Growing Pains (19 page)

A flickering gas jet was over the Curate’s head—it “haloed” him. He was ugly and so lean you saw the shape of his teeth through his cheeks. The Curate’s bed was draped with brown cotton hangings. Table, bed, chair, were loaded with books. He stopped chewing to stare at me, first over, then under, finally through his spectacles.

“Mrs. Crotch in Catfoot Court says you can go and see her if you want to. Here’s my district card; I can’t district-visit any more. It is beastly, how can you!”

The Curate’s face twisted into a sighing little smile. He stretched a bloodless hand and took my card. He said, “You are young,” and looked as if it were a long time since he had felt young.

“MRS. RADCLIFFE,
I’m through with slumming!”

“Oh, Klee Wyck!” She looked disgustedly at me.

“Yes, I have abandoned good works; they never were in my line. Ugh, those revolting creatures, rude, horrible! I am much sorrier for the Curate in his wretched lodging than for those slum people with their roaring fires, their dropsies, their half-eaten pies swarming with flies.”

“What do you know about the Curate’s lodging?”

“Went there, to hand in my district visitor’s card.”

“You went to the Curate’s room!”

“Had to give my card in, didn’t I?”

“You should have taken it to the Church House.”

“Church House! What’s that? I never heard of one, and goodness, my sisters were churchy enough, too.”

“All parish work is conducted through the Church House in London parishes. Workers never go direct to the clergy.”

“Well, I did and he was the miserablest human I ever saw.”

Mrs. Radcliffe assumed a sly simper. “I wonder what he thought of you?” She looked so coy, so hinting, I wanted to hit her. Mrs. Radcliffe twitted me so about that wretched visit to the Curate that I stopped going to St. John’s.

TO MRS. DENNY I WAS
frankly a disappointment. She had taught me London, pointed out the wrongness of Roman Catholicism, had even intimated that she was willing to share with me the love of her very precious son. And London’s history bored me! I continued to wear Mother’s little cornelian cross, to go to the Brompton Oratory on occasion to hear magnificent music. Most astounding of all I did not want Ed’s love! No wonder she was disappointed. At least I had the decency to be honest with Ed, to show him and his mother, too, that I had no intention of marrying him, that I did not want his love! I spared Ed the humiliation of a “No” by not allowing him to ask me.

The heads of Mrs. Denny and Mrs. Radcliffe nodded a duet of amazement and sorrow. Next to Martyn as a husband for me, Mrs. Radcliffe favoured Eddie. The two old ladies had tried to remodel me. I was so difficult to mould. After a couple of years they gave up, concluding that after all I had really come to London seeking Art, not a husband. By this time they had got to love me a little for myself, had accepted me as an assorted bundle of good and bad. Everyone was much more comfortable when at last they realized that love won’t be pushed into contrary channels.

GOOD ED DID NOT
marry; he cared devotedly for his old mother till she died. Fred wrote out to Canada at the time of the World War, “Ed is over-age for active service but he drives himself beyond human limit on the home front to release younger men.”

NOW THAT MY SISTER’S
visit was over, now that Martyn had come and gone, foot troubles were straightened out, London explored, and now that I was comfortably settled in Mrs. Dodds’ boarding house for students in Bulstrode Street, it seemed that things were shaped for steady, hard work.

Besides all-day Life Class at the Westminster School of Art, I joined night classes—design, anatomy, clay modelling. Against London I was not quite so rebellious, though I did not like life in a great city.

I made a few friends in the school and some in the boarding house. Wattie was out in India. I plunged into work, not noticing that my face had become pasty; but, because I was always tired, I pushed and goaded myself harder. It was a long way I had come to get what London had to give. I must make the best of it, learn all I could.

I knew London well—not the formal sights only, but I knew her queer corners too. Mrs. Denny and Mrs. Radcliffe had shown me national astonishments, great sights, picture-galleries, Bank of England, British Museum, Mint, Guildhall, Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, and Windsor. I had canoed with Fred and
his mother up the Thames and down. London had instructed, amazed, inspired, disgusted me. The little corners that I had poked into by myself interested me most. My sight-showers would have gasped had they known the variety and quality of my solitary wanderings. It would have puzzled them that I should want to see such queernesses.

The orthodox sights I found wearing. The Zoo I never tired of, nor of Kew Gardens, St. Paul’s, the Abbey cloisters. I took endless rides on bus-tops, above the crowd yet watching intently the throngs of humanity. I went into the slums of Whitechapel, Poplar, and Westminster and roamed the squalid crookedness of Seven Dials, which is London’s bird-shop district, entering the dark stuffness of the little shops to chirp with bird prisoners, their throats, glory-filled and unquenchable, swelled with song even in these foul captive dens. There was Paternoster Row too—the street of books, Lincoln’s Inn Fields—the world of Dickens, haunted by Dickens’ houses, Dickens’ characters, as St. Bartholomew’s Smithfield was haunted by smell of fire and the burning flesh of martyrs. From the “gods” of the great theatres I saw Shakespeare’s plays, cried over Martin Harvey in
The Only Way
, roared over
Charlie’s Aunt
, saw Julia Neilson in
Nell Gwyn
. That play I saw first from the “gods”; afterwards I saw it from stalls with swell friends from home. I liked it best from the “gods,” distance dimmed the make-up, the sham. In the “gods” it was vision and carried me away.

So I looked at London from different sides, mostly hating it; cities did not sit on me comfortably. There were a few little tag ends I loved, insignificant things that most Londoners scorned, but the oldness and history of it made little appeal to me.

THERE WERE FIFTY-TWO
women and girls in Mrs. Dodds’ boarding house, every kind of student and all nationalities. Once I counted fourteen countries dining at one table of sixteen souls. Sometimes nationalities clashed but not often. Many foreigners were here to learn English. They learnt squabble English and slang as well as the pure language in our boarding house.

We had two large sitting-rooms; one was talkative and had a piano, the other was silent for writing and study. Occasionally I went into the silent room and always got into trouble for drawing caricatures and rhyming, not for talking. Another student would look over my shoulder, see some of our queer ones—giggles were forbidden in the silent room. I would be ejected. But, being out at classes most nights, the sitting-room students were not bothered by me much.

The few private rooms at Mrs. Dodds’ were small and very dismal. The other rooms were very large and were divided into cubicles by red and yellow curtains.

The girl in the cubicle next mine was a North Country farm girl, jolly and wholesome. We drew back the dividing curtains, so making our cubicles one, and had fun. We kept a big box of goodies and had feasts, making cocoa on a spirit lamp after night-school. My cubicle had a private window—windowed cubicles cost a shilling a week extra. There was a curtained alley down the middle of the big room; a window was at one end of the through alley, the door with a ventilator over it at the other.

There were five cubicles in our room. Three of us were permanent, the other two cubicles were let to transients. It was amusing to wonder who would come next into the transients’ cubicles. We had a Welsh singer, a German governess, a French mademoiselle,
some little Swedish girls. Often we had two Scotch sisters in the spare cubicles. They quarrelled over the shutting and opening of the public ventilator in the aisle and sneaked on each other when one thought the other asleep. Each had to stand on her bed to reach the hook of the ventilator using her umbrella handle. Stealthily, stealthily they sneaked, but the other always heard—clash! whack! whack! whack! went umbrellas over the curtain tops!

“Ye hurrt me,” Little Scot would whimper.

“A’ meant ta,” Big Scot would reply.

Bed springs squeaked impatiently, the three permanents were disturbed. Three “shut-ups!” came from their cubicles.

The food at Mrs. Dodds’ had no more variety than a calendar. You knew exactly what the kitchen saucepans were doing without the help even of your nose. Sunday’s supper was the peak of misery. The maids were out; we helped ourselves to the everlasting monotony—same old cold ham, same salad, same cake, same sliced pineapple. Why couldn’t the salad have been other than beet-root and lettuce? Why must the cake always be raspberry slab? Why not another canned fruit than pineapple? Everyone who could wangle an invite to sup out on Sunday wangled.

When it came to bed time, one cubicle would brag, “I had roast beef and Yorkshire.”

Groans!

“I had duck and green peas,” from another cubicle.

More groans.

“Must you gloat over your greed!” from a cubicle who had suppered at home. Bedclothes dragged over heads, there was savage, “goody-hungry” quiet.

WHEN WESTMINSTER SCHOOL
closed for the long summer vacation I, with other students, joined a sketching class at Boxford down in Berkshire. The quaintness of thatched cottages in the village delighted me. The sketching master was a better teacher than painter, I learned a lot from him. It was the first time I had sketched out-doors in England. Even across one field there was soft hazy distance, distance gradations were easier here to get than in our clear Canadian atmosphere and great spaces; everything was faded, gentle here. Colour did not throb so violently. English landscape painting was indolent seeing, ready-made compositions, needing only to be copied. I was very happy in my work, sorry when the summer ended.

The other students went home. I lingered, hating to leave woods and fields for chimney-pots and clatter. The weather grew sharp and a little wet. The master and his wife lived in another village. The man was drinking. He forgot his lesson dates, smelled beery. I stopped taking lessons from him and worked on alone.

I HAD GIVEN
the landlady my week’s notice. She came to me in distress.

“A lady from Westminster Art School wants accommodation immediate. ’Er wants comin’ afore weather’s broke. I got no ‘sittin’ ’ till you goes!—Plenty bedrooms, no ‘sittin’s.’ ”

“Who is the lady?”

“Miss Compton.”

“I know her; she may share my sitting-room, if it is any convenience for you and her.”

“Thanks, Miss.”

Mildred Compton came. At school I knew her only slightly; she was older than I, wealthy, stand-offish, prim.

“We will have little in common, but any way I shall only be in Boxford one week,” I thought.

Mildred Compton was a society girl. I decidedly was not. We ate together, sat together, worked together—amiable, not intimate.

“I’m going back to London tomorrow,” I said one night.

Mildred looked as if I had loosed an evil upon her.

“Oh! I did want to get two whole weeks sketching here, in Boxford.”

“Does my going make any difference?”

“Of course, I could not
possibly
stay in a strange village all alone. Nothing but villagers!”

“They are quite tame.”

“Queer things happen in out-of-the-way places!”

Mildred had been born condensed. Space alarmed her. She was like a hot loaf that had been put immediately into too small a bread-box and got misshapen by cramping. She was unaware of being cramped, because she was unconscious of any humans except those of her own class. The outer crowd propped her, but she was unaware of them. Away from crowds Mildred flopped.

I said, “I am in no hurry; I can stay another week if you like.”

“Would you? How very kind!”

She was glad to have me. I was glad to elude London a little longer. Gladness drew us into companionship in spite of our different upbringings.

Cows and cobwebby barns terrified Mildred as history and crowds terrified me. The weather broke, there was nothing but cow barns and sheds to shelter in against wind and rain while we worked. Smartly-dressed, lily-fair Mildred crouched on a camp-stool, set on a not too clean stable floor, hens scratching in the straw about her feet, a sow and litter penned in the corner, did seem unnatural, topsy-turvy, I’ll confess.

Mildred, hurrying her things into her sketch-sack, asking breathlessly, “Doesn’t the cow come home about this time, Motor?” Mildred saying, “I had no idea hens had such a vocabulary. The speckled thing has made six entirely different squawks in as many minutes. She makes me nervous, Motor!”

“Not as nervous as you make her.”

“Ouch! there’s a mouse!—behind that barrel—ouch, ouch!” She pinched her skirt in close.

“Mice much prefer the bran barrels to you!” I laughed.

She gathered up her things.—“Let’s go.”

“Motor, will you visit us for a week when we go back to London?”

“Me! Why, your life would scare me worse than the barn and hen scare you, Mildred. Besides…I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Clothes!”

“
You
would be inside the clothes, Motor. We don’t love our friends for their clothes. I want you to know my mother; I want
my mother to know you. She is an old lady, a little lonely, a very lonely old lady sometimes!”

“Thank you, Mildred, I’d be a sparrow in a peacock house,—still—if a washed-to-bits muslin dress won’t shame your dinner-table, I’ll come. I would love to meet your mother.”

I dreaded the ordeal, but I’d see London from another side. Yes, I’d go to Mildred’s.

THE COMPTONS LIVED
in a dignified mansion in Belgrave Square. Every house in that square was important, wealthy, opulent. A little park was in the centre of the Square; none but residents were permitted a key to the gate in its high iron fence. Belgravians seldom walked. Very few of the Belgrave Square people were aware of having legs, all owned horses. You could not drive in the little park; there were no roads, only trees, shrubs, grass, seats, and gravel paths.