Growing Pains (10 page)

There was an elevator in the mansion but the students were not allowed to use it. We climbed the three flights of stairs. The
professors might use the elevator if they elevated themselves. An elevator, even in a mansion, was very, very modern and very unusual. In those days, few office buildings downtown even had one.

One morning just as I started to climb the three flights of stairs the ogle-eyed professor shouted, “Here, little girl, I’ll run you up!” I was terrified of the elevator but more terrified still of the professor. I had not the courage to say, “Please, I’d rather walk.” So I stepped in and we began to rise. Then we stuck high up between the walls. The elevator was heavily upholstered in crimson plush. There was no light. In the smothering plush dark all I could do was cower in a corner of the seat trying to elude the professor’s arms which threshed, space-hunting for buttons or handles or something to pull or push or start us going.

“Damn!” he said. “I do not know how to work the thing!”

It was dreadful! Would they ever miss us? If they did, I wondered would they cut the cable and flop us into the cellar to break on the stone floor? All of a sudden we shot up, the door of the elevator clanked, I bolted down the hall like a rabbit, and have always hated elevators since.

The mantels, banisters and newel posts of the mansion were all elaborately carved. There were all sorts of cunningly devised secret places in the mansion, places in which to hide money or jewels. (Mrs. Hopkins could not have had much faith in banks.) In the dining-room you pressed a certain wooden grape in a carved bunch over the mantel and out sprang a little drawer. In the library you squeezed the eye of a carved lion and out shot a cabinet. A towel rack in the bathroom pulled right out and behind it was an iron safe. There were panels that slid and disclosed little rooms between walls. We delighted in going round squeezing and poking to see what would happen next. All the treasure places were
empty. Mrs. Hopkins had cleared them all out before she willed the mansion.

The public roamed from room to room and stared; of course they did not know about all the strange corners that we knew. Occasionally “a public” would stray up our stairs and gaze at us as if we had been part of their fifty cents’ worth. They need not have thought us so extraordinary for in the mansion we were quite ordinary, quite normal. If it had been the old school, well… but no sightseers had ever thought of climbing those dirty stairs. Art students were just part of the squalor that surrounded the market. Nobody was interested in them! But now that we were stupid and elegant and an institution people wanted to see how we looked.

SAN FRANCISCO BOARDING
houses were always changing hands. Sometimes I stayed by the change, sometimes I moved.

All boarding houses seemed to specialize in derelict grandmothers and childless widows, nosey old ladies with nothing t o do but sleep, eat, dress up, go out, come back to eat again. Being lonely and bored they swooped upon anything that they thought ought to be mothered. They concentrated on me. I was soon very overmothered. They had only been out in the New World a generation or two. My English upbringing reminded them of their own childhood. They liked my soap-shiny, unpowdered nose, liked my using the names Father and Mother instead of Momma and Poppa. Not for one moment would they exchange their smart, quick-in-the-uptake granddaughters for me but they did take grim satisfaction out of my dowdy, old-fashioned clothes and my shyness. Their young people were so sophisticated, so independent. They tried lending me little bits of finery, a bow or a bit of jewellery to smarten me, should I be invited out, which was not often. One old lady of sixty wanted me to wear a “pansy flat” (her best hat) when someone took me to see
Robin
Hood
. It hurt them that I refused their finery, preferring to wear my own clothes which I felt were more suitable to age and comfort even though they were not smart. I had a birthday coming and three of them got together and made me a new dress. The result disheartened them—they had to admit that somehow I looked best, and was most me, in my own things.

The landlady’s daughter and I were friends. We decided we would teach ourselves to sew and make our own clothes. We bought Butterick’s patterns, spread them on the floor of the top landing where our little rooms were, and in which there was not much more than space to turn round.

One day I was cutting out on the hall floor. The landlady’s daughter was basting. Spitting out six pins she said, “Seen Mother’s new boarder?” and pointed to the door of a suite up on our floor.

I replied, “No, what flavour is she?”

“Loud! The old house tabbies are furious at Ma for taking her but we have to live, there is so much competition now.”

“The house is big. Those who wish to be exclusive can keep out of each other’s way.”

“The new girl has her own sitting-room—double suite if you please! I don’t think I like her much and you won’t but she’s going to your Art School so you will see her quite a bit.”

“If she is such a swell she won’t bother about me.”

Next morning I slammed the front door and ran down the steps. I had no sooner reached the pavement than the door reopened and Ishbel Dane, the new boarder, came out.

“Can I come along? I rather hate beginning.”

She had large bold eyes, a strong mouth. You would not have suspected her of being shy, but she was. She was very smartly
dressed, fur coat, jewellery, fancy shoes. I took her into the school office and left her signing up. I went on up to the studios.

“Who?” I was asked and nudged by students.

“New boarder at my place.”

Adda frowned, she had never approved of my boarding house—too big, too mixed. Adda was an only boarder and only sure about places that were “Momma-approved.” Suddenly she had a thought. Diving into her pocket she brought out a letter.

“Momma is coming!” she said. “Brother is taking a course at Berkeley University; Momma and sister are coming along; I will join them. We shall rent a house in Berkeley. I’ve given notice. Why not take my room? Shall I ask them to save it for you?”

“No, thanks, I am very well where I am.”

Adda said no more. She watched Ishbel but refused to meet her.

IN THE EVENINGS I
practised on my guitar. There was a tap on my door and there was almost pleading in Ishbel Dane’s voice as she said, “Come to my sitting-room and have a cup of tea with me?”

I went wondering. We had not got to know each other very well. We were in different studios at School. My “grandmother guardians” in the boarding house advised of Ishbel Dane, “Not your sort, my dear.” Having found they could not direct my clothes they were extra dictatorial over my morals. I resented it a little, though I knew they meant well. They were very cool to Ishbel, confined conversation to the weather. All they had against the girl was her elegant clothes—she overdressed for their taste.

Ishbel had made her sitting-room very attractive—flowers, books, cushions, a quaint silver tea service which she told me had been her mother’s. She saw my eyes stray to a beautiful banjo lying on the sofa.

“Yes, I play. I belong to a banjo, mandolin and guitar club. Wouldn’t you like to join? It helps one. I have learnt ever so much since I practised with others.”

I said slowly, “I’ll think.” I knew the old grandmothers, the landlady’s daughter and Adda would disapprove. When I left, Ishbel took my hand.

“Come again,” she said. “It’s lonely. My mother died when I was only a baby; Father brought me up. Father’s friends are all men, old and dull. A few of them have looked me up for Father’s sake. Father is in the South.”

I joined the practice club. My friendship with Ishbel warmed while the old ladies’ affection chilled towards me. Adda was actively distressed. She moved to Berkeley. Her last shot as she started for her new home was, “My old room is still vacant.”

Trouble was in her eyes, anxiety for me, but I liked Ishbel and I knew Ishbel and I knew my friendship meant a lot to her.

I HAD TO GO TO
the music studio for some music. The Club leader was giving a lesson. He shut his pupil into the studio with her tinkling mandolin, followed me out onto the landing. As I took the roll of music from him he caught me round the wrists.

“Little girl,” he said, “be good to Ishbel, you are her
only
woman friend and she loves you. God bless you!” His door banged.

I a woman’s friend! Suddenly I felt grown up. Mysteriously Ishbel—a woman—had been put into my care. Ishbel was my trust. I went down stairs slowly, each tread seemed to stretch me, as if my head had remained on the landing while my feet and legs elongated me. On reaching the pavement I was grown up, a woman with a trust. I did not quite know how or why Ishbel needed me. I only knew she did and was proud.

While I was out a letter had come. I opened it. My guardian thought I had “played at Art” long enough. I was to come home and start Life in earnest.

ISHBEL CLUNG TO ME.
“Funny little mother-girl,” she said, kissing me. “I am going to miss you!”

A man’s head was just appearing over the banister rail. She poked something under my arm, pushed me gently towards my own room. A great lump was in my throat. Ishbel was the only one of them all who hadn’t wanted to change some part of me—the only one who had. Under my arm she had pushed a portrait of herself.

I CAME HOME
one week before Christmas. The house was decorated, there was some snow, fires crackled in every grate of every room, their warmth drew spicy delight from the boughs of pine and cedar decorating everywhere. There were bunches of scarlet berries and holly. The pantry bulged with good things already cooked. In the yard was something for me, something I had wanted all my life, a dog!

They were glad to have me home. We were very merry. All day the postman was bringing cards and letters; flitter, flitter, they dropped through the slit near the front door and we all darted crying, “Whose? whose?”

I got my full share but there were two disappointments—no letter from Nellie McCormick, none from Ishbel Dane. New Year passed before I heard of either.

Adda wrote, “Nellie McCormick could endure home tyranny no longer, she shot herself.”

From the boarding house one of the grandmothers absolutely sniffed in writing, “Ishbel Dane died in the ‘Good Samaritan’
hospital on Christmas Eve. Under the circumstances, my dear, perhaps it was best.”

Nellie my friend! Ishbel my trust!

I carried my crying into the snowy woods. The weather was bitter, my tears were too.

THE TYPE OF WORK
which I brought home from San Francisco was humdrum and unemotional—objects honestly portrayed, nothing more. As yet I had not considered what was underneath surfaces, nor had I considered the inside of myself. I was like a child printing alphabet letters. I had not begun to make words with the letters.

No one was teaching drawing in Victoria: mothers asked me to start a children’s class. I did not want to teach. I was afraid of pupils, but I did teach and soon I got fond of the children and liked the work. I taught my class in our dining-room. The light was bad; the room got messed up; there was trouble after every class.

We had two large barns: one housed our cow, the other our horse. Clambering over the cow, I explored her loft. Low roof, only one tiny window, no door other than a small trap-door over the cow’s head and a great double door that opened into space and had a gibbet over the top for the hauling up of bales of hay. The boards of the floor and walls were knotholed, the wood buckled, the roof leaked. But it was a large loft, high in the middle, low at the side walls.

My eldest sister was tyrannical, an autocrat like Father. She claimed every inch of the old home, though really it belonged to us all. Independence had taught me courage.

“Can I have the loft of the old cow barn for a studio?”

“Certainly not. It’s the cow’s.”

“Couldn’t the cow share with the horse?”

“Have you come home to unsettle the family and worry the cow?”

My sister knew the cow’s barn was very much out of repair. When I offered to mend it she reluctantly consented to my using the loft. I called in a carpenter.

“It’s the floor,” I said.

“No, the roof,” my sister corrected.

“It’s the walls!” declared the carpenter with a determined tongue-click and a head-shake.

I said, “As long as everything relates in being bad, let’s patch all over and let it go at that. But, carpenter, there
must
be an outside stair up to the big door and another window for light.”

So the carpenter let in a wide dormer, hung a little stair onto the outer wall, patched leaks, straightened boards and we were snug. But it was still too dark for work and all my money was spent. The old garden Chinaman and I mounted the roof with saws and cut a great hole. This we fitted with two old window sashes, making a skylight. Now we had lots of light and lots of leak too. I put a tin gutter all round the skylight and drained the leaks into a flower box, shoved a stovepipe into the wash-house chimney which ran through the loft, blocked up pigeon holes, burlapped walls. There we were cosy as anything, with little more than an eggshell’s thickness of wood full of splits, knotholes and cracks and perched right out in the middle of the elements—
rain drumming, wind whistling, sun warming, and everybody happy—pupils, me, even the cow and chickens below.

Under my loft the barn contained a wash-house, an apple-storing room, a tool shed, three cow stalls, a chicken house and an immense wood-shed, big enough to accommodate twelve cords of wood (half oak, half fir, for the household’s winter burning).

“Please, the cow smells like a cow, may she move to the other barn?” I asked my sister.

“She may not.”

I did not really mind sharing with the cow—I was really not keen on her smell but she cosied things.

When I worked at night under a big coal-oil lamp suspended from the rafter under an immense reflector, made by myself out of split coal-oil cans, it was nice to hear the cow’s contented chew, chew, chew below. I loved to stick my head through the trap-door above her stall into the warm dark and say, “Hello, old cow.” She answered with great hay-fragrant sniff-puffs that filled the barn. Any sudden noise sent the hens on their roosts below hiccoughing in their sleep. On moonlight nights the rooster crowed. Rats and mice saw no reason to change their way of living because we had come—after I brought home a half-drowned kitten from the beach it was different. A peacock came down from Beacon Hill Park and made his daytime quarters on the studio roof, strutting before the doubled-back dormer, using it as a mirror. Most splendid of all was my very own big dog. No studio has ever been so dear to me as that old loft, smelling of hay and apples, new sawed wood, Monday washings, earthy garden tools.—The cow’s great sighs! Such delicious content!