Chapter 32.
It was as I have said a fine, sunny morning when I said goodbye to my cousins and set off on my long journey home. The first of February fell on a Monday that year, which just suited, as the mail cart or sleigh left on Monday and was in the habit of taken a passenger or two. My companion was Peter Leonard, the “ne’er-do-well” brother of our friend of that name. He was very cheerful and the bright morning and good sleighing were conducive to good spirits. We stopped for lunch at Binscarth, the experimental farm, and then went on again. We only had one night on the road and reached Moosomin the following afternoon. I still had a vivid remembrance of the rough prairie dotted with tents and the unpainted shack which served as a station, so I was indeed astonished at the change wrought in less than two years. A good station to begin with, three well-built modern hotels, good shops, graded streets, sidewalks; everything a small Canadian town could boast of. We spent the night in one of the hotels and set off again by train on the Wednesday morning. It was a long weary journey to Winnipeg and we did not get there until after dark. Peter got us a good dinner in the station and then put me on the train for St. Paul. He was remaining in Winnipeg.
I have a very vivid remembrance of that evening. I was tired and lonely, and I felt as if my four years of hardship and roughing it had been for nothing. I had come up to help Graham to make a home and here he was as far from it as the day I first arrived. I grieved to leave him, but there seemed no chance of his having a house to put me in. My spirits sank very low. I was going back to take up life again where I had left it off four years before, but I felt the spring had gone out of me. How little we ever know of what is before us!
My journey was uneventful until I reached Chicago on Friday night. I was the only one in the pullman and the porter had disappeared. I picked up my rug and little bag and was getting out, when a man, either drunk or crazy, came into the car and insisted on taking my luggage from me. I went to the omnibus which crossed the city and he followed. It was soon filled with men but no one came to my aid until the conductor appeared and ordered the man out of the bus. On reaching the large, handsome station, I looked about for a telegraph office, but seeing none, I asked one of the officials where it was. I am sure he must have thought I came direct from the North Pole. I had on my buffalo calf coat, a fur cap and moccasins— a great contrast to the well-dressed people around me. Perhaps this idea made him more civil, for when he told me it was some little distance from the station and I said I could not go alone at that hour, he sent a young man with me to show me the way. Having sent my mother a telegram that I would be home on Saturday, I felt relieved and my next step was to get something to eat. I had lived almost entirely on biscuits all the way from Winnipeg, and I never shall forget the steaming cup of coffee and the delicious rolls I so eagerly devoured in that Chicago station. Then I got on my train and was off to Toronto. I arrived at 3 a.m. on Saturday, but in spite of my telegram no one was there to meet me; they imagined I would not be in until the evening. So I walked quietly up and greatly surprised the house folk by my appearance.
It was rather hard work settling in. I found the dull, sunless days very trying after the almost constant sunshine of Manitoba. I had no definite occupation, but seemed to be at everyone’s beck and call. It was eight years since I had first left home and it was hard to go back to the attitude of a seventeen-year-old. My mother seemed to forget that I was now a fully matured woman and not a child. There were changes in the meeting too, which distressed my conservative mind; a new edition of the hymn book, a new meeting room and a number of new people. I was surprised to see all the new young men who had come since I left, and I felt I could never remember all the new names. One of those I was introduced to that first Sunday was Mr. Willis, and on our return home mother told me he was a young man from New Brunswick and that he was coming to board with us on the following Thursday. I have always felt it was wonderful that I should have been brought from Manitoba and he from St. John without any prearranged plan, but surely the Lord’s hand was over it.
My mother had now got a pretty good servant, though one who required much teaching, but she was still quite poorly after her hard winter and Dora was afraid to go out in the evening while she was so subject to cold. Now I was very keen to go to meetings, from which I had been cut off for long, and there were a number to go to, as we had three meetings in Toronto at that time, one in Cumberland Street, one in Gerrard Street and one in Lisgar Street. There was a reading meeting nearly every night in one or another and a prayer meeting in all on Friday, so it came about very naturally that the new young man whose strong point was meetings should escort me to the meeting and bring me home again, and we got very friendly on these evening walks and eating a little supper on our return. Indeed one evening we lost our way in the park and found ourselves walking round and round it. Ah me, that was forty years ago and we are old and sober now, though still walking to meetings together. I got home on February 6th and on April 7th we were engaged, so we did not lose much time. And once more life seemed worth living. I remember reading over that little hymn “Not knowing” and feeling how it had come to pass in my life:
“It maybe He has waiting, for the crossing of my feet,
Some gift of such rare excellence, something so strangely sweet,
That my lips can only tremble with the thanks I cannot speak.”
I suppose in these days our courtship would have been thought a very sombre one. There were no presents of flowers or boxes of chocolates; they were not looked for then. I can count the presents my Jack gave me: a Latin New Testament, two or three books and a large white geranium.
I do not remember anything else except a chair at Christmas time. We went to meetings together and sometimes took tea with Mrs. Brendon, who was then living in Toronto, and went to the prayer meeting afterwards. Once in a great while he took me Tor a row on the bay, which was the great dissipation in the days before canoes and motor boats had become the thing.
Meanwhile my days were not idle. I found living with no definite employment unendurable and tried to get a few children to teach. Mrs. John Cartwright sent me her three little boys, Stephen, Ralph and Aubrey. Mrs. John Cayley sent Madeline (Maud was at school in England). This kept me quite busy in addition to what I did in the house, but I had a good deal of energy, if not much wisdom, and I made up my mind to go and visit all the beggars who came to the door, and being a hard winter a good many came. I had of course various experiences, some quite interesting, but I will only tell of one. It was a cold afternoon when the doorbell rang, and on answering it I found a very tidy looking elderly woman selling oranges. If I had not been young and innocent I should have mistrusted her effusiveness, but I thought her a jewel and asked where she lived. “Along Queen Street,” she said and gave me the number.
A day or two afterwards I went to find her. Such a dilapidated looking house, quite free from paint or other adornment, and looking as if it might fall at any moment. I knocked and the door was opened by a quite respectable looking woman. I asked for Mrs. Graham. There was some tittering and then they showed her to me lying dead drunk on a sort of lounge. I found it was a beggars’ lodging house I had got into. There must have been five or six women in different stages of raggedness and decay. I was a little frightened but began to talk to them and soon found one of them had been cook to my grandmother. I asked if I might read to them and they seemed glad to listen. I often went after that and always found some who were glad to listen. The landlady was always sober, but many of the lodgers were not. At last it became so rough and men began to frequent it that I did not go any more. The woman who had been my grandmother’s cook professed great amendment and went to my grandmother and convinced her of her respectable life. My grandmother looked about and found a room near to her own house with an English family. She furnished this room, making curtains and a table cover of patchwork, and preparing great comfort for her old servant. A few weeks later she found her drinking as hard as ever and her host and hostess joining in, and she soon returned to her old life and haunts. I am afraid my efforts to do good in this direction were not of much avail.
I was very glad to see and be with my old friends once more. Sophie was at home and we were constantly together. Then I had an occasional visit with dear Alice Miller and often went to Lady Robinson’s. Mim had returned to Toronto and just about this time they were all rejoicing over the first grandchild. Lily Reid was married to Ed Checkley and they were living in Preston, where I spent a week with them during the spring and while there visited my old friend Sally Bennett, now Mrs. Alfred Tremaine. I must not forget Birdie Ord. They were now living in a pretty house in Rosedale, which had just waked up to its possibilities as a residential section. College Street was being built up and a part of Pinehurst, the Clark Gamble’s place, had been sold and McCaul Street now ran through what had been their property. But High Park was still far outside the city and a long walk from the cars. Scarborough Heights was a favorite resort and steamers ran out there several times a day, also in the other direction to what was known as Lorne Park. The Island too had begun to build up and the end known as Hanlin’s was becoming a center of attraction.
When the spring came, our tiresome boarders left, much to our relief. We now had only my Jack with us, but in the early summer we had a letter from some friend in England asking if we could make a home for a young man, Martin Luther Rouse, who wished to try his hand at teaching. I would I had an able pen and could describe this young man. He was not very tall and inclined to be stout. He was the soul of good nature, but what one might call a “freak”. He was a full-fledged lawyer, but when he had taken all his examinations he felt the bar was against his conscience and took up farming. Finding he was not adapted for this he was sent out to Canada, his friends hoping he would accomplish something here. The key to his peculiarities I think lay in an undue anxiety over details. For instance, he brought a small creeper from the woods and spent the whole morning planting and replanting it. Of course the plant died. He was occupied over an essay on “Vowel sounds” as found in the scale of music, when he first came. The essay was finished at the last moment and Dora and Jack were both pressed into his service to copy it out, sitting up half the night. But he was kindly and good humored and always ready to help me by teaching the little boys if I wanted a day off, and he was the moving spirit in any children’s teas or picnics, which I often had for the various little cousins.
When the summer holidays came I went to a large conference at Napanee with Sophie. We went a week beforehand and stayed with her old friend Mrs. Alice Smith. Her husband was manager of a bank in that town and they had a pretty house, a pony carriage and other delights belonging to country life. We enjoyed helping to prepare and generally helping to run the conference, in a material way. Lord Cecil and Mr. Pennington and Dr. Lawrence were the spiritual advisers. I spent a couple of weeks in Bowmanville on my return with the Reids—or perhaps it was before the conference, as my principal remembrance is picking raspberries.
In September Mrs. James Cartwright lent us her house in Muskoka and Sophie, mother, Jack and I and a Mrs. Boyd, a friend of Sophie’s, arranged to go up, but Mr. Cayley was taken ill at the last minute and Mrs. Boyd found it rather dull alone with us and went off to other friends. Two things are vividly impressed on my mind: one a long row, one of those summer nights, for it was a warm and beautiful month, and Jack and I watched the stars reflected in the water, everything dark and sombre beside us, and we talked as I suppose lovers have talked from the time of the beginning. Another remembrance is of a bathe we took, when we found a log and Jack sailed me on it until the spirit of mischief overcoming him he suddenly turned the log and dropped me into the water. Of course he had me out in a moment but I was pretty frightened.