Mist of Morning
Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1919
407 pages
"We're piling up fireworks all around — just suppose that some one, with a screw loose, should take a fancy to see them go off?"
Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's longest novel, Mist of Morning meanders, but I enjoyed the meandering. It begins with a Dickensian scene. Young David Greig is brave enough to deliver a parcel to stern Widow Ridley's house. A little girl in bright red turban and Persian shawl answers:
“You boy!” said the little girl. “What do you mean by coming to the front door? Go round to the back directly!”David stands his ground; he's been sent by the minister.
The boy isn't at the door a minute, but his presence echoes. Frances, the little girl's much older cousin, worries about the disruption it has caused. The old woman is already calling down from her upstairs room, certain that the mirror in the front parlor has been broken.
The little girl's name is Rosme. It is a name her aunt, Widow Ridley, dislikes intensely, but then she doesn't care for the girl herself. Like Frances, Rosme is someone she's been saddled with, all because their respective parents died.
David reappears later that afternoon, peering at Rosme over Widow Ridley's high garden wall. The girl has been pretending to be Joan of Arc, but together they become pirates, sail the waves of long grass in the unkempt grounds, plundering ships, and burying treasure until one is called in for dinner. Pirate David returns home to be told by the man he'd believed was his father that his real father has died. And so a Dickensian bookend to a childhood encounter.
Isabel Ecclestone Mackay isn't Dickens of course, but I've enjoyed her novels just the same. She wrote five in total. Mist of Morning, her third, was the only one I'd not read. As I say, it meanders. Though more than a decade passes before David and Rosme meet again, anyone up on Dickens or Mackay will know that the relationship between the two characters is key. By this point, both are living in Toronto. David is a newly-graduated engineer. Rosme, the very example of the New Woman, is the brains of a small advertising firm.
The dialogue between the two as young adults is endearing and every bit as playful as it was all those years ago in the Widow Riley's overgrown garden. What a shame then that their paths hadn't crossed a month or two earlier, before David became engaged to raven-haired Clara Sims, a fellow boarding house tenant. This is how his fiancée is first described:
Clara was ready for bed and the loose kimono she wore had slipped back from her white shoulders leaving them bare above the filmy nightdress which clung to her supple figure with less than classic scantness. Seen so she was superbly young, beautiful, virile, and quite without a soul.Though she very much has the look, Clara isn't quite the classic femme fatale. She'd set her sights on David not for love, lust, revenge or fortune, but because she'd recognized in him a man who would become a stable provider. Their engagement is the resulted of a clever trap, with David as rube. It would read like a Leacock short story were it not for tragic consequences. It begins during a dark and stormy night when Clara enters David's room on the pretence that a burglar is in hers:
Still dizzy with dreams he turned, only to feel sure that he was dreaming still. The door, the door into the hall, had opened and was just closing, while inside it and bright against it’s dark panels, her hand still on the door-knob, stood a girl in a red kimono. David in his first dizziness thought he had never seen the girl before. She was startlingly strange — all red and white with black hair tumbled about her shoulders. White face, red lips, red drapery over something white, from beneath which a white foot peeped. A midnight dream of a girl, with dark eyes and —.
There's that kimono again. While reading the novel I became entangled in women's clothing. There are so many descriptions providing clues as to just when the novel takes place. A discussion over at Clothes in Books was of great help. Another indication is David's work on making an aeroplane engine that would enable commercial air travel. We learn eventually that it is the autumn of 1913 when Rosme and David reconnect. Storm clouds of the coming Great War begin to gather, casting a gloom over the last quarter of the novel, introducing elements of intrigue and betrayal. A man is shot to death.
The murder didn't come as a shock – not after the author's previous novels. The plot of The House of Windows, her debut, involves the abduction of a child. In Up the Hill and Over, her second novel, it's drug addiction. Reducing Mackay's novels to short strokes doesn't do justice. They are not message novels, nor are they thoroughly dour. Her characters are for the most part perfectly pleasant and kind. There are more moments of levity than gloom and despair. I'm just sorry that there aren't more Isabel Ecclestone Mackay novels to read.
The murder didn't come as a shock – not after the author's previous novels. The plot of The House of Windows, her debut, involves the abduction of a child. In Up the Hill and Over, her second novel, it's drug addiction. Reducing Mackay's novels to short strokes doesn't do justice. They are not message novels, nor are they thoroughly dour. Her characters are for the most part perfectly pleasant and kind. There are more moments of levity than gloom and despair. I'm just sorry that there aren't more Isabel Ecclestone Mackay novels to read.
Mist of Morning isn't her best – that would be Blencarrow – but it was a happy place to land. What's more, it has a happy ending, with Rosme and David uniting in the end, just as we knew they would.
Will they live happily ever after?
Well, let's just say that the novel ends in the final days of July 1914 and leave it at that.
Favourite passage: Two women in the novel run Toronto boarding houses, the most interesting being Rosme's Madam Ramses, an unfortunate woman cursed with a masculine appearance and a sixth sense. She's described in entertaining detail, but this picture of Mrs Carr, David's landlady, takes the cake:
She was a frosty person with a grim eye. Her aspect was calm, her mouth tight and her nose suspicious. Long ago there had been a Mr. Carr but he had departed to a better world and left no traces. Perhaps he realised that Mrs. Carr had been intended by the discerning fates to be the widowed keeper of a select city boarding-house. Her eye alone had marked her out for this.
Trivia: Late in the novel, David invites Rosme to accompany him on a canoe excursion on Toronto's Humber River.
These words were published six years after Pauline Johnson died. Mackay was a close friend of the poet and oversaw publication of the posthumous Legends of Vancouver.
Object and Access: A block of a book in grey cloth with black type and design. Sadly, my copy lacks the dust jacket. It was purchased online in 2020 from an Ottawa bookseller. Price: US$23.00. The front free endpaper features a the address label of Helena Jones.
I remember these labels from elementary school. They were like tape and came in a red transparent plastic case that wasn't much different than a tape dispenser except that one had to lick the labels like a stamp.
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| 16 Powell Street, Ottawa in 2024 |
As I write, no copies are listed for sale online
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