He is sitting on the green corduroy chesterfield in our casual parlour, the back parlour, off the kitchen, just three feet from where I myself recline in the sturdy cherry wood rocking chair my Mother usually sits in. When she has time to do so.
She has draped it, I notice, to cover the threadbare cushion, in the canary yellow afghan I crocheted for her at Christmas.
HBC is staring at me with a look of confusion more than compassion, patiently, maybe anxiously, waiting for me to say something. This boyish man is politely allowing the shock of it all to sink in.
With his head of straight sandy hair and the beige cardigan he is sporting over boney, broad shoulders, HBC, indeed, looks just like a school boy.
And he is so informally dressed, when compared to me, we are quite the ridiculous pairing.
But as he explained, he was heading out to a summer camp near Potton Springs with some Montreal friends, when he decided to hop off the train at Richmond. And I had invited him to drop by at the first chance, so he did.
There’s no one to bear witness as we sit so close together in the family room of Tighsolas. An awkward couple, despite our age-appropriateness. Both 27, you see. In another universe we could have become suitors.
HCB, the bank clerk, in my mother’s favorite rocking chair. Me, the school marm, in my father’s world-weary leather wingback.
HBC in his casual summer country-outing attire and me in my formal white dress. I look like quite the eccentric, even Miss Havisham-like. Not a look I previously had aspired to, but quite fitting, these days.
When he first arrived, and I immediately invited him to come into the house to sit and talk privately in our parlour, I told him to spare me nothing.
I wanted to know all. All about the ‘mercy’ trip to Mexico. All about the job transfer t to Cornwall. All about everything leading up to and after the fire. That horrific fatal, fateful fire. The conflagration that converted me, in the space of one week, from a blushing bride-to be to be, perhaps a little on the ripe side, to a opiate-addled spinster-in-training.
As he began, the small, subtle muscles on HBC’s smooth-shaven face, the one’s around his mouth and especially on his temples, pulled taut, so I knew there was more to this sad sad story than even I had guessed. So much much more – as it happens.
I wanted to know, I had to know. Still, I wished on some level that he hadn’t dropped in this particular morning, despite his standing invitation to do so, despite his obligation to do so as Charlie’s closest friend. My dear fiance’s partner at work and leisure at the Bank of Montreal in Danville, Quebec.
Because as he ambled up the street, we were all in our white dresses, standing in front of the house, having our picture taken my Mr. Montgomery, our neighbour. Me, Mother, Marion and Flora.
We were all wearing our new spring hats, too. Well, Marion and I had brand new Easter Bonnets. Purchased at Ogilvy in Montreal on April 28, a day before the terrible event.
Mother’s hat was a year old, refurbished with a few pink silk apple blossoms and Flora’s, well I can’t recall when she got hers. It was of an ordinary sort, with no up to-date flourishes, no velvet ribbon, very a la mode in the 1910 season, just a few faded sprigs of some imaginary bloom, so likely she trimmed it herself with remainders from the basket in Mother’s sewing room.
It was Mothers’ idea to get all dressed up and have a tea party out on the front lawn, as we had done in the past, although much later in the summer. Usually as a way to to escape the clinging heat in the house.
But it was not hot this day, in June. Mother was desperate, that’s all: desperate to save me from my spiraling sadness. Desperate too to forget her own escalating set of family problems.
So after church (Mr. Carmichael’s sermon was on the Garden of Eden) we ceremoniously donned on those white dresses, a fashion from the turn of the century, white dresses being genteel dresses, for they stained easily. And that was the point.
People with white dresses, dresses that showed the dirt so easily, had maids and washing women.
We didn’t. It took us two days to wash, dry and press our white dresses. Our genteel impractical white dresses.
As we sat there, teetering on kitchen chairs on the grass, my mother’s brainstorm had a negative effect on me.
I could see, through my fog of depression, how ridiculous we looked, how pretentious, in our fashionable over-sized hat and ridiculously anachronistic white dresses. Queen Victoria, Victoria Regina, had started the fashion, decades before, in an effort to promote British lace to the world.
I felt out of body and I could also see how pretentious we looked, from the street, and I suddenly I hoped no one was watching.
With the card table and kitchen chairs set out on the lawn and or best china and silver, too over a fine linen tablecloth embroidered in blue, on display, like animals in a zoo.
“Step right up, ladies and gentlemen: on view The Canadian Middle Class. Of Prime Minister Laurier’s Time. Aspiring to the finest lifestyle, theatre, opera, music recitals, afraid of falling into the lower class. Working Class, really, on paper, but with an education in Latin, Botany, History and Euclid’s geometry. Tennyson. So instilled with an appreciation of beauty.
Relying on creams and potions to disguise the rough and reddened skin of their hands.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, these specimens are unique to all Canadian Society in that they WASH THEIR OWN CLOTHING.
(Sometimes it felt that way.)
But before I could feel too ashamed I saw him, HCB as I coyly referred to him in letters home, walking up from College Street and the station. “I was on my way to Kingsey Falls to see, so I dropped by,” he said. “We’re’re off by the 3.10 to Potton Springs. A group of fellows from the bank. I am sorry, I decided right there on the train, about five minutes before the Richmond stop,there was no time for a telegram.”
“Yes, but I told you to drop in anytime. So please don’t apologize.” I said, wondering if he wanted the Oyster Canapes we had prepared for our tea or should I offer him some cold tongue.
We couldn’t ask him to join us for tea, that would have been absurd and uncomfortable.
And that wasn’t the point, anyway so we quickly went into the empty house. Straight to the parlour. The casual parlour, as there was not time to prepare the formal parlour for a visitor.
He asked only for a glass of water.
“I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” he repeated. “You are celebrating something. A happy occasion? A Birthday.”
“Quite the opposite,” I assured him.
I brought him the glass of water, in a light green glass tumbler. And then I asked him to proceed. Without further delay.To tell me all he knew of the circumstance of the death of my Charlie G, right from the beginning, from that Trip to Mexico in November up until that dreadful night, the night Haley’s comet ominously passed directly over Cornwall, Ontario.
I wanted to know all the details of all Charlie was doing the three months since our informal engagement over Christmas, especiallywhat he was doing that he didn’t tell me in his letters.
He couldn’t have spent all his off work hours in the Presybertian Church on 2nd street as he claimed to me. Even I knew he wrote that just to please me. To prove his conversion to the WAY had stuck.
So HCB began, leaning back on the couch, his right elbow at right angles to his body as he combed the hair on the back of his head with his hand; his bicep was a muscular one, much more muscular than Charlie’s, I guess you call men like him wiry, deceptively strong.
But then suddenly taking on a posture and air of a much older man, possibly imitating his own father or a beloved Academy professor, he opened his mouth to speak.
About Mexico, about Cornwall, about… the circumstances of the Rossmore Hotel fire.…I think it took over an hour in all, but I can’t be sure, and then when it all began to sink in, the horrible truth, the numbing realization that I had been protected from the truth this past year, protected by Charlie and HCB as we older siblings protect our little Flora from the unpleasant truths of our own dear, devoted but deeply troubled family.
I had been protected from the real reason Charlie went to Mexcio to help out that Canadian concern after the typhoon and protected from the real reason he got transferred away from Danville to the Cornwall branch immediately upon is return. And worst of all I have been protected from knowledge about myself, my self-centeredness, my female narcissism. My shallow solipsistic existence.
I had spent the past year believing myself to be a woman misused, mistreated. Because I enjoyed the part of being tossed in love. I had taken to my bed like a wealthy Victorian lady in novels and guzzled heart tonics, to elicit pity more than to recover from grief.
HCB told me in plain English, that everything Charlie had done the last few months he had done for me, for love of me. Out of a desire to marry me, and as soon as possible.
He did not get cold feet in October! We was not trying to weasel himself out of our understanding in March.
Charlie was trying to make this marriage happen – and as soon as possible.
How could HCB look at me, now. How could I look on myself?. I wasn’t a victim. I was the victimizer.
And I knew he had to be thinking the same thing.
This handsome man of the middle class, son of a farmer, nowa bank clerk, like Charlie, (although not as handsome as Charlie, nor as charming) stuck in a respectable but decidedly dead end job.
A well educated man with no serious connections, so no real hope. A young man thinking of moving out West, to Alberta or Saskatchewan, like just about everyone else around, including my own father.
And what he didn’t say was even more hurtful. (If it hadn’t been for YOU, Charlie would still be alive!
He’d still be alive._ And through wall of my pitch black state of mind, my depression, I still felt sick to my stomach. Because the truth was truly shocking. The appallingness of it. The Uncleanliness..
So that’s why Charlie spent his off hours in the Presbyterian church.
Not to please me or to impress me, but to hide from those who would harm him?
So HBC just sat there, letting it sink in. Not knowing what more to say. Perhaps trying to stave off his growing repulsion for me. He examined the dark oak moulding around the doors and windows of the parlour, the Moulding my father had installed himself in 1896, with such pride for decoration like this added greatly to the cost of a house.
Then he spoke. “You must know. He wasn’t doing anything illegal. He’d want you to know that. Opium is legal to buy opium in Mexico. I’m telling you this because he wouldn’t want you to think ill of him.
And with that HBC sprang up to leave.
Think ill of Him? How could I? I was the villainess in all piece. Not dear Charlie, dear dead Charlie.
Burned beyond recognition. Immolated.They identified his body by his tie pin, found nearby. In that stairwell. Half of his body, anyway
“I have to catch the next train,” he said. He actually had a full hour and it was only a 15 minutes walk to the station, but I merely nodded.
“Are your sure you don’t want us to make a pulled pork sandwich for your trip.”
No, we’re planning on getting an early supper at the Hotel in Potton Springs..
And as this was getting set to walk out the door, I knew I had to ask him one more question. It was loathsome, but there was no keeping me from it.
He was turning toward the door, pirouetting elegantly on his lithe legs. Athletic young man.
” I’ll see myself out.”
I could tell he was dreading passing my family out on the lawn.
So, I stopped him, extending my arm. ”Henry?”
“I have something more to ask you….Do you know where I can get any, for myself. The opium., For my own use? My own medicinal use.”
And now it was his turn to be shocked.
I continued.
” It’s not like in Montreal where it’s easy to get prescription medicine. This is a small town and everyone knows me. The drug store is owned by Mr. Sutherland, and Dr. Moffatt is related to me by marriage….You say it isn’t illegal for us, only the Chinese.”
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t,” he replied, stuttering. “Edith. I’m sorry.”
He folded his straw boater in his hand. And then he rushed out the front door. And right by my silly-looking sisters and Mother taking tea on the front lawn.
Without so much as tipping his hat to them. Well he couldn’t possibly as he had twisted it like a dirty rag between his pale fists.
In my ebook Threshold Girl I have Flora and Edith Nicholson visit St. James Methodist Church in Montreal in early May 1912, a few days after the Titanic sinks, to see a ‘real British Suffragette’. The suffragette is Barbara Wiley, one that has been forgotten by Herstory and History. Wiley had a brother who was an MP out West and she visited Montreal and Canada in 1912 and probably said more than she should have. (I guess she was a bit of a rogue suffragette.) You see, the militant suffragettes had to be careful what they said in their speeches in Canada, as ‘militants’ were not looked well upon. 
Titanic Fashion, so to speak. A fashion advert from Votes for Women, the magazine of the WSPU, in the UK, April 1912. Hmm. Sunshine Girl.
