Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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to creep over her : she did not mean to Arnold what she believed he meant to her. Yet, vividly as she forced herself to meet her experiences, she could not at once accept this appalling thing. At first it was just a shadow, reflected in her writing, but not received as reality. Two years later she still was refusing to accept it as truth, even when she wrote to Arnold in her journal a letter not to be sent :
“… O — let it remain as it is — Do not suddenly crush out this, the beautiful flower — I am afraid even while I am rejoicing …”
It did not make it any easier that she was in love with an ideal which she herself had created during those changing and emotional three years when she had not seen him, but had built up her dream through letters — so many more on her part than on his. It was not until her return to London three years later, that she was to face the real truth of the situation. Now, in Juliet, she admitted it for a moment, in fancy only to deny it later :
“‘She hates me,’ Rudolph said.
“‘I only wish she hated me,’ said David. ‘It is an impossible position — I feel as though I ought to love her … but I do not. She is too much like me. I understand her too well. We are both too moody. We both feel too much the same about everything … and so she does not attract me. Do you understand?’”
Two chapters from Juliet reflect something of what was happening then : the uneasiness, the sleeplessness of the time when she was meeting Arnold. Her room-mate remembers that she came back from those meetings in a state so highly strung that she would throw herself on the bed, weeping violently; that she talked and moaned and walked in her sleep; that she went to fortune-tellers to “try to discover the future”; that she started going to séances, which only upset her the more. One day she announced to the girls that she was “going to have a séance”; and when they prepared for the table rapping, she “went into a trance” — as one of them remembers— “and talked so wildly that we were frightened out of our wits, and had to shake her violently to bring her back to herself.”
Since Arnold had come to London, everything had subtly changed for Kathleen. It was not Arnold’s coming, merely, nor Garnet’s coming — then. It was that intangible shifting of relationships of which Katherine Mansfield was always so acutely aware. Everything was weaving a new pattern — and a strange light played over it — shadowed, diffused. In it they all looked different; and she, too, as she looked down upon herself, seemed strange.
Her manner toward Ida appeared abrupt to spectators. They heard her say :”Oh, I couldn’t come then!” after Ida had waited for her at an appointed place. They heard her say :”Ida! Get my handkerchief from the left-hand bureau drawer!” And they heard Ida’s quiet reply :”Yes, Katie darling.” Yet it was the sign that now all was accepted, the adjustment made; and that it was sometimes difficult for Kathleen to reveal herself to one who — because she loved her — could interpret the secret most poignant meaning :”I feel I have to tear a delicate veil from my heart when I speak to her; and I feel that I oughtn’t to tear it. Is that nonsense?” Though she hid, at moments, behind a mask, there was the tacit acceptance, only rarely remarked as when, a dozen years later, they had discussed the inexplicable, and Katherine Mansfield,”talking it over” afterwards with herself :
“I must not forget the long talk L. M. and I had…. The marvel is that she understands. No one else on earth could understand.” (And on that same occasion)” All that week she had her little corner. ‘I may come into my little corner tonight?’ she asks timidly, and I reply — so cold, so cynical— ‘If you want to.’ But what would I do if she didn’t come?”
There was the wordless thing between them which they knew, and no other : that Ida, uninstructed, understood certain of Katherine’s needs, as Katherine, by her very being, supplemented Ida’s. The din around them, the mischances, the nervous tensions of daily living could not intrude upon the centre of peace, the “silent singing” of that which lay between.
In Queen’s College days Ida was one “with whom she could be herself.” Kathleen knew (and there were times when she desperately needed to know) that no matter what could happen in her world, Ida was steadfast. They evolved between them, once, a symbol : Ida was the tall green column, and herself the live bird who rested upon it — and from it flew away — only to return before taking the new flight. Except for occasional restless periods, it was always to be so. Superficial circumstances might seem to intervene, but the intangible relationship remained — out of sight, at times — beyond reach, even — yet recognised, acknowledged, as when Katherine Mansfield wrote from Paris in 1915 :
“You sent me a letter from L. M. which was simply marvellous. She wrote, as she can, you know, of all sorts of things, grass and birds and little animals and herself and our friendship with that kind of careless, very infinite joy — There is something quite absolute in Lesley — She said at the end of a page— ‘Katie, dearie — what is Eternity?’ She’s about the nearest thing to eternal that I could ever imagine. I wish she were not so far away …”
The chapters of Juliet written during the last months at Queen’s show not only the restlessness which Kathleen seemed impotent to control, but also the fierce rebellion which rose in her at her father’s intention of taking the girls back to New Zealand, when they had finished college at the end of July, 1906; and her desperate and unavailing attempts to persuade the family to let her remain in London. That they were unable to understand the depth of her desire is not remarkable; neither is it strange that it should have seemed to her impossible to be torn from a place where she felt her whole life was centred — all her friends and her interests, and all her opportunities. She believed in herself — yet when one is young, if that belief is not supported by the belief of another, the doubt creeps in :”Can I do this thing?” So she flew to Ida, crying :”But you believe in me — don’t you?”
Her father said, in bewilderment :”I hardly know the girls; I’ve lost them now. I’ll never send the two younger children ‘home’ to be educated.”
But Kathleen, reassured, said to her room-mate :”When I get to New Zealand, I’ll make myself so objectionable that they’ll have to send me away.” Even then she had perception enough — penetration enough — to know the one way of escape.
CHAPTER XI
WELLINGTON: 47 FITZHERBERT TERRACE
“I do not want to earn a living; I want to live.” — Oscar Wilde. (K. M.’s Note Book, 1907.)
1
THE Beauchamp family moved to 47 Fitzherbert Terrace soon after the girls returned to Wellington. The Terrace was the short street behind Tinakori Road, on the other side of the Gully. A swinging bridge joined the two from the Walter Nathan’s corner (which was No. 13 on Tinakori Road, beside Kathleen’s birthplace) to Miss Swainson’s School, second from the bottom of Fitzherbert Terrace. No. 47 was a huge house — larger than “Chesney Wold,” larger than 75 Tinakori Road. It stood second from the top of Fitzherbert Terrace, where the trams turned on Molesworth Street.
On one of her first days back in Wellington, Kass went over the old haunts — down Hill Street, past the Green Gate, through the short cut to the Convent gardens. Had it dwindled, had it changed, while she was away in London?
“i. x. 06.
“I walk along the broad, almost deserted street. It has a meaningless, forsaken, careless look — like a woman who has ceased to believe in her beauty. The splendid rhythm of life is absent. With their white faces the people pass to and fro — silently — drearily — All colour seems to have lost its keenness. The street is as toneless as a great stretch of sand. And now I pass through the narrow iron gates up the little path and through the heavy doors into the church. Silence hung motionless over the church; the shadow of her great wings darkened everything. Through the door the