Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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bent over them, their weary, pale faces looked into mine with the same depth of wondering, strange, fearful perplexities that I have sometimes seen on the face of a little child. It was as though Spring had entered my room. But with her wings broken, and soiled, and her song quiet — very quiet. This evening I have sat in my chair with my reading lamp turned low, and given myself up to thoughts of the years that have passed. Like a strain of minor music they have surged across my heart, and the memory of them, sweet and fragrant as the perfume of my flowers has sent a strange thrill of comfort through my tired brain.”
It is too deliberately romantic, too manifestly a chosen attitude to be itself evidence of more than indulgence in a mood. But since all save one of her stories in the College magazine have New Zealand for their setting, the nostalgia was real beneath the artifice of the writer to be.
Concealed somewhere within her, Ida had a fund of unfocussed ability; but it always needed some personal devotion to call it forth. Because she had been at Queen’s for six years, she had been allowed to compete for the Professors’ scholarship, although she was in fact a year too young to be eligible. Evelyn Payne, remembering the fascination which questions on the Doomsday Book had for Professor Cramb, the examiner, reminded Ida of this subject. The expected questions were asked, and Ida won the scholarship by three marks. That was the exploit of a prodigy. But Ida’s abilities were real. That they lapsed into a kind of dream under the spell which Kathleen was unwittingly to exercise upon her was a charge made against Kathleen in her college days.
Kathleen herself was to ponder this matter on more than one occasion, in later years, for it had been she who made the first direct advance — she who suggested that they choose each other.”Let’s be friends,” she said, and for the moment startled the dreaming Ida out of her void.
“Be friends!” thought Ida.”But you can’t just be friends. A friend is something you become!”
For a long time she hadn’t known Marie and Kathleen Beauchamp apart. They dressed alike : both wore the big soft black velour hats, flowing ties, and blue nautical coats They were “the Paynes’ cousins.” Her friend was Marian Creelman, a Canadian girl with a fund of keen humour; and Ida,”looking for the perfect thing,” thought to find it in her — until Marian returned to Canada. There had been a few indefinite “signs”; a book of verse which she found upon Kathleen’s bed and remarked upon; a glimpse that Kathleen had of her ardour over the cool leaves unfolding above ivy-twined trunks in the Square. But she took less for granted than the Beauchamp girls did, until — meeting them on the stairs one day, during the next term, she realised their casual acceptance of her when Vera said sweetly, a propos of friendship,”But we are your friends. We’re friends already.”
Even so early the girls adopted the names by which they were to be known in after years. As they sat on either side of their name-carved wooden desk Kathleen passed to Ida a slip with huge leaping letters — inches high : Katherine Mansfield.”My grandmother’s name,” she added,”and my nom-de-plume.” She did, in fact, sign many of her Queen’s College stories (appearing each term in the Queen’s College Magazine) K. M. Beauchamp. And Ida kept the slip until after that name had become universally known. Ida’s mother had been Katherine Moore, and Ida had thought to adopt this name herself; but Kathleen, having chosen Katherine, found for her another — Lesley — which suited her, and did as well; so she became thereafter “L. M.,” to Kathleen and her friends.
It may have been that New Year — it may have been another — when the two girls, Kathleen and Ida, roamed over London to find a church holding a midnight service, because Kathleen longed to go. The mysticism which burned in her, later, with so fine a flame was then crudely flaring. She was drawn by the mystery of Christianity; a crucifix hung between the two Watts prints over her bed.
The New Year, itself, had always a poignant significance for her. She felt that if a friend wished her “a happy new year,” that happiness was sure to follow. She felt that when the bells rang, a gate opened — and she could nearly — just walk away. With her keen awareness of the elusive and intangible, many things came to have for her this “special” significance of good or evil Like “holding thumbs” for luck, when something was at stake; like the evil of Wednesdays, and the danger of Octobers. But the mystery of the New Year she could — and did — share with Ida during the early years:
“The ghost of L. M. ran through my heart, her hair flying, very pale, with dark, startled eyes.”
And there were New Years later when she shared the mystery with her husband.
This first New Year at Queen’s College she made — as she always made the New Year — a turning point in her consciousness. The same night, after the service, she wrote of it; but she already was living beyond the immediate event :
(Jan. I, 1904)”It is twelve o’clock. All the bells in the village churches are pealing. Another year has come. Now, at the entrance of this New Year, my dearest, I propose to begin my book. It will not be at all regal or dramatic, but just all that I have done. You who are so far away know so little of what happens to me, and it is so selfish of me not to tell you more. I have just returned from a midnight service. It was very, very beautiful and solemn. The air outside was cold and bracing, and the Night was a beautiful thing. Over all the woods and the meadows Nature had tenderly flung a veil to protect from the frost, but the trees stood out, dark and beautiful against the clear, starry sky. The Church looked truly very fit for God’s house to-night. It looked so strong, so hospitable, so invincible. It was only during the silent prayer that I made up my mind to write this. I mean this year to try and be a different person, and I wait at the end of this Year to see how I have kept all the vows that I have made to-night. So much happens in a year. One may mean so well and do so little.
“I am writing this by the light of a tiny peep of gas, and I have only got on a dressing gown. So decolleté. I am so tired, I think I must go to bed. To-morrow is the first of January. What a wonderful and what a lovely world this is. I thank God to-night that I am.”
CHAPTER IX
QUEEN’S COLLEGE
“… Nobody saw it, I felt, as I did. My mind was just like a squirrel. I gathered and gathered and hid away, for the long ‘winter’ when I should re-discover all this treasure — and if anybody came close I scuttled up the tallest, darkest tree and hid in the branches.” — Journal.
1
THE Giraffe Hole was on the floor below the Beauchamp girls’ room. How often the boarders leaned over the railing to look down that large square opening to see if their professor had come yet — to watch the professors cross to the Professors’ Room. It was the personalities of these eminent men — each distinguished in his own field — which drew the girls to class and which made them work — when they worked at all : for while “Woodie’s” rules were strict, the College had no regulations. Responsibility for attending lectures rested upon themselves : they might wander in and out of classes, or cut them, or go unprepared. Twice a year — at the end of the Michaelmas term for the professors, and at the end of the Easter term for external examiners — they wrote papers. But the habit of study was not required at Queen’s, as Kathleen had reason, later, to regret :
“I was thinking yesterday of my wasted, wasted early girlhood. My college life, which is such a vivid and detailed memory in one way, might never have contained a book or a lecture. I lived in the girls, the professor, the big, lovely building, the leaping fires in winter and the abundant flowers in summer. The views out of the windows, all the pattern that was — weaving. Nobody saw it, I felt, as I did. My mind was just like a squirrel. I gathered and gathered and hid away, for that long ‘winter’ when I should rediscover all this treasure — and if anybody came close I scuttled up the tallest, darkest tree and hid in the branches. And I was so awfully fascinated in watching Hall Griffin and all his tricks — thinking about him as he sat there, his