Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
life, appearing as she wished to appear among those who never had known her as Kass Beauchamp.
She threw off the big soft black velour hat which her father had just bought for a guinea to replace the Wellington sailor-straw with the Swainson school band; she threw off the nautical coat, with its pipings of red, and its brass buttons down the front and on the shoulders. Dressed in a high-necked white blouse with long sleeves protruding at the shoulders like wings, and the dark skirt pinched in at a small waist, she leaned out of the window to look over London. How often in the next three years she leaned out over Mansfield Mews. Something seemed to fly from her, escaped and free as she listened to the far-away London sounds : hurdy-gurdys, rumbling of hansom cabs, muffled call of coal and flower vendors. When it rained, she spread a towel on the sill, crying,”Don’t bother me, girls : I’m going to have a mood!”
I
“Away beyond the line of dark houses there is a sound like the call of the sea after a storm — passionate, solemn, strong. I lean far out of the window in the warm, still night air. Down below, in the Mews, the little lamp is singing a silent song. It is the only glow of light in all this darkness. Men swilling the carriages with water; their sharp, sudden exclamations; the faint, thin cry of a very young child, the chiming of a bell from the church close by — these are the only other sounds, impersonal, vague, intensely agitating…”
II
“I lean out of my window. The dark houses stare at me and above them a great sweep of sky. Where it meets the houses there is a strange lightness — a suggestion, a promise.
“Silence now in the Mews below. The cry of the child is silent, even the chiming of the bell is less frequent, no longer so persistent. But away beyond the line of the dark houses there is a sound like the call of the sea after a storm. It is assuming gigantic proportions. Nearer and nearer it comes — a vast, incontrollable burst of sound.
“And in its essence it is the faint, thin cry of the very young child. It is the old, old cry for the moon that rises eternally into the great vastness …”
This first time she looked down over Mansfield Mews, it was mid-April. The smoky haze was like bloom on fruit : it had so much of purple and yellow — not mere grey, as she had supposed. New Zealand air was never like this : but keen and clear — or opalescent, tinged with rose, opaque.”Home,” London, was infinitely more exciting. And how strange to find seasons reversed : spring instead of autumn!
In the “novel,” Juliet, begun three years later, before she left Queen’s, she described (with minor variations) her first hour at No. 41 :
“Juliet looked curiously around her room. So this was where she was to spend the next three years — three years. It did not look inviting. She noticed two texts ornamented with foxgloves and robins … and decided that they must come down. The three large windows looked out upon the Mews, below — the houses built all around in a square. She wondered who would share this sanctuary. Some strange girl, stiff and prim who would torture the walls with pictures of dogs and keep a hockey stick in the corner. ‘Heaven forbid,’ she thought…. How strange the night was. She was close in London — glorious thought. Three years of study before her. And then all life to plunge into. The others were actually gone, now. She was to meet total strangers. She could be just as she liked. They had never known her before — oh, what a comfort to know that every minute saw the others farther away from her! ‘I suppose I am preposterously unnatural,’ she thought and smiled. Then the porter brought in her large boxes, and behind him Miss Mackay hovered, and told Juliet she must have everything unpacked before bedtime. It was quite one of the old customs.
“Does the glory of England rest upon old customs? She rather fancied it did — when to start overcoats and when to stop fires — have boiled eggs for Sunday supper and cold lunches. She knelt down on the floor and unstrapped her luggage. From the pocket of her great coat, she drew out David’s picture…. ‘Dearest and ever dear,’ she said…. ‘I feel that life is helping me write now.’
“… When she had undressed, she suddenly longed to write just a few lines of her impressions. So she slipped into her kimono and drew out her notebook.
“‘If I could retain my solitude,’ she wrote, ‘I should be profoundly happy. The knowledge that sooner or later I shall be hampered with desirable acquaintances takes away much of the glamour. The great thing to do is to start as I mean to continue — never for one moment to be other than myself, as I long to be — and I never yet have been except with David …’.”
The “self” that she “longed to be” was not yet consistent, or constant, indeed, but undeveloped like the rest of her. Katherine at fourteen was not the lovely woman she was to become seven years later. As Juliet said of her face in the novel,”the impression which it gives is not by any means strictly beautiful”; but there were glimpses of future loveliness — in her changing expression; watching hazel eyes that altered suddenly from dreaminess to sparkling attention; and in a clean-cut, sensitive mouth. Her expression altered as frequently as did her handwriting. One who knew her well could instantly recognise her state by the appearance of her page : when she was happy, the letters leaped upright, tall and firm; when she was dispirited or ill, they crawled, indistinctly; when she wrote excitedly, they streaked across the page in curves like shorthand, the letters unformed; only when she was desperate or angry, she wrote with clear distinctness, small and sharp. Her handwriting, that first college year, and her notebooks, were the despair of her “sponsor,” Evelyn Payne, who wrote precisely, like printed script, while Kathleen’s pen streaked across the page at lightning speed to keep pace with her thoughts, her principal mark of punctuation being always the dash. But Evelyn found herself unable to impress her cousin who was going her own way, evolving standards for herself — showing a scornful pride when these standards were threatened.
Consequently she was not popular. With her chosen friends, her manner was eager and precipitate, but from most of the girls she seems to have held herself aloof somewhat from the hauteur of her own family, and because she had become withdrawn even within its circle.
The impression which she created upon those about her varied considerably. Ida, when she came to know her, saw the promise of future loveliness; but “Mimi,” another of her friends, slim and quick— “her eyebrows raised, her eyes half veiled” saw her as “‘a stocky build’. Her appearance (she said in retrospect) did not attract me. She interested me very much, but that’s different.”
Yet part of this aloofness was drawn from these very differences in temperament and attitudes of her acquaintances and friends. She exulted in watching the enacting of the play : far more deeply thrilling to her at that time to watch than to act. Just as in Carnation (her one story of Queen’s College, though she had intended to write many, and though many of her later characters were based on the girls she had known there),”fanciful Katie” watched all of it whirling about her, making fascinating patterns : exotic “Eve,” who was Vere Bartrick-Baker (“Mimi”);”Francie,” Frances Maurice, grand-daughter of the Founder, who was for ever inking herself; Sylvia, her cousin, with her innocent, virginal look sheltered in her calyx of light reddish hair; Ida, about whom she “could write endless books.”
So to those who first made her acquaintance, Kathleen Beauchamp seemed very reserved. Few “knew” her. She was still living a life of which they could guess nothing; for she did not immediately become attached to London in spite of the fascination it had for her. At times, in those first months, she turned ardently back toward New Zealand,”the little Colonial” again :
“April Ist. — To-day the weather has been very dull and gray. I woke this morning at four and since then I have heard nothing save the sounds of traffic, and feel nothing except a great longing to be back in the country, among the woods and gardens and the meadows and the chorus of the Spring Orchestra. All day during my work, I have found myself dreaming of the woods, and the little secret nooks that have been mine and mine, only, for many years. A girl passed under my window this morning, selling primroses. I bought great bunches of them, and untied their tight chains,