Growing Pains (5 page)

Long rows of students sat with lap-boards which had straddled hind legs that rested on the floor. Other students stood at
easels drawing. In the centre of the room under a skylight were great plaster images on pedestals. More students were drawing from these images. I was given a lap-board in the first alcove, and a chunk of bread. A very dirty janitor was hacking up a huge crusty loaf; all the students were scrambling for pieces. The floor was littered with old charcoal-blackened crusts. Charcoal scrapings were everywhere. There were men students as well as women. All wore smocks or very dirty painting pinafores. I went back to the office with the Curator to buy charcoal and paper, then I took my place in the long row. On one side of me was a fair, sharp-featured, sweet-faced girl with long, square-toed shoes like a pair of glove boxes. She wore a black dress and a small black apron of silk with a pocket from which she kept pulling a little lace-bordered handkerchief to flip the crumbs and charcoal from her lap. On the other side of me sat a dirty old man with a tobacco-stained beard. Art School was not exactly what I had expected but this was a beginning and I was eager to attack the big plaster foot they set before me to draw.

“My name is Adda,” said the little girl in black with the flipping handkerchief. “What is yours?”

“Emily.”

“I was new last week. I come from Los Angeles. Where is your home?”

“Canada!”

“Oh how terrible for you! I mean coming from a foreign country so far away! How long were you on the sea coming?”

“Three days.”

“It took me less than one whole day. I’d die if I was farther than one day away from Momma and Poppa. I have a little sister too and a brother. I am dreadfully homesick. The School is very
dirty, isn’t it? Just wait till you see the next alcove and smell it, dead birds and fish, and rotting vegetables, still life you know. Shoo, shoo!” Her voice rose to a shrill squeal and the lace bordered handkerchief flipped furiously. A rat was boldly marching a crust to his hole under the pedestal of a near image. “Momma said I must be prepared to face things when I went out into the world, but Momma never dreamt there would be rats!”

Adda seemed much older than I but, after a while, I discovered that she was younger. She knew more about the world. Her mother had prepared her to meet any emergency, had told her how to elude evil and, if she could not dodge, then how to face it. Adda said, “Momma says San Francisco is very, very wicked!”

“That is what my guardian said too. It doesn’t look bad to me, does it to you?”

“Momma would never say it was bad if it wasn’t. She came all the way up from Los Angeles to find a safe home for me to live in. How did your mother manage to see you were safe fixed? You live so far away.”

“My mother is dead.”

“Oh!” Adda said no more but from that moment she took care of me, sharing with me Momma’s warnings, advice, extracts from Momma’s letters.

BEYOND THE LAST
alcove in the great hall was a little dressing-room which contained a cracked mirror, a leaky wash-basin, a row of coat pegs, and a twisty little stair leading to an attic. I was searching for still-life material. Being quite new to the school I did not know its queer corners. One of the High Society students, Miss Hatter, was powdering her nose, trying to make the crack in the looking glass divide her face exactly so that she could balance the rouge and powder on both cheeks. She spat out a mouthful of swansdown puff to say, “Lots of junk for studies up there,” and pointed to the attic.

That was the way in this old San Francisco School of Art, even a top-swell student was ready to help little new nobodies.

I climbed the stair and squeezed gingerly through a small door which the wind caught and banged behind me. The attic was low-roofed and dim. My sleeve brushed something that vibrated—a dry crackly rattle, some shadowy thing that moved. I put out my hand to feel for the door knob—the attic was nearly dark. I found myself clutching the rib of a skeleton whose eye-sockets poured ghastly stares over me, vacant, dumbing stares. The dreadful thing grinned and dangled its arms and legs. The skeleton hung rotating from a hook on the low roof. It was angry with my sleeve for disturbing
the stillness. I saw the white knob of the door-handle and, wrenching the door open, tumbled down the stairs screeching!

“Heavens, child, look what you’ve done to me!” Miss Hatter was dimmed by a blizzard of powder. “One would think you had seen a ghost up there!”

“Oh, worse—more dead—horrible!”

“Why, that’s only old Bonesy. He lives up there! One of these days you will be drawing him, learning what is underneath human skin and fat.”

“I couldn’t sit up in that spooky attic being stared at by a skeleton!”

“Of course not, Bonesy will come down to you. He loves little holidays and if he can make people’s teeth chatter so much the better. It is the only way he can converse with fellow bones. People are too cluttered with flesh for Bonesy to feel companionable with.”

I saw that we were not alone in the dressing-room. A pair of sad, listening eyes was peeping from behind the row of jackets on the rack. The eyes belonged to Nellie McCormick, a student. She came out when Miss Hatter left the room.

“Say, d’you believe in spooks? Up in the attic there is a table that raps. Let’s Therese, Lal, you and me go up at lunch-time—ask the spooks things. Lal has only one arm, so it makes seven hands for the table. Spooks like the number seven.”

“Couldn’t a two-handed person put just one hand on the table?”

“Wouldn’t be the same—got to be wholehearted with spooks or they won’t work.”

Bolting our lunches we hurried to the attic.

The rapping-table was close beside Bonesy. His stare enveloped us. Finger to finger, thumb to thumb, our hands spread themselves upon the table. We trembled a little in the tense silence—rats scuttled—an enormous spider lowered himself from the roof, swayed
above the circle of hands, deciding which, dropped on Lal’s one hand. Lal screamed. Nellie scowled, rats squeaked, the table tipped a little, tipped harder, rapped, moved sideways, moved forward, became violent! We moved with it, scuffling our feet over the uneven floor, pushing Bonesy crooked. All his joints rattled, his legs kicked, his hands slapped, his head was fast to the hook on the rafter but his body circled, circled. A city clock struck one. We waited until the cackle of voices in the dressing-room subsided. Then four nerve-flushed girls crept down the attic stairs.

NELLIE M
c
CORMICK’s
strangeness drew me as apparently I drew her. She had few friends; you found her crouched beside the pedestal of this or that great image, the Venus de Milo, the Dancing Faun, the Greek Slave. Nellie was always thinking—her eyes were such a clear blue there seemed only the merest film between her thoughts and you. Had she thought in words you could have read them.

We talked little when we were together, Nellie and I. One day turning to me sharply she asked, “Is your mother decent?”

“My mother is dead.”

“Lucky for you. My mother is a beast!”

THERE WERE MANY
different nationalities represented in the Art School. Every type of American; there were Jews, Chinese, Japs, poor and wealthy students, old and young students, society women, cripples, deformed, hunchbacked, squint-eyed. There was a deaf-mute girl with one arm, and there was a halfwit. Most of them had come to study seriously, a few came for refuge from some home misery. There was one English girl (Stevie), fresh from the Old Country, homesick. I was not English but I was nearer English than any of the
others. I had English ways, English speech, from my English parents though I was born and bred Canadian.

Stevie took comfort in me. Every morning she brought a tiny posy of mignonette and white sweetpeas and laid it on my easel-board. I smelled it the moment I rounded the screen. Its white sweetness seemed rather “in memoriam” to me. I felt as though I ought to be dead; but it was just Stevie’s way of paying tribute to England’s memory. She felt me British or, at least, I was not American.

Students never thought of having their overall work-aprons washed. We were a grubby looking lot. A few of the swell girls wore embroidered smocks. The very swellest wore no protection for their fine clothes, intimating that paint spots were of no moment, they had plenty more clothes at home.

A SHY GIRL WITH A
very red pigtail and a very strong squint came to the School. She was strange. Everyone said, “Someone ought to do something to make her feel better.” Her shyness made us bashful. It was agreed that the first one who could catch her eye should speak but the shy girl’s eyes were so busy looking at each other behind her nose that nobody could catch one. There was more hope of capturing one of her looks under the red pigtail than there was of catching one in her face.

A big circus parade came to San Francisco. We all climbed out of the attic window onto the flat roof to watch the procession. Poor “Squinty” slipped on a skylight and her leg, knitted into a red worsted stocking, plunged through the skylight to the market below, plunged right to the knee. Everyone held their breath while “Squinty” pulled her leg out with both hands. When we were sure the red worsted stocking was not blood, when we saw
that “Squinty” herself laughed, everyone roared, thinking how funny it must have looked below in the market to see a scarlet leg dangling from the roof. Laughing broke “Squinty’s” shyness; she brought her little parcel of lunch and joined us round the school stove after that. We always gathered about the Art School stove to eat our lunches.

ANNE SAID
, “Confound Jimmy Swinnerton!” and screwed her lunch paper hard and flung it into the stove. It flared and jammy trickles hissed out.

“Jimmy’s frightfully clever, isn’t he?” asked Squinty.

“Clever? Baa! Look at our morning’s work!” The floor of the big room was strewn with easels sprawled on their backs; smudged, smeared, paled, charcoal studies, face down or face up.

To roam in and out among the easels, a ball of twine unrolling as he went, was one of Jimmy’s little “jokes”; its point was to go behind the screen and pull the string. With a clatter every easel fell. Every study was ruined, every student infuriated.

Mrs. Major, a stout, motherly student known as “The Drum” sighed, “Poor orphan, he’s being ruined by the scandalous prices the newspapers pay for his cartoons, enough to send any lad to the devil, poor motherless lamb!”

“Mothers are just as likely to drive one to the devil as to pull them back,” said Nellie McCormick, bitterly adding, “I come to Art School to get away from mine.”

Adda’s lips tightened to pale threads.

“I suppose half of us don’t really come here to study Art,” said Sophie Nye.

“What do they come for then?” snapped Adda.

“To have fun and escape housework.”

“If my parents like to think they have produced a genius and stick me in Art School let ’em—passes the time between school and marriage.”

The speaker was so unattractive one wondered how long the interval between school and marriage might be for her.

“In my family there is a tradition,” said a colourless girl who produced studies as anaemic and flavourless as herself, “that once in every generation a painter is born into our tribe. Aunt Fan, our last genius, painted a picture and when it was hung in an exhibition she was so astonished she died! Someone had to carry on—rest of clan busy—I was thrown to Art.” She shrugged.

THE LITTLE HUNCHBACK
was crouched by the pedestal of the Venus de Milo. She rose to her full mean height, wound long spidery arms about the feet of Venus. “I adore beauty,” she cried, “beauty means more to me than anything else in the world. I’m going to be a great artist!”

We all drew long sorry breaths. Poor little hunchback, never had she won any other “crit” from the drawing master than, “Turn, make a fresh start.” Her work was hopeless.

Suddenly a crash of irrelevant chatter, kind, hiding chatter. A few had kept out of the discussed reasons for “our Art.” There was a general move to pick up the Jimmy-spoiled studies, set easels on their legs. Adda and I alone were left sitting beside the stove.

“Adda, were you pushed into Art or did you come because you wanted to?”

“I wanted to, and you, Dummy?”

I nodded. I was always “Dummy” in the San Francisco Art School. I don’t know who gave me the name or why, but “Dummy” I was from the day I joined to the day I left.

OF ALL THE CLASSES
and all the masters the outdoor sketching class and Mr. Latimer were my favourites.

Every Wednesday morning those students who wished met the master at the ferry boat. There were students who preferred to remain in the Art School and work rather than be exposed to insects, staring eyes, and sun freckles. We sketchers crossed the Bay to some quiet spot and I must say people
did
stare. Thirty or forty men and women of all ages and descriptions done up in smocks, pinafores and sunbonnets, sitting on campstools before easels down in cow pastures or in vacant lots drawing chicken houses, or trees, or a bit of fence and a bush, the little Professor hopping from student to student advising and encouraging.

Outdoor study was as different from studio study as eating is from drinking. Indoors we munched and chewed our subjects. Fingertips roamed objects feeling for bumps and depressions. We tested textures, observed contours. Sketching outdoors was a fluid process, half looking, half dreaming, awaiting invitation from the spirit of the subject to “come, meet me half way.”
Outdoor sketching was as much longing as labour. Atmosphere, space cannot be touched, bullied like the vegetables of still life or like the plaster casts. These space things asked to be felt not with fingertips but with one’s whole self.

ONE SULTRY PUBLIC HOLIDAY
the Art School was empty but not shut. Having nothing particular to do I followed my heels and they took me the daily way. I climbed the dirty Art School stair and found the big, drab room solemn with emptiness. Even the rats were not squeaking and scuttling; there were no breadcrusts to be scrimmaged for. Half-drawn, half-erased studies on the drawing-boards looked particularly like nothing. Everything had stopped in the middle of going-to-be. The parched stare of a big red tommy-cod and a half dozen dried-to-a-curve, smelly smelts sprawled on one of the still-life tables. On another table was a vase of chrysanthemums prematurely dead, limp petals folded over their starved hearts. Even the doings of the plaster images seemed to have halted before completing their objectives. The Dancing Faun had stopped in the middle of his dance. The Greek Slave’s serving was suspended, Venus was arrested at the peak of her beauty.