Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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Even Charles Palliser — her father’s old New Zealand friend, now a London bank manager, whose daughter Eileen was at Queen’s with the Beauchamp girls — took them to concerts at Queen’s Hall. He was lovingly remembered by Kathleen ever after :
“… a tall man with a pointed grey beard, Irish eyes and a voice like the sky at evening. His name is Charles Palliser, and he was a love of my salad days.”
One imagines that Kathleen decided the direction of these expeditions. Music was everything to her, then. It was not music for its own sake, exactly, but music as the atmosphere of romantic love, the path to the garden of the Hesperides. Music linked her with Arnold Trowell; and the bond with Arnold Trowell was the bond with genius, freedom, rapture, Bohemia. Music was for her then a girl’s anticipation of the secret of life, or of that final wisdom to which Tchehov gave perfect utterance, when he felt, in listening to music, that “all things are forgiven, and it would be strange not to forgive.”
The seed of this realisation was in Kathleen’s absorption in music, which was indeed so complete at this time, that afterward she almost persuaded herself that there had been a choice to be made between music and letters, and that she had chosen letters. It was not so. But music was to her, then, a symbol of Art in its vaguely felt significance : it was an earnest of that attitude of all-comprehending significance of which Art at its highest is the sacrament, and of which her own art was finally to be the expression.
She was impatient to excel, to be at the inmost heart of music. Under the Queen’s College’cello master, Professor Hahn, she felt that her progress was too slow. So she became a familiar figure, in her big dark coat and soft black hat, carrying the cumbersome canvas-covered’cello, hurrying down Princess Street in the fog to the Academy, followed by the tall striding Ida and a violin case; or flying back in the evening when the high bowls of yellow light seemed to her so gay and blissful. Often they went early to concerts at Queen’s Hall and waited for the topmost gallery seats — Kathleen, rapt, absorbed in the programme; Ida, watching her lean over the gallery rails, with her “live hands taking and giving the music” :
“Her quick, life-giving hands — so light and sure in their movements — passing over things, hardly touch- ing or moving, but leaving them alive (Ida described it). Later, coming into her room early in the morning — just a glance all around the room, like a greeting, then moving lightly around — a sure quick almost loving touch to the flowers — the mantelpiece, her writing table — sometimes just a fraction of an inch closer or further away — and the room lived and breathed — ever so quietly — and smiled as if it was quite sure you understood — might even have a little joke with you.”
At certain hours during the day — the music room at Queen’s being unoccupied — Kathleen was able to slip down unnoticed in spite of the bulky ‘cello, and Ida looked for her there and sat while she practised. Just as in “Katie’s voice, there was a certain deep sad note which made Ida catch her breath” (and Kathleen “used” it, too, sometimes) — so in her playing there was a note, a strain, a whole phrase, an entire movement, which to Ida was a glimpse of another plane of being — not merely the fulfilment she sought in “the perfect thing,” but a transporting — a vision. She felt, hearing it, that certain phrases were the sheer inspiration of one “living on a higher plane,” one who momentarily succeeded in illuminating, disclosing her own exalted state. And in bright flashes, like the rocketing of stars, Ida felt she knew this state of being.
What Ida gave to Katherine was a deep love, a complete devotion, constant and enduring; and for Katherine, also, the bond was life-long. If at times she seemed to fling herself violently free, she always acknowledged the bond. If to Ida those brief years together at Queen’s seemed a time of rapture and enchantment, there were moments when Katherine herself more than half believed it. Ten years afterward she lent herself to an effort to recapture the past:
“… I kept seeing the Squares with their butterfly leaves just ready to fly. We (Ida and I) met near the old haunts — Queen Anne Street — and walked in one of the little lanes and short cuts that we know so well — side by side, talking. ‘Let me tie your veil,’ and I stop; and she ties it and we walk on again …”
Spring leaves and autumn leaves in a London Square: the tender green and the tender gold. These in their evanescence and their beauty reminded Kathleen of her college days and her college friendship. In one of the moments when she “saw Ida as a character in a book” — while she was writing Maata — she pictured her again as the tall schoolgirl, clumsy and rapt, breaking from the decorous procession through the London Squares to catch in her clapped hands a falling, fluttering leaf— “a happy month” :
“They did not fall like leaves — they fell like feathers — fluttering and floating from the trees that lined the road…. Who was it used to say that every leaf you caught meant a happy month? Rhody (Ida) of course. She saw Rhody, the tall school girl, break from the ‘crocodile’ when they walked in the park, and run after the leaves with big, far too big gestures, as though she expected the whole tree to fall into her arms. Rhody used to keep the leaves in her Bible, and take them out and hold them up to the light and gaze at them in Scripture lessons. And she always said she knew each one apart. Well — if she said so — she did. Just like her.”
That picture of Ida more than any other remained with Katherine as a mark of the past. It was symbolic: of her rapt devotion, of the contrast between her awkwardness and the delicate, elusive thing she tried to grasp; of the happiness she seemed, at times, to miss, by some immediate ignorance of the truth:
“He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who catches a joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.”
Katherine felt that Ida had looked to receive from her a wisdom she had not imparted: that she had failed Ida :
“Ah, why can’t I describe all that happens!” (she wrote in a notebook in 1914).”I think quite seriously that L. M. and I are so extraordinarily interesting. It is not while the thing is happening that I think that but the significance is near enough to rear its heels and make me start, too. Have I ruined her happy life — am I to blame? When I see her pale, and so tired that she shuffles her feet when she walks … when I see the buttons hanging off her coats, and her skirt torn — why do I call myself to account for all this — and feel that I am responsible for her. She gave me the gift of herself. ‘Take me, Katie, I am yours. I will serve you and watch in your ways, Katie.’ I ought to have made a happy being of her and ought to have ‘answered her prayers’ — they cost me so little and they were so humble. I ought to have proved my own worthiness of a disciple — but I did not. Yes, I am altogether to blame. Sometimes I excuse myself. ‘We were too much of an age. I was experimenting and being hurt when she leaned upon me — I couldn’t have stopped the sacrifice if I’d wanted to.’ But it’s all altered to-night…. I came upon her … crouched by my fire like a little animal. So I helped her to bed on the sofa and have made hot drink and brought her some rugs and my dark eiderdown. And as I tucked her up, she was so touching — her long fair hair — so familiar — remembered for so long, drawn back from her face — that it was easy to stoop and kiss her — not as I usually do — one little half kiss — but quick long kisses such as one delights to give a tired child. ‘Oh,’ she sighed, ‘I have dreamed of this …’ Ah, how I long to talk about it sometimes — not for a moment but until I am tired out and have got rid of the burden of memory. Yet it would be madness to expect J. to understand or to sympathise …”
But six years later, in 1920, she “shed her sickness” in that story which — with her stern self-criticism — she was willing to acknowledge as “the one story which satisfies me to any extent”; when as Con “her flowerless one turned toward the sun” in The Daughters of the Late Colonel.
CHAPTER X
WHITE GARDENIA