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 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 straggling 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 public 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. Humanity was closer down there than up here. 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 in bits. I shall see the dreadful agony of those faces as long as I live. You held your breath all down the hall waiting for the signal.
There was an elevator in the mansion but the students were not allowed to use it. We climbed the three flights of stairs. The professors might use the elevator if they elevated themselves. An elevator, even in a mansion, was very, very modern and very unusual. In those days, few office buildings downtown even had one.
One morning just as I started to climb the three flights of stairs the ogle-eyed professor shouted, “Here, little girl, I’ll run you up!” I was terrified of the elevator but more terrified still of the professor. I had not the courage to say, “Please, I’d rather walk.” So I stepped in and we began to rise. Then we stuck high up between the walls. The elevator was heavily upholstered in crimson plush. There was no light. In the smothering plush dark all I could do was cower in a corner of the seat trying to elude the professor’s arms which threshed, space-hunting for buttons or handles or something to pull or push and start us going.
“Damn!” he said, “I do not know how to work the thing!”
It was dreadful! Would they ever miss us? If they did, I wondered would they cut the cable and flop us into the cellar to break on the stone floor? All of a sudden we shot up, the door of the elevator clanked, I bolted down the hall like a rabbit, and have always hated elevators since.
The mantels, banisters and newel posts of the mansion were all elaborately carved. There were all sorts of cunningly devised secret places in the mansion, places in which to hide money or jewels. (Mrs. Hopkins could not have had much faith in banks.) In the dining room you pressed a certain wooden grape in a carved bunch over the mantel and out sprang a little drawer. In the library you squeezed the eye of a carved lion and out shot a cabinet. A towel rack in the bathroom pulled right out and behind it was an iron safe. There were panels that slid and disclosed little rooms between walls. We delighted in going round squeezing and poking to see what would happen next. All the treasure places were empty. Mrs. Hopkins had cleared them all out before she willed the mansion.
The public roamed from room to room and stared; of course they did not know about all the strange corners that we knew. Occasionally “a public” would stray up our stairs and gaze at us as if we had been part of their fifty cents’ worth. They need not have thought us so extraordinary for in the mansion we were quite ordinary, quite normal. If it had been the old school, well . . . but no sightseers had ever thought of climbing those dirty stairs. Art students were just part of the squalor that surrounded the market. Nobody was interested in them! But now that we were stupid and elegant and an institution people wanted to see how we looked.
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