Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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and did not go out again. We had the thunder last night. To-day it is silvery, and now and then some rain falls….
I don't want to complain, but I do think my leg is a bit off, don't you? It hurts like billy-o to-day.
Saturday evening — May 15, 1915
Saturday evening
May 15, 1915
THE lamplighter is just going his rounds, but I am sitting in the dusk still. I have just come in from a small walk. I returned to the garden of Notre Dame. It was dusky already and the smell of the flowery trees a wonder to enjoy. Hardly anybody was there; an old man on the other end of my bench kept up a buzzing in his beard, and a few extremely wicked babies without any hope of bed played ball, just their heads and knees and flying hands to be seen. How black the tree stems were and how fine the leaves! They were like a tune given out in the bass with a wonderful running treble,—and above the trees uprose Notre Dame in all her venerable beauty. Little birds flew among the towers—you know the little birds that always fly about ruins. Looking at them I wanted to write a sonnet, using as an image of old age and the thoughts of old age flying out and returning, the tower and the birds. I shall write it one day.
I have been writing my book all the afternoon. How good the fatigue is that follows after!
Lovers are idling along the Quai. They lean over the parapet and look at the dancing water and then they turn and kiss each other, and walk a few steps further arm in arm and then stop again and again kiss. It is rather the night for it, I must say.
The rain stopped after I had posted your letter to-day, but it is still un temps très lourd. I bought a litre of white wine to-day for 45 c. (very good) and it is lying in a basin of water in the kitchen zinc. The butter and the milk sit on a brick outside the kitchen window. “Some summer,” as a fool at the music hall would say.
Write to me as often as you can. Of course, no human being could compete with my effugions and well I knows it, but alone in furrin parts is not the same as being even as alone as you are in England.
Sunday morning. I have just had your summer letter. London does sound good, and the idea of drinking cider and then sitting in my special little garden was very alluring. I know that garden5 better than any other in the world. I see it now as I write. But for some strange reason, I have always gone there to cry. I well remember one dreadful New Year's Eve when I went there and sat on one of the benches crying into a little black velvet muff with blue ribbons (L. had it after) and an awful old woman with a jet bonnet watched a long time, and then she sighed and said, “Well, that's' ow it is, my dear.”
If you lean over the Pont St. Louis you look down on to a little court which is called Port de l'Hôtel de Ville. It is a pleasant cobbled square with poplars and lime trees growing against the wall' where it slopes down to the river there are two upturned boats. An old man in a straw hat sat by one of them to-day tapping it with a hammer, and over the other two little boys wriggled, dabbling their hands in the water. There were some mattresses propped against the wall in the sun and a wooden frame set up, covered with a square of red linen. An old woman in a lilac print dress with a white band over her head and under her chin was tossing grey flock and feathers on the red linen square. An immense heap of them beside her was lifted and shaken and gathered up for her by a younger woman in black, wearing a cotton bonnet. It was very warm in the sun, and the flock and feathers were so dusty that the two women coughed and sneezed as they worked, but they seemed very happy. I watched until the mattress was filled and folded over like a piecrust. Then the young woman took a little camp-stool and sat down with a needle and thread, stitching, and the old one replaced the ‘buttons’ in the cover with a long, long needle like a skewer. Now and again the two little boys ran up to have their noses blown, or the old man sang out something and they sang back….
Whose fault is it that we are so isolated—that we have no real life—that everything apart from writing and reading is ‘felt’ to be a waste of time?
I walked on to-day and came to a garden behind Notre Dame. The pink and white flowering trees were so lovely that I sat down on a bench. In the middle of the garden there was a grass plot and a marble basin. Sparrows taking their baths turned the basin into a fountain and pigeons walked through the velvety grass, pluming their feathers. Every bench and every chair was occupied by a mother or a nurse or a grandfather and little staggering babies with spades and buckets made mud pies or filled their buckets with fallen chestnut flowers or threw their grandfathers' caps on to the forbidden grass plot. And then there came a chinese nurse trailing two babies. Oh, she was a funny little thing in her green trousers and black tunic, a small turban clamped to her head. She sat down with her darning and kept up a long bird-like chatter all the time, blinking at the children and running the darning needle through her turban.
But after I had watched a long time I realised I was in the middle of a dream. Why haven't I got a real ‘home’—a real life—why haven't I got a chinese nurse with green trousers and two babies who rush at me and clasp my knees? I'm not a girl—I'm a woman. I want things. Shall I ever have them? To write all the morning and then to get lunch over quickly and to write again in the afternoon and have supper and one cigarette together and then to be alone again till bedtime—and all this love and joy that fights for outlet, and all this life drying up, like milk, in an old breast. Oh, I want life! I want friends and people and a house. I want to give and to spend.
5 The little garden in Leicester Square.
Monday night — May 17, 1915 —
Monday night
May 17, 1915
To S. S. Koteliansky
… IT is a rainy evening—not at all cold, rather warm, but rainy, rainy. Everything is wet; the river is sopping, and if you stand still a moment you hear the myriad little voices of the rain. As you walk, the air lifts just enough to blow on your cheeks. Ah! how delicious that is! It is not only leaves you smell when you stand under the trees to-day; you smell the black wet boughs and stems, the ‘forest’ smell. This evening I went walking in a park. Big drops splashed from the leaves and on the paths there lay a drift of pink and white chestnut flowers. In the fountain basin there was a great deal of mixed bathing going on among some sparrows— A little boy stood just outside the park. He thrust one hand through the railing among the ivy leaves and pulled out some tiny snails, arranging them in a neat row on the stone wall. “V'là mes escargots!” But I was rather frightened, that, being French, he'd take a pin out of his jacket and begin eating them! And then they locked the park up. An old caretaker in a black cape with a hood to it locked it up with a whole bunch of keys.
There is a wharf not far from here where the sand barges unload. Do you know the smell of wet sand? Does it make you think of going down to the beach in the evening light after a rainy day and gathering the damp drift wood (it will dry on top of the stove) and picking up for a moment the long branches of sea weed that the waves have tossed and listening to the gulls who stand reflected in the gleaming sand, and just fly a little way off as you come and then—settle again.
This evening a mist rose up from the river and everything looks far away. Down below, two nuns went by, their ample skirts gathered in one hand, the other holding an umbrella over their white hoods. And just below—there is a court where the barrow men take their barrows for the night—their palms and their rose trees and china blue hydrangea bushes. You see the barrows with waving shining leaves float by like miraculous islands. Very few people are out. Two lovers came and hid behind a tree and put up an umbrella—then they walked away, pressed against each other. It made me think of a poem that our German professor used to read us in class.
Ja, das war zum letzenmal
Das wir beide, Arm in Arme,
Unter