Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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world. A nun came and sat beside me. She raised a passionless, expressionless face — and the rosary shone like a thread of silver through her fingers.”
Now, as Kass leaned from her window in the new home in Fitzherbert Terrace, it seemed strange to see so little of the Tinakori Hills, so little of the Harbour; and to hear the lumbering of trams mingled with the song of tuis. But it was of little moment. She leaned out, looking over the same dark pines that used to hide Ole Underwood so long — four years — ago, pines with a blue ribbon of asphalt running between; but actually, she was leaning out over Mansfield Mews, listening to distant London surging beyond Harley Street:
“Away beyond the line of dark houses there is a sound like the call of the sea after a storm — passionate, solemn, strong …”
She drew back into the room and looked at herself in the glass :
“The same Kathie of long ago, and yet not the same.” Then she pulled the curtains, to shut out Wellington, to shut in her own world :
“Here in my room I feel as though I was in London — in London. To write the word makes me feel that I could burst into tears. Isn’t it terrible to love anything so much? I do not care at all for men, but London — it is Life …”
Here in Wellington it was early morning, early spring; there in London it was Indian summer, and night, with the lights brilliant in Piccadilly Circus. People were streaming from cafés, from the theatres, from Queen’s and Bechstein Hall. Perhaps Arnold Trowell had been playing. She heard the quick notes of his “clever performance,” the comfortable murmur and shuffle of the crowds; she saw the revolving lights.
Here — Wellington — nobody smoked. No advantages. No writers. No artists. No pictures. No books. Who that she knew had heard of Rossetti? (She had just said to Mary, the “model pupil” of Miss Swainson :”You ought to read Rossetti!”) As for having read Wilde! Their idea of interesting conversation was babies and jam-making. Their idea of a big party was Godber’s meringues for tea! She loathed those things; she couldn’t be bothered talking or thinking trivialities. After the friends she’d made, after “literary London,” Wellington was a prison :”If Denmark’s a prison, then is life one.” She had given up everything in coming back, and she was now eighteen. She had vowed — she had written the promise to herself, and signed it and burned it :”In two years I will be famous.” In two years she would be twenty, and buried — as good as dead — at the bottom of the world.
At such times — in such moods — she turned to her ‘cello, or to writing and reading.
From Vignettes
“A year ago we sat by the fire, she and I, hand in hand, cheek to cheek, speaking but little, and then whispering, because the room was so dark, the fire so low, and the rain outside so loud and bitter.
“She, a thin little figure in a long, soft black frock, and a string of amethysts around her white throat.
“Eventually it grew so cold that I dragged the blanket from the bed, and we wrapped ourselves up in it, smiling a little and saying, ‘We feel like children on a desert island.’ With one hand she held the rough, gaily-striped thing up to her chin; the other hand lay in mine. We talked of fame, how we both longed for it, how hard the struggle was, what we both meant to do. I found a piece of paper, and together we wrote a declaration vowing that in the space of one year we should both have become famous. And we signed the paper and sealed it; then, dedicating it to the gods, dropped it into the fire. For a moment a bright light, and then a handful of ashes. By and bye she fell asleep, and I gave her my share of the blanket, and arranged a sofa pillow in her low chair. The long night dragged coldly through, while I watched her, and thought, and longed, but could not sleep.
“To-day, at the other end of the world, I have suffered, and she, doubtless, has bought herself a new hat at the February sales. Sic transit gloria mundi.
“K. Mansfield.”
2
The books in her room at the Terrace lined the wall from the floor upwards for some four or five feet : sitting on the floor, she could reach any volume. The little room was arranged like a studio : her writing table by the window, her few treasures carefully placed — the Velasquez Venus, six small nude studies, bowls of flowers, her ‘cello “dreaming in the corner.” Like Grandmother Mansfield, she loved tidiness; her room was a projection of herself. Trespassers were intolerable.
One afternoon, being torn away from her sanctuary to meet people at tea, she startled them all by bursting out furiously :”I loathe this provincial place! Nobody in it understands me, and they haven’t any of my interests, and I detest it here!”
And on another occasion :”At five o’clock I go down to Wellington to watch Life.”
Much of her time was spent upstairs, writing. When she closed the door, she could shut out the whole world :
“Oh! this monotonous, terrible rain. The dull, steady, hopeless sound of it. I have drawn the curtains across the windows to shut out the weeping face of the world — the trees swaying softly in their grief and dropping silver tears upon the brown earth, the narrow, sodden, mean, draggled wooden houses, colourless save for the dull coarse red of the roof, and the long line of grey hills, impassable, spectral-like.
“So I have drawn the curtains across my windows, and the light is intensely fascinating. A perpetual twilight broods here. The atmosphere is heavy with morbid charm. Strange, as I sit here, quiet, alone, how each possession of mine — the calendar gleaming whitely on the wall, each picture, each book, my ‘cello case, the very furniture — seems to stir into life. The Velasquez Venus moves on her couch ever so slightly; across the face of Manon a strange smile flickers for an instant and is gone, my rocking chair is full of patient resignation, my ‘cello case is wrapt in profound thought. Beside me a little bowl of mig- nonette is piercingly sweet, and a cluster of scarlet geraniums is hot with colour.
“Sometimes through the measured sound of the rain comes the long, hopeless note of a fog horn far out at sea. And then all life seems but a crying out drearily, and a groping to and fro in a foolish, aimless darkness. Sometimes — it seems like miles away — I hear the sound of a door downstairs opening and shutting.
“And I listen and think and dream until my life seems not one life, but a thousand million lives, and my soul is weighed down with the burden of past existence, with the vague, uneasy consciousness of future strivings.
“And the grey thoughts fall upon my soul like the grey rain upon the world, but I cannot draw the curtain and shut them out.” *
3
“The Sketch always reminds me of the morning-room at 47,” Kathleen wrote, long afterward, to Marie. This big house, the scene of the tumultuous years of her New Zealand life, did not so readily become her “possession” as either the two homes in Tinakori Road, or “Chesney Wold” in Karori. Yet, had she continued to write, she undoubtedly would have set stories here. In 1920 she was turning back toward it, at last, though it had taken ten years to transcend the conflict of those days :
“Even if one does not acquire any ‘fresh meat’ — one’s vision of what one possesses is continually changing into something rich and strange, isn’t it? I feel mine is. 47, Fitzherbert Terrace p. e. is colouring beautifully with the years and I polish it and examine it, and only now is it ready to come out of the store room into the uncommon light of day.”
The family in 47 was rather quieter than it had been in the earlier homes. Bell Dyer had married, in England, and was living (as Wellington put it)”in a house full of servants.” The Grandmother had moved to Bolton Street to stay with friends. Vera was being courted by a young Canadian geologist who was engaged on a survey in New Zealand; and her departure was imminent.
Leslie Heron (“Chummie”) was going away to the Wailaki Boys’ High School. He was twelve, now — a fine, upstanding lad with