There was a long, bleak period, when we knew acutely the meaning of what
papa wearily termed “Hard Times.” Even in “Good Times” there are few
people who buy paintings, and no one wants them in Hard Times.
Then descended upon Montreal a veritable plague. A terrible epidemic of
smallpox broke out in the city. The French and not the English Canadians
were the ones chiefly afflicted, and my father set this down to the fact
that the French Canadians resisted vaccination. In fact, there were
anti-vaccination riots all over the French quarter, where we lived.
And now my father, in this desperate crisis, proved the truth of the old
adage that “Blood will tell.” Ours was the only house on our block, or
for that matter the surrounding blocks, where the hideous, yellow sign,
“PICOTTE” (smallpox), was not conspicuously nailed upon the front door,
and this despite the fact that we were a large family of children. Papa
hung sheets all over the house, completely saturated with
disinfectants. Every one of us children was vaccinated, and we were not
allowed to leave the premises. Papa himself went upon all the messages,
even doing the marketing.
He was not “absent-minded” in those days, nor in the grueling days of
dire poverty that followed the plague. Child as I was, I vividly recall
the terrors of that period, going to bed hungry, my mother crying in the
night and my father walking up and down, up and down. Sometimes it
seemed to me as if papa walked up and down all night long.
My brother Charles, who had been for some time our main support, had
married (the girl we did not like) and although he had fervently
promised to continue to contribute to the family’s support, his wife
took precious care that the contribution should be of the smallest, and
she kept my brother, as much as she could, from coming to see us.
A day came when, with my mother and it seemed all of my brothers and
sisters, I stood on a wharf waving to papa on a great ship. There he
stood, by the railing, looking so young and good. Papa was going to
England to try to induce grandpa--that grandfather we had never seen--to
help us. We clung about mama’s skirts, poor little mama, who was half
distraught and we all kept waving to papa, with our hats and hands and
handkerchiefs and calling out:
“Good-bye, papa! Come back! Come back soon!” until the boat was only a
dim, shadowy outline.
The dreadful thought came to me that perhaps we would never see papa
again! Suppose his people, who were rich and grand, should induce our
father never to return to us!
I had kept back my tears. Mama had told us that none of us must let papa
see us cry, as it might “unman” him, and she herself had heroically set
the example of restraining her grief until after his departure. Now,
however, the strain was loosened. I fancied I read in my brothers’ and
sisters’ faces--we were all imaginative and sensitive and excitable--my
own fears. Simultaneously we all began to cry.
Never will I forget that return home, all of us children crying and
sobbing, and mama now weeping as unconcealedly as any of us, and the
French people stopping us on the way to console or commiserate with us;
but although they repeated over and over:
“Pauvre petites enfants! Pauvre petite mère!” I saw their significant
glances, and I knew that in their minds was the same treacherous thought
of my father.
But papa did return! He could have stayed in England, and, as my sister
Ada extravagantly put it, “lived in the lap of luxury,” but he came back
to his noisy, ragged little “heathens,” and the “painting, painting of
pot-boilers to feed my hungry children.”