Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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top floor of the College Hall.
Miss Wood had undoubtedly been efficient in her day — but now, in the transition period, she clung to the traditions of the past — the traditions of her mid-Victorian prime, and to the girls, restless at the beginning of a new generation, her ways seemed stern beyond measure. Feeling this restlessness, yet not understanding its cause,”Woodie” was, perhaps even stricter than she had been twenty years previously; in addition, she was severely handicapped by impediments of advancing age.
There were two assistants besides the four maids : little “Robin,” Miss Robinson, rather like a spry bird. When, finally, she married one of the men who brought things to the back door, and thus escaped, the girls were glad for her; though her marriage turned out to be unlucky. When “Robin” left, Bell Dyer, the Beauchamp girls’ young aunt, took her place to help Miss Wood in the Hall. Bell Dyer was thought beautiful by those who knew her; and she had ways, such as tucking a scarlet rose into her lovely red hair, which seemed exotic to the girls. Her hair was memorable :”it was the colour of fresh fallen leaves, brown and red with a glint of yellow.” But in New Zealand this beauty had gone unappreciated. Bell had no chance for wide acquaintance there — in particular, no opportunity to meet eligible men. As Kathleen looked back, she felt sorry for Bell Dyer. When ships had come into Wellington harbour, and there were officers to dinner she remembered how Bell stood where the lamp threw a light on her beautiful hair. She was stationed in the Beauchamp home for a while, helping grandmother Dyer; then she trained to be a nurse, but the threat of tuberculosis made nursing impossible. Now here she was in London as a sort of chaperon for the three girls; yet she had her own life to consider.
The second assistant to “Woodie” was “Hatchet,” old unlucky Miss Hatch, an inoffensive person who crept about her own unimportant business, but very much in the girls’ way for no fault of her own: her cubicle was one end of the only bath-room. It was partitioned off with half the bath-room window in Miss Hatch’s room; and the girls were continually having to run up to see if “Hatchet” was in when they wanted to bathe. Not that she would be likely to spy out of her half window; yet they somehow felt happier if they knew she was not there — though they didn’t mind if she was in when they practised — the piano being in the bath-room, too.
The four maids had so much work caring for forty girls and a big house that they were harried and abrupt. One, a grim person responsible for washing the girls’ hair, was notorious for leaving it soapy and stiff. It was a time when girls were still proud of their long, lovely hair, and it was still the fashion to wear it in a soft veil falling over the shoulders.
Such was the personnel of the boarding-house. The only other person responsible for the welfare and happiness of the boarders, apart from the academic staff, was the Lady Resident, old Miss Croudace, who belonged to the same régime and the same period as Miss Wood. She was assisted by the porter, Alfred, who became, in retrospect, at least, a quaint and legendary figure.
2
Every morning on their way to Queen’s College, the “compounders” saw two figures slowly moving far down Wimpole Street, but they were too familiar to attract attention. Every morning for years they had gone down Wimpole Street to 45 Harley Street — one leaning upon the arm of the other. They were the Baker girls, May and Ida, daughters of Colonel Baker, a Welbeck Street doctor. They had been “compounders” at Queen’s since Ida was seven.
The two were utterly unlike. May, crippled from an accident in infancy when Colonel Baker was stationed as army doctor at Burma, was alert, decisive; Ida Constance, tall, bending toward May, as May leaned upon her arm, moved with the abstract air of one whose spirit is absent. It was not that she was dreaming, or living in some past or future episode real or imagined; not that she lived in Burma while she walked down Wimpole Street. It was rather that she had not yet lived anywhere — that she waited in a state of suspension. Since there were in her the elements of a living, growing being, she herself was dimly conscious of this void. It may have been a vague awareness — unfocussed as yet — a diffused hunger of the soul. She was unself-conscious, and almost wholly undeveloped at fourteen; but she turned, magnetised, towards the vitality in certain strong personalities. Through them, when she could make the connection, she had momentary glimpses; in those instants she found fulfilment; but the contact gone, she lapsed again into abstraction.
There was a time, later, when she and Katherine rode together in taxis which Ida provided as a convenience and a luxury; and Katherine — looking up through the gloom to the bright little taxi mirror — saw Ida’s anxious eyes staring out, dark from her white face, and cried:”Oh! Your face looks like a lemon!” The pale oval seemed to hang suspended in the dark taxi, and she was frightened of it — or not — as the moment seized her. Sometimes she was afraid to look. Yet she forced her chin up until her eyes met the mirror, just as she forced herself to drain every experience — lovely and fearful — to take its full meaning into her until she had passed through it; and all the while a part of her was looking on, aloof — seeing it as a writer — recognising it as “material.” Years afterward, in The Daughters of the Late Colonel, she found use for this moment :
“And Constantia, pale as a lemon in all that darkness, said in a frightened whisper, ‘Done what, Jug?’”
Katherine always felt she “could write endless stories about her.”
At other times, all was taken for granted. The tall girl, with a mane of fair hair to her waist, solicitous of the sister, was rather like a nun, with her abstract air — like a Sister of Charity. She had promised her mother that she would care for May; and Ida would have given anything for her mother’s sake — understanding, as she looked on, her mother’s protective love for May, and May’s return of passionate devotion.
Mrs. Baker was the centre of their home; she might have been said to be the whole meaning of it during the time the girls were in the primary school at Queen’s. Dr. Baker was “difficult,” but his wife seemed to understand him, and he to depend completely upon her. In her relation to the children she was unusual in her day. Most English homes of their station kept on the nurse, and took a governess; their friends the Paynes, whose father was a physician in Welbeck Street, seldom saw their parents; but Mrs. Baker, from preference, filled both positions herself, besides managing the house. She dismissed the nurse when the children were still small, and she sat with them, teaching and reading to them and kept the circle very close. Each of the four had a special need of her — her husband from his tempera- ment, May to supplant her physical disability, Ida to fill her indefinable seeking. The brother was still a little child.
During the January holidays of 1913, about the time that the Beauchamp family sailed from Wellington “home” to England, Mrs. Baker went with her children for a holiday in the country. Before the January term opened again, she had died from typhoid fever.
3
It was curious, since they were to be life-long friends, that it was Ida Baker (then living in a little high room at the college, since her mother’s death) who happened to be the Monitor called to take the three Beauchamp girls to their room. They climbed to to the top of No. 41, fumbled through the dark boot passage, on to the top floor of No. 45, above the French room, overlooking the Mews. It was next to the bath-room, convenient, if not the perfect setting, for Kathleen’s practising.
The girls found their room curtained into three divisions, but since they were sisters the curtains were not drawn to make the usual cubicles. Each girl, in her division of the room, had a bed, a washstand and mirror, and a wall space which she might decorate to her taste with photographs and postcards.
To these new girls it was thrillingly novel, at first — though they disdained to show it. Their air was considered critical; in fact, even scornful; they had their mother’s hauteur, then, with her fastidiousness; and their attitude toward the college surroundings had much to do with their popularity later. Vera was grown-up and sedate, as she would always be; Marie, glowing and cheerful, still dressed like her younger sister. She was so dissimilar in expression though in contour like her — very plump. Kathleen’s bright look was often lost in a dark brooding; but she