The Heart of a Peacock

by Emily Carr, Rosemary Neering (Introduction), Ira Dilworth (Preface by)

Overview

A collection of short stories about people and animals by the legendary Emily Carr that mingle the sad and the joyous, the cruel and the tender, in her unique style.

The Heart of a Peacock is a collection of 51 short stories by the legendary writer and painter Emily Carr. The stories are arranged in themes such as her experiences with Native people, her adventures with various beloved creatures (particularly birds), her love of nature, and a whole section of stories about her mischievous pet monkey Woo. Together, they underline Emily Carr’s place as a writer with the sharp yet tender eye of an artist, with a deep feeling for the tragedies of life and with a rich sense of the comic. The Heart of a Peacock has been in print ever since its publication in 1953, and, like her other books, has been read and loved by a couple of generations. The book is enhanced by seven of Carr’s own line drawings of scenes from nature.

Carr’s first book, published in 1941, was titled Klee Wyck, won the Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction. Her writing is vital and direct, aware and poignant, as well regarded today as when first published.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781926685823
Publisher:	D & M Publishers
Publication date:	07/01/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	300
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Emily Carr was born in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1871, and died there in 1945. She studied art in San Francisco, London and Paris. Except for a period of fifteen years when she was discouraged by the reception to her work, she was a commited painter. After 1927, when she was encouraged by the praise of the Group of Seven, interest in her paintings grew and she gained recognition as one of Canada’s most gifted artists. Now, nearly sixty years after her death, her reputation continues to grow.

Freelance writer Rosemary Neering has long been interested in Emily Carr and her female contemporaries. Her short biography of Carr was first published in 1975 and revised in 1999. She is the author of Wild West Women:Travellers, Adventurers and Rebels, an award-winning look at unconventional women in the Canadian west between 1850 and 1950; Down the Road: Journeys through Small-Town British Columbia, and a long list of other books on the history and society of British Columbia. She has written extensively for magazines on the lesser-known regions of the province. As did Carr, she lives in Victoria, and her travels have taken her to many of the places where Carr found inspiration for her paintings and her writings.

Ira Dilworth taught English at Victoria High School from 1915-26 and was the school's principal from 1926-34. He was a friend and mentor of the great Emily Carr, whose writing career he promoted as her literary agent. He taught at UBC for four years before joining CBC Radio, directing the corporation's BC operations from 1938-46. Dilworth founded the CBC Vancouver Orchestra in 1938 and in 1956 became director of the CBC English language network.

Read an Excerpt

Blue heaven, green earth; betwixt the two the big old cherry tree in full blossom, with the sunshine drawing the sweet, heavy scent of honey from the blooms till the air was almost sickly and even the bees were glutted. Suddenly into the honeyed sweetness burst the passionate cry of a peacock with its long-drawn tang of bitterness.
He belonged to the public park but, wearying of its confines, he had flown the fence, wandering through the little pine grove and thence into our old garden.
From head to tail he was magnificent and knew it, arrogantly flaunting his beauty as he came. Beneath the cherry tree he paused and cried again.
I, looking from the window of the old studio in the barn, close above the tree, wondered how the cherry tree felt about this rival loveliness, but the peacock seemed to draw yet more glory out of the tree, using it as a setting for himself, as he spread his tail and strutted back and forth. Presently he flew to the low roof of the barn. The grey shingles still further enhanced the beauty of his colouring as he mounted the slope with mincing steps. Then he spied the mirror formed by the folding back of the dormer window. He ran to it with evident delight and began to peer and prance and preen before it, bending his small, lovely head this way and that, dancing and spreading his tail in a shower of glory. Then he saw me. The indifferent way in which he looked me over made me feel like the poor shabby little girl at the party. Just a careless glance, then he returned to his mirror where he remained all day as though he could not bear to part with himself.
Towards evening his appetite overcame his pride and he returned to the park.
Next day, before the dew was gone, he was back at his mirror. I heard him call in the pines and then he was up on the roof. I offered some wheat but he had breakfasted and only desired to feed his vanity.
From the sunshine he absorbed the glint and glisten, from the quiet grey roof the contrast which multiplied and offset his brilliance; from me he tried to draw admiration and flattery. His beauty pleased me but I resented his arrogance.
"Vain creature!" I said. "Pretty you’d look if they turned you inside out and showed your selfish, shabby heart." I turned to my work, disgusted at his conceit.
He continued to come every day and I grew to like him there behind me as I worked. Sometimes I pandered to his conceit and applauded his showing off. Then he was pleased and would come and sit on the window-shelf in the far corner, gradually moving closer and closer until his head, surmounted by that glorious coronet of sparkling feathers, rested on my shoulder, and my hand had to steal out and caress it. Subtly the bird was drawing from me, as he had drawn from everything else. I knew it, but I knew also that now he was returning what he drew, tenfold. Suddenly I sensed the loneliness of this creature, hatched from an egg, brooded over by a common domestic hen. No kith, no kin: his looking-glass self the only mate he had ever known.
I learned his call. He answered from the pine wood and came hurrying. Often his call woke me in the morning.
Spring passed: the blossoms were cherries now, the bees had moved to the clover patch. The long summer days passed and the crisp autumn ones, and every day the peacock and I screeched our greeting and spent long companionable hours. Then one day I kissed his crest, put him out, and closed the window. That night I went abroad.
In my absence a parson occupied the studio and wrote sermons there. He closed the wall-cracks with newspaper to keep out the singing wind, and caught the mice in traps.
"What of my peacock?" I wrote home.
"He came once, the morning after you left. Since then he has not come at all," was the reply. "We see him strutting in the park, delighted with admiration. He has doubtless forgotten you," they added.
I was absent for over five years. When a young thing stays out of her own world as long as that, and comes back grown, it is hard to fit in. Some things have grown ahead of you, and you have grown ahead of others.
I ran up the rickety barn stairs to the studio. Phew! How musty and "sermony" it smelt! Even as I crossed to the window I was peeling off strips of the parson’s newspaper. I threw the dormer wide. The garden was full of November fog. "Come in, old fog, and souse out the sermons," I cried. Everything was drab: the cherry tree, old, past bearing, had been cut down. I thought of the peacock. "Gone where good peacocks go," I sighed, and wondered where that was.
Next morning I was busy on the floor with a pail of suds.
Hark! In my rush the suds were knocked over and trickled through the floor onto the back of the patient cow below. I leaned from the window and screeched that unwritable screech. It was answered instantly. The peacock was hurrying througgh theeeee garden, unmindful of his tail, whhich swept the leaves and dirt. Hurrying, hurrying, not to the mirror--he could have had that all these years--but to me.
"Oh, peacock! Now I know that if they did turn you inside out your loyal heart would be lovelier than your feathers!"
How was he aware, that morning, that I had come? I do not know. That is one of the mysteries, and his secret. The park was out of earshot, and I had not been there.
What a pity this happiness could not have continued for years and years, for I hear that peacocks live to a great age. But the park belonged to the people, and the people missed the peacock.
A rumble of little grumbles arose.
What right had an individual to monopolize public property?
They complained to the keepers, who complained to the City fathers, whose fatherly instructions were "Pen the peacock".
Locked up among the sentimental doves and the stupid owls, the peacock beat his breast against the wires in vain. His feathers and his pride were broken.
The glow and sparkle of his plumage dulled, went out. His head sagged forward, wings drooped. He remembered no more the way of brag and display, nor how to spread his tail; it dragged heavily in the dirt.
I tried to cheer him in the padlocked pen. I begged in vain for his release. He belonged to the taxpayers: the City demanded its taxes; the taxpayers demanded their pound of flesh. It gave them satisfaction to see their property securely penned before their eyes. They tried to "shoo" the peacock into strutting for them, and when they did not succeed they said, "Stupid brute! He sulks," and turned away.
When next they came the pen was empty.
"Where is the peacock?" they asked the keeper.
"Dead."
"So? I suppose you saved his feathers? Will you give us some?"
"They wasn’t worth the saving," the man replied. "All the glint went off ’em when his heart broke."

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction by Rosemary Neering
Preface by Ira Dilworth

Five Birds
The Heart of a Peacock
One Crow
Uncle Tom
Sally and Jane

Some Animals
Balance
Even a Rat ...
Bravo, Mary Anne!

More Birds
Height
Eagles of Skeena River
Two Women and an Infant Gull
Wild Geese
Stern Parent
Birds of England
Bullfinches
Garden Gone Wild
Alice’s Sparrows
Sitka’s Ravens
Indian Bird Carving

Indian and Other Stories
In the Shadow of the Eagle
The Hully-up Paper
Lilies
Worship

Small and Her Creatures
When I Was Little
A Debt
Ducks and Mother and Father
Father Is a Cannibal
The Curly Coat
Waxwings


Woo’s Life
Buying Woo
The House
Woo’s Appearance
Woo’s Calls
Three Sisters
My Garden
Winter Quarters
Mrs. Pinker’s Visit
Maternity
Woo and Lizzie
Woo’s Enemies
Monkey Love
The Fox Fur
Canadian Club Lecture
Sewing
Ginger Pop Dies
Pictures, Key, Bantam Rooster
Orgy
Tea Party
Woo Saves Dolf
A Smack for His Majesty
Woo and Ha’Penny and Camping
Exit