Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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alone. I am hidden. Life seems to have passed away — drifted and drifted miles and worlds on beyond the fairy sight.
“Very faint and clear the bird calls and cries — and another on a little scarlet tree close by me answers with an ecstasy of song.
“Then I hear steps approaching. A young Maori girl climbs slowly up the hill. She does not see me. I do not move. She reaches a little knoll and suddenly sits down, native fashion, her legs crossed, her hands clasped in her lap. She is dressed in a blue skirt and a soft white blouse. Round her neck is a piece of twisted flax, and a long piece of greenstone is suspended from it. Her black hair is twisted softly at her neck. She wears long white and red earrings…. She sits silently — utterly motionless — her head thrown back. All the lines of her face are passionate, violent, savage, but in her eyes slumbers a tragic, illimitable Peace.
“The sky changes — softens. The world is all grey mist — the land in heavy shadow — silence in the woods.
“The girl does not move — But very faint, sweet and beautiful — a star wakes in the sky. She is the very incarnation of evening.”
Over the hills they came to Taupo:”in the foreground blue, then purple, then silver — on this side the pines — the gum trees — the clustering houses — and a fringe of yellow meadow.” The little green Island, Motu Taiko, seemed to be floating in the lake,”with at last the mountain, the majestic God of it all towering against the sky.” They passed the little promontory of green flat, and the tracks of broom, approaching Tapu across a white bridge swinging over a river— “peacock-blue.” They followed the white road, past the Maoris “lounging in the sun.” There Kathleen watched a moment of drama — an old Maori woman and a little child crowded together, waiting — for what? The scene lasted a moment only, but to her it seemed a whole cross-section of life:
“Other Maoris come to help the old woman into a cart — a white, bony horse, very lamed. The child cries and cries. The old man sways to and fro. She holds on to him with a most pathetic gesture. They drive into the night.”
The caravan followed the road winding by the Lake and through great avenues of pines to the Hotel.”Here are lawns and cut trees … bolder walks — stray paths — all the red brown pine needle carpet. The house is not pretty, but poppies grow round it.”
She was in a receptive state now. All of the outer layers, hardened by conflict, by friction, were peeled away, leaving the mind so sensitive to beauty, reflecting from innumerable facets any loveliness to which it might be exposed:
“All is harmonious and peaceful and delicious. We camp in a pine forest — beautiful. There are chickens cheeping; the people are so utterly benevolent. We are like children here with happiness. We drive through the sunset — then supper at the hotel. And the night is utterly perfect. We go to the mineral baths. The walk there down the hill is divine. The suggestion of water and cypresses; it is very steep. Not a fire bath, though very hot — so pleasant. Then we go home — tired — hot — happy — blissfully happy. We sleep in the tent … wake early and wash and dress and go down to the hotel again. The birds are magical. I feel I cannot leave, but pluck honeysuckle. The splashes of light lie in the pine woods.”
All her life she had heard of the Waihi massacre, of the True Original Pa Man’s pioneering era — now she walked over that very ground:
“Then — goodbye, Taupo, and we are on the plains. I feel quite at home again. At last we come to Waihi the scene of a more horrible massacre — only two men were saved: one rushed through the bush; one was cutting wood. We stop to look for water, and there are two men — one Oscar; one most perfect Maori — like iron.
“Then we are in a valley of colour — it is strewn everywhere. I have never dreamed of so much blossom.”
When they lunched, it was to discover again what they had found throughout the journey — that the natives accepted them with that inherent Maori kindliness and courtesy that made the blending of the two races so desirable. Kathleen jotted in her notes:”They do not seem so much surprised to see us. Give us fresh bread.”
December 14th was their last morning:”Oh, what a storm last night!” she wrote,”and the coming of the dawn with the willows lashing together.” In her final notes she already was projecting her mind toward the city — back again to her ambitions, to that ardent striving to “live” quickly. On December 15th, she wrote — not a description — but a poem, Youth; and her programme for the days ahead:
“6–8 technique 9–1 practise 2–5 write.”
They left the caravan and were precipitated into the civilisation of Wellington — another world, another epoch, almost all the distance between the days of the True Original Pa Man pioneer, and the days of Kathleen Beauchamp, lately from London.
Her final entry was indicative of the swift leap in time and place — the return to self-consciousness:
“In The Train — Dec. 17th.
“Has there ever been a hotter day? The land parches — golden with the heat. The sheep are sheltering in the shadow of the (woods). In the distance the hills are shimmering in the heat. M. and I. sitting opposite each other. I look perfectly charming.”
3
What was the importance of those six weeks in the wild King Country? It drew her back (that was perhaps paramount) to New Zealand in a way closer than she had ever known. There had been Anikiwa and Picton on the Sounds, when she was a child. There had been Karori, too — the Pa Man’s New Zealand — the Island of the ‘90’s. But at Lake Taupo she found something which rooted her even more deeply and permanently in the wild and beautiful primitive country and its people.
She was older now; she could know its more poignant significance. She never forgot those things; she spoke of them often; all her life she kept the small black Note Book with the jottings of that trip — meaning, in her own way, and in her own time, to make it live again later, as she did, indeed, in the two early stories.
This was its enduring meaning; but the immediate effect was to make her even more restless in Wellington, even more at odds with her immediate surroundings; they had neither the lure of the wild, nor the attraction of the cultivated. January ist she greeted:
“The year be darned — My Year 1908
And a happy New Year to you and the sky, the great star, the light….
Well — I have the brain and also the inventive faculty.
What else is needed?”
February and March were bitter and painful months. Wellington seemed more insufferable by contrast to the wild, free Midlands. Again she lived a dual existence — living, as it were by force of will, in London, gathering all her forces in desperation against the physical barriers that held her from it.
“I always seem to learn at the risk of my life” (she said later)— “but I do learn.” She knew, without doubt, that only by behaving so outrageously that her father would be glad to be rid of her, could she free herself. Yet the price of such behaviour was terrible to her. She was no “widely experienced woman of thirty.” She was a girl of eighteen, reared in an isolated mid-Victorian community for fourteen years; sheltered in Miss Clara Fenessa Wood’s circumspect London boarding-house for three more; taught “life” suddenly and violently by unassimilated, ill-assorted reading.
Her entries for the next three months were only curt “evidence” :
“Feb. 10th.
“I shall end — of course — by killing myself.”
“March 18th.
“I purchase my freedom with my life — It were better that I were dead — really — I am unlike others because I have experienced all there is to experience. But there is no one to help me — Of course Oscar — Dorian Gray has brought the