Mrs. Radcliffe was the aunt of friends of ours at home. They did not give me a letter of introduction but wrote direct to her. They said to me, “Go and see Aunt Marion,” and their faces sparkled at her mention. So, while waiting for school to open, I went.
“I’ve heard all about you from my nieces,” she said and accepted me as you accept a letter from the postman. It may contain good. It may contain bad. There I was. She received me kindly but without demonstration.
Mrs. Radcliffe was a widow with one son who was almost middle-aged, a London lawyer. She was Scotch by birth and raising, had spent her married life in Canada, but by inclination she was pure London through and through. Almost her first question to me was, “And how do you like London?”
“I hate it.”
Her brown, starey eyes popped, grew angry, were hurt as if I had hit her pet pup. She said, “Dear me, dear me!” four times. “London is the most wonderful city in the world, child!”
“It is stuffy, hard and cruel—Canada . . . is . . .”
“Canada!” biting the word off sharp, “Canada is crude!”
She spread her hands as if she would drip all memories of Canada from her fingertips.
“London will soon polish Canada off you, smooth you, as your English parents were smooth. You are entitled to that. Make the most of your opportunities in London, child.”
“I am Canadian, I am not English. I do not want Canada polished out of me.”
“Dear me! Dear me!” said Mrs. Radcliffe, shifting the conversation to her Canadian cousins and nieces. “Come to me whenever you want to, child; I am always home on Sunday at tea time.”
We parted, feeling neither warm nor cold towards each other.
I went to Mrs. Radcliffe’s most Sundays. It got to be a habit. She liked me to come and I liked going. Usually I stayed and went with Mrs. Radcliffe and her son, Fred, to Evening Service in Westminster Abbey, then back with them to supper. Son Fred saw me safely home. Fred was nearly twice my age. He was kindly—teased me about Canada. In his mother’s presence he pretended to be all English. She had educated him so—English schools, Cambridge University, taking him back to England as a small boy at the death of her husband. Down deep Fred loved to remember his early boyhood in Canada. If he saw that I was dreary or homesick he would chatter to me about the woods and the Indians.
One night Fred said, “Tell me about that comic old Indian who threw a tombstone overboard at the spot in the sea where his brother was drowned.”
I had been feeling morose at England, homesick for Canada that week. We all started to laugh at the Indian story. Suddenly Fred, looking at me, said, “Now I see why the Indians called you ‘Klee Wyck’—means laughing one, doesn’t it?” After that the Radcliffes always called me “Klee Wyck”.
Mrs. Radcliffe’s Sunday tea-parties were always masculine for friends of Fred’s. Mrs. Radcliffe never asked girls; occasionally she had an old lady, a contemporary of her own. She gave out plainly that she intended to share her son’s affections with no woman during her lifetime. She never thought of me as a woman; besides, Fred liked girls stylish and very English. She was not afraid of his liking me.
Mrs. Radcliffe was my English backbone. Her kind, practical strength of character was as a pole to a vine. In all my difficulties I went to her.
Mrs. Radcliffe had a dainty, little old lady friend called Mrs. Denny, who also was a widow with a son a good deal younger than Fred. The two men were warm friends.
Mrs. Denny had three little white curls dangling in front of each ear and wore widow bonnets with long crêpe weepers dangling behind. She was fragile, pink and white, and lowest low Evangelical in religion. Mrs. Radcliffe leaned towards the High Church. The ladies never discussed degrees of ritual, but confined conversation to their sons and to London. Mrs. Denny was as rabid a Londoner as Mrs. Radcliffe.
She was as anxious to see “son Ed” happily married before she died, as Mrs. Radcliffe was determined that her son Fred should remain a bachelor. The ladies put their heads together and decided that, with some taming down and brushing up, I would be all right as a wife for Ed Denny. The first thing to be done was so to fill me with London that I would be quite weaned from the crudities of Canada.
Mrs. Denny said to me, “My dear, you stick far too close to that Art School; confinement is telling on your health. Now I tell you what we will do. Every Thursday my daughter Loo and I will call at your school at noon, take you out to lunch; then we will spend the afternoon exploring London. You will come back to dinner with us and Ed will see you home.”
“But my work, Mrs. Denny!”
“One afternoon a week will make no difference. There is more to be learned in life than Art.”
“Art is what I came over to London for.”
“Who knows, you may find love here, may never want to go back to Canada—”
“Oh, I hope not! I would not want that.”
She kissed me, very fondly pinching my cheek. Then her fingers took hold of a little cornelian cross that I wore.
“Don’t wear this as an ornament, child, it savours of R.C.”
She never said “Roman Catholics” out loud, only whispered, “R.C.” Once I saw her take a half a crown from her purse to tip a “Beef-Eater” who had conducted us round the Tower of London. Her hand was half out when the sun glinted on a little cross dangling from his watch chain. She slipped the half-crown back into her purse, substituted a shilling for it.
Under Mrs. Denny’s guidance I saw a lot of London. She always carted a little red Baedeker under her arm with the “sight” we were “doing” marked by a slip of paper. We stood before the sight and read Baedeker and tried to memorize the date. The wretched part of these excursions was Ed’s meeting us for tea. When we came out of the tea shops Loo and her Mother always took a quick, wrong turn on purpose, and left me alone with him for the rest of the time.
I would say, “Oh dear!” in dismay and start hunting them but Ed only laughed and said, “Don’t worry, Mother knows her way about London as well as the nose on her face. They will be waiting at home.” But it provoked me.
English women were horrid about this marrying business. They seemed to think the aim of every girl was to find a husband. Girl students “adored” their stuck-up, autocratic art masters, or their clergy or their employers. Men and women students did not work together in the Westminster Art School. I was glad. English husband-seeking girls shamed me.
Miss Green’s PG’s were all women—all silly. Shortly after I came to Miss Green’s two men came up to London to see me. One was an Englishman from Liverpool whom I had met out in Canada. The other was the ship’s doctor, an Irishman. The Englishman was a brother of Frank Piddington whom I had so detested as a child at home. Clifton had visited Frank in Canada. He did not ask me to marry him there, but came home to think it over and wasted a postage stamp on it. I could not have been more emphatic in saying, “No”, but, as soon as he found I was in London, he came from his home in Liverpool to see how I looked in English setting. He sat very uncomfortably on the edge of a chair in Miss Green’s drawing room. The PG’s were all in a twitter.
When Clifton had got as red as he could get, he said, “Shall we go out and see some sights?”
Anything was better than that horrible drawing room, so I said, “That would be nice . . . what shall we see?”
“I have always had a hanker to see Madame Tussaud’s wax works,” said Clifton.
Off we went. We punched the real policeman, asked the wax policeman the way, tried to buy a catalogue from the wax dummy, watched the chest of the Sleeping Beauty hoist and flop. Then we came to the head of a dark little stair and a man asked us for an extra sixpence. Over the drop into a cellar was the notice, “Chamber of Horrors. Expectant mothers and nervous persons warned.”
“Need we, Clifton?”
“Of course.”
Sinking into that dim underworld was horrid. Red glistened and dripped from a severed head in the guillotine, King Somebody was lying in a bath of red ink, having cut his veins in suicide, Indians were scalping, murderers murdering, villains being villainous. Once outside again, even the dirty London air seemed pure.
“What next, Clifton?”
“Well, I thought—Euston Station?”
“Must you be going so soon?” I said politely.
“Not for several hours yet . . . want to see the engines—very newest models, you know.”
I said, “Oh!”
Clifton was an engineer; engines were meat and drink to him. He ran from platform to platform patting the snorting brutes as they slithered panting into their places, calling them “beauties”, explaining their internals to me.
“You sit here. There is the four-thirty special. I must see her—the very, very newest.”
I sat down on a luggage truck while he ran and dodged and ducked. Then I saw him engage the engineer in conversation. They investigated every bolt and screw of the miserable thing. He came back exhilarated. “Going to let me ride home in the cab with him! Starts in an hour, time for tea first.”
We went to an A.B.C. and ate crumpets.
“Good-bye!” His hand was clammy with excitement, he gasped, “Very latest model!”
He grabbed my hand.
“It’s been splendid! . . . the Chamber of Horrors, the engines—you.”
I was relieved. It was so delightfully plain that this was to be our final meeting.
The Irish doctor’s ship was in port. The doctor came to London and to the Art School.
“Impatient young man downstairs in the Museum waiting to see our young Canadian.” Mr. Ford smiled at me and gave my arm an affectionate little pat. “Young man unable to wait till the janitor was free. Ordered my old bones to run upstairs and fetch you at once.”
He rubbed a rheumatic knee. Dear old man! Descending the stair we saw that the janitor’s amble was unusually brisk. He came lashing his feather duster and glowering down the aisle between the architectural tombs. There sat the little Irish ship’s doctor on the stomach of a “Great One”, impatiently kicking his heels against its stone sofa.
“Oh, doctor, their stomachs are sacred, please don’t!”
He jumped down.
“Shall we go into St. James’s Park and sit on a bench? It is quite close.”
It was a wide bench. The doctor sat down on one end and I on the other. Soon he was so close to my end of the bench that I fell off. I walked round the bench and sat down on its other end,—he did not look nearly so nice or nearly so well-bred in plain clothes. He was ill-at-ease too, trying to make conversation.
I said, “Don’t they squabble?” meaning the sparrows who, down in the dust, were having a battle over a crust. A dove swooped down and took the crust.
“Gentlest of all birds!—a dove—” sighed the doctor. He was slithering up the bench again.
“Doves squabble like the dickens,” I replied.
The doctor said, “Your tongue is losing its Canadian twist; you have changed in these few months.”
“I should hope so! Wasn’t I flabby and ghastly? Let’s walk.”
I jumped up just as his hand touched my arm. We strode silent three times round the duckpond.
“What time is it?”—Being late for dinner is one of the unpardonable sins in England.
“Good-bye.”
I held out my hand. He hurried South, I North, neither looked back. Was it his uniform, not he, that had been a little attractive? Perhaps doctors, too, prefer girls meek and sick.
But for that hint, I was grateful to the doctor. I was trying to speak more like the English, ashamed a little of what they ridiculed as my colonialisms. Bless you, doctor, for the warning! Unconsciously I’d tried to be less different from the other students,—I who had seen many Canadian-born girls go to England to be educated and come back more English than the English. I had despised them for it. I was grateful for the doctor’s visit and I swore to myself I would go home to Canada as Canadian as I left her.
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