Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
talisman, a “sign” between the two of them — which meant, perhaps, that the bond could never be forgotten.
It had the same meaning between them — the same meaning for her, at least — as the little bunch of flowers that he left, years later, at the Casetta:
“And here on the table are five daisies and an orchid that Father picked for me and tied with a bit of grass and handed me. If I had much to forgive him, I would forgive him much for this little bunch of flowers. What have they to do with it all?”
The bond was there. And Kathleen believed that her father, who had his fortune to make, his own career to follow, and lived in a world beyond, was essentially, in his hidden self, of her kind. In her imagination, he was a child battling with giants; and she felt and suffered for him. She knew that behind the armour of the rising business man was the wincing and sensitive boy; and she was instant in sympathy with him. When on a visit to the Riviera, during which he came to see her at the Casetta, his money-wallet was stolen, she quivered in an agony of sympathy for his loss, as for a naked child in a winter storm:
“I really literally nearly fainted when this swept over me and I ‘saw’ him with a very high colour putting on a smile. I do hope to God people don’t suffer quite as I think they do: it’s not to be borne if they do.”
But the battle with giants was his life, as she knew it. He was the business man who left the children to the women of the family. There they were, and that was an end of it.
CHAPTER III
ANIKIWA
1
WHEN Kathleen — or Kass, as everyone in New Zealand called her — was just five, the Grandmother took the three little girls for their first of a series of summers at Anikiwa on the Sounds. The cruise in itself was an exciting adventure:”to walk down the Old Wharf that jutted out into the harbour, a faint wind blowing off the water”; to take the Picton boat,”a little steamer all hung with bright beads”; to sail the thirty-five miles from Wellington, across Cook Strait to Queen Charlotte Sound at the head of the South Island, and down the Sound — to Picton where the grandfather lived. And there the Picton boat swung at anchor, for it could go no further. Great-uncle Cradock had his own row-boat. That was the only way to reach Anikiwa, five miles further down the arm of the Sound.
It was calm water — a sea-fiord scalloped by sheltered bays — like lakes — almost surrounded by the steep hills. The bush: manuka, karaka, tree ferns, ran down to the water’s edge. Marlborough Sounds were really “drowned valleys,” reminders from a long-gone period — back beyond the giant kauri pines — back to the moa. This might even have been “ — the rippling wave where he dug his own grave …”
“Anikiwa” was the Maori word for “Cave of the Sea Birds.” The old homestead was set in the midst of wide paddocks, surrounded by bush-covered hills that sloped to the Sound water. It was only three-fourths of a mile across, tapering to its end half a mile below the farm. Sea-birds flocked there by thousands. Captain Cook, years before, had spoken of the harmony of so many different kinds of birds from the bush, singing together in the early morning. They all sang in a minor key, on a sad note.”New Zealand birds, like New Zealand poets, have always been mournful.” Kass could hear them at day-break from the room that she shared with the Grandmother under the honeysuckle vine … innumerable different notes: Tui, Bell-Bird, Thrush. She could hear the stream down in the paddocks. It was such a quiet sound after the surge of water under the wind that she always listened to from her room over the gully at Wellington. The air, too, was different. It was country air. The light over the paddocks was strange.
The cousins, boys in their ‘teens, teased the little girls for their town ways, but they took them about with them while they did the farm work; and there was bathing, boating and fishing to amuse them. They were happy little girls, but Kass was mostly the silent, dreamy one. She was fat and appeared rather dull, but her big “mossy” eyes lighted with interest when one of the grown-ups took the trouble to speak directly to her, or told her about old Armena and the Maoris who had lived in the pah by the cemetery. She played over the farm, as the others did, but she was not interested in femininities. She didn’t care about the details of her dress, or of the butterfly bow ribbons the girls wore perched on their hair. When Chaddie sat making neat little stitches in her doll’s clothes, or Vera helped a bit in the kitchen, Kass preferred to talk to Armena or the grandfather, or play down by the streams. Her hands would never stay clean long enough for sewing, and she lost her ribbon bows.
The grandmother spoke sharply to her, at times. Yet Kass loved her. She always called to her when she came into the house:”Gran, dear, where are you?”
Great-uncle Cradock wore a long white beard like grandfather Beauchamp’s. Kass climbed on to his knee, one evening, and cast a quick little sidelong glance at Vera. Something very good was about to happen. Kass was going to plait Uncle Cradock’s beard. He bounced Kass up and down, and began telling her about some flowers. Strangely, all of the Beauchamps shared this passionate love for flowers. He had written some verses with a little moral — something about flowers having personalities; they never should be burned, never thrown into fire. Presently Vera slipped up softly behind them, and reached around Uncle Cradock’s neck.”Don’t plait it,” said Kass fiercely;”He’s talking to me”; and she gave her sister a sharp little pinch.
It was doubtless from either the grandfather at Picton, or from Uncle Cradock, there at Anikiwa, that she heard the stories of Pelorus Jack. Both the old men had crossed the track of the solitary white dolphin many times when they sailed from Nelson, at the head of the south island, across the Cook Strait to Wellington. New Zealand children who were small before 1912 lived in a sort of fairy tale which had been begun three centuries before, according to Maori legend, when the god-fish Kaikai-awaro,”flashing like fire in the darkness of the sea,” swam slowly before the mokihi (or raft) of dried flax stalks, korari, in which the chieftain Koangaumu was escaping from his enemies, and piloted him safely across Cook Strait into smooth waters. Old Kipa Hemi Whiro, the tohunga, Maori wise man of the Sounds, who lived at the head of Anakoha Bay close to the mouth of Pelorus, claimed direct descent from this chieftain; Pelorus Jack, the white dolphin of the Sounds, was the incarnation of his ancestor’s sea-god. The tohunga was the authority on ancestral history for the Maoris of the Sounds — quiet and earnest in manner, with a noble face — strong and intelligent. He had a club foot; the Maoris, for generations had set apart cripples and hunchbacks as tribal historians and priests. He was said to be the hereditary “owner” of Kaikai-a-waro, who during three centuries had answered the frantic harakai chant for aid in crossing the dangerous strait:
“Ko wai, ko wai koa tera tangata e tere te moana?” (Who is that yonder, wandering on the face of the ocean?)
Hinepoupou, the Maori chieftainess, over a century before, had chanted this powerful incantation to the sea-god, as she cast off her flax mats and dived into those rough straits from the island Rangitito, where she had been deserted by her husband Manini-pounamu. And, indeed, she would need aid, for — powerful swimmers as the Maoris are — the pass was thirty or forty miles across at that point. But she was supported safely by Kaikai-a-waro and reached shore as serenely as Oberon’s mermaid on a dolphin’s back.
What other little girl ever lived in such a fairy tale? Pelorus Jack of these Sounds was one of the taniwhas, sea-deities of the deep who had been menheroes who had led the Maoris tribes; and now:
“As Triton with his ‘wreathed horn’ preceded his ocean-riding father Poseidon, so the scythe-finned taniwhas of the Maori seas escorted their chiefs’ canoes; and so indeed to-day does Kaikai-a-waro, playing swiftly around the bows of the Trans-Cook Strait fire-canoes, — as if leading them on their way.”
That was one of the tremendously exciting things about going to Anikiwa; for they went almost — not quite, but almost far enough