A Nellie McClung Manitoba Mystery

The Black Creek Stopping-House and Other Stories
Nellie L. McClung
Toronto: William Briggs, 1912
224 pages

We have here a collection of short stories by a writer best known as a novelist.

Scratch that.

Nellie McClung is remembered today as a campaigner for women's rights. I learned this in 1973 when my mum brought home a sheet of newly issued postage stamps bearing her portait.

My mother was born at a time when women in Canada were not considered persons under the law. Strange but true. She wasn't recognized as a person until the month after her second birthday. Nellie McClung worked to made that possible.

I don't remember my mum mentioning that Nellie McClung wrote fiction and am not certain that she knew, though McClung had once time one of the country's bestselling novelists. Her 1908 debut, Sowing Seeds for Danny, sold over 100,000 copies.

Toronto: William Briggs, 1908

The Black Creek Stopping-House and Other Stories was the author's third book and the first of her two short story collections. It was published fifteen years before my mother's birth, sixty-one years before that stamp was issued, and one-hundred-and-thirteen years before today. 

There are eight stories in all. They are interesting enough, though much of that interest has less to do with prose or clever plot than as snapshots of the time in which they were penned. Nowhere is this more true than with 'The Elusive Vote,' which takes place on the final day of the 1911 Canadian federal election:

The story centres on John Thomas Green, "a gentle soul in ill-fitting armor," and attempts by local Conservative Association to secure his vote – or, failing that, preventing him from casting a ballot. It reminded me of Stephen Leacock, as did 'The Runaway Grandmother,' in which a bachelor farmer hires an tenacious elderly housekeeper, bends to her will, and finds his life much improved. Then I remind myself that Prof Leacock was fairly new on the scene as a humorist.

I'm more confident that 'A Short Story of a Rabbit' was influenced by by Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G.D. Roberts. A young rabbit disregards the warnings of his mother and so learns a valuable lesson.

'The Return Ticket' is also timestamped. The narrator has a chance encounter with a woman who is accompanying her daughter's body back from Rochester, Minnesota to Manitoba's Rose Valley. The only the only truly dark story, it is also the very best.

But it is the title story that dominates:

'The Black Creek Stopping-House' begins with John Corbett strolling into a Salvation Army meeting at Winnipeg's Victoria Hall. He has for no other reason to be there other than the fact that "he would do anything once, and if he liked it he would do it again." Corbett is very taken with the music, the camaraderie, and more than anything Maggie Murphy, the pretty young thing seated by the door selling War Cry: "When he went in he bought one; when he came out he bought all she had left."

Corbett is a card shark. He loves the life, the challenge, the money, and may be the very best. But he gives it all up, ill-gotten gains included, for pretty Maggie Murphy. The two wed and with the aid of oxen move more than 200 kilometres west to what would become Brandon, Manitoba. There they set up a "stopping house," feeding hungry men traveling east and west. The railway comes the following year, thus securing their future.

 
Early in the story, John and Maggie Corbett cede their positions as protagonists to twin Brydon brothers Reginald and Randolph. Are they remittance men? They don't do much of anything apart from waiting for wealthy, appropriately-named Aunt Patience to die. As they mess about, making money tighter, Randolph comes up with an idea to tide them over. Why not encourage young half-brother Fred to come out West?

“Wot’s the matter with us gettin’ out Fred for our farm pupil? He’s got some money—they say he married a rich man’s daughter—and we’ve got the experience!”

Fred sends money, then follows with his elegant, delicate, doll-like wife Evelyn. The daughter of a wealthy lumber baron, she had defied her father to marry for love. Events after the couple's arrival are not happy, and involve deceit, betrayal, misunderstanding, and a wolf of a man named Rance Belmont. I was all in! But then came an unimaginative climax that for a short story, no matter how long, relies far too much on coincidence. The denouement, happy and breezy, sees the Brydon twins receiving their just desserts.

Those familiar with the story will appreciate the pun.

The first ten chapters of 'The Black Creek Stopping-House' were so engaging that I moved my copy of Sowing Seeds for Danny to my night table. The final two chapters were such a disappointment that I moved it back to the shelves.

I thought no more about it until glancing through Nellie McClung's 1935 biography Clearing in the West. In the nineteenth chapter, the author recounts a thirty-mile trip to Brandon with her mother and brother Jack on a sleigh heavily loaded with wheat. According to McClung she was twelve at the time, meaning that the journey was untaken in the December of 1885: 

Though the stay at this "Black Creek Stopping house" is brief, four pages provide a Clearing in the West provides a description of the stopping house, which is something lacking in McClung's long short story:

Mrs. Cobett's stopping house was one big room, with one end used as a kitchen, in which stood a great high-over black stove where Mrs. Corbett with quick movements filled plates with a cut of roast bef and helpings of turnips, potatoes and gravy. Each man, who was helped took a place at the long table coveref with oil-cloth, where he found everything else he needed.
   "Da," Corbett, traversed the length of the table with a blue enamel tea pot and filled the cups that were stationed at every place. Bread and butter, pickles, biscuits and cheese were set at close intervals, along the long table and it took but little time to serve thirty or forty men.

Mrs Corbett's first name is not shared in Clearing in the West. In 'The Black Creek Stopping-House,' Maggie cannot bring herself to address her husband, whom she first knew as "Mr Corbett," by his first name. "Da" is Da is short for "Dad" which is something I'd rather not address, particularly as  they have no offspring .

The Corbetts of 'The Black Creek Stopping-House,' have one employee, a young hireling blessed with the unforgettable name Peter Rocket. The Clearing in the West Corbetts have help in the form of an child  named Peter Rocket about whom twelve-year-old Nellie has a strong opinion:

I could see he was a lout of a boy, who could not even think of two things at once.

   There was an impatient rattling of spoons on cups.
   "Let me do it," I said, and took the smallest pot on the stove and went down the line.
   I could hear Mrs. Cobett's voice above the chatter.
   "Look at that now, there's a girl with a quick turn, and her not more than twelve years old. I'd be a proud woman, if I had a little girl like that comin' along."

Young Nellie's mother is not of similar mind: "When we were in the sleigh again, Mother told told me, I should nt be so forward. It did not look well for a little girl to jump up and pour tea for strange men."

Was there a Peter Rocket? No one by that name is recorded in 1881 and 1891 census records, though the latter does include an English immigrant named John Rocket living in Manitoba. In 1885, that Rocket would've been a fourteen-year-old.  

Similarly, the Corbetts don't match up. The 1881 census features a John Corbett (age 27) and Maggie Corbett (age 21) living in Manitoba, but not close to one another. The sole Margaret Corbett is fifty-nine.

Don't get me started on the Brydon bothers.

Neither the Corbetts nor their Black Creek stopping-house receive mention in 1880 editions of the Brandon Daily Sun. Curiously, the newspaper did not review The Black Creek Stopping-House and Other Stories.

So, I ask, is 'The Black Creek Stopping House' a nouvelle à clef? Did such a place exist? Could it be that the Corbetts are modeled on a couple who had entirely different names? What of Peter Rocket? Is it that the author couldn't remember John Rocket's first name? Did she even know it?

And now, I can't stop thinking about 'The Black Creek Stopping House.'

Dedication:

Trivia (personal): Because I'm working on a book about the Maria Monk hoax, I'm leaving this paragraph from 'The Way of the West' by way of reminder.

Object and Access: A very attractive hardcover, my copy, was purchased eight years ago in Toronto as part of a lot. It once belonged to Florence Adams.

The 1911 census features twenty-six women named Florence Adams, three of whom lived in Toronto. I'm ruling out the three-month-old, but not the twenty-three and twenty-five-year-olds  Of course, it's entirely possible that the woman who once owned the copy never lived in Toronto at all. 

I find no evidence of an edition published after 1919.

First editions begin at $30.00. At $177, the prize is a copy inscribed to one Alice Jordan:

A perfect gift for Xmas 2026.

Our Little Life: Dressmaker Meet Cheesemonger

Our Little Life: A Novel of To-Day
J.G. Sime
London: Grant Richards, 1921
394 pages

Jessie Georgina Sime's debut novel begins with a tale of decline. In the eighteen-sixties, the residences at the confluence of O'Neill Street and Drayton Place were amongst the most desirable in Regalia. In the decades that followed, as the city's wealthy gravitated westward, the grand homes became less attractive. At the dawn of a new century they were bought on the cheap by a "Business Woman" who had them divided into small apartments:

The fact of the Buildings having begun life as a cluster of semi-detached dwelling-places explained certain odd constructions in the flats; also the many undesired intimacies—common taps of water on the landings, verandas that belonged to everyone and no one—that the inhabitants so reluctantly shared with one another. The Apartment House was the uncomfortable place it was because when it had been "made over" comfort had been the last thing in anyone's mind.

The Business Woman named the buildings the Penelope Apartments after herself, but soon found them too much to deal with. She signed the buildings over to a French Canadian in exchange a small sum to be followed by yearly payments. The French Canadian promptly flipped the property, thus setting off years of legal squabbling leading to further neglect.

The residents of the Penelope Apartments, known as "Penelopians," include labourers, drunkards, dope sellers, chorus girls, and prostitutes. They're interesting on the whole, but only two are fully drawn. What at first looks to be a novel about disparate and disreputable tenants and their interactions soon centres on the relationship between Katie McGee and Robert Fulton. 

Katie McGee lives in a modest first-storey flat on the Drayton side of the Penelope Apartments. A forty-six-year-old spinster, she makes a living as a dressmaker. Her workdays are spent in the homes of Regalia's upper-middle class, ripping apart last season's gowns so as to make use of the fabrics for the next.

Irish-born, Katie came to Regalia as a child, brought with older sister Mary by their widowed mother. Canada is the only home Katie can remember.

It is a familiar story.

Robert Fulton has a small flat on the third floor of the Penelope Apartments' O'Neill side. His story is less familiar and isn't revealed until fairly late in the novel. An English Cambridge graduate, he has somehow ended up serving at the butter and cheese counter of the Arundel Meat, Grocery, Fruit, Vegetable and Dairy Produce Market. He doesn't enjoy the work:

How Robert hated those prosperous women who came and shopped! How he detested the clipped intimations of their Canadian voices. He loathed their shrillness and their arrogance and their clumsiness of movement (it had taken his labor in the store to show him that women are more clumsy in their movements than men). He hated them from head to foot, and he felt certain that if he could see inside them he would hate them more.

Katie McGee is nothing like the women Robert serves. She'd never be able to afford the market's offerings. The same can be said of Robert. Both earn $1.50 for a day's work, the difference being that dressmaker's employers provide breakfast and lunch.

Their relationship begins in the backstory with an act kindness. Robert saw Katie struggling with a sack of coal for her flat and had insisted on carrying the burden.

Our Little Life is a portrait of a woman and man who would never known one another had they remained overseas. Katie's initial interest in Robert is as a possible partner; we first see her rushing to her flat so as to prepare a meal and herself for his arrival. She is older than Robert, Robert is "younger than his years," but still a girl can hope. A lonely woman drawn to the finer things in life, she looks up to a man who had not only received a fine education, but had once practiced a profession she had wanted for herself.

There is no envy, only awe.

It needs be said that Robert Fulton is nowhere near as interesting as Katie finds him. A bastard (historical definition), he was raised by a kindly woman who'd agreed to take on the task. Robert had wanted for nothing. Well-travelled, Robert chose Canada for his new home. He was provided with a substantial amount of money, which he promptly lost through a poor investment. Robert then looked to support himself as a schoolteacher, but for reasons left unsaid he resigned.

Before befriending Katie, he'd devoted his evenings to setting down his thoughts on immigration with the intent of producing a volume of essays. After befriending Katie, the better part of his evenings are spent in her small flat reading lengthy passages – featured in the novel –  as she listens intently, understanding little, but always ready with a compliment.

This is the novel's great flaw.

The reviewer in the Liverpool Daily Post (14 July 1921) puts it best:

Miss Sime has much to unburden herself of about Canadian conditions and Canadian folk. subjects on which Miss M'Gee is specially voluble, while Robert is writing a book upon them in intervals of leisure from the groceries counter. The novel is long in consequence. We might fairly retitle it "Our Little Life at Great Length." To deny it merit would be unfair to the effect produced by the amazing minutæ of which it is built up. It is not tedious; you may call it a feat of entertaining prolixity.

Our Little Life is set in the final fourteen months of the Great War, a conflict that has a surprisingly small presence. Robert, who had tried to enlist, had been been "turned down":

As he had come away from that rejection he had brought with him a mind torn in two: he had felt relief... and he had felt a miserable sense that he was being forcibly turned back from the only real duty that lay before him. This double attitude of his persisted. Had he been at the War, had he waited in the terrible trenches and rushed over No Man's Land into the German trenches opposite – he would undoubtedly have been miserable. But he could not have been more miserable than he was in the Arundel Store, feeling day after day that he was degradingly safe.

At one point, Robert accompanies Katie to a sort of going away party for Mac, a Penelopian he'd never met:

Robert and Mac looked at one another. Possibly the fact that Mac limped so that he was unable to go back to the front, while Robert had never got even so far as the drill-ground in the Campus may have had something to do with it. Possibly a certain half-bakedness together with the most complete certainty in himself that Mac had may have exasperated Robert unduly: undoubtedly the question that leaped to Mac's mind the instant he set eyes on Robert, "What's he doing here? What's he done for his country?" complicated the situation.

I risk making too much of these brief passages. As with Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's Mist of Morning (1919), read earlier this year, I was focussed on the march of time.

Our Little Life begins in the late autumn of 1917. The summer of 1918 is very hot. One evening, Robert suggests an outing Summer Park. He's heard customers at his counter talking about how much cooler it is there. They travel by there by streetcar moving first through a through French Canadian neighbourhood, then one populated by Eastern European Jews. Sicilian, Chinese, Syrian, Bulgarian, German, Polish neighbourhoods follow. He treats Katie to a chicken dinner and concert. It is the most magical evening of her little life.

The Armistice is to come, but not before the Spanish Flu.

Trivia I: The city in which Our Little Life takes place is referred to as "Regalia" ninety-seven times in the novel, but the Canadian reader will recognize it as Montreal. The façade slips on page 265:

By the time Beta's body had been brought back to Montreal to be buried and Mrs. Morphy's ground-floor across the court was empty and bare, it was May.

Not to worry, there's no real spoiler in the above.

Trivia II: Midway through Our Little Life, quite unexpectedly, one of Katie's clients presents her with two tickets to a talk by a touring Irish poet was is clearly modeled on W.B. Yeats. Sime first met the poet and dramatist as a girl growing up in Cheswick. In her privately printed memoir Brave Sprits (1952), she writes of  attending the poet's 1903 and 1914 Montreal lectures. 

Trivia III: The climax of the novel takes place on 7 November 1918, the day of the False Peace:

The Hamilton Spectator, 7 November 1917

Object and Access: Bound in blue boards with black type, my copy is the first UK edition. It was purchased in four years ago from bookseller in Arlington, East Sussex. Price: £17.50.

The front free endpaper features mysterious notations:

Any ideas?

The 1921 Grant Richards' British first was joined the same year by editions from F.G. Goodchild (Canadian) and Frederick Stokes (American). It would appear that none received a second printing. As I write, no copies of the 1921 editions are listed for sale online.

The good news is that the novel returned to print in 1994 when it was added to the Tecumseh Press Early Canadian Women Writers series. Used copies are just as uncommon as the Richards, Goodchild and Stokes editions, but you can purchase it today through this link to the publisher.