceeds divided between him and his mother. What we proposed to begin the matrimonial venture on was five hundred dollars that he had loaned to an old man who had taught him telegraphy. Needless to say, the loan was never paid.
We set up house in prophetic fashion, with a few sticks of furniture bought on the instalment plan, on a salary of eighty dollars, less than half of what he had been getting in the United States, where the cost of living was a great deal lower than in Canada. But I had the fixed notion that here I must live. I supposed I wanted to feel rooted somewhere, to feel that, other things failing, I had at least some sort of spiritual home.
There is nothing remarkable to remember of those first few years. I balanced the budget by renting rooms and keeping the odd boarder, usually some young man from the telegraph offices. The War put an end to the Winnipeg job, just as we had found a suitable little house, and thought we should have a breathing-space from the bills and the demands upon George from his home. In the nick of time he found a position as manager of the Grand Trunk Telegraph offices in Regina.
That winter I dawdled away in a suite, with nothing to do except cook for ourselves and a young telegrapher who worked with my husband. For amusement I undertook to sew some clothes for a couple of Russian families that the Metropolitan Church discovered in need. I had no friends, except a middle-aged lady, Mrs. Tanner, who is still dear to me as a living example of true Christian conduct.
There is nothing to say of my baby, except that the prospect bored me, and to give it an enterprising turn, I decided to travel fifteen hundred miles two weeks before he was born, to test the twilight sleep, administered by a doctor who had been studying the novelty in Germany when the War broke out. In spite of all that was said against the method in those years, it was entirely successful, and my baby suffered no ill effects whatsoever.
We moved to Saskatoon, and I settled down to honourable housekeeping; pickling, cold-packing vegetables and fruit, and conducting myself with ancient propriety, getting duller by the moment, and thoroughly fed up with the good life.
As luck would have it, we were surrounded by people who, with the exception of my next-door neighbour, were alarmingly devoted to all sorts of extreme religions. They did their best to convert us, and, out of sheer boredom, I did my best to see the light.
Speaking seriously, however, I had more decent reason than mere curiosity in these various beliefs. My people, of the older generation, at least, have always been concerned with spiritual values; in the conquest of essential truths that bear upon the inner life of man. That so many extreme religions sprang to the fore at this time was undoubtedly due to the same hunger in so many human beings to whom the horrors of the War were ever-present.
I was a pacifist then, as I still am, not because I cannot perceive that, in an age of semi-barbarism, war as an instrument of policy commends itself to many earnest people; or that I believe war in itself is the greatest of human evils; but because I had come to see that organized warfare, like every other organized human institution, camouflaged ulterior motives, and was employed, not to maintain liberty for the common man, but to advance the trade monopolies of private interests.
I had come to suspect, albeit vaguely, that industry, under the present system, is an even more merciless warfare than its violent progeny that marches under resplendent banners; that the millions of workers toiling in factories and mines are nothing but conscripts in a service dedicated to wealth and privilege, and not those rights and liberties that sound so bravely on the lips of sentimentalists. Conscripts, whose slow and lingering death in the economic skirmishes brings them not a cenotaph, but the dole, degrading poverty, misery, and crime. Death for one’s country—if one had any share in that country or that country’s wealth—was not what repelled me.
My practical Scandinavian nature stood aghast that some less costly solution should not be found by so-called enlightened nations, for purely economic, commercial problems, and all my instincts were revolted that the dearest ideals of the human heart should be preyed upon by propagandists, to feed the sinews of war.
My husband did not altogether share in these beliefs, but, as an American, he was more or less satisfied with a neutral attitude, until the United States joined in the conflict. Many dear friends, and not a few relatives, were at the front. My cousin served as a surgeon, my brother-in-law left with the first contingent; the two young men who had lived with us a year in Regina died on the Western Front; another, equally dear friend, died from maltreatment in a military prison, because of his religious convictions. These things preyed upon my mind. What solution had the devout to offer?
Nothing practical, I must confess. Yet there was one sect that interested me somewhat, because of its stress upon mercy and divine compassion—until I discovered that these blessings were reserved for a little flock; until I discovered that all this piety was just another garden plot of fancy, prepared as an escape from the difficulties of human relationships and social obligation.
To me, it is inconceivable, and profane, that any concept of the Divine should impose a belief in any specific preference for select cults and rituals, or that Christianity is the one and only approach to spiritual discernment. An opinion not particularly welcome to those good people bent upon my salvation.
There was a very pious group, for instance, which referred to the rest of mankind as Children of the Devil. How poisonous we really were I discovered one fine day when I bought six hens from such a believer. I had no place for the chickens at the moment, and asked that they might remain where they were over the week-end. Saturday night, a timid knock called me to the door. There, bashful and barefoot, stood a small saint:
‘Please, missus,’ said the child, ‘could you take the chickens now? Mamma says we can’t keep things that belong to the Children of the Devil.’
There was another brave fiction that rested its case for salvation on Faith in the Blood; works were vanity, and no justification of man’s essentially evil nature. It set me to thinking, at any rate. As I had formerly mapped out a programme of reading, I now decided to dip into theology. I waded through Thomas Aquinas, and other early fathers, who had sought to codify the Christian doctrines into a logical system, based on premises accepted for so many centuries. I took a look at Wycliffe, and Huss, and Luther, and read some of the unpleasant sermons of Cotton Mather. In the end, I bought myself an anthology of nonclassical religions, and finished the season with the primitives.
Surfeited with all these human theories that had cost so much pain and bloodshed, I fled back to the old favourites, which I had resolutely shelved since that unhappy interlude of disquiet romance. I remember well the autumn day when I dug up my copy of Ruskin’s Art and Architecture, for I propped it up against a row of sealers while I stoned peaches for jam.
To the same accompaniment I re-read Hardy, Eliot, and Victor Hugo, who has always held first place in my affections. The result was an inner discontent that drove me nearly silly. I used to lie awake at night, with endless dialogues running through my head. I used to drive poor George to distraction with my diatribes on human justice, the evils that negative goodness fosters unknowingly, and the cruel subjection of women.
‘Well, great scott, what’s wrong with you?’ the poor dear would exclaim. ‘Who is subduing you, I’d like to know?’
‘But it isn’t me!’ I would declaim. ‘It’s all women. They are the slaves, every one of them, slaves of convention, of religion, of the house—slaves in their mentality. Even the modern woman, who thinks herself free, has only exchanged the bondage to one man, to make herself the slave of many. Even in art, women reflect men, ape men, say what the smart man expects the smart woman to say.’
‘Oh, good Lord, have it your way,’ George would wash his hands of me.
‘It isn’t my way,’ I would retort, feeling frightfully maligned. ‘That’s what’s the matter with me. I can’t see the sense of going on and on for ever, reflecting images and ideas like a dead mirror. I can’t see the sense of doing everything in exactly the say it always has been done, thinking as you’re told to think, believing as you are told to believe—and the highest blessing, to cook in somebody’s kitchen!’
Poor George! That finished every argument. I was a good cook, and if he said so, I accused him of prizing me for that alone, and if he didn’t say so, I felt abused. As a matter of fact, I had too much nervous energy to be satisfied with just running a house and minding a baby.
When the child was two years old I started a dress-making shop in a seven-room cottage on the edge of town, where he could be safe in the open, and I free to work off some of this spleen. I had done a lot of sewing for various neighbours, and, by way of recompense, these friends brought me trade.
In a few weeks I was so busy that I hired an English-woman to assist me. I managed the house, did all the cooking, kept a boarder, fed my son by the clock, and very shortly was earning enough money to pay my assistant more than I had ever been paid for similar services; and had something more than pocket money for myself.
However, I began to suffer continuous, excruciating headaches, for I had not only to work through the day, but to do most of the fitting and cutting by night. Strange as it may seem, I had never suspected something might be wrong with my eyesight until now, when working with endless black materials, I found it increasingly difficult to stitch a fine seam and to thread the needle.
The specialist to whom I finally went was not very complimentary. Any one but a fool would have consulted a doctor long ago, etc., etc. The adjustment reduced me to bed for a couple of days, but I shall never forget my astonishment thereafter, when a whole week went by without any return of the familiar torment. The migrains remained like a faithful lover, but what was an occasional bout, compared with the daily misery formerly acceptable as an inescapable attribute of existence!
The little shop flourished, and I had the pleasure of buying some furniture, a lovely, brown Wilton rug, and clothes for us all. I even had the strange experience of buying a Liberty bond, and saving fifty dollars for a rainy day. And then George, who had never been free of an office in his life, caught the sort of fever every living creature suffers at least once in a lifetime. He wanted to go on the land, to revel in the marvels of the wide open spaces.
What really ailed him was overwork and nervous exhaustion. The office was short-handed, and subject to the tantrums of the sort of official who suffers from a superiority complex—a common ailment in men risen to petty power through political influence, irrespective of any exceptional ability.
George had been working hard and conscientiously, all his spare time that winter devoted to a course in business management and kindred subjects; but, as a long life of service was to demonstrate beyond cavil, such efforts, unless dovetailed with obnoxious subservience and political hobnobbing, are of little benefit.
