The Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield. Katherine Mansfield
And people always say I have a cheerful disposition. They are quite right. I thank my God I have.... All the same, without being morbid, and giving way to — to memories and so on, I must confess that there does seem to me something sad in life. It is hard to say what it is. I don’t mean the sorrow that we all know, like illness and poverty and death. No, it is something different. It is there, deep down, deep down, part of one, like one’s breathing. However hard I work and tire myself I have only to stop to know it is there, waiting. I often wonder if everybody feels the same. One can never know. But isn’t it extraordinary that under his sweet, joyful little singing it was just this — sadness? — Ah, what is it? — that I heard.
SOMETHING CHILDISH, AND OTHER STORIES
Something Childish but Very Natural
How Pearl Button was Kidnapped
A little bird was asked: Why are your songs so short?
He replied: I have many songs to sing, and I should like to singthem all.
—Anton Tchehov
To
H. M. Tomlinson
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
MOST of the stories and sketches in this collection were written in the years between the publication of Katherine Mansfield's first book, "In a German Pension," in 1911 and the publication of her second, "Bliss and other Stories," in 1920. There are a few exceptions. The first story, The Tiredness of Rosabel, was written in 1908 when Katherine Mansfield was nineteen years old, and the three stories following also were written before "In a German Pension" was published: while Sixpence and Poison were written after Bliss had appeared. Sixpence was excluded from "The Garden-Party and Other Stories" by Katherine Mansfield because she thought it "sentimental"; Poison was excluded because I thought it was not wholly successful. I have since changed my mind: it now seems to me a little masterpiece.
I have no doubt that Katherine Mansfield, were she still alive, would not have suffered some of these stories to appear. When she was urged to allow "In a German Pension" to be republished, she would always reply: "Not now; not yet—not until I have a body of work done and it can be seen in perspective. It is not true of me now: I am not like that any more. When the time for a collected edition comes—" she would end, laughing. The time has come.
The stories are arranged in chronological order.
SOMETHING CHILDISH BUT VERY NATURAL
WHETHER he had forgotten what it felt like, or his head had really grown bigger since the summer before, Henry could not decide. But his straw hat hurt him: it pinched his forehead and started a dull ache in the two bones just over the temples. So he chose a corner seat in a third-class "smoker," took off his hat and put it in the rack with his large black cardboard portfolio and his Aunt B's Christmas-present gloves. The carriage smelt horribly of wet india-rubber and soot. There were ten minutes to spare before the train went, so Henry decided to go and have a look at the book-stall. Sunlight darted through the glass roof of the station in long beams of blue and gold; a little boy ran up and down carrying a tray of primroses; there was something about the people—about the women especially—something idle and yet eager. The most thrilling day of the year, the first real day of Spring had unclosed its warm delicious beauty even to London eyes. It had put a spangle in every colour and a new tone in every voice, and city folks walked as though they carried real live bodies under their clothes with real live hearts pumping the stiff blood through.
Henry was a great fellow for books. He did not read many nor did he possess above half-a-dozen. He looked at all in the Charing Cross Road during lunch-time and at any odd time in London; the quantity with which he was on nodding terms was amazing. By his clean neat handling of them and by his nice choice of phrase when discussing them with one or another bookseller you would have thought that he had taken his pap with a tome propped before his nurse's bosom. But you would have been quite wrong. That was only Henry's way with everything he touched or said. That afternoon it was an anthology of English poetry, and he turned over the pages until a title struck his eye—Something Childish but very Natural!
Had I but two little wings,
And were a little feathery bird,
To