Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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a very good idea,”he said.
There was another silence. They walked round once again. Then they had to say Good night.
Murry said to Katherine :”Are you really serious — about the rooms?”
“Of course. Why not?”
“Then I should like it very much.”
“Go — ood!” she said, in a small, cool, flute-like voice. Then :”When will you come?”
“When you like.”
“Well, let’s say Monday — Monday tea-time. I’ll have everything ready by then. Do you like eggs?”
She gave him her hand, holding her body back.”Auf wiedersehen,”she said, and flitted across the Circus. He watched her white hat disappear in the dusk.
On the Monday — it was the middle of April — he arrived with his belongings. Katherine was dressed, as before, and ready to go out. But she showed him his room. A little table had been arranged by the window with a bright blue table-cloth. A cupboard had been emptied to make room for his books and clothes. She gave him two keys.
“I have to go out now. You will find your tea in the kitchen. And you can get your own supper. You’ll find everything there. I hope you will be comfortable. Now I’ll say good night — Murry!”And she disappeared.
He worked hard, and painfully, at his paragraphs after tea. He had to scrap fully a dozen before he had produced two which seemed tolerable. Then it was past ten, and he was tired. He went out to post them, and went to bed.
In the morning he was wakened by a knock at the door.”I’ve finished with the bathroom,” said Katherine’s voice.”And your breakfast is in the kitchen.”
In the kitchen he found the table laid, and a boiling kettle. Brown bread and butter and honey, and a large brown egg in an egg-cup. Fixed between the egg and the egg-cup was, like a big blue label, a half-sheet of notepaper with this inscription :
“This is your egg. You must boil it. K.M.”
So Murry became Katherine Mansfield’s lodger. For many weeks they went their own ways, meeting only after they had finished their work at night. Then, at midnight, they would have bowls of tea on the floor of Katherine’s room and talk till two in the morning. They always shook hands before they went to bed.
“Good night, Mansfield!”
“Good night, Murry!”
Once Katherine had to stay in bed with a sharp attack of her now recurrent pleurisy, and Murry sat in the chair by her bedside and performed her instructions while Ida Baker was away. And once or twice a week they would meet at tea-time and discuss the next issue of Rhythm, which had now imprudently become a monthly.
As they grew closer friends they would dine out cheaply together : perhaps too cheaply. But Murry’s early paragraphs, in spite of all his toil, were rarely acceptable: and he made barely a pound a week. So — until they began to make soup for themselves — they tended to dine, rather painfully, at a meat-pie shop at twopence a time. To take the taste away they went to the saloon bar of the Duke of York, in Theobald’s Road, where the landlady took a liking for them and always insisted, when they had paid for one drink, on standing them another.
“I know what it is, my dear, to be down on your luck,” she would say to Katherine, and nod sagely.” I know.” She was convinced that they were a music-hall couple” resting.”And when they tried to convince her to the contrary, she was rather hurt, because she felt that they were trying to conceal the truth, even from her. Since they liked her they let her have her way. They admitted reluctantly that they were a music-hall turn without engagements; and she was radiant.
“I knew I’d seen yer both on the ‘alls,”she said.
And, looking back, it seems that her idea was reasonable enough. Katherine usually wore a close-fitting velvet bodice and skirt, and a bright shawl: Murry wore a big navy-blue fisherman’s jersey. Such clothes were unfamiliar in Clerkenwell.
The saloon bar of The Duke of York was the scene of a strange happening which was crucial in the relation of Katherine and Murry. He had received for review from The Westminster one of Dr. Wallis Budge’s translations of the sacred books of Egypt. Since he knew nothing of ancient Egypt he was reading it with great care. In it the phrase occurred repeatedly: The Boat of the Million Years. Suddenly the phrase became real to his imagination, and a shadowy boat was laden with the horror of the timeless world. The shock, perhaps by contrast with his present happiness, was overwhelming, and he burst into tears.
In a little while he pulled himself together; but the cold about his heart remained. Perhaps half an hour afterwards Katherine came in.
She noticed instantly that something was wrong.”What is the matter?”she asked anxiously.
“Nothing … it’s nothing.”
“Oh no, it isn’t nothing. I can see that something has happened.”
So he tried to explain the desolation which had suddenly descended upon him: how a sense of the futility and insignificance of all that was human in respect of the infinite process of the years had seized him with an almost physical grasp. It was as though some inward part of him which had been warm and living had been frozen. She listened and understood. Then she said:
“Murry, I love you. Doesn’t that make any difference?”
It was the first time the word had been spoken between them, and it did make a difference.
But as before they lived their separate lives for several days. They kissed each other good night instead of shaking hands. And strangely, Murry was haunted by ghostly traces of the same cold fear. An icy wind would blow upon him suddenly, passing as quickly as it came.
One night they were in The Duke of York together. The saloon bar was fairly full, and the gramophone was playing. Most of the habitués were there — faded and kindly solicitors’ clerks most of them, not improved by the admixture of a repulsive fat man with an insatiable appetite for telling obscene stories — a shopkeeping couple or two, drinking stout sedately at the round tables — and Lil. Lil was almost always there. They took it for granted that she was a prostitute, though they never saw her leave with a man. There was something terribly impressive about Lil. One would never have dreamed of saying that one liked her: she was altogether too remote. No matter how inclusive the gaiety in the saloon bar might be, she was never involved in it. Yet she was Lil to everybody. The name was not meant, or felt to be, a familiarity. Everybody said” Good evening, Lil” when they entered; hardly anybody said anything more to her during the evening. It was a convention of the place to ignore her — out of a kind of deference, as though she were there incognito. Yet if by chance she was absent, the first question asked of Ma, the landlady, was always:” Where’s Lil?”And a great part of the evening’s conversation would be spent in wondering what might have happened to her. Was she ill?
It is hard to say what happened on this particular night. And perhaps nothing particular did happen save to Katherine and Murry — and Lil. Suddenly they were conscious that she was looking at herself intently in the big mirror. Probably she had looked at herself many times before, and probably they had seen her do it often. But to-night it was different. She was looking at herself as at a stranger, in whose face she was trying to discover something. And the stranger’s face in the mirror was terribly white and old; and the eyes in the face were fathomless dark caverns, reaching back, back. It seemed as though Lil could not take her own eyes away from those eyes in the mirror. They had laid some spell upon her. And well they might.
Murry did not know that Katherine was watching Lil; neither did Katherine know that Murry was watching her. When they spoke of it afterwards, they discovered that each had wanted the other not to see. Each had felt that the other should be spared that sight. When Murry had risen to go — long before the usual time — Katherine had followed eagerly, thankful that Murry had escaped the vision.
Neither