Growing Pains (17 page)

Signed “Albert Edward.”

The following morning, passing through St. James’s Park on my way to school, I was halted for a passing carriage. In it sat the new, uncrowned King—Edward VII. He looked sad and old. When they had said to him, “The Queen is dead. Long live the King!” he had replied, “It has come too late, too late!”

I remarked to Wattie, “Queen Victoria might have sat back and let Edward reign a little before he got so old.”

“Carlight! It is poor taste to criticize England’s Queen, particularly after she is dead.”

“She was our Queen too, Wattie. All the same, I do not think it was fair to Edward.”

London completely blacked herself. It was ordered so. Shops displayed nothing but black, lamp posts and buildings draped themselves in black rag which fog soon draggled. Bus-horses wore crêpe rosettes on their bridles. Black bands were round the drivers’ arms, cab and bus whips floated black streamers. Crêpe was supremely fashionable. The flower women couldn’t black the flowers so they favoured white and purple varieties, ignoring the gay ones. Dye-shops did a roaring trade; so many gay garments visited them and returned sobered. The English wallowed in gloom, glutted themselves with mourning.

ON THE FIRST
black Sunday Marie Hall, a young violinist in our house, asked to come to service in the Abbey with me. Young Marie, sure of herself since Kubelik had kissed her and told her she was the prodigy of the day, had just bought a new hat—bright cherry. “I don’t care. It’s my only hat; I shan’t black it.”

Instead of sitting in her usual seat beside me, Mrs. Radcliffe crossed to the far side of the Abbey. After service she whispered
coldly in my ear. “How could you, Klee Wyck! The whole loyal Abbey blacked—that screaming hat!”

“Can I help it, Mrs. Radcliffe, if an English girl won’t kill her hat in honour of her dead Queen?”

In the boarding house Fräulein angrily removed the green parrot. “I don’t see why I should,” she grumbled, rolling “Polly” back in his moth-ball wrappings, slapping a black bow in his place and sulking under it.

The funeral preparations were colossal. Every Royalty in Europe must be represented. Mouse-like queens no one had ever heard of came creeping to the show—and Kaiser William with his furious moustachios! Hundreds of bands throbbed dead marches, the notes dragging so slow one behind another the tune was totally lost. London’s population groaned and wept.

I did not want to go to the Queen’s funeral procession—Little Kindle, my cubicle neighbour in the new boarding house, begged, “Come on, you may never see such another.”

We rose at five; at six we took position in the Piccadilly end of St. James Street, front row. The procession was not due till eleven. In one hour we had been forced back to the sixth row by soldiers, police and officials who planted themselves in front of us. In defiance of the law, I carried a little camp-stool, but by the time I was sitting-tired the crowd was too tight to permit my doubling to sit. You could not even raise an arm. St. James Street had a gentle rise, the upper crowd weighted down on those below. Air could only enter your mouth, you were too squashed to inflate. Each soul was a wedge driven into a mass as a tightener is forced into an axe handle.

Those with seats reserved in upper windows along the route came much later than the crowd. Police tore a way for them
through the people. The seat-holders hanging on to the Bobby, the crowd surged into the gap to better their position. They fought tooth and nail.

“Kindle!”

She half-turned, looked, groaned, pounded a Bobby on the vertebrae, said, “My friend, get her out quick, Bobby.”

“Way there! Lydy faintin’!” shouted the policeman.

A great roaring was in my ears—then nothing. I recovered, draped over an area railing in a side street. I was very sore, very bruised.

“My camp-stool, Kindle?”

“Back among the legs—rejoicing in the scoop it took out of my shin. I told you not to bring the thing!”

She bound a handkerchief round her bloody stocking.

“Come on,” she growled.

“Home?”

“Not after we have waited this long! The Mall, it’s wide; hurry up!”

I dragged. I know exactly how a pressed fig feels.

I saw a corner of the bier, Kindle saw the Kaiser William’s moustachios. Oh, the dismal hearing of those dead-march bands, which linked the interminable procession into one great sag of woe, dragging a little, old woman, who had fulfilled her years, over miles of route-march that her people might glut themselves with woe and souse themselves in tears on seeing the flag that draped the box that held the bones of the lady who had ruled their land.

THE WESTMINSTER ART SCHOOL
closed for a short Easter recess, when I had been nine months in London, nine months of hating the bustle, the crowd, the noise, the smell.

I said, “Mrs. Radcliffe, is there a little village that you know of where I could go and be in real country?”

“There is the village of Goudhurst in Kent. It has a comfortable Inn; I have stayed there myself.”

There was another student in the school who came from Victoria. She decided to come to Goudhurst for the holiday, too.

The village was a tiny sprawl of cottages on the top of a little hill. We were met and wavered up the Goudhurst Hill by the Inn’s ancient host and his more ancient horse and chaise. The village was all of a twitter because tomorrow the Butcher’s daughter was to marry the Baker’s son. Everyone was talking of the coming event.

The Inn parlour was low-ceiled, and beamed. There was a bright fire on the open hearth and its glow pinked the table cloth, the tea cups, and the cheeks of our host and hostess, who were garrulous about the wedding.

My bedroom was bitterly cold, the bed felt clammy with damp. I woke to a sharp spring rain next morning, but the sky did not
want to wet the wedding, clouds scuttled away and soon the sun shone out. Villagers swallowed hasty breakfasts and hurried with flowers to decorate the church which was just across from the Inn.

I too hurried across the churchyard but not to the wedding. I saw a wood just beyond the graves. There was a stile across the graveyard fence. Thrushes, blackbirds, every kind of song bird was shouting welcome. From the centre of the graveyard two larks rose up, up—wings and song twinkling. The notes scattered down to earth clear as rain drops. I sat one moment on top of the stile. The church bells began to peal such a merry jangle. They must have seen the bride coming down the village street and were reporting to the people. Dog carts, pony carts, chaises from all over the neighbourhood nosed up to the churchyard fence, dogs barked, a donkey brayed—long, derisive, melancholy brays. I climbed over the stile. The gravestones were blackening with sitters waiting the bride.

I heard enough church bells, saw enough people in London. I pressed hurriedly into the wood, getting drenched by the dripping greenery. Deeper, deeper I penetrated among foliage illuminated by the pale, tender juices of spring. There were patches of primroses pale as moonlight, patches of bluebells sky colour, beds of softest moss under my feet. Soon my feet were chilled and wet.

“Cuckoo, cuckoo!” Live throats uttered the call I had heard voiced only by little wooden painted birds connected with a mechanical apparatus, unmannerly birds who shrieked “cuckoo!,” burst open a door in the front of the clock and slammed it shut again. Violent little birds!

“Oh, London! Oh, all you great English cities!
Why
did you do this to England? Why did you spoil this sublime song-filled land with money-grabbing and grime?”

Baby daffodils hooked the scruffs of their necks up through the moss under my feet; those whose heads were released from the moss were not yet bold enough to nod. Spring was very young. I was so happy I think I could have died right then. Dear Mrs. Radcliffe, I loved her for directing me to Goudhurst. I would gather a big boxful of bluebells, primroses and daffodils, post them for her Easter in London. Oh, the spring smells! The lambs bleating in the field beyond the graveyard! The shimmer of the greenery that was little more than tinted light! How exquisite it all was! How I hated to go back to London!

I BURST IN ON
Mrs. Radcliffe, reading the war news as usual.

“Mrs. Radcliffe! Oh, oh, oh!”

“You like our English spring, Klee Wyck?”

Mrs. Radcliffe was not a kissy person. I was shy of her, but I could not help what I did. I attacked from behind her chair. Her cheek was not soft, nor used to being kissed—my hug knocked her hat crooked.

“Dear me, dear me!” she gasped. “What a—what a ‘Klee Wyck’ you are, child!”

I HAD BEEN A YEAR
in England when my favourite sister came from Canada to visit me.

Wild with excitement I engaged rooms in the centre of the sightseeing London. Houses and landladies had to be approached through a rigorous reference system of Mrs. Radcliffe’s. I pinned my best studies on the wall of the rooms, thinking my sister would want to see them.

She came in the evening. We talked all through that night. At five
A.M.
my senses shut off from sheer tiredness. My last thought was, “She will want a pause between travel and sightseeing.”

At seven the next morning she shook me.

“Wake! What sight do we see today?”

“Won’t you want to rest a little after travel?”

“The trip was all rest. I am a good traveller.”

We started off. She entered the sights in her diary every night—date, locality, description.

At the end of a week I remarked, “Not interested in my work, are you?”

“Of course, but I have not seen any.”

“I suppose you thought these were wallpaper?” pointing to my studies on the wall. My voice was nasty. I felt bitter. My sister was peeved. She neither looked at nor asked about my work during the whole two months of her visit. It was then that I made myself into an envelope into which I could thrust my work deep, lick the flap, seal it from everybody.

MARTYN CAME ALL
the way from Canada to London just to see me and with him he lugged that great love he had offered to me out in Canada and which I could not return. He warned of his coming in a letter, carefully timed to be just too late for me to stop him even by wire. For I would have pleaded, “Dear Martyn, please don’t come.”

I had been spending the long summer holiday with friends in Scotland. I got his letter there. I had been on the point of returning to London, but, on receipt of that letter, I dallied. It made me unhappy. I wanted time to think.

Martyn got to London first. He was on the platform at Euston waiting for me, had been in London for three days rampaging round, nearly driving my landlady distracted by his frequent—“Have you heard anything of her yet?”

But Martyn on the platform at Euston Station was like a bit of British Columbia, big, strong, handsome. I had to stiff myself not to seem too glad, not to throw my arms round him, deceiving him into thinking other than I meant. He gave me all sorts of messages from everybody at home. Then he searched my face keenly.

“How tired you look!”

“I am, Martyn; please take me straight home.”

In the cab we were silent. On my doorstep he said, “What time tomorrow?”

“I am meeting Mrs. Radcliffe at the Abbey door at five to eleven—join us there.”

He frowned. “Must she be along? Must anyone but you and me?”

“Mrs. Radcliffe and I always sit together in church. She is fine—you will like her.”

Mrs. Radcliffe and Martyn impressed each other at once. Martyn was Canadian born but his parents had raised him ultra-English. After service Mrs. Radcliffe, with a coy smile and one or two “dear me’s,” left us, taking her way home by a route entirely different to the one that was her habit.

“Goodbye, children!” I don’t know how many “dear me’s” her eyes twinkled as she said it.

“Bring your friend in to tea with me this afternoon, Klee Wyck.” In one of her piercing, tactless whispers she spilled into my ear, “Poor Eddie!”

Martyn and I were alone, Mrs. Radcliffe’s back fading down Great Victoria Street.

Martyn asked, “Who is Eddie?”

“The friend of Mrs. Radcliffe’s son, Fred.”

Martyn frowned. We walked along quiet and stupid.

AFTER LUNCH MARTYN
called for me and we went to Kensington Gardens and got things over, sitting uncomfortably on a bench near the lake side. Everywhere was black with children and their nurses. The children sailed boats on the lake and shrieked. The
roar and rumble of London backgrounded all sounds. I was glad of London’s noise that day and of her crowds.

Martyn had three months’ leave. I undertook to show him London. Mrs. Denny and Eddie, Mrs. Radcliffe and Fred, as well as my many solitary pokings round the great city, had made me an efficient guide. Every day at four o’clock I found Martyn ambling among the tombs of the “Great Ones” down below our work-rooms at the Architectural Museum, his eyes always directed to the doors leading off the upper balcony of the great hall, closed doors behind which we studied. From his office old Mr. Ford gave us a kind smile as we passed, politely amused smiles but never objectionable nor coy like the ones English ladies and the students lipped at you when they saw you with a man.

I showed Martyn every sight I thought would interest him. We went to the theatres. Martyn liked Shakespearian plays best, but it did not matter much what the play was, whenever I took my eyes off the stage I met Martyn’s staring at
me
.

“What’s the good of buying tickets!” I said crossly—“you can see my face for nothing any day.” He asked me on an average of five times every week to marry him, at my every “No” he got more woebegone and I got crosser. He went to Mrs. Radcliffe for comfort and advice. She was provoked with me about Martyn, she kept his time, while I was at school, divided between inter-cession services and sentimentality. I wished she would tell him how horrid, how perverse I really was, but she advised patience and perseverance, said, “Klee Wyck will come round in time.”