Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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water; the slim tree-trunks glistened whitely, like stems beneath water, too; small roots twining lacily over the bare ground were like roots washed bare at the bottom of the sea. Did they merely imagine that the bell bird sounded different here? That it was like a bell heard across lonely water?
In spring, the fern-like dark beech leaves with flaming Iceland poppies, and boronia — little tight bunches heaped in the huge baskets with daphne — were sold down on the corners of Lambton Quay.
People stood talking, gesturing with unwrapped flowers.
As she pinned boronia on her coat, Kathleen thought that nothing could bring the woods down into the city as that beech fern — as those minute bronze bells of boronia, splotched with their own sunlight and with a fragrance like none other on earth. On early mornings, when the flowers had just come heavy with scent from the Hutt Valley, she stood pressed against the windows of flower shops and “gazed into them as small boys are supposed to gaze into pastry-cooks.”
Nothing could so bring back New Zealand spring — (azalea bushes in the Botanical Garden, beds of cinerarias at Tinakori Road, or flower baskets on Lambton Quay) — as the heavy scent of boronia:
“I’d like to send you seeds from the far corners of the earth and have a boronia plant below the studio window. Do you know the scent of boronia? My grandmother and I were very fond of going to a place called McNab’s Tea Gardens, and there we used to follow our noses and track down the boronia bushes. Oh, how I must have tired the darling out! It doesn’t bear thinking about.”
In their own garden at No. 75 there were “glimpses,” too:
“‘I remember ruffling the violet leaves…. Do you remember that some of the pears we found used to have little teeth marks in them?’
“‘Who bit them?’
“‘It was always a mystery’.”
As, years later, at Hampstead, she had “moments” of that same faëriness intruding over the borders from another world:
“There is nobody in the house, and yet whose is this faint whispering? On the stairs there are tiny spots of gold — tiny foot-prints.”
The Green Gate hid the enchanted garden — for how long? Yet (as Marion remembers) the day came when they must know:
“Cautiously we pulled the latch and pushed it slowly open. There was our garden, a riot of colour, but there also was the dragon in the form of a gardener. With a roar of rage he advanced toward us with a rake in his hand, and we needed no second warning. We simply flew up the hill, not stopping once until we were in my mother’s sitting-room, where cambric tea awaited us and thin slabs of bread and butter with many coloured ‘hundreds and thousands,’ so beloved of Kass and me.”
Kathleen was nearly twelve, then; her childhood was almost over. Her father was arranging to send the three girls to the more “exclusive” Terrace School on Fitzherbert Terrace. Marion was going to the South Island to a boarding school. Kathleen saw Marion for the last time at an exhibition, where she went with Gran and Marie to watch Marion dance a minuet with three other girls. Already she was conscious of the breaking away of things which had bound her — conscious of new tides rising in her. It was less than half realised; she only knew a certain strange stirring.
She said good-bye to Marion:”You lucky girl to be going away to school!”
CHAPTER VI
THE TERRACE SCHOOL
“When does one really begin a journey — or a friendship — or a love affair? It is those beginnings which are so fascinating and so misunderstood. There comes a moment when we realize we are already well on our way — déjà.” — K. M. (Letters.)
1
WHEN the three Beauchamps entered the School in Fitzherbert Terrace, in June, 1900, their Wellington High School friends felt that “the girls looked down on them.” Miss Swainson’s Terrace School was a step up the social ladder. Also, it was an advance to a new terror.
“Ole Underwood” would come singing from Wadestown, hide behind the wind-blown evergreens that lined the centre of Fitzherbert Terrace, and jump out at the children, chasing them shrieking into school. He was a prospector — a gold-hunter from early settlement days — no one knew just what. Swarthy — more like an Italian than an Englishman — he always wore a postman’s cap; and gleaming out from his long black hair was a pair of little gold earrings. While he was let alone he paid scant attention to other people — just drifted down from the hills, through the town to the Chinaman’s Shop, where he sat among cases of fruit and argued in a loud voice with the quiet, discreet Chinamen. He had one sensitive point: he couldn’t endure a whistle. Yet he seemed magnetised back and back again to the Terrace where the small brothers of the Terrace School girls: Leslie Beauchamp, Cheviot Bell (who were in the Primary School) strolled along nonchalantly, whistling to themselves. Then with a howl of rage he would tear bark, twigs, anything, from the trees that concealed him, and rush after them. In consequence the girls arrived at this “exclusive” school flushed and panting and dishevelled, until Mr. Beauchamp — who was a visiting Justice of Peace — had him “charged as a rogue and a vagabond to serve some time in jail.”
The school had been built at 20 Fitzherbert Terrace in 1878 by Mrs. Swainson. Three years before the Beauchamp girls entered, Miss Mary Swainson had taken charge of it, but she was not the stuff of which Head Mistresses are made; and the following year she engaged Mrs. Henry Smith as Head Mistress. Mr. Robert Parker taught music — though Miss Swainson, herself, led the singing — and Eva Butts taught elocution, arithmetic and geography.
Two of these served Katherine Mansfield as characters later. All four were distinctive individuals; and — as afterward at Queen’s College in London — Kathleen Beauchamp was more interested in their individuality than she was in the instruction they dispensed. She easily pierced through to their “secret” as she sat in the Form, gazing up at them while they taught.
Eva Butts was a young school-mistress at the age when she would be “just one of the girls” — a trifle out of their ken, of course — a leader, glamourous, radiating light. She was one of those who must hold court, must have an entourage.
Often she arrived a trifle late in the morning — late to prayers and to class. She made an entrance, sweeping her train behind her. Her purple tweed was flecked with white, giving it a dusty look; it fitted close, showing her figure.”Figures” were in style then; and though she was thin, her tweed was cut to rise and fall in the proper places. Her long strands of hair were wound round and round and round about her head; and very light eyelashes gave her blue eyes a wide child-like candour in surprising contrast to the studied sophistication. She was one of the few people to whom light eyelashes can add distinctiveness.
A certain Mary — who was “the model pupil” while Kass was “the rebel” — looked discreetly down at her paper as she sat at “attention.” Though her expression would never have betrayed her, she was thinking privately that she didn’t believe Eva Butts knew much, or that her mind was on her teaching; she went out to dances in the evening; her mind must be on them — not her work.
Kass was leaning on her elbows, chin in her hand, looking up through her lashes at Miss Butts. She didn’t trouble to veil her slightly ironic smile; she scorned “attention” as humiliating.
Yet she tolerated — even sometimes liked — Miss Butts, who didn’t attempt to make her conform, like Mrs. Henry Smith. Miss Butts “tried to correct her comps” and told her “they never are on the subject assigned”; yet she was sometimes amused by them, though she thought Kass untidy and careless and lacking concentration. Kass was one of her “circle” — rebellious spirits, six or eight — rebelling against what they considered narrowness and provincialism.