The Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield. Katherine Mansfield
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ears, and suddenly bound to its feet, and fix its longing, hungry stare upon those far away places. But all she said was, smiling gently: “How I envy you.”
He accepted that. “It has been,” he said, “very wonderful—especially Russia. Russia was all that we had imagined, and far, far more. I even spent some days on a river boat on the Volga. Do you remember that boatman’s song that you used to play?”
“Yes.” It began to play in her mind as she spoke.
“Do you ever play it now?”
“No, I’ve no piano.”
He was amazed at that. “But what has become of your beautiful piano?”
She made a little grimace. “Sold. Ages ago.”
“But you were so fond of music,” he wondered.
“I’ve no time for it now,” said she.
He let it go at that. “That river life,” he went on, “is something quite special. After a day or two you cannot realize that you have ever known another. And it is not necessary to know the language—the life of the boat creates a bond between you and the people that’s more than sufficient. You eat with them, pass the day with them, and in the evening there is that endless singing.”
She shivered, hearing the boatman’s song break out again loud and tragic, and seeing the boat floating on the darkening river with melancholy trees on either side. . . . “Yes, I should like that,” said she, stroking her muff.
“You’d like almost everything about Russian life,” he said warmly. “It’s so informal, so impulsive, so free without question. And then the peasants are so splendid. They are such human beings—yes, that is it. Even the man who drives your carriage has—has some real part in what is happening. I remember the evening a party of us, two friends of mine and the wife of one of them, went for a picnic by the Black Sea. We took supper and champagne and ate and drank on the grass. And while we were eating the coachman came up. ‘Have a dill pickle,’ he said. He wanted to share with us. That seemed to me so right, so—you know what I mean?”
And she seemed at that moment to be sitting on the grass beside the mysteriously Black Sea, black as velvet, and rippling against the banks in silent, velvet waves. She saw the carriage drawn up to one side of the road, and the little group on the grass, their faces and hands white in the moonlight. She saw the pale dress of the woman outspread and her folded parasol, lying on the grass like a huge pearl crochet hook. Apart from them, with his supper in a cloth on his knees, sat the coachman. “Have a dill pickle,” said he, and although she was not certain what a dill pickle was, she saw the greenish glass jar with a red chili like a parrot’s beak glimmering through. She sucked in her cheeks; the dill pickle was terribly sour. . . .
“Yes, I know perfectly what you mean,” she said.
In the pause that followed they looked at each other. In the past when they had looked at each other like that they had felt such a boundless understanding between them that their souls had, as it were, put their arms round each other and dropped into the same sea, content to be drowned, like mournful lovers. But now, the surprising thing was that it was he who held back. He who said:
“What a marvellous listener you are. When you look at me with those wild eyes I feel that I could tell you things that I would never breathe to another human being.”
Was there just a hint of mockery in his voice or was it her fancy? She could not be sure.
“Before I met you,” he said, “I had never spoken of myself to anybody. How well I remember one night, the night that I brought you the little Christmas tree, telling you all about my childhood. And of how I was so miserable that I ran away and lived under a cart in our yard for two days without being discovered. And you listened, and your eyes shone, and I felt that you had even made the little Christmas tree listen too, as in a fairy story.”
But of that evening she had remembered a little pot of caviare. It had cost seven and sixpence. He could not get over it. Think of it—a tiny jar like that costing seven and sixpence. While she ate it he watched her, delighted and shocked.
“No, really, that is eating money. You could not get seven shillings into a little pot that size. Only think of the profit they must make. . . .” And he had begun some immensely complicated calculations. . . . But now good-bye to the caviare. The Christmas tree was on the table, and the little boy lay under the cart with his head pillowed on the yard dog.
“The dog was called Bosun,” she cried delightedly.
But he did not follow. “Which dog? Had you a dog? I don’t remember a dog at all.”
“No, no. I mean the yard dog when you were a little boy.” He laughed and snapped the cigarette case to.
“Was he? Do you know I had forgotten that. It seems such ages ago. I cannot believe that it is only six years. After I had recognized you to-day—I had to take such a leap—I had to take a leap over my whole life to get back to that time. I was such a kid then.” He drummed on the table. “I’ve often thought how I must have bored you. And now I understand so perfectly why you wrote to me as you did—although at the time that letter nearly finished my life. I found it again the other day, and I couldn’t help laughing as I read it. It was so clever—such a true picture of me.” He glanced up. “You’re not going?”
She had buttoned her collar again and drawn down her veil.
“Yes, I am afraid I must,” she said, and managed a smile. Now she knew that he had been mocking.
“Ah, no, please,” he pleaded. “Don’t go just for a moment,” and he caught up one of her gloves from the table and clutched at it as if that would hold her. “I see so few people to talk to nowadays, that I have turned into a sort of barbarian,” he said. “Have I said something to hurt you?”
“Not a bit,” she lied. But as she watched him draw her glove through his fingers, gently, gently, her anger really did die down, and besides, at the moment he looked more like himself of six years ago. . . .
“What I really wanted then,” he said softly, “was to be a sort of carpet—to make myself into a sort of carpet for you to walk on so that you need not be hurt by the sharp stones and the mud that you hated so. It was nothing more positive than that—nothing more selfish. Only I did desire, eventually, to turn into a magic carpet and carry you away to all those lands you longed to see.”
As he spoke she lifted her head as though she drank something; the strange beast in her bosom began to purr. . . .
“I felt that you were more lonely than anybody else in the world,” he went on, “and yet, perhaps, that you were the only person in the world who was really, truly alive. Born out of your time,” he murmured, stroking the glove, “fated.”
Ah, God! What had she done! How had she dared to throw away her happiness like this. This was the only man who had ever understood her. Was it too late? Could it be too late? She was that glove that he held in his fingers. . . .
“And then the fact that you had no friends and never had made friends with people. How I understood that, for neither had I. Is it just the same now?”
“Yes,” she breathed. “Just the same. I am as alone as ever.”
“So am I,” he laughed gently, “just the same.”
Suddenly with a quick gesture he handed her back the glove and scraped his chair on the floor, “But what seemed to me so mysterious then is perfectly plain to me now. And to you, too, of course. . . . It simply was that we were such egoists, so self-engrossed, so wrapped up in ourselves that we hadn’t a corner in our hearts for anybody else. Do you know,” he cried, naive and hearty, and dreadfully like another side of that old self again, “I began studying a Mind System when I was in Russia, and I found that we were not peculiar at all. It’s quite a well known form of . . .”
She had gone. He sat there, thunder-struck, astounded beyond words. . . . And then he asked