Growing Pains (20 page)

The Compton family consisted of Mrs. Compton, her companion, an elderly lady named Miss Bole, who was a family institution—began as governess, continued as secretary till Mr. Compton died and was now companion to Mrs. Compton. Mildred divided her time between being a society girl and an Art student of Westminster. A staff of twelve servants attended to the creature comforts of the three women.

The Compton mansion was enormous and not half as cosy as one of our Western homes—thousands of stairs, no elevator, no telephone, no central heating. There were roaring grate-fires in every room but the halls and passages were like ice.

There was a marble swimming bath, a glass-topped billiard room, a conservatory and a walled garden through which I longed to run, unlock an arched doorway in the wall and pass into the mews where the Compton carriages lived. I hinted to
Mildred about wanting to visit the horses, but Mildred hinted back that it was not done by London ladies, and I did not want to shame Mildred before her family.

The servants ran the house like clockwork, but they upset me dreadfully. The maids were so superior, and I wanted to push the footmen out of the way to save tumbling over them, rushing to do things for me I had rather do for myself. They made me feel as stupid as a doll.

Mildred’s mother was beautiful. She was plump, with a tiny waist and great dignity, white hair, blue eyes, pink cheeks. I loved her the moment she took my hand and said, “So this is
our
little Motor.” I was always “our” little Motor to her.

Miss Bole was plump too, with bright brown eyes like a robin’s, black hair smoothed back. She always dressed in plain, rich black.

Belgrave food was marvellous, each help faded into your appetite without effort, like a tiny dream, not like the boarding-house stuff. This was food which, somehow, you never connected with a kitchen or a cook. The butler juggled it off the sideboard like a magician. A footman slid the silver dishes noiselessly to your elbow. Sometimes I remembered the heavy plates of heaped monotony slapped down in front of us by a frowsy maid at Mrs. Dodds’ student home and laughed to myself.

Besides three table-meals a day we ate snacks in other rooms—wine and biscuits in the library at eleven in the morning, afternoon tea in the drawing-room, a little something in the library before going to bed, the early morning tea in bed that destroyed your loveliest sleep and from which I begged to be excused.

When I asked, “Must I have that early tea, Mildred?” she exclaimed, “No early morning tea, Motor! Oh, you’d better.”

So a prettiness in a frilly cap and apron stole into my room very early. She pulled back the heavy silk curtains, lit a fire in the grate, laid a downy pink rug before it; on that she set a white bath, half pudding-basin and half arm-chair. On either side of the tub she stood a great covered can of hot water, draped over the top with a snowy bath towel. Then she fetched a dainty tea tray, put it on a little table at the bedside, and, bending close, whispered, “Tea, Miss,” and was gone. At Bulstrode Street yawns and groans would that minute be filtering through the cubicle curtains. The dressing bell—we called it the distressing bell—would clang, there would be pandemonium. And yet this wealth of luxury weighted me, not being born to it.

I had not dreamt that social obligations
could
be so arduous. After breakfast we marched soberly into the library to write notes, notes of inviting or of accepting. Every dinner, tea, house-party, call, must be punctiliously returned. I was rather sorry for these rich, they could so seldom be themselves; even their smiles were set, wound up to so many degrees of grin for so much intimacy. Their pleasures seemed kept in glass cases just out of reach. They saw but could not quite handle or feel their fun, it was so over-hung with convention.

When later I told Mrs. Radcliffe where I had been staying, her eyes popped. She said “dear me!” six times, then she exclaimed, “Fred, Klee Wyck in Belgravia!” and again, “dear me!” After that she had nothing more to say.

While the ladies attended to the answering of the morning notes, Miss Bole took me and the key and went into the Park in the centre of the Square. This was the time I felt I really had got ahead of London. In the middle of the little park, among the trees and bushes, you were quite hidden from London
and London was quite hidden from you. There was no traffic in Belgrave Square, only the purring roll of carriages and the smart step of dainty horses outside the railing of the little park. Even London’s roar was quite cut off by great, high mansions all round. Every house-front was gay with flower-boxes. There was no grime, scarcely any sparrows—only a few very elegant pigeons who strutted in the park cooing. Miss Bole and I watched them, we did not talk much but we liked each other.

Mildred had a married sister who despised me for one of Mildred’s “low-down student friends.” When she came to the house I was unhappy. She talked over my head and made me feel so awfully naked, as if I had no clothes on at all. I felt ugly, shy, shabby and nervous the moment she came into the house, and feeling that way made me so.

One night Mrs. Compton gave a dinner party. The married daughter came. I slunk from my bedroom in the old white muslin, to find Mildred waiting for me on the stairs. She looked lovely, dressed in a gown all colours yet no colour at all, just shimmer. She held her hand to me. “Come, my poppet!”

“Oh, Mildred, I am so shabby in this wretched old muslin!”

“Motor, you are
Spring
.”

She caught me up and kissed me. Suddenly I did not care about the old muslin any more. Mildred had sent Spring bubbling up into my heart, I knew she loved me for me, not for my clothes.

We “Noah-arked” into the dining-room. The men’s coat tails swished so elegantly, the silks of the women rustled and billowed. Then came Miss Bole in her rich black, very quiet and clinging to her arm was me, just a little cotton rattle. Mrs. Compton placed me close to her. I watched, shy and very quiet till Mrs. Compton said, “Tell that little Indian story you told us at lunch, Motor.” My
face burned—I thought I should have died, but to please her I tried. It went all right till a beastly footman slithered a dish of peas close to my elbow and made me jump—the peas upset. The married daughter began to talk and laugh very loud. I wanted to hurl the peas, along with a frightful face, at her. I wish now that I had.

“LOOK AT MY FACE,
Mildred.”

“It is rather greeny white, isn’t it? It’s those stuffy rooms in the Westminster Art School, Motor.”

“Is there any part of England where one can work outdoors all the year round?”

“At St. Ives there is an Art Colony who work outdoors nearly all the year.”

“I’m going there.”

Mrs. Compton ordered a great hamper to be packed for me. In it were four bottles of wine, a great plum cake, biscuits, nuts and fruit—the kind she knew I liked. I was to stay at the Temperance Hotel in St. Ives until I found rooms.

I went to say goodbye to Mrs. Radcliffe and to Mrs. Denny. Mrs. Radcliffe was a little glad; I think she resented the Comptons having me. Perhaps she thought Mrs. Compton would make me soft with too much petting. I did love Mrs. Compton, but I could not have got along without Mrs. Radcliffe’s bullying and strength.

Mrs. Denny shook her head. “My dear,” she said, “the R.C.’s are strong in Cornwall, beware!” She frowned at the little cornelian cross I still wore in spite of her protests. The next day Ed staggered to Belgrave Square carrying two huge books, one under each arm—
Roman Catholicism Exposed, Volumes I and II
!

“Mother wants you to take these with you to read in your spare time.”

“I shan’t have any spare time, I am going to St. Ives to work like blazes, Ed. I have more luggage now—work things and food—than I can manage.”

Kind Ed tucked the volumes under his arms again saying, “I understand.” I liked Ed better that moment than I ever had before, loyal to his mother—understanding both to his mother and to me.

AS OUR TRAIN
slithered through the small prettiness of Devonshire I was angered. My parents had so lavishly praised its beauty to us when were children. I wondered if after many years in Canada it would have seemed as small and pinched to them as it did to me seeing it for the first time—something one could fold up and put in his pocket, tiny patches of grass field hemmed about with little green hedges.

When we came to Cornwall, the land grew sterner and more jagged—stony fields, separated by low stone walls, stunted, wind-blown trees, wild but not with the volume of Canada’s wildness. Cornwall’s land had been punished into tameness, but her sea would always be boisterous, stormy. From Devonshire to Cornwall the land changed; Devon was, as it were, pernickety check, while Cornwall loosened to broader plaid.

My luggage looked sneaky and self-conscious wheeled into the Temperance Hotel. I knew Mrs. Compton’s red wine blushed in its middle. I tried to forget its presence as I entered the Hotel, a sour-faced structure down in the old town. Never having stayed alone in a hotel before, I entered timidly.

The old town of St. Ives lay low, its rocky edges worn by the
violence of the sea. On the hillside above was a smarter, newer St. Ives, composed of tourist hotels, modern houses and fine studios of artists who had inherited wealth or made names—few students could afford the heights. Most students other than snobs and the ultra-smarts lived down among the fisherfolk in the old town. Fisherfolk packed themselves like sardines in order to enlarge their incomes by renting rooms to student lodgers. Many of the old sail lofts were converted into studios.

A few students lived at the Temperance Hotel and from them I made enquiry about studios.—Did I want
work
or studio teaparties?—Work? Then go to Julius Olsen’s studio; he worked you to the last gasp!

To Julius Olsen I presented myself.

JULIUS OLSEN’S STUDIO
had been an immense sail loft overlooking the sea. The massive, blue-eyed Swede carelessly shoved my fee into the sagging pocket of his old tweed jacket, waved a hand towards the beach and left me stranded like a jelly fish at low tide, he striding off to criticize canvases which some boy students were turning from the walls.

“I’ll show you,” said an Irish voice at my elbow.

Hilda was the only girl student in the room.

“You will want to outfit?” she asked.

“I have my kit.”

She looked at it with disapproval.

“Too light—‘Jo’ insists on weight,”—she exhibited her own equipment.

“Gracious! That easel is as heavy as a cannon and that enormous brass-bound paintbox! I can’t, I
won’t
lug such heaviness.”

“Jo bellows if you cross his will,” warned Hilda.

“Let him roar!”

She led me to the open front of the studio. Great doors folded back, creating an opening which was wide enough to admit three or four fishing boats abreast. A bar was fixed across the opening, we leaned on it looking at the busy fisher life buzzing on the beach below. Morning fish market was in progress. Buyers raced down from London on swift express trains, bartered for the night’s catch, raced it back to London’s markets. Not Cornwall ate St. Ives’ fish, but London. In St. Ives you could not buy so much as one herring.

Shrill-voiced fish-wives bargained, children yelled, cats yowled. Every house-roof, every street, every boat, swarmed with cats.

Each wife had seven sacks,
Each sack had seven cats,
Each cat had seven kits!

This was obviously the
cat
St. Ives of our nursery rhyme book.

The tide was far out. Looking down on it all, I was suddenly back in Mrs. Compton’s drawing room standing before Moffat Linder’s picture,
St. Ives’ Beach
. Sky, sea, mud flats were shown but he had left out the bustle and the smell.

“Now,” said Hilda, “to the sands and work!”

“Not work on those sands amid that turmoil!”

“Jo insists—white boats in sunlight—sunlight full on the canvas, too.”

“Jo will find me in a shady street-end sitting with my back to the wall so that rubbernoses can’t overlook.”

Hilda’s head nodded forebodings beyond wording. “I’d advise that you don’t let him see you work sitting,” was her parting head-shake. Leaving me to my fate she went off, lugging her heavy kit.

STUMP, STUMP, I
heard Jo’s heavy footfalls on the cobbles and trembled, not scared of Jo, the man, but of Jo’s artist eye, a splendid eye for colour, space, light. Nervous as a cat, I waited.

“Sitting to work!”

“Bad foot, sir.”

“Huh! I said the sands, didn’t I? Sunshine on sea and white boats. With the first puff that thing will blow out to sea,” pointing to my easel. “Get the weighty ‘Standard.’ ”

“Too heavy to lug, sir. Mine is weighted. See!”

I showed him a great rock suspended in a paint rag and hung from my easel top.

“If you please, sir, the glare of sea and white sand blind me with headache.”

Jo snorted, strode away—adoring English students never argued with their masters. He came back by and by, gave a grunt, made no comment and was away again! That was my first day of study under Julius Olsen. We remained antagonistic always. I believe each admired the other’s grim determination but neither would give in.

The St. Ives students were a kindly lot—ready to give, ready to take, criticism. We numbered ten or more in the studio. Three Australian boys, a Frenchman, an ultra-Englishman, and an ultra-Englishwoman, (swells rooming up on the hill), a cockney boy, the Irish girl, myself, and the nondescript old women who are found in most studios just killing time.

We met in the big studio at eight each morning to receive “crits” on the work done the afternoon before. Olsen gave us criticisms three times a week, his partner, Talmage, the other three days. What one taught the other untaught; it was baffling but broadening. After “crit” we dispersed. The master came wherever we were working to examine our work on the spot. From eight in the morning till dusk we worked outdoors, in all weathers except during hurricanes. The great studio doors were shut then and we huddled under the studio skylight and worked from a model. But St. Ives was primarily a school for land- and seascape painting.