Reasons

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 McCormick’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.