Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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o’clock. Is it light now at four o’clock? I jump out of the bed and run over to the window. It is half-light, neither black nor blue. The wing of the coast is violet; in the lilac sky are black banners and little black boats manned by black shadows put out on the purple water.
“Oh! how often I have watched this hour when I was a girl! But then — I stayed at the window until I grew cold — until I was icy — thrilled by something — I did not know what.”
Below in the garden — beneath the tennis courts (where they had tournaments some days), beneath the lily lawn, was the violet bed and the old peartree:
“‘Do you remember the enormous number of pears that used to be on that old tree?’ …
“‘And how after there’s been a Southerly Buster we used to go out with clothes baskets to pick them up?’
“‘And how while we stooped they went on falling, bouncing on our backs and heads?’
“‘And how far they used to be scattered, ever so far, under the violet leaves, down the steps, right down to the lily-lawn? We used to find them trodden in the grass. And how soon the ants got to them. I can see now that little round hole with a sort of fringe of brown pepper round it.’ …
“‘They were so bright, canary yellow — and small. And the peel was so thin and the pips jet — jet black. First you pulled out the little stem and sucked it. It was faintly sour, and then you ate them always from the top — core and all?’ …
“‘Do you remember sitting on the pink garden seat?”
“‘It always wobbled a bit and there were usually the marks of a snail on it.’
“‘Sitting on that seat, swinging our legs and eating the pears’.”
Perhaps it had as much magic for her as any “wildish garden” which Kathleen Beauchamp — or Katherine Mansfield — ever knew.
There was the mother, walking about, pointing to some stem, some branch of blossom:”Look, dear! Isn’t that lovely! See! how lovely!” Flowers seemed to have more reality to her than anything outside her own family. As soon as she entered the big gates below the flight of concrete stairs, she would call:”Children! Children!” And in the evenings, as they played about the garden, she was on her husband’s arm:
“The stillness, the lightness, the steps on the gravel — the dark trees, the flowers, the night-scented stocks — what happiness it was to walk with him there. What he said did not really matter so very much. But she felt she had to be herself in a way that no other occasion granted her. She felt his ease and although he never looked at what she pointed out to him it did not matter. His ‘Very nice, dear!’ was enough. He was always planning, always staring towards a future. ‘I should like later on.’ But she — she did not in the least; the present was all she loved and dwelt in.”
Her life revolved inside the palings of her home, illuminated by the flowers in her garden, which overflowed into her house. Was it from her that the girls got this way of noticing some flower, some twig — even with unappreciative people? They all did it. They all noticed them in this way. Kathleen Beauchamp, as she grew up, was for ever pointing out something:”Look! How lovely!” It was not — as many people afterward thought — because New Zealand abounded in strange and gorgeous bloom. In fact, New Zealand has few, few wild flowers, and those few are small and white:
“Oh, how I love flowers! People always say it must be because I spent my childhood among all those gorgeous tropical trees and blossoms. But I don’t seem to remember us making daisy chains of magnolias — do you?’ (she wrote to Chaddie, years later).
It was rather the quality of her feeling for the ones she had — both in her childhood in New Zealand — and during her life, afterward:
“To feel the flame at your throat as you used to imagine you felt the spot of yellow when Bogey held a buttercup under your chin.”
She saw Karori — saw Wellington — almost as though she looked at them through a flowering bush. And at 75 Tinakori Road, the parlour, the dining-room, were seen through this flowering bush too. She wrote to Chaddie (Marie):
“Cinerarias … blue ones — and the faint, faint pink kind. Mother loved them and we used to grow masses in a raised flower bed. I love the shape of the petals. It is so delicate. We used to have blue ones in pots in a rather white and gold drawing room that had green wooden sunblinds. Faint light, big cushions, tables with ‘photographs of the children’ in silver frames, some little yellow and black cups and saucers that belonged to Napoleon in a high cupboard and some one playing Chopin — beyond words playing Chopin.”
and
“It’s strange we should all of us Beauchamps have this passion for flowers…. I have a large bunch of good old-fashioned marigolds on my table, buds, leaves, and all. They take me back to the black vase of ours at 75, one that you (Marie) used to like to put mignonette in. It was a charming vase and well in the van of fashion, wasn’t it? Do you remember the brown china (bear) on the top of the black what-not? I can see it!”
It was not the flowers in themselves that Katherine was then remembering — but flowers as the setting and the passion of the family at No. 75 — flowers as the key to the life of the family there. At the memory of the flowers,”all the life of that house flickers up, trembles, glows again, is rich again.” Those were words written by Katherine to John Galsworthy in praise of his picture of the Soames’s house in Bayswater Road, to which she responded as one who had also known and savoured the rich reality of Victorian middle-class life. She, too, could go back into a kindred past,
“back to the dining-room at 75, to the proud and rather angry-looking seltzogene on the sideboard, with the little bucket under the spout. Do you remember that hiss it gave and sometimes a kind of groan? And the smell inside the sideboard of Worcester sauce and corks from old claret bottles?”
In this family, and the life they lived so closely together — with “things” so important to them, there was a kind of unity, partly because of the harmony between the father and mother — because she satisfied his needs so well and asked for nothing further — partly because (as in all New Zealand homes) the children were trained by the parents, not by a nurse. They were brought up in “the English tradition,” the mid-Victorian tradition, really; yet the contact between children and parents was much closer than in most English homes because in New Zealand the scarcity of maids for the household, and nurses for the children, demands a still closer contact. So there was a sense of living their lives together, of overlapping almost, of the whole family revolving about in one main current. It was in this way that Kezia — that Laura — remembered No. 75:
“The father in his dressing-room — a familiar talk. His using her (the mother’s) hair brushes — his passion for things that wear well. The children sitting around the table — a light outside; the silver. Her pity as she sees them all gathered together — her longing for them always to be there.”
and
“Aunt Beryl, Aunt Harriet and Mother sat at the round table with big shallow teacups in front of them. In the dusky light, with their white puffed-up muslin blouses with wing sleeves, they were three birds at the edge of a lily pond. Beyond them the shadowy room melted into the shadowy air; the cut glass door-knob glittered — a song, a white butterfly with wings out spread — clung to the ebony piano.”
It was this very sense of the tide sweeping in, sweeping out, bearing them all together in its swing to and from the beach and out to the sea again — the sense that their rhythm was from their unity — that they all seemed caught together in the ebb and flow of their lives — it was this sense which made Kass (“the odd one”) feel her separateness. The very things which bound the others together, seemed to help to cast her out. She was “different.” They had simply “the family feeling”; she was inoculated with something foreign:
“… I remember one birthday when you (Jeanne) bit