The Radcliffes’ Art and District Visiting

The Westminster Art School Students did not discuss Art in general very much. They soberly drudged at the foundations, grounding themselves, working like ditch-diggers, straightening, widening, deepening the channel through which something was to flow—none were quite sure what as yet.

I never wrote home about my work nor did my people ask me about it. A student said to me once, “Are any of your people Artists?”

“No.”

“Take my advice, then—don’t send any of your nude studies home.”

“Goodness gracious, I would never dream of doing so! Why, they’d have me prayed for in church. My family are very conservative, they suppose I only draw clothes. If my drawings intimated that there was flesh and blood under the clothes they’d think I’d gone bad!”

The other girl said, “My people wrote begging me, ‘Send us home some of your studies to see.’ I did. They wrote again, ‘Oh, please do not send us any more; we wanted to be able to show your work to our friends—well, the only place we could hang them was in the bathroom.’ ”

Mrs. Radcliffe and Fred were Art-lovers but they only liked or tolerated old masters or later work of the most conservative type. They knew every continental gallery by heart, had volumes of photos of the masterpieces of the world. The modern school of painting was as indecent to them as my nude studies would have been to the home folks. The Radcliffes had arty cousins, studying in Paris and in Rome. They talked about the Art exploits of these cousins till I was sick of them.

Perhaps a little of my disgust came from jealousy, for I was beginning to feel that Paris and Rome were probably greater centres for Art than London. The Art trend in London was mainly very conservative. I sort of wished I had chosen to study in Paris rather than in London. What had decided me was the difficulty my tongue had always experienced in crawling round foreign words; even the difference in English and Scotch words from those we used in Canada was perplexing at times. The students ridiculed what they called my colonialisms.

Fred asked, “Klee Wyck, do you go often to the National Gallery?”

“I did at first, but not now. It is a dreary place. Besides, one wet day, when the rooms were dark and empty, I was alone in a big gallery. One of the guards came into the room and said something horrid to me. I have never been back to the National Gallery since.”

“The man should have been reported,” said Fred angrily. “Come with Mother and me next Saturday.”

I went. Mrs. Radcliffe and I stood, one on either side of Fred. Fred told us what pictures to look at, the date of each picture’s painting. Fred knew every date of every happening in the world. He knew why the artist painted the picture and how. The older they were and the more cracked and faded, the better he loved them. He loved the Old Masters like blood brothers. If he had eaten and shaken hands with them he could not have seemed more intimate with the artists.

Every year the Radcliffes swallowed the Royal Academy show, a week of steady gulping, as if it were a great pill. They went on opening day, bought their catalogues and ticked off just how many pictures they had to do a day. They knew to a minute just when they would finish the Academy and were scrupulously conscientious, giving even the more modern canvases (though there were very few with even a modern taint in the Academy show) an honest stare before passing on. They liked sentiment, something that told a story. The more harrowing the story the better.

“The Doctor” by Luke Fildes was a great favourite of theirs. They wracked themselves over the dying child, the agonized mother, the breaking dawn and the tired doctor. They liked “The Hopeless Dawn” too. I forget whom that was by. It showed the waiting wives and mothers in a fisherman’s cottage on the night after a terrific storm. And the Radcliffes liked Arnesby Brown’s cow pictures very much—billows of breath bursting from the cows’ nostrils like steam from tea kettles.

The dark spots in the dewy grass where the milkmaid’s feet had smudged the wet, making the grass a deeper green, nearly brought tears to Mrs. Radcliffe’s eyes, though, of course, she would have said, “Dear me, dear me! No, I am not the least sentimental.”

I found on the whole that it was better not to discuss Art with the Radcliffes. We did not agree about London. We conversed a good deal about churches—not as to their degree of highness or lowness as much as about their mellow old beauty. Even the jump from high to low ritual was not so violent as that between ancient and modern Art. Mrs. Radcliffe leaned towards the high but all churches were more or less acceptable to her. She and I both attended morning service at an unfashionable old church behind Westminster Abbey. It was called St. John’s and Canon Wilberforce preached grand sermons there. In the evening we went to Westminster Abbey and Fred came with us.

It provoked Mrs. Radcliffe that I would not cut morning school by an hour every day to attend intercession services for the troops in the Boer War.

Canon Wilberforce called for district visitors in the parish. Mrs. Radcliffe volunteered and said to me, “Klee Wyck, I think you should offer to take a district too.”

“Oh, I couldn’t, Mrs. Radcliffe. I think it is beastly to go poking into the houses of the poor, shoving tracts at them and patting the heads of their dirty babies, pretending you are benevolent.”

“That is not the idea. A district visitor simply calls in a friendly spirit and reports any cases of sickness or distress to the visiting curate, asks if they would care to have him visit them. Don’t let Art be a selfish obsession, Klee Wyck. Art is all very well, but be of some real, practical use in the world, too.”

“All right, I’ll try to swallow a lump of Westminster slum, but I don’t like it and I know the slummers will hate me.”

I was to visit two long stacks of three-storey tenements in a dirty court—deadly places. Each family’s quarters opened onto a long landing or balcony. Door, window—door, window, down the whole row, monotonous as “knit, purl, knit, purl”. All the doors had the most aggressive bangs, all the windows had dirty curtains.

When I knocked, the curtain waggled and a stare peered out. If they did open the door it was only so that they might bang it harder against my nose, as they shouted through the keyhole, “Don’t want no visitors pokin’ round ’ere.”

“Mrs. Radcliffe, I tremendously loathe slumming!”

“Dear me! you have only just started, Klee Wyck. You will get fond of the unfortunate creatures by-and-by.”

So I sneaked out of school one afternoon every week, telling no one where I was going. I’d have died of shame if the students had known I was district-visiting in the Westminster slums. At last, after a week or two, a girl twice my own age in what she knew about life and half my span of years, opened a door after I had passed it and called, “ ’Ere you! Ma says, ‘Come,’ she’s took bad.”

I went into the tiny stifling room. An enormous, roaring coal fire burned in the grate. Besides that in the tiny room there was a great bed, a chair and a half-eaten pie on a tin plate. The pie sat on the bed beside the woman; it was black with flies. The girl flipped the pie onto the floor. The swarm of flies rose and buzzed angrily up to the tight-closed dirty windows as if they were all going to be sick and wanted to get out immediately. I felt that way myself, especially when the morose, aggressive woman in the bed discoursed on her symptoms. She had dropsy and rolled her great body round in the bed so that I might hear her dropsy swish.

“Tell that there Curate feller ’e can come see me ef ’e wants ter.”

I came away and the filthy court seemed as a pure lily after that fetid room.

I rushed round to the door of St. John’s church and got the address of the visiting curate from the notice board.

“Reverend be ’ome,” said the slattern who opened the door to me, adding, “foller!”

We went upstairs, the slattern flung the door back. The Curate was having tea at a littered, messy table, reading as he ate, his book propped against the sugar basin. There was no fire in the room. Late afternoon had dimmed London; it was cold, drab and full of fog, yellow fog that crowded up to the window panes.

A flickering gas jet was over the Curate’s head—it “haloed” him. He was ugly and so lean you saw the shape of his teeth through his cheeks. The Curate’s bed was draped with brown cotton hangings. Table, bed, chair, were loaded with books. He stopped chewing to stare at me, first over, then under, finally through his spectacles.

“Mrs. Crotch in Catfoot Court says you can go and see her if you want to. Here’s my district card; I can’t district-visit any more. It is beastly, how can you!”

The Curate’s face twisted into a sighing little smile. He stretched a bloodless hand and took my card. He said, “You are young,” and looked as if it were a long time since he had felt young.

“Mrs. Radcliffe, I’m through with slumming!”

“Oh, Klee Wyck!” She looked disgustedly at me.

“Yes, I have abandoned good works; they never were in my line. Ugh, those revolting creatures, rude, horrible! I am much sorrier for the Curate in his wretched lodging than for those slum people with their roaring fires, their dropsies, their half-eaten pies swarming with flies.”

“What do you know about the Curate’s lodging?”

“Went there, to hand in my district visitor’s card.”

“You went to the Curate’s room!”

“Had to give my card in, didn’t I?”

“You should have taken it to the Church House.”

“Church House! What’s that? I never heard of one, and goodness, my sisters were churchy enough, too.”

“All parish work is conducted through the Church House in London parishes. Workers never go direct to the clergy.”

“Well, I did and he was the miserablest human I ever saw.”

Mrs. Radcliffe assumed a sly simper. “I wonder what he thought of you?” She looked so coy, so hinting, I wanted to hit her. Mrs. Radcliffe twitted me so about that wretched visit to the Curate that I stopped going to St. John’s.

To Mrs. Denny I was frankly a disappointment. She had taught me London, pointed out the wrongness of Roman Catholicism, had even intimated that she was willing to share with me the love of her very precious son. And London’s history bored me! I continued to wear Mother’s little cornelian cross, to go to the Brompton Oratory on occasion to hear magnificent music. Most astounding of all I did not want Ed’s love! No wonder she was disappointed. At least I had the decency to be honest with Ed, to show him and his mother, too, that I had no intention of marrying him, that I did not want his love! I spared Ed the humiliation of a “No” by not allowing him to ask me.

The heads of Mrs. Denny and Mrs. Radcliffe nodded a duet of amazement and sorrow. Next to Martyn as a husband for me, Mrs. Radcliffe favoured Eddie. The two old ladies had tried to remodel me. I was so difficult to mould. After a couple of years they gave up, concluding that after all I had really come to London seeking Art, not a husband. By this time they had got to love me a little for myself, had accepted me as an assorted bundle of good and bad. Everyone was much more comfortable when at last they realized that love won’t be pushed into contrary channels.

Good Ed did not marry; he cared devotedly for his old mother till she died. Fred wrote out to Canada at the time of the World War, “Ed is over-age for active service but he drives himself beyond human limit on the home front to release younger men.”