Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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Hill Street, and Kass came up from the Girls’ High School. They felt there were too many “barbarians” in Miss Swainson’s. Diddy was a sweet-looking girl, rather chunky, like Kass. Unlike Kass, however, she took many things for granted. She had a fund of sympathetic and romantic feeling, and this drew the two together; though Kass sometimes hurt her by unexpected changes in attitude which she was unable to understand.
Diddy hadn’t noticed what Miss Butts did when the last bell rang at school; but Kass threw a little sidelong glance at Mary. Mary looked away; she was thinking privately that Kass wasn’t bright — that she never could spell. She must be difficult to teach, just sitting, wondering whether to agree, or not; it was disconcerting to the teachers.
Kass was watching Miss Butts who had changed into a riding habit. A horse was waiting at the door. She mounted, and rode grandly up and down Fitzherbert Terrace before everyone.
2
Mrs. Henry Smith expected to stay at school until late, even though she had her home as well as the school to manage. She had married beneath her socially, and “had a hard life.” It made her abnormally strict, though she was really a kind and a just woman. In some matters she was in advance of her day: she introduced school-journalism, and encouraged a group of girls to form their own club, and to write and edit their magazine. But she believed in rules and in implicit, unquestioning obedience. The girls had to march like soldiers, to rise in a body when she, the Head Mistress, entered the room — irrespective of what they might be working upon at the moment. She was a straight, tiny, determined-looking woman with a sense of humour rigidly concealed beneath a sense of duty. She built her schools so firmly upon discipline that one which she had owned went to pieces when her successor tried “to rule by love.” She believed in personal discipline, too. One girl who mumbled was kept standing on the platform for hours, reading slowly and distinctly: yet the “discipline” never improved her enunciation.
Mrs. Henry Smith remembered Kathleen Beauchamp because she began and edited the first magazine at Miss Swainson’s. It was called The School, and was to remain as a permanent institution, though the name was later translated into Maori. Kathleen was the leader of a group that met upstairs, under the eaves (rather influenced by Little Women perhaps) and keeping the “literary club” and its activities secret. The School was composed of jokes collected from grown-up papers and “original” stories. Kathleen’s was a story about a dog:”The door opened and in-flu-Enza.” The first issue (for club members only) was copied in Kathleen’s irregular, rather distinctive hand, on large double sheets of foolscap. Several of the girls kept their copies for nearly thirty years because of one contributor who they believed would “do something” in the future; but as she never was heard of again, the copies of The School were gradually destroyed. There may be one in existence, somewhere, but it seems doubtful.
Mrs. Henry Smith thought Kathleen was “a thundercloud” among the other girls of the family. Vera was pretty and affectionate. Several times she showed affection for Mrs. Smith; but there never was a sign of it from Kathleen. Jeanne looked like Alice-in-Wonderland — quaint and dainty. The Beauchamps were affectionate among themselves:”an affectionate family.” But Kathleen seemed to her “a very unpolished diamond, while the others were too polished.” She was “plain,” “a surly sort of a girl”— “imaginative to the point of untruth.” Even the other girls used to say of her stories:”Oh, wait till to-morrow and it will be different!”
Kathleen didn’t conceal her dislike when Mrs. Henry Smith returned her compositions with severe criticism. Like Miss Butts, she told her they were poorly written, poorly spelled, and careless. Then she added a few points of her own: they were “too prolific” — she wrote so much that she spoiled her writing— “though it had something original about it.” Kathleen had been given two subjects for compositions.”One,” said Mrs. Henry Smith, ‘was good. The other wasn’t because it was about school life, and no girl should write about school girls: she put herself in too much.”
Long afterward, the Head Mistress explained:”The family was very conventional; Kass was the outlaw. No one here saw that the unconventionality and rebellion had something behind it. Nobody, I think, understood that or her. They just tried to make her conform: reprimanded her for errors in spelling, carelessness, and poor writing. But that was ‘the method’ in those days.”
Yet it was not all suppression. When Kathleen arranged and directed “Mrs. Jarley’s Wax Works,” a school benefit for the Polynesian Missions, some of her newly awakening life was allowed wings. She was influenced by her reading, of course: but she added her own inventions. Excitement was added to the performance by a visitor from England (the Rev. Charles Prodgers) who didn’t conceal his amusement and delight in Kathleen Beauchamp’s unique exhibition. He was perhaps the first to realise something of the promise in her individuality. Before he returned to England, he wrote in her album:
“With every good wish for ‘Mrs. Jarley’s’ future success.”
3
Mr. Robert Parker taught Kathleen pianoforte for two years. Vera was the better musician, the better student of music; but even thirty years later he remembered Kass— “Well … very well. I can see her sitting there at the piano … her very attitude. It is remarkable how she noticed details at her age. The pale picture of Rubinstein (there it is) did hang above the mantelpiece, though there was no inscription; and the picture of Solitude was over the piano. She has the room down exactly in that — what shall I call it? — that very sentimental little piece about me in The Wind Blows.”
But Mr. Parker was renowned for sentiment. He leaned over a little as he talked, rubbing together those pale, slim, well-groomed hands. His slightly stooped shoulders seemed bent rather from hovering above his guests — so courteously, so solicitously — than from any stoop of age. His beautiful long hair was brushed smoothly back. It gleaned with its own light. His features, aquiline; his mouth, full and a trifle loose; but it was his eyes — the meaning glance in them. In the “quiet cave” of his studio, a music lesson with Mr. Parker could be a sedative, it could be a cocktail. Unimportant the composition:
“ ‘Nellie Bly
Caught a fly
Put it in her tea!”
“This exquisite morceau was in my pianoforte Tutor, words and all. Who could have composed it?”
He had the rare power of transmitting his own delight in music; and music was his life — taught at Miss Swainson’s School. He was on the staff until he was nearly eighty years old; even then he was as courtly as ever; and even after that his own students still felt that his look had some special meaning, some significance for them, alone.
Miss Mary Swainson herself took music lessons from him for years; and she sang to his accompaniment at St. Paul’s. The girls even told how the sexton had overlooked them when they were rehearsing one evening and locked them in the Cathedral.
If her singing class dragged, the girls wished Mr. Parker would look in, for then all lessons stopped; and they could have a little chat while the Mistress swept forward with her best outside-of-school smile. Kass glanced sideways at Diddy, when she saw the door open; but Diddy looked back at her, smiling pleasantly and raising her brows in a question:”What do you mean?” Mary looked discreetly down her nose.
4
There was one other at the Terrace School who claimed Kathleen’s special notice. Martha-Grace,”Princess Maata” among her own people, was a half-caste Maori girl a form or two above Kass at school.
The Maoris, from the first, had been accepted in New Zealand on an equal social basis with the English, and were absorbed into the white population. They became a kindly, a courteous and an amiable people, with a leaning toward beauty, a flair for fantasy, a greater receptivity. They took on most of the physical characteristics of the English — a fair skin, blue eyes, often — but their eyes were limpid; they had a softer, warmer look — a