(a girl) and her dog to shore in his canoe. (Local missionaries usually insisted Emily take their daughters along to avoid the “scandal” of being an unescorted woman.) When William went back for the others, Emily and the girl were alone. “It was so still and solemn on the beach, it would have seemed irreverent to speak aloud,” she said later. There is a particular, overpowering silence in these islands, as if everything “were waiting and holding its breath.” Even her dog felt the power of the place for “he stood with cocked ears, trembling.”
At one side of the beach was a bluff the Russes said was haunted. Facing the water were the remains of the great houses where several families once lived, and several totem poles, one of which had belonged to Claras grandmother. Emily knew that, because she was non-native, what she saw in these villages “must have been quite different” from what native people saw.
The Russes helped her by telling her about their stories as they sat around the fire: how the hat on the figure at the base of this pole, for example, was a hat of honour. Clara told how the man wearing the hat once adopted a raven for his son. But the raven was a trickster who caused a flood to be brought down on his foster parents, and the family was only saved by climbing up on the rings of the hat of honour.
When it was time for bed, Emily was alarmed to see the Russes carry their canoe toward the water.
“What are you going out to the boat for?”
“We are going to sleep out there.”
“You are going to leave us alone in Tanu?”
“You can call if anything is wrong,” they told her.
But Emily knew the boat was too far out for them to hear her if she called. She watched the canoe slip into the blackness, and all that night, with the story of the trickster ringing in her ears, she slept with the tent flaps open. She felt safer when the trees were close.
The next morning she got to work early. When it was time for breakfast, there was still no sign of life on the big boat. It got late. Suddenly Emily remembered something she’d heard in the last village.
“Do you remember what they said about those Indians being asphyxiated by the fumes from their engine while they slept?” she asked the girl.
“I was thinking of that too,” the child replied, and suddenly they both yelled louder and ran as far out onto the point as they could to get closer to the bobbing, empty-looking boat. “There was a horrible feeling down inside us,” Emily said, “that neither of us cared to speak about.” Finally a head peered up over the side, and the woman and girl on shore were greatly relieved.
On this ambitious trip, Emily found native people who welcomed and helped her, like the Russes, and others who ordered her to leave their village. She encouraged the people who wanted to watch her draw, often giving them a sketch, and when she left an inhabited village, she gave a small exhibition of what she had done there.
She found some villages abandoned, like Tanu, and others with brass bands and street lamps. She camped on beaches and slept in missionary beds, broke through thick salal and nettles, fended off hordes of slugs and mosquitoes, and everywhere, she sketched the poles.
It is unlikely any European woman before Emily Carr had accomplished such a trip alone. (European women in the northwest were mostly wives of missionaries and pioneers.) In overcoming the hardships, dangers, and fears of the journey and returning triumphantly with a large number of sketches and drawings, she must have had some sense of a quest complete.
Emily’s hope now was that the provincial government would buy her entire collection of over two hundred northern paintings to hang in the parliament buildings in Victoria. To this end, the minister of education contacted Dr. C.F. Newcombe, an ethnologist for the provincial government. Would he please visit Miss Emily Carr to assess her work for its anthropological value?
Dr. Newcombe liked Emily and bought three of her paintings for himself, but after his visit to her Vancouver studio he reported to the minister that although her sketches were accurate, he found the colours too bright. Also, in her efforts to get the entire pole into her pictures, she sometimes distorted perspective. He suggested that Miss Carr be hired to paint decorative scenes on the walls of public buildings. The government, now restrained by a growing economic depression, refused to buy her work.
This rejection must have hurt Emily. If she could not make a living selling her art, she would have to find another way. She returned to Victoria, where, with the money her father left her, she built a small boarding house at 646 Simcoe Street in what had once been the cow yard of her family property. At the age of forty-two, she became a landlady.
The house was called Hill House, but when Emily wrote about it years later, she called it The House of All Sorts because of the many different kinds of people who passed through. It had two suites on the bottom floor and a larger one, including a splendid painting studio for herself, on the top floor.
It was a good idea – keeping a boarding house was considered an appropriate job for a woman – but it was bad timing. In 1913 there was a worldwide depression that would soon culminate in World War I. There were fewer and fewer people who wanted to rent houses and many families trying to survive on a soldier’s low wages.
Emily’s original plan had been to have a handyman or maid to help her with the work so she could paint part-time. But as World War I closed in and rents fell, she could barely afford to pay the mortgage let alone hire help, and she was forced to do most of the work herself. For extra income she also had to turn part of her own flat into a tiny additional apartment she called The Doll’s House.
Emily loathed landladying. The work was endless. In winter she woke up before dawn and eased her way down the wet or snowy outside steps to light the coal furnace in the basement. In summer she cut the grass, kept large fruit, vegetable, and flower gardens, and always, she cooked, cleaned, repaired, and painted apartments as tenants came and went.
It wasn’t the work that bothered her. She was rather proud of the fact that she kept such a neat establishment. But The House of All Sorts, the book she later wrote about the experience, is full of anger. Dealing with her tenants was a torment because it constantly drew her away from her own work. She felt not just tied, not just nailed, but screwed down, twist by twist, to the house and its unending stream of crabby, demanding, noisy, endlessly demanding tenants. They seemed to say to her, “Forget you ever wanted to be an artist. Nobody wanted your art. Buckle down to being a landlady.”
Her first tenants were newlyweds fresh from their honeymoon. The bride slip-slopped all day around the apartment in her slippers and negligee. When she occasionally did a washing, she embarrassed Emily by leaving it, shamefully grey, hanging for days on the clothesline until Emily furiously pulled it down herself. The couple left abruptly when their brand-new furniture was reclaimed because they hadn’t kept up the payments. Their parting gift was a pot of soup thrown down the kitchen sink that required that Emily become a plumber because she couldn’t afford to hire one.
When Emily consulted a more experienced landlady about the whole affair, the woman explained, “In time you will learn to make yourself hard, hard!”
Emily
