The doctor found my foot had a dislocated toe, a split bone—results of an old injury. His treatment made no improvement.
“We will have to amputate that toe,” he said. “I do not care to do it, though, without the consent of your home people; your general condition is bad.”
“To write home and wait an answer will take so long, do it this afternoon. I want to get back to school. Please do it quick.”
“Not so fast. The fact is I do not care to take the responsibility.”
“It’s my foot. I have no parents.”
“Tell cousin Marion to come and see me,” said the surgeon. Mrs. Radcliffe went.
“I will accept the responsibility,” she told her cousin. “If that toe must come off, do it.” To me she said, prefacing her words as usual with “dear me!”—“My cousin is a good surgeon. If he says amputation is best, it is. You don’t mind, I suppose, don’t feel sentimental over a toe?”
“Goodness no! I only want to get back to work.”
“Of course a toe is not like your hand or head. I’ve told Cory to go ahead,” said Mrs. Radcliffe.
The foot went wrong. I suffered cruelly. Every day Mrs. Radcliffe tramped clear across London in fierce heat to sit by my bed. She kept a vase full of red roses, velvety red ones with the glorious smell, always fresh by my bedside. She sat close, rocking in a rocker. The toe of her shoe struck the bed with every rock, each vibration was agony, but I would not cry out. I bit my lips and my cheeks were scarlet.
She said to the nurse, “Klee Wyck looks fine! Such bright colour! That foot must be doing splendidly!”
“She is suffering,” said the nurse.
“Oh, well! The restless creature—doubtless she bangs that foot about all night.”
I longed to yell, “Turn the cruel old thing out!” and yet, when Mrs. Radcliffe had gone, I turned my face into the pillow crying, counting the hours until she would come again. She was my strength; without her I was jelly.
Mr. Ford sent his daughter with flowers. Aunt Amelia Green came, wagging her pinched little head, saying, “I told you. . . . You should never have left my house. My Canadian nieces were the same—wayward.”
Wattie had won her diploma. She was down in Cambridgeshire, at her Father’s vicarage. She wrote, “Come to us, Carlight, the moment they will let you leave the nursing home. You will love the vicarage garden, the wonderful old church. I will take such care of you.”
When Wattie left London I had moved to Mrs. Dodds’ big boarding house for students.
The vicarage garden was a tangled wilderness, the church and vicarage tumbling down. The Vicar had passed his eightieth year and was doddery. He was, however, still possessed of a beautiful intoning voice, so the Church retained his services. Wattie from her seat in the choir, her sister from the organ bench, agonizingly watched their father. After the Vicar had filled the solemn old church with his voice, reading lessons and intoning the service, his strength was spent. Tottering up the pulpit stair, gasping out the text of his sermon, his eye roved vaguely over the congregation. A halting sentence or two, a feeble lifting of his arms to bless, the congregation was dismissed to its dinner.
But for the old man’s prattle Sunday dinner in the vicarage would often have been very sad. One after the other his three daughters taking me aside said, “Father ought to be retired,” but, in the next breath, “Isn’t his intoning voice rich and mellow?” They were proud of him, but the Church was not being fair to the congregation.
The vicarage garden was high-walled with red brick circled by venerable elm trees in which was a rookery. Daws and starlings chattered around the disused stable. The Vicar could not afford to keep a horse. He had an old gardener, an old cook, and an old nurse to maintain as well as himself and three daughters. The daughters helped to eke out the living expenses by teaching drawing and music and by running his house. The cook was too old to cook, the gardener too old to dig, the nurse too old to be bothered with children; besides, the vicarage nursery had been empty for the last fifteen years.
Wattie, scouring the unpruned rose bushes for a house posy, said to me, “Our gardener is beyond work, besides which he is lazy and drunken.”
“Why don’t you sack him?”
“Carlight! Sack an old servant! In England servants remain with us until they die.”
“What do they do?”
“Cook can still peel potatoes. The gardener sweeps up the paths, when he is not too drunk to hold the broom. Nurse dusts the nursery and makes our underwear all by hand.”
“Can’t she run a sewing machine?”
“Our family wearing machine-made body linen! Oh, Carlight!”
“Dozening hand stitches when you could million better, stronger ones by machine! Life’s too short! Come to Canada, Wattie.”
“Canada! Why, Carlight? England is the only place in the whole world to live.”
“Your brothers have all gone abroad, haven’t they?”
“Men are different, more adventurous. The world needs educated Englishmen. All my seven brothers went to college. It meant pinching a bit at home. They have all done so well for themselves in the Civil Service—India, China . . .”
“Why don’t they do a bit for you girls now, make up for your pinch? Why should everything be for the boys and men in England?”
“Mother brought us up that way—the boys first always. The boys have wives now.”
“I’m glad I’m Canadian! I don’t like your English ways, Wattie!”
“Being English is my greatest pride, Carlight.”
A narrow, walled way led from the side door of the vicarage to the church vestry, a sombre interlude in which to bottle secular thoughts and uncork sacred. Through a squeaky, hinged gate you could pass from vicarage garden to churchyard, from overgrown, shady green to sunny, close-clipped graves. Some of these had gay posies snuggled to the tombstones. Some stones staggered and tipped, almost as if they were dancing on the emerald turf. Everything was so sombre about the vicarage and church it made the graves seem almost hilarious. Gaiety accompanied you through the churchyard, but, at the threshold of the church the merry spirit fell back into the sunlight, sky, air of the graveyard. The church was too dead, too dreary for that bright spirit. It belonged to life, to perpetual living.
“Rebellious Carlight!” Wattie would say, with a shake of her head, and a few swaying rocks to my shoulders. “Rebellious little Carlight!”
There had been moments when I nearly envied Wattie’s uneventful calm at Art School. We worked easel-to-easel. Wattie’s work was stable, evenly good. Sometimes my work was better than hers, sometimes worse. She neither lifted nor sank. She had enough South Kensington certificates to paper the Vicarage. I had none.
She knew Art History from the Creation to now. She knew the Elgin Marbles and the National Gallery, the South Kensington Museum, all the Art treasures of London. She knew the anatomical structure of the human body, bone for bone. She stepped with reverent tip-toeing among the stone couches of the “Great Ones” in the Architectural Museum, but neither our Art nor our hearts had anything in common other than that we loved one another deeply. Each went her own way unfalteringly, staunch to her own ideals. When our ideals clashed, each jumped back into silence, because we wanted to keep both our friendship and our own opinion.
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