Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  The treatment specifically prescribed for Crombie was to be wrapped tightly in his heavy, feather-filled officer’s quilt and positioned outside on a bed that was set up on the lodge’s porch. That way he could take in as much fresh, spring air as possible. It meant long days of boredom for the vibrant Daphne, and when she tired of reading, she explored the trails around the lodge, becoming friendly with both Annie Fraser and Tom Thomson, the shy, dark artist who was also around the lodge. Often, she would sit and watch Tom paint as he sought to capture the daily advance of spring. They talked as he worked and, according to her, they got on wonderfully.

  Thomson even painted Crombie at one point. The sketch, with both Annie and Daphne in the scene, became his well-known work The Artist’s Hut. He also gave Daphne another gift: a sketch of the path behind Mowat Lodge.

  In 1977 I visited Daphne Crombie at her apartment on Clarendon Avenue in Toronto. A print of The Artist’s Hut was hanging above the mantel. “Tom told me it was the best one of the season,” she said. She giggled while admitting that she thought his paintings might be fine for a cottage—“alright to show in the kitchen,” she said—but hardly suitable for a sophisticated city home. But as his reputation grew, so did her regard for the small painting he had given to her. She began to fear that his gift might one day be stolen, so whenever she travelled, she’d wrap it in a blanket and lock it away in a cupboard. Then she decided to sell the original and use a small portion of the $1,200 the work brought in to replace it with a simple print of the sketch she and Annie Fraser had appeared in.

  At the time I interviewed her, Daphne Crombie was nearing ninety, but her beauty and grace had hardly been diminished. She had enormous presence, a charming sense of humour and a razor-sharp memory for detail. She remembered returning to the lodge one afternoon in the spring of 1917 with a mittful of pussywillows and trying to fit them into a small jam jar. The jar was inadequate; the long branches needed a vase.

  “I’ll make you one,” Tom offered.

  “I’d like one with pussywillows painted around it,” she said.

  He made and painted the vase exactly as she’d envisioned it. “It was beautiful,” she remembered, “but Annie broke it accidentally when she was cleaning. Tom said, ‘I’ll make you another one’—but, of course, he never did. When I got back, he wasn’t alive.”

  Daphne Crombie’s remembrances of Thomson painting are revealing. He would sometimes talk to her about the tone he was trying to capture. He told her once, “Now I’m trying to get the light just right—because it’s a different light from over here if you’ll come and see.”

  She thought he was kidding.

  “I’m serious,” he protested. “Go over.”

  She did, and saw that he was right—the light was different in the spot where he had told her to go and stand.

  Another time when he was working on a sketch, she happened to say, slightly puzzled, “Those shadows are very blue, aren’t they?” He told her to go out the next day at a certain hour and see for herself. “I did,” she recalled, “and he was right.”

  She remembered the day a wild storm broke out over the lake. “He came running down to the gallery,” she remembered, saying ‘I’m going to paint!’ ” They went out onto the verandah, where Robert Crombie, tightly wrapped in his quilt, was also staring out over the water. It was an extreme spring storm. The sky had broken, and shafts of light were coming down in the most spectacular manner.

  “ ‘I’m going to get that!’ ” Thomson shouted as he began to sketch. “ ‘Look! Look!’ he was shouting. And you know, he did get it. Exactly. Later on he showed it to Dr. MacCallum, who said, ‘My God, Tom—were you tight when you painted this?’

  “I said, ‘I can assure you it was not the case.’ And Tom looked at me with a smile as if to say, ‘Thank you.’ ”

  Daphne’s recollections of a somewhat manic Tom are in line with Mark Robinson’s descriptions of the man. “Tom was a study at all times,” Robinson wrote in a 1930 letter to Thomson’s first biographer, Blodwen Davies. “[O]ne day he was Jovial and Jolly ready for a frolic of any kind so long as it was clean and honest in its purpose. At times he appeared quite melancholy and defeated in manner. At such times he would suddenly as it were awaken and be almost angry in appearance and action. It was at those times he did his best work.”

  Robinson noted what a perfectionist Thomson was, insisting on getting the “snarles” right in birchbark, obsessed with different shades of grey in wood, determined to be “true to nature.” While some art experts have suggested that Thomson, through Jackson, was increasingly influenced by the European Impressionists, those more familiar with the natural world, such as Robinson, saw only a true and accurate portrayal of nature in his works. As Thoreau MacDonald, J.E.H.’s son, wrote in his foreword to a slim 1969 biography written by Ottelyn Addison (daughter of Ranger Mark Robinson), “Thomson’s work would be a fine study for some competent critic, but anyone attempting it should be familiar, not only with every phase of his work, but with the country too. He must know the trees, rocks, lakes, rivers, weather; to have them in his bones.…”

  Phil Chadwick, an Ontario artist and meteorologist, has created a PowerPoint presentation demonstrating Thomson’s remarkable fealty to nature and the skies. Using graphs and overlays, Chadwick shows how a Thomson painting such as Clouds (“The Zeppelins”) is accurate by every conceivable measure: direction, cloud buildup, winds.… When Thomson painted a night sky, Chadwick says, he placed the stars—even the planets—exactly as they were in reality. He was an accurate witness to all that he saw and painted.

  But there were also times when the artist seemed too sullen and moody to observe the world around him. Daphne Crombie recalled that Tom would sometimes disappear to his room or drift off into a corner with a book. “Tom was very quiet,” she said. “There were times when he was not wanting to talk to people.” To her, he seemed “a very lonely man at times.”

  Somewhat surprisingly, Crombie claimed to know nothing of any romantic interest the artist had, even though the Trainors were sometimes at the lake that spring and Tom would visit at their cottage, where he hung some of his spring paintings to dry. “Tom never mentioned Winnie to me,” she told me. “He didn’t seem interested at all at that time.”

  The notion would likely have shocked Daphne Crombie, but in today’s nomenclature, it might be suggested that Tom was “hitting” on her. She was, the few grainy photographs of the time suggest, petite and beautiful, a young woman positively glowing with good health and a love of life. Her sick husband was, for most of every day, completely removed from the picture as he lay on the verandah or on the wind-protected sides of the lodge wrapped in his heavy cover. Tom’s failure to mention his friend Winnifred Trainor might have been less oversight than a calculated move.

  The truth about Tom Thomson the romancer—perhaps even serial romancer—is difficult to nail down. That he fell in love in Seattle is largely accepted through the memories of those friends and siblings who were there at the time, as well as in the later writings of Alice Lambert. It was well known in Huntsville that Tom and Winnie were courting. Yet he made no mention of Winnie’s existence to Daphne Crombie. Nor was Daphne aware of any other romantic interest Thomson might have had in the area, though the trapper Ralph Bice of Kearney claimed there was a young woman there and another in Kiosk—and each one thought she was Tom’s intended. As Bice put it, “He got around.”

  There was also Florence H. McGillivray, a Toronto painter of some reputation who had visited Thomson at his shack studio near the Rosedale Ravine the previous winter. She was thirteen years Thomson’s senior and much admired by the artistic community. According to David Silcox and Harold Town, writing in Tom Thomson: The Silence and the Storm, McGillivray even visited Mowat Lodge during the spring of 1917, and Thomson introduced her to Mark Robinson as “one of the best.” Art historian Joan Murray has also written that, after Tom’s death, McGillivray’s calling card and an invitation to her upcoming a
rt show were found in his sketchbox. This may, of course, merely be evidence of the mutual admiration of two rising Canadian artists. But it is undeniable that Thomson attracted the attention of a great many women. What we don’t know is how much of that attention he returned.

  Although Daphne Crombie came to know most of the characters around Canoe Lake, the intriguing exception is Winnie. If there was an opportunity for the two young women to meet, Thomson did not take it to introduce them. The Crombies were at the lodge through much of the winter and spring of 1917, and while the Trainors were largely summer cottagers, they did come up on weekends whenever possible. An entry in Mark Robinson’s journals confirms that, on at least one occasion, the Trainors were at Canoe Lake at the same time as the Crombies. The Manse and Mowat Lodge were close enough together that you could shout an introduction, yet Tom made no effort to connect Daphne with Winnie.

  Daphne did meet Martin Blecher, Jr., the son of the German-Americans who had a cottage close to both the Trainors and the lodge. She considered him “an unattractive blasé sort of fellow” and thought he was boorish as well. She also wondered how he could possibly be allowed to keep the pet groundhog he often carried around. As for later suggestions that Tom and Annie Fraser had something going, Daphne indignantly said, “Never!” during my 1977 interview with her. Daphne adored Annie’s simple, friendly personality, and the two became fast friends, regularly walking and talking together along the many trails spreading out from Mowat Lodge.

  Daphne’s impression of her new friend’s husband was not kind, however. Like so many others, she found Shannon Fraser a bit of a blowhard. He liked to talk and didn’t listen well. He drank, she said, and she found him physically intimidating. “He had hands as big as hams,” she told me, and owned “a furious temper” that frightened everyone around the lodge. She found him “a devious kind of a creature.”

  Mark Robinson had been away from Canoe Lake since he’d enlisted in the fall of 1915, so he, too, would have missed the more serious courtship between Tom and Winnie in the year and a half. He was now on his way back—and thankfully not headed off to the devastating battle for Vimy Ridge—because he had been wounded and discharged. Robinson’s grandsons told me he was hit in the hip by shrapnel that killed several nearby horses and that he used a cane for the rest of his life. Leslie Frost, who had served in the same battalion and later became premier of Ontario, told the family that Robinson had served well, despite being nearly fifty, and he had acted as a father figure to the younger soldiers. Robinson was back at the Joe Lake ranger quarters by April 12th.

  He recorded that the ice went out on Canoe Lake on May 1st. At about that time the Trainors left for Huntsville. The Crombies also left, as Lieutenant Crombie’s health had improved dramatically after so many weeks of fresh, cold Algonquin air. Robinson himself left to be with his family in Barrie for nearly three weeks in June—during the worst of the blackfly season.

  Thomson stayed on, determined to complete his opus on the arrival of spring. At the end of June, Mark Robinson returned from his family vacation and Thomson soon paid him a visit. “He came to my house one day and looked around,” Robinson recalled years later in a taped interview. “ ‘You know,’ he says, ‘I have something unique in art that no other artist has ever attempted,’ and I can hear him, ‘I have a record of the weather for sixty-two days, rain or shine, or snow, dark or bright, I have a record of the day in a sketch. I’d like to hang them around the walls of your cabin here.’ Well, Tom and I had a little talk and I assured him that he’d be welcome to do so if he’d accept the responsibility as I couldn’t do so, as I wouldn’t be present probably all summer—never knew when I’d be called away and some of them might disappear and I wouldn’t feel that I could be responsible.

  “He said, ‘I’ll accept all responsibility and I’ll hang them around the wall here one of those days.’ ”

  Thomson never followed through. With the Trainors back in Huntsville, he decided instead to keep the bulk of his spring work, as well as his pack and canoe, at their cottage, which was so much closer to the lodge, where he took his meals.

  Thomson appeared to be in good spirits, Robinson thought. In a letter the artist wrote to MacCallum on July 7th—his last known correspondence—he said, “I am still around Frasers and have not done any sketching since the flies started. The weather has been wet and cold all spring and the flies and mosquitoes much worse than I have seen them any year and the fly dope doesn’t have any effect on them. This however is the second warm day we have had this year and another day or so like this will finish them. Will send my winter sketches down in a day or two and have every intention of making some more but it has been almost impossible lately … Have done some guiding this spring and will have some other trips this month and next with probably sketching in between.…”

  The evening after Thomson wrote to MacCallum, there was, by all accounts, a raucous drinking party at guide George Rowe’s rundown cabin on the old Gilmour mill site. Among those in attendance, and drinking fairly heavily, were Thomson, Rowe, guide Lawrie Dickson, Shannon Fraser and Martin Blecher, Jr.

  According to almost all versions of the Tom Thomson story, Blecher and Thomson got into an argument about the war. William Little, author of The Tom Thomson Mystery, said that the two “were actually prevented from coming to blows only by the good-natured efforts of the guides.”

  It is entirely plausible that the two got into a spat over the war. While Vimy Ridge had been an enormous victory in early April, the Hindenburg Line was still holding for the most part, and the Allies were suffering huge losses in the trenches. The Russians had sustained so many losses that they had withdrawn and were now caught up in a violent revolution. Thomson was said to be despondent about the war, though it is not known if this was connected to his possible rejection if he had tried to enlist, his possible conscientious objection to war as a peace resister, or even his sharing of the widespread sense that the war was not going well. Whatever caused it, Thomson’s moodiness could easily have gotten him into an argument with a man who might have been mocking the Allied effort. Blecher had a reputation around the lake for belligerence.

  The party broke up without further incident, but not before the loudmouthed Blecher is said to have threatened Thomson: “Don’t get in my way if you know what’s good for you!”

  The following morning—Sunday, July 8, 1917—is considered pivotal to the Tom Thomson mystery, yet it is filled with its own mysteries. The day began overcast and drizzly, with the wind at times gusting and bringing harder rain. Mark Robinson’s journal records that he and his young son Jack, then eleven, and Ed Thomas, the local station master, had headed east on the rail line to Source Lake, where Robinson had been asked to examine some wood that had been cut and piled near the siding. To rebuff the periodic rain, he had dressed his son in his own old trench coat. It was, apparently, not a pleasant day at all.

  Robinson recorded nothing about Tom Thomson that particular Sunday in his carefully kept journals, but in the early 1930s, he wrote a letter to Thomson biographer Blodwen Davies describing a specific scene involving Shannon Fraser and Tom—and he gave more elaborate detail about that same episode in his long 1953 taped interview with Alex Edmison who did the interview at the request of Taylor Statten Camps to preserve Robinson’s memories.

  The ranger remembered that he had been preparing lunch for himself and Jack when he happened to see Tom and Shannon walking along the trail toward the Joe Lake dam. They had apparently walked the considerable distance from Mowat Lodge, a trip Shannon would normally take by horse and cart and one Tom would usually take by canoe. Robinson said Tom was carrying a fishing rod.

  He recalled watching through his binoculars as Tom cast again and again for a large trout that was known to live below the dam. He snagged it once but lost it. Then, Robinson said, he overheard Tom remark to Shannon that he planned to head down toward Tea Lake and, either at the dam or in one of the smaller lakes along the way, catch a big trout.
“I’ll bring it home,” Tom went on, “and I’ll put it on Mark’s doorstep; he’ll think I’ve got the fish.”

  In his letter and interview, Robinson claimed that as Tom went back up the bank, he turned and caught sight of the ranger spying on them.

  “Howdy,” he said. “That’s the last time Tom Thomson spoke to me,” said the former ranger.

  This scenario—held by William Little and the CBC to be critical and irrefutable evidence that Tom was still alive that morning—is troublesome in many ways. First, in Robinson’s retelling, it seems such a pleasant, relaxed morning, whereas in his own journals, he’d described miserable weather as he and his son headed up the tracks to Source Lake and back. Second, it seems unlikely—but not impossible—that Shannon and Tom would have taken such a long walk together with no real point other than to try to catch a fish. Third, if Robinson required binoculars to make out what they were doing, how could he have overheard every single word the two men were saying, especially since they were standing close together and would have been deliberately quiet so as not to spook the trout?

  But there is much more. The big trout itself is a huge problem, one that leaves those familiar with Algonquin Park and the habits of the wily trout scratching their heads. A big trout in the shallow, warm waters of July and one that Thomson was able to snag by casting? Not likely. For a short period after the ice goes out, it is indeed possible to catch lake trout in shallow waters and close to the shores, but by late June, even in a spring considered cool, the lake trout have invariably sought the much deeper waters and trenches off the islands. A speckled trout might linger in shallows, but tiny Algonquin speckles could never be described as “big trout.” Besides, smallmouth bass had been introduced to these waters and were thriving, the most muscular bass taking over the more shallow and warmer waters, thus making it even less likely that trout would be discovered there.