Growing Pains (18 page)

We used to go to tea at the Radcliffes’ every Sunday afternoon, stay on and go with her to the Abbey for evening service. One night Mrs. Radcliffe and I were putting on our hats in her bedroom. She returned unexpectedly to the sitting-room for her scarf
and surprised Martyn on his knees before the fire warming my cloak. He was patting the fur collar as if the thing were a live kitten. Mrs. Radcliffe was delighted.

“Dear me! So romantic, Klee Wyck! Don’t be a fool, child!”

“He’s a silly goat!” I snapped.

Ever after that night, when Mrs. Radcliffe spoke to me of Martyn, she called him the Knight of the Cloak.

MARTYN AND I
had one perfect day during his stay in London—the day we went to Epping Forest. For a long, long day Martyn promised me that he would not
ask
that day. You could depend on Martyn to keep his promises.

First we pretended that Epping Forest was our Canadian woods, but it was no good, there was not one bit of similarity. We gave up and sipped England’s sweetness happily. Here were trees venerable, huge and grand but tamed. All England’s things were tame, self-satisfied, smug and meek—even the deer that came right up to us in the forest, smelled our clothes. There was no turmoil of undergrowth swirling round the boles of the trees. The forest was almost like a garden—no brambles, no thorns, nothing to stumble over, no rotten stumps, no fallen branches, all mellow to look at, melodious to hear, every kind of bird, all singing, no awed hush, no vast echoes, just beautiful, smiling woods, not solemn, solemn, solemn like our forests. This exquisite, enchanting gentleness was perfect for one day, but not for always—we were Canadians.

We hired a pony and cart and drove through the straight
made
roads of the forest, easy, too easy. Soon we returned the pony and went on foot into the forest’s lesser ways. Here greenery swished against us, rubbed shoulders with old tree boles. It was good to
get our feet on the grass-grown paths and against the cool earth. When we came into the wider ways again, we took hands and ran. Martyn gathered some sprigs of holly for me in the forest.

The woman who hired us the pony said, “Keepers would jail ye shure, ef they sawed you with that there ’olly.”

It had never occurred to us we could not gather a twig. At home we might take anything we wanted from the woods.

Epping Forest was honey sweet—rich as cream. That was a perfect day, but too many days like that would have cloyed. We ate our picnic lunch among the trees, enjoying it thoroughly, but all the while there was a gnaw in us for wild, untrimmed places. This entranced, the other satisfied; this was bounded, the other free.

MARTYN AND I
made a great many mistakes in England not realizing that we were doing wrong according to English standards.

One evening we took a bus ride and at the terminus got off to walk in the cool. Tiring, we stepped inside a wide open gateway and sat down on a bench to rest. The place appeared to be a park, no house was in sight. Very soon a man came and walked round our bench several times, staring at us. He went away and brought another man. They both stood staring at us. Simultaneously they shouted, “How dare you!”

Seeing they meant us, Martyn asked, “How dare we what?”

“Trespass.”

“We are only resting a few moments, the gate was open.”

“Do you think select tennis clubs are for the resting of vagabonds?”

They drove us out and locked the gate. I had difficulty keeping Martyn cool.

“Hateful snob-country! Emily, come home,” he begged.

After Art School one late autumn day we went to walk in Kensington Gardens. It was one of Martyn’s
asking days
; they always depressed us.

“Come,” I said, “it must be near closing time.”

Martyn looked at his watch—“Half an hour yet.” We sauntered to the great gates; to our horror we found them shut, locked. Nobody could possibly scale that mile-high iron fence. There we stood between the dusking empty gardens and the light and roar of Piccadilly.

I said, “There is a keeper’s lodge close to the Albert Memorial, Martyn. He has a tiny gate. I’ve noticed it.”

We tapped at the door of the lodge and explained that, being strangers, we did not know about winter hours—this it seemed was the first day of the winter change; the time had been hurried on by half an hour. The man said vile things, was grossly insulting. Martyn boiled at the things the man said, the language he used before me. It was all I could do to hold him back.

“Don’t,” I whispered, “let us get out first.”

The man led to the little gate, stood before it with outstretched palm. We must tip before he would open.

“Lend me sixpence,” whispered Martyn. “I have only big coin in my pocket. I will not give the brute more than sixpence!”

In my flurry I took half a sovereign from my purse, thinking it was sixpence. The lodge keeper became polite and servile at once when he saw gold. I never dared tell Martyn about my mistake.

WE WERE ALWAYS
doing things that were right for Canada but found they were wrong in England.

“Martyn, I hate, hate, hate London!”

“Come home, Emily; marry me; you don’t belong here.”

“I can’t marry you, Martyn. It would be wicked and cruel, because I don’t love that way. Besides—my work.”

“Hang work; I can support you. Love will grow.”

“It is not support; it is not money or love; it’s the work itself. And, Martyn, while you are here, I am not doing my best. Go away, Martyn; please go away!”

“Always that detestable work!”

Dear Martyn, because he loved me he went away.

“MARTYN’S GONE BACK
to Canada.”

Mrs. Radcliffe’s eyes bulged.

“When are you marrying him, Klee Wyck?”

“Never.”

Mrs. Radcliffe jumped to her feet. “Little silly! What more do you want? Is it a prince you wait for?”

“I wait for no one; I came to London to study.”

THE WESTMINSTER ART SCHOOL
students did not discuss Art in general very much. They soberly drudged at the foundations, grounding themselves, working like ditch-diggers, straightening, widening, deepening the channel through which something was to flow—none were quite sure what as yet.

I never wrote home about my work nor did my people ask me about it. A student said to me once, “Are any of your people artists?”

“No.”

“Take my advice, then—don’t send any of your nude studies home.”

“Goodness gracious, I would never dream of doing so! Why, they’d have me prayed for in church. My family are very conservative, they suppose I only draw clothes. If my drawings intimated that there was flesh and blood under the clothes they’d think I’d gone bad!”

The other girl said, “My people wrote begging me, ‘Send us home some of your studies to see.’ I did. They wrote again, ‘Oh, please do not send us any more; we wanted to be able to show
your work to our friends—well, the only place we could hang them was in the bathroom.’ ”

MRS. RADCLIFFE AND FRED
were Art-lovers but they only liked or tolerated Old Masters or later work of the most conservative type. They knew every continental gallery by heart, had volumes of photos of the masterpieces of the world. The modern school of painting was as indecent to them as my nude studies would have been to the home folks. The Radcliffes had arty cousins, studying in Paris and in Rome. They talked about the Art exploits of these cousins till I was sick of them. Perhaps a little of my disgust came from jealousy, for I was beginning to feel that Paris and Rome were probably greater centres for Art than London. The Art trend in London was mainly very conservative. I sort of wished I had chosen to study in Paris rather than in London. What had decided me was the difficulty my tongue had always experienced in crawling round foreign words; even the difference in English and Scotch words from those we used in Canada was perplexing at times. The students ridiculed what they called my colonialisms.

Fred asked, “Klee Wyck, do you go often to the National Gallery?”

“I did at first, but not now. It is a dreary place. Besides, one wet day, when the rooms were dark and empty, I was alone in a big gallery. One of the guards came into the room and said something horrid to me. I have never been back to the National Gallery since.”

“The man should have been reported,” said Fred angrily. “Come with Mother and me next Saturday.”

I went. Mrs. Radcliffe and I stood, one on either side of Fred. Fred told us what pictures to look at, the date of each picture’s painting. Fred knew every date of every happening in the world. He knew why the artist painted the picture and how. The older
they were and the more cracked and faded, the better he loved them. He loved the Old Masters like blood brothers. If he had eaten and shaken hands with them he could not have seemed more intimate with the artists.

Every year the Radcliffes swallowed the Royal Academy show, a week of steady gulping, as if it were a great pill. They went on opening day, bought their catalogues and ticked off just how many pictures they had to do a day. They knew to a minute just when they would fi
nish
the Academy and were scrupulously conscientious, giving even the more modern canvases (though there were very few with even a modern taint in the Academy show) an honest stare before passing on. They liked sentiment, something that told a story. The more harrowing the story the better.
The Doctor
by Luke Fildes was a great favourite of theirs. They wracked themselves over the dying child, the agonized mother, the breaking dawn and the tired doctor. They liked
The Hopeless Dawn
too. I forget whom that was by. It showed the waiting wives and mothers in a fisherman’s cottage on the night after a terrific storm. And the Radcliffes liked Arnesby Brown’s cow pictures very much—billows of breath bursting from the cows’ nostrils like steam from tea kettles. The dark spots in the dewy grass where the milkmaid’s feet had smudged the wet, making the grass a deeper green, nearly brought tears to Mrs. Radcliffe’s eyes, though, of course, she would have said, “Dear me, dear me! No,
I
am not the least sentimental.”

I found on the whole that it was better not to discuss Art with the Radcliffes. We did not agree about London. We conversed a good deal about churches—not as to their degree of highness or lowness as much as about their mellow old beauty. Even the jump from high to low ritual was not so violent as that between
ancient and modern Art. Mrs. Radcliffe leaned towards the high but all churches were more or less acceptable to her. She and I both attended morning service at an unfashionable old church behind Westminster Abbey. It was called St. John’s and Canon Wilberforce preached grand sermons there. In the evening we went to Westminster Abbey and Fred came with us.

It provoked Mrs. Radcliffe that I would not cut morning school by an hour every day to attend intercession services for the troops in the Boer War.

CANON WILBERFORCE CALLED
for district visitors in the parish. Mrs. Radcliffe volunteered and said to me, “Klee Wyck, I think you should offer to take a district too.”

“Oh, I couldn’t, Mrs. Radcliffe. I think it is beastly to go poking into the houses of the poor, shoving tracts at them and patting the heads of their dirty babies, pretending you are benevolent.”

“That is not the idea. A district visitor simply calls in a friendly spirit and reports any cases of sickness or distress to the visiting curate, asks if they would care to have him visit them. Don’t let Art be a selfish obsession, Klee Wyck. Art is all very well, but be of some real, practical use in the world, too.”

“All right, I’ll try to swallow a lump of Westminster slum, but I don’t like it and I know the slummers will hate me.”

I was to visit two long stacks of three-storey tenements in a dirty court—deadly places. Each family’s quarters opened onto a long landing or balcony. Door, window—door, window, down the whole row, monotonous as “knit, purl, knit, purl.” All the doors had the most aggressive bangs, all the windows had dirty curtains.

When I knocked, the curtain waggled and a stare peered out. If they
did
open the door it was only so that they might bang it
harder against my nose, as they shouted through the keyhole, “Don’t want no visitors pokin’ round ’ere.”

“Mrs. Radcliffe, I tremendously loathe slumming!”

“Dear me! you have only just started, Klee Wyck. You will get fond of the unfortunate creatures by and by.”

So I sneaked out of school one afternoon every week, telling no one where I was going. I’d have died of shame if the students had known I was district-visiting in the Westminster slums. At last, after a week or two, a girl twice my own age in what she knew about life and half my span of years, opened a door after I had passed it and called, “ ’Ere you! Ma says, ‘Come,’ she’s took bad.”

I went into the tiny stiffing room. An enormous, roaring coal fire burned in the grate. Besides that in the tiny room there was a great bed, a chair and a half-eaten pie on a tin plate. The pie sat on the bed beside the woman; it was black with flies. The girl flipped the pie onto the floor. The swarm of flies rose and buzzed angrily up to the tight-closed dirty windows as if they were all going to be sick and wanted to get out immediately. I felt that way myself, especially when the morose, aggressive woman in the bed discoursed on her symptoms. She had dropsy and rolled her great body round in the bed so that I might hear her dropsy swish.

“Tell that there Curate feller ’e can come see me ef ’e wants ter.”

I came away and the filthy court seemed as a pure lily after that fetid room.

I rushed round to the door of St. John’s Church and got the address of the visiting curate from the notice board.

“Reverend be ’ome,” said the slattern who opened the door to me, adding, “foller!”

We went upstairs, the slattern flung the door back. The Curate was having tea at a littered, messy table, reading as he ate, his
book propped against the sugar basin. There was no fire in the room. Late afternoon had dimmed London; it was cold, drab and full of fog, yellow fog that crowded up to the window panes.