Growing Pains (9 page)

One day as I came in from school Mrs. Tucket beckoned to me from the doorway of her bedroom. The wind was busy in there, tearing the covers off the bed, whirling the pincushion and clanking the window blind.

“Listen!” In the middle of the turmoil a cruel, tearing breathing.

“Kirkby’s!”

I bent over the bed. The child did not know me.

“Get a doctor quick!”

“But doctors are so expensive,” she complained.

“Quick.” I stamped my foot.

She got a homeopathist, not that she believed in homeopathy but this doctor-woman was a friend of hers and would not charge. We moved a cot into the unfurnished front room of the cottage and took turn and turn about sitting on an apple box beside it watching.

Little Kirkby battled with death in this grim setting. The crisis came one night just as I had turned in for my four hours of rest.

“Come!”

The cottage was full of moonlight. She had switched out all the lights so that Kirkby should not see the blood. There was hemorrhage. We worked in and out between shadows and moonlight, doing what we could. The exhausted child dropped back on the pillow like a wilted snowdrop. The woman yawned.

“I’ll take forty winks now, your bed I think, handier should you need me.”

As she passed through the living room she switched on a light and stood, wrapped in admiration of the sketch the dealer had praised. It was framed and hung on the wall. I heard a deep, deep sigh, then blackness, the sounds of sleep. Moonlight flooded the bare room. The life of the child flickered. Kirkby in the bed was
scarcely more tangible than the moonlight. I sat the night out on the apple box. “Art I hate you, I hate you! You steal from babies!” I cried and would not go to school next morning. I did not go back for a whole week. I told stories and sang to Kirkby feeling very tender towards the child and bitter towards Art and the woman.

SUMMER VACATION CAME.
I did not like summer vacation. I was compelled to spend it at Auntie’s in San Jose. Auntie undertook to discipline me for two years each vacation, the year that was past and the year to come. Between Aunt and me there was no love.

Mrs. Tucket was giving up the cottage. She was joining a friend in Chicago. They were to run a boarding house. She was full of plans. Kirkby and I watched her packing, Kirkby, a mere shadow child, clinging to his chair to keep the wind from blowing him away. Mrs. Tucket held up his little patched pants. The wind filled them; their empty legs were vigorous with kickings. Kirkby laughed.

“My pants are fatter than me.”

The woman pressed the wind out of the pants and tumbled them into the trunk.

“I am not going to Chicago!”

She banged down the trunk lid.

“What has happened?” I asked. “All your arrangements are made.”

“The cards say I shall not go!”

When I returned from San Jose the cottage was for rent. I never heard of Mrs. Tucket, her Art or little Kirkby again.

EXIT MRS. PIDDINGTON,
and vice and terror faded from my consciousness. Free, unfearful I roamed San Francisco interested in everything, most particularly interested in my art studies. Suddenly I was brought face to face with Piddington horrors again.

I was taking guitar lessons from an old German professor. The frets on my guitar needed resetting, the professor said.

“Take to de’ musics-man he sharge you big moneys. My fren’ dat make fiddle he do sheep for you!”

He wrote an address on a card and off I started, my guitar in a green cloth bag. I called in at Adda’s on the way. It was Saturday afternoon. We often spent the half holiday together.

“Where are you going?”

“To get my guitar fixed.”

“I’ll come for the walk.”

“Hurry then, Adda, it dusks early.”

On and on we tramped. It seemed a very long way but we asked direction now and again from people we met. Yes, we were going in the right direction but—they looked at us queerly as if they wondered.

By and by the smells of the sea and tarry wharf smells met our noses. Ah, here was the name on our card. We turned into a wide, quiet street. It had an abandoned, strange look. In front of us was a great building with a sign, “Telegraph Hill Foundry and Storage.” Telegraph Hill! “Why, Adda, this is the awful, wicked place Captain pointed out as we came through the Golden Gate, the place I was never to go near.”

“It does look very queer,” said Adda. “Shall we turn back?”

“No, this is number 213. Ours will be two blocks further on. It is best to show our business but it is almost too dark to see the numbers over the doors.”

We walked the two blocks in silence except that I said, “Adda, let’s walk in the middle of the street.”

Suddenly a burst of light from street lamps and simultaneously over every door came a little red twinkling light. There were big shop windows dazzlingly bright on either side of the way. In them were displayed, not goods but women, scantily clad women, swaying in rocking chairs and showing a great deal of leg. Some toyed with fancy work, some simpered, some stared with blank, unseeing eyes, all rocked restlessly.

“Momma, Momma!” gasped Adda again. “Shall we turn back?” she asked of me.

My head shook. I shook all over because of Mrs. Piddington’s horrible tales.

“Here’s the great mock fiddle. I’ll go in and show why I came. Oh, Adda!”

I was quaking. “Hold the door wide, Adda, don’t let them shut me in! Don’t, don’t!”

Adda braced, spread her members like a starfish, clinging octopus-wise to the floor and to all sides of the door’s frame.

The little shop was full of men and smoke. There was only one dim light in the place. An old man pushed forward to take the green bag from my arms. He took the guitar out, touched her strings lovingly.

“She is sweet-toned,” he smiled down at me, “but these frets, ach, they tear the little fingers! She is ready Monday.”

He laid the instrument upon his work shelf.

Adda released the door posts and grabbed me as if I had just come back from the dead. Momma herself could not have been more protecting towards me, more belligerent towards my danger than was dear, staunch Adda.

We hurried into the middle of the street with firm stepping, determined not to break into a tell-tale run. We nearly burst ourselves for wanting to draw deep breaths and not daring to do so for hurry and worry. We turned the corner and met a policeman. I never knew a policeman could look so beautiful, so safe.

“Momma, Momma, if you knew!” whispered Adda, to me. “Of course you won’t go back for the guitar, Dummy?”

“I must, Adda. It belongs to my big sister. You see if I went home without it I would have to explain—and then…!”

“I’ll go with you, but I won’t tell Momma till afterwards. Of course I couldn’t deceive Momma. I must tell sometime, but after will be best.”

ONE MORNING I CLIMBED
the old grubby stair of the Art School to find everything in excitement and confusion. Clumps of students congested the Oriental Rug Room, groups of students were in the hall, the office was full. The old Curator was tugging at his beard harder than ever, shaking his head, nodding answers or ignoring questions as excitement permitted.

Supposing it to be some American anniversary, I strode through the hubbub into the work hall. Here I found professors, model and janitor in close confabulation around the stove. Obviously some common interest had levelled rank and profession. The only unmoved person I could see was the wooden-faced, stone-hearted painter of still life, the woman who ordered her birds smothered so that their plumage should not be soiled by blood for her studies, the woman who painted tables full of fish with eyes that ogled even when dead and whose stiffened bodies curled and smelled in spite of the fact that she kept trying to revive one last glitter by slopping water over them periodically. On a still-life table stood a forsaken vase of red roses, sagging, prematurely dead, no water. Stevie dashed in to stick her daily posy of mignonette and sweetpeas on my easel board—dashed
out again. What! Stevie too? Then this was no American do, this excitement. Stevie would not be so unpatriotic as to recognize an American occasion! In bustled Adda tying the strings of her little black silk apron.

“Aren’t you excited, Dummy?”

“Excited? What about?”

“The move, of course!”

“What move?”

“Dummy, you
are
dumb! The School move, of course.”

“Is the School moving?”

“This very day. Look!” She pointed out the window, where men were tearing down our chimneys, ripping at our roof.

“Time this dilapidated dreadfulness disappeared,” scorned Adda. “A mansion! A perfectly clean mansion fallen from the sky! Oh, won’t Momma be pleased!”

“Adda, do tell me what it is all about!”

“Well, our lease was up and the market and Art School building is condemned. Haven’t you seen how the poor old Curator has torn at his beard the last week? I wonder he did not pull it out! No place for his School to go! Then this mansion falls straight from heaven! Mrs. Hopkins could not take it with her, could she? So she dropped it from heaven’s gate. Down it tumbled stuffed with her best wishes for Science and Art!”

Adda’s sharp little teeth bit on her lip.

“Oh, Momma, I’m so sorry, you would not, I know, like me to mix heaven and Art. But Dummy, no more smells, no more rats! Lovely, lovely!”

I frowned.

“I’m sorry. I love this old place and don’t want to move.”

“Oh, Dummy, imagine anybody loving this old School.”

Adda’s lace-bordered hanky swished, a rat scuttled.

I said, “It is the underneath of it that I love.”

“Underneath! that disgusting market!”

“Not exactly, though the market with its honest old roots and chickens and cheese is all right, it is comfortable, commonsense. But I was not thinking of the market, Adda. It is the space and freedom we have here in this old School. We can splash and experiment all we like. Nobody grumbles at us. Our work is not hampered by bullying, ‘Don’t, don’t.’ We sharpen charcoal, toss bread crusts. Nobody calls us pigs even if they think we are. Art students are a little like pigs, aren’t they, Adda? They’d far rather root in earth and mud than eat the daintiest chef-made swill out of china bowls.”

Adda shuddered.

“Dummy, you are … ! What would Momma say? Momma never eats pork, not even bacon, and she can’t bear the mention of a pig!”

“What will our poor rats do, Adda?” At that moment a couple of them were grumbling rattily about there being no crusts on the floor.

“Where is this mansion, Adda? You are not romancing, are you?”

“No. It’s at the top of Pine Street Hill, and we are to pack up and climb immediately. Hurry, Dummy, uproot or they’ll have the roof off you and you’ll be left sitting under the sky with a lap full of your beloved rats.”

The janitor waddled mournfully past lugging Bonesy. His face was turned distastefully from the skeleton’s grin.

In little struggling groups bristling with paintbrushes, rolls of drawing-paper, boxes of charcoal, bags and cardboard boxes, the students, some in smocks, some carrying aprons, some carrying
wet canvases, climbed Pine Street Hill. Some chattered, some were curiously quiet. There were many backward looks towards our old School which men were hurriedly ripping down.

THE HOPKINS MANSION
was built of stone and was circled by a high stone coping and was beautified with lawns and flowerbeds. There were two pair of doors, massive outer ones of metal with iron openwork. The inner doors were of solid oak. There was a doorkeeper in livery, too. The pubic were admitted at a charge of fifty cents apiece to see the mansion that had been bequeathed to Science and Art. We were not the old San Francisco Art School any longer. We were now the Mark Hopkins’ Institute of Art and were housed on the top storey of the mansion in high, light rooms with clean walls and polished floors. No sploshings were permitted and there was not one rat. The still-life tables were of polished wood and there were no studies of dead things. The glittering tables were set with studies of hothouse flowers arranged among silk drapes and in silver, brass or crystal vases. We looked through gleaming plate-glass windows clean over the top of San Francisco, above murk, squalor, grime. The mansion was too new even for sparrows to have built in the chinks of its walls.

Starting from the Art School landing was a little winding stair rising to a glass tower from which you could view the whole world. At noon we went up there to eat our lunch. We all had little fancy lunch-baskets now instead of paper bags to carry our lunches in. We washed our aprons every few weeks and ate elegantly up in the tower, huddled into a little group, backs to the view because from the top of Pine Street Hill we could see over such vast space that its emptiness upset the emptiness of our stomachs. So first we lunched, and then we looked. Most often our
looks wandered down Pine Street to watch how the old School sank and sank, for, as well as being space-sick up in the Hopkins Tower, we were a little homesick.

We were a great deal more elegant here but we were not so cosy or so free as we had been in the old place. From the old School we had seen nothing but chimney pots and a little sky, yet somehow I think we had felt life deeper. Looking across this vastness we were more apt to dream, to float, than to study.

The two lower floors of the mansion were thrown open to the public. They had vast echoing halls and chambers, unfurnished, bare. The woodwork was massively carved, the floors inlaid. The ceilings had flocks of cherubs flapping across them, painted by Italian artists who had come from Italy specially to cherubize Mrs. Hopkins’ mansion. The cherubs were clothed in nothing but tangles of pink and blue ribbons.

One great hall was hung with pictures. Of these pictures I only remember one. It was by a Russian painter and was called
The Blowing from the Guns.
The painting was a very large canvas, you could not escape the horror of it. The great double door of the picture gallery was directly in front of the mansion’s main entrance and it always stood open. The picture hung directly facing anyone who entered. Every time you came into the building you saw that picture. It was before you all the way down the hall till you turned up the Art School stair. Its subject matter was a long row of cannon and across the mouth of each a man was bound awaiting the signal, “Fire,” which would scatter him to bits. I shall see the dreadful agaony of those faces as long as I live. You held your breath all down the hall waiting for the signal.