The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1898-1915 9781399503976

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The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield Volume 1

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The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield Volume 1: The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1898–1915, edited by Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan Volume 2: The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1916–1922, edited by Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan Volume 3: The Poetry and Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Gerri Kimber and Angela Smith Volume 4: The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Gerri Kimber and Angela Smith

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The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1898–1915

Edited by Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan

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Introduction, Arrangement and Editorial matter © Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan © The Estate of Katherine Mansfield for copyright in the stories held by the Estate © Margaret Scott and Daphne Brasell Associates for copyright in The Notebooks of Katherine Mansfield not otherwise held by the Estate of Katherine Mansfield © Random House, Inc. for copyright in the stories held in the US by Alfred A. Knopf. Copyright 1920, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1926, 1937 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/12 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4274 8 (hardback)

The New Zealand Society

New Zealand Link Foundation

The New Zealand Universities Graduates’ Association

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Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations and Textual Note Chronology Introduction

ix xi xiii xix

Fiction 1898–1915 1898 Enna Blake

3

1899 A Happy Christmas Eve

5

1901 The Great Examination

7

1903 The Pine Tree, The Sparrows, and You and I Misunderstood She A True Tale ‘It was a big bare house’ ‘I am afraid I must be very old-fashioned’ Two Ideas with One Moral

10 12 13 15 16 17 18

1904 Die Einsame (The Lonely One) Your Birthday One Day

20 22 24

1905 About Pat

29

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1906 My Potplants Les Deux Étrangères Juliet ‘“I was never happy”, Huia said’ Memories The Tale of the Three

32 35 37 61 63 64

1907 L’Incendie Vignette: Summer in Winter Summer Idyll Night Came Swiftly She and the Boy; or the Story of the Funny-Old-Thing ‘She unpacked her box’ Vignettes Vignette: Through the Autumn Afternoon Silhouettes In the Botanical Gardens In a Café Leves Amores The Story of Pearl Button Vignette: Sunset Tuesday ‘On waking next morning’ An Attempt Vignette: Westminster Cathedral ‘She sat on the broad window-sill’ The Man, the Monkey and the Mask

66 66 67 71 73 76 78 82 83 84 86 89 91 93 94 97 98 99 100

1908 The Education of Audrey Juliette Delacour The Unexpected Must Happen Vignette: By the Sea In Summer The Yellow Chrysanthemum The Thoughtful Child. Her Literary Aspirations Vignette: They are a ridiculous company The Thoughtful Child Rewa The Tiredness of Rosabel Study: The Death of a Rose ‘Youth and Age’

102 107 109 110 113 116 119 122 124 127 133 138 139

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vii

Vignette: ‘I look out through the window’ Almost a Tragedy: The Cars on Lambton Quay

140 140

1909 A God, One Day on Mount Olympus ‘He met her again on the Pier at Eastbourne’ Prose His Sister’s Keeper

143 143 146 150

1910 The Child-Who-Was-Tired Germans at Meat Mary The Baron The Luftbad At ‘Lehmann’s’ Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding The Sister of the Baroness Frau Fischer A Fairy Story

158 164 168 172 175 178 184 189 193 198

1911 A Birthday The Modern Soul The Festival of the Coronation The Journey to Bruges Being a Truthful Adventure The Advanced Lady The Swing of the Pendulum A Blaze The Green Tree – A Fairy Tale

206 214 221 224 229 234 242 251 255

1912 A Marriage of Passion At the Club The Woman at the Store Green Goggles Tales of a Courtyard How Pearl Button was Kidnapped Spring in a Dream New Dresses The Little Girl The House Old Cockatoo Curl

261 266 268 277 280 285 288 291 301 304 311

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1913 Ole Underwood Epilogue I: Pension Seguin Millie Epilogue II Bains Turcs Old Tar Maata Young Country Rose Eagle

319 322 326 331 336 340 344 365 371

1914 Something Childish But Very Natural K.T. and her sister Hydrangeas ‘There is always something wonderfully touching’

373 388 389 392

1915 Brave Love The Little Governess The Beautiful Miss Richardson Spring Pictures Rough Sketch An Indiscreet Journey Autumns: I Autumns: II Stay-laces The Dark Hollow The Aloe

398 422 433 435 438 439 451 454 458 462 467

Appendix A: Plan of Maata Appendix B: Unpublished stories in King’s College London Archives Index of First Lines Index of Stories

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520 529 545 549

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Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the following people for making this edition of KM’s fiction possible: Margaret Scott and her publisher Daphne Brasell, for so generously allowing the editors to make full use of the transcriptions of KM’s notebooks; Jackie Jones, our editor at Edinburgh University Press (EUP), for having the vision and foresight to commit wholeheartedly to taking this massive project on, together with the editorial team at EUP including Jenny Daly, Rebecca MacKenzie, James Dale and Wendy Lee, for their good-natured efficiency; the Society of Authors, as the literary representatives of the Estate of Katherine Mansfield, for granting permission to reproduce copyright material, and especially Jeremy Crow and Lisa Dowdeswell; Random House, for granting permission to reproduce Mansfield material for which they own the copyright; the Advisory Board: Sydney Janet Kaplan, J. Laurence Mitchell and Angela Smith for their constant generosity and without whose collective wisdom this edition would be the poorer; the New Zealand Society of Great Britain (and especially Michelle Marsh and John Greager), the New Zealand Universities Graduates’ Association (and especially Romy Brandeis and Karyn Newman) and the New Zealand United Kingdom Link Foundation (and especially Richard Eats, Richard Fell, Tony Fryer, Mark Horton, Jane Kirkcaldie and Anna Lady Weir), for generously funding and supporting Gerri Kimber’s research trip to Wellington in 2011; the exceptionally helpful and friendly staff at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, and especially: Jocelyn Chalmers, Jill Goodwin, Gillian Headifen, Michelle Jackson, Rob McGregor, Keith Thorsen, Amy Watling; Gillian Barlow at the Queen’s University Archives in Kingston, Ontario, for her patience and diligence over the reproduction of our cover images; Katherine Mansfield Society Patron Jacqueline Wilson and colleagues for their support and encouragement, including Sarah Ailwood, Kevin Boon, Bernadette Cibulskas, Delia da Sousa Correa, Jessica Gildersleeve, Stephanie Hancox, Melinda Harvey, Kathleen Jones, Janka Kašcˇáková, Alice Kelly, Kate Kennedy, Todd Martin, Jenny McDonnell, Sheila McDonagh, Rolf ix

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x

acknowledgements

Panny, Neil Plimmer, Janine Renshaw-Beauchamp, Kathryn Simpson, Dunstan Ward, Nelson Wattie, Peter Whiteford, Janet Wilson, Gina Wisker, Irene Zohrab; Chris Mourant for contacting the editors regarding his discovery of unpublished material by KM, and King’s College London Archives and Dr Anna Snaith for facilitating access to the material and granting permission for its use in this edition; Ralph Kimber, for spending hundreds of hours scanning documents used in the creation of this edition, and Bella Kimber for doing without her mother for an entire summer; Helen O’Sullivan, for not minding her home in Karori being turned into a paper- and book-strewn research hub, and the ever-friendly Norman, for providing a much-needed reason for the editors to stretch their legs; Sarah Sandley, for her belief in this project from the outset, and for generously providing a home-from-home in Auckland at both the beginning and the end of the research trip; and finally to the New Zealand weather, for creating an exceptional once-in-a-lifetime winter wonderland in Wellington during our research period, and cutting off Karori for twenty-four hours. Kass Beauchamp would surely have never seen anything like it.

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Abbreviations and Textual Note

Aloe

The Aloe with Prelude, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan (Wellington: Port Nicholson, 1982) Alpers The Stories of Katherine Mansfield – Definitive Edition, ed. Antony Alpers (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1984) ATL Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington BJK B. J. Kirkpatrick, A Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989) BOS Bliss and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1920) CLKM The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984–2008) DNOS The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1923) GPOS The Garden Party and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1922) IGP In a German Pension (London: Stephen Swift, 1911) JMM John Middleton Murry Journal, 1927 Journal, ed. J. Middleton Murry (London: Constable, 1927) Journal, 1954 Journal, Definitive Edition, ed. J. Middleton Murry (London: Constable, 1954) KM Katherine Mansfield KMN The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, ed. Margaret Scott, 2 vols (Canterbury, New Zealand and Wellington: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates, 1997) Life Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980) LJMM Katherine Mansfield’s Letters to John Middleton Murry 1913–1922, ed. John Middleton Murry (London: Constable, 1951) MS Manuscript xi

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abbreviations and textual note

NLC Poems SCOS Scrapbook TS U

Newberry Library, Chicago Poems of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) Something Childish and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1924) The Scrapbook, ed. J. Middleton Murry (London: Constable, 1939) Typescript Not published in KM’s lifetime

Our intention with this edition has been to retain KM’s own texts as far as possible, without aiming for facsimile. The notes following each story indicate source of text, first publication, and where first collected. With those stories published in her lifetime, we have followed the last printing which she corrected or approved. With work that appeared posthumously, and was taken from MS or TS, we have removed the titles sometimes invented by JMM, returning to the working title if KM had arrived at one, and in other cases, heading the text with the first phrase of the story or fragment placed in inverted commas. (JMM’s titles however are given in footnotes.) We have silently emended slips of the pen, but retained KM’s rare idiosyncratic spellings, and supplied minor omissions such as obviously required commas, full stops and apostrophes, expanded ampersands, and provided quotation marks where direct speech clearly required them. In dramatic sketches, the characters’ names have been conventionalised to capital letters. Quotations from her letters, and personal entries in the notebooks, however, follow the published texts. KM frequently used ellipses in both her fiction and personal writing. To avoid confusion, editorial omissions are indicated by ellipses in square brackets. We have not reproduced those sections of the notebooks or MSS which KM herself clearly cancelled. Key words in foreign languages have been translated. It is appropriate to note again how much the editors are indebted to the monumental work on KM’s notebooks by Margaret Scott, which we have so constantly drawn on with her kind permission; also to the late Antony Alpers, the pre-eminent and ground-breaking Mansfield scholar. The Society of Authors has allowed us – invaluably – to draw on several of the texts he established in his 1984 edition of her stories, while his annotations to that edition, like his magisterial The Life of Katherine Mansfield (1980), remain a quarry and an inspiration for later scholars. It is also fair to say that it is inconceivable for any presentday Mansfield scholar not to be indebted to B. J. Kirkpatrick’s A Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield.

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Chronology: Katherine Mansfield 1888–1923

1888

14 Oct: Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (KM), third daughter of Harold and Annie Burnell Beauchamp, born at 11 Tinakori Road, Wellington. Easter: Beauchamp family move to ‘Chesney Wold’, Karori, a village 6 miles from Wellington. Attends Karori village school. At Wellington Girls’ High School. Nov: Beauchamp family move back to Wellington, now residing at 75 Tinakori Road. Dec: Harold Beauchamp appointed Director of the Bank of New Zealand. At Miss Swainson’s School, Fitzherbert Terrace, Wellington. During this time begins friendship with Maata Mahupuku. Meets the Trowell family for the first time. 29 Jan: Beauchamp family sail for London on S.S. Niwaru. Spring: Commences education at Queen’s College, Harley Street; meets Ida Baker (LM). Easter: In Brussels with Aunt Belle Dyer and sisters Vera and Chaddie to see the Trowell twins perform. 18 Oct: Beauchamp family sail for New Zealand on S.S. Corinthic. KM begins spasmodic journal. 6 Dec: Arrives back in Wellington, once more living at 75 Tinakori Road. 31 Dec: Granny Dyer dies – KM has not visited her since her return to New Zealand. During this summer, Harold Beauchamp rents a small cottage overlooking the beach at Day’s Bay. March: Annie Beauchamp holds a garden party at 75 Tinakori Road, on the same day that a poverty-stricken neighbour is killed in a street accident.

1893 1895–8 1898–9 1898

1899– 1902 1902 1903

1906

1907

xiii

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xiv

1908

1909

1910

1911

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chronology April: Harold Beauchamp becomes Chairman of the Directors of the Bank of New Zealand. May: Beauchamp family move to 47 Fitzherbert Terrace. Oct–Dec: First published stories in the Native Companion (Melbourne). 15 Nov–18 Dec: With camping party in the ‘King Country’ of the North Island. 6 Jul: Sails for London alone, on S.S. Papanui, via Montevideo and Tenerife. 24 Aug: At Beauchamp Lodge, Warwick Crescent, a single women’s hostel in Paddington. Sep: Begins love affair with Garnet Trowell, and is probably pregnant by the end of the year. 2 Mar: Marries George Bowden at Paddington Register Office, leaving him the same day. c. 10–28 Mar: Joins Garnet Trowell on tour in Glasgow and Liverpool with the Moody–Manners Opera Company. 29 Apr: In Brussels alone for several days. 27 May: Annie Beauchamp arrives in London and takes Kathleen to Bad Wörishofen. Returns to London a few days later and, back in Wellington on 13 August, she cuts KM out of her will. Jun–Dec: Baby still-born in ?late June. Meets Polish writer Floryan Sobieniowski, a devotee of Stanislaw Wyspianski, Polish artist and writer. They begin a love affair. Jan: Returns to London, living briefly with George Bowden at 62 Gloucester Place, Marylebone. 24 Feb: First ‘Bavarian Sketches’ published in the New Age. Mar–?Jul: At Rottingdean, Sussex, with LM, after operation for ‘peritonitis’, possibly the termination of another pregnancy. 29 Jul: Staying with A. R. Orage and Beatrice Hastings at 39 Abingdon Villas, Kensington. Autumn: At 131 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Commences friendship with William Orton and has an affair with Francis Heinemann. Jan: Moves to 69 Clovelly Mansions, Gray’s Inn Road. Will live here until Sep 1912. May: The Beauchamp family minus Harold arrive in London for the coronation of King George V. KM’s sisters presented at court.

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chronology

1912

1913

1914

1915

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Aug: KM travels to Bruges and then Geneva. Possible termination of another pregnancy. Dec: Meets John Middleton Murry (JMM), editor of Rhythm, at W. L. George’s house. In a German Pension published by Stephen Swift & Co. Feb: Again in Geneva. Invites JMM to tea on her return. Apr: JMM her lodger, and shortly thereafter her lover; she is assistant editor of Rhythm. Summer: Brief friendship with Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Sep: Couple move to Runcton Cottage, near Chichester. Oct–Nov: Rhythm’s publisher absconds, leaving JMM responsible for its debts. KM and JMM now live in office-cum-flat at 57 Chancery Lane. Dec: Couple in Paris for Christmas with Campbells and Cannans. Meets J. D. Fergusson and Anne Estelle Rice. Mar: Move to The Gables, Cholesbury, Bucks. May–Jul: Last three issues of Rhythm, renamed the Blue Review. Jun: meets D. H. Lawrence (DHL). 1 Jul: Couple move to Chaucer Mansions, Barons Court. Dec: Couple move to Paris, where they take a flat at 31 rue de Tournon. Meeting with Francis Carco. Feb: JMM declared bankrupt. 26 Feb: They return to London. Move to 119 Beaufort Mansions, Chelsea. Apr: Move to 102 Edith Grove, where KM has an attack of pleurisy. Jul: Move to 111 Arthur Street, Chelsea. 13 Jul: DHL and Frieda are married, with JMM and KM as witnesses. Frieda gives her old wedding ring to KM, who wears it for the rest of her life. 26 Oct: Move to Rose Tree Cottage, The Lee, Great Missenden. Oct/Nov: First meeting with S. S. Koteliansky during this time. Dec: Unhappy in relationship with JMM. Starts receiving love letters from Carco in Paris. 15–25 Feb: Travels to France, with money given by her brother Leslie, who is in England to enlist. Joins Carco at Gray (Saône et Loire) for four days; in Paris en route. 25 Feb: Returns to Rose Tree Cottage and JMM. 18–31 March: In Paris, staying alone at Carco’s flat on the quai aux Fleurs.

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xvi

1916

1917

1918

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chronology 31 Mar: Lives with JMM at 95 Elgin Crescent. Has begun to write The Aloe. 5–19 May: Back in Carco’s flat in Paris. Jun: With JMM, moves to 5 Acacia Road, St John’s Wood. Autumn: JMM and DHL begin the Signature. 6 Oct: Leslie Beauchamp killed in France. Nov: KM and JMM leave for the South of France, staying first at Cassis, then at Bandol. 7 Dec: JMM returns to England; KM alone at Hôtel Beau Rivage, Bandol. 31 Dec: JMM rejoins KM at Villa Pauline, Bandol. Jan–Mar: With JMM at Villa Pauline. Rewrites The Aloe. 7 Apr: They return to England, and join the Lawrences at Higher Tregerthen, near Zennor, Cornwall. Jun: Move to Sunnyside Cottage, Mylor, near Penrhyn. Jul: KM’s first visit to Garsington. Aug: KM stays with Dorothy Brett at 4 Logan Place, Earl’s Court. 31 Aug: In Café Royal with Gertler and Koteliansky. Snatches copy of DHL’s Amores from mocking group. 4 Sep: JMM begins work in the War Office as a translator. 29 Sep: Couple move to 3 Gower Street, Bloomsbury, sharing the house with Brett and Dora Carrington. Autumn: KM meets Virginia Woolf (VW); is meeting and corresponding with Bertrand Russell. 25 Dec: Christmas at Garsington. Feb: KM moves to a studio at 141A Old Church Street, Chelsea; JMM nearby at 47 Redcliffe Road. 26 Apr: VW and Leonard Woolf ask KM for a story to publish on their new printing press. Summer: Works on The Aloe for the Woolfs. Nov–Dec: JMM ill from overwork; KM falls ill with ‘pleurisy’. 12 Dec: KM’s tuberculosis diagnosed; advised to go abroad. 7 Jan: KM leaves alone for Bandol, where LM joins her. 19 Feb: First lung haemorrhage. 21 Mar: KM and LM leave for England; detained three weeks in Paris which is under bombardment. Stays at the Select Hôtel, place de la Sorbonne. 11 Apr: KM joins JMM at 47 Redcliffe Road. 3 May: Her divorce from Bowden final, KM and JMM are married at South Kensington Register Office. J. D. Fergusson and Brett are witnesses.

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chronology

1919

1920

1921

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May–Jun: KM at Headland Hotel, Looe, in Cornwall. c. 1 Jul: Returns to 47 Redcliffe Road. 10 Jul: Prelude (formerly The Aloe) published by the Hogarth Press. 8 Aug: KM’s mother dies in Wellington. Late Aug: KM and JMM move to 2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead, known as ‘The Elephant’. Sep: KM first consults Dr Sorapure. 14 Oct: Two tuberculosis specialists tell KM that she has, at the outside, four years left to live unless she immediately enters a sanatorium. Dec: Learns from Sorapure that what she always thought was her ‘arthritis’ is, in fact, the effects of a long-term gonorrhoea infection. Feb: JMM appointed editor of the Athenaeum; KM begins reviewing fiction for it. Aug: KM so ill she decides to enter a sanatorium for the winter. Sorapure advises against such a move. 11 Sep: Travels with JMM and LM to San Remo, Italy. With LM at Casetta Deerholme, Ospedaletti, JMM having returned to England. 16 Dec–2 Jan: Joined by JMM. 21 Jan: Goes with LM to Menton to stay at L’Hermitage, near to a cousin, Connie Beauchamp. 15 Feb: Moves into Villa Flora to be with Connie Beauchamp and her companion Jinnie Fullerton. c. 27 Apr: Leaves Menton with LM and returns to Hampstead. May–Aug: At 2 Portland Villas. 11 Sep: Returns to Menton with LM, now renting the Villa Isola Bella. 16 Sep: Arranges for payment of £40 to Sobieniowski, for the return of letters written to him by KM in 1909. 18 Dec: JMM leaves London for Menton. Dec: Bliss and Other Stories published by Constable. 10 Dec: Last review for the Athenaeum. 11–19 Jan: JMM returns to London. 5–20 Feb: JMM in London winding up his affairs. 4 May: Leaves for Switzerland with LM whilst JMM returns to Oxford to deliver a series of lectures. 21 May: Leaves Montreux for Sierre, close to the home of her cousin, the novelist Elizabeth von Arnim. 9 Jun: JMM leaves London and joins KM at Hôtel Château Belle Vue, Sierre.

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1922

1923

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chronology c. 23 Jun: Couple move to Chalet des Sapins, Montanasur-Sierre. LM living nearby. 29 Nov: Writes to Koteliansky, asking for information about Manoukhin’s tuberculosis treatment. 4 Dec: Writes to Manoukhin. 24 Dec: Manoukhin’s reply arrives. 1 Jan: Is reading Cosmic Anatomy, by ‘M. B. Oxon’, sent by A. R. Orage, who has been seeing Ouspensky. 30 Jan: Leaves for Paris with LM, to begin treatment with Manoukhin, staying at the Victoria Palace Hotel. 31 Jan: Sees Manoukhin and begins treatment the next day. 9 Feb: Joined by JMM. 23 Feb: The Garden Party and Other Stories published by Constable. 29 Mar: Couple have tea with James Joyce at their hotel. Apr: Still undergoing Manoukhin’s radiation treatment, which leaves her exhausted. 4 Jun: Couple return to Switzerland, staying at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, Randogne-sur Sierre. 8 Jun: Writes to LM, now back in England, asking her to return. 29 Jun: Rift between JMM and KM – she moves alone to Hôtel Belle Vue, Sierre. 5 Jun: Brett staying with KM in Sierre. 14 Aug: Makes her will at Sierre. 16 Aug: Returns to London with JMM and LM, to stay with Brett at 6 Pond Street, Hampstead. 30 Aug: Meets Orage at Pond Street and discusses Gurdjieff. Sep: JMM in Sussex. KM has further discussions with Orage and attends lectures by Ouspensky. 2 Oct: Returns to Paris with LM, staying at Select Hôtel. 14 Oct: Orage arrives in Paris. 16 Oct: Goes to Le Prieuré, Avon, Fontainebleau, to Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. 20 Oct: LM leaves her for the last time, to work on a farm at Lisieux. 9 Jan: JMM arrives at Fontainebleau to visit KM; that evening at around 10.30 pm, whilst climbing the stairs, she has a massive haemorrhage and dies. 11 Jan: Buried at the communal cemetery in Fontainebleau.

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Introduction

Both scholars and general readers of Katherine Mansfield have frequently been frustrated by the lack of a complete edition of her fiction. This edition, published to coincide with the ninetieth anniversary of her death in 1923, is a complete collection of Mansfield’s fiction writing. Antony Alpers’s 1984 Definitive Edition (now out of print) contained 85 stories, both complete and incomplete. This new gathering contains 220 fiction pieces, including hitherto uncollected or rarely seen stories and prose fragments, as well as the instantly recognisable stories. It undertakes a complete remapping of the author’s fiction, arranged in chronological order, from her earliest childhood pieces to the pitch-perfect quality of the mature writer at the height of her craft. The annotations and their cross-referencing to her letters and notebooks deepen what we know of the context and genesis of her fiction. Mansfield has long been recognised as a significant Modernist figure. Now that this edition joins the five volumes of her Collected Letters and the two volumes of her Notebooks, her importance among twentieth-century, English-language writers, and her rare originality in the short story, are further confirmed. There is a span of twenty-four years between Katherine Mansfield’s first story, published in a school magazine in 1898, and her last, unpublished in her lifetime, in June 1922. That final story, written in the Swiss Alps, was set in the same Wellington street where she lived as she wrote her first, dreaming of England. But Mansfield is celebrated mainly for those stories she wrote in what her husband, John Middleton Murry, called her ‘three brief years of full productiveness’,1 and most of which she included in either Bliss or The Garden Party, the collections she put together in the last few years of her life. Neither volume has been out of print in the ninety-odd years since. The numerous selections that reproduce her work almost entirely draw from these, from her early In a German Pension, 1911, and the two volumes Murry put together after her death. They are the basis for her increasingly acknowledged place among the important figures in English-language Modernism. The five volumes xix

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introduction

of her correspondence, and the two of that still-tricky terrain, her notebooks, more recently have confirmed her standing as a unique and incisive voice, catching both the raw edginess and the embattled confidence of a mind, a temperament, so distinctively of her time. Mansfield’s combination of influences in her stories has been described as ‘her own peculiar form of geographical schizophrenia’.2 In assessing her writing, Alpers notes: Stories about people who are in some way on the move and have mislaid their roots are so numerous that to express this category as a fraction would be impossible. [. . .] Katherine Mansfield the expatriate colonial, the doubly uprooted, had come on the scene with a talent precisely fitted to the rootless age of solitude in cities, constant movement and dreams of travel (Alpers, pp. xx–xxi).

This new edition of Mansfield’s fiction allows us to trace out a writer always in transition, before the clarity of biographers, or the weight of posthumous success, has been imposed; to track the uneven, sometimes blurred, trajectory of work as it evolves, before achievement can be assumed. For the first time, a reader can follow Mansfield the writer, often month by month, as she alters tack, puts aside, mines an untried vein, works to break old habits, to drive through to new forms – the messiness of the workshop that surrounds the nowestablished works. To write something new, and to make money from writing it – both are frequent refrains in Mansfield’s correspondence and notebooks. For most of her adult life, an allowance from her banker father may have covered bare necessities, but there was seldom quite enough for either the independence or the lifestyle that she had in mind, that increasingly serious illness called for, and a too-cautious husband often failed to take on board. Through most of her final decade, there were those two challenging pressures that became more entwined: to find the form for what she wanted to write, then to find a market that accepted it. If often at the back of her mind there was the hope that she might bring off a novel, there was the pragmatism too to accept that was not her province. The ‘shape’ of her career, as it may seem in retrospect, is rather different from the frequently random and fortuitous playing out of circumstance that, as a writer, she made the most of. Her pregnancy as a twenty-year-old, and her months in Bavaria, were turned to those first satirical stories which she later so disliked, but provided an entrée to the pages and the abrasive milieu of the Fabian weekly, the New Age, at the very moment when baiting Germans chimed with British taste. The paper – which in fact offered the chance to make a name, but at the price of not offering

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payment – was equally hospitable to an outsider’s neatly turned take on English class and arty posturing. Soon after the Bavarian stories were collected as In a German Pension, Murry’s journal Rhythm, with its Modernist agenda and its declared intent that art, to be modern, must first learn to be brutal, was the opportunity for that handful of Mansfield’s tough, calculated slices of colonial life. But as this edition now follows both the order and the profusion of what she wrote, published, tried her hand at and put aside, one picks up on quite how much was going into the mix as the Edwardian heyday faded into 1914 and the First World War. Here were the continued harkings-back to middle-class life and family dynamics in Wellington, fey fairy tales and fables, the long shadow – still – of Wilde and the Nineties, leads taken up from her schooldays in London, fantasies of lost romantic dreams, a slew of Russian impersonations, remnants and hints from German or French memories, dialogues, slivers of smart cosmopolitan life, various playings-out of her own emotional past, with few quite finding the form that would bring a clarity that eluded the events themselves. The death of Mansfield’s brother early in the war is often read as the turning point where a good writer moves toward becoming something more. That devastating loss was part of the change, but not all. Already, in the first published version of ‘The Wind Blows’, she had hit on her own way to move time levels adroitly and unexpectedly. Already, how a story was told was becoming part of what was told. Incandescent memories of Wellington were being quarried before Lesley’s death added its imperative. Now more urgently, Mansfield realised as an artist, and not simply as a bereaved sister, that to arrive at more than personal nostalgia called for a ‘kind of special prose’ (KMN, 2, p. 33). As for many writers, the war destroyed the assumptions of a stable world, and demanded less traditional ways to deal with it. Already, yet again, Mansfield’s acting as an extra in early movies alerted her, far earlier than it did with most, to the fact that cinematic narrative, with its editing techniques, was there to be learned from – the single take, the juxtapositions, the abrupt opening, the quick dissolve, the vivid clarity that cutting can impose. As she once described to Bertrand Russell, her way of apprehending experience through atmosphere, a cinematic flow, as it were, the quick altering of angles, seemed especially congenial to her: to arrive late at night in strange cities or to come into little harbours just at pink of dawn when its cold with a high wind blowing somewhere up in the air, to push through the heavy door into little cafes and to watch the pattern people make among tables & bottles and glasses, to watch when they are off their guard . . . To air oneself among these things, to seek

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them, to explore them and then to go apart and detach oneself from them – and to write. (CLKM, 1, pp. 287–8)

Or, as she explained the method of ‘Prelude’ to her painter friend Dorothey Brett, preferring an image rather than a technical account, it made her think of those mornings back in Wellington, when ‘white milky mists rise and uncover some beauty, then smother it again and then again disclose it. I tried to lift that mist from my people and let them be seen and then to hide them again’ (CLKM, 1, p. 331). A story is process as much as content, a matter of perspective, rather than anything like the ‘plotty’ narratives she so disliked (CLKM, 4, p. 311), but was partly driven back to when obliged to make money quickly, in her last two years, to cover expensive medical treatment. Similarly, it was for payment’s sake that she spent so much time writing book reviews, sometimes two or three a week, when Murry was editor of the Athenaeum, rather than the stories he published more sparingly. Mansfield’s discontent with her work runs parallel with her sense of diminishing time. There is a constant thread of self-reprimand as one story after another fails to satisfy her, as she sets herself the challenge of ‘No novels, no problem stories, nothing that is not simple, open’ (KMN, 2, p. 33). Again, as much as in her earlier years, to follow her work in sequence is to witness an abiding quest to extend what she has done, so that one reads major stories, such as ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ or ‘Je ne parle pas français’, ‘Miss Brill’ or ‘Poison’, among surrounding scraps and lesser pieces, back-trackings, proposals that come to nothing, abandoned schemes and proposed lists. ‘Is that quite my game?’ Mansfield wrote after finishing ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’, feeling she had used actual doves ‘unwarrantably’, in edging them towards an emblematic role (KMN, 2, p. 278). So what, then, was her game? The closest she came perhaps to putting it almost directly was when she copied out a sentence from Hegel where the philosopher declares the object of our thinking is ‘to attain existence by quite other means than that of existence itself’. Mansfield – with a nudge almost certainly from her mentor Chekhov – took this to mean that, for herself as a writer, she was not intending to offer ‘a vision of Life’, or a hard-line exercise in realism, but something rather different. For all fiction’s interest in a specific time and a particular place, that is not, finally, a story’s artistic point. The revelation is that, in writing about experience, there is something we did not expect to be revealed. ‘We single out, we bring into the light, we put up higher’ (KMN, 2, p. 267): not a copy of what we know, but something new to know, to take delight in. Each fiction in these two volumes, the complete and the fragmentary, the achieved and the discarded, moves towards that final intent.

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Notes 1. John Middleton Murry, Introductory Note, in Ruth Elvish Mantz, The Critical Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield (1931), p. xiv. 2. Gillian Boddy, Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer (1988), p. 160.

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FICTION

1898–1915

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1898

Enna Blake ‘Oh, mother, it is still raining, and you say I can’t go out.’ It was a girl who spoke; she looked about ten. She was standing in a wellfurnished room, and was looking out of a large bay window. ‘No, Enna dear,’ said her mother, ‘you have a little cold and I don’t want it made worse.’ Just then the gong rang for luncheon and they went into the dining-room. In the midst of this meal the maid came in with the letters; there was one for Enna and one for Mrs Blake. As it had stopped raining after lunch, they all went outside, where Enna seated herself in a shady nook and began to read her letter. It was a note from Lucy Brown, to ask her and her mother to spend a few weeks holiday with her at her home at Torquay. Enna was delighted and ran to ask her mother. And so it happened that next morning they got into the train that bore them to Torquay. When Enna was tired of looking out of the window she lay back in her seat and knew nothing more until she heard the porter shout ‘Torquay’. Lucy was on the platform to welcome them. ‘I am so glad you have come,’ she said, ‘mother thought your music might prevent you.’ They had a pleasant drive to Sunny Glen; it was nine o’clock at night when they reached it and so they were told to go to bed at once, which Enna willingly did. The next day was very fine. Mrs Brown proposed that they should go ferning. So soon after breakfast they started. ‘It seems just the day for enjoying one’s self,’ said Lucy, as they climbed the hill. ‘Yes,’ Enna answered, ‘today is much nicer here than in London.’ At about twelve o’clock the two girls sat on a log and ate their dinners. ‘I think it would be very nice to get some moss,’ Enna said; so off they trudged. The girls spent a very happy day, and got a great many nice ferns and some beautiful moss. And that night Enna said she thought it was the nicest day she had ever spent in the country. The next day was very wet so they had to stay indoors, but they made cakes, scones, 3

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ginger-nuts and other dainties for a party she meant to have the day after next. At about eight o’clock that night a box came directed to Lucy in her uncle’s hand. On opening it she found a darling little kitten; it was pure white except for a black spot on its neck. Lucy was delighted, and played with it all the rest of the evening. The third day of Enna’s stay was very pleasant. The girls went for a ride in the morning, and visited some girl friends of Lucy’s in the afternoon. When they had had tea a gentleman came to see Mrs Brown and amused them for the rest of the evening. And indeed the weeks flew by too quickly, but when the holidays did come to an end, Enna thought it was the happiest holiday she had ever had. Notes Text: High School Reporter, Wellington Girls’ High School, Second Term, 1898, pp. 21–2. There is the note ‘by Kathleen Beauchamp, aged nine years,’ and the editorial comment that the story ‘shows promise of great merit.’ KM was enrolled at the school from May 1898 until May 1899. Her parents were on an extended visit to England for much of 1898, which perhaps explains the setting of KM’s first story.

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1899

A Happy Christmas Eve The town clock was striking half-past twelve, and a sigh of relief came from the children in the little schoolroom at the Courteneys’ house. ‘I am glad lessons are over,’ said Grace the eldest one. ‘I could not learn today.’ ‘Well,’ said Fanny, ‘let’s be quick and gather the books together and tidy the room, for mamma said she wanted to see us after the morning’s lessons.’ The room was soon tidied and the children ran into the study to see their mother. ‘Good morning, my darlings,’ said Mrs Courteney, laying down the book that she had been reading. ‘As you break up today, I am going to take you with me to town, to get the presents for our tree.’ For the Courteneys were going to have a tree for the poor children that year. ‘How lovely,’ said the children, dancing about the room in their glee. ‘Will we go directly after dinner, mamma?’ ‘Yes, I think so, darlings, and now run to nurse and get ready for dinner.’ What a busy afternoon they had, buying small things and large things of every sort and description. They were thoroughly tired when they reached home, and very glad to get to bed. It was to be Christmas Eve in a week, and as the tree was to be shown that night they had to be rather quick. The next morning when they awoke the first thought was of the presents they had bought. ‘I wonder if they have come,’ said Harold to his favourite, Beth, ‘do you think they will have?’ ‘I think so,’ said Beth, ‘mamma will be very quick.’ I will pass over the next few days and will resume my story on the morning of the day before Christmas. The day dawned clear and bright, and the children were up at a very early hour. ‘I have never felt more happy before,’ said Harry, giving Fanny’s arm a squeeze; ‘but 5

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there is the breakfast bell; we must hurry.’ It was impossible to keep silence at breakfast time, they chatted all the while about the tree. ‘What are we going to do this morning, mamma,’ said Grace. ‘Going for a long walk, darling, to work off your spirits.’ They had a long pleasant walk and when they came back, the noises that came out of the study were wonderful. ‘Oh, dear! I do want to look so; but then it would spoil all the fun,’ said Beth. Such a funny crowd it was that came that night, ragged and dirty, but having a look of curiosity on their faces. When they had all come, the study door was thrown open and the Christmas tree was seen in all its splendour. I wish I could have let you see the delight on the faces of the children. Really it was a sight to behold. The tree was loaded with sweets, fruits and presents and there was a present for everyone besides the sweets. Then there were games, supper at which the children ate very heartily, more games, and then they went home. When the guests had gone the children sat alone in the study talking over the events of the evening. Soon their mother came in, looking very tired. ‘Well, Children,’ she said, ‘how have you enjoyed yourselves?’ ‘Mamma,’ they answered, ‘it is the happiest Christmas Eve we have ever had.’ Notes Text: High School Reporter, Wellington Girls’ High School, Second Term, 1899, pp. 3–4. Signed Kathleen Beauchamp. A forerunner of the many stories KM will write with variations on her family life and relationships. ‘Harold’ was her father’s name, while there is a distant hint of the rich family’s largesse in ‘The Garden Party’.

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The Great Examination They were walking in a leisurely fashion up the stairs. They had been sent to bed as it was past nine o’clock, but that was a mere detail in their minds. There are three girls in the family, the eldest, Phoebe, is just sixteen. Phoebe is not what could be called a truly pretty girl, but she had a wealth of beautiful nut brown hair that fell in one thick plait down her back. Next in age is Kitty or Edith, if you wish to be exact. She is what girls call, a ‘real good sort’, and here the writer agrees, she is one girl in twenty. And last comes Bessie, who is the one beauty in the family, though is herself entirely unconscious of the fact. Lately, she has developed a tendency to appear masculine, to the great amusement of the rest of the family. The ages of these two are fourteen and thirteen. Bessie is speaking. ‘Phoebe’, she says, ‘I wish that when you wake me in the morning, that you’d roll me right out of bed. How can a fellow be expected to jump from the comfortable regions of the Equator, to the icy coldness of the North pole.’ ‘I simply couldn’t’, Kitty says, ‘really I don’t see any advantage in you doing your lessons twice.’ ‘Of course you don’t’ the two others exclaimed both together, ‘but you are not trying nearly so hard for the prize as we are.’ ‘I’m like a skeleton, already’, Bessie continued ‘if we did not break up in a week, something would go wrong with my brain. I was just trying to find the square root of the fifth Euclid prop.’ The three then said goodnight and departed to their respective bedrooms. These girls have no father, their Mother is middle-aged. She is passionately loved by the family and deserves it all. There are two boys, one aged twenty, whose name is Arthur, the other seventeen, named Albert. Next morning the girls went off to school on their bicycles (the whole family had cycles, which were the presents of their Grandfather) 7

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with much fear and trepidation. It was the day of the great exam. Girls from twelve upwards were trying and it was thought to be a hard battle. Soon all the candidates assembled in a large schoolroom, where the papers were given out. Every girl described it as being very stiff, and Kitty bit the handles of two pens down to nothing in the time given them. After school all girls who had done the exam had the rest of the day free to do what they pleased. Our three went home in low spirits. ‘How did you get on?’ queried the Mother, directly they entered the door. But a chorus of groans was the only answer she received. ‘Awful’, said Phoebe, ‘dreadful’, said Kitty, ‘terrific’, said Bessie. ‘Really’, went on Kitty, ‘you will have to seriously think of increasing my allowance, Mater, in the time of exams. The numbers of handles of pens that I nibble away is absolutely appaling’. The Mother smiled, and told them to run away and get ready for dinner. ‘What can we do with ourselves this afternoon?’ said Phoebe. ‘For my part, I shall enjoy myself with ‘Paul Dombey’, in the hammock’, said Bessie. ‘And the apples’, Kitty said. ‘Mother, only think, the other day I found Bessie sitting under the apple tree, crying over the death of Paul’.1 Bessie stoutly denied such ‘feminine weakness’, as she expressed it, and turned the conversation into a different channel. A week after, the girls assembled to hear the results of the great exam and to break up. The headmistress made a short speech and then said that the prize was awarded to one of the younger girls and I have much pleasure in presenting [it] to Kitty Mahony. There was a burst of applause and Kitty went up with flaming cheeks to receive the ‘Waverly Novels’,2 bound in red morocca. –––––––––––––– A pleasant surprise ‘Do suggest something that we can do these holidays Arthur’ said Phoebe, ‘Of course [we] want to be at home for Christmas and here we are waiting till it comes.’ Arthur thought for a moment, and then a bright idea struck him. ‘Why not go on a bicycling tour, you three?’ he said. ‘Bravo’ they all shouted, ‘we’ll go to the same place as you and Bert went last holidays.’ ‘And I’ll chaperone you girls,’ continued Bert, ‘we’ll have a ripping time’. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 3–5. Dated and signed, June 4th 1901 by K. Beauchamp.

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Possibly part of a longer story originally given the title ‘Three 20th Century Girls’ by KM. 1. Charles Dickens, Chapter XVI, Dombey and Son (1848). 2. The extensive series of novels by Sir Walter Scott, taking their general title from Waverley (1814).

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1903

The Pine-Tree, The Sparrows, and You and I He was a tall, stately pine-tree. So tall, so very tall, that when you stood underneath and looked right up through the branches you could not see the top. How very fond you were of that pine-tree. We used to go and see it every day. He sang the most beautiful songs and told the most lovely stories; but he always seemed a little sad, somehow. You could not understand why for days and days, until one morning I discovered quite by accident – poor, dear old pine-tree. No little bird had ever built a nest in his branches. All the other trees had two and three, but no bird ever seemed to come near this one. We decided it must be a very unfashionable quarter for birds, yet there was no reason why it should be. A dear little rippling stream ran quite near it and laughed all day long. But yet no birds came near him. One day when we were sitting under an old apple-tree in the garden, you pointed with your finger to a little husband and wife sparrow who had evidently gone out house-hunting. They looked tidy and very respectable; so we thought what a good idea it would be for them to build in the pine-tree. We went back to the house very quickly, and while you got a nice crumby piece of bread I wrote a little letter. Then I tied it on to the bread with one of your little blue hair ribbons, and hand-in-hand we walked back to where the sparrows were sitting. Yes, they were still in just the same place, so we put the bread down quite near them, and then walked away with our heads in the air as though we knew nothing about it. The next morning, very early, you and I went to the old pine-tree. Your little legs were going along so fast that it made me quite dizzy to look at them. Long before we came to the place I had to carry you – you had such a terrible stitch! At last we caught sight of him. His branches were all waving and his head was high in the air. When he saw us he bowed most graciously, but very proudly. I stole along ever so quietly with you in my arms, and, sure enough, there were the sparrows sitting in the branches. They did not seem at all shy, and 10

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how glad we both were. The old pine-tree looked just like you do when you have had a cold bath and Mummy has put you in a clean starched frock, and a petticoat that sticks out all round. You look as though you never made mud pies in your life and would rather die than tread in the puddles. After that visit we came regularly every day with hay and feathers and little bits for their nest, and at last it was finished. The old pinetree simply sang the whole day now. He never was sad. You said he always seemed to be singing ‘hymns of gladness’, and I think you were right. One night when you were in bed and asleep, Mummy and I went for a walk all by our own selves, and suddenly we found we were standing under the old pine-tree. He was not looking half so proud that night, but very, very tender and loving. The moon shone down through the branches and we could see the little nest and suddenly we heard a little ‘cheep, cheep’. Just a weeny-teeny sound. Then Mummy and I knew that there must be some little baby sparrows, so we came home just as fast as we could, wishing that morning would come, so that we could tell you. How excited you were, and how quickly Mummy dressed you. When we did come to the pine-tree, you kept one little hand over my mouth (I had you on my shoulder) so that I would not say a word. We listened for a long long time, and heard them saying ‘cheep, cheep’. We would have stayed all day, I think, if I had not managed to whisper a little breath whisper that I was going to sneeze. Then you made me run, because you knew how loud my sneezing was. When we reached home your cheeks were like roses, and your eyes were shining like stars, and you tried to tell Mummy so much in one breath that I thought you would burst. We did not go and see them again all day, but when the dew had begun to fall, and the little shadow boys were coming out of school, and the air smelt full of roses, Mummy and you and I went. Mummy had hold of one of your hands and I had hold of the other, and we jumped you over all the big stones, till you shouted with laughter. All the way home I played horses with you on my back, and poor Mummy’s hair nearly came down, we ran so fast. You told me it had got soft with washing, just as though she sent it to the laundry. Late that night, when I was locking the windows, and Mummy was lighting the bedroom lamp, a huge big grandfather storm came. He shook the house ’mensely, and woke you right up. I found you underneath the bed-clothes, crying and looking so red and hot. I got you a clean ‘hanky’ and a drink, and asked you if you were crying because you were frightened, and you said No–o–o, and the tooth glass shook so in your hand that I thought the water would spill. ‘Have you got a pain, darling’ I said.

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‘No–o–o–o’ you said, crying much harder. ‘Its about zem poor ’icle spawows.’ I sat right down on the bed and felt like Mummy feels when the cook says she’s going to leave, ‘dinner-party or no dinnerparty.’ We went to see them the first thing next morning. Alas! As soon as I saw our old friend, I knew something must be the matter. He was crying and moaning – and then – and – then, you found three little dead sparrows. Poor, poor little darlings. You held them in your pinafore, and I quite forgot Mummy would be cross. That afternoon we had a little sad funeral. We buried them under the old pine-tree, and you planted a geranium flower on their grave. Notes Text: Queen’s College Magazine, December 1903, pp. 74–6. Signed Kathleen Beauchamp. The first of a number of ‘baby’ stories written over the next several years.

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Misunderstood It was visiting afternoon in a London hospital. Mothers, Fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts and uncles, streamed up to the door. The hospital was in one of the poorest parts of the City and was for children, whose parents could not afford to pay a doctor, and who could not, or would not, follow his instructions if they did have one. In the front ward there was only one cot which did not have a visitor. This was occupied by a child of about eight years of age. A little curly haired dark skinned child with great luminous black eyes. She was one of the most beautiful and also one of the most eccentric children who had ever entered the Hospital. She had been run over in the streets and her ankle broken. When brought to the Hospital she was asked where she lived. ‘Nowhere’ was the response. Had she a Mother and Father. ‘No’. Any relations. ‘No’. Who did she live with. ‘No one’. And that was all they ever learnt of her circumstances. She never wished for toys, but would sit hour by hour moving her right hand up and down, as though wielding a bow, and singing a weird indescribable accompaniment. Once, when the other children wished to sleep the ‘little musician’ as she was called persisted in singing. One of the nurses came up, and taking hold of her hands, told her she must stop

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instantly. The child looked up at her and then bursting into a torrent of sobs, declared it was ‘all gone’. In vain she was asked what was gone, she only shook her head and sobbed more piteously. It was half past three. The little musician, despite all the noise of talking in the room, had begun playing again, and singing softly. As she sat there, one of the nurses happened to be taking round an old gentleman, a patron of the Hospital, a bachelor, and intensely musical. As they came to her cot, he stopped amazed and wondering. The child did not see them. She went on swaying her body slightly from side to side and singing a plaintive minor cadence. The tears rolled down her cheeks as she sang, but the sweet voice never quavered right on to the end. When the last note had died away, Lord Hunter, strangely excited, spoke to the nurse. Who was she? Her name? Her age? The nurse told him all she knew, and then the old man leant over the child. ‘It was very sad’ he said, ‘where did you learn that.’ The little one looked up, and seeing his kindly old face, and sympathetic eyes, she said ‘I didn’t learn it. I just – thought it.’ He went on talking. ‘Would you like to hear beautiful music, and to play beautiful music?’ The child looked up at him. Her eyes were flashing. ‘O – – – h’ was all she said. Then ‘but I heard some once. It was in one of the houses of the gentry folk. It was O like just nothing else.’ ‘Do you remember the tune?’ he said gently. ‘Why yes’ she answered, ‘I’ll tell you.’ She sang with her queer little bowing movement that little masterpiece which touches our hearts and brings the tears to our eyes. Ave Maria.1 He listened, and the same sense of awe and wonder filled him, as it had before – Notes U Text: KMN, 1, p. 14. 1. Presumably the 1859 setting of ‘Ave Maria’ by Charles Gounod (1818–93).

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She He was but a child when he first saw Her. Such a wee child and ah, so ill, so very ill!!! It was night. The room was dark. Out of the window he saw the night, the stars, and the tall dark trees. And he lay in his

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little bed and gazed out at it. He had been in pain all day, and with the evening it had left him. ‘If he can but sleep’, said the doctor, ‘sleep is his only chance.’ And he was lying there, hot and fevered, when She came to him. He saw Her, he saw Her!! And she was tall with a long white robe, that shimmered like the moonbeams. Her black hair streamed round her, Her white throat was bare. On her forehead shone a star, and there was another at her breast. She leant over him with a face full of tenderness and pity. And he, not knowing, ah, the poor little child, not knowing stretched out his arms to touch her. For as he gazed at her his soul longed for her to take him in [her] arms and to soothe him and hold him to her breast. He was so tired, so very very tired. But she shrank back, before his fingers touched her robe, and she looked at him with such a look of compassion that the tears came to his eyes and he hid his face. When he looked again, she was gone. And he slept. He did not see her again for many years. But Her memory haunted him always. He grew unlike other children. He did not play, or laugh, but sat alone and in silence, always thinking of her, always wishing for her. If she would only come again. Ah, if she would only come!!! One day when he was grown older, when many many years had passed and he had become a young man, he was thrown from his horse and was found unconscious. They found him on the road, with the blood streaming down his forehead, and they took him home and laid him on his bed. He moaned and tossed about for many days, and one day he sat up and in a strong voice cried out ‘I have seen Her. I have seen her!’ They thought that the fall had injured his brain for ever after, for he grew more silent, more reserved, living quite by himself. He had seen her but she had not taken him with her although he had longed to go. Why should he wish to stay? She had shaken her head and gone without him. One day, he walked by the river. The sun was hidden behind the clouds. The wind moaned as though in pain. The tall trees shook their branches in despair. Winter was at hand. But the river flowed on, calm and restful. And his heart was desolate. It moaned with the wind – Ah, for one sight of Her!!! Then a thought flashed across his brain. Why not go to the river and bury himself in its depths, and see her again, for always and for ever. And he gave one hoarse cry, and then ah, he saw her again. She stretched out her arms, with her lips parted, with her eyes luminous, and clasped him to her heart. She held [him] in her arms as she would a little child, but as her arms touched him, he felt all his sorrows, his tears and his bitterness fade away into the past, become buried with the past. Then he looked up at her. ‘Take me with you’ he moaned, ‘take me with you.’ And she looked at him

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and smiled at him, and clasped him still more tightly in her arms and took him. Death. Death. And her name was – ah! how well we know her you and I. She who came with our Forefathers, and will stay while this little universe will remain. Too often do we bar our doors against her, and watch her entrance with blinding tears. Her name was Death. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 30–1.1 1. An earlier version titled ‘His Ideal’ appears in KMN, 1, p. 7. Close to that entry KM copied in German stanzas from ‘Der Tod’, the poem by Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), set by Johannes Brahms (1833–97), Op. 96, No. 1. In her enthusiasm for fin de siècle writers, KM was avidly reading Oscar Wilde, and very likely Ernest Dowson, whose prose-poem ‘The Visit’ in Decorations (1899), may have influenced this story.

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A True Tale Many, many miles from here, my little Saxons, many many years ago, there was a beautiful island. All round it lay the lovely laughing sea, and there were tall, green, ‘smelly’ woods, the like of which you have never seen, down to the water’s edge. There were no white people living there, but tall, stately, copper coloured men and women, who sailed all round their country in great, carved canoes, and hunted in the woods for game, and very often, I am afraid, human people, whom they killed with aké-akés.1 They were always having wars among themselves, and it is about one of these wars that I am going to tell you. Let us come closer to the fire, dear children, and be glad that you did not live in the time that Motorua2 did. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, p. 9. The MS has several tentative signatures – Kathleen, K., Kathleen M. Beauchamp, K. M. Beauchamp.

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‘it was a big bare house’

1. Ake, a weapon made from a tree called akerautangi (Dodonaea viscosa). In Maori, reduplicated forms are used as intensifiers. 2. This is not a personal name relating to any Maori legend, but KM may have taken it from a place name.

•

‘It was a big bare house’ It was a big bare house surrounded with pine trees. A wilderness of a garden stretched away on all sides – no settled beds of flowers, but the whole overrun with weeds, and tall, long grass. At the back of the house were high thickly wooded hills. Beautiful hills where the tui1 sang all day in summer and the morepork2 cried aloud in the evenings. But the house looked desolate. There were no dainty window curtains, no creepers to soften its outlines. It was painted white. There was a broad verandah at the back, that was the only ‘nice’ thing about it. It was a desperately hot afternoon in the middle of November. The sun streamed down, and there was not a breath of wind. Suddenly the front door opened. ‘Ettie’ cried out a girl’s voice. ‘Ettie, where are you.’ No answer. She stepped outside and looked about. ‘She can’t have gone off with the boys’ she said, ‘I’ll go down to the gate and see if they are coming.’ She was a tall thin girl. Her hair still hung down her back in masses of thick golden brown curls, which were tied back by a ribbon. Her face was beautiful, very beautiful, but she was too thin, and she looked almost old and certainly care worn. Yet she was only fifteen. She was the eldest of a family of Notes U Text: KMN, 1, p. 11. The first attempt to describe ‘Chesney Wold’, the home in Karori, 6 miles from the centre of Wellington, where the Beauchamps lived from 1893 to 1898. 1. Prosthemadera novaeseelandiae, also known in colonial times as the parson bird because of the white tuft at its throat, and its otherwise black plumage. 2. A name based on the mournful nocturnal cry of the small native owl, Ninox novaeseelandiae.

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•

‘I am afraid I must be very old-fashioned’ I am afraid I must be very old-fashioned. I used to pride myself upon being quite a Modern woman, but, within the last week I have had a rude awakening. Last Saturday afternoon when my Beloved had come home and we had drawn the curtains and poked the fire, and settled down for a lovely quiet time just by ourselves, there came a loud ring at the doorbell. A moment after the maid appeared with a suspicious looking envelope bearing the words ‘With Mr Johnson’s Compliments’. ‘Bother Mr Johnson’, I said quickly. ‘Beloved I am sure they are tickets for a Horse Show or a Flower Show or something else equally objectionable.’ But no, I was wrong. The tickets blazed with pomp and show, and it was not without a great deal of perseverance that we managed to discover between floral wreaths, and angels blowing trumpets this notice:– Lecture on Physical Culture by Miss Mickle, at the Assembly Rooms 3 p.m. To my infinite distress my beloved was seized with a wish to go, so we left our dear little cosy sitting room, and very soon found ourselves in a most draughty room, on the most hard chairs, surrounded by the most Physical Cultured men and women. I shuddered at the women. Great tall gaunt looking figures, and all angles. They seemed to be seized with a mania to appear masculine. Men’s boots, men’s gloves, men’s hats, men’s coats. They walked with long strides and spoke in low tones. Poor benighted dears, I am sure in their heart of hearts they were very sorry for themselves. They had a hungry look in their eyes. I longed to take them home and show them my babies and make their hair soft and fluffy and put them in tea gowns, and then cuddle them. I think they would never have gone back to their Physical Culture or their Society for the Promotion of Women’s Rights. At precisely 3 o’clock Miss Mickle appeared amid a burst of applause. Never shall I forget that woman. It seemed to be her great desire to squeeze out all the tenderness, all the loving, all the affectionate ways that should belong by rights to every woman, and to put in their places divided skirts and no figures. On the subject of children she became most eloquent. Why teach an infant the entirely foolish and senseless rhyme of Jack Horner1 for instance. How much better it would be for him to learn the position of his heart and the Circulation of the Blood. A great clapping followed this, and many cries of hear, hear, that’s so. Now my Mother had taught me Little Jack Horner when I was about three, and I had taught it to my babies. I never

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two ideas with one moral

considered it senseless. It always seemed to have a high Moral value. I thought it encouraged a grateful spirit. Instead of that charming child Jack Horner seizing the plum and promptly devouring it he cast up his eyes with a Saint-like expression exclaiming blest am I to be the fortunate possessor of such parents as do impart to me the high virtue of Godliness. On, On, went that female. She pulled down, and cast into the fire, all the little things that seem to be part of our childhood. And where the little rose-covered summer houses had stood for so long, she erected great dull stone buildings and parallel bars. O Mothers of this generation let us rise in a great body and blunt the tools of these women before it is too late. Let us, with renewed fervour, impart to the babes Little Jack Horner and all his contemporaries. My beloved and I walked home in silence after that lecture. The rain was dripping on to my hat and I knew that my feet were soaking but I did not care. At the door I said ‘We will have the babies to tea tonight.’ They appeared at five o’clock and when they [had] eaten as much as they could and their cheeks were rosy and their eyes were bright with the fire they ran to their Daddy and begged for a story. Something seemed to come over my beloved. He sat down with his hands in his pockets and his feet on the mantelpiece, and began: – Once upon a time there was a dear little boy and his name was Little Jack Horner. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 19–21. Dated ‘27/XII/03’, and written at Queen’s College. 1.

Little Jack Horner Sat in a corner Eating his Christmas pie, He put in his thumb And pulled out a plum, And said, ‘What a good boy am I!’ An English nursery rhyme first recorded in the eighteenth century.

•

Two Ideas with One Moral A. Once upon a time there was a nice, sweety, chubby little girl, and she did nothing at all except grow sweeter and chubbier and [her] hair

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more deliciously curly, each year of her life. She never worried about other people’s affairs, she never bothered other people with wishing for wholly unnecessary knowledge, she had never heard of the verb ‘to think’ and as to ‘reason’ why it was Greek to her. At last she became so adorably chubby, so ridiculously light hearted that she fell down the stairs – and they made her a heavenly funeral, and the most warm snug little grave you can imagine – and even the undertaker said as he scraped the clay off his hands ‘Well, she was a dear . . .’ Finis. B. Once upon a time there was a nasty, thoughtful, thin little girl, and she did nothing at all except grow more thoughtful and thin – and her hair more obnoxiously straight – each year of her life. She always worried about other people’s affairs, she always worried other people with wishing for unnecessary knowledge, she babbled solely of the verb ‘to think’ and as to ‘reason’, why it was life to her! At last she became so disgustingly thin – so preposterously wretched – that she fell up the stairs and they threw her into the darkest moistest little hole you can imagine – and even the undertaker said, as he put a handful of nails into his mouth, ‘Well, she was a horror.’ Finis Notes U Text: KMN, 1, p. 28, dated 1903.

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1904

Die Einsame (The Lonely One) All alone she was. All alone with her soul. She lived on the top of a solitary hill. Her house was small and bare, and alone, too. All day long she spent in the forest, with the trees and the flowers and the birds. She seemed like a creature of the forest herself, sometimes. She walked with a swift, silent tread. She spoke to no one. No one spoke to her. At night, it was said, she walked by the sea, and that once a fisherman had heard her singing. He told of how she was clothed in shining raiment, and that the sea-gulls fluttered around her as she sang. Yes, it was true. All night she spent by the ocean, by the great tall rocks. Her hair hung loose and streamed out behind her like a veil. Her face was white, white as her dress, and her eyes were like misty stars. She sang with her arms outstretched to the sea. Sang with a passionate longing, a wild, mad entreaty. Sometimes she knelt upon the sand, the tears streaming down her face, and ever she sang the same song: – ‘All, all alone, God, yes, all alone, No one at all, God, I pray and moan. Take me, Father, I cannot stay; God, my God, can’st hear me pray? All, all alone, God, yes, all alone, No one to hear me cry and moan.’

Thus she would sing all through the night, and when the dawn began to come, she would hasten back to her cottage. Her feet scarce seemed to touch the grass, and there was no trace of her past agony in her face. One night, after her song had been madder and wilder, she suddenly felt a great calm steal over her, and she lay down on the sands, 20

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her head in her hands, and her bosom heaving. She felt that all was coming to an end. All her loneliness was passing. How weak and exhausted she was as she stole home! Time after time she had to pause and rest. In the forest, in the forest, silence had cast a spell over all things. She plucked a great bouquet of daffodils and snowdrops, and tenderly held them to her, and tenderly kissed their fresh spring faces. She did not sing at all, but sat silent, expectant, and wondering, till her flowers faded and withered in her hands. The sun sank lower and lower. It hung like a great red ball over the sea, and then a sudden fear smote her heart. She feared the silence and the darkness and the forest. Could she reach her cottage before the sun went down? She sprang to her feet and fled swiftly along. Her hands became torn with the brambles. Often she fell, but ever struggled to her feet again. *

*

*

No! it was hopeless. The sun had gone. Darkness had come. ‘I am afraid,’ she cried aloud. No answer save the rustle of the leaves, and the echo of her cry. Then she knew she must go to the sea. She tried at first to keep away, but something impelled her, pushed her, almost carried her. By the time she had reached the beach the moon had risen, and the great fear was dying in her heart. She sank down, and watched the sky in silence. There was a broad silver pathway on the sea, and she watched it, fascinated. Suddenly on the horizon appeared a boat, a white, wonderful boat. It seemed to be fashioned of moonshine, and she saw it come nearer and nearer, cutting its way without sound across the path of the sea. Slowly she rose, slowly she walked towards it. Then – ah, then! – she saw the Figure waiting for her, with his arms outstretched, and his lips smiling, and a wonderful light flooding him. She ran towards the sea, and waded far out to meet him. It was cold – very, very cold! Now the water was creeping, higher to her waist, and now it was at her throat. She could barely stand. ‘Take me,’ she cried piteously, and looking up she saw – the boat and the figure had gone. ‘I must go back,’ she cried, sobbing, ‘back to the land. I shall be drowned. Help me, God!’ She started hurriedly, and her foot struck a sharp hidden rock. *

*

*

Then a great wave came, and there was silence.

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your birthday

Notes Text: Queen’s College Magazine, March 1904, pp. 126–31. Signed Kathleen Beauchamp. As Alpers notes, ‘The production of a girl of 15 years, it is the first in a long series of pieces about women who live or travel alone’ (p. 544).

•

Your Birthday What! It can’t be six o’clock. Dear, dear, how time flies. What about someone’s bedtime? If I were you I should be just longing to go, for tomorrow is your birthday, and the sooner you get to sleep, the sooner the fun will begin. Well, if you have a story, it must be a ‘weeny’ one. Snuggle up close . . . quite comfy? Once upon a time when you were quite small – only four years old – you had a birthday. You don’t mean to say that you have forgotten? What a baby! The day before Mummy and I went out and bought you a rockinghorse, and ordered you a cake with icing on the top, and four real candles, and a lovely frill of pink paper to go round it. Next morning, very early, I woke up feeling someone stroking my face and begging me to wake up. Why, I thought, it can’t be that baby! It was. If it had not been your birthday, I would have made you go right back to bed, but you looked so excited, and jumped about so, I let you creep under the clothes and play ‘rabbits’. I was the old father rabbit with a bone in my leg, and you were the mother rabbit, while the pillow was the shockin’ baby rabbit. It would fall out of bed, and you had to jump down and rescue it and talk to it, while I lay still and told you what to do. Of course I could not move because of that bone in my leg. That’s an awful thing some very old people have. All the morning you went riding on the new rocking-horse, and when you were the milkman you even had a spot of real milk in the doll’s saucepan. Oh, it was fun! In the afternoon, after you had been dressed for the party, Mummy and I let you play quite alone in the dining room. There was a big, big cupboard in there where all the birthday things were put ready for the tea. You were very quiet for a long time, and then you came into the drawing room where we were sitting. ‘What a hot little girl’ I said. You did not speak, but went to the window and began to sing ‘Oh

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dear, what can the matter be’.1 But you could not get it right. Then you sat down very still with one finger in your mouth. The little clock on the piano struck three. You looked up. ‘When are they coming?’ you said. ‘Who, dear?’ ‘All the peoples!’ ‘Why, very soon. Have you got tired of waiting?’ You said nothing for a minute, and then you suddenly ran forward and buried your head in Mummy’s lap. ‘I don’t want a party’ you said. For a moment Mummy and I could not say anything, we were so surprised. At last when I had got some breath back, ‘Don’t want a party?’ I said. ‘Don’t you want presents and games, and little friends to come and see you, and real tea? Don’t you want birthday cake with pink and white icing? Wait until you see it!’ ‘No, no’ you said. ‘Hate birthday cake.’ I really felt as though I was going to fall off the sofa. Mummy asked if you felt ill. ‘Yes’ you said, shakily. ‘Fink I’ve caught a measle’. Mummy asked if you would like to go to bed. You seemed so glad about it that I had to carry you upstairs right away. Poor Mummy had to go and tell Mary Ann to say to all of the party: Miss Baby’s compliments, but she has suddenly become ill, and hopes that her little friends will be able to come again some other day. We undressed you quickly and popped you into bed. Still you looked ill. ‘Don’t you feel any better, little one?’ I whispered. You wiggled down under the bedclothes, and I heard you crying. ‘Never mind’ Mummy said, ‘we’ll have the party another day just the same. The cake will keep.’ You cried much louder. ‘Don’t want any cake’ you said. ‘Oh, but you will when you are better’ Mummy said. A sudden thought struck me. I went out of the room, down to the dining room, and – opened the cupboard. Yes, there was the cake, but oh, where was the lovely pink and white icing off the top? Why was the frilly thing all torn, and the candles lying on the floor? Then, because I was a Daddy I understood. I went to the door and called Jane. ‘Please hide that cake somewhere or give it to the policeman’ I said. I went back to the nursery. ‘Baby,’ said I, ‘I have something to tell you.’ You grew hotter and hotter. ‘The birthday cake is – lost’ I said. ‘It can’t be’ said Mummy. ‘Well, it is;’ and I nodded my head like this. ‘Poor darling, what a disappointment’ said Mummy, kissing you . . . About two minutes after you sat up.

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one day

‘Funny thing’ you said, ‘but all my pain’s gone.’ –––––––––––––– That is all. So you say it may have been a little mouse? Well, may be. Sometimes (let me whisper) I think it was a baby. You don’t think so? . . . What, you say it was a Daddy! . . . I’m shocked . . . Good-night, Little Precious. Say a monster big prayer for me. Notes Text: Queen’s College Magazine, December 1904, pp. 203–5. Signed Kathleen M. Beauchamp. 1. ‘Oh dear, what can the matter be,’ the opening of ‘Johnny’s so long at the fair’, a nursery song from the eighteenth century.

•

One Day The sun streamed through the night nursery window, and woke them up, Jinks, Beggles, and Baby Luls. ‘Morning’ they cried cheerfully, as they always did in the game called ‘Night’ which they played in the nursery with the blinds down, all snugly tucked under the tablecloth. Jinks sat up, the frills of her ‘nighty’ perked up round her face like the petals of a daisy. ‘Where’s Isabel Marion?’ she said. She looked under the pillow and under the quilt, and then Beggles hopped out of his little white bed in the corner and joined the search. Baby Luls lay still placidly and looked on. ‘She was lyin’ in my arms last night’ said Jinks, a worried little maternal expression on her face. Beggles sat on the edge of the bed and swung his legs. Jinks turned to baby Luls. ‘You might help us’ she said crossly, ‘Beggles is lookin’ for her and he’s only an uncle, so you might as you’re an aunt and a godmother.’ Baby Luls yawned, then sat up quickly. ‘O’ she said, in a funny, little voice, ‘I’m sittin’ on Isabel Mawion.’ Jinks’ eyes grew big with horror. ‘A relation’ she gasped, ‘I’ll not let you be an aunt again, only a second removed cousin.’ Then in came mother. ‘Such a glorious day’ she said nodding brightly. ‘Bath’s ready, Jinks,

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hurry up and soap yourself well. Fly along, dear, if you only knew what it’s like in the garden.’ Jinks sprang to the ground, screwed up her plait into a tight little knob with one hairpin, seized her towel, and telling Luls to come in five minutes, she skipped off. Mother came and sat on Beggle’s bed and smoothed his hair. ‘Let’s all have a beautiful day’ she said softly, ‘and be very very happy and good. I’ll give you a surprise this afternoon.’ ‘O’ cried Beggles, cuddling her. ‘Sweet mummy’ said Baby Luls, as she ran to join Jinks. ‘I must go and finish dressing, sunbeam’ said mother, never stirring however. ‘I wonder if all mummys is as good as you’ said Beggles. ‘Do English chul’ren, an’ French chul’ren, and little black chul’ren have the same kinds?’ Mummy smiled happily. ‘Perhaps they have not got the same little girls and boy.’ ‘Such a cold bath’ cried Jinks and Luls, in chorus, performing a strange and wonderful dance in their ‘nighties’. ‘I wented a – huh – a – huh – a – huh, every time Jinks squeezed the sponge on me neck’ Luls shouted. They heard Beggles whistling ‘Down by the Swanee River’1 and splashing furiously. Beggles whistled like a blackbird in the bath. When he came back Jinks and Luls were at the petticoat stage. ‘Funny thing, I can’t find me shirt’ he said sitting down despairingly. ‘All me other clothes is here, but mummy left it on the table ’cause she had to mend it.’ Luls suddenly turned pink and sat down on the floor to put on her socks. Jinks and Beggles had their second search party for that morning. ‘It’s just ’systerious’ they said. ‘Why Luls is cryin’’ Beggles exclaimed. ‘O, O’ said that wretched little mortal. ‘I’ve been and putted Beggles’ shirt on meself.’ They laughed so much that Mummy came in to hurry them up. Beggles’ hairdressing took a long time. ‘I don’t know why’ he said, ‘but mummy one hand shakes and the comb wobbles so, it won’t go right . . .’ ‘Um’ said Luls, ‘I kin smell hot scones.’ They took hands and raced down the stairs. Daddy sat reading the paper in the nursery, and they rushed at him with enthusiasm. ‘One game of engines before breakfast’ they entreated. ‘Well, just one’ said daddy. The garden was full of sunshine. The birds were all singing. Everything seemed to have blossomed in the night. ‘Now you hold on to the back of my coat’ said daddy to Beggles. ‘Now Jinks hold Beggles’ belt, and you hold Jinks’ pinafore, baby. Ready – go – off. If anyone breaks this lovely train the game is over.

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one day

Oh how exciting it was. Father started quite slowly but got faster and faster, till they flew shrieking round and round the tennis court. ‘Go on, daddy’ they cried. ‘I feels like a tiger in “Little Black Sambo”’2 Luls gasped. Mummy came to the doorway. ‘Breakfast at the next station’ she said. They steamed majestically into the nursery. After breakfast daddy had to go to office. They all stood on the front steps. Handkerchiefs and ‘good-byes’ were as fervent and numerous as though he was leaving home for a year. ‘Bring me back a pony, daddy’ Jinks cried. ‘Me too’ from Beggles. ‘An’ me barley sugar’ piped Luls, hopping on one leg. ‘Bring back yourself, dear’ mother said smiling. They watched till he was quite out of sight. ‘Now let’s go an’ play shipwrecks’ suggested Beggles. ‘There’s a huge Apollinaris3 case in the back yard. We’ll drag it round to the Dead Sea.’ They found the case in the coal-house, and pushed, and pulled, and groaned till they reached their destination – a strip of waste ground where docks and long straggling grass grew in profusion. ‘Now for provisions’ said Jinks, climbing through the pantry window. Beggles and Luls followed. Mummy was baking buns. She gave them each one handful of currants, two lumps of sugar, and a water biscuit. ‘That will keep us for months’ they assured her. They slipped everything into Luls’ sun-bonnet. . . . A few minutes later, three Englishmen armed to the teeth were seen stealing round the Jungle. They seemed to be rather inconvenienced by numerous oceans, which they swam with great exertion and puffing. Suddenly, from behind a giant fuchsia bush they caught a glimpse of a tomahawk. A fierce battle ensued, ending in the complete victory of the English. ‘One man wounded’ said Beggles, with great satisfaction, viewing Jinks’ knee. ‘Wet me hanky under the tap, and bring a geranium leaf’ said the victim. She sat in the bottom of the boat and Beggles doctored her. First he laid on the cool leaf, which they believed was used by the ancient Britons for medicinal purposes, and then tightly bound round the handkerchief. The rest of the morning they cruised round Fiji, had a look at Queen Victoria, an unimportant fight off the coast of China, and arrived home in time for lunch. They had fish for lunch and a great pineapple. Mummy thanked

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them fervently for having brought her back such useful presents from their wanderings. ‘I boughted the pineapple in India’ said Luls, coaxing a piece into her spoon, with a fat little thumb. ‘O, Luls, no,’ said Beggles, ‘I shot it off a tree in Ceylon.’ ‘Both wrong’ cried Jinks. ‘The Prince of Wales wrapped it in a bit of newspaper an’ said “there, take it to y’er mummy.”’ ‘Well, it’s very good’ said mummy. ‘And this afternoon we are going to the hills for a long walk.’ ‘May I take Isabel Marion?’ said Jinks hastily. Mummy assented. ‘Not the pwam’ Luls pleaded. ‘Please not the pwam, Jinks. You always wheels it over me feets.’ ‘She’s gettin’ too old for the pram’ said Jinks meditatively. ‘Besides, I buried a poor little rabbit in the last babies’ blanket, and the mattress has got no more insides left. Beggles and I will hold her hands.’ Isabel Marion, decked in festive array, formed one of a very merry party. She literally swung along at a great pace several feet from the ground, supported by Jinks and Beggles, who held her by her little pink kid hands. They reached a hollow in the hill – ‘The City of Imagination’ mummy called it – and there they sat and told stories. When her turn came, Baby Luls grew very fidgety, fanned her hot face with her pinny, carefully pulled up her socks, and then said: ‘Once there was a little girl, and her mummy gave her the slipper4 and she died, and was buried with flowers on her grave, Amen’ she said breathlessly. Tea was over. Daddy had come home. Mummy and he were having supper, and the babes were in the nursery, having a concert. Jinks had turned up the edge of the tablecloth, and was playing the piano with vigour. Beggles was playing the violin with a headless wooden horse (it had such a flat neck for his chin, he said), and bowing in a reckless and magnificent fashion with Isabel Marion’s parasol. Luls was playing the organ on the verandah of the doll’s house. It was exhausting work, but they entered into it heart and soul. Jinks’ little hands twinkled up and down the keyboard, and she sang ‘Up into the Cherry Tree’5 with variations, and a violin and organ obligato, with distinct success. Mummy and daddy came in and heard their last piece of poetry. They stood in a row. It was called ‘O think what George Adolphus did’.6 It was a strong moral lesson, and they delivered it most gravely, with their eyes fixed sternly at mummy and daddy. One little polka round the table, with mummy playing ‘My mother said that I never should’7 and then daddy gave Luls a pick-a-back up to bed. They were so tired. Mummy came and tucked them up and cuddled them.

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one day

‘Had a nice day?’ she whispered. ‘O, so lovely’ they murmured. ‘Pleasant dreams, my popsies’ said daddy. ‘Same to you’ said the sleepy little voices. Then a little squeaky voice piped ‘Doodnight, G’anny.’ ‘That’s that sweet little Isabel Marion’ said Jinks. Notes Text: Queen’s College Magazine, July 1905, pp. 294–9. Signed K. M. Beauchamp. Written late 1904. According to family anecdote, KM had read the enormously successful Elizabeth and her German Garden, by Elizabeth von Arnim (her Australian-born cousin Mary Annette ‘Elizabeth’ Beauchamp) when it was published in 1898. There was also family correspondence with her famous author relative, married to the Prussian aristocrat Count Henning von Arnim-Schlagenthin. KM wrote to Sylvia Payne, another cousin who was a fellow student at Queen’s College, 26 December 1904: Among my Xmas presents I got a photo of the blessed German baby. [The five year old Felicitas Joyce von Arnim, the fourth of Elizabeth’s daughters.] [. . .] I have written another little tale about her. It is better than the others, so I am going to send it to the Mag. Some people seem to like those ‘baby’ stories, and I love writing them. KM also drew on another cousin’s child, Esterel Beauchamp, who ‘sings in a little shaky voice about a black-bird, and says the drollest things. [. . .] Are you very fond of small children? They always will captivate me – (CLKM, 1, p. 15). The story is set in Karori. 1. Words and music by Stephen Foster (1851). 2. In the immensely popular children’s book by Helen Bannerman, Little Black Sambo (1899), Sambo, a South Indian boy, gives up his clothes, shoes and umbrella rather than being eaten by four tigers, who then chase each other round a tree until reduced to ghee (melted butter), from which Sambo’s mother makes pancakes, and her son gets back his clothes. 3. Apollinaris, a sparkling mineral water, was sold by the case. 4. A common punishment for children was to be slapped with a slipper. 5. Possibly ‘The Cherry Tree Carol’, a traditional ballad. 6. ‘O think what George Adolphus did’, a comic instructive verse by the American humorist Gelett Burgess, Goops and How to be Them, a manual of manners for polite infants, inculcating many juvenile virtues both by precept and example, with ninety drawings (1900). 7. ‘My mother said that I never should / Play with the gypsies in the wood’. The opening of a traditional children’s skipping rhyme with numerous variant verses.

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1905

About Pat A day or two ago I was in a train. A small child sat opposite with her brother and asked questions as to ‘Why the train didn’t run backwards, and if the engine turned topsy-turvy.’ What next? I found myself wondering whether I had said and done such things in just the same manner. I suppose that we all have. In the days of our childhood we lived in a great old rambling house planted lonesomely in the midst of huge gardens, orchards and paddocks. We had few toys, but – far better – plenty of good, strong mud and a flight of concrete steps that grew hot in the heat of the sun and became dreams of ovens. The feeling of making a mud pie with all due seriousness, is one of the most delicious feelings that we experience; you sit with your mixture in the doll’s saucepan, or if it is soup, in the doll’s wash-hand basin, and stir and stir, and thicken and ‘whip’, and become more deliciously grimy each minute; whilst the sense of utter wickedness you have if it happens to be on clean pinafore days thrills me to this hour. Well I remember one occasion when we made pies with real flour, stole some water from the dish by the dog’s kennel, baked them and ate them. Very soon after three crushed, subdued little girls wended their way quietly up to bed, and the blind was pulled down. At that period our old Irish gardener was our hero. His name was Patrick Sheehan.1 On Sunday he wore gloves with real ‘kid backs’, and a tie pin made out of a boar’s tusk. Every morning I went across to the feed room where he cleaned father’s boots, and always at a certain stage of the proceedings, I would say, ‘O please, Pat, don’t.’ He as invariably replied that ‘nothing else at all gave them such a fine gloss’. He used to hoist me up on to the table, and recount long tales of the Dukes of Ireland whom he had seen and even conversed with. We were most proud of our gardener having rubbed shoulders 29

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about pat

with Ireland’s aristocracy, and in the evening when Pat was at tea in the kitchen we would steal out and beg him to show us the manners of the people in Ireland. Standing in a row, hand in hand, we would watch while Pat put some salt on his knife, tapped it off with his fork, the little finger of his right hand well curled, in a manner which seemed to us ingenious enough for the first Lords of the land. Pat was never very fond of me. I am afraid he did not think my character at all desirable. I professed no joy in having a bird in a cage; and one day committed the unpardonable offence of picking a pumpkin flower. He never recovered from the shock occasioned by that last act of barbarism. I can see him now, whenever I came near, nodding his head and saying, ‘Well now, to think. It might have become the finest vegetable of the season, and given us food for weeks.’ Pat’s birthdays occurred with alarming frequency. We always gave him the same presents – three sticks of Juno tobacco and three cakes of hokey-pokey. The presentation took place in the back-yard, and he sang us a wonderful Irish song, of which we never guessed any more than the phrase ‘I threw up me hat.’ It seemed to be the one definite remark throughout. He considered it a duty to propose to each cook who came to the house, making them the offer of himself, the gloves with the ‘kid backs’, and the boar-tusk tie pin whenever the occasion demanded. They never by any chance accepted him, and I am sure that he never expected them to do so. Every afternoon he used to brush his old brown bowler hat, harness the mare and start for town, and every evening when he had come home it was my delight to wait till he had unharnessed the mare, then to be lifted on to her back, and start at a jogging trot through the big white gates, down the quiet road and into the paddock. There I waited until Pat came swinging along with the milk pails. On those late evenings he had wonderful stories to tell of a little old man no bigger than his thumb with a hat as high as the barb-wired fence, who, in the night, crept out of the creek, climbed up the blue gum tree, picked some leaves from the topmost branches and then crept down again. ‘You see,’ Pat would say, his dear weather-beaten face as grave as possible, ‘it’s from blue gums that you get eucalyptus, and the old man suffered from cold, living in such dampness.’ On those evenings, too, I had my first lesson in the mysterious art of milking, but try as I would I could never obtain more than a teacup full. On several occasions the ignominy of this reduced me to tears, but Pat would say, ‘You see, she’s such a keen old cow, is Daisy. Having had children of her own, she knows how much you ought to have, and how much more would give you indigestion.’ I was always

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much comforted. Pat had a wonderfully young heart. He entered into our pleasures with as much zest as we did ourselves. I played a game which had no ending or beginning, but was called ‘Beyond the Blue Mountains’. The scene was generally placed near the rhubarb beds, and Pat officiated as the villain, the hero, and even the villainess, with unfailing charm. Sometimes, to make it more real, we had lunch together, sitting on the wheel-barrow turned upside down, and sharing the slice of German sausage and a bath bun with loaf sugar in it. On Sunday mornings Pat, in the full glory of a clean blue shirt and corduroy trousers, took us for a walk in the great pine plantation. He, childishly, used to collect gum and carry it in a corner of his handkerchief. For years afterwards I believed that those trees just grew for the old witches of the woods, who used their needles in making the big, big umbrella over our heads, and all the dresses of the flowers, basting their nice, fine, blue sky calico with the gum thoughtfully provided for them. . . . When we left that house in the country and went to live in town, Pat left us to try his luck on the goldfields. We parted with bitter tears. He presented each of my sisters with a goldfinch, and me with a pair of white china vases cheerfully embroidered with forget-me-nots and pink roses. His parting advice to us was to look after ourselves in this world and never to pick flowers out of the vegetable garden because we liked the colour. From that day to this I have never heard of him. I should dearly love to show him the sights of London, and take him to the ‘Carlton’ for a slice of German sausage and a bath bun, and see once again the way in which the Dukes of Ireland balanced their salt on their knives. Notes Text: Queen’s College Magazine, December 1905, pp. 344–7. Scrapbook, 1939, pp. 1–5. 1. Patrick Sheehan, the handyman and driver during the years when the Beauchamps lived in Karori. The same character appears again in ‘Prelude’ (1918).

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1904

Die Einsame (The Lonely One) All alone she was. All alone with her soul. She lived on the top of a solitary hill. Her house was small and bare, and alone, too. All day long she spent in the forest, with the trees and the flowers and the birds. She seemed like a creature of the forest herself, sometimes. She walked with a swift, silent tread. She spoke to no one. No one spoke to her. At night, it was said, she walked by the sea, and that once a fisherman had heard her singing. He told of how she was clothed in shining raiment, and that the sea-gulls fluttered around her as she sang. Yes, it was true. All night she spent by the ocean, by the great tall rocks. Her hair hung loose and streamed out behind her like a veil. Her face was white, white as her dress, and her eyes were like misty stars. She sang with her arms outstretched to the sea. Sang with a passionate longing, a wild, mad entreaty. Sometimes she knelt upon the sand, the tears streaming down her face, and ever she sang the same song: – ‘All, all alone, God, yes, all alone, No one at all, God, I pray and moan. Take me, Father, I cannot stay; God, my God, can’st hear me pray? All, all alone, God, yes, all alone, No one to hear me cry and moan.’

Thus she would sing all through the night, and when the dawn began to come, she would hasten back to her cottage. Her feet scarce seemed to touch the grass, and there was no trace of her past agony in her face. One night, after her song had been madder and wilder, she suddenly felt a great calm steal over her, and she lay down on the sands, 20

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her head in her hands, and her bosom heaving. She felt that all was coming to an end. All her loneliness was passing. How weak and exhausted she was as she stole home! Time after time she had to pause and rest. In the forest, in the forest, silence had cast a spell over all things. She plucked a great bouquet of daffodils and snowdrops, and tenderly held them to her, and tenderly kissed their fresh spring faces. She did not sing at all, but sat silent, expectant, and wondering, till her flowers faded and withered in her hands. The sun sank lower and lower. It hung like a great red ball over the sea, and then a sudden fear smote her heart. She feared the silence and the darkness and the forest. Could she reach her cottage before the sun went down? She sprang to her feet and fled swiftly along. Her hands became torn with the brambles. Often she fell, but ever struggled to her feet again. *

*

*

No! it was hopeless. The sun had gone. Darkness had come. ‘I am afraid,’ she cried aloud. No answer save the rustle of the leaves, and the echo of her cry. Then she knew she must go to the sea. She tried at first to keep away, but something impelled her, pushed her, almost carried her. By the time she had reached the beach the moon had risen, and the great fear was dying in her heart. She sank down, and watched the sky in silence. There was a broad silver pathway on the sea, and she watched it, fascinated. Suddenly on the horizon appeared a boat, a white, wonderful boat. It seemed to be fashioned of moonshine, and she saw it come nearer and nearer, cutting its way without sound across the path of the sea. Slowly she rose, slowly she walked towards it. Then – ah, then! – she saw the Figure waiting for her, with his arms outstretched, and his lips smiling, and a wonderful light flooding him. She ran towards the sea, and waded far out to meet him. It was cold – very, very cold! Now the water was creeping, higher to her waist, and now it was at her throat. She could barely stand. ‘Take me,’ she cried piteously, and looking up she saw – the boat and the figure had gone. ‘I must go back,’ she cried, sobbing, ‘back to the land. I shall be drowned. Help me, God!’ She started hurriedly, and her foot struck a sharp hidden rock. *

*

*

Then a great wave came, and there was silence.

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your birthday

Notes Text: Queen’s College Magazine, March 1904, pp. 126–31. Signed Kathleen Beauchamp. As Alpers notes, ‘The production of a girl of 15 years, it is the first in a long series of pieces about women who live or travel alone’ (p. 544).

•

Your Birthday What! It can’t be six o’clock. Dear, dear, how time flies. What about someone’s bedtime? If I were you I should be just longing to go, for tomorrow is your birthday, and the sooner you get to sleep, the sooner the fun will begin. Well, if you have a story, it must be a ‘weeny’ one. Snuggle up close . . . quite comfy? Once upon a time when you were quite small – only four years old – you had a birthday. You don’t mean to say that you have forgotten? What a baby! The day before Mummy and I went out and bought you a rockinghorse, and ordered you a cake with icing on the top, and four real candles, and a lovely frill of pink paper to go round it. Next morning, very early, I woke up feeling someone stroking my face and begging me to wake up. Why, I thought, it can’t be that baby! It was. If it had not been your birthday, I would have made you go right back to bed, but you looked so excited, and jumped about so, I let you creep under the clothes and play ‘rabbits’. I was the old father rabbit with a bone in my leg, and you were the mother rabbit, while the pillow was the shockin’ baby rabbit. It would fall out of bed, and you had to jump down and rescue it and talk to it, while I lay still and told you what to do. Of course I could not move because of that bone in my leg. That’s an awful thing some very old people have. All the morning you went riding on the new rocking-horse, and when you were the milkman you even had a spot of real milk in the doll’s saucepan. Oh, it was fun! In the afternoon, after you had been dressed for the party, Mummy and I let you play quite alone in the dining room. There was a big, big cupboard in there where all the birthday things were put ready for the tea. You were very quiet for a long time, and then you came into the drawing room where we were sitting. ‘What a hot little girl’ I said. You did not speak, but went to the window and began to sing ‘Oh

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one day

‘Funny thing’ you said, ‘but all my pain’s gone.’ –––––––––––––– That is all. So you say it may have been a little mouse? Well, may be. Sometimes (let me whisper) I think it was a baby. You don’t think so? . . . What, you say it was a Daddy! . . . I’m shocked . . . Good-night, Little Precious. Say a monster big prayer for me. Notes Text: Queen’s College Magazine, December 1904, pp. 203–5. Signed Kathleen M. Beauchamp. 1. ‘Oh dear, what can the matter be,’ the opening of ‘Johnny’s so long at the fair’, a nursery song from the eighteenth century.

•

One Day The sun streamed through the night nursery window, and woke them up, Jinks, Beggles, and Baby Luls. ‘Morning’ they cried cheerfully, as they always did in the game called ‘Night’ which they played in the nursery with the blinds down, all snugly tucked under the tablecloth. Jinks sat up, the frills of her ‘nighty’ perked up round her face like the petals of a daisy. ‘Where’s Isabel Marion?’ she said. She looked under the pillow and under the quilt, and then Beggles hopped out of his little white bed in the corner and joined the search. Baby Luls lay still placidly and looked on. ‘She was lyin’ in my arms last night’ said Jinks, a worried little maternal expression on her face. Beggles sat on the edge of the bed and swung his legs. Jinks turned to baby Luls. ‘You might help us’ she said crossly, ‘Beggles is lookin’ for her and he’s only an uncle, so you might as you’re an aunt and a godmother.’ Baby Luls yawned, then sat up quickly. ‘O’ she said, in a funny, little voice, ‘I’m sittin’ on Isabel Mawion.’ Jinks’ eyes grew big with horror. ‘A relation’ she gasped, ‘I’ll not let you be an aunt again, only a second removed cousin.’ Then in came mother. ‘Such a glorious day’ she said nodding brightly. ‘Bath’s ready, Jinks,

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hurry up and soap yourself well. Fly along, dear, if you only knew what it’s like in the garden.’ Jinks sprang to the ground, screwed up her plait into a tight little knob with one hairpin, seized her towel, and telling Luls to come in five minutes, she skipped off. Mother came and sat on Beggle’s bed and smoothed his hair. ‘Let’s all have a beautiful day’ she said softly, ‘and be very very happy and good. I’ll give you a surprise this afternoon.’ ‘O’ cried Beggles, cuddling her. ‘Sweet mummy’ said Baby Luls, as she ran to join Jinks. ‘I must go and finish dressing, sunbeam’ said mother, never stirring however. ‘I wonder if all mummys is as good as you’ said Beggles. ‘Do English chul’ren, an’ French chul’ren, and little black chul’ren have the same kinds?’ Mummy smiled happily. ‘Perhaps they have not got the same little girls and boy.’ ‘Such a cold bath’ cried Jinks and Luls, in chorus, performing a strange and wonderful dance in their ‘nighties’. ‘I wented a – huh – a – huh – a – huh, every time Jinks squeezed the sponge on me neck’ Luls shouted. They heard Beggles whistling ‘Down by the Swanee River’1 and splashing furiously. Beggles whistled like a blackbird in the bath. When he came back Jinks and Luls were at the petticoat stage. ‘Funny thing, I can’t find me shirt’ he said sitting down despairingly. ‘All me other clothes is here, but mummy left it on the table ’cause she had to mend it.’ Luls suddenly turned pink and sat down on the floor to put on her socks. Jinks and Beggles had their second search party for that morning. ‘It’s just ’systerious’ they said. ‘Why Luls is cryin’’ Beggles exclaimed. ‘O, O’ said that wretched little mortal. ‘I’ve been and putted Beggles’ shirt on meself.’ They laughed so much that Mummy came in to hurry them up. Beggles’ hairdressing took a long time. ‘I don’t know why’ he said, ‘but mummy one hand shakes and the comb wobbles so, it won’t go right . . .’ ‘Um’ said Luls, ‘I kin smell hot scones.’ They took hands and raced down the stairs. Daddy sat reading the paper in the nursery, and they rushed at him with enthusiasm. ‘One game of engines before breakfast’ they entreated. ‘Well, just one’ said daddy. The garden was full of sunshine. The birds were all singing. Everything seemed to have blossomed in the night. ‘Now you hold on to the back of my coat’ said daddy to Beggles. ‘Now Jinks hold Beggles’ belt, and you hold Jinks’ pinafore, baby. Ready – go – off. If anyone breaks this lovely train the game is over.

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Oh how exciting it was. Father started quite slowly but got faster and faster, till they flew shrieking round and round the tennis court. ‘Go on, daddy’ they cried. ‘I feels like a tiger in “Little Black Sambo”’2 Luls gasped. Mummy came to the doorway. ‘Breakfast at the next station’ she said. They steamed majestically into the nursery. After breakfast daddy had to go to office. They all stood on the front steps. Handkerchiefs and ‘good-byes’ were as fervent and numerous as though he was leaving home for a year. ‘Bring me back a pony, daddy’ Jinks cried. ‘Me too’ from Beggles. ‘An’ me barley sugar’ piped Luls, hopping on one leg. ‘Bring back yourself, dear’ mother said smiling. They watched till he was quite out of sight. ‘Now let’s go an’ play shipwrecks’ suggested Beggles. ‘There’s a huge Apollinaris3 case in the back yard. We’ll drag it round to the Dead Sea.’ They found the case in the coal-house, and pushed, and pulled, and groaned till they reached their destination – a strip of waste ground where docks and long straggling grass grew in profusion. ‘Now for provisions’ said Jinks, climbing through the pantry window. Beggles and Luls followed. Mummy was baking buns. She gave them each one handful of currants, two lumps of sugar, and a water biscuit. ‘That will keep us for months’ they assured her. They slipped everything into Luls’ sun-bonnet. . . . A few minutes later, three Englishmen armed to the teeth were seen stealing round the Jungle. They seemed to be rather inconvenienced by numerous oceans, which they swam with great exertion and puffing. Suddenly, from behind a giant fuchsia bush they caught a glimpse of a tomahawk. A fierce battle ensued, ending in the complete victory of the English. ‘One man wounded’ said Beggles, with great satisfaction, viewing Jinks’ knee. ‘Wet me hanky under the tap, and bring a geranium leaf’ said the victim. She sat in the bottom of the boat and Beggles doctored her. First he laid on the cool leaf, which they believed was used by the ancient Britons for medicinal purposes, and then tightly bound round the handkerchief. The rest of the morning they cruised round Fiji, had a look at Queen Victoria, an unimportant fight off the coast of China, and arrived home in time for lunch. They had fish for lunch and a great pineapple. Mummy thanked

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them fervently for having brought her back such useful presents from their wanderings. ‘I boughted the pineapple in India’ said Luls, coaxing a piece into her spoon, with a fat little thumb. ‘O, Luls, no,’ said Beggles, ‘I shot it off a tree in Ceylon.’ ‘Both wrong’ cried Jinks. ‘The Prince of Wales wrapped it in a bit of newspaper an’ said “there, take it to y’er mummy.”’ ‘Well, it’s very good’ said mummy. ‘And this afternoon we are going to the hills for a long walk.’ ‘May I take Isabel Marion?’ said Jinks hastily. Mummy assented. ‘Not the pwam’ Luls pleaded. ‘Please not the pwam, Jinks. You always wheels it over me feets.’ ‘She’s gettin’ too old for the pram’ said Jinks meditatively. ‘Besides, I buried a poor little rabbit in the last babies’ blanket, and the mattress has got no more insides left. Beggles and I will hold her hands.’ Isabel Marion, decked in festive array, formed one of a very merry party. She literally swung along at a great pace several feet from the ground, supported by Jinks and Beggles, who held her by her little pink kid hands. They reached a hollow in the hill – ‘The City of Imagination’ mummy called it – and there they sat and told stories. When her turn came, Baby Luls grew very fidgety, fanned her hot face with her pinny, carefully pulled up her socks, and then said: ‘Once there was a little girl, and her mummy gave her the slipper4 and she died, and was buried with flowers on her grave, Amen’ she said breathlessly. Tea was over. Daddy had come home. Mummy and he were having supper, and the babes were in the nursery, having a concert. Jinks had turned up the edge of the tablecloth, and was playing the piano with vigour. Beggles was playing the violin with a headless wooden horse (it had such a flat neck for his chin, he said), and bowing in a reckless and magnificent fashion with Isabel Marion’s parasol. Luls was playing the organ on the verandah of the doll’s house. It was exhausting work, but they entered into it heart and soul. Jinks’ little hands twinkled up and down the keyboard, and she sang ‘Up into the Cherry Tree’5 with variations, and a violin and organ obligato, with distinct success. Mummy and daddy came in and heard their last piece of poetry. They stood in a row. It was called ‘O think what George Adolphus did’.6 It was a strong moral lesson, and they delivered it most gravely, with their eyes fixed sternly at mummy and daddy. One little polka round the table, with mummy playing ‘My mother said that I never should’7 and then daddy gave Luls a pick-a-back up to bed. They were so tired. Mummy came and tucked them up and cuddled them.

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one day

‘Had a nice day?’ she whispered. ‘O, so lovely’ they murmured. ‘Pleasant dreams, my popsies’ said daddy. ‘Same to you’ said the sleepy little voices. Then a little squeaky voice piped ‘Doodnight, G’anny.’ ‘That’s that sweet little Isabel Marion’ said Jinks. Notes Text: Queen’s College Magazine, July 1905, pp. 294–9. Signed K. M. Beauchamp. Written late 1904. According to family anecdote, KM had read the enormously successful Elizabeth and her German Garden, by Elizabeth von Arnim (her Australian-born cousin Mary Annette ‘Elizabeth’ Beauchamp) when it was published in 1898. There was also family correspondence with her famous author relative, married to the Prussian aristocrat Count Henning von Arnim-Schlagenthin. KM wrote to Sylvia Payne, another cousin who was a fellow student at Queen’s College, 26 December 1904: Among my Xmas presents I got a photo of the blessed German baby. [The five year old Felicitas Joyce von Arnim, the fourth of Elizabeth’s daughters.] [. . .] I have written another little tale about her. It is better than the others, so I am going to send it to the Mag. Some people seem to like those ‘baby’ stories, and I love writing them. KM also drew on another cousin’s child, Esterel Beauchamp, who ‘sings in a little shaky voice about a black-bird, and says the drollest things. [. . .] Are you very fond of small children? They always will captivate me – (CLKM, 1, p. 15). The story is set in Karori. 1. Words and music by Stephen Foster (1851). 2. In the immensely popular children’s book by Helen Bannerman, Little Black Sambo (1899), Sambo, a South Indian boy, gives up his clothes, shoes and umbrella rather than being eaten by four tigers, who then chase each other round a tree until reduced to ghee (melted butter), from which Sambo’s mother makes pancakes, and her son gets back his clothes. 3. Apollinaris, a sparkling mineral water, was sold by the case. 4. A common punishment for children was to be slapped with a slipper. 5. Possibly ‘The Cherry Tree Carol’, a traditional ballad. 6. ‘O think what George Adolphus did’, a comic instructive verse by the American humorist Gelett Burgess, Goops and How to be Them, a manual of manners for polite infants, inculcating many juvenile virtues both by precept and example, with ninety drawings (1900). 7. ‘My mother said that I never should / Play with the gypsies in the wood’. The opening of a traditional children’s skipping rhyme with numerous variant verses.

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‘Heavy with tears’ she said, looking up at the boy. He nodded appreciatively. ‘Will you tell me your name?’ ‘Juliet – and yours?’ ‘David. I am a musician and have been playing tonight – a ’cellist you know. I am going to Europe next year.’ ‘I too, but not for music – to complete my education, you know.’ ‘Do you want to go away?’ ‘Yes – and no. I long for fresh experiences, new places, but I shall miss the things that I love here. Do you like nights Juliet’. His face was transfigured. ‘I feel like a chrysalis in the daytime, compared to my feelings after sunset. For instance I should never have met you as I have if I hadn’t just come in from the stars. They make me all music. Sometimes I think that if I could be alone long enough I should hear the Music of the Spheres. Think of what would burst from those thousands of golden throats.’ ‘I have heard so little music’ said Juliet sadly. ‘There are so few opportunities. And a ’cello – I have never heard a ’cello.’ David’s face was full of compassion and yet joy. ‘Then I shall be the first to show you what can be’ he said. He stooped down and broke a great flower off the branches and gave it to her. She fastened it in her dress, and then the sound of the guests returning from the supper room put an end to their conversation. Soon after, they left. Juliet purposely avoided saying ‘goodnight’ to David. She felt as though she could not, but she was conscious of his eyes watching her as she left the room. The walk home was silent. Margaret was awaiting their arrival and immediately began telling Mrs Wilberforce how ‘used up’ the babies seemed. ‘Henry has certainly a nasty little cough’ she said, ‘and Mary looked so pasty.’ ‘Well, we shall all leave town in a couple of days’ Mrs Wilberforce said. ‘Tomorrow that young boy is coming here to play, and Father has asked a number of men.’ Juliet bade them goodnight and fled to her own room. Her heart was beating furiously – she could hardly repress a feeling of the most intense joy that bade her cry out. She sat on the side of her bed staring at the darkness, her breath coming quickly. Sleep was impossible. The whole world had changed and he was coming again tomorrow night, and she should hear him play. She crept into bed and lay still, thinking. A curious sensation stole over her – as though she was drifting in a great fiery sea of thoughts, and every thought was sweet. When she pulled up the blind next morning the trees outside were being tossed to and fro, and the sea lashed into fury by a wild Southerly gale. Juliet shuddered. The wind always hurt her, unsettled

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her. It was a Saturday, so there was no thought of school. She wandered about all the morning, and in the afternoon put on her reefer coat3 and tam-o’-shanter and went for a walk up the hills that spread like a great wall behind the little town. The wind blew fiercer than ever. She held on to bushes and strong tufts of grass, and climbed rapidly, rejoicing in the strength that it required. Down in a hollow where the gorse spread like a thick green mantle she paused to recover breath. The utter loneliness of it filled her with pleasure. She stood perfectly still, letting the wind blow cold and strong in her face and loosen her hair. The sky was dull and grey, and vague thoughts swept through her – of the Future, of her leaving this little island and going so far away, of all that she knew and loved, all that she wished to be. ‘O I wish I was a poet’ she cried, spreading out her arms. ‘I wish I could interpret this atmosphere, this influence.’ She found a little bird fluttering near in a bush, its wing broken by the storm – and held it close to her, overcome with a feeling of tenderness. ‘I am so strong’ she said, ‘and the strong are never hurt. It is always the weak who are pained.’ She walked home more slowly. Now that the excitement of climbing had left her she felt tired and depressed. Clouds of dust whirled up the road – dry particles of sand stung her face. She longed for the evening to come, yet almost dreaded it. When tea was over Juliet went back to her room, tried to read and failed, and walked up and down – nine steps one way – nine steps another. The feeling soothed her. She heard the front door bell ring and knew that the guests had arrived, but she stayed there till Margaret sought her out and brought her down with great indignation. The room seemed full of people, but Juliet was not shy. She held her head a little higher than usual and an expression of almost indifference came into her face. David stood by the piano unfastening his music case. She shook hands with him and shot him a keen quick glance of recognition. Then she curled herself up in a corner of the sofa and watched the people with amusement and interest. She liked to listen to little pieces of conversation, create her idea of their lives. There was the usual amount of very second rate singing concerning Swallows and ‘Had I Known’. Margaret played several nondescript pieces on the piano – and at last David’s turn came. Juliet watched him with great pleasure and curiosity. A bright spot came into her cheeks, her eyes wide opened – but when he drew his bow across the strings her whole soul woke and lived for the first time in her life. She became utterly absorbed in the music. The room faded, the people faded. She saw only his sensitive inspired face, felt only the rapture that held her fast, that clung to her and hid her in its folds, as impenetrable and pure as the mists from the sea – – –

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Suddenly the music ceased, the tears poured down her face and she came back to reality – – – She put her handkerchief to her eyes and when she looked round became aware of the amused glances of the company, and heard the steady, almost prophetic sounding voice of David’s Father: ‘That child is a born musician.’ The rest of the evening passed she knew not how. Something had come to life in Juliet’s soul and it shone in her transfigured face. For that night she was brilliantly beautiful – not with the beauty of a child, but the charm of a woman seemed to emanate from her. David was conscious of this, conscious too that he had never played before as he was playing. They avoided each other strangely, but Mr Wilberforce praised the boy and said ‘You might come and give my little daughter a few lessons, and see if she has any talent.’ She never forgot their leave-taking. The wind was furious, and she stood on the verandah and saw David turn round and smile at her before he passed out of sight. ‘Know anything about these times that we have had – but whenever you come to see us in London – I – I shall feel so utterly different.’ David looked at her. ‘Yet now you would not have it otherwise, Juliet. A secret is a glorious thing.’ She gave him both her hands. ‘Goodbye, my friend’ she said. ‘I promise to write to you – often – often.’ He suddenly caught his breath. ‘You would not kiss me . . . Juliet,’ he said hoarsely. But she shook her head, and a moment later the beach was deserted and the sea crept up and washed away their footmarks from that place. ‘We’ve told Father all about it, Juliet,’ said Margaret. ‘And Father’s fearfully angry,’ Mary added. Juliet slipped the Byron down in the front of her sailor blouse. She had no definite idea of what she had been reading but her head was full of strange unreasonable impulses. She was feeling slightly sorry for her absence of self control in that it incurred a long interview with her Father, and in all probability some degrading issue – no jam for a week, or to go to bed at seven o’clock until she apologised. She walked slowly to the house, up the broad stone steps, into the wide hall, and knocked at the morning room door. At two o’clock in the afternoon Juliet had thrown a heavy book at her eldest sister Margaret, and a bottle of ink at her elder sister Mary. At six in the evening she was summoned to the morning room to explain these offences. After her two wholly successful acts of violence she had retired to a sloping lawn at the extreme end of the garden where she lay down comfortably and read Don Juan4 – – –

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Margaret and Mary, still smarting from the shock to their sensitive little systems, had rather rejoiced in the search for her, and more especially in the knowledge that Mr Night was pacing up and down, up and down. They were both virtuous enough to take a keen enjoyment in the punishment of others. Chapter III It was the close of a dark day – London was shrouded in fog. The streets were wet and the long line of lampposts shone like dim ghosts of themselves. A four-wheeler, laden with luggage, stopped at the door of an eminently respectable house. Juliet looked round her room curiously. 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 round in a square. She wondered who would share this sanctum. Some English girl, stiff and sporting, who would torture the walls with pictures of dogs and keep a hockey stick in the corner. Heaven forbid, she thought. She sat down by the side of the bed and pulled off her long gloves. How strange and dim the light was. She was alone 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. O, what a comfort it was to know that every minute sent The Others further away from her! I suppose I am preposterously unnatural, she thought, and smiled. Then the porter brought in her two large boxes, and behind him Miss Mackay hovered and told Juliet she must have everything unpacked before teatime – it was quite one of the old customs. Did the glory of England rest upon old customs? She rather fancied it did. When to start overcoats and when to stop fires, hard boiled eggs for Sunday supper, and cold lunches. She knelt down on the floor and unstrapped her luggage. From the pocket of her suitcase she drew out David’s picture and looked at it seriously, then bent forward and kissed it. ‘Here we are, dear,’ she said aloud. ‘Boy of mine, I feel that life is beginning – write now.’ When the old custom had been sustained and 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

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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, as I never yet have been except with David.’ She laid down her pen and began braiding her hair in two thick braids. There was a knock at the door and immediately afterwards Miss Mackay entered with a tall thin girl beside her. ‘My dear’ the old lady said, ‘Juliet’, positive Maternity in her tone, ‘this is your roommate, Pearl Saffron – new like yourself so I hope you will be friends.’ It was certainly a very successful dinner party. Caesar was never so gay, so irresponsible, so full of boyish spirits. He stood on his chair with a glass of the 1/3d claret in his hand and made interminable speeches till Rudolph seized him by the coat and dragged him to earth. And then the four of them sat round the fire and smoked, and laughed, and finally grew serious. Rudolph seized his fiddle and played the Serenade Melancholique,5 and then they left Caesar. Their feelings overcame them – ‘it was the claret’ said Rudolph sighing heavily. ‘Gott sei dank’ said Caesar. The Triumph of Rudolph. Juliet dressed with great care that afternoon. She had on a thin white muslin frock with a square-cut yolk and short sleeves tied with ribbons. She brushed out her long hair, and then braided it round her head. Pearl, sitting huddled upon the lounge, smoking and read[ing] Zola’s Paris,6 laughed. ‘How do I look’ said Juliet anxiously, slipping on a long coat and then taking a rapid survey of her two possible hats. ‘Entirely irresistable my dear. Wear the black one – it’s so ingenuous-looking’ said Pearl – – – ‘I want to make a really good impression. I’ve been looking hideous lately I know – because I’ve been worried about the play – but now that it’s actually finished I shall grow a big conceit in myself. Do you know, Pearl’ she added, with mock gravity, ‘I never realised that Summer was here until today.’ ‘Well run along or you’ll be late dear. Kiss me first. Somehow I feel as though I should like to take opium this afternoon.’ Juliet put her arms around her . . . ‘Dearest and best’ she said, and blushed on saying it, ‘I should like to be staying with you but duty calls – you understand.’ ‘Of course . . . of course – by the way I shan’t be in until after eleven – I’m going to a Promenade.’

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‘Very well, I shall be waiting for you – perhaps crushed to death by the criticism of David.’ ‘Who knows’ said Pearl, shrugging her shoulders. On her way to Canton Mansions Juliet bought two pink roses and tucked them into her belt. Also she felt that the sunshine had got into her brain – – – It was sparkling and golden and enchanting like champagne. She hugged her roll of MS as she mounted the stairs and then knocked quickly. Her heart was beating and she felt that her cheeks were crimson. She stood waiting for several seconds and then knocked again. Rudolf opened the door and swept her an extravagant bow. ‘Bon jour, Mdlle,’ he cried in his mocking voice. ‘Is David in,’ asked Juliet. ‘He received your telegram Mdlle and a thousand apologies but asks me to amuse you for just thirty minutes as he has so important an engagement. It is just thirty minutes, Mdlle, and I am sorry for you – – –’ Juliet felt intensely annoyed. How could David have done such a thing, knowing as he did that she hated the very sight of Rudolf. Also for some inexplicable reason she felt afraid of him – he was so utterly at his ease, so lightly contemptuous, so recklessly impertinent. She stood by the table in the middle of the room, frowning slightly, and Rudolf leaned against the mantelpiece – and laughed. Then she turned to him. ‘It is very kind of you to offer to entertain me. If I can sit here and read through my work I shall be quite happy, thank you,’ she said. On no account must she allow Rudolf to guess that her heart was beating violently, that she had to hold her hands under her long cloak so that he could not see how they were trembling. She drew up a chair and sat down. ‘Dieu, Dieu, how hot it is,’ called Rudolf. ‘That coat is impossible Mdlle. Here – let me take it. Stand up – Voilà . . . and your hat. Is it not heavy – – il faut souffrir – no, that cannot apply to you.’ Juliet stood up and allowed him to take her coat and hat. She could not trust herself to speak to him. He is a fiend, she thought, a perfect fiend. How can he look at me like that. She did not know exactly what to do, and then suddenly thought – ‘how idiotic I am. Really I am rude. Perhaps he is trying to be kind – and fancy being afraid of anyone. Perhaps if I really can talk to him alone for thirty minutes we shall understand each other in the future. Perhaps – yes – I am sure that is why David has arranged this.’ She looked up and smiled suddenly. ‘Après tout, I shall talk,’ she said – ‘Do you think I am rude?’ ‘Not at all – perhaps you, if I might venture to say it, do not disguise

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your feelings very well, Mdlle.’ Rudolf sat down opposite to her, and leaning his elbows on the table watched her face – – ‘Tenez,’ he said, ‘let us revive recollections. It is a charming thing that I love to do – – – My favourite word in the whole language is “Souvenir”, Mdlle.’ ‘The first time I saw you,’ Juliet answered severely, ‘I heard you whisper to David “but she is a curiosity”, and I never forgave you. It sounded as though I edited the Family Herald.’ ‘No. No, you misunderstood me. I was interested. You were so different from anyone else and you had known those tea coffee and cocoa creatures7 that we have seen – and also you did not like me. I saw it in your eyes.’ ‘Did you expect me to? Did all the tea coffee and cocoa creatures “cast down their golden crowns”8 straightway?’ ‘Ah, you do not know the life of the musician,’ said Rudolf, sighing deeply and casting his eyes heavenward. Juliet laughed and said, ‘Don’t be affected. I don’t like you, to tell you the truth – you’re forward, at least you appear so, and I feel that you despise me. I hate that! I like you professionally, not personally.’ She suddenly jumped up and looked at herself in the little glass that hung over the mantelpiece. ‘How my hair looks’ she said, giving it a little pat all over. ‘Is it alright now?’ she appealed to him. ‘Adorable,’ said Rudolf, ‘and the little white dress and the two pink roses and the little black shoes – and the ribbon.’ ‘Please stop’ said Juliet. She was afraid again. Why would he not understand when she was joking and when she was serious? ‘It is his voice that is so abominable,’ she thought. ‘His voice and his eyes.’ Rudolf tossed back his hair and opened the piano. He began playing the overture to Tannhäuser, heavily and magnificently. ‘Ah Mdlle’ he said, raising his voice, ‘you do not understand me. We can never be friends, I fear. There are too many obstacles. You are too conventional.’ ‘I am –’ interrupted Juliet. ‘Yes you are more conventional than a child from a convent school. Also you never allow your feelings to run away with you – you have no core of sensation.’ ‘I haven’t.’ cried Juliet. ‘No you haven’t. Also you are a bad actress and I am a wonderful reader of caractère.’ He had come to the end of the Pilgrim’s Song and began playing it again. His tone was almost brutal. ‘It is the heritage from your parents’ he said. ‘You have fought against it, but voilà there it is, always conquering you. You are afraid of everything and you suspect everybody. Dieu! How afraid you are.’

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‘I am not’ said Juliet, shaking her head – but the colour rushed into her cheeks. He started the Venus Motif.9 ‘Here am I’ he said ‘reckless, a lover of all that you have desired to love, because my mother was a Danseuse and my father an artist. Also there was no marriage – –’ He ceased speaking but the music filled the room. He repeated the wonderful Venus call. ‘Ah, it is divine,’ he said. ‘That is what you should be, Juliet. What – how am I for Tannhäuser.’ The music was flooding Juliet’s soul now. The room faded. She heard her hot heavy impassioned voice above the storm of emotion ––– ‘Stop, stop,’ she said, feeling as though some spell was being cast over her. She shook from head to foot with anger and horror. ‘Listen again,’ said Rudolf. It was a Chopin nocturne this time. ‘Live this life, Juliet. Did Chopin fear to satisfy the cravings of his nature, his natural desires. No, that is how [?] he is so great. Why do you push away just that which you need, because of convention. Why do you dwarf your nature, spoil your life. If you were a man you would be a teetotaller and then a Revivalist. You are the most beautiful girl I have ever seen – no don’t interrupt – I shall never speak like this again. I shall go away tonight. But you are, Juliet. It is not regular beauty – it is fascination – some fearful attraction when you choose to appear fascinating. Yet you are a little timide, and you know nothing – absolutely nothing. You are blind, and far worse, you are deaf to all that is most worth living for.’ Juliet sprang to her feet. ‘I shall not listen to you,’ she said, the tears starting to her eyes. ‘I shall go home now, this instant. How dare you speak like this Rudolf – how dare you. I am suffocated . Where did you put my coat and hat!’ Her eyes were blazing. Rudolf suddenly sprang up from the music stool and caught her by the arm. ‘It is not for nothing that I have such a tone,’ he said, speaking hoarsely. His face was mad with passion, white with desire. ‘Leave me alone,’ said Juliet. She raised her eyes to his face, and his expression caused her to suddenly cease struggling and look up at him dumbly, her lips parted, terror in her eyes. ‘You adorable creature,’ whispered Rudolf, his face close to hers. ‘You adorable creature – you shall not go now – –’ She felt the room sway and heave. She felt that she was going to faint. ‘Rudolf, Rudolf,’ she said, and Rudolf’s answer was ‘at last.’ It was eleven o’clock when David entered the sitting room. He found Rudolf at the piano composing. ‘Be quiet mon ami’ he cried, ‘listen a moment.’ David stood still. Rudolf played madly, wildly,

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fiercely – the Music that was coursing through his brain seemed to intoxicate him. ‘It is my masterpiece,’ he shouted, closing the piano and falling on to David’s neck. ‘It was my masterpiece.’ ‘What the Devil has come over you,’ cried David, bringing out of his pocket the program of the evening Promenade. ‘I’m still full of Wagner, and behold I find he is here incarnate in my room.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ said Rudolf, pulling David’s handkerchief out of his pocket and applying it to his eyes. ‘I am Wagner – I’m at the top of the whole world, and it is rather strange. Rejoice with me,’ he said. David lighted a cigarette and stood with his hands clasped behind his back. ‘Are you drunk?’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Oui, oui, drunk I am – with the wine of Life, mon ami – – –’ ‘Well go and be drunk somewhere else. I’ve got an infernal headache and I want to smoke in peace.’ ‘Ah excuse, mon cher,’ said Rudolf, laying his strong hand on David’s arm. ‘I shall be like a sucking baby [?] if you will be kind. Where have you been?’ ‘I took Pearl to the Promenade.’ ‘Bon Dieu me garde!’ ejaculated Rudolf. David turned to him sharply. ‘Why not?’ he said, ‘why not? What do you mean? We talked about Juliet the whole time.’ ‘Did you take Pearl home?’ ‘Yes. I didn’t stay – Juliet was asleep on the sofa – – – and it was so late. Anyone been here?’ ‘Not a soul,’ cried Rudolf airily, waving his hands to express boundless emptiness and vast solitude – – – ‘I suppose the rose leaves floated through the window,’ said David, stooping to pick up some pink petals. ‘They were once a buttonhole,’ said Rudolf, ‘but it died and I threw it out of the window.’ ‘That is a lie,’ was the answer. His voice was very quiet. ‘Juliet’s been here, I know it. The remains of these blossoms [?] she was wearing ten minutes ago. Besides, I knew it the moment I came in.’ Rudolf grew suddenly confused and silent. Then he shrugged his shoulders. ‘It is true’ he said. ‘She left you this MS. I can’t think why I invented that sweet little tale – – –’ ‘Ah thanks,’ said David, taking the roll of paper from the table. ‘I can’t think why you did either – you two fight like cat and dog.’ Rudolf frowned. ‘She hates me,’ he said. ‘She is impudent. This afternoon she insulted me. She is the only woman who has ever insulted me.’ ‘So you were ashamed to tell’ queried David. ‘I wish that she hated

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me. It is an abominable position – – – I feel as though I ought to love her – to me she is an angel, she has always been an angel – but I do not. She is too like me. I understand her too well. We are both too moody, we both feel too much the same about everything. That is what I feel and so she does not attract me – do you understand?’ ‘Perfectly – but Pearl?’ David paused, then ‘Need I tell you? I cannot help myself. I am madly in love with Pearl. She is so inexplicable, so reckless, so unlike me – I cannot understand her. I cannot think how she feels about me. It attracts me – – – and she challenges me. The Lord only knows how all this will end’ he added. ‘Juliet – Juliet please sit still. You walked round and round this room till my pen is describing a hopeless and idiotic circle. I must get this off tonight, and I can’t if you will be so restless.’ There was a note of intense annoyance in Vere’s voice. She looked up from the sheets of foolscap arranged in neat piles before her. The afternoon had closed in – Pearl was writing by candlelight. Juliet had drawn down the blinds. The rain in the street hurt her. She had arranged all the odd books in a neat line on the mantelpiece. She had twice pulled the tablecloth straight, and then flung herself in a chair, tried to read and failed, tried to write and torn up the paper, sighed, tossed her hair out of her eyes, and finally started walking up and down the room, swiftly, quietly – – – She had a headache, felt tired, nervous – and longed to burst out crying. For days the rain had been falling steadily monotonously over London until it seemed to be suffocating her, beating into her brain. She had slept very little at night and her face [was a] little worn and set. At Vere’s remark she stopped walking and said ‘I – I beg your pardon. I did not quite realise what I was doing.’ Vere laid down her pen and pushed back her chair. ‘Got a mood?’ she said. ‘Yes’ said Juliet, ‘it’s the very Devil. While it lasts I think it is going to be eternal and I’m contemplating suicide.’ ‘It’s sure to be something physical. Why don’t you sleep better Juliet? Are you – you’re not . . . repenting?’ ‘Good Heavens, no. The truth is, my dear girl, well I hardly like to own it to myself even, you understand. Bernard Shaw10 would be gratified.’ ‘You feel sexual.’ ‘Horribly. And in need of a physical shock or violence – perhaps a good smacking would be beneficial.’ ‘Don’t laugh so much at yourself, Juliet. I’m sorry dear – you look wretchedly ill.’

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‘It’s the candlelight. Also I am in need of exercise. I shall go out, I think, for a walk, despite the fact that I shall become physically, mentally and psychically damped.’ ‘Do, dear.’ ‘I feel a need of a big grey sky, and a long line of lights. Also a confused noise of traffic and the sense of many people – you know?’ ‘Yes, I understand, but I loathe the rain. It makes me irritable. I hate the slashing effect that it has – and it makes me “fussy”.’ Juliet went over to Vere and suddenly kissed her. ‘Think my dear,’ she said, one hand on Vere’s shoulder, ‘if it had not happened I should be in the middle of Summer. Saturday night – helping the family to entertain a few friends to dinner perhaps, or hearing Father first snore and then yawn and finally tell me all he had for lunch, and all that everybody else had for lunch. The Evening would come to an end at ten o’clock with lemon and soda which Mother would refuse to drink because – quotation of course – it was so “windy”. O Lord! Instead – I earn at least £1.0.0 a week, I live with the best friend that anyone could wish for in London and I am free! Voilà, by enumerating all these excellent fors and againsts I feel better, and inclined to kiss you again.’ ‘Our friendship is unique’ said Vere, folding her arms and staring at the light. ‘Nothing could separate us, Juliet. All the comforts of matrimony with none of its encumbrances, hein?’ ‘My word yes! As it is we are both individuals. We both ask from the other personal privacy, and we can be silent for hours when the desire seizes us.’ ‘Think of a man always with you. A woman cannot be wholly natural with a man – there is always a feeling that she must take care that she doesn’t let him go.’ ‘A perpetual strain.’ ‘Also I should inevitably want to fly very high if I was certain that my wings were clipped.’ ‘Ugh’ said Juliet, going over to the wardrobe and reaching for her coat and hat, ‘I loathe the very principle of matrimony. It must end in failure, and it is death to a woman’s personality. She must drop the theme and begin to start playing the accompaniment. For me there is no attraction.’ Vere suddenly laughed. ‘I was thinking of your past affaire de cœur with David Méjin,’ she said. ‘Please don’t,’ cried Juliet. ‘To think of it makes me feel overwhelmingly sick. When I think how he filled, swayed my whole life, how I worshipped him – only I did. How jealous I was of him! I kept the very envelopes of his letters for years, and he – to say the least – raised his hat and passed on.’

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‘What would you do if you met him now?’ ‘Broadly speaking – do as I had been done by. I should simply bow.’ ‘I don’t know that I would do that – – –’ ‘Well,’ she drew on her gloves, ‘I shall take the plunge dear, and bring you back a brown loaf for supper. There is something aesthetic in the substance of a brown loaf.’ Once out in the streets Juliet walked very fast, her head bent. She was thinking, thinking. How absurd everything was. How small she was. She walked along Holborn and into Oxford Street. The restaurants were full of light, and the sound of laughter seemed to be in the air. (Let us linger no longer over these things. They are really very touching.) The Man When she reached the long tree-lined avenue, the rain had ceased and great splashes of sunlight lay across the road. As she neared the house she stopped and repeated the Dorian Grey. Her heart was beating almost unbearably. She pressed her hand against her hot face. ‘This is gloriously unconventional’ said Juliet, ‘but I wish I was less frightened.’ Walter opened the door. ‘Ha – you’ve come at last’ he said, his voice full of intense hospitality. ‘Come along into the smoking room – second door to the right.’ She pushed aside the heavy purple portière. The room was full of gloom but vivid yellow curtains hung straight and fine before the three windows. Tall wrought-iron candle-sticks stood in the corners – the dead whiteness of the candles suddenly brought back a memory of Saint Gudule11 at dusk and Juliet caught her breath. There were prints of beautiful women on the walls, and the graceful figure of a girl holding a shell in her exquisite arms stood on a table. There was a long low couch upholstered in dull purple, and quaint low chairs in the same colour. The room was full of the odour of chrysanthemums. The blossoms were arranged in high glasses on the mantel shelf – – – ‘I am afraid,’ said Walter, closing the door and speaking slightly apologetically, ‘it’s not very – – –’ ‘Please I like it,’ Juliet said, smiling at him and pulling off her long gloves. He pulled up a great armchair for her, then seating him[self] opposite so that he might watch her face – ‘Now tell me all about yourself.’ ‘How revoltingly hearty his voice sounds,’ thought Juliet – – – She paused, then ‘There’s not very much to tell.’ ‘How about those complications.’ ‘O they’re quite gone, thank you. I – I took your advice.’

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‘That’s fine. That’s fine. I knew you would my dear girl, I always said you had the grit in you.’ O, the fearful paternal conceit. ‘I – – I finally made up my mind to put an end to them. It was hard, you know – but – I have wished to thank you ever since.’ ‘O that’s alright, and as you grow older and see more cases of that very thing, you will realise better than you can now how right I was. Drifting is so dangerous.’ ‘Yes – – you made me feel that.’ ‘And don’t you feel more comfortable in yourself. Of course you miss something.’ ‘Yes I really do – intensely.’ ‘Yes, naturally, but now the leaving [tearing?] part of the whole business is over, aren’t you really very pleased?’ ‘Yes, I think I am.’ She sat very still and suddenly smiled slightly. ‘You have changed’ said Walter. His voice had curiously altered. Juliet passed a sleepless night. She lay still in the darkness staring at the dim outline of the roofs outside the window, thinking, thinking. Each moment her brain seemed more awake. If I do once go back, she thought, all will be over. It is stagnation, desolation that stares [me] in the face. I shall be lonely. I shall be thousands of miles from all that I care for and once I get there I can’t come back. I can’t do it. If they choose to behave like devils they must be treated as such. On one hand lay the mode bohème – alluring, knowledge-bringing, full of work and sensation, full of impulse, pulsating with the cry of Youth Youth Youth. Pearl with her pale eager face and smiling ripe mouth, crying to Juliet, ‘Here I am – here we both are. Trust me dear, live with me. You and I to reach for things together, you and I to live and prove our new Philosophy.’ On the other hand lay the Suitable Appropriate Existence. The days full of perpetual Society functions, the hours full of clothes discussions – the waste of life. ‘The stifling atmosphere would kill me,’ she thought. The days – weeks – months – years of it all. Her father, with his successful characteristic respectable face, crying ‘Now is the time. What have I got for my money. Come along – deck yourself out, show the world that you are expensive. Now is the time for me to sit still and have my slippers brought for me. You are behaving badly. You must learn to realise that the silken cords of parental authority are very tight ropes indeed. I want no erratic spasmodic daughter. I demand a sane healthy-minded girl. It is quite time for you to put up the shutters upon this period.’12 In the darkness Juliet smiled at the last expression. It was so exactly like him – an undeniable trade atmosphere.

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Towards dawn she slipped out of bed, wrapped herself round in the quilt, and began pacing up and down. Her face was burning with excitement. It has been so easy to speak of taking the plunge when two years of student life lay definitely before me, but now that the moment has arrived, the water looked very cold. All their arguments passed sharply across her brain – a neat selection of platitudes, altruisms, aphorisms.’ Will they wear – will they hold good,’ she thought, and then cried, ‘Yes, yes – I have the Key in my hands. Shall I unlock the door and get through and then shut it again, bang it again with all the old Life outside – and Pearl and I alone at last.’ She sat down at the table and took up her pen, then wrote rapidly, ‘Pearl I am coming. Understand I answer now for good and for all. I don’t know why I have hesitated so long. Ought I to be grateful to you for taking me – – – I don’t think I am, dear, because I would do exactly the same if the circumstances were reversed. You realise that I want to find out what everything is worth – and you too, my friend. What has held me back from coming has been I think principally the thought that we are not to be together for a week or a month or a year even, but for all times. It is rather immense and requires consideration. So to bed. I am lonely. J.’ When the seven o’clock dressing bell rang [Juliet] woke to the full consciousness of a nervous headache. She knew from experience that it was of no earthly use to attempt to do anything except succumb and lie still. So she slipped into her kimono and went along the stone passage to Miss Grimwood’s bedroom. That lady on a seat before the glass tastefully decorated [?] her head with her three soft switches, and when Juliet came in she enmeshed herself in a salmon pink fascinator13 with no small measure of confusion and embarrassment. ‘I am afraid I shall have to stay in bed all day’ said Juliet. Then in answer to numerous significant inquiries and nods – ‘No, nothing, thank you. Merely a headache. Meals – no thank you. Yes, tea perhaps, if I might have it very strong. If I can just lie still. O, no, quite unnecessary – I shall take some phenacetin. If I might be left alone. Overwork – O, by no means. They are quite a common occurrence.’ Then she went back to her room and pulled down the blinds and crept into bed. The hours pulsed slowly on. After an immeasurable length of time she saw Pearl standing beside her, tall and grave in her black frock with a white feather boa round her throat. ‘This is good’ said Juliet sitting up with her hands clasped round her knees. ‘What is the time.’ ‘Just four,’ Pearl smiled. ‘How do you feel?’ ‘Rather damnable.’ ‘Can you talk?’

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‘My dear yes. I feel better for the sight of you. Give me that pink carnation you’re wearing, and sit on the bed here.’ ‘I got your letter this afternoon, Juliet, by the two o’clock post, and came straightway to your room, my dear.’ They suddenly held each other’s hand. ‘To the devil with my relations,’ said Juliet. ‘To the Devil with our Past Life,’ said Pearl. ‘All the way here I have been quoting Oscar’s “Relations are a very tedious set of people”.14 You know, it has been like a charm.’ And the winter came again. The rooms in Carbury Avenue began to look cold and cheerless. ‘Don’t for Heaven’s sake start fires,’ said Pearl, ‘they stop me working strenuously – also the price of coal.’ So they kept the screen in front of the fireplace and resolutely refused to think of the long sweet drowsy evenings that might have been theirs. Juliet was sleeping badly again. ‘I dream so much,’ she told Pearl. ‘Every night terrible dreams – all about when I was little and about people I’d quite forgotten – and then I wake and try not to sleep again – it is so heart-breaking.’ She had become intensely pale and the shadows were always under her eyes now. ‘You ought to feel more, and think less’ Pearl would answer. ‘Write something stupendous, create a colossal scheme and then it will cure you.’ ‘Ideas keep coming to me – it is not for lack of ideas that I have not written, but somehow that last play seemed to have stolen so much of my vitality.’ They were both sitting in the half dark, talking thus, when Pearl suddenly looked at the clock and cried ‘Good Heavens – I must fly – I’m due for a sitting at half past six and it’s nearly that now.’ She went. Juliet listened to the sound of her steps going down down down, then along the corridor and then lost. She folded her hands in front of her and suddenly the tears poured down her face – – – ‘I wonder why I am crying,’ she thought – ‘am I sad – am I, am I?’ She crept over to the lounge and lay down, her head buried in the cushions. She was assailed with the most extraordinary thoughts. They seemed to be floating towards her, vast and terrible. ‘I feel as though I was on a great river,’ she thought, ‘and the rocks were all closing around me – coming towards me to sink me’ – and now and again Rudolf’s face came before her – the broad low brow, the great sweep of hair, the fire of the eyes, the eager curve of his mouth – almost just a trifle mocking but also concerned, just a trifle concerned. She saw the strong supple hands, hands such as Aubrey Beardsley15

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would have given an Artist. ‘It is Rudolf, and Rudolf and Rudolf,’ she said to herself. Then suddenly a fierce thought sprang to birth in her brain – – – ‘Did he ever think that there might be consequences to his act? Did he ever for one moment dream that Nature might cry to the world what was so hidden, so buried?’ Terror took possession of her. ‘O no, not that,’ she said, ‘never, never that. That would be diabolical and the world isn’t diabolical – at least it can’t be. Nothing would exist if it was.’ But if – if – then if she were certain she ‘Keys with the caretaker.’ The street looked cheap, Juliet looked at it with tired eyes – dingy, forlorn, certainly this would be very near her standard. She found the caretaker and he conducted her up five flights of stairs. ‘Certainly not here’ thought Juliet with an uneasy feeling that her legs might consider themselves as separate from her body and refuse to advance. And then – ‘Nonsense, perhaps it must be here.’ There was a passage and leading from it three rooms – one large ‘living’ room and a small bedroom and a minute kitchen. She looked round, noticed that the window had wide low ledges, that in the recess at either side of the fireplace there [was] a white-washed cupboard doing up with a button. ‘O – I like it’ she said, nodding seriously – and the rent was decidedly within her limit. Chapter III Juliet stumbled up the stairs – somehow she reached the door and let herself in and locked it again. Then she groped her way into the sitting room. The fire had gone out – she did not notice it. The wind had blown over the roses on the table, and they lay in a crushed heap on the carpet. The room was flooded in the cold light of the moon. She stood gazing at it all, then a long shudder went through her and she fell heavily on to the floor. She was conscious as she lay there. ‘Why didn’t I strike my head on the fender,’ she thought – ‘I’m not hurt a bit. I shall have to get up again and then it will be day.’ She shivered incessantly from head to foot, and a wheel began to go round and round and round in her head. ‘Down and down and down and down and down,’ said the wheel as it whirred, ‘down and down and down and down and down.’ Then it assumed gigantic proportions, and she clung to it and it dragged her round. Round and round and round and round and round in a great pit of darkness – and she fell. And dark crept into the room. Juliet, lying back in her chair, saw the sky a pale soft yellow, watched the steady outpouring of smoke from the chimneys opposite. A faint breath, like a sigh from the passing day, stirred the window curtains and blew on to her face. Sounds floated up to her – – – intensely individual yet blending into the

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great Chorale of Twilight. An extraordinary weakness stole over her. ‘She was dying softly softly’ like the day. Her arms hung straight on either side of her chair, her hair fell back among the cushions, her lips slightly parted. – – – The horror of the long white day. She could not endure another. Here in this twilight, shaking off her great chains of Commerce, London shone, mystical, dreamlike. And Juliet too felt like a dream. She was floating, floating in the veil-like pale sky. Yesterday had never been, today had never been, tomorrow was not. This struggle for bread, this starvation of Art. How could she expect to keep art with her in the ugliness of her rooms, in the sordidness of her surroundings. Listlessly she raised her head and looked round. But the room was full of cool emptiness – nothing was apparent, everything suggestive and full of charm. ‘You will stay with me a little longer, while I can offer you this Magic hour’ whispered – The sky changed. Only a narrow strip of the pale yellow remained and above a thin blue on which the darkness of night sky was partially hidden. Patches of rich golden light shone in the houses. She felt her fatigue, her doubt, her regrets, slip off from her tired heart. ‘O – O’, she said, ‘How weak I am. How I ought to be full of strength, and rejoicing all the day. Relations at the other end of the world who have, thank Heaven, cast me off and my wish fulfilled. I’m alone in the heart of London, working and living – – –’ Then another thought came – she shook her head and frowned, but a great wave of bitter [. . .] memories broke over her and drowned all else – – – Where was he now. What was he doing. How did he live – married, single, rich, poor – nothing was known. She shook from head to foot with pain and anger with herself. Were those five years to haunt her always – would she never be strong enough to stand absolutely alone. Should the first thought at waking always be ‘Who knows,’ and the last thought at night ‘Perhaps tomorrow.’ She moved restlessly. ‘I say I am independent – I am utterly dependent. I say I am masculine – no-one could be more feminine. I say I am complete – I am hopelessly incomplete.’ Try as she would she knew that it was hopeless to attempt to change. ‘I must just put up with it’ she said aloud. Suddenly she listened. Someone was mounting the stairs quickly, lightly. She glanced at the clock, it was just half past eight. The steps came nearer. Outside her door they stopped. There was a momentary pause, then a knock, sharp, imperative. She sprang to her feet, and something within her seemed to spring to birth and laugh. She sprang to her feet, lit a small jet of gas, then opened the door wide. In the passage a man leaned against the wall, the intense black of his coat against the white wall, the broad sweep of his hat. Then he put out his hand. Terror seized her. ‘David’ she whispered – she could scarcely

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articulate. Her mouth was parched. She leaned against the door for support. ‘David’. ‘I have found you now’ he said, seizing both her hands. ‘How you’ve changed,’ he said, half whispering. ‘Mightn’t it have been better if you had just followed your destiny. For girls like Pearl it is of course different – she is made differently, Juliet, but – your guarded life. Perhaps by this time you would be – – –’ ‘Please be quiet’ said Juliet. The tears were choking her now – the hopeless tragedy. O, yes, he was a fool, this David – why did she love him? ‘But am I not right?’ he went on, almost tenderly. She shook her head. ‘I have made my own bed – no, no I don’t mean that. I adore this life, I worship it – it has been Heaven!’ But she over acted her part. Suddenly he caught one of her hands. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Listen. Go back, dear. We shall all help you, we have spoken so much of you lately. You are so changed – it is not right – you are wasting your life. And you have been dear and sweet to me always. How we change, Juliet. When we first knew each other, both so young, so full of quaint romantic impossibilities – but those two children are dead now and we are man and woman – all is different. You made a mistake – for the sake of your old view, Juliet, try and go back. We shall both help you – – – Pearl and I – – –’ Juliet looked up into [his] face. How very very heavy she had grown. She could hardly hold up her head now – – – It is quite extraordinary – like a dead body, she thought. All the six undertakers couldn’t lift her now. How curious – two Davids – how strange – two huge gigantic Davids – both of them thundering ‘Pearl and I – – –’ What colossal Davids. She must run away and tell Grannie. She started to her feet – – – and fell – – – Day and night the rain fell. The sky would never be light again, it seemed. The little bedroom was always dark but it did not matter – as Pearl told David, Juliet did not need light now. When the doctor had first come and told Pearl how it was with Juliet the girl was dismayed and horror stricken. She went into the sitting room where David was waiting. ‘David’ she said ‘this is awful – I had not the slightest idea that Juliet –’ ‘What is the matter?’ he said. ‘O our poor Juliet. She has been shockingly treated – you know – you understand?’ ‘I’ll not believe you,’ said David. ‘It is perfectly true. David she is going to die.’ ‘I’ll not believe you.’

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‘It is true. Come in and see her – she cannot know – – –’ They went back to her room. The doctor left as they entered, promising to come again next morning. Also he would send a nurse immediately. Juliet lay straight and still, her face twisted with horror. They stood and watched her. David suddenly stroked her hand – – – ‘Rudolf,’ she cried piteously, pleadingly – and then both of them knew. Day and night the rain fell and at last one afternoon the end came. Juliet came back painfully. She was groping the dark, trying to feel her way along. Out of the dark two voices came. ‘It cannot be long now.’ ‘But it is for the best. If she had lived what could have happened?’ ‘I begin to believe there must be a merciful God.’ ‘I, too.’ She opened her eyes and saw the two beside her. ‘Ought I to join your hands and say bless you,’ she whispered. Suddenly she raised herself – ‘O – O I want to live,’ she screamed, but Death put his hand over her mouth. David and Pearl were married as soon as I [they] reasonably could be after Juliet’s death, and a year and a half later, when a girl child was born, they both decided she should be christened after ‘poor Juliet’. Pearl gave up smoking cigarettes and published a little volume which she called ‘Mother Thought’ . . . somehow the title does not seem intensely original. Also, when they realised the possibility of another extension to their family they bought a nice little house near Cricklewood, and David achieved no small measure of success with his gardening. *

*

*

*

*

*

*

Rudolf did not return to England after his tour in Italy but went further afield to Spain and Portugal. So he knew nothing of Juliet’s death until a long time had passed – – – Mr Thring, the porter at No 65, gave him a most full, true and particular account. In the Autumn season he brought out a very charming little morceau ‘Souvenir de Juliet.’ It create[d] quite a quiver [?] at the London concerts. It was reported on highest authority that the original MS was stained with tears – – – – (Let us linger no longer over these things. They are really very touching.) Notes U Text: KMN , 1, pp. 68–9, pp. 48–59. Beginning dated ‘18.V.06’.

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1. KM began writing this story while still a student at Queen’s College, and worked at it sporadically for the rest of the year, as well as after her return to New Zealand. The date at the opening of ‘Chapter I, October 14th’, made it clear that the narrative was set on her birthday, reinforcing the fact that this is an early self-portrait. There is also another list of chapter headings which propose a plan for the story that was only partly followed. ‘i. Running away. B. night-meeting. ii. Sea chapter. iii. London. iv. College Influence. v. Vere. vi. Parents. vii. Project. viii. Fulfilment. ix. Truth and Illness. x. Marriage. xi. Vere and T. xii. Death’ (KMN , 1, p. 56). As was often the case, KM did not write sequentially in a notebook, but filled pages at random, at times breaking up a page with quite unrelated entries. Scott’s transcription in KMN , 1, preserves the page order of Notebook 1, and so the story’s dislocated fragments. That option however presents problems for the reader with its narrative confusion. Since what KM left was both incomplete and a first draft, there can be no certainty about the order of its various sections, but at least there are sufficient narrative hints to attempt the roughly sequential line which is printed here. The story tells of a young woman eager to move from Wellington to the London she yearns for, especially after David, the musician she is infatuated with, travels there to study. Once in the metropolis, she becomes close to Pearl, a fellow student at a women’s hostel, whom David falls in love with, while Juliet is seduced by his friend, Rudolf. Following her pregnancy, and her refusal to consider returning home, she lives in some degree of squalor, possibly has an abortion, and some kind of relationship is hinted at with another man called Walter. She is desperately ill when found by David and taken to live with him and Pearl, and dies at their home. That at least is the story’s rough scaffolding. There are still sections of the manuscript which puzzle, such as two beginnings marked ‘Chapter I’, the earlier of them a realist portrayal of life in Wellington, the other and later, written on her return to Wellington, a feverish dream-like episode, expanding the story’s motif of ‘falling’. The tone of the draft is similarly uncertain, from heavily romantic to sharply cynical. There is also a curious prescience in the writing, anticipating as it does the turmoil of Mansfield’s own experience in the year after she returned to England in 1908. The fact that ‘Caesar’, a nickname she gave Arnold Trowell, and ‘Vere’ appear by mistake, as it were, at points in the manuscript, make it clear that the characters David and Pearl drew on Arnold and KM’s Queen’s College friend, Vere Bartrick-Baker. Rudolf may well owe something to a fellow student of the Trowell brothers whom she met when visiting Brussels at Easter 1906, and who later committed suicide. (See KM’s important letter, ‘? before April 1909’, CLKM , 1, 89–90.) The

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2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

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story’s Wellington chapter clearly depicts her own family, even repeating phrases about her father recorded elsewhere in the notebooks, while the early character description of Juliet is the fullest self-depiction of the young Katherine that survives. Supplejack, Ripogonum scandens , a tough, twining forest vine. Reefer coat, a short close-fitting jacket derived from nautical clothing; tam-o’-shanter, a woollen floppy hat with a pom-pom, the name taken from the Robert Burns poem, ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ (1791). Don Juan (1819–24), Byron’s long poem of passion and picaresque adventure. Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Srnade Mlancolique for violin and piano (1875). Émile Zola, Paris (1897). KM here means conventional, shallow people. An inaccurate memory of Revelation , 4: 10. The Overture and the Venus motif from Richard Wagner, Tannhuser , first performed in 1845. Such plays by George Bernard Shaw as Mrs Warrens Profession (1895) and Arms and the Man (1894) earned him the reputation for frank dealing with sexual topics. La Cathédrale Saints Michel-et-Gudules, which KM had visited in Brussels. See KMN , 1, p. 79. Fascinator: an ornamental headpiece, smaller than a hat, often decorated with feathers. KM’s memory of ‘Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.’ The Importance of Being Earnest , Act I (1891). Aubrey Beardsley (1872– 1898), English artist and writer.

‘ “I was never happy”, Huia said’ ‘I was never happy’, Huia1 said, leaning back wearily and closing his eyes. Radiana laid her hand lightly against his face. ‘That is because you do not know the secret’ she said. ‘There is none,’ answered the young man, in a dull toneless voice. The scent of the flowering jessamine clung round them with almost mystical sweetness.

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‘ “i was never happy”, huia said’

‘O that flower,’ cried Radiana, breaking off a great spray. ‘I literally feel it in my blood, Huia – literally.’ Huia opened his eyes and smiled languidly. ‘I like to think of your perfumed veins, but you are not like a jessamine – not at all. This flower never can be connected with joy, and tonight your happiness is too evident – it creates in me a profound melancholy.’ Radiana lay leaning back among the golden cushions, her eyes halfclosed, her lips parted – her hair quivered with life. ‘I am half stifled with happiness’ she murmured. Huia caught her hands suddenly, roughly. ‘Give it to me’ he said. ‘Withhold nothing from me Radiana.’ She twined her arms round his neck and raised her face to his. ‘Look in my eyes, Huia, listen, listen. I have a bird in my heart, deep down in my heart and it sings to me – and then I am happy – – – that is all. Look too, Huia, is there not a bird in your heart – and once it shakes one note from its golden throat, you cannot be sad.’ The pain deepened in Huia’s face. Silence fell between them, then the young man cried ‘I have looked into my heart and the bird is there – but it sleeps.’ ‘Call to it to awaken, Huia, cry to it that sleep is impossible.’ Deep down in his heart he saw the bird, still and slumbering, its beautiful plumage unruffled. A feeling of fierce anger overcame him. Why should this woman be capable of an emotion unattained by him. ‘It must sing to me’ he thought. ‘I shall force it to sing. I shall never rest day or night until the first note has shaken the very inmost visions of my soul.’ He released himself from the window and stepped out on to the balcony. It was a voluptuous night – powerful and yet yielding. ‘Huia, Huia,’ called Radiana. ‘Give me my cloak,’ he said, ‘I shall go riding.’ ‘Riding, Huia.’ Radiana came and stood beside him – ‘no it is too late. You shall not go. You are not strong enough. I – I cannot be left alone – besides the roads are dangerous and the night is very dark – see – there is something almost cynical about the darkness, and the shadows.’ ‘You talk like a child – am I to be the companion of your unreasoning fancies. Hold, there’ he called to a man who passed below. ‘Saddle my horse as fast as possible.’ He waited in the garden until the horse, a great powerful brute, was brought to him. By the light of the lantern Huia saw the servant’s face. ‘What is the matter’ he questioned. ‘Nothing, sir – I am happy, I am well.’ He paused, the reins in his hands. ‘Define your happiness.’ ‘Ah it is as though the lark had got into my heart.’

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‘Even this fellow,’ thought Huia. He rode on the cliffs beside the sea – the dreary lapping of the water and the soft thud of the horse’s feet were the only sounds. Then he drew rein and stood looking over the water, and the lapping of the water beat in his brain –he felt the soft oozy water enfolding him – in his very hair. Notes U Text: KMN , 1, pp. 43–4. 1. Although Huia, the Maori name of the extinct New Zealand bird, Heteralocha acutirostris , is not used as a man’s name, KM does so here presumably for its symbolic association with the bird in her character’s heart which is unable to sing.

Memories December, cold, dark and dreary. The wind was blowing all round his house, the rain was pattering on the roof – and he was alone. He was old, his beard was white, he could hardly walk now. There was a fire in the little grate that flickered and died down, flickered again, and made strange shadows in the room, queer indefinable shapes. He sat beside the fire, one hand covering his face, the other grasping the arm of his chair. He was thinking, thinking, thinking. It was the eve of his birthday. Yes, he would die soon, everyone did. They would bury him in the little old churchyard and then pull his cottage down, and take away his things. They would forget all about him. It was very very quiet in the room. The storm raged outside, and the darkness came nearer and nearer. Where would he be? Would he be in the old churchyard or – where? He huddled a little closer to the fire. If only he could blot out that one page, all might be well. It stood out amongst the others, some of which were white, some grey, but it was red, blood-red. As he thought of it, it seemed to grow bigger. It seemed to spread over all. God, God, how fearful. Quite dark now. The storm became less furious. He covered his face with his hands, the old lonely man, and he shook from head to foot. Suddenly he seemed to feel that there was something else in the room. Something that came nearer and nearer. He heard its garments rustle. He almost heard it breathe. He raised his head. The

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room became dimly lit. Before him was a figure clothed in a long grey garment. It was a woman. Her face was white as the snow Her hair which fell over her shoulders was black and glossy, but he seemed to see streaks of grey in it. She looked old – very old – yet young. Suddenly he heard a faint cry. And the woman bent over something she held in her arms. It was a little child – such a wee thing, with flushed cheeks and great wistful eyes. It clung to the woman and it wailed again. She looked up at the old man and spoke. Her voice was full of despair. The tears rained down her face. ‘The baby is dying,’ she cried. ‘Dying of cold. You will let us stop here. You will not thrust us out as they have done.’ Unsteadily the old man rose to his feet and looked at the woman and pointed to his chair. ‘The fire is very low,’ was all he said. Notes U Text: KMN , 1, pp. 44–5. Signed ‘Kathleen M. Beauchamp’.

The Tale of the Three Vera Margaret, Charlotte Mary and K.M. were cleaning out the doll’s house. There were three dippers of water on the floor, three little pieces of real monkey brand1 and in their hands they held three little rags – of various degrees of dirtiness. They were being systematic thorough little souls and their cheeks were flaming, their hands aching with the exertion. ‘It’s the chimleys’ said K.M., polishing these articles with tremendous verve. ‘All the dust seems to fly into them.’ ‘On them’ corrected C.M. in her careful cool little voice. ‘They haven’t got any reglar insides you know.’ Vera Margaret was working at the windows, trying to clean the little square of glass without washing away the thin red line of paint which was the dividing line between the bottom and top panes. ‘How pleased all the family will be’ she said ‘to find everything so fresh and neat.’ Outside the nursery window the rain was falling in torrents. They peeked through and saw the long wet garden, the paddocks, and far away the bush-covered hills were hardly to be seen – – – Early in the morning when they had been allowed to put some sacking over

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their heads and run across the courtyard into the feedroom to see Pat and get the clean boots, he had called the day a ‘Southerly busted’2 and they knew that meant ‘a big wetness and then a blow’ as K.M. graphically described it. Notes U Text: KMN , 1, pp. 73–4. A distant anticipation of ‘The Doll’s House’, written in late 1921. Again, she uses the names of her sisters in what is a memoir as well as a story. 1. A brand of heavy-duty soap, extensively advertised, that depicted figures of monkeys. 2. ‘Southerly buster’, as the often gale-force southerly wind that struck Wellington was called. KM believed she had been born during such a storm.

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1907

L’Incendie A stretch of gorse clothing the hillside has caught fire. From my window I see the blue smoke spreading afar in twists and turns and curves of thin exquisite loveliness. I see, too, the fierce red glow of the flames. I watch their mad hungry progress. There is a steady, strong destructive sound. The flames rush forward, crying ‘See, see, can we ever be satisfied?’ Above the hills the sky is widely luminous. Below the hills is a street of little wooden houses. From the yards come the piercing incoherent sounds of children at play, and at this evening hour their voices sound thin and old, their crying seeming full of protestation. Each moment the fire on the hills is gaining strength. From my window I watch it, eagerly, fascinated and horrified. Shall it be always from my window that I must watch the fire burning? May I not hold the flames in my hand, if only for a little while, and hold them against my heart – and laugh as they fiercely attack it? Notes U Text: KMN, 1, p. 177. Dated and signed ‘Karl Mansfield 21.I.1907’.

•

Vignette: Summer in Winter Through the wild Winter afternoon Carlotta1 at the piano sang of love. Standing by the window I watched her beautiful passionate profile. The walls were hung with daffodil silk – a faint golden light seemed to linger on her face. She wore a long black frock and a hat with a drooping black feather. 66

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Her gloves, her great ermine coat, her silver purse were flung over the lounge beside her. The air was faintly scented with the perfume she loved that Winter – peau d’Espagne.2 There was a little fire of juniper wood burning in the grate and the flames cast into the room strange grotesque shadows that leapt upon the walls, the curtains, that lurked under the chairs, behind the lounge, that hid in the corners, and seemed to point long shadow fingers at Carlotta. She sang and sang and the room seemed warm and full of sunshine and happy flowers. ‘Come’ her voice cried to me ‘and we shall wander in a mystic garden filled with beautiful nonexistent flowers. And I alone possess the key, I alone can search out the secret paths. Lo! there is a bower lit with the pale light of gardenia blossom, and the fountains are filled with laughing water.’ I drew back the heavy curtains from the window – the rain was splashing against the glass. The house opposite repelled me – it was like the face of an old old man drowned in tears. In the garden below rotting leaves were heaped upon the lawns in the walls, the skeleton trees rattled together, the wind had torn a rose bush from the ground – it sprawled across the path, ugly and thorn-encrusted. Heavily, drearily fell the winter rain upon the dead garden, upon the skeleton trees. I turned from the window and in the warm firelit room, with almost a noble defiance in her voice, Carlotta at the piano sang passionately of love. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, p. 158. Dated ‘9.II.07’. 1. A name KM sometimes used for Maata Mahupuku. 2. According to Havelock Ellis, ‘Peau d’Espagne may be mentioned as a highly complex and luxurious perfume, often the favorite scent of sensuous persons, which really owes a large part of its potency to the presence of the crude animal sexual odors of musk and civet.’ Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 4 (1905), p. 75.

•

Summer Idyll A slow tranquil surrender of the Night Spirits, a knowledge that her body was refreshed and cool and light, a great breath from the sea that skimmed through the window and kissed her laughingly – and

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her awakening was complete. She slipped out of bed and ran over to the window and looked out. The sea shone with such an intense splendour – danced, leapt up, cried aloud, ran along the line of white beach so daintily, drew back so shyly, and then flung itself on to the warm whiteness with so complete an abandon that she clapped her hands like a child, pulled the blinds high in every window and filled the room with brightness. She looked up at the sun – it could not be more than four o’clock and away in the bush a tui called. Suddenly she grew serious, frowned, and then smiled ironically. ‘I’d forgotten she existed,’ she laughed opening the door. She peered into the passage – the sun was not there, and the whole house was very quiet. In Marina’s room the scent of the manuka1 was heavy and soothing. The floor was strewn with blossoms. Great sprays stood in every corner and in the fireplace and even over the bed. Marina lay straight and still in her bed, her hands clasped over her head, her lips slightly parted. A faint thin colour like the petal of a dull rose leaf shone in the dusk of her skin. Hinemoa2 bent over her with a curious feeling of pleasure, intermingled with a sensation which she did not analyse. It came upon her if she had used too much perfume, if she had drunk wine that was too heavy and sweet, laid her hand on velvet that was too soft and smooth. Marina was wrapped in the darkness of her hair. Hinemoa took it up in her hands and drew it away from her brow and face and shoulders. ‘Marina, Marina’ she called, and Marina opened her eyes and said ‘Is it day’ – and then sat up and took Hinemoa’s face in her hands and kissed her just between her eyebrows. ‘O come quick, come quick’ cried Hinemoa. ‘Your room is hot with this manuka and I want to bathe.’ ‘I come now,’ Marina answered, and suddenly she seized a great spray of manuka and threw it full in Hinemoa’s face and the blossoms fell into her hair. ‘Snow Maiden – Snow Maiden’ she said, laughing, ‘look at your hair. It is holding the blossoms in its curls.’ But Hinemoa filled her hands with manuka and they ran laughing out of the house and down to the shore. And there it was before them. They stretched out their arms and ran in without speaking, and then swam swiftly and strongly towards an island that lay like a great emerald embedded in the heart of a gigantic amethyst. Hinemoa fell back a little to see Marina. She loved to watch her complete harmony – it increased her enjoyment. ‘You are just where you ought to be’ she said, raising her voice. ‘But I like not that,’3 said Hinemoa, shaking back her hair. ‘I lack that congruity.’ ‘It is because you are so utterly the foreign element – – – you see?’

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They reached the island and lay on a long smooth ledge of brown rock and rested. Above them the fern trees rose, and among the fern trees a rata4 rose like a pillar of flame. ‘See the hanging beautiful arms of the fern trees’ laughed Hinemoa. ‘Not arms, not arms. All other trees have arms – saving the rata with his tongues of flame – but the fern trees have beautiful green hair. See, Hinemoa, it is hair, and know you not, should a warrior venture through the bush in the night they seize him and wrap him round in their hair and in the morning he is dead. They are cruel even as I might wish to be to thee, little Hinemoa.’ She looked at Hinemoa with half shut eyes, her upper lip drawn back showing her teeth, but Hinemoa caught her hand. ‘[. . .]’ she pleaded. ‘Now we dive’ said Marina, rising and walking to the edge of the rock. The water was here in shadow, deep green, slumbering. ‘Remember’ she said, turning to Hinemoa, ‘it is with the eyes open that you must fall – otherwise it is useless. Fall into the water and look right down, down. Those who have never dived so do not know the sea. It is not ripples and foam, you see. Try and sink as deeply as [you] can – with the eyes open and then you will learn.’ Marina stood for a moment, poised like a beautiful statue, then she sprang down into the water. To Hinemoa it seemed a long bit of waiting, but at last Marina came up, and shook her head many times and cried out exultantly ‘Come – come.’ A flood of excitement bounded to Hinemoa’s brain. She quivered suddenly, laughed again, and then descended. When she came up she caught Marina’s hands. ‘I am mad – mad,’ she said. ‘Race me back, quickly, I shall drown myself.’ She started swimming. Marina said ‘Little foolish one’ but Hinemoa swam on, her eyes wide with terror, her lips parted. She reached the shore, wrung out her braid, and ran back into the house, never pausing to see if Marina would follow. She shut and locked the door, ran over to the mirror and looked at her reflection. ‘What a fright you had, dear,’ she whispered, and bent and kissed the pale wet face. She dressed slowly and gravely in a straight white gown just like a child wears, then she drew on her stockings and shoes. Her hair was still wet. She went to dry it on the verandah. Marina had dressed and prepared breakfast. She was standing in the sunshine, combing her hair, and catching hold of a long straight piece and watching the light shining through it. ‘See how beautiful I am,’ she cried, as Hinemoa came up to her. ‘Come and eat, little one.’

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‘O I am hungry,’ said Hinemoa, going up to table. ‘Eggs and bread and honey and peaches – and what is in this dish, Marina?’ ‘Baked koumaras – – –’5 Hinemoa sat down and peeled a peach and ate it with the juice running through her fingers. ‘Is it good?’ said Marina. ‘Very.’ ‘And you are not afraid any more?’ ‘No.’ ‘What was it like?’ ‘It was like – like –’ ‘Yes?’ Hinemoa bent her head. ‘I have seen the look on your face,’ Marina laughed. ‘Hinemoa eat a koumara.’ ‘No, I don’t like them. They’re blue – they’re too unnatural. Give me some bread.’ Marina handed her a piece, then helped herself to a koumara, which she ate delicately, looking at Hinemoa with a strange half-smile expanding over her face. ‘I eat it for that reason’ she said. ‘I eat it because it is blue.’ ‘Yes.’ said Hinemoa breaking the bread in her white fingers. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 75–7. The title of the story refers back to an earlier occasion, rather than being the date of composition. KM’s account of erotic attraction between a Maori woman and a younger pakeha (New Zealander of European descent) draws on her relationship with the handsome and sophisticated Maata Mahupuku (Martha Grace), whom she had known when she attended Miss Swainson’s School in 1899–1902. They met again in London early in 1906. Maata, of Ngati Kahungunu descent, was from a distinguished and wealthy family in the Wairarapa, across the Rimutaka Range north of Wellington. KM complicates the narrative by giving the Maori woman the name Marina, and calling the pakeha Hinemoa, the name of a woman lover in Maori legend. She also makes the Maori older and more experienced, while in fact Maata was younger than KM. A surviving fragment from Maata’s own journal includes the entry for 10 April 1907, I am 17 today. It is extraordinary how young I am in years and how old in body – ugh. I am miserable and oh! so bored. [. . .] I had letter from [. . .] K. this morning. [. . .] dearest K. writes ‘ducky’ letters. I like this bit. ‘What did you mean by being so superlatively beautiful just as you went away. You witch; you are beauty incarnate.’

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KM in turn wrote in a notebook early in 1907, Do other people of my own age feel as I do I wonder – so absolutely powerfully licentious, so almost physically ill. [. . .] I want Maata – I want her as I have had her – terribly. This is unclean I know but true. What an extraordinary thing – I feel savagely crude – and almost powerfully enamoured of the child. (CLKM, 1, n. 1, p. 22) 1. Manuka, Leptospermum scoparium, a flowering shrub also called tea-tree by European settlers. 2. See Scott, KMN, 1, p. 75 n.1, on standardising KM’s various spellings of Hinemoa. 3. Also Scott’s plausible suggestion that KM intended to write ‘But I am not like that.’ 4. Rata, Metrosideros robusta, a large tree with vivid red blossoms. 5. Kumara, the New Zealand sweet potato, takes on a blue tint when cooked.

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Night Came Swiftly Pearl1 had ridden far out of the town, along the road that crept like a white ribbon by the side of the sea. She had a fierce longing to escape from people, to find herself alone. And when the last house had disappeared she reined in. She felt as wild as the sea that thundered against the rocks and threw up exquisite passionate curves of white spray – as troubled – as full of agitation as the sky, a riot of flame colour, and purple, and scarlet – as profoundly melancholy as the purple hills. The wind blew the bitter salt-laden air into her face – she flung back her head, and half shut her eyes. What was happening to her? She felt terrified yet triumphant, exultant yet cowed. He was coming to see her that evening – he, the very soul and spirit of her. More than a year had passed since she had received a letter, since she had heard anything from him, and now just this note which she had slipped under her loose suede gloves. I must try and realise it, she thought, I must decide what I am going to do or say. I am a fool to expect anything. A visit from a friend, that is all. He may be married – he certainly does not care for me – O look it in the face. And the thought was more bitter and strong than the fierce salt air. She could think of nothing consecutively. Her mind had got beyond control. For so many weeks

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Life had been a little thing of [. . .] and simplicity. Now something magnificent and fierce seized her, and shook her. I think I have been dead, she thought. I must have been dead. Would he have changed – had she changed – grown older looking, sadder, thinner. She kept trying to gain mastery over herself but in vain. An absurd fancy came to her that she was conducting an Orchestra that would not heed her signals to them to stop but continued playing more and more fiercely some Hungarian Fantasie, some Dvorak Serenade.2 She wheeled her horse round and lashed at it brutally, savagely, with her whip. The animal took fright and cantered in the direction of home. O faster she called to it – faster, faster. Some terrific energy had sprung to birth in her brain. When she reached the town the streets were lighted, rain was falling, and the reflections in the silver streets were lurid. She took the horse to the stables. Outside the front door she paused a moment to feel for her latchkey. There was a great cabbage tree3 growing in the front garden and the shadow it cast on the door looked like a many-armed monster waving her away – the action was fantastic and real. She stood still, fascinated. In the hall she took off her gloves and hat and looked at herself in the glass. Her face was pale, her eyes shining, her mouth scarlet. From the half-open drawing room door she saw the reflection of fire dancing on the walls and felt very pleased. She would have some tea, change her dress and then wait for him. She pushed open the door. Before her, standing by the fireplace, stood Max. Pearl shut the door and stood leaning against it. For one moment every pulse in her body seemed to have stopped beating then a wave of scarlet rushed over her. ‘Is it you’ she whispered. ‘It is I.’ He suddenly came forward and caught her two cold hands in his. ‘I’ll [. . .] for a moment’ he said – his voice shook oddly. Pearl suddenly raised her eyes to his face – the same yet not the same – new lines of suffering and strength and courage. Then their eyes met. He caught hold of her and kissed her mouth, her eyes, her throat, her cold hands. She felt as though a wild sea storm was sweeping over the sandy wastes of her nature. And then, his arms still round her, she heard him saying ‘Pearl, Pearl, I have been dead and now I am alive. I cannot exist without you. I need you – you are Life to me. Pearl, Pearl, hear me. I have come to tell you just this – that I must have you – Pearl, answer me. The long year was swept away and had become as nothing. Nothing mattered – if she would but listen and feel his strength. ‘I am yours’ she whispered. Then Silence fell. ‘Max, let me go. I want to know a great deal.’ She walked over to the fire and kneeling on the floor spread out her hands to the blaze. M flung himself in to an easy chair. ‘There is nothing to tell you, Pearl.’ ‘O but there is – twelve months

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to account for.’ ‘They don’t exist now Pearl.’ He leant forward. ‘Pearl look at me. Don’t let us bother each other about the Past. It has been hell – but let us live in the present and future only.’ ‘Very well’ she said – ‘I am too glad to have you to be horrid today. Max would you like some tea – I’ve had nothing to eat since breakfast this morning.’ ‘I should. Shall I ring.’ ‘Please.’ ‘Tea please, and a lamp, and light the candles in the music room. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 119–20. Dated ‘April 1907’. 1. Pearl, like Max, is a name KM used in different contexts in a number of stories. During her eighteen months back in Wellington, in both her personal notebook jottings and in usually abandoned stories, she played over various permutations of her infatuation with Arnold Trowell, her belief that her future was to be as a musician, her quarrelling with her family and the vagaries of her sexual feelings. 2. Franz Liszt (1811–86), Hungarian Fantasy for piano and orchestra, an arrangement of his Hungarian Rhapsody No. 14; Antonin Dvorˇák (1841–1904), Serenade for Strings, Op. 22, Serenade for Wind Instruments, Op. 44. 3. Cordyline australis, a common New Zealand tree that can grow to 20 metres, with spiky clumped heads above a clear trunk.

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She and the Boy; or, the Story of the Funny-Old-Thing1 Well. The Thoughtful Child and The Boy (‘Yes, silly names, I quite agree with you’ . . . ‘No, I can’t possibly change them’) had been a little crabby together. And you know that really means ‘pinching’, which is an awful terrible thing that even well brought up little crabs don’t think of doing. It all happened because The Boy said he had nine currants in his bread-and-butter pudding at dinner, and the Thoughtful Child said she had more, and he didn’t believe her. Oh, such a quarrel. And, at the end, there they were singing the song of the Little Horrors – you know:– ‘You didn’t.’ ‘I did.’ ‘You didn’t.’

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‘I did.’ If the Thoughtful Child hadn’t started washing her eyes out, they might have been doing it still. But she washed them out so much that The Boy got nice and kissed her. (‘Yes, it was a very wet kiss.’) After that they both lay down on the lawn and put their hats over their faces, and baked. Oh, that is such a lovely thing to do. There is a nice little hot ‘hatty’ smell after a while like nothing else. (‘The bits scratch your nose? Oh, that must be awkward.’) And then, you know what I mean, because you still belong to the Secret Society, they found themselves walking along a white road. Very nice it was, too – hand in hand, which is the only proper way. And by and bye they came to a little house called ‘Step-Inside-and-Find-Out’. The Thoughtful Child said ‘Isn’t that a sweet name? Let’s’. And The Boy said ‘Let’s’ too, so they lifted the latch (‘No, it’s not the same door quite – Yes, it just opened the same way’) and walked in. Oh, my Goodness. It was the queerest little room, full of machinery that thumped and bumped and jumped all the time. Such a noise there was too. And fussing about with her head tied up in a ‘hanky’ and felt slippers – red – on her feet, was a Funny-Old-Thing. (‘You know what that means, don’t you? Yes – I beg your pardon for being so insulting.’) ‘If you please’ said The Boy, ‘where are we?’ The Funny-Old-Thing turned round and stared at them. ‘I know’ said the Thoughtful Child giving a jump, ‘it’s the Heart of the World.’ ‘Correct’ said the Funny-Old-Thing, wiping the oil off her hands with a corner of her skirt, and still staring. ‘Now where in earth did you come from?’ The Thoughtful Child and The Boy looked puzzled, and had perfect railway lines round their foreheads. ‘Well’ said the Thoughtful Child, ‘we were both lying flat in the sun.’ ‘Oh, I understand, don’t explain, Child, I see,’ said the Funny-OldThing. ‘The sun’s caught you. That don’t happen so often to folks in these days as it used to. Sit down and be quiet a moment. I’ve just got to attend to this volcano – it’s boiling over.’ They sat down on a narrow bench, and presently the Funny-OldThing sat opposite to them. ‘Attention, please’ she said, and took the hanky off her head, and blew her nose with it hard. (‘Yes, with the same hanky . . . Very nasty habit, dear, you’re quite right.’) She looked so particular and so solemn that the Thoughtful Child felt that she was in Sunday School and began whispering ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ to see if she remembered the verses. ‘Never whisper in public’ cried the Funny-Old-Thing. ‘If you have anything sensible to say, you may depend upon it everybody wants

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to hear you. And if you haven’t, there’s no sense in whispering. You look far too young to talk nonsense.’ The Thoughtful Child screwed up a corner of her ‘pinny’ and put it into her mouth. (‘You like the taste? Well, may be, I’ve forgotten’). ‘What are you doing, FunnyOld-Thing’ asked The Boy. ‘Making the wheels go round, young man, and keeping grown-up people awake, but letting them see what I can do when I like.’ ‘How old are you?’ said the Thoughtful Child. ‘How many babies have you got?’ said The Boy. ‘Are you married?’ said the Thoughtful Child. ‘What’s your favourite vegetable?’ said The Boy. Now these are really most important questions, as everybody knows. The Funny-Old-Thing didn’t pay the slightest attention to them. She started talking to herself, and this is what she said:– ‘People are so careless about their youth. They leave it behind just like you do hankies at parties, and toothbrushes when you’re visiting, and umbrellas in hansoms. And there’s no Scotland Yard for lost youth, and you only have one, so nobody else’s fits you at all. How sad it does seem. Bear that in mind.’ ‘What is youth?’ asked the Thoughtful Child. ‘Something that you only have once – and sometimes don’t have at all, but it’s hard to escape.’ ‘Oh, Whooping Cough,’ said The Boy. ‘The loud sort that makes a great deal of noise and means treacle in teaspoons.’ There was silence then for a minute while the Funny-Old-Thing got up and stirred the Bay of Biscay, and made it as rough as rough. She came back to her chair with a queer little smile round the corners of her face humming ‘Heigh-ho, blow the man down’. ‘Now you can talk’ she said. ‘We are going to get married,’ said the Thoughtful Child. ‘And have babies,’ cried The Boy. ‘Oh, such babies,’ said the Thoughtful Child, ‘dozens and dozens of such babies.’ And both of them raised their hands and wagged their heads so hard that the Funny-Old-Thing grew quite giddy watching them. ‘What do you eat?’ asked The Boy ‘Oh, that’s a mystery,’ said the Funny-Old-Thing, licking her lips in a mouth-watery way. (‘Mystery? Oh it means curtains and keys – to tell you a secret, very often a great deal of rubbish.’) ‘When we pay calls, we always have something to eat,’ said The Boy. The Funny-Old-Thing looked rather ashamed, and got up and skimmed them two little cups of creamy foam from the Bay of Biscay, which, by this time, was very excited. They found it very ‘tasty’, with

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just that nice little ‘salty’ flavour which you have sometimes at the seaside when you suck your thumb. ‘Now, I think we’d better go home,’ said the Thoughtful Child, getting up and trying to smooth the place where she had screwed her pinafore. ‘Goodbye Funny-Old-Thing, don’t you feel a little lonesome here?’ ‘Goodbye’ said the Funny-Old-Thing. ‘I guess you’re a real sweet little girl.’ And The Boy kissed her. She was very hard and ‘cornery’, but after he had done that she was pink. They went out at the door, and then, very far away, they heard someone calling ‘Children, children.’ And they tried to run, and couldn’t, and fell down and sat up on their very own lawn. There stood Daddy. They flew at him, and he lifted up the Thoughtful Child, and she snuggled close to him. And when he had said ‘My little blossom,’ and she ‘My precious Dads,’ and he ‘My blooming rosebud,’ and she ‘My blessed Farves,’ and he ‘My blithesome wench,’ and a great many other things which belong to the Secret Society language, which you know I never can tell, Daddy cried, ‘My, what hot cheeks.’ ‘I’ve been on a travel’ said the Thoughtful Child. When she had said that, she and The Boy had a sudden awful feeling that they were going to burst because they couldn’t tell ‘all through’ at the same time. But they both explained and described, and when it was all over both had terrible ‘tea cups’ and their eyes shone like new pennies – so bright. ‘Dear me’ said Daddy, ‘dear, dear me. To think.’ And he rolled his eyes so awfully till the spots went right up into his head. ‘Here comes the lamp, precious. Well, did you like it? Give me a “really truly” kiss. No, not on the very back of my ear, Cherub.’ Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 124–6. Signed ‘K. Mansfield’. 1. KM wrote to Martha Putnam, her father’s secretary who typed several of her stories, on 22 July 1907, ‘I send you the sheet – it ought to read “She & the Boy” – and that is all –’ (CLKM, 1, p. 23).

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‘She unpacked her box’ She unpacked her box and then went into the sitting room. She was in a curious vague mood, wandering about the room, opening the piano,

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striking a chord and shutting it again, taking up the books from the table and putting them back, staring out of the window at the heavy grey rain and the poor draggled line of houses, then staring at her own reflection in the glass over the mantelpiece. She leant both her elbows on the mantelpiece and spoke to the face. ‘Well’ she said, ‘are you feeling better – less insufferably bored, less hideously foolish. And in a week’s time you will be married to him. How does that appeal to you now? Yes, my dear, I know it seemed inevitable out there – away – out there, but now – are you glad you came or are you still haunted with the idea of that miserable David?’ Bah! She tossed back her hair. ‘I despise you – do cease being a child and look things in the face. What matter if you do love him so much – he does not care a 1/2d stamp for you, and Philip does – or for what he thinks is you.’ She laughed, bitterly, and the tears rushed into her eyes. ‘I’m ruining my life – that’s the long and short of it’ she said. ‘My beautiful Ideals, Resolutions, theories, are as dead as my fiddle playing – – – and I am wrapt up in conventional feminine thoughts – – –.’ The face in the glass was sullen, the brows drawn together, yet the mouth quivering – – – ‘O how I hate it’ she said, in a curiously dull even toneless voice – ‘how I hate myself and – and my head aches. Poof! I feel suffocated. I want cigarettes. After all this exquisite respectability – to smoke again, and read again, and sit over the fire until I like, and no maid – or anything.’ She ran into the bedroom and put on a long coat and fur cap – no gloves she decided, and no veil, no umbrella, but just a fine fresh poverty-stricken feeling. She ran down the narrow stairs, along the passage, and into the street. The wind blew in great gusts. There was a pungent smell of sea water. Her hair curled darkly round her face. ‘O’ she said, almost running a little, ‘O how fine this is.’ She took in great draughts of the fresh air. It seemed to intoxicate her. With her hands in her pockets and her head thrown back she walked with the wind full in her face. The sense of physical struggle seemed such a blessed relief – such a beautifully simple thing after all this mental fighting. ‘I’m alive again’ she said, and laughed aloud. There were few people in the streets. She found a tobacconists and bought a packet of State Express Cig. and a copy of the evening paper. Coming back to her rooms the sky ahead was banked with purple clouds. Yet to her it was full of suggestion and promise – – She felt almost too strong – capable of anything – capable of pushing down the houses if she stretched out her hands – like a giant, and O the friendly buffeting wind, the laughing splashing rain. Up the stairs again and back into the sitting room. The blinds had been pulled down and a lamp stood on the table. A little tea was

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spread – a boiled egg, a teapot to herself, a little roll of bread. It looked so delicious and homely Anna could hardly wait to take off her hat and coat and wash her hands. ‘The teapot allures me’ she said ‘and the egg beckons and the roll calls and cries, and O I am hungry, and I’ll read the paper while I’m eating.’ She spread out the crisp white sheet, and suddenly a wave of colour seemed to rush over her whole body. Something within her, some numbed part of her, woke to fierce life. ‘O God,’ said [Anna], crushing the paper in her hands. Then she read it again – David Rositter – only Violin Recital – in the Assembly Hall tonight at 7.30. Anna glanced over at the clock – it was barely seven. I shall get ready now, she said. In the dark bedroom while she was feeling for her outdoor clothes she whispered to herself. ‘David, David,’ said Anna, ‘here we are again, dear, you see – thrown together. It’s all in the lap of the Gods David, and I promise this shall truly be the last time. But before I die, dear, I’m going to have a fling – I must hear you. I don’t want to, but I must and nothing matters at all but – beloved.’ She groped her way over to the window, and kneeling down, her chin in her hands, peered out into the darkness. Silence at first, and then faintly, but fully – a wonderful agitating sound – the call of her savage lawless Mother – the sea. She listened – it came again and again, and each time it seemed to sweep over her and carry away all the shifting clinging hypocrises which had wrapt her round – and she, Anna, was living again – understanding – feeling. How she felt! In my heart, she said, I am praying, praying – I’m sick of everything, but I belong to you now. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 104–6. Dated ‘August 15th’ [1907].

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Vignettes I Away beyond the line of the dark houses there is a sound like the call of the sea after a storm – passionate, solemn, strong. I am leaning far out of my 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 sudden, sharp, exclamations; the faint, thin cry of a very young child,

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the chiming of a bell from the church close by – these are the only other sounds, impersonal, vague, intensely agitating. It is at this hour and in this loneliness that London stretches out eager hands towards me, and in her eyes is the light of knowledge. ‘In my streets’ she whispers, ‘there is the passing of many feet, there are lines of flaring lights, there are cafes full of men and women, there is the intoxicating madness of night music, a great glamour of darkness, a tremendous anticipation, and, o’er all, the sound of laughter, half sad, half joyous, yet fearful, dying away in a strange shudder of satisfaction, and then swelling out into more laughter.’ The men and women in the cafes hear it. They look at each other suddenly, swiftly, searchingly, and the lights seem stronger, the night music throbs yet more madly. Out of the theatres a great crowd of people stream into the streets. There is the penetrating rhythm of the hansom cabs. Convention has long since sought her bed. With blinds down, with curtains drawn, she is sleeping and dreaming. Do you not hear the quick beat of my heart? Do you not feel the fierce rushing of blood through my veins? In my streets there is the answer to all your aching and cryings. Prove yourself, permeate your senses with the heavy sweetness of the night. Let nothing remain hidden. Who knows that in the exploration of your mysteries you may find the answer to your questionings. II I lean out of the 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 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 [sic] 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. I lean from my window in the tower. Through the stillness comes the hushed sound of the fountain. I fancy I can hear the rose petals in the garden falling softly. In the crude white moonlight a field of blue cabbages on my right shimmers like a cold sea. And before me, and round me, the beech woods rise, strong, black, and alluring. If I lean out far, and listen very intently, I hear a sound like the muttering of the darkness, the halfstifled breathing of the summer night. It is the heavy, indolent river

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slipping dreamily through the wide fields, and the luscious tangle of sweet rushes. High among the beech woods stands the old castle, a mammoth skeleton, a vast, yawning, forsaken tomb, in whose grey shadows the sweet body of romance lies – long dead. There is a light step in the garden below. It is Monsieur le Musician. Lantern in one hand, fiddle case in the other, he is strolling homeward from the cafe in the village. Riding through the village this evening I saw him seated at one of the green tables drinking much beer, and laughing loudly with Nicholas, the gardener, and Hans, the waiter. Now he is a dream figure, stepping into the night picture with singular appropriateness of expression. I hear him softly whistling the opening bars of Max Bruch’s D Minor Concerto.1 And a moment later he is gone. A sudden faint breeze passes through the garden, and a wave of vague, agitating, bitter, sweet memories enwraps my heart in a darkness profound, inexplicable, silent. III Oh! this monotonous, terrible rain. The dull, steady, hopeless sound of it. I have drawn the curtains across the window to shut out the weeping face of the world – the trees swaying softly in their grief and dropping silver tears upon the brown earth, the narrow, sodden, mean, draggled wooden houses, colourless save for the dull, coarse red of the roof, and the long line of grey hills, impassable, spectral-like. So I have drawn the curtains across my windows, and the light is intensely fascinating. A perpetual twilight broods here. The atmosphere is heavy with morbid charm. Strange, as I sit here, quiet, alone, how each possession of mine – the calendar gleaming whitely on the wall, each picture, each book, my ’cello case, the very furniture – seems to stir into life. The Velasquez Venus2 moves on her couch, ever so slightly; across the face of Manon3 a strange smile flickers for an instant, and is gone, my rocking chair is full of patient resignation, my ’cello case is wrapt in profound thought. Beside me a little bowl of mignonette is piercingly sweet, and a cluster of scarlet geraniums is hot with colour. Sometimes through the measured sound of the rain comes the long, hopeless note of a foghorn far out at sea. And then all life seems but a crying out drearily, and a groping to and fro in a foolish, aimless darkness. Sometimes – it seems like miles away – I hear the sound of a door downstairs opening and shutting. And I listen and think and dream until my life seems not one life,

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but a thousand million lives, and my soul is weighed down with the burden of past existence, with the vague, uneasy consciousness of future strivings. And the grey thoughts fall upon my soul like the grey rain upon the world, but I cannot draw the curtain and shut it all out. A year ago we sat by the fire, she and I, hand in hand, cheek to cheek, speaking but little, and then whispering, because the room was so dark, the fire so low, and the rain outside so loud and bitter. She, a thin, little figure in a long, soft black frock, and a string of amethysts round her white throat. Eventually it grew so cold that I dragged the blanket from the bed, and we wrapped ourselves up in it, smiling a little and saying, ‘We feel like children on a desert island.’ With one hand she held the rough, gaily-striped thing up to her chin; the other hand lay in mine. We talked of fame, how we both longed for it, how hard the struggle was, what we both meant to do. I found a piece of paper, and together we wrote a declaration vowing that in the space of one year we should both have become famous. And we signed the paper and sealed it; then, dedicating it to the gods, dropped it into the fire. For the moment a bright light, and then a handful of ashes. By and bye she fell softly asleep, and I gave her my share of the blanket, and arranged the sofa pillow in her low chair. The long night dragged coldly through, while I watched her, and thought, and longed, but could not sleep. To-day, at the other end of the world, I have suffered, and she, doubtless, has bought herself a new hat at the February sales. Sic transit gloria mundi.4 Notes Text: Native Companion, Melbourne, 2: 3, 1 October 1907, pp. 129–32. Signed ‘K. Mansfield’. KM wrote on 23 September 1907, in reply to E. J. Brady, the editor of the Native Companion, who had thought her work too highly influenced by Oscar Wilde: With regard to the ‘Vignettes’ I am sorry that [they] resemble their illustrious relatives to so marked an extent – and assure you – they feel very much my own – This style of work absorbs me, at present – but – well – it cannot be said that anything you have of mine is ‘cribbed’ – – – Frankly – I hate plagiarism. [. . .] You ask for some details as to myself. I am poor – obscure – just eighteen years of age – with a rapacious appetite for everything and principles as light as my purse – –. (CLKM, 1, p. 26)

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1. The Max Bruch (1838–1920) violin concerto composed in 1858. 2. KM would have seen La Venus del espejo by Diego Velázquez (1599– 1660) in the National Gallery, London. 3. KM may have had a reproduction of the 1757 painting of Manon Baletti, one-time fiancée of Casanova, by Jean-Marc Nattier (1685–1766), also in the National Gallery, London. 4. ‘Thus passes the glory of the world,’ for more than five hundred years a repeated phrase at papal coronations.

•

Vignette: Through the Autumn Afternoon Through the Autumn afternoon – I sat before the fire in the Library1 – and read – almost a little wildly. I wanted to drug myself with books – drown my thoughts in a great violet sea of Oblivion. I read about Youth – how the Young and the Strong had gone forth into battle – with banners of golden and blue and crimson. Of the sunshine that turned their processions into a river of colour – and the songs that, mellow and sweet, rose in their round throats. I read of the young Painters – hollow eyed and pale – who paced their studios like young tigers – and with stupendous colossal ideas. How they sat together at night, in sweet companionship, round a fire – their cigarette smoke mystical, ethereal. And in the glowing coals was shadowed the beautiful flame – like body of Art. And deeply I pored over the books of Youthful Musicians. Splendid – and tragic – and prophetic their faces gleamed at me – always with that strange haunted look. They had taken Life to them, and sung a Scarlet Song that had no ending and no beginning. And I read of all their resolves – and of their feverish haste, and the Phantastic Desires that sang themselves to birth . . . This and much more I read in my books. Then all in a fever myself I rushed out of the stifling house – out of the city streets and on to the gorse golden hills. A white road ran round the hills – there I walked. And below me, like a beautiful PreRaphaelite picture, lay the sea and the violet mountains. The sky all a riot of rose and yellow, amethyst and purple. At the foot of the hill – the city – but all curtained by a blue mist that hung over it in pale wreaths of Beauty. No sound at all – and yet – the Silence of that Prophetic Atmosphere – that is created by the Twilight only. I leaned against a low paling fence – in my brain

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thoughts were clashing with the sound of cymbals. I felt Myself – by the power of my Youth – alone – God of it all. Love and Fellowship – work and Delicious Fascinating Pleasures – must exist for me – if I only search for them. Away out in the harbour lights shone from the ships, and now in the city too – golden beckoning flowers. There came a sound of slowly moving horses. I saw coming towards me a heavy carriage – slowly, slowly, coming towards me. And I stood still – and waited. The horses were hot and strained, the driver muffled up to the eyes . . . it was very cold. As it passed me I saw, inside, an old man, his head fallen back among the cushions, the eyes closed, the mouth half open, and hands of Age crossed before him. He was muttering to himself – mumbling, muttering. Slowly it passed, and I watched it wind round the hill out of sight. I turned again towards the sea and the mountains – the City and the golden lights – but Darkness had rushed across the sky. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, 195–6. Signed and dated ‘K. Mansfield 4.X.07’. 1. The Parliamentary Library in Wellington, also known as the General Assembly Library, for which KM held a reader’s ticket, and frequently visited.

•

Silhouettes It is evening, and very cold. From my window the laurestinus bush, in this half light, looks weighted with snow. It moves languidly, gently, backwards and forwards, and each time I look at it a delicate flower melody fills my brain. Against the pearl sky the great hills tower, gorse-covered, leonine, magnificently savage. The air is quiet with still rain, yet, from the karaka tree comes a tremulous sound of bird song. In the avenue three little boys are crouched under a tree smoking cigarettes. They are quite silent, and though terrified of discovery, their attitudes are full of luxurious abandon. . . . And the grey smoke floats into the air – their incense, strong and perfumed, to the Great God of the Forbidden.

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Two men pass down the avenue, talking eagerly. . . . In the house opposite are four beautiful squares of golden light. . . . My room is almost in darkness. The bed frightens me –it is so long and white. And the tassel of the window blind moves languidly to and fro. I cannot believe that it is not some living thing . . . It is growing very dark. The little boys, laughing shrilly, have left the avenue. And I, leaning out of my window, alone, peering into the gloom, am seized by a passionate desire for everything that is hidden and forbidden. I want the night to come, and kiss me with her hot mouth, and lead me through an amethyst twilight to the place of the white gardenia . . . The laurestinus bush moves languidly, gently, backwards and forwards. There is a dull heavy sound of clocks striking far away, and, in my room, darkness, emptiness, save for the ghost-like bed. I feel to lie there quiet, silent, passively cold would be too fearful – yet – quite a little fascinating. Notes Text: Native Companion, Melbourne, 2: 4, 1 November 1907, p. 229. Signed ‘K. Mansfield’.

•

In the Botanical Gardens1 They are such a subtle combination of the artificial and the natural – that is, partly, the secret of their charm. From the entrance gate down the broad central walk, with the orthodox banality of carpet bedding on either side, stroll men and women and children – a great many children, who call to each other lustily, and jump up and down the green wooden seats. They seem as meaningless, as lacking in individuality, as the little figures in an impressionist landscape. Above the carpet bedding, on one hand, there is a green hedge, and above the hedge a long row of cabbage trees. I stare up at them, and, suddenly the green hedge is a stave, and the cabbage trees, now high, now low, have become an arrangement of notes – a curious, pattering, native melody. In the enclosure the spring flowers are almost too beautiful – a great

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stretch of foam-like cowslips. As I bend over them, the air is heavy and sweet with their scent, like hay and new milk and the kisses of children, and, further on, a sunlit wonder of chiming daffodils. Before me two great rhododendron bushes. Against the dark, broad leaves the blossoms rise, flame-like, tremulous in the still air, and the pearl rose loving-cup of a magnolia hangs delicately on the grey bough. Everywhere there are clusters of china blue pansies, a mist of forgetme-nots, a tangle of anemones. Strange that these anemones – scarlet, and amethyst, and purple – vibrant with colour, always appear to me a trifle dangerous, sinister, seductive but poisonous. And, leaving the enclosure, I pass a little gully, filled with tree ferns, and lit with pale virgin lamps of arum lilies. I turn from the smooth swept paths, and climb up a steep track, where the knotted tree roots have seared a rude pattern in the yellow clay. And, suddenly, it disappears – all the pretty, carefully-tended surface of gravel and sward and blossom, and there is bush, silent and splendid. On the green moss, on the brown earth, a wide splashing of yellow sunlight. And, everywhere that strange, indefinable scent. As I breathe it, it seems to absorb, to become part of me – and I am old with the age of centuries, strong with the strength of savagery. Somewhere I hear the soft rhythmic flowing of water, and I follow the path down and down until I come to a little stream idly, dreamily floating past. I fling myself down and put my hands in the water. An inexplicable, persistent feeling seizes me that I must become one with it all. Remembrance has gone – this is the Lotus Land – the green trees stir languorously, sleepily – there is the silver sound of a bird’s call. Bending down, I drink a little of the water. Oh is it magic? Shall I, looking intently, see vague forms lurking in the shadow staring at me malevolently, wildly, the thief of their birthright? Shall I, down the hillside, through the bush, ever in the shadow, see a great company moving towards me, their faces averted, wreathed with green garlands, passing, passing, following the little stream in silence until it is sucked into the wide sea . . . There is a sudden restless movement, a pressure of the trees – they sway against one another – It is like the sound of weeping . . . I pass down the central walk towards the entrance gates. The men and women and children are crowding the pathway, looking reverently, admiringly, at the carpet bedding, spelling aloud the Latin names of the flowers. Here is laughter and movement and bright sunlight – but, behind me – is it near, or miles and miles away? – the bush lies, hidden in the shadow.

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in a cafe

Notes Text: Native Companion, Melbourne, 2: 5, 2 December 1907, pp. 285–6. Signed ‘Julian Mark’.2 1. Extensive gardens at the northern end of Tinakori Road in Wellington. KM wrote to E. J. Brady, 23 September 1907, ‘I send you some more work – practically there is nothing local – except the ‘Botanical Garden’ Vignette – The reason is that for the last few years London has held me – very tightly indeed – and I’ve not yet escaped’ (CLKM, 1, p. 26). 2. One of the noms de plume KM experimented with before settling on her writing name. It was used here to disguise the fact of two contributions appearing in the one issue.

•

In a Cafe Each day they walked down Bond-street together, between the hours of twelve and one, and turned in at the Blenheim Cafe for lunch and conversation. She a pale, dark girl, with that unmistakable air of ‘acquaintance with life’ which is so general among the students in London, and an expression at once of intense eagerness and anticipated disillusion. Life to a girl who had read Nietzsche, Eugène Sue, Baudelaire, D’Annunzio, George Barres, Catulle Mendes, Sudermann, Ibsen, Tolstoi,1 was, in her opinion, no longer complex, but a trifle obvious. He was slightly taller than she with the regulation ‘stoop’ and heavy walk, and the regulation wide hat and soft tie. But to her he walked in a great light, and she knew that genius had traced the laurel wreath round his brows. Each day they sat at the same table in the left-hand corner – she with her elbows on the table, her chin in her hands, watching him while he talked. And sometimes he criticised the people. Then she would throw back her head, and make the most keenly witty remarks; but for the most part it was Art, Art, Art, and youth, scarlet youth, and mortality, and life, and the Ten Deadly Conventions – with a glorious irresponsibility, an intoxicating glamour. ‘Life in its widest, fullest sense is granted to artists only,’ he would say, running his white hands through his hair, ‘and in our brains we create the most eloquent, the most fertile images. I can derive exquisite pleasure from the simplest things – the very soot on my dressing-table, a heavy morbid tone on the white.’

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‘Oh! now. Oh!! now – nonsense,’ she would interrupt, her voice full of affectionate remonstrance. ‘My dear, you are viewing life from a hyper-sensitive aspect. . . . Can we afford one portion of red currant jelly between us? I have ordered it, so you must. . . . Look at the colour – nom d’un chien, how beautiful. How much better to have it for two-pence, instead of possessing a wife in an apron to cook it for you. And you would have to ‘stone’ the currants, and then, perhaps, the result would not ‘jell’. Listen to my technicalities – domestic instinct, you see. I shall marry an English clergyman yet, and have you to stay for the weekend to compose voluntaries for the Early Service.’ He shouted with laughter. ‘My dear girl, you won’t do that. I always connect the Church with dispensing tea and buns on the lawn, and festooning graves, and making little shawls for you and the parishioners to wear on your respective heads in the passages. No, I assure you, it is not your vocation.’ And one day, when they had talked together in this strain, she leaned across the table, her face flushed suddenly. ‘Do you think I shall ever marry?’ she said. For a moment he sat silent, staring into the mirror opposite. Then he turned to her, and she imagined she read in his face all that had never been there for her, and never would be. ‘I am sure you will,’ he said. ‘Why?’ ‘Question not the prophetic utterance.’ She pulled the little bunch of violets from the front of her coat, and began playing with the flowers, shaking them out, and loosening the threads. She knew the danger of the conversation, but the suspense was sickening her. If she could feel a little more certainty. . . . ‘Do you think I should make a good wife?’ ‘That depends.’ He stirred his coffee thoughtfully. ‘Yes; why not? Interesting, certainly, beyond doubt; and who could do better than marry a problem? Misunderstanding keepeth Love alive.’ ‘I believe that, too,’ she said, ‘and yet, somehow, it’s abominable. Oh! how I want and want things which are out of the question.’ ‘But not a husband, surely?’ ‘I hardly see myself settling down to sentimental domesticity and discussing the price of mutton.’ ‘Ah! now you are being foolish. You know that marriage need not mean that. Mine won’t. And I certainly shall marry.’ ‘Oh! oh! oh! – then there are years of bachelorhood ahead of you, extravagant and reckless one.’ A sudden tremendous happiness seemed to have sprung to birth in her heart. ‘Oh! this adorable life,’ she said. ‘Oh! the infinite possibilities. Listen; can’t you hear London knocking, knocking?’

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He looked at her, and suddenly found her beautiful, with her intensely magnetic expression and the violets against her face. He bent forward, and whispered the simplest request; yet it seemed to carry a subtle, unmistakable, joyous significance. ‘May I have your violets to keep?’ ‘They are yours,’ she said, and the touch of his fingers thrilled her. They sat in silence for a few minutes. He was annoyed at having yielded to a sudden sentimental impulse, and felt, somehow, that she had expected it of him. He felt a light hand on his shoulder, and, looking up, smiled at the Fellow Student. ‘Well?’ ‘There is a rehearsal of your Fantasie at the Aeolian Hall2 at two o’clock. Come, quickly.’ He sprang up and shook hands with her across the table. ‘Till to-morrow,’ he said, ‘au revoir,’ and took the Fellow Student’s arm. Once outside, the wind was bitterly cold. ‘Nice weather for playing,’ said the Fellow Student. ‘Keep your hands warm.’ He dropped the violets on to the pavement, and thrust his hands into his coat pockets. The Fellow Student began relating an adventure of a slightly unscrupulous character, and he laughed and continued laughing all the way down the street. *

*

*

When the two men had left, she took a slip of paper from her pocket, and wrote a date. She was conscious of never having felt so entirely happy before. So, in a dream, she threaded her way past the tables. The little violinist, who had so often played the Wienawski ‘Legende’3 for her, smiled as she passed, and she had a sudden impulse to shake hands with him. Out in the cold street – what did the cold matter? A great fire was hugging her heart. It had been raining. She looked down at the pavements, and saw the violets, knew them immediately – realised swiftly what had happened. She felt herself grow white to the lips. Then, very deliberately, she kicked the flowers into the gutter; and she, too, laughed, and continued laughing all the way down the street. *

*

*

Thus is the High Torch of Tragedy kindled at the little spark of Sentiment, and the good God pity the bearer. Notes Text: Native Companion, Melbourne, 2: 5, 2 December 1907, pp. 265–9. Signed ‘K. Mansfield’.

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1. Eugène Sue (1804–75), surgeon and novelist, especially admired for his fiction drawing on Parisian low life, and for his populist social ideas; Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), poet and novelist, known at this time as a voice of modern sensibilities. He would become infatuated with military ambition, and a supporter of Fascism; KM meant Maurice Barrès (1862–1923), an influential novelist described by The Oxford Companion to French Literature as ‘always concerned to experience new sensations and develop his personality’. His culte du moi would have complemented KM’s current infatuation with Wilde; Catulle Mendès (1842–1909), poet, playwright, prolific novelist, and founding editor of the Revue fantaisiste, where one of his stories resulted in imprisonment; Hermann Sudermann (1857–1928), Prussian-born playwright and fiction writer with strong Nietzschean sympathies, and increasingly an advocate for Nationalism. It is doubtful that KM had read anywhere near as widely in these authors as she seems eager to suggest. For an even more extensive list of twenty essential authors, see a letter to her sister Vera in early 1908, where she declares: I am ashamed of young New Zealand, but what is to be done. All the firm fat framework of their brains must be demolished before they can begin to learn. They want a purifying influence – a mad wave of Pre-Raphaelitism, of super-aestheticism, should intoxicate the country. They must go to excess in the direction of culture, become almost decadent in their tendencies for a year or two and then find balance and proportion. [. . .] These people have not learned their alphabet yet. (CLKM, 1, pp. 44–5) 2. The Aeolian Hall, New Bond Street, a concert hall where KM attended recitals during her years at Queen’s College. 3. Henryk Wieniawski (1835–80), Polish composer and violinist whose Legende, Op. 17, for violin and orchestra, demanded virtuoso technique.

•

Leves Amores1 I can never forget the Thistle Hotel.2 I can never forget that strange Winter night. I had asked her to dine with me, and then go to the Opera. My room was opposite hers. She said she would come, but – could I do up her evening bodice, it was hooks at the back. Very well. It was still daylight when I knocked at the door and entered. In her

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petticoat bodice and a full silk petticoat she was washing, sponging her face and neck. She said she was finished, and I might sit on the bed and wait for her. So I looked round at the dreary room. The one filthy window faced the street. She could see the choked, dust-grimed window of a wash-house opposite. For furniture, the room contained a low bed, draped with revolting, yellow, vine-patterned curtains, a chair, a wardrobe with a piece of cracked mirror attached, a washstand. But the wall paper hurt me physically. It hung in tattered strips from the wall. In its less discoloured and faded patches I could trace the pattern of roses – buds and flowers – and the frieze was a conventional design of birds, of what genus the good God alone knows. And this was where she lived. I watched her curiously. She was pulling on long, thin stockings, and saying ‘damn’ when she could not find her suspenders. And I felt within me a certainty that nothing beautiful could ever happen in that room, and for her I felt, contempt, a little tolerance, a very little pity. A dull, grey light hovered over everything; it seemed to accentuate the thin tawdriness of her clothes, the squalor of her life. She, too, looked dull and grey and tired. And I sat on the bed, and thought: ‘Come, this Old Age. I have forgotten passion. I have been left behind in the beautiful golden procession of Youth. Now I am seeing life in the dressing-room of the theatre.’ So we dined somewhere and went to the Opera. It was late when we came out into the crowded night street, late and cold. She gathered up her long skirts. Silently we walked back to the Thistle Hotel, down the white pathway fringed with beautiful golden lilies, up the amethyst shadowed staircase. Was Youth dead? . . . . . . . Was Youth dead? She told me as we walked along the corridor to her room that she was glad the night had come. I did not ask why. I was glad, too. It seemed a secret between us. So I went with her into her room to undo those troublesome hooks. She lit a little candle on an enamel bracket. The light filled the room with darkness. Like a sleepy child she slipped out of her frock, and then, suddenly, turned to me and flung her arms round my neck. Lo every bird upon the bulging frieze broke into song. Lo every rose upon the tattered paper budded and formed into blossom. Yes, even the green vine upon the bed curtains wreathed itself into strange chaplets and garlands, twined round us in a leafy embrace, held us with a thousand clinging tendrils. And Youth was not dead. Notes U Text: Poems, pp. 14–15.

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1. KM took her Latin title, meaning ‘casual loves’, from an erotic poem with that name in Arthur Symons, London Nights (1895). The imagery of entangled vines is also derived from the Symons poem. As KM wrote to Martha Putnam, who typed it for her in late 1907, ‘I’m afraid you won’t like “Leves Amores” – – – I can’t think how I wrote it – it’s partly a sort of dream –’ (CLKM, 1, p. 35). It is likely that the story was sent to the Native Companion, and was one of the pieces ‘in hand and in type’ when the magazine ceased publication at the end of 1907. (See E. J. Brady, ‘Life’s Highway’, Southerly, 2, 1955, p. 105.) 2. A rather down-market public hotel close to where the Beauchamps lived in Fitzherbert Terrace after KM’s return from London.

• The Story of Pearl Button Life was a very vague scheme of things until Pearl Button went to school in the Spring of 1897 – the 14th of October1 – her birthday. Hop Hop. The door of the class room opened and a little child stepped in. ‘I think please, Mr Dyer, I’ll marry you when I’ve finished marrying Mr Lee. Will you wait please?’ ‘Oh, yes, I’ll wait’ said Mr Dyer. ‘Thank you very much’ said P.B. ‘Mr Dyer’ said Pearl Button, ‘is it afternoon?’ ‘Quite late afternoon, Pearl’. ‘Aren’t they going to have the singing.’ ‘Teacher thought maybe you’d like to be quiet.’ ‘Oh no – because – I simply love the singing and its only through the window.’ Mr Dyer turned to Bridget. ‘Tell the children little P.B. would like them to sing.’ The child lay silent, watching the shadows chase each other across the ceiling. Mr Dyer noticed a transfer stuck to the little wrist he held and a bead ring on her fourth finger. Her hands were so small – [. . .] for even a child of her age, and soft. He suddenly remembered the supplejack whipping and almost groaned aloud. Far away Mr Atkinson was mowing the front paddock – the swishing of the scythe seemed to fill the empty sunlit air. Then the sound was lost in the high clear voices of the children that floated through the windows into the room where little Pearl Button was lying so quietly. The child did not move but tears poured down her face. ‘Oh, Mr Dyer’ she said, ‘That’s the song I came to school with. It’s my favourite song Mr Dyer.’

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the story of pearl button Oh Forest green and fair Oh Pine trees waving high How sweet their cool retreat How full of rest.

In the pause which followed the first verse Mr Dyer heard the sharpening of the scythe. ‘It was rather wobbly’ said the child. ‘I hope they’ll sing it again – ah there it is.’ Once more, but softer, they seemed to be singing to the rhythmic swishing of the scythe. The child closed her eyes and suddenly clung to Mr Dyer’s hand. ‘Isn’t it heavingly’. And forth into those forests green and fair, in whose bounds no foot has trod, whose pine trees waving high ruffle the darkness in their heavy hands, into the forests green and fair [one line illegible] held by the children’s voices, wandered the dream-child soul of little Pearl Button and was lost among the shades of that cool retreat. Oh, Forest green and fair etc. The door of the class room opened and a little child entered. She stood quite still, soberly staring, her pink sunbonnet pushed back from her placid face, in her hands two great paua shells.2 ‘Well’ said Teacher, gravely, ‘have you come with a message?’ ‘No,’ said the child. The class began to laugh but the child did not smile. ‘You must run away,’ [Teacher] said. ‘This is only a place where little girls learn lessons.’ ‘Please I’ve come to school’ said the child. ‘Oh, who sent you.’ said Teacher. ‘I – I sent myself.’ The children screamed with laughter. Here was an extraordinary state of affairs – a child who came to school all by her own self – no Mother to promise her honey for tea if she’d stop holding on like grim death to the gates of the schoolyard, no Father to give you a bit of blue pencil if you walked in like a man hanging your hat on the peg, first time. ‘What is your name?’ asked Teacher. ‘Pearl.’ ‘Pearl who? Speak up.’ ‘Pearl Button.’ This time Teacher smiled. ‘What does Mother do?’ ‘Mother washes.’ ‘And Father?’ ‘Father –’ she paused a moment – ‘Father doesn’t wash.’ Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 112–13.

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1. KM’s birthday, suggesting either the date when the story was written, or some identification with the child in the story. 2. An abalone-type mollusc, its shell valued for ornaments and decorating carvings.

•

Vignette: Sunset Tuesday1 I stand in the manuka scrub, the fairy blossom. Away ahead the pines black, the soughing of the wind. On my right the lake is cold, grey, steel-like, the quiet land sleeps beside it. Away ahead in the silver sea lies the island, then the wild sky. Everywhere the golden broom tossed its golden fragrant plumes into the evening air. I am on a little rise – to my right a great tree of mimosa laden with blossoms bends and foams in the breeze. And, before me, the lake is drowned in the sunset. The distant mountains are silver blue, and the sky, first vivid rose, thins and spreads into a pale amber. Far away on my left the land is heavily heliotrope, curving and sharply outlined, and fold upon fold of grey sky. And far far ahead a little golden moon daintily, graciously dances in the blue floor of the sky. A white moth flutters past me. I hear always the whispering of the water. I am alone. I am hidden. Life seems to have passed away, drifted, drifted, miles and worlds on beyond this fairy sight. Very faint and clear the bird calls and cries, and another on a little scarlet touched pine tree close by me answers with an ecstasy of song. Then I hear steps approaching. A young Maori girl climbs slowly up the hill – she does not see me, I do not move. She reaches a little knoll and suddenly sits down native fashion, her legs crossed under her, her hands clasped in her lap. She is dressed in a blue skirt and white soft blouse. Round her neck is a piece of twisted flax and and [sic] a long piece of greenstone is suspended from it. Her black hair is twisted softly at her neck, she wears long white and red bone earrings. She is very young. She sits silent, utterly motionless, her head thrown back. All the lines of her face are passionate, violent, crudely savage, but in her lifted eyes slumbers a tragic illimitable Peace. The sky changes, softens, the lake is all grey mist, the land in heavy shadow, silence broods among the trees. The girl does not move. But very faint and sweet and beautiful, a star wakes in the sky. She is the very incarnation of evening, and lo – the first star shines in her eyes.

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‘on waking next morning’

Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 148–9. Dated ‘December 1907’. 1. Written at Lake Taupo, during KM’s camping trip through the central North Island.

•

‘On waking next morning’ On waking next morning Käthie slipped out of bed, ran over to the window, shook her hair back from her face and leaned out. ‘Good morning sea, sky, trees, earth, blessed little island’1 she said, ‘for today the Mail comes in.’ She sat on the window sill, her eyes half closed, a smile playing over her face, and thought – how many years I have waited. How the days have begun and ended – the long days – and never a word about him, and the life here flowed on, and now it is Mail Day. ‘O Expectation, Expectation’2 she cried aloud, her voice eager and high, and every pulse in her body beating with excitement. ‘I feel [as] though my heart has run up a big flag and its blowing inside me.’ She dressed very slowly. ‘My old green linen’ she said, pulling it out joyfully. ‘Souvenir d’Angleterre. I shall write an Orchestral Fantasie on that.’ Two roses for the front of her blouse. She ran out into the garden – her heart suffocated her. She wished that there were great thorns on the bushes to tear her hands. ‘I want a big physical sensation’ she said, and then she ran back to her room and looked at herself in the long glass – the same Käthie of so long ago – but yet not the same. And another night was over, and another day came. Käthie lay still and watched the light creep into her room, slowly and mournfully. ‘If the sun shone I should go mad’ she thought, ‘thank God that it is raining.’ Suddenly she buried her face in the pillows. ‘O God, O God, O God’ she cried, and then ‘No you damned old hypocrite I won’t shout at you.’ She laughed suddenly. ‘Dear Mr Death, would you kindly send round a sheet this morning as there is a large parcel awaiting your convenience.’ Then she lay with her face towards the window and cried – hopelessly, madly. Long shudders passed through her, she grew icy cold

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– only her left hand under its bandages seemed to burn into her like a white hot iron. ‘I shall go mad – mad – mad’ she moaned. ‘Hear me somebody. Is the whole place dead. Listen – damn you all – I’m ruined, and there the devils lie in their beds and dream and say ‘Never mind, dear, you can always write.’ O the simpering brainless idiots – I shall commit suicide.’ She went through the whole scene again. The light in Leslie’s eyes – the way his little hands had trembled when he showed her the great beautiful packet – all bought for two shillings, and most of them ‘double-bangers’. How they two had crept round to the dining[room] window and looked in and seen all the dull quiet faces, and had to put their handkerchiefs into their mouths to stop all the laughter. How he had climbed up the fire escape ladder and into her bedroom, and come down with the box of matches in his mouth so he could hold on with both hands, and she had said ‘Good Rover – fetch it, drop it boy.’ She seemed to hear again his little agitated staccato voice. ‘You hold this big one in your hand and then light it and throw it away.’ And she had held the big one and lighted a match. A great noise came. ‘God – my hand’ she said – and fell into the great Dark. Then there came the long long days, and the little voice always telling her to hold it in her hand. And at last the Doctor had told her that a very sad thing had happened. And she had said dear dear, couldn’t he sew on five nice neat little crackers instead of the fingers, and she could live at the North Pole and be quite safe. He had left the room and closed the door loudly behind him. ‘More fireworks’ she called, and lay still and laughed. Käthie thought of it all quietly, calmly now. ‘I am well now’ she thought, ‘if there is anything to be well for. I suppose they want to keep me here as long as possible because they don’t know what is to happen next.’ Suddenly she flung back the covers and slipped out of bed. She felt as though she was walking on needles, and slowly, carefully, she dragged herself over to the dressing table. Then she looked at her reflection in the mirror above. A long thin face, lines of suffering deeply engraved by the Artist Pain, an extraordinary pallor in her cheeks and lips. ‘That is Käthie’ she said hoarsely – ‘Käthie’, and then suddenly realised the illness was over. Now she was looking back. ‘The fact that I have done this proves that it is over’ she said. She looked curiously at her bandaged hand and then suddenly bent her head and kissed it. Then she crept back to bed, and when her Mother came, opening the door very softly, just poking her head in, Käthie said ‘Good morning. Can I see the paper?’ and Mother, almost unbelieving, rushed into the girls’ room and told them, and the three of them clung together and then went in to see her.

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She wondered why – what could have happened. Then she crept out of bed and ran to the head of the stairs. Leslie sat there whistling and plaiting a piece of flax. At the sight of her he stopped and uttered an exclamation. ‘Dear little chappie’ she said, ‘fly and bring me a paper – just for a secret – don’t tell a soul darling.’ He shot down the bannister and in a moment he was back, the paper inside his sailor blouse. Käthie sat down in her armchair. It was a difficult matter to manage a newspaper with one hand. She must lay it on the table. Bah! ‘Wool rising.’ ‘Fashionable Wedding.’ ‘Trouble in Russia.’ Surely all this was very harmless – – – She turned over the page – ‘Visit of Prominent Musician. Recital tonight at Town Hall. Interview by our Special Correspondent’ – and then the name flared out, and she understood. The paper lay at her feet now. ‘I shall go to that concert’ she said. She felt not the slightest emotion or surprise. She only wanted to lay her plans carefully – but no inspiration came. At lunch time Chaddie brought in her tray. ‘We’re all going over to the Hutt3 this afternoon till tomorrow’ she said. ‘You won’t mind being here just with the Cook as you’re so much better. Dick4 has asked us all and the Governor is going to be there.’ When they had all gone it was already six o’clock. The recital commenced at eight. She rang the bell and when the maid appeared she motioned her to a chair. ‘Now please listen’ she [said] authoritatively. ‘Look what lies on the table.’ Ten sovereigns were Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 71–3. The unfinished story set in 14 Fitzherbert Terrace, Thorndon, the large new home KM returned to after her time at Queen’s College, dramatises her thenintense feelings against her father, with her imagined physical injury conveying the damage circumstances inflicted on her. She retains family names – her own, in a curiously German form, her younger brother Leslie, and Charlotte (Chaddie), her older sister. 1. Somes Island (now Matiu, its Maori name restored), in Wellington harbour. 2. KM was intent on going back to London to study the cello, and regarded her father, a prominent businessman and banker, as both the impediment and the means to her return. 3. The Hutt Valley, an expanding settlement at the northern end of Wellington Harbour.

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4. To indicate the family’s social standing, KM is recalling their close friend and relative by marriage, Richard Seddon, who was Liberal Prime Minister of New Zealand for thirteen years, until his death in 1906.

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An Attempt Marina stood at the scullery door and called ‘Pat, Pat’. The sun streamed over the courtyard – the pincushion flowers stood limply and thirstily against the wall of the feedroom. ‘Pat – Pat,’ she called. ‘Here Miss Marina,’ shouted a voice from the woodshed. ‘Pat, I want to go riding.’ ‘Daisy’s in the paddock. The sheepskin I’ll bring yer in a minute.’ ‘Pat, I want to go now,’ She put her handkerchief over her head and walked over to the woodshed. ‘Phew it’s hot,’ she said, shaking back her long braid of hair. ‘I’ll be a mass of freckles by the time I come back.’ Pat put down the tomahawk and regarded her seriously. ‘Wait for two hours, Miss Marina.’ But the girl shook her head. ‘No, I’m off to see Farkey Anderson,1 and it will be cooler in the bush.’ Pat took up his big hat and together they walked across the yard, through the great white gates, down the road and into the paddock. Under the wattle trees Daisy regarded them seriously. ‘I feel a bit of a devil to take her,’ Marina murmured. ‘Pat, make it alright with the family if they kick up a shindy. I’m so dead sick of them all I must go off.’ She laid her hand caressingly against the arm of his old blue shirt. ‘Done, Miss Marina,’ said Pat, and he stood in the paddock and watched her mount and ride straddle-legs out of sight. Riding was almost as natural as walking to Marina. She held herself very loosely and far back from the waist, like a native riding – and fear had never entered into her thoughts. ‘I like riding down this road with the sun hurting me,’ she mused. ‘I’ll love everything that really comes fiercely – it makes me feel so “fighty,” and that’s what I like. I wish I hadn’t quarrelled with Mother and Father again – that’s a distinct bore, especially as it’s only a week to my birthday.’

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Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 69–70. 1. A local personality, Farquhar Campbell Anderson came from a distinguished Scottish background and had served in the army in India before becoming a policeman in Karori, and then a farm labourer. See KM’s poem, ‘The Man with the Wooden Leg’ (Poems, p. 58).

• Vignette: Westminster Cathedral Did we ever climb that tower, Vere,1 you and I? Is it all a charming romance? Very languidly and dreamily we wandered through Westminster Cathedral. A faint blue perfume of incense filled the air. In one chapel a woman was kneeling, the rosary falling – a little stream of silver through the ivory of her fingers. Then we came to the heavily locked gates and stood before them, smiling at each other. An old man – I wonder if you remember his hands, they were rude, knotted, gnarled hands – opened the gates and we passed through. Looking back, those stairs seem to me to have been endless, an eternity of stone steps, then a great ascent of wooden ladders, and a dark, narrow staircase, twisting upwards. And sometimes, Vere, you were first, and sometimes I led the way. Often we walked together or rested, a little breathless, on a stone parapet, saying ‘Can we go further?’ . . . Always the thin blue perfume of the incense enveloped us. It filled the whole incident with dream atmosphere. So, at last, we reached the dome. A balcony had been built east and west, north and south – a little shrine to each of the four winds of Heaven. With a sensation of extraordinary relief, of lightness, we stepped out upon the balcony, and, below us, London was spread out like a charming, intricate tapestry . . . I think of it now, Vere, as a wonderful fusion of amethyst and silver. And laughing, laughing childishly, with our hands on each other’s shoulders, we watched the little people walking in the streets, like flies in the folds of some gigantic tablecloth. The sky was filled with grey clouds. They floated by like a flock of silent birds. And I remember far away the Crystal Palace2 shone, a moonstone pearl in an emerald setting. We leaned far over the parapet, and the four winds of Heaven seemed to beat upon us both. A long strand of your hair blew across my face, and the voice of London thundered out some stupendous,

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colossal, overwhelming fugue to the whole world – to us, clinging together outside the little tower. ‘Do you think,’ I said, ‘in the evening when they have trimmed their lamps and set them in the blue dome of the sky, the ghosts may lean out, shoulder to shoulder, and point down to London and whisper ‘This is where I lived; in the Spring we walked there together’. Do you think, sometimes, sometimes, when there is no light in the sky darkness, they have drowned their little flame in a passion of tears . . .’ ‘Look,’ you said, ‘that is our street. Perhaps, years hence, we shall look out and say ‘In the third house, on the right-hand side, we kissed each other.’ Out of the wind, down the stairs, down the wooden ladders, we went together. The iron gate clanged to after us. A service was being held in one of the chapels. While the people knelt, a great wave of music broke over, flooded the whole building. A boy in a long gown walked slowly up the aisle. He held in his arms a great spray of flowering lilies. But you and I, Vere, passed out into the streets. Notes U Text: Poems, p. 11. 1. Vere Bartrick-Baker, KM’s closest ‘literary’ friend at Queen’s College, who lent her a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and shared her enthusiasm for the so-called Decadents. When KM received a letter from ‘Mimi’, as she called her, in 1922, she found Her letter was almost frightening. It brought back the inexplicable Past. It flashed into my mind too, that she must have a large number of letters of mine which don’t bear thinking about. In some way I fear her. [. . .] There was a peculiar recklessness in her manner and in her tones which made me feel she would recognise no barriers at all. At the same time of course, one is fascinated. (KMN, 2, p. 316) 2. The huge building erected in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851, later moved to Penge Common, where it could be seen from the tower of Westminster Cathedral.

• ‘She sat on the broad window-sill’ She sat on the broad window-sill, her hands clasped loosely in her lap. Just below her in the garden a passion flower twined round a little

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fence – in the half-light the blossoms were like pale hands among the leaves. In the distance a little belt of pine trees, dark and motionless against a saffron evening sky. Inside the room she could see dimly the piano, the two tall pewter candlesticks and a shallow bowl full of hill crimson carnations. The Australian Student was playing, and turning round and round on the revolving music stool, and talking excitedly. They were both smoking beautiful cigarettes. It gave Rana such pleasure to sit there in the gloom smoking and listening that she felt languid with delight. ‘Well, here’s a pretty kettle of fish’ said the Monkey, ‘he’s done for himself rather considerably.’ He jumped from his perch on to the floor and ran to the man, dragging his silver chain after him. He felt in the man’s pockets – lo, in the waistcoat one, a little silver pencil and a lump of sugar . . . nothing else. ‘Neither of these possessions can make much tangible difference to the gentleman’s future welfare’ said the monkey, nibbling the sugar and scratching his head with the little silver pencil. And through the uncurtained window the moon shone in upon the Broken Things. High and white and sweet was the moon and the sky like black velvet. The monkey finished the sugar and carefully licked his paw – then, glancing up, he saw the man. With one bound he fled into the shadow, and then, crouching, whimpering, shivering, he crept into his corner. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 87–8.

•

The Man, the Monkey and the Mask He had lived there a very long time – ten years – twenty years – even more – he himself was astonishingly vague. And it was a small terracotta plastered wall on the fourth floor, but undoubtedly there was a balcony quite three feet long that was the great attraction. The man had few possessions – a bed, a chair, a wide cupboard, and a grand piano. He had no pictures, but directly opposite the piano a little black velvet curtain hid the Mask. And in one corner he kept the monkey tethered by a thin silver chain to a white perch. Everybody spoke of the Man as a crank. Some even whispered that

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he followed a cult, and that is sufficient to damn the reputation of an archangel. Small wonder that he had few friends. He was tall and thin – emaciated even – but in his face shone that divine, never-to-bemistaken light of Youth. The long day pulsed slowly through. Late in the afternoon the Man crept out of bed and over to the window. He pulled it wide open and leaned out. From the street came a muttering confused nightly sound but he looked over the shining silver roofs of the houses. There was a jagged scarlet wound in the pale sky. The wind blew towards him – he stood motionless, hardly thinking, yet some dark ghost seemed to be confronting his inner self, shrieking why, why, and wherefore. Then the night came – the sky was filled with the gold of stars. Lights woke in the houses opposite. He felt curiously remote from it all – the sole spectator at some colossal stupendous drama. He looked down into the street. A girl, slight and very shabbily dressed, was walking up the area steps of the house opposite. She had a blue gingham apron over her dress. In one hand she held a letter. She looked so astonishingly young that he felt glad she was not forced to cross the road – the pillar box stood in the shadow a few yards away. Then he noticed a man standing on the pavement waiting. The girl noticed him too. She put her hand up to her hair, anxiously pulled her apron straight and almost ran forward. She lifted her hand to drop the letter, and the man waiting on the pavement suddenly caught hold of her and kissed her – twice. The girl slipped her arms round his neck, kissed him on the mouth. The watcher left the window. He staggered across the room, wrenched the black velvet curtain from the mask. ‘Damn you damn you damn you,’ he screamed and struck her thrice on her smiling mouth. (In the corner the monkey was very methodically searching for fleas.) But the mask crashed down upon the floor in a thousand pieces and the man fell too, silently. He looked like a bundle of worn out rags. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 88–9.

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The Education of Audrey ‘Now, when, in the name of fortune, am I to see you? I have a thousand things to show you, and as many again to talk about, but not the slightest desire to come and interview you in a boarding-house, or to take you out to tea. Come and see me this afternoon, and give me your advice upon my wholly charming room. I have been in London a month, and twice we have met – once at a concert, where you looked daggers at me, once at a restaurant, where you did not look at me at all. Just wire me, dear. I’m hungry for you, here, this very minute with me. Are you coming? – Max.’ Audrey smiled. She stood by the open window, looking out upon the street, the note in her hand. It was Saturday morning, and full of sunshine. She watched the fugue-like course of hansoms, and four-wheelers and automobiles. A man wheeling a barrow full of shining, waving palms in terra-cotta jars, passed by. Just under her window a boy was singing: ‘Ladies fair, I bring to you Sweet lavender with spikes of blue.’1

in a fresh, rough, vigorous voice. His basket was full of little bunches of the fragrant dainty blossom. Audrey felt she would like to buy it all, crush it in her hands, bury her face in it, absorb it. At the corner pillar-box a postman shovelled the collection of white envelopes into a canvas bag. . . . Again she read the note in her hand. A faint flush spread over her face. She walked over to the dressing-table, leaned her elbows on the table, her chin in her hand, and nodded to the mirror face: ‘We’ll go, my dear, and enjoy ourselves, and wear our best clothes. But, first, kindly send a wire at the post office.’ She pulled a fur cap, gloves, and long soft coat from her wardrobe, and, as she stood 102

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buttoning her collar, the street sounds floating up, the autumn wind stirring the blinds, she laughed softly. ‘I am the happiest woman on this earth,’ said Audrey. ‘I have youth – Oh, divine youth,’ she beat her gloved hands together, ‘and my beautiful voice, and freedom, absolute liberty.’ For days rain had been falling over London with a steady monotonous persistence. Now, in this sunshine, she felt intoxicated. It was sparkling and golden, and enchanting, like champagne. Lying in her bed that morning, she had felt all through her that wonderful sense of power, of complete confidence in herself, that happiness which always followed her successful concerts. And when she had come back from her bath, her hair, all wet, hanging round her face, she had run over to the piano and sung, ‘Softly Awakes my Heart’,2 and almost frightened herself with the golden sounds. Now, a letter from Max, and the prospect of an adorable afternoon. She almost ran down the street. A child, bowling a great hoop, skipped past her. ‘It is an uncomfortable thing,’ sighed Audrey, ‘to possess a spirit that persists in hoop-bowling at my mature age, when the flesh must plod the pavestones of convention.’ She wired to Max merely ‘I come’, and went back to her rooms with her arms full of chrysanthemums, yellow and rusty red, with a flaming setting of Cape-gooseberry flower. ‘What can I wear?’ said Audrey, later, brushing her black silk-like hair, and arranging it round her face in puffs and curls. ‘Max is so intensely critical about clothes, and I mean to look beautiful.’ She decided upon a Liberty dress3 of mauve face-cloth, trimmed with dull violet buttons, and a beaver hat of the same colour, with a long curled feather. She took a hansom to No. 9, East-square, and told the driver to call for her at 5.30; it was then a quarter after 4. A sudden breeze in the Square caught the leaves of the plane trees, burnt a bright golden and a dull brown, and whirled them into the air like a flock of magic birds. Two floated on to her muff, and she held them against her cold face as she mounted the steep flight of stairs. Max opened the door, and she gave him both her hands, and the two little golden leaves. ‘See,’ she said, ‘I am bringing you summer!’ ‘Oh, Audrey, this is fine. Come along into the smoking-room – this way.’ He pushed aside the heavy purple portière. The room was full of gloom, but vivid yellow curtains hung, straight and fine, before the three windows. Tall wrought-iron candlesticks stood in the corners. The intense whiteness of the candles suddenly brought back a memory of Saint Gudule4 at dusk, and Audrey caught her breath. There were prints of beautiful women on the walls, and the graceful figure of a girl holding a green shell in her arms stood on one of the

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tables. There was a long low couch upholstered in dull purple, and quaint low chairs in the same colour. The air was full of the odour of chrysanthemums, the blossoms arranged in pewter bowls on the mantelshelf, and bookcases and tables. At the far corner of the room there was a great Blüthner piano.5 Audrey gave Max her coat and furs and long gloves. She sat on the low lounge, her feet tucked under her, a big leather cushion at her back. ‘Max, what a fascinating room!’ ‘I thought you’d like it,’ he said, stirring the fire, and then flinging himself into a great chair facing her. ‘Well, I’ve got you at last.’ ‘Silly boy, not to have hailed me before. I couldn’t fly a flag out of my window to attract you.’ Max leaned forward, impulsively – ‘Do you realise how long it is since we have seen each other?’ ‘Oh, let me see – four years.’ ‘Yes, and I cannot realise that we have ever been apart.’ ‘Oh, Max! Do you remember our parting? – that terrible place; you had to catch the evening boat. I walked down to the ferry with you along the road. I had no shoes and stockings on – do you remember? And the wind. You had proposed to me that afternoon with unqualified success on the back verandah, and we tried to kiss each other before the boat went, but the wind blew all my hair across my face.’ Audrey flung back her head and laughed. ‘Oh, what children!’ she said. ‘I watched that ship put out to sea; you stood by the rail, waving me a little friendly greeting. I was crying, without a handkerchief. I remember going back to my room, kneeling by the window, looking up at the fierce sky, and praying, “Oh, God, keep him, keep him!”’ Audrey laughed again, this time a little bitterly. ‘And this morning I got my first letter from you.’ Max got up, and walked over to the fireplace. He stood looking into the glowing coals. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘go on.’ ‘Are you enjoying it?’ said Audrey, ‘How very good and how very rare for a man to hear this! And after the absolute sense of my nearness had worn off, it was easy to put the whole episode away. You realised, and how wisely, that you must not be distracted. You thought of me in weak moments as “poor little girl”, or when your pictures failed you as “dear little girl”. Oh, how much I owe you!’ cried Audrey. ‘Can it ever be repaid?’ Max faced her swiftly – ‘What?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I owe you almost everything. You see, Max, for a little while I did worship you, lived in a strange passionate dream of you and of me, believed that love between man and woman was the

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only thing in the world, instead of a lion in the path I’ve conquered and walked over. Then grandfather died, and I kissed his dead face. I woke and came to Paris. I have all his money, you know, and slaved, and now’ – There was silence in the room. Then Audrey spoke again. ‘Love,’ she said, ‘is a means to the end. You must have gone through all the abandonment of love. You must have been bruised and scarred by his mighty fetters. You must have been tossed upon the very sea of passion, and if you can escape free in body and soul, there lies before you such a wide wind-swept waste of freedom, such promise of happiness in this freedom that you run forward, your arms outstretched to take the whole world into your embrace.’ Max took a green suède case from one of the tables. He sat down on the lounge beside Audrey. ‘Do not think for a moment,’ he said, seriously, ‘that I should question such philosophy. I am going to show you some of my work. – Want a cigarette?’ ‘Please.’ He handed her his case. Then he showed her a collection of sketches – ‘This is where I spent last summer, Audrey . . . and a winter there . . . I call this “The Poet’s House”. Observe the great broken branch of the cedar tree that shadows half the picture. Can’t you feel the mystery, the morbid imaginings, the exotic, feverish fancies, the long nights?’ ‘Oh, how good!’ said Audrey. ‘Here is “The Spirit of Music”,’ said Max. It was a portrait of herself, singing – wild-rose tinted cheeks, shining eyes, her hair in two long braids. ‘When did you do this?’ she asked. ‘Oh, about a year ago, when I was a little “off colour”, you know.’ Audrey pushed the sketch away from her. ‘Do not laugh at me,’ she cried. ‘Oh, but why not? How can the laughter of a mere man disturb the freshness of your wind-swept spaces? But, look, Audrey, here is the “Mystic Garden Scene” I wished to show you.’ Audrey stared at the picture in silence. Then – ‘You are a genius, Max.’ ‘What arrests you immediately in my work?’ ‘Oh, of course, a certain almost fierce concentration. Your touch is the very quintessence of power.’ ‘If you are to become an artist, Audrey, that is the secret. Art demands of her disciples absolute slavish obedience, complete surrender of everything in the years of their apprenticeship. But when those years are passed, we know that the time has come to “realise

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one’s nature perfectly”6 – then to create. Do you understand me? You see, my dear girl,’ he continued lighting another cigarette, ‘your experience of life is based upon – forgive me – a little literature and a great deal of morbid imaginings.’ He crossed the room and lit the four candles upon the piano. ‘Come and sing for me.’ Audrey felt intensely angry, also, that her splendid happiness was slipping from her. ‘Oh, do not talk like this,’ she said, seating herself at the piano, and looking up at Max: ‘I have bought the experience that I possess with the very gold of my youth.’ Max laughed gently. ‘Sing now,’ he said, ‘we can talk again afterwards.’ He leaned across the piano and watched her. Her beautiful voice filled the room. She sang song after passionate song. And he thought: Could anything be more fascinating than to teach this beautiful child that she might so live her life, that each song she sang would be the crystallisation of a wonderful experience? The music ceased. Audrey looked out of the window. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it is pouring with rain, and quite late. Please bring me my coat and furs.’ She drew on her gloves; he helped her into her coat. Her hands trembled so much that she could not fasten the collar. ‘Here, let me,’ said Max. He could feel that she was shivering, and looking at her, he saw the pallor of her face. Her eyes were strangely bright, her under-lip quivered. ‘What is the matter, child?’ ‘Oh, I do not know,’ she said, moving towards the door. The room had become quite dark now, the silver rain beat softly upon the windows. ‘Audrey,’ said Max, ‘Audrey, you child, don’t you know, dear, that you have not spent one atom of the gold of your youth, that you are still walking along the little white road of childhood, fighting lions with your fairy wand?’ ‘I have been happy.’ ‘Why are you crying?’ ‘Do you know how I feel?’ she said painfully – ‘as though my philosophy was a thing for sunshine and daylight – and, it is raining now. You have made me believe Max, that I have been playing with life. Yet, I have been happy.’ ‘Yes, as a child is happy. Ah, there are heights and depths in Art and Life that you have never dreamed of, Audrey. If you could only realise what might belong to you! You are playing on the outskirts of a forest filled with beautiful scarlet flowers. One day, sooner or later, if you want to fulfil your destiny, someone will take you by the hand and lead you there, and you will learn.’ Silence again in the dark room . . . the silver rain beat against the window.

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She suddenly turned towards him and stretched out her hands – ‘Teach me, Max,’ said Audrey. Notes Text: Evening Post, Wellington, 30 January 1909,7 p. 12. Signed ‘K. Mansfield’. 1. ‘Who’ll buy my lavender?’, a poem by Caryl Battersby (b. 1858), set to music by Sir Edward German in 1896. 2. From Camille Saint-Saëns, Samson et Dalila, 1877. 3. A dress style based on Graeco-Roman design, from Liberty’s store in Regent Street, London. 4. See n. 11 to ‘Juliet’, p. 61. 5. A renowned make of piano from the firm of Julius Blüthner in Leipzig. 6. ‘The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for.’ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Ch. 2. 7. The story was written a year before publication. As KM told her sister Vera on 17 January 1908, ‘I have just written a sketch “The Education of Audrey” which I think you might like – Of course it is London – but it is actually happy, and ends to begin – you understand?’ (CLKM, 1, p. 37).

•

Juliette Delacour It happened that on Juliette Delacour’s fourth birthday she played on a wide balcony with her Father. It was a golden day – from the garden below floated the scents of flowers innumerable – roses and lilies, mignonette, and the faint mystic sweetness of carnations. Juliette was never still. She had received a little book and a china tea pot full of chocolates – a charming tea pot painted all over with a design of cats and babies. She held up her white frock and danced to and fro, to and fro. Her father lay in a long cushioned chair, a coloured rug about his knees, and she had given him to make him better her tea pot. ‘Hold it carefully, dear Papa’ she cried, ‘hold it carefully’. Sunshine streamed upon them both – upon the man’s pale face, upon the child’s wildrose tinted cheeks. A dainty wind stirred the flowers in the garden below – it blew Juliette’s black silk-like hair across her face.

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And at the same moment – Oh, terrible, unforgettable horror – the tea pot fell to the ground where its silver paper spoils scattered here and there. The child uttered a little cry of mingled disappointment and astonishment. Her Father’s head was sunk upon his breast, the rug had slipped on [to] the balcony floor. She thought he had fallen asleep, ran to him and shook him by the arm, beat upon his cheeks – roughly, with her child hands. ‘Papa Papa wake up, don’t be frightened dear, about the tea pot.’ Juliette knelt on the floor and stripping a chocolate of its silver paper she held it close to him, tried to force it into his mouth. ‘See Papa, just one. I’m not angry.’ Suddenly she burst into a frightful passion of weeping, and so they found her, and carried her to her room. And the next day she was led into a dark room. Looking back upon it in after years, the room seemed to assume gigantic proportions – a vast gloomy cavern. She was told to kiss the white face upon the little bed. For a moment she shrank back, frightened, but then leaned forward – and so they lay a little space, warm cheek against cold cheek, and the lilies smothering both. In after years it seemed to Juliette that never again was there so much sunlight. The great brown house was partially closed, shutters were drawn across the windows, the furniture was enveloped in ghostlike hideous shapeless coverings. There were never any flowers on the tables and shelves, and her Mother dismissed all the servants except an old Frenchwoman – she cooked for and waited on them all – her Mother, her sister, and she. While the Summer flowers were still sweet in the garden her Mother taught her to read from an old red book used years ago by her tall pale sister who sat so placidly sewing all day long, and embroidering grapes and leaves upon a square frame. Her Mother in her dull dress, her faded face, curiously calm, awed and terrified the child. But she learnt with ease and rapidity, reading aloud the little old world foolish stories with such passionate eagerness that her Mother was amazed. The brown house stood far back from a narrow tree lined road. But the garden was so full of trees and lawns, flowers and hedges, little overgrown paths, deserted arbours, that Juliette never passed out of the gates. And no people ever disturbed their solitude. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 154–5. Late January 1908.1 1. The story is written almost immediately after the date ‘January 28th 1908’ in Notebook 2, ATL.

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The Unexpected Must Happen Guy Gaythorn knocked the ash from his cigar end into the fire behind his back, restored the comfort to his lips, tilted his head further back if that were possible, and balancing himself on his toes for half a second, proceeded – ‘You are half witch, Judith, and half pussy cat my dear – that subtle combination which is so essentially feminine, but if you were not so young, so completely childish – it is no use denying the fact – I should be seriously annoyed.’ The lady upon the opposite side of the table plucked a feather from her fan and blew it across the polished surface where it lay like a tiny swan on a dark miniature lake. ‘Allow me to assure you, sir, that under the circumstances I feel my action in this matter to be beyond reproach.’ She suddenly rose, stretched out her white arms and looked at him, half laughing, half angry, from under her long lashes. ‘Why on earth, because in a weak moment I became engaged to you, am I to regard you as the only Adam. Why, the Garden of Eden now a days is simply stocked with them and they are like Penny-in-the-slot machines, Guy – they all fascinate me, and I want to find out about them all. So for Heaven’s sake don’t develop the middle aged, vulgar, jealous husband attitude, but leave me my adorable Macdowell – the boy needs a woman – his Father’s history you know – in peace.’ The man made no reply for a moment. Then with a sudden movement, almost with fierceness he took his wife in his arms, kissed her passionately, then pushed her gently back into her seat. ‘We have argued quite long enough, and quite often enough upon this – to me – painful subject, Judith. I will have no more of it. Let us now spend a quiet evening together.’ She was surprised, satisfied, soothed with the spontaneous passion of the man, but a frightful fear had crept into her very blood. Why would he not leave her as he had intended, and meet his friends at the Admiralty Club. God! What would he say or do if the door were to open, as in a few moments it would open, and Cecil, eager, living, excitable, burst into the room. She could not forgive herself for her foolish action in giving him the duplicate key to her flat – it was so lacking in dignity, it looked so bad, even though she knew it meant nothing. She clasped her hands convulsively. What could she do, how could she make Guy go. It was strongly evident that her husband would not leave her. To get him away from their room she must go with him. This must be done.

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How! Suddenly a thought seized her and the relief that it brought lighted her face with what Guy interpreted as love. Moving quickly to the window she lifted the blind, and the moonlight flooded the room and killed the firelight. ‘Guy it is moonlight again, just as it was that happy night. Let us walk for a while’ and her voice was full of trembling persuasion. ‘Do you want to Judith’ he said. ‘Let us go. Life is too short for you and me to quarrel. Run and get on your coat and hat.’ Swiftly she left the room and ran along the passage. She was standing in front of the mirror buttoning her jacket when – was it fancy – it could not be reality – she heard the front door open and close, steps across the hall, then her husband’s voice, loud and commanding. ‘You’re Cecil Macdowell.’ She stood motionless, helpless, listening intensely for further sounds. The painful throbbing at her temples suggested some long forgotten melody which repeated and repeated itself maddeningly. But there came no sound from the sitting room. Then suddenly the door opened, the two men came out – talking excitedly, her husband paused to put on a coat and hat and the next moment the hall door had clicked behind them and she was alone! Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 155–6. [Early 1908?1] 1. The story immediately follows ‘Juliette Delacour’ in Notebook 2, ATL.

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Vignette: By the Sea Lying thus on the sand, the foam almost washing over my hands, I am spellbound by the sea. Behind the golden hills the sun is going down, a flaming jewel in a lurid setting, and there is a faint flush everywhere, on sea and land. To my right the sky has blossomed into a vivid rose, but, to my left, the land is hidden by a grey blue mist, lightened now here, now there, by the sun colour . . . it is like land seen from a ship, very far away, dreamland, mirage, enchanted country. Two sea birds, high in the air, fly screaming towards the light. It beats upon their white breasts. It flames upon their dull wings. Far

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away, a little boat is sailing upon the sweet water, a golden butterfly upon the dainty bosom of a mystic blossom. And now the Italian fishermen are sailing in, their white sails bellying in the breeze. Several come rowing in a little boat. They spring ashore, the light shines on their crisp black hair, it shines on their faces, so that their skin is the colour of hot amber on their bare legs and strong brown arms. They are dragging towards them the boat, the long black, wet rope running through their fingers and falling in a bold pattern on the foam-blown sand. They call to one another – I cannot hear what they say – but against the long, rhythmic pulsing of the sea their voices sound curiously insignificant, like voices in a dream. And there are exquisite golden brown sprays and garlands of sea weed, set about with berries, white and brown. Are they flowers blown from the garden of the Sea King’s Daughter? Does she wander through the delicate coral forests, seeking them, playing upon a little silver shell, her long hair floating behind her? And near me there is a light upon the blue coast, steadily, tenderly it burns, a little candle set upon the great altar of the world. The glow pales in the sky, on the land, but ever the long, rhythmic pulsing of the sea. Oh, to sail and sail into the heart of the sea. Is it darkness and silence there, or is it a Great Light? So the grey sand slips, drifts through my fingers. Night comes swiftly. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 193–4. The typescript is a revision of a longer, earlier and more factual version dated ‘February’ [1908], KMN, 1, pp. 156–8. It is printed below to illustrate KM’s method of moving an actual event or description towards a more ‘atmospheric’ fictional form. As she wrote to a friend in early 1908, ‘Am just off to Island Bay for a long day & maybe an evening – I am going to write – and have to go to the sea for “Copy” –’ (CLKM, 1, p. 36). Thursday. I am at the sea – at Island Bay1 in fact – lying flat on my face on the warm white sand. And before me the sea stretches – miles, after all, the horizon looks. To my right, shrouded in mist like a fairy land, a dream country, the snow mountains of the South Island.2 To my left, fold upon fold of splendid golden hills, two white lighthouses like great watching birds perched upon them. A huge yellow dog lies by me; he is wet and ruffled, and I have no boots or stockings on. A print dress, a panama hat, a big parasol. Adelaida I wish that you were with me.

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vignette: by the sea Where the rocks lie their shadow is thickly violet upon the green blue. You know that peacock shade of water. Blue it is with the blueness of Rossetti, green with the greenness of William Morris.3 Oh, what a glorious day this is. I shall stay here until after dark, walking along the beach, the waves foaming over my feet, drinking a great deal of tea and eating a preposterous amount of bread and apricot jam at a little place called The Cliff House. Across the blue sea a boat is floating with an orange sail. Now the Maori fishermen are sailing in, their white sail bellying in the wind. On the beach a group of them, with blue jerseys, thick trousers rolled to their knees. The sun shines on their thick crisp hair, and shines on their faces, so that their skins are the colour of hot amber. It shines on their bare legs and firm brown arms. They are drawing in a little boat called ‘Te Kooti’,4 the wet rope running through their fingers and falling in a mystic pattern on the foam blown sand. Evening. By the sea. Lying thus on the sand, the foam almost washing over my hands, I feel the magic of the sea. Behind the golden hills the sun is going down, a ruby jewel in a lurid setting, and there is a faint flush everywhere over sea and land. To my right the sky has blossomed into vivid rose but to my left the land is hidden by a grey blue mist lightened now here now there by a suggestion of the sun – colour – it is like land seen from a ship a very long way away – dreamland, mirage, enchanted country. Two sea birds high in the air fly screaming towards the light. It beats upon their white breasts, it flames upon their dull wings. Far away a little boat is sailing on the sweet water, a golden butterfly upon the dainty bosom of a mystic blossom. And now the Italian fishermen are sailing in, their white sail bellying in the breeze – several come rowing in a little boat. They spring ashore. The sun shines on their crisp black hair. It shines on their faces, so that their skin is the colour of hot amber, on their bare legs and strong brown arms. They are dragging towards them the boat, the long black wet rope running through their fingers and falling in a mystic pattern on the foam blown sand. They call to one another. I cannot hear what they say but against the long rhythmic pulsing of the sea their voices sound curiously insignificant, like voices in a dream. And there are exquisite golden brown sprays and garlands of seaweed set about with berries, white and brown. Are they flowers blown from the garden of the sea-King’s daughter – does she wander through the delicate coral forest seeking them, her long hair floating behind her, playing upon a little silver shell? And near me I see a light upon the blue coast – steadily tenderly it beams – a little candle set upon the great altar of the world. The glow pales in the sky, on the land, but the voice of the sea grows stronger. Oh, to sail and sail into the heart of the sea.

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Is it darkness and silence there or is – a Great Light. So the grey sand slips – sifts through my fingers. Night comes swiftly. 1. Island Bay, on the southern coast, a few miles from Wellington city. 2. The Kaikoura Ranges, on the upper east coast of the South Island, clearly visible from Wellington in good weather. 3. KM was immersed in the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris and Aestheticism during her last year at Queen’s College, and on returning to New Zealand. 4. Te Kooti (c.1832–91), of the Rongowhakaata iwi (tribe), an eminent warrior falsely charged with sedition, and subsequently founder of the Ringatu religion.

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In Summer1 And for the first time in her short life, Phyllis wept. She lay on the hillside among the flowering broom, her head pillowed, childlike, on her arms. ‘Oh, I think I am going to die’ she said. Phyllis did not look like Death in her white, pink-sprigged skirt, her blue laced bodice, her pink stockings, and ridiculously small, redheeled, pink slippers. By her side was a long white crook, gay with a posy of roses and ribbons, and near by, her wide rose-wreathed hat, and a little straw basket full of barley sugar. ‘Oh, I have never been so unhappy before’ sobbed Phyllis. ‘I have a curious pain somewhere.’ Suddenly she heard a bee buzzing very close to her ear. She sat up hastily. And there, standing before her, laughing softly, was the Yellow Dwarf. His hair was yellow, he had yellow eyes, his skin was the colour of hot amber. He wore a tight fitting yellow silk garment, and long, soft, yellow suede boots. ‘Who are you,’ said Phyllis, shaking her hair out of her eyes. ‘Why are you crying?’ said the Yellow Dwarf. ‘Who are you?’ said Phyllis. Her flowerlike face, her long eyes, her rose mouth, excited the Yellow Dwarf curiously. With charming grace he leant against a spray of broom blossom. ‘I,’ he said, ‘I am the child of the gorse and of the broom – of the wild gorse, my Father, and of the dainty broom, my Mother. And I live upon dewdrops fried in sunshine and the spoil of honey bees. By day I lie on the warm hillside, and smile at the blue sky, and count the little flocks of white clouds that pass so gently, so dreamily above

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me. And at night. Oh’ – he bent forward, took one of Phyllis’ curls in his hand and pulled it gently, teasingly – ‘you’re too young to know.’ ‘Tell me,’ cried Phyllis eagerly. He laughed, and Phyllis fancied – was it fancy? – that, at the sound, every blade of grass on the warm hillside quivered and took new life. ‘Oh, perhaps,’ he said, ‘later on. First you must tell me all about yourself, why you came here, why you have been weeping, what you want. Spread out your skirt, little Phyllis, that I may sit upon a piece of it, and hand me, I pray you, ever the slightest suspicion of that barley sugar.’ She did as he asked her. Then, ‘why should I tell you,’ she asked. ‘Look,’ said the Yellow Dwarf. In his hand he held a very perfect, languishing golden rose. ‘Bend down, little Phyllis. Oh what perfume, what perfume.’ His voice was like a caress, and, as she bent over the rose, ‘This is a magic flower’ he said. Looking at him anew, Phyllis saw in his yellow eyes, perfect understanding, unbounded sympathy, and, too, command. ‘I will tell you now,’ she said, ‘it is this.’ ‘I am listening.’ ‘Well, long, long ago, my Mother sat alone in her cottage, and it was Summer. In the garden, she told me this, all the roses were like nodding, perfumed bells. There had never been so many flowers before, she said, in any garden. But she sat in the little house, dreaming, and by and bye, a white butterfly drifted through the open window – Oh a beautiful wonderful butterfly, and there, curled up between its two wings, I lay a baby, fast asleep.’ ‘How infinitely delicious,’ murmured the Yellow Dwarf. ‘And then, Phyllis?’ ‘Oh, she was so happy, my Mother. She wrapped me in her fine embroidered handkerchiefs until I was big enough for clothes, and then she spun me little things – they were too lovely. So I grew old enough to walk and talk, and, every night, she sat beside me until I slept, and sang softly, softly, “Little Bo-Peep.” She called me Phyllis, but she said “You must always remember that you are a Fairy Child, and that one day, the Great Pedlar, Fate, will come knocking at the door, and you must not say him nay.” So I remembered. I was never unhappy. I learned a great many songs, and drank milk out of a little white cup, and my Mother curled and uncurled my hair, and we looked at each other in the looking glass. Then, one day, my Mother was in the fields. I sat by the table threading a necklace of glass beads. Somebody knocked at the door. “Come in” I said. The door opened, and there stood a great black man. Oh, so big, I can never say how big’ said Phyllis. ‘He was

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dressed in the richest silks, red as roses, yellow as buttercups, blue as periwinkles. He had round gold earrings in his ears, and, on his shoulders, he carried a great carved chest. “Little Phyllis,” he said, and his voice was like the wind up the chimney, “I am Fate.” Then he set down the great carved chest, and opened it. Within lay my shepherdess dress, my tiny shoes, and silk stockings, even my little straw basket of barley sugar. And I remembered what my Mother had told me, and put on the clothes. He gave me, too, a silver whistle, and when I blew upon it I heard a pattering sound in the garden. I looked out, and saw a little flock of white sheep.’ ‘This comes of lullabies,’ interrupted the Yellow Dwarf. Phyllis did not listen. ‘I forgot my Mother, and my white cup, and my necklace of glass beads, but I followed where the white sheep led, far away, far away.’ ‘How long ago did this happen, Phyllis?’ asked the Yellow Dwarf. ‘I do not know,’ she said. Again the tears fell down her face. ‘I think it must have been a thousand years ago.’ ‘Perhaps so, go on.’ ‘There is really nothing else, except, except’ . . . a tiny blush stole up her face, her brow . . . ‘somehow everything is changing. My clothes, they are too small for me, my slippers hurt my feet, my stockings are torn by brambles, and I am tired of barley sugar, and, Yellow Dwarf, I have lost my silver whistle, so all my sheep have strayed. And I want something, I do not know what, but I think I shall never cease weeping.’ The Yellow Dwarf smiled. ‘Tut, you girls, you’re all alike,’ he said, taking her hand and patting it softly. ‘Now wait here one moment, look, what is this in my pocket?’ He took out a tiny packet, shook it in the breeze, and it was a yellow frock, straight and fine, like sunshine, like Summer. ‘This is what you ought to be wearing, Phyllis.’ But Phyllis was already slipping out of her skirt and bodice. She bent down and he popped the new frock over her head. ‘Oh, how nice,’ she said. He eyed her slippers doubtfully. ‘It is Summer, child, why not bare feet?’ So she took off her shoes and stockings, and her feet were like little white birds on the warm hillside. ‘I have grown out of my child clothes’ she said, gravely. The Yellow Dwarf caught her hands. ‘You are to walk over the hillside’ – his voice was like running water, like the soft sound of Summer leaves – ‘you will come to a tree, and under the tree, your Happiness sits, waiting.’

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Dreaming, she left him. By and bye, she came to a laburnum tree, a bower of beauty, and under the tree sat Corydon, playing on an instrument with seven silver strings. He was dark and strong. He wore a garland of roses, and very little else. ‘Oh, at last,’ he said, and took her hand. As their fingers met, as they stared at each other, fascinated and happy, a lark rose suddenly and mounted singing, singing into the Summer sky. ‘That is my unhappiness,’ said Phyllis, nodding to Corydon, ‘it has flown away, singing, at your touch.’ Blissfully, blissfully, down the warm hillside, swinging their hands as children do, the broom waving and beckoning, they walked slowly. ‘Evening is coming,’ said Phyllis. Below them lay the sea. The little waves ran along the line of white beach, so daintily, drew back so shyly, then flung themselves along the smooth, strong sand stretch with such absolute abandon that Phyllis smiled. ‘It is telling me something,’ she said – then looking up at Corydon – ‘Evening is coming.’ The wind had blown a curl of her hair across her face, a pulse at her throat beat flutteringly. Above them, in the opaque sky, one pale star heralded the night. ‘Darkness is coming,’ said Corydon, catching her in his strong arms. And somewhere, in the tangle of broom, the Yellow Dwarf shook with laughter. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 174–6. Signed ‘Julian Mark’. 1. A much shorter preliminary version appears in KMN, 1, p. 85.

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The Yellow Chrysanthemum Scene: A circular room with dull purple hangings. Four Roman candles set in heavy wrought-iron holders shed a pale thin light. Across the windows yellow curtains are hung – straight and fine. On a couch below the window a woman is seated, holding a little mirror up to her face, and shaking the petals of a yellow chrysanthemum over her hair.

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RADIANA: Ah! how beautiful! They are like little pieces of perfumed gold falling over my hair . . . They are like little drops of pure amber falling, falling into the darkness of my hair . . . They are like flakes of golden snow . . . (she leans far back among the purple cushions) O, I am wrapt in the perfume of the chrysanthemums. The air is full of the perfume . . . It is as though there had been a dead body in the room . . . It is the body of Summer who is lying dead in the room – and all her beautiful gold is spent . . . My fingers burn with the scent of her dead body . . . O, I thirst, I thirst. My soul is like a great stretch of sand on which the sun has shone all the long day. I am dried up, parched, hot. I am waiting for the waves to beat upon me, to hold me in a green, strong embrace . . . (Guido enters) GUIDO: Radiana . . . Radiana! No – stir not . . . Ah! how beautiful you are – golden and white like the heart of a water lily . . . The petals in your hair are like little stars in the Night sweetness . . . Your face in the depths of your hair is like a pale flower in a deep forest . . . Never have I seen you so beautiful! Your gown is the colour of a cloud of narcissus blossom and your hands are like strange white moths. (He seats himself beside her) Look at me – speak to me – Radiana! Last night I woke from a dream, fearful and overpowering. It hovered round my brow – vague, shadow-like. And as I lay still and stared into the purple darkness your face, Radiana, came before me . . . the sweetness of your eyelids, and the shadows that lie under your eyes . . . In the intensity of my longing I cried aloud, and beat upon the pillows of my couch . . . I shook from my hair to my feet and shuddered with the strength of myself . . . I was drowning, suffocating in the heart of a purple sea . . . and the light of your face was as the light of the moon above the waters . . . In the topaz of the morning sky I rode forth towards the mountains. All the day I have journeyed through the emerald of the forests, and when Twilight fell I saw the white towers of your castle far ahead of me . . . RADIANA: O – I am afraid – I am afraid . . . Somewhere under these hangings, know you not, Summer lies dead . . . Ah! the perfume of her dead body stifles me! Loose my girdle, Guido . . . I cannot breathe . . . GUIDO: Radiana, you dream . . . you have been too much alone . . . See, see, I am weeping! The tears all falling down my face, and on to your silver throat. You are so beautiful that you are tragic . . . tragic . . . One cannot possess so much beauty – and yet live.

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RADIANA: (in a stifled voice) Take off your cloak and wrap me in its folds . . . I am so cold and weary . . . tired of passion, weary of love . . . In the night hours I have called and cried for you. I have wept in the long darkness. My hair has become heavy and damp with my tears . . . Through the days I have leant against my balcony in the hot sunlight, and pulled the petals, one by one, from the roses that grow there so passionately and beautifully . . . I have watched the petals fluttering to my feet, one by one, till my feet were covered with the crimson of them . . . And I have felt that I was standing in a pool of blood . . . At the fall of each petal I have whispered your name . . . I have been like a virgin telling her rosary . . . my beads were rose petals . . . beautiful drops of blood . . . It is gone . . . my desire . . . my strength is gone . . . GUIDO: Radiana, Radiana your brow is so hot – it is burning beneath my hand . . . Speak to me again. Your breath is as sweet as the perfume of incense. Your body is like a shell – white and cool – that has been cast up by the sea on to the dull shore . . . Look, I will raise you to your feet . . . My arms are round you . . . I am very strong . . . here in the darkness of this room . . . let me feel your body leaning against me . . . Can I give you my strength? It is as though I had a great torch in my heart that leaps up and flames and burns all over my body. I feel as though my hair were on fire . . . Radiana, Radiana! Let me give you my strength . . . Let me pour into you the fire that is coursing through me . . . RADIANA: Ah! Ah! (A cold wind blows through the room. The light of the candles is quenched. The yellow curtains blow in and out from the windows, silently, heavily. Guido, in the darkness, lifts Radiana in his arms and lays her upon the couch.) GUIDO: (whispering) I spread all your hair around you. It is so dark . . . I can only see your face and your hands and your little white feet . . . Your face is like a little moon . . . a wan moon in the fierceness of a storm night. RADIANA: O, O, the perfume of the dead body . . . GUIDO: It is the smoke from the candles . . . The night air has blown their light out . . . RADIANA: O the dead body of the Summer. GUIDO: (fiercely) Why are you so pale? Why are you so pale? Why are you shuddering? Close your eyes . . . close your eyes . . . RADIANA: Guido! . . . GUIDO: Hold me! Hold to me! I shall hold your little hands against my face . . . Feel how hot I am . . . and you so cold . . . Your fingers are damp . . . and there is a strange scent . . . Radiana! Radiana! Horror! Horror! I am holding a dead body . . . It is the perfume of

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your dead body . . . and I am afraid. Ah! how loathsome!. . . I shall wrap you round in your hair . . . shut out your face . . . hide your hands, cover your pale feet . . . (Suddenly he rises from the couch where he has been kneeling, and wrenches one of the yellow curtains from the windows. He flings it over her body.) CURTAIN. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 191–3. Signed ‘KMB’. [March 19081] 1. A clue to the play’s dating may be KM writing to her sister Vera in late March 1908, ‘The voice of the chrysanthemum is heard in the land’ (CLKM, 1, p. 43). The fragment is laden with the influence of Oscar Wilde’s early drama, The Duchess of Padua, first produced as Guido Ferranti in 1891.

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The Thoughtful Child. Her Literary Aspirations1 In a very short time now the Thoughtful Child is going to take to pothooks. In fact she had one lesson the other day and she made an ‘A’ – ‘a sort of gate, Father’ – and a ‘B’ – ‘two little rooms’ – and a ‘1’ – ‘just a long, Father – and a ‘2’ – ‘a ‘long’ with a bag at one end and a piggy tail.’ After that she washed the faces of her family with the slate sponge and found it far more fascinating. ‘But I will learn’ she says, nodding and smiling, when I’m turned some more, dear’ – her way of expressing birthdays. You see we are so very anxious to write a book for all those Poor Things who have no babies of their own to look after but other people’s children – for ‘Aunt Emilys’ who wipe their feet on two doormats, for Uncle Peters who ‘nearly blow their noses right into their hankeys – so hard’ – that they may therein read about the private and particular language of the Secret Society – to which every respectable child belongs – their customs and their demands. As it is they are always being misunderstood. I remember the last time Uncle Peter came to stay with us. It was in the smoking room after tea . . . ‘Father always “snugs” me in the evenings, Uncle Peter’ announced the Thoughtful Child, climbing up my chair. ‘Eh, what!’ said Uncle Peter.

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‘We have such nice snuggles.’ ‘Eh, what!’ said Uncle Peter – and we really thought his eyes were going to drop right over the carpet – they were so surprised. Then the next day at dinner – there was apple tart. ‘Won’t you have some of the friendly cow,2 Uncle Peter’ asked my daughter, waving her teaspoon airily at the cream jug. ‘Bless me, you’re a very smart young lady.’ ‘Oh, it’s not me, Uncle Peter – Mr Stevenson, you know.’ But he did not know – and she was amazed. ‘Oh, I knew that years ago,’ she cried. ‘Years and years before I was born even. Why I remember –’ ‘Yes, dear, that’s enough’ said Mother, looking at me and I smiled back at her. Was Mother thinking of those Winter evenings when she sat sewing, sewing, and I read to her from the ‘Child’s Garden’, and showed her the pictures that peeked and ran out at you from every corner. Small wonder the Thoughtful Child remembers that – small wonder . . . And there are times when you cannot be called ‘young lady’, or ‘child’ or ‘little girl’, when there is a pain in you that will not get better until someone says ‘Chick-a-bidee’ or ‘Toodle-ums’ or ‘Precious Poppet’, or ‘Dear-my-sweet’. Uncle Peters and Aunt Emilys do not realise one half of the importance of these things . . . We never say we have cried – we ‘wash our eyes out’. When we want to whisper we tell people ‘please shut your ears’. When we are tired of the house ‘my feet are so walky’. When we lie flat and look up there is no blue sky and white clouds – those are the sweetest pet lambs roaming through fields of forgetmenots. They must learn, too, that there are no such things as dolls – they are fairy babies living for a little time with Thoughtful Children to be treated ever so kindly – and dressed and undressed and buttoned and tied – never sewn. And the day you wake and find one gone – she is carried off in the night to a real Mother who will wake and find her curled up in her arms like a little pink flower. Why, one day, when we were out walking and a little girl passed with her nurse – ‘why there’s my Arabella Susan, Father’ cried the Thoughtful Child, ‘she’s got just the same fat legs.’ The little girl did not look at all pleased but some children are quite ‘blushy’ about it. My daughter is not – she remembers perfectly well being Janet Maria and having biscuit crumbs popped into her mouth with a hair pin . . . And what is the use of a waistcoat pocket if it does not contain a chocolate button – one with little white seeds all over. You take them carefully off and put one back into the pocket so another button can grow there. And then you eat the brown part and sometimes it sticks to the top of your mouth – tongue or no tongue it won’t come down again.

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In so many families a boiled egg is a ‘higgledy piggledy’ in remembrance of the black hen who laid hers for gentlemen only.3 ‘Fathers are always gentlemen’ – and you say ‘Father, some bread, please.’ ‘Plain or coloured, Miss,’ answers Father, smiling at you across the jam pot, ‘half a yard cut on the cross, I take it, with as little selvedge as possible.’ You do not understand at all but it is the ‘jokey’ voice and you expect to be talked to that way . . . There is another thing. When you are staying away and bedtime comes – ‘Can I have a candle, please Aunt Emily’ – and your voice seems to come from your poor little pink toes quite lost ’way down in the cold sheet. It is different at home – where Mother holds your hands and sings – but Aunt Emily’s hands are cold and knobbly like the bath tap, and Aunt Emily, shaking out your clothes until the wonder is that a button is left to tell the tale says ‘Nonsense, child – spoilt girls – wrong days – bad habits.’ So you lie there, quiet, until a piece of the dark creeps under your bed and hides there and begins to come out, nearer and nearer and nearer and nearer and nearer – until there you are sitting up in bed, your curls standing up round your head like a regiment of soldiers and Aunt Emily – who comes so quickly she must have been waiting round the corner with a glass of water in her ‘bath-tappy’ hand. Now if she had only known to have nice hands and a song – none of that need have happened . . . About having your hair washed – This is a ceremony which ought to be the right of Mothers only, the Thoughtful Child tells me. No Aunt, be she ever so ‘Auntie’, no Godmother, no dear old friend must trespass here. It is Mother alone who keeps the soap out of your eyes, it is only Mother who gives you 3d if you do not splash through the bathroom floor on to the dining room ceiling, who dries you very very gently – all the others make you feel as if your head was coming off in the towel – and who kisses that little place at the back of your neck that comes with leaning . . . The Thoughtful Child would like the point made very clear. People – the right sort of people – must expect children to sit on them. ‘Now, there’s no place to sit on Uncle Peter’ she says, ‘and Aunt Emily is so cracky. Now, you, Father dear, why I’m sitting on you now, and Mother.’ I put an arm round her to hold her there, tightly, shuddering at the thought that one day I shall be so Uncle Peterish and she so old that maybe we shall sit sedately in two chairs and talk about the newspaper. ‘The book would be very big, Father dear.’ ‘Oh very, indeed.’ ‘There are such lots and lots more. I’ll have to begin quite soon and

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make billions of books for Aunt Emilys and Uncle Peters.’ She slips down from my knee and pushes the curls back from her face, looking a little flushed and puzzled. ‘Perhaps, Father dear,’ the voice is distinctly wobbly, ‘perhaps I’d better make pothooks before I’ve turned.’ ‘Oh, not yet, Babbles. I’ve got a bone in my arm. Soon.’ She is all joy again – let it rest at that. Notes U Text KMN, 1, pp. 204–6. Signed and dated ‘K. Mansfield IV. 08’. 1. The story was dedicated to ‘E.K.B.’ Edith Bendall was nine years older than KM, whose initial sexual infatuation with her settled to a friendship in which they planned a book of verses and stories for children, to be illustrated by ‘Edie’. The book did not eventuate, but the several ‘baby’ stories and numerous poems from this period were intended for it. 2.

The friendly cow all red and white I love with all my heart She gives me cream with all her might To eat with apple tart. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Cow’, A Child’s Garden of Verses, 1885

3. The traditional nursery rhyme: Higgledy-piggledy My black hen, She lays eggs For Gentlemen, Sometimes nine And sometimes ten, Higgledy-piggledy My black hen.

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Vignette: They are a ridiculous company They are a ridiculous company in this brown holland1 world – an elephant, a white poodle playing the ’cello, a blue jug, a gnome in a red cap, a handkerchief [box], a box of matches, and the whole flanked by two gigantic blazing candles – [. . .] blossoms in a green

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setting. Tonight I sat in a low chair, smoking, and by and bye I was so silent they forgot me and took life. The dog shook back its braids and started vigorously bowing, the elephant trumpeted wildly, the blue jug settled herself with a great exhibition of snugness, the gnome took off his red cap and fanned himself with it, the handkerchief box yawned, the box of matches shook himself with a crisp vigour that half startled half charmed me, and the candles blazed and flamed and cast strange evil patterns over the brown holland world. But then, shouted the elephant to the dog ‘Cease this foolish scraping.’ He rushed to the unfortunate animal, clasped him and his ’cello in his trunk, shook them and deposited them on the top of the handkerchief box who shrieked feebly and blushed a vivid rose. The blue jug spoke with a compressed spout. ‘At least attempt to conduct yourselves as gentlemen’ she said. ‘This ridiculous nonsense takes place every evening.’ And the elephant, utterly discomforted, ambled away behind the match box. Heavens how the gnome laughed, stuffing his red cap into his mouth, leering at the dog in a Quilp-like2 manner. But the matchbox, her palmy days long over, her body scratched and worthless, whispered soft nothings to the elephant. Once when the breeze almost blew out the light of the candles I saw him bend over and kiss her with his trunk – it was an intensely novel proceeding. The dog was playing hey diddle carefully, with one finger. The H.B., a martyr to obesity, was snoring. The gnome was digging the blue jug in the ribs. The elephant sat holding the matchbox in his trunk. The candles blazed when Yvonne entered. She ran across the room and flung a great bouquet of white lilac and roses on the table. ‘Oh the darkness’ said Yvonne, pressing the clicking light button. She sat down, her elbows planted firmly in the brown holland world, her long loose sleeves sweeping to right and to left the dog, the elephant, the handkerchief box, the blue jug, and the matches. ‘That is so like you’ I said, flinging away my cigarette – ‘You have smothered a whole world with your roses.’ Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 110–11. [May 1908]3 1. Holland blinds, made from unbleached linen. 2. Daniel Quilp, the sinister dwarf in Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). 3. The piece is entered in Notebook 39, ATL, between two sections dated ‘May 1908’ and ‘May 17th’.

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The Thoughtful Child They had lived together for a very long time – Father, Mother and she, in the white house on the Hill. Other people lived a great way off, and seemed a little unreal to the thoughtful child. She had no time for them, and so many ‘really truly’ friends with her always. After tea time you always might come across ‘The Bhong with the Luminous Nose’1 on the gravel path, and ‘Little Johnny Head-in-Air’2 wandered somewhere near the pool in the back-yard – not to mention the animals. It is always a difficult question as to who are changed Princes and Princesses, and who not, and thousands of Fairies. The thoughtful child knew ’most everything about Fairies. She had been one herself once, and lived in a crocus on the lawn. Oh, the dear house it made, and one day Father ‘peeked’ out of the window and saw the crocus and cut it with his penknife, and carried it ever so carefully to Mother. ‘Oh, how charming’ said Mother, ‘Thank you, dear husband.’ She put her face close down to smell the fresh ‘snowy’ smell, and the thoughtful child couldn’t help it – she put her arms round the Mother’s neck. Now, it always happens that, if a fairy does that, she is not a fairy any more. The thoughtful child knew that, but she was not sorry. It was such a beautiful feeling. So they lived together. Sometimes she was naughty. That was when the black monkey crept down the chimney and perched on the second button of her pinafore, but Oh, the lovely, sad time that came after the monkey had got hungry and crept back to nibble a bit of soot. The ‘beg-your-pardon’ moment when Father took her on his knee and said, ‘I knew it wasn’t my little daughter’ and Mother let her paint some ladies’ dresses out of a Fashion Book – it always gave her a ‘creepy’ feeling down her back. Wonderful things were happening all day to the Thoughtful Child. From the moment when she woke and watched ‘Jack-on-the-Wall’3 doing a dance all by himself for her to the time when she found the barley sugar on her pillow – all in the dark – while Mother was looking for the bed candle. Through the days Father drove away to find bread and butter, and Mother looked after the house, so she played there ever so many games. One nice one was ‘paying calls’. She tucked her hair under her sun-bonnet, held up her dress ‘like a train’ and visited all the houses in Box Hedge Street. There was the Pansy School where dear children with clean faces sang ‘Gentle Jesus’4 and

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other songs that she taught them very carefully – the long words slowly – the Violet Family, who played ‘Hide and Seek’ all the day long, the rich ‘Lady Hollyhock’ and Sweet William – a little common – she had heard him say ‘’andsome’ – but still very friendly. Some days there was no lawn at all, but only a great big sea, and she lived in a ‘teeny weeny’ house all by herself, and was a mermaid. Very fresh it was to swim about for as long as she liked, and dive and do ‘leg stroke’, and when she was tired creep back under the wheelbarrow – into her house I mean. Then there were Dinner Parties under the Fuchsia bush on the pink seat, when she’d do the cooking and make cakes of rich brown flour and water, and sliced geranium stalk for ‘leming’ peel. Truly it was easy to give dinner parties, the garden was so full of cooking things. Pepper in pepper pots at Mr Poppy’s, Eggs – ready poached – at Mr Daisy’s, and Caraway Seeds at Grandfather Dandelion’s. But the best times she had were with the Shadow Children in the wood at the bottom of the garden. When she went into the wood, somehow she never felt ‘jokey’, but almost like Church time. It was quite different to sit on the ground and look right up and listen to the trees talking, talking to each other. They always had so much to say, and she understood it, but she could not ‘say it back’ to anyone, not even to Father and Mother, because they would not understand now. They had stopped being Fairies for so long. Nobody ever said ‘Good morning’ or ‘Nice day’ or ‘don’t wet your shoes’ or ‘out loud’ things in the wood, yet the Thoughtful Child understood all these, and answered them inside her. Also if she had talked the Shadow Children would never have crept out of their little places and come to her, so she was quiet, and they came, all of them, and smiled at her. They taught her how to kiss a tree, where it could feel, how never to tread where the primroses sleep, how to make the bluebells ring, and, most of all, how to catch the sunbeams, and pop them into her mouth, and then jump till they shook down, down, right into her heart. She was always good at these times. Who could have been naughty when there were no chimneys to hold monkeys, and only a sunbeam lighting a fire in her heart. The Shadow Children were very thin. Oh, very thin indeed, but, as they always said in their ‘inside talk’ – ‘Who could be fat and still slip about as they did?’ Also, very often they jumped through key holes, in fact, the Thoughtful Child knew that keyholes were front doors to them, and no fat person ever could come through a keyhole ‘unsticked’. But the day It happened, the Thoughtful Child had been very happy with them, playing and dancing and sunbeam-catching, when, suddenly, she called out loud, like a person ‘Who are you, Shadow

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Children?’ She looked round and they were gone. She called and cried, but they did not come back. So at last she ran out of the wood across the garden, and right into Father’s room. It was late, so he had finished finding bread and butter. ‘Father, Farves,’ she sobbed, ‘they’re all gone, gone, my Shadow Children.’ Father’s face was very serious, yet glad, too. ‘Never mind’ he said, ‘Mother has found a real brother for you.’ ‘Oh’ she said, ‘let me see him, do.’ And she did. So small he was, and sunburnt, she thought. ‘I like my Shadow Children best’ she said, shaking her head gravely. So the days passed, and brother began to grow and stretch out his arms. The Thoughtful Child watched him with a quiet face, but most of the time she spent in the wood calling and whispering the sweetest ‘inside’ things, but the Shadow Children never answered. Brother used to be carried on to the lawn, never into the wood – it was too shady, but often when the Thoughtful Child looked at him, she saw his eyes looking that way, looking, looking, and she wondered about it. It was Summer when he came, so by the Winter he was really getting big, and thinking about ‘sitting up,’ so Mother told her. She smiled at that, but even smiling seemed like going to cry, now everything was funny – she was lonesome, lonesome, with almost a real pain. The Winter seemed to come very soon, when the Thoughtful Child stayed in the house all day, and looked out of the nursery window across the garden at the wood. And the garden was all white with snow, and the wood all still and soft looking. Everything was asleep, she thought. Perhaps the Shadow Children, too, were cuddled under the blanket and would pop their heads out when it was all gone. Brother got something the matter with him. He cried all the day until the Thoughtful Child was cross. Mother was with him always, and Father, too. She wandered about from room to room and looked carefully at all the keyholes. She wished Brother had never come. He could not play or talk inside him, and – and – Mother – Father – – – One night she woke up and heard someone crying in her room. It was Mother. Father held a light and Mother took the Thoughtful Child to her arms, and said ‘You are all that we have now, baby, baby’. Her face was very wet. She did not see Brother again, though Mother and Father were always with her now. They were sad, and never played, but just sat and looked at her, and did not even smile. All the house seemed quiet, even the furniture looked different. There was a ‘party-all-over’ feeling. The Thoughtful Child tried to walk on the carpets always, so as not to make a noise ever. Oh, how lonesome she was, till at last she went to Mother and said ‘I think I would like to go to bed’, and it was nicer there.

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But when the doctor came one day, he said ‘There is no snow in the garden now, Thoughtful Child. Would you like to get up and take a little walk?’ She grew hot all over her face. ‘Please’ she whispered. Mother put on her clothes and her fur coat and her cap. She went slowly down the stairs out of the front door across the garden and into the wood. No blanket now, but trees with little green babies. They waved at her. She stood still, and then someone caught hold of her hand. She looked down and saw it was brother smiling at her. ‘Brother,’ she said, in the ‘inside’ voice, ‘are you a shadow child?’ ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘I’ve come to play. Let’s go sunbeam-catching.’ All round her in a ring she saw the Shadow Children hand in hand, she and Brother together in the middle, and they danced round them and sang the Fairy Song. The Thoughtful Child went back to the house, still singing a little. In the hall, she called ‘Father – Mother’ and they came to her. She was laughing and dancing on one leg. ‘Don’t be sad, dears’ she said, ‘Brother’s here. I’ve been playing with him in the garden. He lives in the wood and he sends his love.’ And the sunbeams that she had swallowed grew so big that when she started laughing they flew out – all except one, and filled the whole house. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 126–9. 1. A child-like confusion with ‘The Dong with the Luminous Nose’ in Edward Lear’s Laughable Lyrics (1877). 2. ‘Little Johnny Head-in-Air’, one of the darkly moralistic tales for children in Heinrich Hoffmann, Struwwelpeter, 1844, first translated into English in 1848. 3. Jack-on-the-Wall usually refers to a game in which ‘jacks’ or stones are bounced against a wall, but KM is using it here for shadow-play. 4. ‘Gentle Jesus meek and mild’, the children’s rhyme by Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1742.

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Rewa Rewa1 felt that she had entered upon a new life, that she was purified, reborn. She slipped off her blouse, drew on a white jersey and

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short blue skirt, and went for a walk. The rain had ceased, the sea thundered against the brown rocks in the brown sand. The sky was faintly mirrored in the yellow puddles. On both sides of the road the toi toi2 branches bent in the wind to shake out their fluffy golden hair. She had never seen the bush more exquisite. Each separate tree fern seemed to take new life. Great bushes of briar berries heavy with silver rain drops flashed against the green hills, and once, listening intently, Rewa heard the sweet wild song of the pipiwharauroa.3 She walked rapidly, her head thrown back. She tore off a great branch of briar berries and swung them in one hand. The sea sounded sturdy, resolute, full – – It seemed to call upon her to live a boundless free glorious life, to revel in her physical strength, her mental fitness, to keep [?] the world. The cottage stood upon a great ledge of brown rock that stretched out to sea.4 I am beginning to find myself I am coming back, she said. She woke on Sunday morning chilled through, and raising herself on her elbow looked out over a grey waste of sea. The sky was full of hurrying grey clouds. Wind had risen during the night – it took the little cottage in a gigantic grip, shook it as a dog shakes a rat. A loose sheet of corrugated iron in the back yard kept banging against the outhouse – the persistent sound at last got on Rewa’s nerves. She thought she must get Jennie to hold it down with a large stone. She got out of her bunk and dressed rapidly, all the time staring out at the angry sea – it moved heavily, lumbering against the rock – just a glint of white teeth showing, just a suggestion of what it could do – – – She heard Jennie unlock the back door, saw her stumble across the yard, her apron round her head, and come back from the outhouse laden with manuka. Presently there was a strong clean smell of the wood burning, a crackling sound. Rewa slipped into a blue jersey and rough blue skirt, she brushed out her hair and plaited it in a long braid, slipped her feet into red mocassins and went into the living room. Jennie, setting the table, looked up anxiously. ‘You look fair done up Miss Rewa,’ she said, ‘it’s this atmosphere that does it, Miss. There’s going to be a terrible storm – the seagulls have all come close to the land Miss, regiments of them are on the wharf poles, Miss. Did you hear me get up in the night and bring in the tea towels Miss? They were tied to the line like and all twisted up like tape measures. I was lying awake Miss and I kept thinking of them till I got up. The wind was that bad I felt it would have torn my hair off and it was so scary Miss Rewa, to hear it getting up more and more.’

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‘There’s going to be a storm Jennie,’ said Rewa. ‘We must keep up a good fire, and I shall be in all day. You had better have the little stove in your bedroom – when you are sewing.’ ‘Oh yes thank you Miss, and there are plenty of books you can read.’ ‘Here let me make the toast Jennie – Oh, how good it smells.’ She knelt down before the fire, the light on her face and the short curls of her hair round her forehead. Jennie looked across at her, a little smile hovering round the corners of her mouth. ‘Oh Miss Rewa beggin your pardon but you don’t look more older than when you were twelve and used to come into the kitchen for buttered crusts.’ ‘Oh Jennie I’d forgotten,’ cried Rewa, ‘and sometimes it was dripping and salt and pepper you remember.’ ‘Yes Miss I remember. Your breakfast’s ready Miss Rewa. Have it while it’s hot.’ ‘We’ve still got some [. . .] strawberry,’ said Jennie. ‘I’ll walk over to the store this evening, Miss – Oh, it won’t be open – Sunday.’ ‘You can get in at the side door,’ said Rewa. ‘What do we need?’ ‘Carbonated soda, Miss, and some monkey brand.’ ‘Can’t they wait till tomorrow?’ ‘Well I don’t like feeling they’re not there, Miss Rewa.’ The table cleared, the red cloth straightened, Rewa went into the bedroom, pulled out her old trunk from under the bunk and found her writing case. She took it into the sitting room and sat down on the floor before the fire.5 My dear Friend, I wonder where you are and what doing? London England seems to me almost another planet. I cannot realise that only a few months ago we talked in your cool room and outside saw the leaves turning in the chestnut tree at the corner. That Life seems dead for me – buried surely. After my terrible sorrow London seemed to lose all her reality. I had thought of her as a gigantic Mother in whose womb were bred all the Great Ones of the earth, and then, suddenly she was barren, sterile – her body the burial ground of all who counted in the world. I could not have stayed there any longer. I’d rather be a frightened child lost in a funeral procession – yes, as bad as that – and came home – each day bitterly eager for your– and here I am. It is Summer. You I suppose are abroad or in London – I wish I knew. But today there is a storm threatening each moment to burst upon us. It is as though the shadow of its giant form is even now upon the sea, and the

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waves know and move restlessly, yet fiercely. Wind raises great pillars of sand up in the road, in the bush, the trees lashing together, and the long leaves of the flax bushes stream like ribbons of green and silver. How like me to have not told you even where I am but your fatal gift of divination [. . .] assures me that you know, that I never need explain. I see you now in this quiet room, scented with the manuka wood that burns so brilliantly. It is dull indeed except for the firelight. Quite plainly I see you, standing, your back to the fire, and saying ‘Rewa’ – the name was always a little foreign on your lips. Dear Friend, from my life I write to you in your life – and yet it seems that we never meet on any definite ground, that I found you in the borders of Nomans Land, that our hands met and knew each other there. The Future is quite in darkness but I know now that I am on the road again, back again, and that [this] time I journey with a fuller knowledge – a child no longer.

Rewa pushed back her chair, went over to the window, knelt on the little pink couch, pillowed her arms on the sill, and looked out over the sea. And it suddenly seemed to her that all those miles upon miles of leaden water were held together, were banded together, shepherded – to separate her from him. I shall never cross them again, she thought. I shall always be standing here on the rocks looking out over the water. Yet turning back into the room his warm presence seemed to fill it. In love surely, she thought, time is not, time never was, time cannot be. And does not the sun teach me that more than all else. Ebb and flow maybe, light and darkness, calm and storm, yet always such depths to discover, such treasures to find – – – And nothing is ever lost – cast up on the beach one moment, thrown on the barren rocks, but taken back again with the tide turning, surely, surely, into its great bosom. Not all the fires of the earth could quench the sea – but such helplessness – it was bitter in the mouth. I must give myself tomorrow, she thought – I am too much like my wild lawless Mother, and my baptisms of sea water – my baptisms and sacraments – it is in my blood now. I can promise nothing. She went back to her letter. You know, dear Friend, what store I set on your Friendship – so alone am I. Perhaps you are the only human being whom I love. This is not by nature of a confession – rather it is an affirmation – I am going to dedicate myself to my own, to my trees, my mountains, my solitary places, my little rivers – for in them it seems, I have my being. We shall not meet again but I shall keep the thought [?] of you in my heart until I die. That is all . . .

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She addressed the letter, sealed it. Pausing a moment, the wind seemed to have increased in violence and again as in those past years she heard the strange overtone and undertone as though it were crying and then it gathered together the voices of all those who had died, and the crying of all those who were not yet born. And it seemed that the wind called her and the children of the wind – the sea itself cried her name. She put on a pair of sandshoes, a long cloak – head covering was out of the question. In the quiet bedroom Jennie was stitching at a long holland cloth, her comfortable stockinged feet pressed against the bars of the stove, and singing to herself as she stitched ‘Come to Jesus’ – a pacification to the Almighty for her breaking of the Sabbath. Said Rewa, ‘I shall be out for some hours Jennie.’ Said Jennie, ‘Very well Miss Rewa – I’ll keep up the fire.’ At her touch the door burst open. With great difficulty she closed it again. And then the wind seemed to her like a giant child, waiting, watching for a moment’s peephole to rush in – to invade the cottage, to blow it off the very face of the globe. There were no flowers left in the garden and storm-beaten, her carnations and marigolds sprawled across the path. She did not [know] exactly where she was going but held to the fence a moment and looked up and down the road. Nothing to be seen. She suddenly started almost running in the direction of the yellow clay bush path that so many years ago she had found and loved. Once in the bush it was easier – she was more sheltered, though the sound was more violent. It seemed that every tree had found voice. Rewa looked round her – the living [?] green, the wild sweet scented [. . .] tasted of the Forest leaf she bit in her mouth – all these entered in to her – – – She climbed quickly, catching at trees and branches, wrenching her hand. A long arm of lawyer6 pulled her skirt – the leaves brilliantly scarlet, the plant looked as though it had fed on blood. Sticking to the supplejacks, almost swinging herself upwards. And at last the top was reached and the bush behind. She slipped on to the grass plateau, the great ledge overhanging the sea – here unprotected [?] the wind spent its fury. ‘I have had a [. . .]’ it cried ‘and now lo you are the sacrifice.’ She didn’t have time to stand up but crawled on hands and knees to the top of the land. Looking round she saw the whole depth down bush covered, and below her lay the sea – right out to the open ocean it spread, leant against the sky, dead cheek against dead cheek. But clumps of manuka grew upon the cliff and Rewa lay down in it. The plant was strongly sprung and thick with leaf and flower so that it pillowed her. She was warm and dry and tried with her long climbing to laugh silently. The sea looked swollen with agony – it broke

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against rocks and sand-shelters [?] with a harsh shattering sound. And then suddenly the rain fell in great gouts. The sky seemed let loose upon the earth. Rewa did not move – the rain beat upon her, drenched her thin clothes – but she looked out at the swirl of waters almost smiling. ‘You must satisfy me now, Oh my Mother,’ she said, ‘I have come back to the heart of Nature – take me, take me.’ As she lay there, rain-beaten, wind-tossed, on her frail body even to the roots of her hair, she felt the thundering of the sea. Nature spoke. ‘I am desire,’ said the sea, ‘I crave all, insatiably I long, untiringly I hold.’ ‘I am breath’ said the wind. ‘I blow over all the waste places of the earth and make them filled with my voice.’ ‘I am that which holds seed,’ said the earth. ‘I am that which receives and gives back again, ever more bountifully, from the life in the plant, and so I justify my being.’ ‘I am healing,’ said the rain, ‘the ugliness and sorrow that has been before I wipe away with my tears. I fill the barren valleys with running water.’ ‘I am love,’ said the bush, ‘for I am blown hither by the breath of the wind, conceived in the womb of the earth, roused by the rain. And I bloom in great waves like the waves of the sea.’ ‘I am desire,’ said the sea. ‘Insatiably [I] crave, hold all and give all, I sink myself in all that I possess, and yet I am I and changeless and untouched by the sinking. I am drawn up to the sky by the sun, and yet I return and am the same.’ Rewa stood upright, stretched out her arms. Darkness shrouded the world. Through the storm she heard footsteps behind her, wheeled round sharply, her terror distorting her face. But he came forward and caught her in his arms. ‘You,’ she said, ‘you’. Their voices were carried away by the wind; the bush and sea seemed to thunder all that [they] said. ‘I have come for my own,’ he said, holding her, her long braids of hair blown across his face. She clung passionately. ‘I am desire,’ said the sea, ‘I crave all, insatiably I long, untiringly I hold.’ Notes U Text: KMN, 1, p. 161, pp. 220–4. [?May–June 1908]7 1. Another instance of KM giving a Maori name to a non-Maori character. 2. A name for tall plumed grasses (Cortaderia). 3. Also known as the shining cuckoo. 4. The story is set in the Beauchamp seaside cottage at Downes Point, Days

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Bay. Until here the story was written in one notebook, and then continued in another. 5. At this point the MS is interrupted by KM writing ‘The New Zealander’, and on the next line, ‘K. Mansfield’. 6. Commonly known as bush lawyer, the hooked and clinging forest plant, Rubus cissoides. 7. KM wrote to her sister Vera [?May–June 1908], ‘I have been spending days at the Library reading and writing a novel – entitled The Youth of Rewa – it is very much in embryo just at present’ (CLKM, 1, p. 46).

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The Tiredness of Rosabel At the corner of Oxford Circus Rosabel bought a bunch of violets, and that was practically the reason why she had so little tea – for a scone and a boiled egg and a cup of cocoa at Lyons1 are not ample sufficiency after a hard day’s work in a millinery establishment. As she swung on to the step of the Atlas ’bus,2 grabbed her skirt with one hand, and clung to the railing with the other, Rosabel thought she would have sacrificed her soul for a good dinner – roast duck and green peas, chestnut stuffing, pudding with brandy sauce – something hot and strong and filling. She sat down next to a girl very much her own age who was reading ‘Anna Lombard’3 in a cheap, papercovered edition, and the rain had tear-spattered the pages. Rosabel looked out of the windows; the street was blurred and misty, but light striking on the panes turned their dullness to opal and silver and the jewellers’ shops, seen through this, were fairy palaces. Her feet were horribly wet and she knew the bottom of her skirt and petticoat would be coated with black, greasy mud. There was a sickening smell of warm humanity – it seemed to be oozing out of everybody in the ’bus – and everybody had the same expression, sitting so still, staring in front of them. How many times had she read these advertisements – ‘Sapolio Saves Time, Saves Labor’4 – ‘Heinz’s Tomato Sauce’ – and the inane, annoying dialogue between doctor and judge concerning the superlative merits of ‘Lamplough’s Pyretic Saline’.5 She glanced at the book which the girl read so earnestly, mouthing the words in a way that Rosabel detested, licking her first finger and thumb each time that she turned the page. She could not see very clearly; it was something about a hot, voluptuous night, a band playing, and a girl with lovely, white shoulders. Oh, heavens! Rosabel stirred suddenly

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and unfastened the two top buttons of her coat – she felt almost stifled. Through her half-closed eyes the whole row of people on the opposite seat seemed to resolve into one fatuous, staring face – and this was her corner. She stumbled a little on her way out and lurched against the girl next her. ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Rosabel, but the girl did not even look up. Rosabel saw that she was smiling as she read. Westbourne Grove looked as she had always imagined Venice to look at night, mysterious, dark; even the hansoms were like gondolas dodging up and down, and the lights trailing luridly – tongues of flame licking the wet street – magic fish swimming in the Grand Canal. She was more than glad to reach Richmond Road, but from the corner of the street until she came to No. 26 she thought of those four flights of stairs. Oh, why four flights! It was really criminal to expect people to live so high up. Every house ought to have a lift, something simple and inexpensive, or else an electric staircase like the one at Earl’s Court6 – but four flights! When she stood in the hall and saw the first flight ahead of her and the stuffed albatross head on the landing, glimmering ghostlike in the light of the little gas jet, she almost cried. Well, they had to be faced; it was very like bicycling up a steep hill, but there was not the satisfaction of flying down the other side. . . . Her own room at last! She closed the door, lit the gas, took off her hat and coat, skirt, blouse; unhooked her old flannel dressing gown from behind the door, pulled it on, then unlaced her boots – on consideration her stockings were not wet enough to change. She went over to the washstand; the jug had not been filled again to-day, there was just enough water to soak the sponge, and the enamel was coming off the basin – that was the second time she had scratched her chin. It was just seven o’clock. If she pulled the blind up and put out the gas, it was much more restful – Rosabel did not want to read. So she knelt down on the floor, pillowing her arms on the windowsill . . . just one little sheet of glass between her and the great, wet world outside! She began to think of all that had happened during the day. Would she ever forget that awful woman in the gray mackintosh who had wanted a trimmed motor cap – ‘something purple with something rosy each side’ – or the girl who had tried on every hat in the shop and then said she would ‘call in to-morrow and decide definitely’. Rosabel could not help smiling; the excuse was worn so thin. But there had been one other – a girl with beautiful red hair and a white skin and eyes the colour of that green ribbon shot with gold they had got from Paris last week. Rosabel had seen her electric brougham7 at the door; a man had come in with her, quite a young man, and so well dressed.

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‘What is it exactly that I want, Harry?’ she said, as Rosabel took the pins out of her hat, untied her veil, and gave her a hand mirror. ‘You must have a black hat,’ he answered, ‘a black hat with a feather that goes right round it and then round your neck and ties in a bow under your chin, and the ends tuck into your belt – a decent-sized feather.’ The girl glanced at Rosabel laughingly: ‘Have you any hats like that?’ They had been very hard to please; Harry would demand the impossible, and Rosabel was almost in despair. Then she remembered the big, untouched box upstairs. ‘Oh, one moment madam,’ she had said; ‘I think perhaps I can show you something that will please you better.’ She had run up, breathlessly, cut the cords, scattered the tissue paper, and yes, there was the very hat – rather large, soft, with a great, curled feather, and a black velvet rose, nothing else. They had been charmed. The girl had put it on and then handed it to Rosabel. ‘Let me see how it looks on you,’ she said, frowning a little, very serious indeed. Rosabel turned to the mirror and placed it on her brown hair, then faced them. ‘Oh, Harry, isn’t it adorable!’ the girl cried. ‘I must have that!’ She smiled again at Rosabel. ‘It suits you, beautifully.’ A sudden ridiculous feeling of anger had seized Rosabel. She longed to throw the lovely, perishable thing in the girl’s face, and bent over the hat, flushing. ‘It’s exquisitely finished off inside, madam,’ she said. The girl swept out to her brougham, and left Harry to pay and bring the box with him. ‘I shall go straight home and put it on before I come out to lunch with you,’ Rosabel heard her say. The man leant over her as she made out the bill; then, as he counted the money into her hand – ‘Ever been painted?’ he said. ‘No,’ said Rosabel shortly, realizing swiftly the change in his voice, the slight tinge of insolence, of familiarity. ‘Oh, well, you ought to be,’ said Harry. ‘You’ve got such a damned pretty little figure.’ Rosabel did not pay the slightest attention. How handsome he had been! She had thought of no one else all day; his face fascinated her; she could see clearly his fine, straight eyebrows, and his hair grew back from his forehead with just the slightest suspicion of crisp curl; his laughing, disdainful mouth. She saw again his slim hands counting the money into hers. . . . Rosabel suddenly pushed the hair back from her face; her forehead

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was hot . . . if those slim hands could rest one moment! The luck of that girl! Suppose they changed places. Rosabel would drive home with him. Of course they were in love with each other, but not engaged – very nearly – and she would say: ‘I won’t be one moment.’ He would wait in the brougham while her maid took the hat box up the stairs, following Rosabel. Then the great white and pink bedroom with roses everywhere in dull silver vases. She would sit down before the mirror, and the little French maid would fasten her hat and find her a thin, fine veil and another pair of white suede gloves – a button had come off the ones she had worn that morning. She had scented her furs and gloves and handkerchief, taken a big muff and run downstairs. The butler opened the door, Harry was waiting, they drove away together. . . . That was life, thought Rosabel! On the way to the Carlton they stopped at Gerard’s. Harry bought her great sprays of Parma violets, filled her hands with them. ‘Oh, they are sweet,’ she said, holding them against her face. ‘It is as you always should be,’ said Harry, ‘with your hands full of violets.’ (Rosabel realized that her knees were getting stiff; she sat down on the floor and leant her head against the wall.) Oh, that lunch! The table, covered with flowers; a band hidden behind a grove of palms playing music that fired her blood like wine; the soup, and oysters, and pigeons, and creamed potatoes, and champagne, of course, and afterwards coffee and cigarettes. She would lean over the table fingering her glass with one hand, talking with that charming gaiety which Harry so appreciated. Afterwards a matinée, something that gripped them both, and then tea at the ‘Cottage’. ‘Sugar? Milk? Cream?’ The little homely questions seemed to suggest a joyous intimacy. And then home again in the dusk, and the scent of the Parma violets seemed to drench the air with their sweetness. ‘I’ll call for you at nine,’ he said as he left her. The fire had been lighted in her boudoir, the curtains drawn; there were a great pile of letters waiting her – invitations for the Opera, dinners, balls, a week-end on the river, a motor tour – she glanced through them listlessly as she went upstairs to dress. A fire in her bedroom too, and her beautiful, shining dress spread on the bed – white tulle over silver, silver shoes, silver scarf, a little silver fan. Rosabel knew that she was the most famous woman at the ball that night; men paid her homage, a foreign prince desired to be presented to this English wonder. Yes, it was a voluptuous night, a band playing, and her lovely white shoulders. . . . But she became very tired. Harry took her home, and came in with her for just one moment. The fire was out in the drawing room but the

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sleepy maid waited for her in her boudoir. She took off her cloak, dismissed the servant, and went over to the fireplace, and stood peeling off her gloves; the firelight shone on her hair. Harry came across the room and caught her in his arms: ‘Rosabel, Rosabel, Rosabel!’ . . . Oh the haven of those arms, and she was very tired! (The real Rosabel, the girl crouched on the floor in the dark, laughed aloud, and put her hand up to her hot mouth.) Of course they rode in the park next morning, the engagement had been announced in the Court Circular, all the world knew, all the world was shaking hands with her. . . . They were married shortly afterward at St George’s, Hanover Square, and motored down to Harry’s old ancestral home for the honeymoon; the peasants in the village curtseyed to them as they passed; under the folds of the rug he pressed her hands convulsively. And that night she wore again her white and silver frock. She was tired after the journey and went upstairs to bed – quite early. . . . The real Rosabel got up from the floor and undressed slowly, folding her clothes over the back of a chair. She slipped over her head her coarse, calico nightdress, and took the pins out of her hair – the soft, brown flood of it fell round her, warmly. Then she blew out the candle and groped her way into bed, pulling the blankets and grimy ‘honeycomb’ quilt closely round her neck, cuddling down in the darkness. . . . So she slept and dreamed, and smiled in her sleep, and once threw out her arm to feel for something which was not there, dreaming still. And the night passed. Presently the cold fingers of dawn closed over her uncovered hand; gray light flooded the dull room. Rosabel shivered, drew a little gasping breath, sat up. And because her heritage was that tragic optimism which is all too often the only inheritance of Youth, still half asleep, she smiled, with a little nervous tremor round her mouth. Notes U Text: Typescript NLC. Signed and dated ‘K. Mansfield, June 1908’.7 SCOS. 1. Lyons Corner Houses, a chain of inexpensive tearooms. 2. Buses of the Atlas and Waterloo Bus Company. 3. Anna Lombard (1901), by Victoria Cross (Annie Sophie Carnie), a sensational novel set in India and Burma, with inter-racial sex, cholera, the killing of the heroine’s child, and enduring male devotion, before an instructive Christian ending. A glance at Chapter 1 would provide the details KM mentions. 4. Sapolio, a brand of soap famous for its extensive advertising campaigns.

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5. Lamplough’s Pyretic Saline, advertised as an antidote for disorders of the stomach, liver, and kidneys, a proprietary medicine marketed by Henry Lamplough. 6. KM’s reference in the story to the ‘electric staircase at Earl’s Court’ presents an intractable problem, as the first escalator in the London Underground was not installed at Earl’s Court station until 1911. Alpers’s case for the story being written in Wellington before KM’s return to London in July 1908, apart from the signed typescript, whose date conceivably may have been written in error, is that it was typed on the same machine as ‘The Thoughtful Child’, another Wellington story from 1908, and that KM’s phrase ‘the tragic optimism of youth’ was twice used in letters she wrote from there. He further argues that her writing so precisely of the streets near Beauchamp Lodge in Paddington, a hostel for female music students beside the Grand Union Canal, where she stayed on returning to London, is explained by her already being familiar with this area before going back to Wellington in late 1906. (See Alpers, p. 546.) 7. An early motor car, with the driver seated outside a closed compartment.

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Study: The Death of a Rose It is a sensation that can never be forgotten, to sit in solitude, in semi-darkness, and to watch the slow, sweet, shadowful death of a Rose. Oh, to see the perfection of the perfumed petals being changed ever so slightly, as though a thin flame had kissed each with hot breath, and where the wounds had bled the colour is savagely intense . . . I have before me such a Rose, in a thin, clear glass, and behind it a little spray of scarlet leaves. Yesterday it was beautiful with a certain serene, tearful, virginal beauty; it was strong and wholesome, and the scent was fresh and invigorating. Today it is heavy and languid with the loves of a thousand strange Things, who, lured by the gold of my candlelight, came in the Purple Hours, and kissed it hotly on the mouth, and sucked it into their beautiful lips with tearing, passionate desire. . . . So now it dies . . . And I listen . . . for under each petal fold there lies the ghost of a dead melody, as frail and as full of suggestion as a ray of light upon a shadowed pool. Oh, divine sweet Rose. Oh, exotic and elusive and deliciously vague Death. From the tedious sobbing and gasping, and hoarse guttural

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screaming, and uncouth repulsive movements of the body of the dying Man, I draw apart, and, smiling, I lean over you and watch your dainty, delicate Death. Notes Text: Triad, Dunedin, 1 July 1908, p. 35. Signed ‘K. Mansfield’.

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‘Youth and Age’ Youth and Age walked hand in hand beneath the trees. A strange, half-frozen day, yet the air was drenched with thin sunshine, and the blue sky full of white winged clouds . . . The garden beds were smothered under a mauve mist of Michaelmas daisies, burning with the dusky fires of chrysanthemum blossoms. In the dew pearled grass white daisies, like butterflies, quivered and shone. Age walked slowly. The riotous Autumn wind blew her black skirt about her shapeless body; her strange face gleamed like ivory in the silver setting of her hair. And she stared with faded eyes at the blackened boughs of the trees, at the leaves, falling in a fluttering crowd upon the dew pearled grass. One leaf touched her cheek – God! It was like a kiss from the withered mouth of Death! And in the bare trees she saw her naked soul, to be tossed, defenceless, in the fury of a thousand tempests, to be torn, limb from limb, by Winter, by her last lover, by Death . . . Her heart beat in her body like a frightened bird – a caged bird that beat its wings – in vain – in vain – Youth suddenly stood still, her laughing child face lit with sunlight, and stretched out her white arms, her rosy tipped fingers to the blackened boughs. Ever the leaves fell in a shining shower upon her radiant face and bosom. Her heart beat in her body like a restless bird, like a strong bird that if it did but spread its wings would fly away – away – ‘See,’ she cried to Age, ‘see the kisses of Summer, the golden leaves from the fairy book of Spring.’ Notes U Text: KMN, 1, p. 203. Signed and dated ‘K. Mansfield I.X. 08’.

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Vignette: ‘I look out through the window’ I look out through the window. A rhododendron bush sways restlessly, mysteriously, to and fro . . . The bare trees stand crucified against the opalescent sky. In the next room someone is playing the piano. The sun shines whitely, touches the rhododendron leaves with soft colour. To and fro the branches sway, stretching upwards, outwards, so mysteriously; it is as though they moved in a dream. Through the open window, the cold air, blowing in, stirs the heavy folds of the curtains . . . What is being played in the next room . . . Does the music float through this room – and out of the window to the garden? Does the plant hear it, and answer to the sound? The music, too, is strangely restless . . . it is seeking something . . . perhaps this mystic, green plant, so faintly touched with sun colour . . . . . . I dream . . . And there is no plant, no music – only a restless mysterious seeking, a stretching upwards to the light – and outwards – a dream like movement. What is it? I look out into the garden at the bare trees crucified against the opalescent sky . . . The sun is smothered under the white wing of a cloud – in the shadowed garden the plant is trembling. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 200–1. Signed and dated ‘K. Mansfield. II.XII.08’.

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Almost a Tragedy: The Cars on Lambton Quay He told himself that he had managed that rather neatly – in fact he felt quite proud as he followed her through the turnstile. There was not very much time to do it in, certainly, but he still thought that there might be enough – the time it took to walk from Kelburne Avenue (where they left her mother) to the time when they would arrive at the Government station, where several of her friends would be waiting to

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see her off. During those minutes (not walking too slowly since they had left rather late) he must explain why he had acted so curiously the day before, and try to come to a definite understanding. With some girls, of course, the time would be too short, but Constantia was quick in the up-take, and not, he thought, disposed to be unfriendly. Naturally, she would expect an explanation, but some reasonable one would satisfy her. A little cluster of people blocked the way to the Quay. He steered her past them, and when they were fairly going along the wide street he began. ‘Oh, I wanted to tell you one thing, Miss Harrison.’ She turned inquiring eyes on him. ‘I wanted to say how it –’ ‘Burr, bz-z-z-z, whoo-oo-oo . . .’ said a tramcar, thundering past. He waited patiently till speech was again possible, and found that she was telling him brightly about Miss Roch’s sister. Miss Roch was the heroine of yesterday’s episode and it seemed that Constantia had a great admiration for her sister. The little story ended pleasantly, and he began again. ‘Er, as I was saying, Miss Harrison, I wanted to tell you –’ Burr-r-r-r went another car, and before its noise had mitigated it was joined by a car from the opposite direction, clamouring along the Quay with a deafening half roar, half sob. It was her voice again that tested the comparative silence. ‘You were going to tell me, Mr Hayste, that you had tried to get that book I wanted, weren’t you? It was awfully good of you to trouble, but please don’t bother any more. I have it now. By the merest chance Mr –’ Brr-r-r-r . . . oo-oo . . . bang . . . bump – He inclined his ear and tried to catch the name of the man who had been so fortunate, but though he could see that she was shouting it at him, not a word could he distinguish, and as he waited she shook her head with a pretty gesture of despair, and abandoned the attempt. ‘It was really very good of him, wasn’t it?’ she said when the turmoil ceased, ‘because he had only overheard what I said to you, but he thought he had seen it the day before I went to look.’ He? Not for worlds would Hayste have asked who he was. He knew too well; his heart told him. But he would explain; he must explain, and hurry too, for now they were past Woodward Street. ‘I am afraid we shall be late,’ she said, hastening her steps. Br-r-r-r . . . whoo-zoo-oo . . . bang . . . A procession of cars came up the Quay, drowning their voices as they passed.

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‘Confound these cars,’ he said to himself. He said it aloud, but that didn’t matter. He crossed the road, which made no difference, as the cars go down the centre, and it was only so much waste time, since one cannot talk at a crossing. Burr . . . yaha! . . . Have at you! . . . boo-hoo . . . ‘It would not do to try and converse in this street, would it?’ she asked with that brightness he found so difficult to appreciate under the circumstances, and he noticed distressfully that they were passing the Supreme Court. Hardly any time left now. ‘I wanted to tell you why I left so hurriedly yesterday,’ he said in a lull, the words tumbling over each other. ‘To tell me? Why?’ her pretty eyebrows went up. Only two blocks left now, the long stretch past the Government Buildings, and the next. ‘Oh,’ she cried, as a car br-r-r-r past. ‘There are Nancy and Eileen. See they are getting out at the next stopping place to wait for us.’ Only this one block, and nothing said. Distraction!! He stood still and looked at her. It was for a moment like the dreadful calm after a tornado. ‘Constantia,’ he said, rapidly, earnestly, ‘I love you with all my heart. Will you marry me?’ Br-r-r-r . . . whoo-hoo . . . bz-z-z . . . the strenuous life . . . yah . . . oo-hoo . . . A reprieve! A reprieve! No, bang, bump! Three trams were passing. Constantia nodded. Notes Text: Dominion, Wellington, 23 December 1908, p. 11. Unsigned.

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A God, One Day on Mount Olympus Cupid one day grew tired and fell asleep, his golden head pillowed against the barren breast of Minerva. Looking down upon his loveliness she grew sorrowful and then dreamy, and when he woke and begged her play with him, beating upon her with his child hands, she borrowed a reed that Pan had fashioned for a pipe, and dipping it into the shadowed water of Lethe that flows out but remains always, shadowed, silent, she blew a bubble into the shining air and coloured the heart of it with her dreams. And Cupid, laughing, clutched at it with his child hands but it blew up and away into the air – tremulously lovely – blew away away over the world. Cupid and Minerva watched it fascinated. ‘See, see,’ said Minerva, ‘the little people – how they fly after it, see – they forsake their houses and fields, their wives and children, [. . .] their women from them and heed them not – and all run after my bubble.’ She clapped her hands and laughed. ‘I do not like such games,’ said Cupid, plucking out a wing feather and sticking it jauntily into his golden curls. ‘Such games are never for people.’ Notes U Text: KMN, 1, p. 216.

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‘He met her again on the Pier at Eastbourne’1 He met her again on the Pier at Eastbourne – the wind had blown her hair in soft curls round her face, wild rose colour stained her neck, 143

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her red mouth trembled – – – The wind was terribly strong. She was trying to hold her skirts down, laughing in a childish eager way – – – That is how Tim saw her after four years. Her letter was forgotten, his suspicions he pitched from him as one throws a pebble far into the sea – the fact of her, the reality of her, the beauty of her made his strong heart tremble – he almost stumbled forward holding out his hands – Miriam – ‘Life what a gale,’ said Miriam. ‘You haven’t changed a day Tim, except you’re look. . . .’ And one day when he bought her a bunch of daffodils she burst out crying, holding the flowers up to her face. ‘Oh what a fool I am’ she said, ‘and the sticky stuff in the stems will stain all this white lace.’ She stood under a lamp, the yellow shade made her hair and face and body shine like gold – like a daffodil herself. ‘Well what’s the price?’ said Miriam, laughing softly, taking a little bottle of perfume from the table and sprinkling her handkerchief. ‘4 2/4 and a packet of pins thrown in.’ She looked at him over her bare shoulder and Howard sprang up and caught her in his arms. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘So much beauty – my God, I could kill you.’ In the cool of the evening when Twilight had softly entered the garden, the shadow of her presence lingering upon every tree and shrub and plant, Miriam could remain indoors no longer. She got up stiffly from her knees and strapped and corded the tin box that she had been packing so laboriously, with so many eager hopes, vague half regretful desires and memories folded among the plain linen and simple childish treasures. In the faded light the pink wallpaper, stripped now of her Christmas cards and Pictorial Supplements, of her Bible Class certificates, and paper fans, looked hideous – blotched, like the face of her Father when he was angry. She shuddered and walked over to the window. The trees waved to her, she smelt the wild sweetness of the wallflower growing by the gate, the soft musky perfume of the little white pansies that spread down the garden like moths – – – ‘I’ll pick a big bunch and take them with me,’ she said, nodding gravely. In the kitchen her Mother was bathing her younger children. Miriam heard their laughing voices – ‘Can’t I splash, look, Mum, look at me swimming’, but as she passed through Silence fell – the children looked up in sudden awe of this tall black sister playing with them it only seemed yesterday and now going to London all alone and with her hair up – – – The Mother raised her hot face and looked anxiously at Miriam. ‘Going out for a spell?’ she asked. ‘No Mother, I thought I’d get some flowers to take with me tomorrow.’

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‘Oh alright. Take the pertater knife – it’s on the plate rack – there. You won’t mess yer hands then. Expect anybody along Mirrie.’ At the question her tired face relaxed, a little smile hovered round the corners of her mouth. Miriam blushed faintly. ‘Oh I don’t know, Mother.’ She stepped out of the house quickly, down the narrow path to the wall flowers. So strong the scent it almost seemed to drag her into it. She knelt down on the grass border and cut a great spray of them, then a pink full blown rose, some mignonette, a handful of sweet william. Twilight had deepened into darkness. She gathered the flowers up in the skirt of her dress and stood upright. In the dark someone quite close beside her called her – ‘Mirrie’. Miriam turned round sharply, the colour flooding her face and throat. She had been waiting all the time – the flowers were only an excuse – and yet now that he came she wanted to fly back into the house – her heart beat in her body like a frightened bird. ‘How quietly you came.’ ‘I went first to the house, through the back way but your Mother told me you were out here, so I walked through, over the grass – that’s why you didn’t hear. I wanted to surprise you.’ She laughed awkwardly. All the time they stood facing each other, M. holding the flowers gathered up in her skirt, Tim clasping and unclasping his hands and kicking a stone which was firmly wedged into the pathway. He seemed to regard that a far more important item than the fact of Miriam, so few yards away. She bit her lip. The silence seemed to hang trembling, a thin veil between them, a breath at any moment to be torn apart by something new and strange. Miriam looked down too, at the stone in the path. Ah, at last he kicked it out of the path, sent it flying out of the garden. Miriam smiled, for something had happened to her [. . .], yet trembled – – – In the dark garden Tim came nearer to her. ‘Mirrie’ he said, ‘Mirrie’. The rough passion of his voice startled her so much that she dropped her flowers – they lay heaped about her feet. Tim caught her by the arms. ‘Oh girl’ he said ‘I’ve been in a Hell all day, thinking what might happen to you in London. It’s no joke for a girl like you, Mirrie. You’re young and you’re innocent. Why you don’t know any more about real Life than a lamb in Spring.’ He shook her roughly as though it was her fault. ‘Oh’ he said, ‘I’d like to take you up in my arms and carry you away right now and never let you see anything else.’ ‘Don’t Tim’ said Mirrie. Tears started to her eyes, ran down her cheeks.

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It was his thorough good sense, his innate spirit of gentleness, his unfailing patience and self-sacrifice which angered Miriam more than anything else. Perhaps if he had shown her less regard she would have felt for him a tolerance if nothing else, but as it was – – – Miriam was a child still – one of those women who go through Life’s greatest experiences and remain children still. She loved to drift with the current but the current had to be strong. Till the world ends – vote or no vote, sexual equality or no sexual equality, that will be the type of woman who considers herself cheated of her rightful position if her husband does not throw the fire irons at her – the E.V. attitude,2 the Jane Eyre passion will be upon the sex while women are women.3 Sacrifice is her primary and fundamental attribute. She is given to and does not give. Man must take the initiative – they are as uncommon now as they were 1909 years ago, but Miriam had been spoiled and had drunk of wine so strong that she craved it ever, that all else sickened her. She had warmed herself by a fire so fierce that anything less passionate chilled her. When Tim took her tenderly in his arms, kissed her brow and chin and hair, it seemed a wild beast fought and tore – – – ravaging with hunger, it smelt meat and was denied it, and beat against the bars in vain. Her mental state of mind affected her physically. She grew tired easily and was querulous – upset by the least unexpected noise or excitement. [. . .] to go [. . .]. Hypercritical of Tim. Noticed the way he walked, held his head, put on his clothes. Was offended by all that he did. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 217–19. 1. A small settlement across the harbour from Wellington, close to Day’s Bay. 2. English Version (of the Bible). 3. Mr Rochester’s initial harshness attracted the heroine in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847).

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Prose1 1) Now a certain young man of the city fell sick. And he could find no cure for his sickness; it was as though a flame burnt by day and by night in his heart, and all his strength was gone out of him.

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And he went unto his friends and told them of his ill, but they mocked at him and laughed at him with their mouths and cried:– ‘Verily, thy cure is not hard to find. Thou must fain seek a nurse whose lips are golden with wine and who weareth a little Order of the Garter from the Burlington Arcade. Fie upon thee! Tush! We will have none of thee.’ But he was sore troubled. And the women whom he had loved left him for there was no more light in his eyes, neither was there any sound of laughter in his speech. And his days were as stale as the Buttonhole of Yesterday; his nights were barren of beauty. But, beloved, certain of his Pater’s Friends heard of his sickness and came unto him with fair words and spake with him softly. ‘Why goest thou not unto the Country House of thy Pater and tarry there awhile? Perchance the tumult of thy days and the burden of thy life has wearied thee. The full flower of thy manhood thou canst not wantonly fling away, and the treasures of thy youth thou canst not count as nothingness. For lo, thy oats are yet as seeds to be sown. Haply the Vicar hath a daughter or thy sister hath a Confidential Friend . . .’ But he cried out and spake against them. Bitter words issued out of his mouth. ‘Go ye your ways,’ he commanded, ‘as for me I am sick unto death of your fox faces.’ And he arose and went into the street and took a Taxi unto Harley Street – yea unto the Hives of the doctors fared he sorrowfully. And he went to one and to another and stamped his feet upon their Expensive Velvet Pile Carpets when they spake unto him of young girls and Happy English Homes. ‘Now verily,’ he cried, ‘I am about to die. Ye stand before me in your rich apparel – yea even unto the bald crowns of your heads are ye polished. Yet there is nothing beneath this polish. Ye are Old Boots in New Blacking.’ And his heart was angered against them. Even the Taxi he dismissed with loud words. For he said unto himself, ‘all men are robbers.’ 2) And as he journeyed towards Piccadilly Circus he met a goodly procession of Sandwich Men bearing placards covered with Cryptic Signs and strange lettering. ‘Alas,’ said the young man, ‘would that I could change places with one of these. For though their appearance speaketh of long fasting, a Sick Heart is heavier to bear than an Empty Belly.’ But they marvelled to see him standing at that hour and alone in such a place, and certain of the more Flagrant Spirits among them made obeisance giving unto him one of the scrolls which they carried ...

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prose Consult Dayêésha Keephfâ Central Africa’s Only Mud Diviner. For Many Years Confidential Advisor to All the Provincial Harems. Complete Diagnosis of Your Heart and its Needs in One Interview Mascot Motto:– ‘A Cracked Heart Never Breaks.’ 10–1 New Bond Street.

Save for the timely presence of the Traffic a strange cry would have fallen upon the ears of the multitude. ‘Lo,’ said the young man, pulling out his watch, and seeing that he had yet an hour to wait before the Desert of the Piccadilly Circus Tube Station blossomed with his Last Rose, ‘this is the hand of Fate. Behold I will hie me thither.’ And he girded up his loins and he went. And he journeyed swiftly unto That Place. 3) Now when he had come thither he climbed up a flight of stairs that were narrow and uncarpeted, neither was there any linoleum to cover their nakedness. And on the first floor he tarried and knocked upon a door that bore the marks of many fingers – yea, the marks of the Fingers of Secrecy and the marks of the Fingers of Suède saw he upon that door. And it was opened unto him. And he entered a little room that was hung with red draperies and the skins of wild beasts and the skins of rabbits were upon that floor. And seated before a table he saw a little man having a Red Quill behind his ear. ‘At last,’ said the Old Man, ‘is my fame noised abroad in the market places of the Great City.’ ‘It was in Piccadilly Circus that I read of thee.’ ‘What seekest thou?’ ‘I am sick of a sore disease, yea, verily, my heart is sick and not all the wise men who dwell in the valley of the shadow of Harley Street can cure me of my ill. I pray ye, comfort me. For my cigarette is as hay in my mouth. Yea, even though I pay a guinea a Bundle for my Asparagas it is but as a green herb that must be swallowed.’ And the Old Man took a Flat Dish and spread upon it a mixture of water and earth. From the red pot of a geranium flower took he the earth and from the window box of the Masseuse next to him, stole he yet further. And he mixed it and placed it in the hands of the young man. ‘Now, by Livingstone,2 thou shalt see what thou shalt see’ he cried, turning up his eyes until they were like unto eggs that have been poachèd. And he began to speak but the words were in a strange tongue. ‘Speak thee more clearly,’ demanded the young man, ‘for thy mouth

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is so full of false teeth that I cannot hear what thou speakest unto me.’ But he heeded him not. Now as the young man sat there silent and weary, a square patch of sunlight lay upon the floor and he saw suddenly the shadow of a bird that flew across it – once and then again. ‘Ah,’ he cried, ‘I know. It is the bird only that can cure my ill. It is the bird that I have seen in the sunlight on thy floor. Could I but hold that bird upon my heart and I were well again.’ ‘Behold,’ spake Dayêésha Keephfâ, ‘thou hast consulted the oracle and it is made plain unto thee. It is so. But thou canst never find the bird, for it flies by night across the world, neither does it brood in any tree. Thou art doomed to wander over the face of the globe and find it not. No hearthstone shall know the sight of thy slippers. Thou shalt not be aroused from bed to make warm the food of thy children.’ But the Young Man laughed him to scorn and cried unto him with a loud voice:– ‘Fool, I shall find the bird; thou art little better than the rest of them.’ And he arose, knocking over the table of the Old Man in his flight so that the ink well spilled upon the floor. ‘Now indeed it is well,’ said the Old Man, ‘for he hath left behind him his cigarette case studded with diamonds and my rabbits hath he turned into leopards.’ 4) On the evening of That Day the Young Man gathered together into a waterproof mackintosh the Vital Necessities of Life – one pair socks and a handkerchief and toothbrush and a safety razor, and a little packet of seasick cure, folded he up together. And when evening was come, ere yet the voice of the diner was heard in the land he fared forth from that city upon his quest. 5) Now concerning the details of that Pilgrimage I shall not speak save to say that for three years he searched all the cities of the world, the secret places and the solitary deserts – yea, even the Fashionate Watering Places knew his presence. But no sight or sound of the bird was vouchsafed him – neither did he hear speech of it in the market places of Brighton or of Bruges. But it came to pass one night as he sat in a little cafe in Bavaria, he heard two men speaking together. ‘If it be millinery which has tempted thee, Brother, go you to the old man who dwells in the city over the mountains. For he keeps many Strange Birds. There are not so many birds in all the land as he keeps, and they are in cages of gold and silver work. Fine strings of pearls hath one – and another he has snared with a ruby as red as the mouth of thy mistress. There is a bird with a white breast so soft that it can only sleep upon . . . another breast.’ And they laughed.

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But the Young Man thought:– ‘I must go swiftly and see what this thing is. Haply this man will gain his destination before me.’ Now in the early morning as he journeyed he heard a soft sound of weeping, and he saw, sitting under a tree, a little maid. She was clad in a brown garment that fell from her round throat to her ankles; her hair leapt round her body like a ruddy flame. ‘Why weepest thou,’ he said. She pushed back her long hair, and moved away from him, yet could she not hide her sobbing. ‘Why weepest thou,’ he said, ‘for it is not comely for a maid to weep.’ Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 131–4. 1. Rather than pastiche, KM is now parodying Oscar Wilde’s biblical mannerisms. 2. Presumably because he is from ‘Central Africa’, the mud diviner swears by David Livingstone (1813–73), the Scottish missionary and explorer.

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His Sister’s Keeper The girl came up on deck to find Dieppe like the mouth of some giant monster and a little crowd of officials groaning a gangway on board. Then up the sanded staircase to the luggage room, where the flaring posters on the walls – Normandy, Brittany, Paris, Luxembourg – seemed like magic hands stretched out in invitation – ‘See what I hold, come here.’ Her one small bag was passed without comment. There was still half an hour to spare before the train left. She was cold and tired, and went into the Buffet for a cup of coffee. Glancing at her watch she found that it was barely three o’clock. Three o’clock in the morning . . . and Dieppe . . . when she had only made up her mind at six o’clock the evening before, and at seven she had been at Victoria, debating still, still safe, and now . . . well, anything to live. She was sick of existing. If she had spent another day of the frightful monotony it would have driven her mad, and after all so many would only have jumped at the opportunity when it was first offered. This idiotic habit of drawing back would never take her anywhere at all.

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She sipped her coffee slowly out of a thick, white cup, noticed the little fern-filled dish of Hungarian peasant ware on the table, and at the table next to her, a honeymoon couple – she looked half-smilingly, half-sneeringly at the blatantly new wedding-ring upon the woman’s finger, their new clothes, and yellow leather handbag. They looked ridiculous – abashed, self-conscious and almost apologetic towards the waiter. Heaven preserve her! Then out again on to the cold platform to climb into the high, padded carriage. A porter ran along smashing up the darkness with a jangling bell – shrill whistles sounded. She was settling her bag and hat and umbrella in the rack when the door was thrown open and a woman half fell, half jumped into the carriage, seizing her suitcase from a porter. She threw him some money, he banged the door to, and they were off. ‘That was a case of all but,’ said the Fellow Passenger, panting a little, holding her handkerchief up to her lips, ‘I hadn’t an idea . . .’ She tugged at the buttons of her coat collar. The girl smiled and watched her curiously. The Fellow Passenger was a woman, obviously young still, but over dressed, her childish face covered with rouge and powder, her pretty brown hair curled and puffed against her hat. She wore a scarlet blanket coat over a pale blue cloth dress, her high-heeled shoes were cut low enough to show her blue clocked1 stockings. She sat down in one corner, putting her feet on the opposite cushion, and began peeling off her suede gloves, a little smile still curving her red mouth; her eyes, serious. Out of the window on one side the girl saw a street of rain-washed cobble stones – on the other side the harbour full of lights – then darkness . . . She wrapped her cloak round her and took out a little copy of ‘The Shropshire Lad’2 from an inside pocket but could not read. The Fellow Passenger was never still. She opened a red leather bag, took out a powder puff, a mirror, looked at herself critically, put out her tongue, wet her finger and carefully smoothed her eyebrows, found a hairpin and put her curls in position. Then she recklessly applied the pink powder to face and throat and even the bosom of her dress. ‘Gilding refined gold and painting the lily’ she said, glancing up and catching the girl’s eye. ‘But lilies have no right to go journeying in railway carriages, my dear, even they can’t be exempt from smuts. My name’s Lily – a series of remarkable coincidences.’ She flung back her head, laughing like a child, and showing her little white teeth like seeds in a red fruit. Then suddenly serious ‘I say that to everybody I meet travelling. It’s the greatest point. Came on me like an inspiration one day when I was in the same carriage with a Salvation Army Officer. You see it puts one on such a charming footing, such a delicate flower-like intimacy. What are you reading . . .

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Oh, don’t tell me, it’s poems. And you wanted to be alone in the carriage, to curl up and look out of the window, then read a little verse, then remember how he smiled at you in the last verse of the hymn on Sunday evening. It’s a good thing I came in to chaperon you . . . you’re too pretty for empty railway carriages. Are you going to stay in Paris with grandma in rooms conveniently near the Louvre? I am.’ As she spoke she laughed so much, spread out her little white hands with such a friendly gesture that the girl caught the infection. ‘Do go on,’ she said. ‘Of course I’m going to grandma. I felt somehow you must be going to yours.’ ‘Oh, what a surprise’ said the Fellow Passenger, sobering a little, ‘your voice isn’t at all what I had hoped and expected of you – and now I see that your eyebrows too – no, not gênée at all, my dear, you don’t tell me . . . Do you want to go to sleep?’ She suddenly stood up, stretching herself like a little kitten, yawning and rubbing her eyes. ‘I’m not sleepy.’ ‘Neither am I’ said the girl. ‘I slept on the boat.’ ‘I am feeling queer’ said the Fellow Passenger. ‘Could howl with crying or put my head out of the window and wave my hanky at nobody at all, or shoot myself or read a love poem. Hand me the book.’ The girl gave it to her in silence. ‘Hallo’ said the Fellow Passenger, ‘got a fit of the tarradiddles – your hands are on the jump.’ ‘I am tired,’ said the girl, blushing faintly. ‘I know, my dear, the heaviness that endures for a night . . . Good Lord. Now you go bye-bye while I read.’ She curled up in the railway carriage, pillowed her head on her arm, the little book in her hand. It was bitterly cold. The girl felt suddenly exhausted. It was the Fellow Passenger’s comment upon her nervous shaky hands. She had not quite got command of herself. She could not quite see the future. Felt suddenly that she had plunged into a sea without the slightest idea as to whether she was swimming towards land or quicksand, or mirage. Now this Fellow Passenger, her assurance, her laughter, the very way she powdered her face, all seemed to speak of success and experience. The girl felt crude beside her, longed suddenly to speak of a dozen vague fears. But she fell asleep and did not wake until the train stopped at Rouen. It certainly was bitterly cold. The Fellow Passenger was tugging a long fur out of her rug-strap. ‘Felt I couldn’t do without my little piece of dog,’ she said. ‘Have I been asleep?’ said the girl. ‘Asleep, my dear, like a baby, with your eyelashes curled on your nice little pink cheeks – most fascinating to a “Young Lady’s

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Companion”. That’s a neat way of expressing a fact, isn’t it? I’ve got a gift that way.’ She picked up the red book that she had been reading. ‘I say, there’s a photo pasted in here of a kiddy – who is he?’ And the girl answered, ‘Oh, that’s my brother.’ A wave of colour seemed to flood over her whole body. She did not want this woman to look at him, to speak laughingly of him. Felt almost ashamed for one moment of her sentimentality, that she could snatch away the little photograph and hide it in her bosom. But the Fellow Passenger did not laugh. She spread the page out on her lap. ‘Oh, so that’s your brother. My word he looks fine – a regular boy, and yet . . . there’s something so sensitive and splendid in his face – spiritual, my dear.’ ‘Yes, that’s just it.’ The girl sat upright, her hands clasped on her knees, ‘he’s a marvellous child.’ Her heart warmed to this other woman, she could have kissed her. ‘Well, nurse, your night-duty now’ said the Fellow Passenger, her voice regaining its flippant tone. ‘I’m going up the wooden lane. Send me to sleep with a story – about your little brother.’ The girl smiled but the Fellow Passenger nodded gravely. ‘Across my heart,’ she said, ‘I’d really love to hear anything, it’s so refreshing.’ She wound her fur twice round her throat and lay down to sleep. ‘When I last saw him,’ said the girl, ‘he was thirteen – very young, you see, but tall and splendidly made, broad shoulders and slight of hip – you know.’ She was speaking to nobody really, only thinking aloud, her head raised, in her eyes almost a prophetic sweetness. The light fell upon the yellow braids of her hair. ‘I felt maternal towards him. As a baby he clung to me, and all the years after – I could still when I looked at him, feel those little hands round my neck, on my face, blindly feeling. And through all the sadness of my girlhood that child brought me light and sweetness. He had a little habit of bringing me flowers – a rose, some violets, a spray of apple blossom – yes, he was always coming to me with his hands full of flowers. I have so many pictures of him’ said the girl, ‘in my mind you know. He will be the finest man on earth. Oh, I see him as a little child sitting on the table while I scrubbed his grubby knees, and after his bath in my room in the morning in his pink pyjamas, his hair curling all over his head, standing on one leg and flicking the towel and crying “It’s a lovely day, dearest”. And at night after he had gone to bed we had a mysterious game called “Pyjama arm”. I used to go in the dark and lie down on his bed, my head pillowed on his arm while he told me all his thoughts, his growing ideas, his strange little fantastic conceptions, questioned me, implicitly believed in me. In the dark even now sometimes I hear that little high voice. And then, particularly after he had been playing cricket, I could hear him stumbling up the

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stairs, hot, out of breath, his shirt collar unbuttoned, his hair on end, damp with perspiration, and mopping his face with an indescribable handkerchief.’ The girl laughed suddenly. ‘He was so absent-minded, too. Often I would go into his room when he was half an hour late for breakfast – “I can’t find my braces anywhere, sister, I’ve been looking and looking” and they’d be buttoned to his trousers all the time, trailing on the floor. Then he used to stand on a chair and part his hair before my mirror, called it a “bug-track” after he’d been to school. He read too, everything I gave him, good things you know, the very best always. Oh dear, what didn’t he exact and demand of me in those days. I remember very well saying Goodbye to him. He was going to school, and we kissed for a moment and then I leaned out of my window. It had been raining – the air was very cool and clean. He waved to me from the gate and I listened, hearing the glad little footsteps die down the street, fainter and fainter, so fast . . . out of my life.’ She stopped speaking a moment. The Fellow Passenger was lying with her hands over her face. Blue light flooded the windows of the carriage and the girl, rubbing a place in the glass, saw in the gloom a green tree white with frost. ‘He is going to be a splendid man,’ she said suddenly, ‘Oh, one of the best – a wonderful man. Yes, you were right – spiritual is the word. He needs the very best influences . . . Are you laughing?’ She thought the Fellow Passenger stirred. No answer. The train throbbed on and the girl, tired out, lay down in the corner. Then, the Fellow Passenger suddenly sat up, and to her amazement the girl saw that her face was wet with tears. She was twisting her handkerchief in her hand, dabbing her eyes with it, the powder and rouge smudging her face, and she suddenly slipped down to the floor of the carriage and pillowed her head in the girl’s lap. ‘Oh, listen’ she said. ‘I, too, had just such a brother, just. The world to me, you understand. We lived just so together. I was his sister and his mother. On him I based all the hopes and aspirations of my life. Unhappy at home, too, you know, and he my ideal – but we did not part – oh no. We were twins, that was the great difference to you, so although I felt older and he always came to me I had not felt him as a child in my arms. That does make such a difference – absurd how we love the helplessness, but we do . . . I gave up my life for him. Put him, if you like, upon a pedestal, made him perfect man, and he you know took such care of me, watched over me so. We decided that when I was old enough we should live together. I did not wish to marry, he filled my life, and I was sound asleep, really, you know. Well, one day I had to go to London. We lived in the country and at that time my brother was living in London sharing a small flat. I was to stay several

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days with an aunt of mine. My train was very late, and when we reached the station Aunt was not to be found. I waited on the station – all alone – and by and bye a woman quietly dressed came up and asked me if I was waiting for anybody. You know I was young. All I said to her was “Have you come from my Aunt, Mrs –” oh well, the name’s nothing – and she said “Yes, there’s a cab waiting.” My aunt was engaged and would meet me at the house. So we walked along the platform, it was six o’clock, a winter day and quite dark. I remember several people looking at us closely – I had my hair down still you know, in a long plait. A carriage was waiting, we got in. The woman gave no address, but we drove a long distance. During the drive she was silent, and I, thinking her a maid of my aunt’s, looked out of the window. We drove for what seemed an interminable distance, and then at last the carriage stopped in a quiet street, a large grey stone house before us. Though I had never been to stay with her before, the house did not look at all as I had expected, but still I was unsuspicious. The woman had a key, and I remember standing on the steps and looking down the lighted street as she fitted it into the lock. Then she turned round. “Well, come in Miss, your aunt will be waiting for you.” So I walked into the hall and the door was shut to. I wonder if you can imagine my feelings at seeing a great heavily furnished hall with a gilt mirror and in the glass visiting cards – the names most curious to me. The woman with me took off her hat and cloak. “I’ll have your things taken to your room, Miss” she said. “I’m afraid your Aunt won’t be able to see you tonight. You will find some supper ready – this way.” I followed her up the stairs along the passage and into a bedroom. She turned on the light, the room was large and ugly, but I was too tired and hungry to care about anything except that there was some supper on a table by the fire. The woman stood by me while I ate, and, I cannot tell you why, I think it was the strange silence of the house, of this woman – even the room seemed curiously expectant – I was frightened and after all I could not eat. If you will send up my boxes I will go to bed, I told her. “Yes” she said, moving towards the door, the supper tray in her hands. “I’d go to bed now, if I were you, and have a nice long sleep.” ‘Something in her voice . . . I turned round, but she was out of the room, the door shut and I heard the heavy key grate in the lock. Locked in! I ran to the door, pulled it, shook it, beat upon it with my hands – it was no use. Silent a moment, terror choking me, I heard in the passage outside a woman laughing – such stupid, senseless laughter – it rose and fell . . . Who was laughing like that – why? I cried out and screamed – nobody came. Stories I had overheard from the servants, newspaper reports that I had half read, vague transitory thoughts I had imagined almost obliterated – they trooped before me

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now, a hideous procession of hideous realities. There was a bell push in the room above the electric switch – I rang and rang – still silence. ‘Then I thought of him – my splendid brother. What would he think or say to know his sister . . . And he was in the same city, visiting Aunt, maybe. His horror and terror at learning the awful truth. I remembered our conversations together – his high ideals – his reverence for women. ‘At the thought I cried anew, flinging myself down upon the bed, my hands over my face. Finally, do you know, I fell asleep tired out – and woke, to find the room in darkness – someone was kissing my neck and throat, someone was whispering to me to . . . think of it, my dear, his arms round me, a country girl, filled with a white heat of reserve and terror –’ The Fellow Passenger laughed bitterly, her voice full of tears. ‘I struggled like a little wild cat, shook him off me, rushed to the bell push, and groping for it, in the darkness my hand touched the electric switch instead. I turned round – and it was he – the idol, my brother. Sic transit gloria me.’ said the Fellow Passenger. ‘We both left that room, but I went into another.’ The girl stared, sat up, and rubbed her eyes. The carriage was full of light. Out of the windows a sky like steel, and on both sides quaint, small, grey-built villages, miniature fields girt with Noah’s ark trees. And now and again the river, like a silver ribbon through the green tapestry of the fields. At last dawn came. In the sky hung a pink banner of cloud. It grew and widened until at last it touched the houses and fields and peered into the silver mirror of the river. She looked across at the Fellow Passenger who lay still as before, her hands over her face. A strange, terrible dream, thought the girl. They were nearly there. The girl gathered together her wraps, pulled down her hat, then tapped the Fellow Passenger on the shoulder. ‘We’re there,’ she said, ‘nearly.’ ‘Oh all right my dear, half a shake.’ She sat up and felt again for her powder puff – applied it with renewed vigour. They did not speak again until the station was reached. The Fellow Passenger got out first, greeted gaily a man whom she called Bertie. As she stepped from the carriage the girl saw her drop her handkerchief – it lay on the floor. The girl picked it up – a little damp ball – and handed it to her. ‘Oh thanks,’ said the Fellow Passenger carelessly. ‘Bye bye dear.’ In the cold of the winter morning the girl stumbled out of the train, her bag and rug and umbrella in her hand. A man came up to her gladly, quickly, but she almost ran past him and out alone into the street.

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Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 228–34. Signed and dated ‘K. Mansfield 1909’. The most bitter of any of KM’s stories of disillusion, written after her crossing to the Continent in early June, and being left in Bavaria to have Garnet Trowell’s child. The idealism and depth of her affection for her brother is set against the counter-story where trust is incestuously betrayed. 1. It was fashionable at the time to wear stockings with an ornamental clock pattern woven into them. 2. A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad (1896).

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The Child-Who-Was-Tired1 She was just beginning to walk along a little white road with tall black trees on either side, a little road that led to nowhere, and where nobody walked at all, when a hand gripped her shoulder, shook her, slapped her ear. ‘Oh, oh, don’t stop me,’ cried the Child-Who-Was-Tired. ‘Let me go.’ ‘Get up, you good-for-nothing brat,’ said a voice; ‘get up and light the oven or I’ll shake every bone out of your body.’ With an immense effort she opened her eyes, and saw the Frau standing by, the baby bundled under one arm. The three other children who shared the same bed with the Child-Who-Was-Tired, accustomed to brawls, slept on peacefully. In a corner of the room the Man was fastening his braces. ‘What do you mean by sleeping like this the whole night through – like a sack of potatoes? You’ve let the baby wet his bed twice.’ She did not answer, but tied her petticoat string, and buttoned on her plaid frock with cold, shaking fingers. ‘There, that’s enough. Take the baby into the kitchen with you, and heat that cold coffee on the spirit lamp for the master, and give him the loaf of black bread out of the table drawer. Don’t guzzle it yourself or I’ll know.’ The Frau staggered across the room, flung herself on to her bed, drawing the pink bolster round her shoulders. It was almost dark in the kitchen. She laid the baby on the wooden settle, covering him with a shawl, then poured the coffee from the earthenware jug into the saucepan, and set it on the spirit lamp to boil. ‘I’m sleepy,’ nodded the Child-Who-Was-Tired, kneeling on the floor and splitting the damp pine logs into little chips. ‘That’s why I’m not awake.’ The oven took a long time to light. Perhaps it was cold, like herself, 158

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and sleepy. . . . Perhaps it had been dreaming of a little white road with black trees on either side, a little road that led to nowhere. Then the door was pulled violently open and the Man strode in. ‘Here, what are you doing, sitting on the floor?’ he shouted. ‘Give me my coffee. I’ve got to be off. Ugh! You haven’t even washed over the table.’ She sprang to her feet, poured his coffee into an enamel cup, gave him bread and a knife, then, taking a wash rag from the sink, smeared over the black linoleumed table. ‘Swine of a day – swine’s life,’ mumbled the Man, sitting by the table and staring out of the window at the bruised sky, which seemed to bulge heavily over the dull land. He stuffed his mouth with bread and then swilled it down with the coffee. The Child drew a pail of water, turned up her sleeves, frowning the while at her arms, as if to scold them for being so thin, so much like little, stunted twigs, and began to mop over the floor. ‘Stop sousing about the water while I’m here,’ grumbled the Man. ‘Stop the baby snivelling; it’s been going on like that all night.’ The Child gathered the baby into her lap and sat rocking him. ‘Ts – ts – ts,’ she said. ‘He’s cutting his eye teeth, that’s what makes him cry so. And dribble – I never seen a baby dribble like this one.’ She wiped his mouth and nose with a corner of her skirt. ‘Some babies get their teeth without you knowing it,’ she went on, ‘and some take on this way all the time. I once heard of a baby that died, and they found all its teeth in its stomach.’ The Man got up, unhooked his cloak from the back of the door, and flung it round him. ‘There’s another coming,’ said he. ‘What – a tooth!’ exclaimed the Child, startled for the first time that morning out of her dreadful heaviness, and thrusting her finger into the baby’s mouth. ‘No,’ he said grimly, ‘another baby. Now, get on with your work; it’s time the others got up for school.’ She stood a moment quite silently, hearing his heavy steps on the stone passage, then the gravel walk, and finally the slam of the front gate. ‘Another baby! Hasn’t she finished having them yet?’ thought the Child. ‘Two babies getting eye teeth – two babies to get up for in the night – two babies to carry about and wash their little piggy clothes!’ She looked with horror at the one in her arms, who, seeming to understand the contemptuous loathing of her tired glance, doubled his fists, stiffened his body, and began violently screaming. ‘Ts – ts – ts.’ She laid him on the settle and went back to her floorwashing. He never ceased crying for a moment, but she got quite used

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to it and kept time with her broom. Oh, how tired she was! Oh, the heavy broom handle and the burning spot just at the back of her neck that ached so, and a funny little fluttering feeling just at the back of her waistband, as though something were going to break. The clock struck six. She set a pan of milk in the oven, and went into the next room to wake and dress the three children. Anton and Hans lay together in attitudes of mutual amity which certainly never existed out of their sleeping hours. Lena was curled up, her knees under her chin, only a straight, standing-up pigtail of hair showing above the bolster. ‘Get up,’ cried the Child, speaking in a voice of immense authority, pulling off the bedclothes and giving the boys sundry pokes and digs. ‘I’ve been calling you this last half-hour. It’s late, and I’ll tell on you if you don’t get dressed this minute.’ Anton awoke sufficiently to turn over and kick Hans on a tender part, whereupon Hans pulled Lena’s pigtail until she shrieked for her mother. ‘Oh, do be quiet,’ whispered the Child. ‘Oh, do get up and dress. You know what will happen. There – I’ll help you.’ But the warning came too late. The Frau got out of bed, walked in a determined fashion into the kitchen, returning with a bundle of twigs in her hand fastened together with a strong cord. One by one she laid the children across her knee and severely beat them, expending a final burst of energy on the Child-Who-Was-Tired, then returned to bed, with a comfortable sense of her maternal duties in good working order for the day. Very subdued, the three allowed themselves to be dressed and washed by the Child, who even laced the boys’ boots, having found through experience that if left to themselves they hopped about for at least five minutes to find a comfortable ledge for their foot, and then spat on their hands and broke the bootlaces. While she gave them their breakfast they became uproarious, and the baby would not cease crying. When she filled the tin kettle with milk, tied on the rubber tit, and, first moistening it herself, tried with little coaxing words to make him drink, he threw the bottle on to the floor and trembled all over. ‘Eye teeth!’ shouted Hans, hitting Anton over the head with his empty cup; ‘he’s getting the evil-eye teeth, I should say.’ ‘Smarty!’ retorted Lena, poking out her tongue at him, and then, when he promptly did the same, crying at the top of her voice, ‘Mother, Hans is making faces at me!’ ‘That’s right,’ said Hans; ‘go on howling, and when you’re in bed tonight I’ll wait till you’re asleep, and then I’ll creep over and take a little tiny piece of your arm and twist and twist it until –’ He leant over the table, making the most horrible faces at Lena, not noticing

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that Anton was standing behind his chair until the little boy bent over and spat on his brother’s shaven head. ‘Oh, weh! oh, weh!’ The Child-Who-Was-Tired pushed and pulled them apart, muffled them into their coats, and drove them out of the house. ‘Hurry, hurry! the second bell’s rung,’ she urged, knowing perfectly well she was telling a story, and rather exulting in the fact. She washed up the breakfast things, then went down to the cellar to look out the potatoes and beetroot. Such a funny, cold place the coal cellar! With potatoes banked on one corner, beetroot in an old candle box, two tubs of sauerkraut, and a twisted mass of dahlia roots – that looked as real as though they were fighting one another, thought the Child. She gathered the potatoes into her skirt, choosing big ones with few eyes because they were easier to peel, and bending over the dull heap in the silent cellar, she began to nod. ‘Here, you, what are you doing down there?’ cried the Frau, from the top of the stairs. ‘The baby’s fallen off the settle, and got a bump as big as an egg over his eye. Come up here, and I’ll teach you!’ ‘It wasn’t me – it wasn’t me!’ screamed the Child, beaten from one side of the hall to the other, so that the potatoes and beetroot rolled out of her skirt. The Frau seemed to be as big as a giant, and there was a certain heaviness in all her movements that was terrifying to anyone so small. ‘Sit in the corner, and peel and wash the vegetables, and keep the baby quiet while I do the washing.’ Whimpering, she obeyed, but as to keeping the baby quiet, that was impossible. His face was hot, little beads of sweat stood all over his head, and he stiffened his body and cried. She held him on her knees, with a pan of cold water beside her for the cleaned vegetables and the ‘ducks’ bucket’ for the peelings. ‘Ts – ts – ts!’ she crooned, scraping and boring; ‘there’s going to be another soon, and you can’t both keep on crying. Why don’t you go to sleep, baby? I would, if I were you. I’ll tell you a dream. Once upon a time there was a little white road –’ She shook back her head, a great lump ached in her throat and then the tears ran down her face on to the vegetables. ‘That’s no good,’ said the Child, shaking them away. ‘Just stop crying until I’ve finished this, baby, and I’ll walk you up and down.’ But by that time she had to peg out the washing for the Frau. A wind had sprung up. Standing on tiptoe in the yard, she almost felt she would be blown away. There was a bad smell coming from the ducks’ coop, which was half full of manure water, but away in the meadow she saw the grass blowing like little green hairs. And she

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remembered having heard of a child who had once played for a whole day in just such a meadow with real sausages and beer for her dinner – and not a little bit of tiredness. Who had told her that story? She could not remember, and yet it was so plain. The wet clothes flapped in her face as she pegged them; danced and jigged on the line, bulged out and twisted. She walked back to the house with lagging steps, looking longingly at the grass in the meadow. ‘What must I do now, please?’ she said. ‘Make the beds and hang the baby’s mattress out of the window, then get the waggon and take him for a little walk along the road. In front of the house, mind – where I can see you. Don’t stand there, gaping! Then come in when I call you and help me cut up the salad.’ When she had made the beds the Child stood and looked at them. Gently she stroked a pillow with her hand, and then, just for one moment, let her head rest there. Again the smarting lump in her throat, the stupid tears that fell and kept on falling as she dressed the baby and dragged the little waggon up and down the road. A man passed, driving a bullock waggon. He wore a long, queer feather in his hat, and whistled as he passed. Two girls with bundles on their shoulders came walking out of the village – one wore a red handkerchief about her head and one a blue. They were laughing and holding each other by the hand. Then the sun pushed by a heavy fold of grey cloud and spread a warm yellow light over everything. ‘Perhaps,’ thought the Child-Who-Was-Tired, ‘if I walked far enough up this road I might come to a little white one, with tall black trees on either side – a little road –’ ‘Salad, salad!’ cried the Frau’s voice from the house. Soon the children came home from school, dinner was eaten, the Man took the Frau’s share of pudding as well as his own, and the three children seemed to smear themselves all over with whatever they ate. Then more dish-washing and more cleaning and babyminding. So the afternoon dragged coldly through. Old Frau Grathwohl came in with a fresh piece of pig’s flesh for the Frau, and the Child listened to them gossiping together. ‘Frau Manda went on her “journey to Rome” last night, and brought back a daughter. How are you feeling?’ ‘I was sick twice this morning,’ said the Frau. ‘My insides are all twisted up with having children too quickly.’ ‘I see you’ve got a new help,’ commented old Mother Grathwohl. ‘Oh, dear Lord’ – the Frau lowered her voice – ‘don’t you know her? She’s the free-born one – daughter of the waitress at the railway station. They found her mother trying to squeeze her head in the wash-hand jug, and the child’s half silly.’

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‘Ts – ts – ts!’ whispered the ‘free-born’ one to the baby. As the day drew in the Child-Who-Was-Tired did not know how to fight her sleepiness any longer. She was afraid to sit down or stand still. As she sat at supper the Man and the Frau seemed to swell to an immense size as she watched them, and then become smaller than dolls, with little voices that seemed to come from outside the window. Looking at the baby, it suddenly had two heads, and then no head. Even his crying made her feel worse. When she thought of the nearness of bedtime she shook all over with excited joy. But as eight o’clock approached there was the sound of wheels on the road, and presently in came a party of friends to spend the evening. Then it was: ‘Put on the coffee.’ ‘Bring me the sugar tin.’ ‘Carry the chairs out of the bedroom.’ ‘Set the table.’ And, finally, the Frau sent her into the next room to keep the baby quiet. There was a little piece of candle burning in the enamel bracket. As she walked up and down she saw her great big shadow on the wall like a grown-up person with a grown-up baby. Whatever would it look like when she carried two babies so! ‘Ts – ts – ts! Once upon a time she was walking along a little white road, with oh! such great big black trees on either side.’ ‘Here, you!’ called the Frau’s voice, ‘bring me my new jacket from behind the door.’ And as she took it into the warm room one of the women said, ‘She looks like an owl. Such children are seldom right in their heads.’ ‘Why don’t you keep that baby quiet?’ said the Man, who had just drunk enough beer to make him feel very brave and master of his house. ‘If you don’t keep that baby quiet you’ll know why later on.’ They burst out laughing as she stumbled back into the bedroom. ‘I don’t believe Holy Mary could keep him quiet,’ she murmured. ‘Did Jesus cry like this when He was little? If I was not so tired perhaps I could do it; but the baby just knows that I want to go to sleep. And there is going to be another one.’ She flung the baby on the bed, and stood looking at him with terror. From the next room there came the jingle of glasses and the warm sound of laughter. And she suddenly had a beautiful, marvellous idea. She laughed for the first time that day, and clapped her hands. ‘Ts – ts – ts!’ she said, ‘lie there, silly one; you will go to sleep. You’ll not cry any more or wake up in the night. Funny, little, ugly baby.’

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He opened his eyes, and shrieked loudly at the sight of the ChildWho-Was-Tired. From the next room she heard the Frau call out to her. ‘One moment – he is almost asleep,’ she cried. And then gently, smiling, on tiptoe, she brought the pink bolster from the Frau’s bed and covered the baby’s face with it, pressed with all her might as he struggled, ‘like a duck with its head off, wriggling,’ she thought. She heaved a long sigh, then fell back on to the floor, and was walking along a little white road with tall black trees on either side, a little road that led to nowhere, and where nobody walked at all – nobody at all. Notes Text: IGP2. New Age,3 6: 17, 24 February 1910, pp. 396–8. Signed ‘Katherine Mansfield’.4 1. In Appendix 2 of her biography, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (1987, pp. 261–72), Claire Tomalin gives a detailed account of the charge that KM’s story was plagiarised from ‘Sleepyhead’, a Chekhov story which had been translated and published in English in 1903. 2. KM’s collection of thirteen stories, including the ten German stories in the New Age, published by Stephen Swift in December 1911. Only four of the New Age stories were subtitled ‘Pension Sketches’ when they appeared: ‘The Baron’, ‘The Sister of the Baroness’, ‘Frau Fischer’, ‘The Modern Soul’. 3. On the advice of George Bowden, whom she married on 2 March, KM had taken the story to A. R. Orage, editor of the socialist weekly, the New Age. 4. This was the first time KM used her name in this form in a published work, and continued to do so in most of her future publications.

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Germans at Meat Bread soup was placed upon the table. ‘Ah,’ said the Herr Rat, leaning upon the table as he peered into the tureen, ‘that is what I need. My “magen”1 has not been in order for several days. Bread soup, and just the right consistency. I am a good cook myself’ – he turned to me.

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‘How interesting,’ I said, attempting to infuse just the right amount of enthusiasm into my voice. ‘Oh yes – when one is not married it is necessary. As for me, I have had all I wanted from women without marriage.’ He tucked his napkin into his collar and blew upon his soup as he spoke. ‘Now at nine o’clock I make myself an English breakfast, but not much. Four slices of bread, two eggs, two slices of cold ham, one plate of soup, two cups of tea – that is nothing to you.’ He asserted the fact so vehemently that I had not the courage to refute it. All eyes were suddenly turned upon me. I felt I was bearing the burden of the nation’s preposterous breakfast – I who drank a cup of coffee while buttoning my blouse in the morning. ‘Nothing at all,’ cried Herr Hoffman from Berlin. ‘Ach, when I was in England in the morning I used to eat.’ He turned up his eyes and his moustache, wiping the soup drippings from his coat and waistcoat. ‘Do they really eat so much?’ asked Fräulein Stiegelauer. ‘Soup and baker’s bread and pig’s flesh, and tea and coffee and stewed fruit, and honey and eggs, and cold fish and kidneys, and hot fish and liver. All the ladies eat, too, especially the ladies?’ ‘Certainly. I myself have noticed it, when I was living in a hotel in Leicester Square,’ cried the Herr Rat. ‘It was a good hotel, but they could not make tea – now –’ ‘Ah, that’s one thing I can do,’ said I, laughing brightly, ‘I can make very good tea. The great secret is to warm the teapot.’ ‘Warm the teapot,’ interrupted the Herr Rat, pushing away his soup plate. ‘What do you warm the teapot for? Ha! ha! that’s very good! One does not eat the teapot, I suppose?’ He fixed his cold blue eyes upon me with an expression which suggested a thousand premeditated invasions. ‘So that is the great secret of your English tea? All you do is to warm the teapot.’ I wanted to say that was only the preliminary canter, but could not translate it, and so was silent. The servant brought in veal, with ‘sauerkraut’ and potatoes. ‘I eat sauerkraut with great pleasure,’ said the Traveller from North Germany, ‘but now I have eaten so much of it that I cannot retain it. I am immediately forced to –’ ‘A beautiful day,’ I cried, turning to Fräulein Stiegelauer. ‘Did you get up early?’ ‘At five o’clock I walked for ten minutes in the wet grass.2 Again in bed. At half-past five I fell asleep, and woke at seven, when I made an “overbody” washing! Again in bed. At eight o’clock I had a

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cold-water poultice, and at half-past eight I drank a cup of mint tea. At nine I drank some malt coffee, and began my “cure”. Pass me the sauerkraut, please. You do not eat it?’ ‘No, thank you. I still find it a little strong.’ ‘Is it true,’ asked the Widow, picking her teeth with a hairpin as she spoke, ‘that you are a vegetarian?’ ‘Why, yes; I have not eaten meat for three years.’ ‘Im – possible! Have you any family?’ ‘No.’ ‘There now, you see, that’s what you’re coming to! Who ever heard of having children upon vegetables? It is not possible. But you never have large families in England now; I suppose you are too busy with your suffragetting. Now I have had nine children, and they are all alive, thank God. Fine, healthy babies – though after the first one was born I had to –’ ‘How wonderful!’ I cried. ‘Wonderful,’ said the Widow contemptuously, replacing the hairpin in the knob which was balanced on the top of her head. ‘Not at all! A friend of mine had four at the same time. Her husband was so pleased he gave a supper party and had them placed on the table. Of course she was very proud.’ ‘Germany,’ boomed the Traveller, biting round a potato which he had speared with his knife, ‘is the home of the Family.’ Followed an appreciative silence. The dishes were changed for beef, red currants and spinach. They wiped their forks upon black bread and started again. ‘How long are you remaining here?’ asked the Herr Rat. ‘I do not know exactly. I must be back in London in September.’ ‘Of course you will visit München?’ ‘I am afraid I shall not have time. You see, it is important not to break into my “cure”.’ ‘But you must go to München. You have not seen Germany if you have not been to München. All the Exhibitions, all the Art and Soul life of Germany are in München. There is the Wagner Festival in August, and Mozart and a Japanese collection of pictures – and there is the beer! You do not know what good beer is until you have been to München. Why, I see fine ladies every afternoon, but fine ladies, I tell you, drinking glasses so high.’ He measured a good washstand pitcher in height, and I smiled. ‘If I drink a great deal of München beer I sweat so,’ said Herr Hoffman. ‘When I am here in the fields or before my baths, I sweat, but I enjoy it; but in the town it is not at all the same thing.’ Prompted by the thought, he wiped his neck and face with his dinner napkin and carefully cleaned his ears.

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A glass dish of stewed apricots was placed upon the table. ‘Ah, fruit!’ said Fräulein Stiegelauer, ‘that is so necessary to health. The doctor told me this morning that the more fruit I could eat the better.’ She very obviously followed the advice. Said the Traveller: ‘I suppose you are frightened of an invasion, too, eh? Oh, that’s good. I’ve been reading all about your English play3 in a newspaper. Did you see it?’ ‘Yes.’ I sat upright. ‘I assure you we are not afraid.’ ‘Well, then, you ought to be,’ said the Herr Rat. ‘You have got no army at all – a few little boys with their veins full of nicotine poisoning.’ ‘Don’t be afraid,’ Herr Hoffman said. ‘We don’t want England. If we did we would have had her long ago. We really do not want you.’ He waved his spoon airily, looking across at me as though I were a little child whom he would keep or dismiss as he pleased. ‘We certainly do not want Germany,’ I said. ‘This morning I took a half bath. Then this afternoon I must take a knee bath and an arm bath,’ volunteered the Herr Rat; ‘then I do my exercises for an hour, and my work is over. A glass of wine and a couple of rolls with some sardines –’ They were handed cherry cake with whipped cream. ‘What is your husband’s favourite meat?’ asked the Widow. ‘I really do not know,’ I answered. ‘You really do not know? How long have you been married?’ ‘Three years.’ ‘But you cannot be in earnest! You would not have kept house as his wife for a week without knowing that fact.’ ‘I really never asked him; he is not at all particular about his food.’ A pause. They all looked at me, shaking their heads, their mouths full of cherry stones. ‘No wonder there is a repetition in England of that dreadful state of things in Paris,’ said the Widow, folding her dinner napkin. ‘How can a woman expect to keep her husband if she does not know his favourite food after three years?’ ‘Mahlzeit!’4 ‘Mahlzeit!’ I closed the door after me. Notes Text: IGP. New Age, 6: 18, 3 March 1910, pp. 419–20. 1. Magen, stomach. 2. Bad Wörishofen, where KM lived during and following her pregnancy, from June to December 1909, was famous for its cold water cure, a form

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of holistic therapy discovered and promoted by Father Sebastian Kneipp (1821–97). Part of its advocated method involved walking barefoot through wet grass. 3. Guy du Maurier’s An Englishman’s Home, staged in London in 1909, with its author identified simply as ‘A Patriot’, depicted England as decadent and ill prepared for an impending German invasion. 4. Mahlzeit, German salutation, ‘Enjoy your meal’.

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Mary On poetry afternoons grandmother let Mary and me wear Mrs. Gardner’s white hemstitched pinafores because we had nothing to do with ink or pencil. Triumphant and feeling unspeakably beautiful, we would fly along the road, swinging our kits and half chanting, half singing our new piece. I always knew my poetry, but Mary, who was a year and a half older, never knew hers. In fact, lessons of any sort worried her soul and body. She could never distinguish between ‘m’ and ‘n.’ ‘Now, Kass – turmip,’ she would say, wrinkling her nose, ‘t–o–u– r–m–i–p, isn’t it?’ Also in words like ‘celery’ or ‘gallery’ she invariably said ‘cerely’ and ‘garrely.’ I was a strong, fat little child who burst my buttons and shot out of my skirts to grandmother’s entire satisfaction, but Mary was a ‘weed.’ She had a continuous little cough. ‘Poor old Mary’s bark,’ as father called it. Every spare moment of her time seemed to be occupied in journeying with mother to the pantry and being forced to take something out of a spoon – cod-liver oil, Easton’s syrup,1 malt extract. And though she had her nose held and a piece of barley sugar after, these sorties, I am sure, told on her spirits. ‘I can’t bear lessons,’ she would say woefully. ‘I’m all tired in my elbows and my feet.’ And yet, when she was well she was elfishly gay and bright – danced like a fairy and sang like a bird. And heroic! She would hold a rooster by the legs while Pat chopped his head off. She loved boys, and played with a fine sense of honor and purity. In fact, I think she loved everybody; and I, who did not, worshipped her. I suffered untold agonies when the girls laughed at her in class, and when she

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answered wrongly I put up my hand and cried, ‘Please, Teacher, she means something quite different.’ Then I would turn to Mary and say, ‘You meant “island” and not “peninsula,” didn’t you, dear?’ ‘Of course,’ she would say – ‘how very silly!’ But on poetry afternoons I could be no help at all. The class was divided into two and ranged on both sides of the room. Two of us drew lots as to which side must begin, and when the first half had each in turn said their piece, they left the room while Teacher and the remaining ones voted for the best reciter. Time and again I was top of my side, and time and again Mary was bottom. To stand before all those girls and Teacher, knowing my piece, loving it so much that I went in the knees and shivered all over, was joy; but she would stand twisting ‘Mrs. Gardner’s white linen stitched,’ blundering and finally breaking down ignominiously. There came a day when we had learned the whole of Thomas Hood’s ‘I remember, I remember,’2 and Teacher offered a prize for the best girl on each side. The prize for our side was a green-plush bracket with a yellow china frog stuck on it. All the morning these treasures had stood on Teacher’s table; all through playtime and the dinner hour we had talked of nothing else. It was agreed that it was bound to fall to me. I saw pictures of myself carrying it home to grandmother – I saw it hanging on her wall – never doubting for one moment that she would think it the most desirable ornament in life. But as we ran to afternoon school Mary’s memory seemed weaker than ever before, and suddenly she stopped on the road. ‘Kass,’ she said, ‘think what a s’prise if I got it after all; I believe mother would go mad with joy. I know I should. But then . . . I’m so stupid, I know.’ She sighed, and we ran on. Oh, from that moment I longed that the prize might fall to Mary. I said the ‘piece’ to her three times over as we ran up the last hill and across the playground. Sides were chosen. She and I, as our names began with ‘B’, were the first to begin. And alas! that she was older, her turn was before mine. The first verse went splendidly. I prayed viciously for another miracle. ‘Oh, please, God, dear, do be nice! . . . If you won’t –’ The Almighty slumbered. Mary broke down. I saw her standing there all alone, her pale little freckled face flushed, her mouth quivering, and the thin fingers twisting and twisting at the unfortunate pinafore frill. She was helped, in a critical condition, to the very end. I saw Teacher’s face smiling at me suddenly – the cold, shivering feeling came over me – and then I saw the house and ‘the little window where the sun came peeping in at morn.’ When it was over the girls clapped, and the look of pride and love on Mary’s face decided me.

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‘Kass has got it; there’s no good trying now,’ was the spirit in the rest of my side. Finally they left the room. I waited the moment until the door was shut. Then I went over to Teacher and whispered: ‘If I’ve got it, put Mary’s name. Don’t tell anybody, and don’t let the others tell her – oh, please.’ I shot out the last word at her, and Teacher looked astounded. She shook her head at me in a way I could not understand. I ran out and joined the others. They were gathered in the passage, twittering like birds. Only Mary stood apart, clearing her throat and trying to hum a little tune. I knew she would cry if I talked to her, so I paid no attention. I felt I would like to run out of school and never come back again. Trying not to be sorry for what I had done trying not to think of that heavenly green bracket, which seemed big and beautiful enough now to give Queen Victoria – and longing for the voting to be over kept me busy. At last the door was opened, and we trooped in. Teacher stood by the table. The girls were radiant. I shut my mouth hard and looked down at my slippers. ‘The First Prize,’ said Teacher, ‘is awarded to Mary Beetham.’ A great burst of clapping; but above it all I heard Mary’s little cry of joy. For a moment I could not look up; but when I did, and saw her walking to the desk, so happy, so confident, so utterly unsuspecting, when I saw her going back to her place with that green-plush bracket in her hands, it needed all my wildest expostulations with the Deity to keep back my tears. The rest of the afternoon passed like a dream; but when school broke up Mary was the heroine of the hour. Boys and girls followed her – held the prize in their ‘own hands’ – and all looked at me with pitying contempt, especially those who were in the secret and knew what I had done. On the way home we passed the Karori bus going home from town full of business men. The driver gave us a lift, and we bundled in. We knew all the people. ‘I’ve won a prize for po’try!’ cried Mary, in a high, excited voice. ‘Good old Mary!’ they chorused. Again she was the center of admiring popularity. ‘Well, Kass, you needn’t look so doleful,’ said Mr. England, laughing at me; ‘you aren’t clever enough to win everything.’ ‘I know,’ I answered, wishing I were dead and buried. I did not go into the house when we reached home, but wandered down to the loft and watched Pat mixing the chicken food. But the bell rang at last, and with slow steps I crept up to the nursery. Mother and grandmother were there with two callers. Alice had come up from the kitchen; Vera was sitting with her arm round Mary’s neck.

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‘Well, that’s wonderful, Mary,’ mother was saying. ‘Such a lovely prize, too. Now, you see what you really can do, darling.’ ‘That will be nice for you to show your little girls when you grow up,’ said grandmother. Slowly I slipped into my chair. ‘Well, Kass, you don’t look very pleased,’ cried one of the tactful callers. Mother looked at me severely. ‘Don’t say you are going to be a sulky child about your sister,’ she said. Even Mary’s bright little face clouded. ‘You are glad, aren’t you, dear?’ she questioned. ‘I’m frightfully glad,’ I said, holding on to the handle of my mug, and seeing all too plainly the glance of understanding that passed between the grown-ups. We had the yellow frog for tea, we had the green-plush bracket for the entire evening when father came home, and even when Mary and I had been sent to bed she sang a little song made out of her own head: ‘I got a yellow frog for a prize, An’ it had china eyes.’ But she tried to fit this to the tune of ‘Sun of My Soul,’3 which grandmother thought a little irreverent, and stopped her. Mary’s bed was in the opposite corner of the room. I lay with my head pressed into the pillow. Then the tears came. I pulled the clothes over my head. The sacrifice was too great. I stuffed a corner of the sheet into my mouth to stop me from shouting out the truth. Nobody loved me, nobody understood me, and they loved Mary without the frog, and now that she had it I decided they loved me less. A long time seemed to pass. I got hot and stuffy, and came up to breathe. And the Devil entered into my soul. I decided to tell Mary the truth. From that moment I was happy and light again, but I felt savage. I sat up – then got out of bed. The linoleum was very cold. I crossed over to the other corner. The moon shone through the window straight on to Mary’s bed. She lay on her side, one hand against her cheek, soundly sleeping. Her little plait of hair stood straight up from her head; it was tied with a piece of pink wool. Very white her small face, and the funny freckles I could see even in this light; she had thrown off half the bedclothes; one button of her nightdress was undone, showing her flannel chest protector. I stood there for one moment, on one leg, watching her asleep. I looked at the green-plush bracket already hung on the wall above her head, at that perfect yellow frog with china eyes, and then again at Mary, who stirred and flung out one arm across the bed. . . . Suddenly I stooped and kissed her.

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the baron

Notes Text: Idler, 36: 90, March 1910, pp. 661–5. Signed ‘K. Mansfield’. 1. Easton’s Syrup, a proprietary medicine combining strychnine, iron phosphate and quinine, variously advocated as a stimulant and brain food. 2.

I remember, I remember, The house where I was born, The little window where the sun Came peeping in at morn . . .

A popular schoolroom recitation piece by Thomas Hood (1799–1845). 3. ‘Sun of my soul, Thou Saviour dear, / It is not night if Thou be near’, a hymn with words by John Keble (1792–1866), set to music by Edmund Sedding (1836–68).

•

The Baron ‘Who is he?’ I said. ‘And why does he sit always alone, with his back to us, too?’ ‘Ah!’ whispered the Frau Oberregierungsrat, ‘he is a Baron.’ She looked at me very solemnly, and yet with the slightest possible contempt – a ‘fancy-not-recognising-that-at-the-first-glance’ expression. ‘But, poor soul, he cannot help it,’ I said. ‘Surely that unfortunate fact ought not to debar him from the pleasures of intellectual intercourse.’ If it had not been for her fork I think she would have crossed herself. ‘Surely you cannot understand. He is one of the First Barons.’ More than a little unnerved, she turned and spoke to the Frau Doktor, on her left. ‘My omelette is empty – empty,’ she protested, ‘and this is the third I have tried!’ I looked at the First of the Barons. He was eating salad – taking a whole lettuce leaf on his fork and absorbing it slowly, rabbit-wise – a fascinating process to watch. Small and slight, with scanty black hair and beard and yellowtoned complexion, he invariably wore black serge clothes, a rough

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linen shirt, black sandals, and the largest black-rimmed spectacles that I had ever seen. The Herr Oberlehrer, who sat opposite me, smiled benignantly. ‘It must be very interesting for you, gnädige Frau, to be able to watch . . . of course this is a very fine house. There was a lady from the Spanish Court here in the summer; she had a liver. We often spoke together.’ I looked gratified and humble. ‘Now, in England, in your “boarding ’ouse”, one does not find the First Class, as in Germany.’ ‘No, indeed,’ I replied, still hypnotised by the Baron, who looked like a little yellow silkworm. ‘The Baron comes every year,’ went on the Herr Oberlehrer, ‘for his nerves. He has never spoken to any of the guests – yet.’ A smile crossed his face. I seemed to see his visions of some splendid upheaval of that silence – a dazzling exchange of courtesies in a dim future, a splendid sacrifice of a newspaper to this Exalted One, a ‘danke schön’ to be handed down to future generations. At that moment the postman, looking like a German army officer, came in with the mail. He threw my letters into my milk pudding, and then turned to a waitress and whispered. She retired hastily. The manager of the pension came in with a little tray. A picture post card was deposited on it, and, reverently bowing his head, the manager of the pension carried it to the Baron. Myself, I felt disappointed that there was not a salute of twenty-five guns. At the end of the meal we were served with coffee. I noticed the Baron took three lumps of sugar, putting two in his cup and wrapping up the third in a corner of his pocket-handkerchief. He was always the first to enter the dining-room and the last to leave; and in a vacant chair beside him he placed a little black leather bag. In the afternoon, leaning from my window, I saw him pass down the street, walking tremulously and carrying the bag. Each time he passed a lamp-post he shrank a little, as though expecting it to strike him, or maybe the sense of plebeian contamination. . . . I wondered where he was going, and why he carried the bag. Never had I seen him at the Casino or the Bath Establishment. He looked forlorn, his feet slipped in his sandals. I found myself pitying the Baron. That evening a party of us were gathered in the salon discussing the day’s ‘kur’ with feverish animation. The Frau Oberregierungsrat sat by me knitting a shawl for her youngest of nine daughters, who was in that very interesting, frail condition. . . . ‘But it is bound to be quite satisfactory,’ she said to me. ‘The dear married a banker – the desire of her life.’

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There must have been eight or ten of us gathered together, we who were married exchanging confidences as to the underclothing and peculiar characteristics of our husbands, the unmarried discussing the over-clothing and peculiar fascinations of Possible Ones. ‘I knit them myself,’ I heard the Frau Lehrer cry, ‘of thick grey wool. He wears one a month, with two soft collars.’ ‘And then,’ whispered Fräulein Lisa, ‘he said to me, “Indeed you please me. I shall, perhaps, write to your mother.”’ Small wonder that we were a little violently excited, a little expostulatory. Suddenly the door opened and admitted the Baron. Followed a complete and deathlike silence. He came in slowly, hesitated, took up a toothpick from a dish on the top of the piano, and went out again. When the door was closed we raised a triumphant cry! It was the first time he had ever been known to enter the salon. Who could tell what the Future held! Days lengthened into weeks. Still we were together, and still the solitary little figure, head bowed as though under the weight of the spectacles, haunted me. He entered with the black bag, he retired with the black bag – and that was all. At last the manager of the pension told us the Baron was leaving the next day. ‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘surely he cannot drift into obscurity – be lost without one word! Surely he will honour the Frau Oberregierungsrat or the Frau Feldleutnantswitwe once before he goes.’ In the evening of that day it rained heavily. I went to the post office, and as I stood on the steps, umbrellaless, hesitating before plunging into the slushy road, a little, hesitating voice seemed to come from under my elbow. I looked down. It was the First of the Barons with the black bag and an umbrella. Was I mad? Was I sane? He was asking me to share the latter. But I was exceedingly nice, a trifle diffident, appropriately reverential. Together we walked through the mud and slush. Now, there is something peculiarly intimate in sharing an umbrella. It is apt to put one on the same footing as brushing a man’s coat for him – a little daring, naïve. I longed to know why he sat alone, why he carried the bag, what he did all day. But he himself volunteered some information. ‘I fear,’ he said, ‘that my luggage will be damp. I invariably carry it with me in this bag – one requires so little – for servants are untrustworthy.’ ‘A wise idea,’ I answered. And then: ‘Why have you denied us the pleasure –’

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‘I sit alone that I may eat more,’ said the Baron, peering into the dusk; ‘my stomach requires a great deal of food. I order double portions, and eat them in peace.’ Which sounded finely Baronial. ‘And what do you do all day?’ ‘I imbibe nourishment in my room,’ he replied, in a voice that closed the conversation and almost repented of the umbrella. When we arrived at the pension there was very nearly an open riot. I ran half way up the stairs, and thanked the Baron audibly from the landing. He distinctly replied: ‘Not at all!’ It was very friendly of the Herr Oberlehrer to have sent me a bouquet that evening, and the Frau Oberregierungsrat asked me for my pattern of a baby’s bonnet! *

*

*

Next day the Baron was gone. Sic transit gloria German mundi. Notes Text: IGP. New Age, 6: 19, 10 March 1910, p. 444. Much of the satire on German social snobbery is conveyed by the gradations of the titles KM uses for those obsessed with the Baron – Oberregierungsrat, chief senior civil servant; Oberlehrer, senior primary school teacher; Feldsleutnantswitwe, Field Marshal’s widow.

•

The Luftbad I think it must be the umbrellas which make us look ridiculous. When I was admitted into the enclosure for the first time, and saw my fellow-bathers walking about very nearly ‘in their nakeds’, it struck me that the umbrellas gave a distinctly ‘Little Black Sambo’ touch. Ridiculous dignity in holding over yourself a green cotton thing with a red parroquet handle when you are dressed in nothing larger than a handkerchief. There are no trees in the ‘Luftbad’. It boasts a collection of plain, wooden cells, a bath shelter, two swings and two odd clubs – one, presumably the lost property of Hercules or the German army, and the other to be used with safety in the cradle.

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And there in all weathers we take the air – walking, or sitting in little companies talking over each other’s ailments and measurements and ‘ills the flesh is heir to’.1 A high wooden wall compasses us all about; above it the pine-trees look down a little superciliously, nudging each other in a way that is peculiarly trying to a débutante. Over the wall, on the right side, is the men’s section. We hear them chopping down trees and sawing through planks, dashing heavy weights to the ground, and singing part songs. Yes, they take it far more seriously. On the first day I was conscious of my legs, and went back into my cell three times to look at my watch, but when a woman with whom I had played chess for three weeks cut me dead, I took heart and joined a circle. We lay curled on the ground while a Hungarian lady of immense proportions told us what a beautiful tomb she had bought for her second husband. ‘A vault it is,’ she said, ‘with nice black railings. And so large that I can go down there and walk about. Both their photographs are there, with two very handsome wreaths sent me by my first husband’s brother. There is an enlargement of a family group photograph, too, and an illuminated address presented to my first husband on his marriage. I am often there; it makes such a pleasant excursion for a fine Saturday afternoon.’ She suddenly lay down flat on her back, took in six long breaths, and sat up again. ‘The death agony was dreadful,’ she said brightly; ‘of the second, I mean. The “first” was run into by a furniture waggon, and had fifty marks stolen out of a new waistcoat pocket, but the “second” was dying for sixty-seven hours. I never ceased crying once – not even to put the children to bed.’ A young Russian, with a ‘bang’2 curl on her forehead, turned to me. ‘Can you do the “Salome”3 dance?’ she asked. ‘I can.’ ‘How delightful,’ I said. ‘Shall I do it now? Would you like to see me?’ She sprang to her feet, executed a series of amazing contortions for the next ten minutes, and then paused, panting, twisting her long hair. ‘Isn’t that nice?’ she said. ‘And now I am perspiring so splendidly. I shall go and take a bath.’ Opposite me was the brownest woman I have ever seen, lying on her back, her arms clasped over her head. ‘How long have you been here today?’ she was asked. ‘Oh, I spend the day here now,’ she answered. ‘I am making my own “cure”, and living entirely on raw vegetables and nuts, and each

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day I feel my spirit is stronger and purer. After all, what can you expect? The majority of us are walking about with pig corpuscles and oxen fragments in our brain. The wonder is the world is as good as it is. Now I live on the simple, provided food’ – she pointed to a little bag beside her – ‘a lettuce, a carrot, a potato, and some nuts are ample, rational nourishment. I wash them under the tap and eat them raw, just as they come from the harmless earth – fresh and uncontaminated.’ ‘Do you take nothing else all day?’ I cried. ‘Water. And perhaps a banana if I wake in the night.’ She turned round and leaned on one elbow. ‘You over-eat yourself dreadfully,’ she said; ‘shamelessly! How can you expect the Flame of the Spirit to burn brightly under layers of superfluous flesh?’ I wished she would not stare at me, and thought of going to look at my watch again when a little girl wearing a string of coral beads joined us. ‘The poor Frau Hauptmann cannot join us to-day,’ she said; ‘she has come out in spots all over on account of her nerves. She was very excited yesterday after having written two post-cards.’ ‘A delicate woman,’ volunteered the Hungarian, ‘but pleasant. Fancy, she has a separate plate for each of her front teeth! But she has no right to let her daughters wear such short sailor suits. They sit about on benches, crossing their legs in a most shameless manner. What are you going to do this afternoon, Fräulein Anna?’ ‘Oh,’ said the Coral Necklace, ‘the Herr Oberleutnant has asked me to go with him to Landsdorf. He must buy some eggs there to take home to his mother. He saves a penny on eight eggs by knowing the right peasants to bargain with.’ ‘Are you an American?’ said the Vegetable Lady, turning to me. ‘No.’ ‘Then you are an Englishwoman?’ ‘Well, hardly –’ ‘You must be one of the two; you cannot help it. I have seen you walking alone several times. You wear your –’ I got up and climbed on to the swing. The air was sweet and cool, rushing past my body. Above, white clouds trailed delicately through the blue sky. From the pine forest streamed a wild perfume, the branches swayed together, rhythmically, sonorously. I felt so light and free and happy – so childish! I wanted to poke my tongue out at the circle on the grass, who, drawing close together, were whispering meaningly. ‘Perhaps you do not know,’ cried a voice from one of the cells, ‘to swing is very upsetting for the stomach? A friend of mine could keep nothing down for three weeks after exciting herself so.’ I went to the bath shelter and was hosed.

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As I dressed, someone tapped on the wall. ‘Do you know,’ said a voice, ‘there is a man who lives in the Luftbad next door? He buries himself up to the armpits in mud and refuses to believe in the Trinity.’ The umbrellas are the saving grace of the Luftbad. Now, when I go, I take my husband’s ‘storm gamp’ and sit in a corner, hiding behind it. Not that I am in the least ashamed of my legs. Notes Text: IGP. New Age, 6: 21, 24 March 1910, p. 493. 1. ‘the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.’ Hamlet, III, i, 62–3. 2. ‘Bang’, a hairstyle with a deep fringe. 3. Richard Strauss’s opera Salome, setting a German translation of Oscar Wilde’s French drama, 1891, was first performed in 1905. Its ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ was instantly notorious.

•

At ‘Lehmann’s’ Certainly Sabina did not find life slow. She was on the trot from early morning until late at night. At five o’clock she tumbled out of bed, buttoned on her clothes, wearing a long-sleeved alpaca pinafore over her black frock, and groped her way downstairs into the kitchen. Anna, the cook, had grown so fat during the summer that she adored her bed because she did not have to wear her corsets there, but could spread as much as she liked, roll about under the great mattress, calling upon Jesus and Holy Mary and Blessed Anthony himself that her life was not fit for a pig in a cellar. Sabina was new to her work. Pink colour still flew in her cheeks; there was a little dimple on the left side of her mouth that even when she was most serious, most absorbed, popped out and gave her away. And Anna blessed that dimple. It meant an extra half-hour in bed for her; it made Sabina light the fire, turn out the kitchen and wash endless cups and saucers that had been left over from the evening before. Hans, the scullery boy, did not come until seven. He was the son of the butcher – a mean, undersized child very much like one of his father’s sausages, Sabina thought. His red face was covered with pimples, and his nails indescribably filthy. When Herr Lehmann himself told Hans to get a hairpin and clean them he said they were

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stained from birth because his mother had always got so inky doing the accounts – and Sabina believed him and pitied him. Winter had come very early to Mindelbau. By the end of October the streets were banked waist-high with snow, and the greater number of the ‘Cure Guests’, sick unto death of cold water and herbs, had departed in nothing approaching peace. So the large salon was shut at Lehmann’s and the breakfast-room was all the accommodation the café afforded. Here the floor had to be washed over, the tables rubbed, coffee-cups set out, each with its little china platter of sugar, and newspapers and magazines hung on their hooks along the walls before Herr Lehmann appeared at seven-thirty and opened business. As a rule his wife served in the shop leading into the café, but she had chosen the quiet season to have a baby, and, a big woman at the best of times, she had grown so enormous in the process that her husband told her she looked unappetising, and had better remain upstairs and sew. Sabina took on the extra work without any thought of extra pay. She loved to stand behind the counter, cutting up slices of Anna’s marvellous chocolate-spotted confections, or doing up packets of sugar almonds in pink and blue striped bags. ‘You’ll get varicose veins, like me,’ said Anna. ‘That’s what the Frau’s got, too. No wonder the baby doesn’t come! All her swelling’s got into her legs.’ And Hans was immensely interested. During the morning business was comparatively slack. Sabina answered the shop bell, attended to a few customers who drank a liqueur to warm their stomachs before the midday meal, and ran upstairs now and again to ask the Frau if she wanted anything. But in the afternoon six or seven choice spirits played cards, and everybody who was anybody drank tea or coffee. ‘Sabina . . . Sabina. . . .’ She flew from one table to the other, counting out handfuls of small change, giving orders to Anna through the ‘slide’, helping the men with their heavy coats, always with that magical child air about her, that delightful sense of perpetually attending a party. ‘How is the Frau Lehmann?’ the women would whisper. ‘She feels rather low, but as well as can be expected,’ Sabina would answer, nodding confidentially. Frau Lehmann’s bad time was approaching. Anna and her friends referred to it as her ‘journey to Rome’, and Sabina longed to ask questions, yet, being ashamed of her ignorance, was silent, trying to puzzle it out for herself. She knew practically nothing except that the Frau had a baby inside her, which had to come out – very painful indeed. One could not have one without a husband – that also she realised. But what had the man got to do with it? So she wondered as she sat

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mending tea towels in the evening, head bent over her work, light shining on her brown curls. Birth – what was it? wondered Sabina. Death – such a simple thing. She had a little picture of her dead grandmother dressed in a black silk frock, tired hands clasping the crucifix that dragged between her flattened breasts, mouth curiously tight, yet almost secretly smiling. But the grandmother had been born once – that was the important fact. As she sat there one evening, thinking, the Young Man entered the café, and called for a glass of port wine. Sabina rose slowly. The long day and the hot room made her feel a little languid, but as she poured out the wine she felt the Young Man’s eyes fixed on her, looked down at him and dimpled. ‘It’s cold out,’ she said, corking the bottle. The Young Man ran his hands through his snow-powdered hair and laughed. ‘I wouldn’t call it exactly tropical,’ he said. ‘But you’re very snug in here – look as though you’ve been asleep.’ Very languid felt Sabina in the hot room, and the Young Man’s voice was strong and deep. She thought she had never seen anybody who looked so strong – as though he could take up the table in one hand – and his restless gaze wandering over her face and figure gave her a curious thrill deep in her body, half pleasure, half pain. . . . She wanted to stand there, close beside him, while he drank his wine. A little silence followed. Then he took a book out of his pocket, and Sabina went back to her sewing. Sitting there in the corner, she listened to the sound of the leaves being turned and the loud ticking of the clock that hung over the gilt mirror. She wanted to look at him again – there was a something about him, in his deep voice, even in the way his clothes fitted. From the room above she heard the heavy, dragging sound of Frau Lehmann’s footsteps, and again the old thoughts worried Sabina. If she herself should one day look like that – feel like that! Yet it would be very sweet to have a little baby to dress and jump up and down. ‘Fräulein – what’s your name – what are you smiling at?’ called the Young Man. She blushed and looked up, hands quiet in her lap, looked across the empty tables and shook her head. ‘Come here, and I’ll show you a picture,’ he commanded. She went and stood beside him. He opened the book, and Sabina saw a coloured sketch of a naked girl sitting on the edge of a great, crumpled bed, a man’s opera hat on the back of her head. He put his hand over the body, leaving only the face exposed, then scrutinised Sabina closely. ‘Well?’

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‘What do you mean?’ she asked, knowing perfectly well. ‘Why, it might be your own photograph – the face, I mean – that’s as far as I can judge.’ ‘But the hair’s done differently,’ said Sabina, laughing. She threw back her head, and the laughter bubbled in her round, white throat. ‘It’s a rather nice picture, don’t you think?’ he asked. But she was looking at a curious ring he wore on the hand that covered the girl’s body, and only nodded. ‘Ever seen anything like it before?’ ‘Oh, there’s plenty of those funny ones in the illustrated papers.’ ‘How would you like to have your picture taken that way?’ ‘Me? I’d never let anybody see it. Besides, I haven’t got a hat like that!’ ‘That’s easily remedied.’ Again a little silence, broken by Anna throwing up the slide. Sabina ran into the kitchen. ‘Here, take this milk and egg up to the Frau,’ said Anna. ‘Who’ve you got in there?’ ‘Got such a funny man! I think he’s a little gone here,’ tapping her forehead. Upstairs in the ugly room the Frau sat sewing, a black shawl round her shoulders, her feet encased in red woollen slippers. The girl put the milk on a table by her, then stood, polishing a spoon on her apron. ‘Nothing else?’ ‘Na,’ said the Frau, heaving up in her chair. ‘Where’s my man?’ ‘He’s playing cards over at Luitpold’s.1 Do you want him?’ ‘Dear heaven, leave him alone. I’m nothing. I don’t matter. . . . And the whole day waiting here.’ Her hand shook as she wiped the rim of the glass with her fat finger. ‘Shall I help you to bed?’ ‘You go downstairs, leave me alone. Tell Anna not to let Hans grub the sugar – give him one on the ear.’ ‘Ugly – ugly – ugly,’ muttered Sabina returning to the cafe where the Young Man stood coat-buttoned, ready for departure. ‘I’ll come again to-morrow,’ said he. ‘Don’t twist your hair back so tightly; it will lose all its curl.’ ‘Well, you are a funny one,’ she said. ‘Good-night.’ By the time Sabina was ready for bed Anna was snoring. She brushed out her long hair and gathered it in her hands. . . . Perhaps it would be a pity if it lost all its curl. Then she looked down at her straight chemise, and drawing it off, sat down on the side of the bed. ‘I wish,’ she whispered, smiling sleepily, ‘there was a great big looking-glass in this room.’

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Lying down in the darkness, she hugged her little body. ‘I wouldn’t be the Frau for one hundred marks – not for a thousand marks. To look like that.’ And, half-dreaming, she imagined herself heaving up in her chair with the port wine bottle in her hand as the Young Man entered the café. Cold and dark the next morning. Sabina woke, tired, feeling as though something heavy had been pressing under her heart all night. There was a sound of footsteps shuffling along the passage. Herr Lehmann! She must have overslept herself. Yes, he was rattling the door-handle. ‘One moment, one moment,’ she called, dragging on her stockings. ‘Bina, tell Anna to go to the Frau – but quickly. I must ride for the nurse.’ ‘Yes, yes!’ she cried. ‘Has it come?’ But he had gone, and she ran over to Anna and shook her by the shoulder. ‘The Frau – the baby – Herr Lehmann for the nurse,’ she stuttered. ‘Name of God!’ said Anna, flinging herself out of bed. No complaints to-day. Importance – enthusiasm in Anna’s whole bearing. ‘You run downstairs and light the oven. Put on a pan of water’ – speaking to an imaginary sufferer as she fastened her blouse – ‘Yes, yes, I know – we must be worse before we are better – I’m coming – patience.’ It was dark all that day. Lights were turned on immediately the café opened, and business was very brisk. Anna, turned out of the Frau’s room by the nurse, refused to work, and sat in a corner nursing herself, listening to sounds overhead. Hans was more sympathetic than Sabina. He also forsook work, and stood by the window, picking his nose. ‘But why must I do everything?’ said Sabina, washing glasses. ‘I can’t help the Frau; she oughtn’t to take such a time about it.’ ‘Listen,’ said Anna, ‘they’ve moved her into the back bedroom above here, so as not to disturb the people. That was a groan – that one!’ ‘Two small beers,’ shouted Herr Lehmann through the slide. ‘One moment, one moment.’ At eight o’clock the cafe was deserted. Sabina sat down in the corner without her sewing. Nothing seemed to have happened to the Frau. A doctor had come – that was all. ‘Ach,’ said Sabina. ‘I think no more of it. I listen no more. Ach, I would like to go away – I hate this talk. I will not hear it. No, it is too

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much.’ She leaned both elbows on the table – cupped her face in her hands and pouted. But the outer door suddenly opening, she sprang to her feet and laughed. It was the Young Man again. He ordered more port, and brought no book this time. ‘Don’t go and sit miles away,’ he grumbled. ‘I want to be amused. And here, take my coat. Can’t you dry it somewhere? – snowing again.’ ‘There’s a warm place – the ladies’ cloak-room,’ she said. ‘I’ll take it in there – just by the kitchen.’ She felt better, and quite happy again. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘I’ll see where you put it.’ And that did not seem at all extraordinary. She laughed and beckoned to him. ‘In here,’ she cried. ‘Feel how warm. I’ll put more wood on that oven. It doesn’t matter, they’re all busy upstairs.’ She knelt down on the floor, and thrust the wood into the oven, laughing at her own wicked extravagance. The Frau was forgotten, the stupid day was forgotten. Here was someone beside her laughing, too. They were together in the little warm room stealing Herr Lehmann’s wood. It seemed the most exciting adventure in the world. She wanted to go on laughing – or burst out crying – or – or – catch hold of the Young Man. ‘What a fire,’ she shrieked, stretching out her hands. ‘Here’s a hand; pull up,’ said the Young Man. ‘There, now, you’ll catch it to-morrow.’ They stood opposite to each other, hands still clinging. And again that strange tremor thrilled Sabina. ‘Look here,’ he said roughly, ‘are you a child, or are you playing at being one?’ ‘I – I –’ Laughter ceased. She looked up at him once, then down at the floor, and began breathing like a frightened little animal. He pulled her closer still and kissed her mouth. ‘Na, what are you doing – what are you doing?’ she whispered. He let go her hands, he placed his on her breasts, and the room seemed to swim round Sabina. Suddenly, from the room above, a frightful, tearing shriek. She wrenched herself away, tightened herself, drew herself up. ‘Who did that – who made that noise?’ *

*

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In the silence the thin wailing of a baby. ‘Achk!’ shrieked Sabina, rushing from the room.

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Notes Text: IGP. New Age, 7: 10, 7 July 1910, pp. 225–7. 1. Following Alpers (p. 548), the ‘Snipold’s’ of IGP, repeating the error of the New Age text, has been replaced by Luitpold’s, the actual name of a Wörishofen café.

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Frau Brechenmacher1 Attends a Wedding Getting ready was a terrible business. After supper Frau Brechenmacher packed four of the five babies to bed, allowing Rosa to stay with her and help to polish the buttons of Herr Brechenmacher’s uniform. Then she ran over his best shirt with a hot iron, polished his boots, and put a stitch or two into his black satin necktie. ‘Rosa,’ she said, ‘fetch my dress and hang it in front of the stove to get the creases out. Now, mind, you must look after the children and not sit up later than half-past eight, and not touch the lamp – you know what will happen if you do.’ ‘Yes, mamma,’ said Rosa, who was nine and felt old enough to manage a thousand lamps. ‘But let me stay up – the “Bub” may wake and want some milk.’ ‘Half-past eight!’ said the Frau. ‘I’ll make the father tell you, too.’ Rosa drew down both corners of her mouth. ‘But . . . but . . .’ ‘Here comes the father. You go into the bedroom and fetch my blue silk handkerchief. You can wear my black shawl while I’m out – there now!’ Rosa dragged it off her mother’s shoulders and wound it carefully round her own, tying the two ends in a knot at the back. After all, she reflected, if she had to go to bed at half-past eight she would keep the shawl on. Which resolution comforted her absolutely. ‘Now, then, where are my clothes?’ cried Herr Brechenmacher, hanging his empty letter-bag behind the door and stamping the snow out of his boots. ‘Nothing ready, of course, and everybody at the wedding by this time. I heard the music as I passed. What are you doing? You’re not dressed. You can’t go like that.’ ‘Here they are – all ready for you on the table, and some warm water in the tin basin. Dip your head in. Rosa, give your father the towel. Everything ready except the trousers. I haven’t had time to

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shorten them. You must tuck the ends into your boots until we get there.’ ‘Nu,’ said the Herr, ‘there isn’t room to turn. I want the light. You go and dress in the passage.’ Dressing in the dark was nothing to Frau Brechenmacher. She hooked her skirt and bodice, fastened her handkerchief round her neck with a beautiful brooch that had four medals to the Virgin dangling from it, and then drew on her cloak and hood. ‘Here, come and fasten this buckle,’ called Herr Brechenmacher. He stood in the kitchen puffing himself out, the buttons on his blue uniform shining with an enthusiasm which nothing but official buttons could possibly possess. ‘How do I look?’ ‘Wonderful,’ replied the little Frau, straining at the waist buckle and giving him a little pull here, a little tug there. ‘Rosa, come and look at your father.’ Herr Brechenmacher strode up and down the kitchen, was helped on with his coat, then waited while the Frau lighted the lantern. ‘Now, then – finished at last! Come along.’ ‘The lamp, Rosa,’ warned the Frau, slamming the front door behind them. Snow had not fallen all day; the frozen ground was slippery as an ice-pond. She had not been out of the house for weeks past, and the day had so flurried her that she felt muddled and stupid – felt that Rosa had pushed her out of the house and her man was running away from her. ‘Wait, wait!’ she cried. ‘No. I’ll get my feet damp – you hurry.’ It was easier when they came into the village. There were fences to cling to, and leading from the railway station to the Gasthaus a little path of cinders had been strewn for the benefit of the wedding guests. The Gasthaus was very festive. Lights shone out from every window, wreaths of fir twigs hung from the ledges. Branches decorated the front doors, which swung open, and in the hall the landlord voiced his superiority by bullying the waitresses, who ran about continually with glasses of beer, trays of cups and saucers, and bottles of wine. ‘Up the stairs – up the stairs!’ boomed the landlord. ‘Leave your coats on the landing.’ Herr Brechenmacher, completely overawed by this grand manner, so far forgot his rights as a husband as to beg his wife’s pardon for jostling her against the banisters in his efforts to get ahead of everybody else. Herr Brechenmacher’s colleagues greeted him with acclamation as he entered the door of the Festsaal, and the Frau straightened her

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brooch and folded her hands, assuming the air of dignity becoming to the wife of a postman and the mother of five children. Beautiful indeed was the Festsaal. Three long tables were grouped at one end, the remainder of the floor space cleared for dancing. Oil lamps, hanging from the ceiling, shed a warm, bright light on the walls decorated with paper flowers and garlands; shed a warmer, brighter light on the red faces of the guests in their best clothes. At the head of the centre table sat the bride and bridegroom, she in a white dress trimmed with stripes and bows of coloured ribbon, giving her the appearance of an iced cake all ready to be cut and served in neat little pieces to the bridegroom beside her, who wore a suit of white clothes much too large for him and a white silk tie that rose half way up his collar. Grouped about them, with a fine regard for dignity and precedence, sat their parents and relations; and perched on a stool at the bride’s right hand a little girl in a crumpled muslin dress with a wreath of forget-me-nots hanging over one ear. Everybody was laughing and talking, shaking hands, clinking glasses, stamping on the floor – a stench of beer and perspiration filled the air. Frau Brechenmacher, following her man down the room after greeting the bridal party, knew that she was going to enjoy herself. She seemed to fill out and become rosy and warm as she sniffed that familiar, festive smell. Somebody pulled at her skirt, and, looking down, she saw Frau Rupp, the butcher’s wife, who pulled out an empty chair and begged her to sit beside her. ‘Fritz will get you some beer,’ she said. ‘My dear, your skirt is open at the back. We could not help laughing as you walked up the room with the white tape of your petticoat showing!’ ‘But how frightful!’ said Frau Brechenmacher, collapsing into her chair and biting her lip. ‘Na, it’s over now,’ said Frau Rupp, stretching her fat hands over the table and regarding her three mourning rings with intense enjoyment; ‘but one must be careful, especially at a wedding.’ ‘And such a wedding as this,’ cried Frau Ledermann, who sat on the other side of Frau Brechenmacher. ‘Fancy Theresa bringing that child with her. It’s her own child, you know, my dear and it’s going to live with them. That’s what I call a sin against the Church for a free-born child to attend its own mother’s wedding.’ The three women sat and stared at the bride, who remained very still, with a little vacant smile on her lips, only her eyes shifting uneasily from side to side. ‘Beer they’ve given it, too,’ whispered Frau Rupp, ‘and white wine and an ice. It never did have a stomach; she ought to have left it at home.’ Frau Brechenmacher turned round and looked towards the bride’s

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mother. She never took her eyes off her daughter, but wrinkled her brown forehead like an old monkey, and nodded now and again very solemnly. Her hands shook as she raised her beer mug, and when she had drunk she spat on the floor and savagely wiped her mouth with her sleeve. Then the music started and she followed Theresa with her eyes, looking suspiciously at each man who danced with her. ‘Cheer up, old woman,’ shouted her husband, digging her in the ribs; ‘this isn’t Theresa’s funeral.’ He winked at the guests, who broke into loud laughter. ‘I am cheerful,’ mumbled the old woman, and beat upon the table with her fist, keeping time to the music, proving she was not out of the festivities. ‘She can’t forget how wild Theresa has been,’ said Frau Ledermann. ‘Who could – with the child there? I heard that last Sunday evening Theresa had hysterics and said that she would not marry this man. They had to get the priest to her.’ ‘Where is the other one?’ asked Frau Brechenmacher. ‘Why didn’t he marry her?’ The woman shrugged her shoulders. ‘Gone – disappeared. He was a traveller, and only stayed at their house two nights. He was selling shirt buttons – I bought some myself, and they were beautiful shirt buttons – but what a pig of a fellow! I can’t think what he saw in such a plain girl – but you never know. Her mother says she’s been like fire ever since she was sixteen!’ Frau Brechenmacher looked down at her beer and blew a little hole in the froth. ‘That’s not how a wedding should be,’ she said; ‘it’s not religion to love two men.’ ‘Nice time she’ll have with this one,’ Frau Rupp exclaimed. ‘He was lodging with me last summer and I had to get rid of him. He never changed his clothes once in two months, and when I spoke to him of the smell in his room he told me he was sure it floated up from the shop. Ah, every wife has her cross. Isn’t that true, my dear?’ Frau Brechenmacher saw her husband among his colleagues at the next table. He was drinking far too much, she knew – gesticulating wildly, the saliva spluttering out of his mouth as he talked. ‘Yes,’ she assented, ‘that’s true. Girls have a lot to learn.’ Wedged in between these two fat old women, the Frau had no hope of being asked to dance. She watched the couples going round and round; she forgot her five babies and her man and felt almost like a girl again. The music sounded sad and sweet. Her roughened hands clasped and unclasped themselves in the folds of her skirt. While the music went on she was afraid to look anybody in the face, and she smiled with a little nervous tremor round the mouth.

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‘But, my God,’ Frau Rupp cried, ‘they’ve given that child of Theresa’s a piece of sausage. It’s to keep her quiet. There’s going to be a presentation now – your man has to speak.’ Frau Brechenmacher sat up stiffly. The music ceased, and the dancers took their places again at the tables. Herr Brechenmacher alone remained standing – he held in his hands a big silver coffee-pot. Everybody laughed at his speech, except the Frau; everybody roared at his grimaces, and at the way he carried the coffee-pot to the bridal pair, as if it were a baby he was holding. She lifted the lid, peeped in, then shut it down with a little scream and sat biting her lips. The bridegroom wrenched the pot away from her and drew forth a baby’s bottle and two little cradles holding china dolls. As he dandled these treasures before Theresa the hot room seemed to heave and sway with laughter. Frau Brechenmacher did not think it funny. She stared round at the laughing faces, and suddenly they all seemed strange to her. She wanted to go home and never come out again. She imagined that all these people were laughing at her, more people than there were in the room even – all laughing at her because they were so much stronger than she was. *

*

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They walked home in silence. Herr Brechenmacher strode ahead, she stumbled after him. White and forsaken lay the road from the railway station to their house – a cold rush of wind blew her hood from her face, and suddenly she remembered how they had come home together the first night. Now they had five babies and twice as much money; but – ‘Na, what is it all for?’ she muttered, and not until she had reached home, and prepared a little supper of meat and bread for her man did she stop asking herself that silly question. Herr Brechenmacher broke the bread into his plate, smeared it round with his fork, and chewed greedily. ‘Good?’ she asked, leaning her arms on the table and pillowing her breast against them. ‘But fine!’ He took a piece of the crumb, wiped it round his plate edge, and held it up to her mouth. She shook her head. ‘Not hungry,’ she said. ‘But it is one of the best pieces, and full of the fat.’ He cleared the plate; then pulled off his boots and flung them into a corner. ‘Not much of a wedding,’ he said, stretching out his feet and wriggling his toes in the worsted socks.

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‘N – no,’ she replied, taking up the discarded boots and placing them on the oven to dry. Herr Brechenmacher yawned and stretched himself, and then looked up at her, grinning. ‘Remember the night that we came home? You were an innocent one, you were.’ ‘Get along! Such a time ago I forget.’ Well she remembered. ‘Such a clout on the ear as you gave me. . . . But I soon taught you.’ ‘Oh, don’t start talking. You’ve too much beer. Come to bed.’ He tilted back in his chair, chuckling with laughter. ‘That’s not what you said to me that night. God, the trouble you gave me!’ But the little Frau seized the candle and went into the next room. The children were all soundly sleeping. She stripped the mattress off the baby’s bed to see if he was still dry, then began unfastening her blouse and skirt. ‘Always the same,’ she said – ‘all over the world the same; but, God in heaven – but stupid.’ Then even the memory of the wedding faded quite. She lay down on the bed and put her arm across her face like a child who expected to be hurt as Herr Brechenmacher lurched in. Notes Text: IGP. New Age, 7: 12, 21 July 1910, pp. 273–5. 1. KM boarded with a Brechenmacher family during part of her stay in Wörishofen.

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The Sister of the Baroness ‘There are two new guests arriving this afternoon,’ said the manager of the pension, placing a chair for me at the breakfast-table. ‘I have only received the letter acquainting me with the fact this morning. The Baroness von Gall is sending her little daughter – the poor child is dumb – to make the “cure”. She is to stay with us a month, and then the Baroness herself is coming.’ ‘Baroness von Gall,’ cried the Frau Doktor, coming into the room and positively scenting the name. ‘Coming here? There was a picture of her only last week in Sport and Salon. She is a friend of the Court: I have heard that the Kaiserin says “du” to her. But this is delightful!

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I shall take my doctor’s advice and spend an extra six weeks here. There is nothing like young society.’ ‘But the child is dumb,’ ventured the manager apologetically. ‘Bah! What does that matter? Afflicted children have such pretty ways.’ Each guest who came into the breakfast-room was bombarded with the wonderful news. ‘The Baroness von Gall is sending her little daughter here; the Baroness herself is coming in a month’s time.’ Coffee and rolls took on the nature of an orgy. We positively scintillated. Anecdotes of the High Born were poured out, sweetened and sipped: we gorged on scandals of High Birth generously buttered. ‘They are to have the room next to yours,’ said the manager, addressing me. ‘I was wondering if you would permit me to take down the portrait of the Kaiserin Elizabeth from above your bed to hang over their sofa.’ ‘Yes, indeed, something homelike’ – the Frau Oberregierungsrat patted my hand – ‘and of no possible significance to you.’ I felt a little crushed. Not at the prospect of losing that vision of diamonds and blue velvet bust, but at the tone – placing me outside the pale – branding me as a foreigner. We dissipated the day in valid speculations. Decided it was too warm to walk in the afternoon, so lay down on our bed, mustering in great force for afternoon coffee. And a carriage drew up at the door. A tall, young girl got out, leading a child by the hand. They entered the hall, were greeted and shown to their room. Ten minutes later she came down with the child to sign the visitors’ book. She wore a black, closely fitting dress, touched at throat and wrists with white frilling. Her brown hair, braided, was tied with a black bow – unusually pale, with a small mole on her left cheek. ‘I am the Baroness von Gall’s sister,’ she said, trying the pen on a piece of blotting-paper, and smiling at us deprecatingly. Even for the most jaded of us life holds its thrilling moments. Two Baronesses in two months! The manager immediately left the room to find a new nib. To my plebeian eyes that afflicted child was singularly unattractive. She had the air of having been perpetually washed with a blue bag, and hair like grey wool – dressed, too, in a pinafore so stiffly starched that she could only peer at us over the frill of it – a social barrier of a pinafore – and perhaps it was too much to expect a noble aunt to attend to the menial consideration of her niece’s ears. But a dumb niece with unwashed ears struck me as a most depressing object. They were given places at the head of the table. For a moment we all looked at one another with an eena-deena-dina-do1 expression. Then the Frau Oberregierungsrat: ‘I hope you are not tired after your journey.’

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‘No,’ said the sister of the Baroness, smiling into her cup. ‘I hope the dear child is not tired,’ said the Frau Doktor. ‘Not at all.’ I expect, I hope you will sleep well to-night,’ the Herr Oberlehrer said reverently. ‘Yes.’ The poet from Munich never took his eyes off the pair. He allowed his tie to absorb most of his coffee while he gazed at them exceedingly soulfully. Unyoking Pegasus, thought I. Death spasms of his Odes to Solitude! There were possibilities in that young woman for an inspiration, not to mention a dedication, and from that moment his suffering temperament took up its bed and walked. They retired after the meal, leaving us to discuss them at leisure. ‘There is a likeness,’ mused the Frau Doktor. ‘Quite. What a manner she has. Such reserve, such a tender way with the child.’ ‘Pity she has the child to attend to,’ exclaimed the student from Bonn. He had hitherto relied upon three scars and a ribbon to produce an effect, but the sister of a Baroness demanded more than these. Absorbing days followed. Had she been one whit less beautifully born we could not have endured the continual conversation about her, the songs in her praise, the detailed account of her movements. But she graciously suffered our worship and we were more than content. The poet she took into her confidence. He carried her books when we went walking, he jumped the afflicted one on his knee – poetic licence, this – and one morning brought his notebook into the salon and read to us. ‘The sister of the Baroness has assured me she is going into a convent,’ he said. (That made the student from Bonn sit up.) ‘I have written these few lines last night from my window in the sweet night air –’ ‘Oh, your delicate chest,’ commented the Frau Doktor. He fixed a stony eye on her, and she blushed. ‘I have written these lines: ‘ “Ah, will you to a convent fly So young, so fresh, so fair, Spring like a doe upon the fields And find your beauty there.”’

Nine verses equally lovely commanded her to equally violent action. I am certain that had she followed his advice not even the remainder of her life in a convent would have given her time to recover her breath. ‘I have presented her with a copy,’ he said. ‘And to-day we are going to look for wild flowers in the wood.’

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The student from Bonn got up and left the room. I begged the poet to repeat the verses once more. At the end of the sixth verse I saw from the window the sister of the Baroness and the scarred youth disappearing through the front gate, which enabled me to thank the poet so charmingly that he offered to write me out a copy. But we were living at too high pressure in those days. Swinging from our humble pension to the high walls of palaces, how could we help but fall? Late one afternoon the Frau Doktor came upon me in the writing-room and took me to her bosom. ‘She has been telling me all about her life,’ whispered the Frau Doktor. ‘She came to my bedroom and offered to massage my arm. You know, I am the greatest martyr to rheumatism. And, fancy now, she has already had six proposals of marriage. Such beautiful offers that I assure you I wept – and every one of noble birth. My dear, the most beautiful was in the wood. Not that I do not think a proposal should take place in a drawing-room – it is more fitting to have four walls – but this was a private wood. He said, the young officer, she was like a young tree whose branches had never been touched by the ruthless hand of man. Such delicacy!’ She sighed and turned up her eyes. ‘Of course it is difficult for you English to understand when you are always exposing your legs on cricket-fields, and breeding dogs in your back gardens. The pity of it! Youth should be like a wild rose. For myself I do not understand how your women ever get married at all.’ She shook her head so violently that I shook mine too, and a gloom settled round my heart. It seemed we were really in a very bad way. Did the spirit of romance spread her rose wings only over aristocratic Germany? I went up to my room, bound a pink scarf about my hair, and took a volume of Mörike’s2 lyrics into the garden. A great bush of purple lilac grew behind the summer-house. There I sat down, finding a sad significance in the delicate suggestion of half mourning. I began to write a poem myself. ‘They sway and languish dreamily, And we, close pressed, are kissing there.’

It ended! ‘Close pressed’ did not sound at all fascinating. Savoured of wardrobes. Did my wild rose then already trail in the dust? I chewed a leaf and hugged my knees. Then – magic moment – I heard voices from the summer-house, the sister of the Baroness and the student from Bonn. Second-hand was better than nothing; I pricked up my ears. ‘What small hands you have,’ said the student from Bonn. ‘They were like white lilies lying in the pool of your black dress.’ This

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certainly sounded the real thing. Her high-born reply was what interested me. Sympathetic murmur only. ‘May I hold one?’ I heard two sighs – presumed they held – he had rifled those dark waters of a noble blossom. ‘Look at my great fingers beside yours.’ ‘But they are beautifully kept,’ said the sister of the Baroness shyly. The minx! Was love then a question of manicure? ‘How I should adore to kiss you,’ murmured the student. ‘But you know I am suffering from severe nasal catarrh, and I dare not risk giving it to you. Sixteen times last night did I count myself sneezing. And three different handkerchiefs.’ I threw Mörike into the lilac bush, and went back to the house. A great automobile snorted at the front door. In the salon great commotion. The Baroness was paying a surprise visit to her little daughter. Clad in a yellow mackintosh she stood in the middle of the room questioning the manager. And every guest the pension contained was grouped about her, even the Frau Doktor, presumably examining a timetable, as near to the august skirts as possible. ‘But where is my maid?’ asked the Baroness. ‘There was no maid,’ replied the manager, ‘save for your gracious sister and daughter.’ ‘Sister!’ she cried sharply. ‘Fool, I have no sister. My child travelled with the daughter of my dressmaker.’ Tableau grandissimo! Notes Text: IGP. New Age, 7: 14, 4 August 1910, pp. 323–4. 1. A phrase in children’s games when deciding on who shall take first turn. 2. Eduard Frederich Mörike (1804–75), lyric poet, novelist, Lutheran pastor and university professor. KM remembered reading him at school, and quotes from his poem ‘Erinnerung – an C.N.’, in a letter to S. S. Koteliansky, 17 May 1915 (CLKM, 1, p. 192).

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Frau Fischer Frau Fischer was the fortunate possessor of a candle factory somewhere on the banks of the Eger, and once a year she ceased from her

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labours to make a ‘cure’ in Dorschausen, arriving with a dress-basket neatly covered in a black tarpaulin and a hand-bag, the latter containing amongst her handkerchiefs, eau de Cologne, toothpicks, and a certain woollen muffler very comforting to the ‘tummy’, samples of her skill in candle-making, to be offered up as tokens of thanksgiving when her holiday time was over. Four of the clock one July afternoon she appeared at the Pension Müller. I was sitting in the arbour and watched her bustling up the path followed by the red-bearded porter with her dress-basket in his arms and a sunflower between his teeth. The Widow and her five innocent daughters stood tastefully grouped upon the steps in appropriate attitudes of welcome; and the greetings were so long and loud that I felt a sympathetic glow. ‘What a journey!’ cried the Frau Fischer. ‘And nothing to eat in the train – nothing solid. I assure you the sides of my stomach are flapping together. But I must not spoil my appetite for dinner – just a cup of coffee in my room. Bertha,’ turning to the youngest of the five, ‘how changed! What a bust! Frau Hartmann, I congratulate you.’ Once again the Widow seized Frau Fischer’s hands. ‘Kathi, too, a splendid woman; but a little pale. Perhaps the young man from Nürnberg is here again this year. How you keep them all I don’t know. Each year I come expecting to find you with an empty nest. It’s surprising.’ Frau Hartmann, in an ashamed, apologetic voice: ‘We are such a happy family since my dear man died.’ ‘But these marriages – one must have courage; and after all, give them time, they all make the happy family bigger – thank God for that. . . . Are there many people here just now?’ ‘Every room engaged.’ Followed a detailed description in the hall, murmured on the stairs, continued in six parts as they entered the large room (windows opening upon the garden) which Frau Fisher occupied each successive year. I was reading the ‘Miracles of Lourdes’,1 which a Catholic priest – fixing a gloomy eye upon my soul – had begged me to digest; but its wonders were completely routed by Frau Fischer’s arrival. Not even the white roses upon the feet of the Virgin could flourish in that atmosphere. ‘. . . It was a simple shepherd-child who pastured her flocks upon the barren fields. . . .’ Voices from the room above: ‘The washstand has, of course, been scrubbed over with soda.’ ‘. . . Poverty-stricken, her limbs with tattered rags half covered. . . .’ ‘Every stick of the furniture has been sunning in the garden for three

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days. And the carpet we made ourselves out of old clothes. There is a piece of that beautiful flannel petticoat you left us last summer.’ ‘. . . Deaf and dumb was the child; in fact, the population considered her half idiot. . . .’ ‘Yes, that is a new picture of the Kaiser. We have moved the thorncrowned one of Jesus Christ out into the passage. It was not cheerful to sleep with. Dear Frau Fischer, won’t you take your coffee out in the garden?’ ‘That is a very nice idea. But first I must remove my corsets and my boots. Ah, what a relief to wear sandals again. I am needing the “cure” very badly this year. My nerves! I am a mass of them. During the entire journey I sat with my handkerchief over my head, even while the guard collected the tickets. Exhausted!’ She came into the arbour wearing a black and white spotted dressing-gown, and a calico cap peaked with patent leather, followed by Kathi, carrying the little blue jugs of malt coffee. We were formally introduced. Frau Fischer sat down, produced a perfectly clean pockethandkerchief and polished her cup and saucer, then lifted the lid of the coffee-pot and peered in at the contents mournfully. ‘Malt coffee,’ she said. ‘Ah, for the first few days I wonder how I can put up with it. Naturally, absent from home one must expect much discomfort and strange food. But as I used to say to my dear husband: with a clean sheet and a good cup of coffee I can find my happiness anywhere. But now, with nerves like mine, no sacrifice is too terrible for me to make. What complaint are you suffering from? You look exceedingly healthy!’ I smiled and shrugged my shoulders. ‘Ah, that is so strange about you English. You do not seem to enjoy discussing the functions of the body. As well speak of a railway train and refuse to mention the engine. How can we hope to understand anybody, knowing nothing of their stomachs? In my husband’s most severe illness – the poultices –’ She dipped a piece of sugar in her coffee and watched it dissolve. ‘Yet a young friend of mine who travelled to England for the funeral of his brother told me that women wore bodices in public restaurants no waiter could help looking into as he handed the soup.’ ‘But only German waiters,’ I said. ‘English ones look over the top of your head.’ ‘There,’ she cried, ‘now you see your dependence on Germany. Not even an efficient waiter can you have by yourselves.’ ‘But I prefer them to look over your head.’ ‘And that proves that you must be ashamed of your bodice.’ I looked out over the garden full of wallflowers and standard rosetrees growing stiffly like German bouquets, feeling I did not care one

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way or the other. I rather wanted to ask her if the young friend had gone to England in the capacity of waiter to attend the funeral baked meats,2 but decided it was not worth it. The weather was too hot to be malicious, and who could be uncharitable, victimised by the flapping sensations which Frau Fischer was enduring until six-thirty? As a gift from heaven for my forbearance, down the path towards us came the Herr Rat, angelically clad in a white silk suit. He and Frau Fischer were old friends. She drew the folds of her dressing-gown together, and made room for him on the little green bench. ‘How cool you are looking,’ she said; ‘and if I may make the remark – what a beautiful suit!’ ‘Surely I wore it last summer when you were here? I brought the silk from China –smuggled it through the Russian customs by swathing it round my body. And such a quantity: two dress lengths for my sister-in-law, three suits for myself, a cloak for the housekeeper of my flat in Munich. How I perspired! Every inch of it had to be washed afterwards.’ ‘Surely you have had more adventures than any man in Germany. When I think of the time that you spent in Turkey with a drunken guide who was bitten by a mad dog and fell over a precipice into a field of attar of roses, I lament that you have not written a book.’ ‘Time – time. I am getting a few notes together. And now that you are here we shall renew our quiet little talks after supper. Yes? It is necessary and pleasant for a man to find relaxation in the company of women occasionally.’ ‘Indeed I realise that. Even here your life is too strenuous – you are so sought after – so admired. It was just the same with my dear husband. He was a tall, beautiful man, and sometimes in the evening he would come down into the kitchen and say: “Wife, I would like to be stupid for two minutes.” Nothing rested him so much then as for me to stroke his head.’ The Herr Rat’s bald pate glistening in the sunlight seemed symbolical of the sad absence of a wife. I began to wonder as to the nature of these quiet little after-supper talks. How could one play Delilah to so shorn a Samson?3 ‘Herr Hoffman from Berlin arrived yesterday,’ said the Herr Rat. ‘That young man I refuse to converse with. He told me last year that he had stayed in France in an hotel where they did not have serviettes; what a place it must have been! In Austria even the cabmen have serviettes. Also I have heard that he discussed “free love” with Bertha as she was sweeping his room. I am not accustomed to such company. I had suspected him for a long time.’ ‘Young blood,’ answered the Herr Rat genially. ‘I have had several disputes with him – you have heard them – is it not so?’ turning to me.

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‘A great many,’ I said, smiling. ‘Doubtless you too consider me behind the times. I make no secret of my age; I am sixty-nine; but you must have surely observed how impossible it was for him to speak at all when I raised my voice.’ I replied with the utmost conviction, and, catching Frau Fischer’s eye, suddenly realised I had better go back to the house and write some letters. It was dark and cool in my room. A chestnut-tree pushed green boughs against the window. I looked down at the horsehair sofa so openly flouting the idea of curling up as immoral, pulled the red pillow on to the floor and lay down. And barely had I got comfortable when the door opened and Frau Fischer entered. ‘The Herr Rat had a bathing appointment,’ she said, shutting the door after her. ‘May I come in? Pray do not move. You look like a little Persian kitten. Now, tell me something really interesting about your life. When I meet new people I squeeze them dry like a sponge. To begin with – you are married.’ I admitted the fact. ‘Then, dear child, where is your husband?’ I said he was a sea-captain on a long and perilous voyage. ‘What a position to leave you in – so young and so unprotected.’ She sat down on the sofa and shook her finger at me playfully. ‘Admit, now, that you keep your journeys secret from him. For what man would think of allowing a woman with such a wealth of hair to go wandering in foreign countries? Now, supposing that you lost your purse at midnight in a snowbound train in North Russia?’ ‘But I haven’t the slightest intention –’ I began. ‘I don’t say that you have. But when you said good-bye to your dear man I am positive that you had no intention of coming here. My dear, I am a woman of experience, and I know the world. While he is away you have a fever in your blood. Your sad heart flies for comfort to these foreign lands. At home you cannot bear the sight of that empty bed – it is like widowhood. Since the death of my dear husband I have never known an hour’s peace.’ ‘I like empty beds,’ I protested sleepily, thumping the pillow. ‘That cannot be true because it is not natural. Every wife ought to feel that her place is by her husband’s side – sleeping or waking. It is plain to see that the strongest tie of all does not yet bind you. Wait until a little pair of hands stretches across the water – wait until he comes into harbour and sees you with the child at your breast.’ I sat up stiffly. ‘But I consider child-bearing the most ignominious of all professions,’ I said.

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For a moment there was silence, then Frau Fischer reached down and caught my hand. ‘So young and yet to suffer so cruelly,’ she murmured. ‘There is nothing that sours a woman so terribly as to be left alone without a man, especially if she is married, for then it is impossible for her to accept the attentions of others – unless she is unfortunately a widow. Of course, I know that sea-captains are subject to terrible temptations, and they are as inflammable as tenor singers – that is why you must present a bright and energetic appearance, and try and make him proud of you when his ship reaches port.’ This husband that I had created for the benefit of Frau Fischer became in her hands so substantial a figure that I could no longer see myself sitting on a rock with seaweed in my hair, awaiting that phantom ship for which all women love to suppose they hunger. Rather, I saw myself pushing a perambulator up a gangway, and counting up the missing buttons on my husband’s uniform jacket. ‘Handfuls of babies, that is what you are really in need of,’ mused Frau Fischer. ‘Then, as the father of a family he cannot leave you. Think of his delight and excitement when he saw you!’ The plan seemed to me something of a risk. To appear suddenly with handfuls of strange babies is not generally calculated to raise enthusiasm in the heart of the average British husband. I decided to wreck my virgin conception and send him down somewhere off Cape Horn. Then the dinner-gong sounded. ‘Come up to my room afterwards,’ said Frau Fischer. ‘There is still much that I must ask you.’ She squeezed my hand, but I did not squeeze back. Notes Text: IGP. New Age, 7: 16, 18 August 1910, pp. 366–8. 1. There were numerous publications on St Bernadette Soubirous and the shrine of her visions at Lourdes. 2. Hamlet, I.ii.179. 3. Judges, 13–16.

•

A Fairy Story It was the old story of the woodcutter’s daughter, but he was by no means a prince.

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The woodcutter had found him, one year, in the beautiful spring weather, lying in a daisy-pied meadow, sucking his thumb, and his rosy limbs warm with sunshine. ‘Tut,’ said the woodcutter, ‘here is the very playmate for my baby daughter.’ He was certainly an unsophisticated old man, with no eye to the future. But he had been brought up on fairy tales and felt, keenly, the necessity, the duty, of acting his part. So he folded the baby man-child in his arms and walked home. The woodcutter’s wife was not pleased. ‘Fie upon your Grimm and your Andersen,’ she cried, ‘go, read in the books of Ibsen and of Shaw,1 and learn the error of your ways,’ and she burnt his supper of fried onions. But she took the lovely, sleeping, baby from her husband and clad him in a little woollen vest of her daughter’s – infancy is deliciously unconventional – and put him on the hearthrug, where the other child sprawled lazily, and blinked at the fire. While the woodman’s wife washed the dishes, the woodcutter sat in a corner, silent, but not unhappy. Presently he fell asleep and dreamed that he journeyed again to the meadow where the child had been found, and there on the very spot shone and flamed a wonderful Crown of Gold. ‘This is just as it should be,’ he heard himself saying. He bent down to take it in his hands, and it was only a ring of yellow buttercups. Then a wind came and scattered the petals far and away over the world. The woodcutter awoke. His wife had put the babies to bed in the square, brown crib that stood against the wall – they were smiling in their sleep. She sat beside them, fashioning baby clothes out of her new cambric skirt, evidently reasoning, like a wise woman, that it is far, far safer to offer the other cheek to fate, without any fuss or nonsense. So they grew out of babyhood and into childhood together, the Boy and the Girl. The little hut on the top of the hill was filled by day with happy, rippling laughter. The Girl was slender and dark eyed, with fine straight brows, and long silk-like hair. He was shorter than she, far slower in his movements, pale faced and blue eyed, with a mop of the lightest flaxen curls. ‘You are like a baby bird in a nest,’ the Girl would say, rumpling his hair with both hands. And when they were seven years old the woodcutter’s wife taught them their letters, how to count beads in a little steel frame, and how to embroider kettle-holders with canvas backs.

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The Girl learnt eagerly – she seemed hungry for knowledge. When lesson time came, with flushed cheeks and shining eyes, she sat on a stool at her mother’s feet, and – ‘tell me more,’ she would always say – ‘and next, mother, and next?’ But the Boy would remain silent, staring in front of him, dreaming. The woodcutter’s wife was an exceptional woman; she was very ‘up’ in everything. She had once lived a whole year in Bayswater, W., and had gone regularly to the pit of the Court Theatre,2 and taken a course at the Polytechnic,3 and she had sat in the same ’bus with George Bernard Shaw, and once seen Mr. G. K. Chesterton4 riding in a hansom. These little things cannot fail to leave their impress upon character; they had stirred in her ideals, ideas, vague longings which took fierce life in her daughter. Why she had married the woodcutter was always a little vague. She was a plain woman with a shining complexion, and wore obtrusive hair-nets; then her skirt-supporter invariably parted from her blouse. Perhaps these facts, and the woodcutter’s dreaming disposition, explain the matter. On winter evenings, when the cheerful domesticated fire roared appropriately up the chimney, the woodcutter used to lift the Boy on his knee, and ‘whisper.’ For the first time in his life he felt understood and appreciated. He told him all Grimm and the story of the ‘Wild Swans’ – the Boy hid his face and wept – the story of ‘Old Luk-Oie,’ and ‘The Goloshes of Fortune,’ and the ‘Red Shoes.’5 And to the Boy, Karen was far more real than the Girl who sat by the woodcutter’s wife and learnt words of three syllables. ‘Father,’ he would whisper, when the stories were over, ‘I saw ten elves and a hundred fairies fly out of the vegetable dish at dinner.’ Then the old man would hold him fast and tell him that two snails poked their tongues out at a slug on the garden path that very afternoon. ‘Mother,’ said the Girl, ‘what is independence?’ Ah, she was certainly very advanced indeed. They were twelve years old when the Wanderer came to spend the summer with them. He rented the little front bedroom, and brought with him a knapsack of clothes and two great cases of books. And the woodcutter’s wife fed him on leeks and brown bread, and fresh walnuts, and on Sundays and Thursdays he had a little lime juice with his water. At three o’clock every morning he weeded out carrots in the garden, and the Girl, peering out of the window, heard him singing softly as he worked, ‘Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough.’ He must be very hungry, she thought sympathetically. At this time she had read all Shakespeare and ‘Lycidas’ and ‘Paradise Lost,’ and Dickens, and ‘The Lady of the Lake.’ Her

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mother had read to her ‘You never can tell,’ ‘The Doll’s House’ and ‘Aglavaine and Selysette’.6 The Boy was reading ‘What the Moon Saw,’7 and worshipping the ground she trod upon. One afternoon the Girl walked into the Wanderer’s room. He was sitting on the bed writing a letter, his writing-pad on his knee. That is a horrible occupation, but the table had the inevitable deformed leg failing. The Wanderer was irritable – he had tied a belt tightly round his waist, he had inhaled the perfume of two cabbage-roses, but the gnawing feeling remained unpacified. ‘Well?’ he said sharply, as the Girl stood by the door. ‘I want to look at your books,’ said she. He glanced at her curiously. Her wonderful face gleamed strangely at him, from billow and billow of white pinafore. ‘I’m – I’m quite exceptional,’ she said, hastily, ‘‘I’m very advanced.’ ‘Oh, are you?’ said the Wanderer. ‘Don’t think of what I look like; as Mr. Shaw says, ‘You Never can Tell.’ ‘Hang thee, sweet wench,’ said the Wanderer, ‘come along here – you know the “Open Sesame” and I’ll show you the books.’ And two hours later, they were, both sitting on the floor – And he was reading her Omar Kháyyám,8 and she was looking into Arthur Symons. Then a new life began for the Girl. She, too, weeded carrots, and ate leeks and brown bread, and talked to the Wanderer. And he told her of London, of Spain, of Paris, of Brussels, and again London. And he taught her his ethics of life, and that unselfishness signifies lack of Progress –and that she must avoid the Seven Deadly Virtues.9 And she printed a little text, and hung it above her washstand – ‘The strongest man is he who stands most alone.’10 When the bracken was turning golden, and the days becoming short and cold, the Wanderer packed his knapsack and left them. But he gave the Girl his books, and with them a little card bearing his name and address. ‘When the time comes,’ he said, ‘this will always find me.’ She did not understand, but she sewed the card inside her pocket, and kissed the Wanderer on both cheeks. Winter came early that year. The Boy began working with the Woodcutter. They left home each morning, with their lunch in a paper bag, and, through the day, they lived in an Enchanted Land – the Boy was a Prince and the Girl, at home, a Princess in her castle. He was very, very happy.

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She had begun reading seriously. The Woodcutter’s wife never allowed her to touch the housekeeping or the dishes – ‘You must be very advanced’ she always said, ‘you must find other things to do.’ And the Wanderer did not forget her. He sent her a post-card of Maxim Gorki,11 and a little book ‘The Virgins of the Rocks’;12 she did not understand it, but it gave her beautiful dreams. One night, the following summer, the Girl sat on the doorstep watching the stars, and the Boy, beside her. ‘Boy,’ she said, ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘I am going to find the world,’ he cried, standing up, and stretching out his thin arms to the moon, ‘And you – Girl?’ ‘I am going to find myself,’ the Girl answered. She put her hand into her pocket, and pressed the Wanderer’s little card. ‘Oh, the world,’ said the Boy – ‘the people, the great battles, the wide streets, the castles, the dragons and the hidden places. All are to belong to me. I am going to be so famous that when I ride past on my white horse, the people will point at me crying, “See, there he goes, the boy who has found the world; the boy who has conquered the world.” And I shall sit in a bower made out of my laurel wreaths, and you shall be the queen and hold my hand. And I shall never be old, and always be beautiful.’ ‘Do wisdom and beauty walk hand in hand?’ said the Girl. She sat with her chin pillowed on her hand, and wondered. A breeze shook the rose-bush above the door, and, round them, floated a flutter of white petals. ‘See, summer snow,’ said the Boy, catching at them. But the Girl suddenly sprang to her feet and flung her arms round his neck, and held his head against her little breast. Then she ran into her room and locked the door. And the moonlight fell upon the text above the washstand. ‘The strongest man is he who stands most alone.’ *

*

*

So two years passed. Then the woodcutter’s wife died. She had been sitting at the table, cutting the leaves of ‘A Wife Without a Smile,’13 when her heart stopped beating. And the woodcutter, true to his vocation, died also. They were buried in a churchyard, miles away. When the Girl and the Boy came back from the funeral, to the silent hut, the Boy put his hand into the Girl’s and said, ‘Now we two are left. I must begin to learn to find the world. I must read all the books that have been written, and find what all truly great men have said, to prepare myself. And you shall mend my clothes, Girl, and cook my little meals.’

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But the Girl shook herself free and laughed, and ran from him down the hill, down the road to a little railway station. And she travelled all the way to London, with the wanderer’s card unpicked from her pocket and clasped in her hand. And when she had reached Liverpool Street Station a policeman showed her the way. He lived in a great house. She was almost nervous when she was shown into the lofty drawing room, but the Wanderer had not changed. She ran to him, her face aglow. ‘Oh, teach me to find myself,’ she said. ‘I have come to learn.’ So the Wanderer taught her many things. She was so exceedingly beautiful that he found pleasure in doing so. Later she acted in great dramas, and when she rode in her carriage, in beautiful ‘Doucet’ gowns,14 all the people pointed at her, and cried, ‘See, there she goes – the Girl who has found herself, the Girl who has conquered the world.’ But in her bed, at night, she thought of the Boy in the little hut on the hill, and cried. Left alone, the Boy was, at first, dazed with agony and surprise. ‘Ah, I understand,’ he said, ‘she could not stay with such a great simpleton. Wait till I have found the world.’ So he sent to Mudie’s15 for cases of books, and he spent all his days and half his nights, reading. He became slower than ever in his movements, his face paler; but ‘I have not so long to wait now,’ he said. ‘Soon I shall be ready.’ And he wrote for more books and more books, until every room in the hut was full, and they were heaped in great piles up to the ceiling. And one night, as he sat by the fireplace a great mountain of books, from the mantel-piece above, fell on him and killed him.16 It was very terrible. ‘Ah,’ said the poor Boy, as he lay dying, ‘if the Girl would only come now, and hold my head just once against her little breast.’ Then he died. And there crept into the room a worn-out, bent old ghost, who lifted up the Boy’s frail body, and laid him on a bed. An old ghost, who moaned and muttered about the ‘Little Sea Maid’ and ‘The Snow Queen,’17 as he smoothed the Boy’s hair. Then he recklessly, savagely, pulled down all the roses – for it was summer – that grew above the door and spread them over him. And he lighted a little candle at the feet and at the head, and left the Boy – alone. That afternoon the Girl had been acting in a great Matinee. When it was over the Wanderer came round to her dressing room. ‘Girl,’ he said, ‘you have found yourself – now marry me.’

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But she shook her head and ran past him into her motor brougham. ‘Drive to Liverpool Street Station,’ she said. It was past midnight when the train reached the same little railway station. The Girl felt that she could not run fast enough up the steep hill. She saw the lights from the woodcutter’s hut. ‘Oh, I have been a fool,’ cried the Girl, ‘I do not want myself, and I do not want the world, but just the Boy, the Boy.’ She sobbed as she ran. Then she came to the door – there were no roses, and the bush was all mangled and torn. She lifted the latch, ‘Boy, Boy,’ she said. Silence. She walked in, past the sitting room – it was difficult to pick her way, she stumbled often – the books were so numerous – and into her little bedroom. And the bed was heaped with white roses. A candle burned at the head and a candle at the feet. ‘So this is where it ends,’ said the Girl. She knelt softly by the bed. Above the wash-stand she saw the faded text – ‘The strongest man is he, who stands most alone’ – she lifted the sheet, and the Boy, as of old, smiled at her. All his flaxen hair was spread upon the pillow. ‘Oh, my dear,’ said the Girl, kissing him on the mouth – and her heart broke. *

*

*

They were buried in a great meadow – daisy-pied – where the sun shone warmly. And the morning after, when some children came with dahlia heads in little glass jam jars, a miracle had happened. The grass grew green upon the little mound, and round it a wide crown of golden buttercups. ‘Oh, look, look, how beautiful!’ they cried. But a wind came and scattered the petals far and away over the world. Notes Text: Open Window, 1: 3, December 1910, pp. 162–76. Signed ‘Katherina Mansfield’. 1. KM contrasts the collections of moralistic children’s stories by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, published between 1814 and 1857, and Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales (1835–7), with the two leading exponents of

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2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

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modern drama, Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) and George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950). The Court Theatre, in Sloane Square, where several of Shaw’s plays were first performed early in the century. The early Victorian Royal Polytechnic Institution, originally intended to teach the sciences, had expanded by the 1880s to arts and the humanities, and was a touchstone for contemporary educational practice. G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), novelist, poet, biographer and essayist. His most recent novel, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), was a study of the decadence KM had been so fascinated by a few years before. All stories by Hans Christian Andersen. John Milton, Lycidas (1638), Paradise Lost (1667); Sir Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake (1810); George Bernard Shaw, You Never Can Tell (1907), a play whose heroine is a modern young woman who believes herself beyond interest in romance or marriage; Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House (1879), challenging accepted views of marriage; Maurice Maeterlinck, Aglavaine et Selysette (1908), a play contrasting traditional and modern female values. Another Hans Christian Andersen story. Edward Fitzgerald, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859), a free translation of the quatrains of the eleventh-century Persian poet; Arthur Symons (1863–1945), poet, essayist and editor. See ‘Leves Amores’, n. 1, p. 89. A phrase Oscar Wilde uses in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Chapter 17, and An Ideal Husband (1894), Act I. The words of Dr Stockman, who stands against popular opinion, at the end of Act V, Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People (1882). Maxim Gorky (1868–1936), playwright, fiction writer and an early Marxist critic of Russian society. Leonardo da Vinci painted two works known as ‘The Virgin of the Rocks’, one in the Louvre, the other in the National Gallery, London. No book with the title KM uses has been traced. A Wife Without a Smile (1904), by Arthur Wing Pinero. Elegant, translucent gowns, based on eighteenth-century art fashions, by the designer and collector Jacques Doucet (1853–1929). He was noted especially for his creations for stage celebrities. Mudie’s, a chain of bookshops and lending libraries established by the publisher Charles Edward Mudie in the mid-nineteenth century. E. M. Forster’s Howards End was published to immediate acclaim in November 1910, which makes it conceivable that KM was slyly referring to the death of the self-educated Leonard Bast beneath falling bookshelves. Two more Andersen stories.

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A Birthday Andreas Binzer woke slowly. He turned over on the narrow bed and stretched himself – yawned – opening his mouth as widely as possible and bringing his teeth together afterwards with a sharp ‘click’. The sound of that click fascinated him; he repeated it quickly several times, with a snapping movement of the jaws. What teeth! he thought. Sound as a bell, every man jack of them. Never had one out, never had one stopped. That comes of no tomfoolery in eating, and a good, regular brushing night and morning. He raised himself on his left elbow and waved his right arm over the side of the bed to feel for the chair where he put his watch and chain overnight. No chair was there – of course, he’d forgotten, there wasn’t a chair in this wretched spare room. Had to put the confounded thing under his pillow. ‘Half-past eight, Sunday, breakfast at nine – time for the bath’ – his brain ticked to the watch. He sprang out of bed and went over to the window. The venetian blind was broken, hung fan-shaped over the upper pane. . . . ‘That blind must be mended. I’ll get the office boy to drop in and fix it on his way home to-morrow – he’s a good hand at blinds. Give him twopence and he’ll do it as well as a carpenter. . . . Anna could do it herself if she was all right. So would I, for the matter of that, but I don’t like to trust myself on rickety step-ladders.’ He looked up at the sky: it shone, strangely white, unflecked with cloud; he looked down at the row of garden strips and backyards. The fence of these gardens was built along the edge of a gully, spanned by an iron suspension bridge, and the people had a wretched habit of throwing their empty tins over the fence into the gully. Just like them, of course! Andreas started counting the tins, and decided, viciously, to write a letter to the papers about it and sign it – sign it in full. The servant girl came out of their back door into the yard, carrying his boots. She threw one down on the ground, thrust her hand into the other, and stared at it, sucking in her cheeks. Suddenly she bent forward, spat on the toecap, and started polishing with a brush rooted 206

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out of her apron pocket. . . . ‘Slut of a girl! Heaven knows what infectious disease may be breeding now in that boot. Anna must get rid of that girl – even if she has to do without one for a bit – as soon as she’s up and about again. The way she chucked one boot down and then spat upon the other! She didn’t care whose boots she’d got hold of. She had no false notions of the respect due to the master of the house.’ He turned away from the window and switched his bath towel from the washstand rail, sick at heart. ‘I’m too sensitive for a man – that’s what’s the matter with me. Have been from the beginning, and will be to the end.’ There was a gentle knock at the door and his mother came in. She closed the door after her and leant against it. Andreas noticed that her cap was crooked, and a long tail of hair hung over her shoulder. He went forward and kissed her. ‘Good-morning, mother; how’s Anna?’ The old woman spoke quickly, clasping and unclasping her hands. ‘Andreas, please go to Doctor Erb as soon as you are dressed.’ ‘Why,’ he said, ‘is she bad?’ Frau Binzer nodded, and Andreas, watching her, saw her face suddenly change; a fine network of wrinkles seemed to pull over it from under the skin surface. ‘Sit down on the bed a moment,’ he said. ‘Been up all night?’ ‘Yes. No, I won’t sit down. I must go back to her. Anna has been in pain all night. She wouldn’t have you disturbed before because she said you looked so run down yesterday. You told her you had caught a cold and been very worried.’ Straightway Andreas felt that he was being accused. ‘Well, she made me tell her, worried it out of me; you know the way she does.’ Again Frau Binzer nodded. ‘Oh yes, I know. She says, is your cold better, and there’s a warm under-vest for you in the left-hand corner of the big drawer.’ Quite automatically Andreas cleared his throat twice. ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Tell her my throat certainly feels looser. I suppose I’d better not disturb her?’ ‘No, and besides, time, Andreas.’ ‘I’ll be ready in five minutes.’ They went into the passage. As Frau Binzer opened the door of the front bedroom, a long wail came from the room. That shocked and terrified Andreas. He dashed into the bathroom, turned on both taps as far as they would go, cleaned his teeth and pared his nails while the water was running. ‘Frightful business, frightful business,’ he heard himself whispering. ‘And I can’t understand it. It isn’t as though it were her first – it’s

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her third. Old Shäfer told me, yesterday, his wife simply “dropped” her fourth. Anna ought to have had a qualified nurse. Mother gives way to her. Mother spoils her. I wonder what she meant by saying I’d worried Anna yesterday. Nice remark to make to a husband at a time like this. Unstrung, I suppose – and my sensitiveness again.’ When he went into the kitchen for his boots, the servant girl was bent over the stove, cooking breakfast. ‘Breathing into that, now, I suppose,’ thought Andreas, and was very short with the servant girl. She did not notice. She was full of terrified joy and importance in the goings on upstairs. She felt she was learning the secrets of life with every breath she drew. Had laid the table that morning saying, ‘Boy’, as she put down the first dish, ‘Girl’, as she placed the second – it had worked out with the saltspoon to ‘Boy’. ‘For two pins I’d tell the master that, to comfort him, like,’ she decided. But the master gave her no opening. ‘Put an extra cup and saucer on the table,’ he said; ‘the doctor may want some coffee.’ ‘The doctor, sir?’ The servant girl whipped a spoon out of a pan, and spilt two drops of grease on the stove. ‘Shall I fry something extra?’ But the master had gone, slamming the door after him. He walked down the street – there was nobody about at all – dead and alive this place on a Sunday morning. As he crossed the suspension bridge a strong stench of fennel and decayed refuse streamed from the gully, and again Andreas began concocting a letter. He turned into the main road. The shutters were still up before the shops. Scraps of newspaper, hay, and fruit skins strewed the pavement; the gutters were choked with the leavings of Saturday night. Two dogs sprawled in the middle of the road, scuffling and biting. Only the public-house at the corner was open; a young barman slopped water over the doorstep. Fastidiously, his lips curling, Andreas picked his way through the water. ‘Extraordinary how I am noticing things this morning. It’s partly the effect of Sunday. I loathe a Sunday when Anna’s tied by the leg and the children are away. On Sunday a man has the right to expect his family. Everything here’s filthy, the whole place might be down with the plague, and will be, too, if this street’s not swept away. I’d like to have a hand on the government ropes.’ He braced his shoulders. ‘Now for this doctor.’ ‘Doctor Erb is at breakfast,’ the maid informed him. She showed him into the waiting-room, a dark and musty place, with some ferns under a glass-case by the window. ‘He says he won’t be a minute, please, sir, and there is a paper on the table.’ ‘Unhealthy hole,’ thought Binzer, walking over to the window and drumming his fingers on the glass fern-shade. ‘At breakfast, is he? That’s the mistake I made: turning out early on an empty stomach.’

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A milk cart rattled down the street, the driver standing at the back, cracking a whip; he wore an immense geranium flower stuck in the lapel of his coat. Firm as a rock he stood, bending back a little in the swaying cart. Andreas craned his neck to watch him all the way down the road, even after he had gone, listening for the sharp sound of those rattling cans. ‘H’m, not much wrong with him,’ he reflected. ‘Wouldn’t mind a taste of that life myself. Up early, work all over by eleven o’clock, nothing to do but loaf about all day until milking time.’ Which he knew was an exaggeration, but he wanted to pity himself. The maid opened the door, and stood aside for Doctor Erb. Andreas wheeled round; the two men shook hands. ‘Well, Binzer,’ said the doctor jovially, brushing some crumbs from a pearl-coloured waistcoat, ‘son and heir becoming importunate?’ Up went Binzer’s spirits with a bound. Son and heir, by Jove! He was glad to have to deal with a man again. And a sane fellow this, who came across this sort of thing every day of the week. ‘That’s about the measure of it, Doctor,’ he answered, smiling and picking up his hat. ‘Mother dragged me out of bed this morning with imperative orders to bring you along.’ ‘Gig will be round in a minute. Drive back with me, won’t you? Extraordinary, sultry day; you’re as red as a beetroot already.’ Andreas affected to laugh. The doctor had one annoying habit – imagined he had the right to poke fun at everybody simply because he was a doctor. ‘The man’s riddled with conceit, like all these professionals,’ Andreas decided. ‘What sort of a night did Frau Binzer have?’ asked the doctor. ‘Ah, here’s the gig. Tell me on the way up. Sit as near the middle as you can, will you, Binzer? Your weight tilts it over a bit one side – that’s the worst of you successful business men.’ ‘Two stone heavier than I, if he’s a pound,’ thought Andreas. ‘The man may be all right in his profession – but heaven preserve me.’ ‘Off you go, my beauty.’ Doctor Erb flicked the little brown mare. ‘Did your wife get any sleep last night?’ ‘No; I don’t think she did,’ answered Andreas shortly. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m not satisfied that she hasn’t a nurse.’ ‘Oh, your mother’s worth a dozen nurses,’ cried the doctor, with immense gusto. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m not keen on nurses – too raw – raw as rump-steak. They wrestle for a baby as though they were wrestling with Death for the body of Patroclus1. . . . Ever seen that picture by an English artist. Leighton? Wonderful thing – full of sinew!’ ‘There he goes again,’ thought Andreas, ‘airing off his knowledge to make a fool of me.’

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‘Now your mother – she’s firm – she’s capable. Does what she’s told with a fund of sympathy. Look at these shops we’re passing – they’re festering sores. How on earth this government can tolerate –’ ‘They’re not so bad – sound enough – only want a coat of paint.’ The doctor whistled a little tune and flicked the mare again. ‘Well, I hope the young shaver won’t give his mother too much trouble,’ he said. ‘Here we are.’ A skinny little boy, who had been sliding up and down the back seat of the gig, sprang out and held the horse’s head. Andreas went straight into the dining-room and left the servant girl to take the doctor upstairs. He sat down, poured out some coffee, and bit through half a roll before helping himself to fish. Then he noticed there was no hot plate for the fish – the whole house was at sixes and sevens. He rang the bell, but the servant girl came in with a tray holding a bowl of soup and a hot plate. ‘I’ve been keeping them on the stove,’ she simpered. ‘Ah, thanks, that’s very kind of you.’ As he swallowed the soup his heart warmed to this fool of a girl. ‘Oh, it’s a good thing Doctor Erb has come,’ volunteered the servant girl, who was bursting for want of sympathy. ‘H’m, h’m,’ said Andreas. She waited a moment, expectantly, rolling her eyes, then in full loathing of menkind went back to the kitchen and vowed herself to sterility. Andreas cleared the soup bowl, and cleared the fish. As he ate, the room slowly darkened. A faint wind sprang up and beat the tree branches against the window. The dining-room looked over the breakwater of the harbour, and the sea swung heavily in rolling waves. Wind crept round the house, moaning drearily. ‘We’re in for a storm. That means I’m boxed up here all day. Well, there’s one blessing; it’ll clear the air.’ He heard the servant girl rushing importantly round the house, slamming windows. Then he caught a glimpse of her in the garden, unpegging tea towels from the line across the lawn. She was a worker, there was no doubt about that. He took up a book, and wheeled his arm-chair over to the window. But it was useless. Too dark to read; he didn’t believe in straining his eyes, and gas at ten o’clock in the morning seemed absurd. So he slipped down in the chair, leaned his elbows on the padded arms and gave himself up, for once, to idle dreaming. ‘A boy? Yes, it was bound to be a boy this time. . . .’ ‘What’s your family, Binzer?’ ‘Oh, I’ve two girls and a boy!’ A very nice little number. Of course he was the last man to have a favourite child, but a man needed a son. ‘I’m working up the business for my son! Binzer and Son! It would mean living very tight for the next ten years, cutting expenses as fine as possible; and then –’

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A tremendous gust of wind sprang upon the house, seized it, shook it, dropped, only to grip the more tightly. The waves swelled up along the breakwater and were whipped with broken foam. Over the white sky flew tattered streamers of grey cloud. Andreas felt quite relieved to hear Doctor Erb coming down the stairs; he got up and lit the gas. ‘Mind if I smoke in here?’ asked Doctor Erb, lighting a cigarette before Andreas had time to answer. ‘You don’t smoke, do you? No time to indulge in pernicious little habits!’ ‘How is she now?’ asked Andreas, loathing the man. ‘Oh, well as can be expected, poor little soul. She begged me to come down and have a look at you. Said she knew you were worrying.’ With laughing eyes the doctor looked at the breakfast-table. ‘Managed to peck a bit, I see, eh?’ ‘Hoo-wih!’ shouted the wind, shaking the window-sashes. ‘Pity, this weather,’ said Doctor Erb. ‘Yes, it gets on Anna’s nerves, and it’s just nerve she wants.’ ‘Eh, what’s that?’ retorted the doctor. ‘Nerve! Man alive! She’s got twice the nerve of you and me rolled into one. Nerve! she’s nothing but nerve. A woman who works as she does about the house and has three children in four years thrown in with the dusting, so to speak!’ He pitched his half-smoked cigarette into the fireplace and frowned at the window. ‘Now he’s accusing me,’ thought Andreas. ‘That’s the second time this morning – first mother and now this man taking advantage of my sensitiveness.’ He could not trust himself to speak, and rang the bell for the servant girl. ‘Clear away the breakfast things,’ he ordered. ‘I can’t have them messing about on the table till dinner!’ ‘Don’t be hard on the girl,’ coaxed Doctor Erb. ‘She’s got twice the work to do to-day.’ At that Binzer’s anger blazed out. ‘I’ll trouble you, Doctor, not to interfere between me and my servants!’ And he felt a fool at the same moment for not saying ‘servant’. Doctor Erb was not perturbed. He shook his head, thrust his hands into his pockets, and began balancing himself on toe and heel. ‘You’re jagged by the weather,’ he said wryly, ‘nothing else. A great pity – this storm. You know climate has an immense effect upon birth. A fine day perks a woman – gives her heart for her business. Good weather is as necessary to a confinement as it is to a washing day. Not bad – that last remark of mine – for a professional fossil, eh?’ Andreas made no reply. ‘Well, I’ll be getting back to my patient. Why don’t you take a walk, and clear your head? That’s the idea for you.’

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‘No,’ he answered, ‘I won’t do that; it’s too rough.’ He went back to his chair by the window. While the servant girl cleared away he pretended to read . . . then his dreams! It seemed years since he had had the time to himself to dream like that – he never had a breathing space. Saddled with work all day, and couldn’t shake it off in the evening, like other men. Besides, Anna was interested – they talked of practically nothing else together. Excellent mother she’d make for a boy; she had a grip of things. Church bells started ringing through the windy air, now sounding as though from very far away, then again as though all the churches in the town had been suddenly transplanted into their street. They stirred something in him, those bells, something vague and tender. Just about that time Anna would call him from the hall. ‘Andreas, come and have your coat brushed. I’m ready.’ Then off they would go, she hanging on his arm, and looking up at him. She certainly was a little thing. He remembered once saying when they were engaged, ‘Just as high as my heart,’ and she had jumped on to a stool and pulled his head down, laughing. A kid in those days, younger than her children in nature, brighter, more ‘go’ and ‘spirit’ in her. The way she’d run down the road to meet him after business! And the way she laughed when they were looking for a house. By Jove! that laugh of hers! At the memory he grinned, then grew suddenly grave. Marriage certainly changed a woman far more than it did a man. Talk about sobering down. She had lost all her go in two months! Well, once this boy business was over she’d get stronger. He began to plan a little trip for them. He’d take her away and they’d loaf about together somewhere. After all, dash it, they were young still. She’d got into a groove; he’d have to force her out of it, that’s all. He got up and went into the drawing-room, carefully shut the door and took Anna’s photograph from the top of the piano. She wore a white dress with a big bow of some soft stuff under the chin, and stood, a little stiffly, holding a sheaf of artificial poppies and corn in her hands. Delicate she looked even then; her masses of hair gave her that look. She seemed to droop under the heavy braids of it, and yet she was smiling. Andreas caught his breath sharply. She was his wife – that girl. Posh! it had only been taken four years ago. He held it close to him, bent forward and kissed it. Then rubbed the glass with the back of his hand. At that moment, fainter than he had heard it in the passage, more terrifying, Andreas heard again that wailing cry. The wind caught it up in mocking echo, blew it over the house-tops, down the street, far away from him. He flung out his arms, ‘I’m so damnably helpless,’ he said, and then to the picture, ‘Perhaps it’s not as bad as it sounds; perhaps it is just my sensitiveness.’ In the half light of the drawing-room the smile seemed to deepen in Anna’s portrait, and to become secret, even cruel.

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‘No,’ he reflected, ‘that smile is not at all her happiest expression – it was a mistake to let her have it taken smiling like that. She doesn’t look like my wife – like the mother of my son.’ Yes, that was it, she did not look like the mother of a son who was going to be a partner in the firm. The picture got on his nerves; he held it in different lights, looked at it from a distance, sideways, spent, it seemed to Andreas afterwards, a whole lifetime trying to fit it in. The more he played with it the deeper grew his dislike of it. Thrice he carried it over to the fireplace and decided to chuck it behind the Japanese umbrella in the grate; then he thought it absurd to waste an expensive frame. There was no good in beating about the bush. Anna looked like a stranger – abnormal, a freak – it might be a picture taken just before or after death. Suddenly he realised that the wind had dropped, that the whole house was still, terribly still. Cold and pale, with a disgusting feeling that spiders were creeping up his spine and across his face, he stood in the centre of the drawing-room, hearing Doctor Erb’s footsteps descending the stairs. He saw Doctor Erb come into the room; the room seemed to change into a great glass bowl that spun round, and Doctor Erb seemed to swim through this glass bowl towards him, like a goldfish in a pearl-coloured waistcoat. ‘My beloved wife has passed away!’ He wanted to shout it out before the doctor spoke. ‘Well, she’s hooked a boy this time!’ said Doctor Erb. Andreas staggered forward. ‘Look out. Keep on your pins,’ said Doctor Erb, catching Binzer’s arm, and murmuring, as he felt it, ‘Flabby as butter.’ A glow spread all over Andreas. He was exultant. ‘Well, by God! Nobody can accuse me of not knowing what suffering is,’ he said. Notes Text: IGP. New Age, 9: 3, 18 May 1911, pp. 61–3. Although the story uses German names, in this case that of the local shoemaker in Wörishofen, to make it seemingly consistent with the other stories set in Germany, ‘A Birthday’ is very much located in a Wellington context. It is set in the house where KM was born in Tinakori Road, with the small suspension bridge spanning the gully behind it. Andreas and Anna Binzer are early depictions of her parents, with her father’s bluff self-centredness and her mother’s delicate health. 1. A confused memory of Lord Frederic Leighton’s ‘Heracles wrestling with Death for the body of Alcestis’ (1869–71), based on Euripides’ Alcestis, not the episode in Iliad XVI, when Hector kills Patroclus.

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The Modern Soul ‘Good-evening,’ said the Herr Professor, squeezing my hand; ‘wonderful weather! I have just returned from a party in the wood. I have been making music for them on my trombone. You know, these pinetrees provide most suitable accompaniment for a trombone! they are sighing delicacy against sustained strength, as I remarked once in a lecture on wind instruments in Frankfort. May I be permitted to sit beside you on this bench, gnädige Frau?’ He sat down, tugging at a white paper package in the tail pocket of his coat. ‘Cherries,’ he said, nodding and smiling. ‘There is nothing like cherries for producing free saliva after trombone playing, especially after Grieg’s “Ich Liebe Dich”.1 Those sustained blasts on “liebe” make my throat as dry as a railway tunnel. Have some?’ He shook the bag at me. ‘I prefer watching you eat them.’ ‘Ah, ha!’ He crossed his legs, sticking the cherry bag between his knees, to leave both hands free. ‘Psychologically I understood your refusal. It is your innate feminine delicacy in preferring etherealised sensations. . . . Or perhaps you do not care to eat the worms? All cherries contain worms. Once I made a very interesting experiment with a colleague of mine at the university. We bit into four pounds of the best cherries and did not find one specimen without a worm. But what would you? As I remarked to him afterwards – dear friend, it amounts to this: if one wishes to satisfy the desires of nature one must be strong enough to ignore the facts of nature. . . . The conversation is not out of your depth? I have so seldom the time or opportunity to open my heart to a woman that I am apt to forget.’ I looked at him brightly. ‘See, what a fat one!’ cried the Herr Professor. ‘That is almost a mouthful in itself; it is beautiful enough to hang from a watch-chain.’ He chewed it up and spat the stone an incredible distance – over the garden path into the flower bed. He was proud of the feat. I saw it. ‘The quantity of fruit I have eaten on this bench,’ he sighed, ‘apricots, peaches and cherries. One day that garden bed will become an orchard grove, and I shall allow you to pick as much as you please, without paying me anything.’ I was grateful, without showing undue excitement.

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‘Which reminds me’ – he hit the side of his nose with one finger – ‘the manager of the pension handed me my weekly bill after dinner this evening. It is almost impossible to credit. I do not expect you to believe me – he has charged me extra for a miserable little glass of milk I drink in bed at night to prevent insomnia. Naturally, I did not pay. But the tragedy of the story is this: I cannot expect the milk to produce somnolence any longer; my peaceful attitude of mind towards it is completely destroyed. I know I shall throw myself into a fever in attempting to plumb this want of generosity in so wealthy a man as the manager of a pension. Think of me to-night’ – he ground the empty bag under his heel – ‘think that the worst is happening to me as your head drops asleep on your pillow.’ Two ladies came on the front steps of the pension and stood, arm in arm, looking over the garden. The one, old and scraggy, dressed almost entirely in black bead trimming and a satin reticule; the other, young and thin, in a white gown, her yellow hair tastefully garnished with mauve sweet peas. The Professor drew in his feet and sat up sharply, pulling down his waistcoat. ‘The Godowskas,’ he murmured. ‘Do you know them? A mother and daughter from Vienna. The mother has an internal complaint and the daughter is an actress. Fräulein Sonia is a very modern soul. I think you would find her most sympathetic. She is forced to be in attendance on her mother just now. But what a temperament! I have once described her in her autograph album as a tigress with a flower in the hair. Will you excuse me? Perhaps I can persuade them to be introduced to you.’ I said, ‘I am going up to my room.’ But the Professor rose and shook a playful finger at me. ‘Na,’ he said ‘we are friends, and, therefore, I shall speak quite frankly to you. I think they would consider it a little “marked” if you immediately retired to the house at their approach, after sitting here alone with me in the twilight. You know this world. Yes, you know it as I do.’ I shrugged my shoulders, remarking ‘with one eye’ that while the Professor had been talking the Godowskas had trailed across the lawn towards us. They confronted the Herr Professor as he stood up. ‘Good-evening,’ quavered Frau Godowska. ‘Wonderful weather! It has given me quite a touch of hay fever!’ Fräulein Godowska said nothing. She swooped over a rose growing in the embryo orchard, then stretched out her hand with a magnificent gesture to the Herr Professor. He presented me. ‘This is my little English friend of whom I have spoken. She is the stranger in our midst. We have been eating cherries together.’

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‘How delightful,’ sighed Frau Godowska. ‘My daughter and I have often observed you through the bedroom window. Haven’t we, Sonia?’ Sonia absorbed my outward and visible form with an inward and spiritual glance, then repeated the magnificent gesture for my benefit. The four of us sat on the bench, with that faint air of excitement of passengers established in a railway carriage on the qui vive for the train whistle. Frau Godowska sneezed. ‘I wonder if it is hay fever,’ she remarked, worrying the satin reticule for her handkerchief, ‘or would it be the dew. Sonia dear, is the dew falling?’ Fräulein Sonia raised her face to the sky, and half closed her eyes. ‘No, mamma, my face is quite warm. Oh, look, Herr Professor, there are swallows in flight; they are like a little flock of Japanese thoughts – nicht wahr?’ ‘Where?’ cried the Herr Professor. ‘Oh yes, I see, by the kitchen chimney. But why do you say “Japanese”? Could you not compare them with equal veracity to a little flock of German thoughts in flight?’ He rounded on me. ‘Have you swallows in England?’ ‘I believe there are some at certain seasons. But doubtless they have not the same symbolical value for the English. In Germany –’ ‘I have never been to England,’ interrupted Fräulein Sonia, ‘but I have many English acquaintances. They are so cold!’ She shivered. ‘Fish-blooded,’ snapped Frau Godowska. ‘Without soul, without heart, without grace. But you cannot equal their dress materials. I spent a week in Brighton twenty years ago, and the travelling cape I bought there is not yet worn out – the one you wrap the hot-water bottle in, Sonia. My lamented husband, your father, Sonia, knew a great deal about England. But the more he knew about it the oftener he remarked to me, “England is merely an island of beef flesh swimming in a warm gulf sea of gravy.” Such a brilliant way of putting things. Do you remember, Sonia?’ ‘I forget nothing, mamma,’ answered Sonia. Said the Herr Professor: ‘That is the proof of your calling, gnädiges Fräulein. Now I wonder – and this is a very interesting speculation – is memory a blessing or – excuse the word – a curse?’ Frau Godowska looked into the distance, then the corners of her mouth dropped and her skin puckered. She began to shed tears. ‘Ach Gott! Gracious lady, what have I said?’ exclaimed the Herr Professor. Sonia took her mother’s hand. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘to-night it is stewed carrots and nut tart for supper. Suppose we go in and take our places,’ her sidelong, tragic stare accusing the Professor and me the while. I followed them across the lawn and up the steps. Frau Godowska

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was murmuring, ‘Such a wonderful, beloved man’; with her disengaged hand Fräulein Sonia was arranging the sweet-pea ‘garniture’. *

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‘A concert for the benefit of afflicted Catholic infants will take place in the salon at eight-thirty P.M. Artists: Fräulein Sonia Godowska, from Vienna; Herr Professor Windberg and his trombone; Frau Oberlehrer Weidel, and others.’ This notice was tied round the neck of the melancholy stag’s head in the dining-room. It graced him like a red and white ‘dinner bib’ for days before the event, causing the Herr Professor to bow before it and say ‘good appetite’ until we sickened of his pleasantry and left the smiling to be done by the waiter, who was paid to be pleasing to the guests. On the appointed day the married ladies sailed about the pension dressed like upholstered chairs, and the unmarried ladies like draped muslin dressing-table covers. Frau Godowska pinned a rose in the centre of her reticule; another blossom was tucked in the mazy folds of a white antimacassar thrown across her breast. The gentlemen wore black coats, white silk ties and ferny buttonholes tickling the chin. The floor of the salon was freshly polished, chairs and benches arranged, and a row of little flags strung across the ceiling – they flew and jigged in the draught with all the enthusiasm of family washing. It was arranged that I should sit beside Frau Godowska, and that the Herr Professor and Sonia should join us when their share of the concert was over. ‘That will make you feel quite one of the performers,’ said the Herr Professor genially. ‘It is a great pity that the English nation is so unmusical. Never mind! To-night you shall hear something – we have discovered a nest of talent during the rehearsals.’ ‘What do you intend to recite, Fräulein Sonia?’ She shook back her hair. ‘I never know until the last moment. When I come on the stage I wait for one moment and then I have the sensation as though something struck me here’ – she placed her hand upon her collar brooch – ‘and . . . words come!’ ‘Bend down a moment,’ whispered her mother. ‘Sonia, love, your skirt safety-pin is showing at the back. Shall I come outside and fasten it properly for you, or will you do it yourself?’ ‘Oh, mamma, please don’t say such things.’ Sonia flushed and grew very angry. ‘You know how sensitive I am to the slightest unsympathetic impression at a time like this. . . . I would rather my skirt dropped off my body –’

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‘Sonia – my heart!’ A bell tinkled. The waiter came in and opened the piano. In the heated excitement of the moment he entirely forgot what was fitting, and flicked the keys with the grimy table napkin he carried over his arm. The Frau Oberlehrer tripped on the platform followed by a very young gentleman, who blew his nose twice before he hurled his handkerchief into the bosom of the piano. ‘Yes, I know you have no love for me, And no forget-me-not. No love, no heart, and no forget-me-not,’

sang the Frau Oberlehrer, in a voice that seemed to issue from her forgotten thimble and have nothing to do with her. ‘Ach, how sweet, how delicate,’ we cried, clapping her soothingly. She bowed as though to say, ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ and retired, the very young gentleman dodging her train and scowling. The piano was closed, an arm-chair was placed in the centre of the platform. Fräulein Sonia drifted towards it. A breathless pause. Then, presumably, the winged shaft struck her collar brooch. She implored us not to go into the woods in trained dresses, but rather as lightly draped as possible, and bed with her among the pine needles. Her loud, slightly harsh voice filled the salon. She dropped her arms over the back of the chair, moving her lean hands from the wrists. We were thrilled and silent. The Herr Professor, beside me, abnormally serious, his eyes bulging, pulled at his moustache ends. Frau Godowska adopted that peculiarly detached attitude of the proud parent. The only soul who remained untouched by her appeal was the waiter, who leaned idly against the wall of the salon and cleaned his nails with the edge of a programme. He was ‘off duty’ and intended to show it. ‘What did I say?’ shouted the Herr Professor under cover of tumultuous applause, ‘tem-per-ament! There you have it. She is a flame in the heart of a lily. I know I am going to play well. It is my turn now. I am inspired. Fräulein Sonia’ – as that lady returned to us, pale and draped in a large shawl – ‘you are my inspiration. To-night you shall be the soul of my trombone. Wait only.’ To right and left of us people bent over and whispered admiration down Fräulein Sonia’s neck. She bowed in the grand style. ‘I am always successful,’ she said to me. ‘You see, when I act I am. In Vienna, in the plays of Ibsen we had so many bouquets that the cook had three in the kitchen. But it is difficult here. There is so little magic. Do you not feel it? There is none of that mysterious perfume which floats almost as a visible thing from the souls of the Viennese

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audiences. My spirit starves for want of that.’ She leaned forward, chin on hand. ‘Starves,’ she repeated. The Professor appeared with his trombone, blew into it, held it up to one eye, tucked back his shirt cuffs and wallowed in the soul of Sonia Godowska. Such a sensation did he create that he was recalled to play a Bavarian dance, which he acknowledged was to be taken as a breathing exercise rather than an artistic achievement. Frau Godowska kept time to it with a fan. Followed the very young gentleman who piped in a tenor voice that he loved somebody, ‘with blood in his heart and a thousand pains’.2 Fräulein Sonia acted a poison scene with the assistance of her mother’s pill vial and the arm-chair replaced by a ‘chaise longue’; a young girl scratched a lullaby on a young fiddle; and the Herr Professor performed the last sacrificial rites on the altar of the afflicted children by playing the National Anthem. ‘Now I must put mamma to bed,’ whispered Fräulein Sonia. ‘But afterwards I must take a walk. It is imperative that I free my spirit in the open air for a moment. Would you come with me, as far as the railway station and back?’ ‘Very well, then, knock on my door when you’re ready.’ Thus the modern soul and I found ourselves together under the stars. ‘What a night!’ she said. ‘Do you know that poem of Sappho about her hands in the stars. . . .3 I am curiously sapphic. And this is so remarkable – not only am I sapphic, I find in all the works of all the greatest writers, especially in their unedited letters, some touch, some sign of myself – some resemblance, some part of myself, like a thousand reflections of my own hands in a dark mirror.’ ‘But what a bother,’ said I. ‘I do not know what you mean by “bother”; it is rather the curse of my genius. . . .’ She paused suddenly, staring at me. ‘Do you know my tragedy?’ she asked. I shook my head. ‘My tragedy is my mother. Living with her I live with the coffin of my unborn aspirations. You heard that about the safety-pin to-night. It may seem to you a little thing, but it ruined my three first gestures. They were –’ ‘Impaled on a safety-pin,’ I suggested. ‘Yes, exactly that. And when we are in Vienna I am the victim of moods, you know. I long to do wild, passionate things. And mamma says, “Please pour out my mixture first.” Once I remember I flew into a rage and threw a washstand jug out of the window. Do you know what she said? “Sonia, it is not so much throwing things out of windows, if only you would –”’ ‘Choose something smaller?’ said I.

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‘No . . . “tell me about it beforehand.” Humiliating! And I do not see any possible light out of this darkness.’ ‘Why don’t you join a touring company and leave your mother in Vienna?’ ‘What! Leave my poor, little, sick, widowed mother in Vienna! Sooner than that I would drown myself. I love my mother as I love nobody else in the world – nobody and nothing! Do you think it is impossible to love one’s tragedy? “Out of my great sorrows I make my little songs”,4 that is Heine or myself.’ ‘Oh, well, that’s all right,’ I said cheerfully. ‘But it is not all right!’ I suggested we should turn back. We turned. ‘Sometimes I think the solution lies in marriage,’ said Fräulein Sonia. ‘If I find a simple, peaceful man who adores me and will look after mamma – a man who would be for me a pillow – for genius cannot hope to mate – I shall marry him. . . . You know the Herr Professor has paid me very marked attentions.’ ‘Oh, Fräulein Sonia,’ I said, very pleased with myself, ‘why not marry him to your mother?’ We were passing the hairdresser’s shop at the moment. Fräulein Sonia clutched my arm. ‘You, you,’ she stammered. ‘The cruelty. I am going to faint. Mamma to marry again before I marry – the indignity. I am going to faint here and now.’ I was frightened. ‘You can’t,’ I said, shaking her. ‘Come back to the pension and faint as much as you please. But you can’t faint here. All the shops are closed. There is nobody about. Please don’t be so foolish.’ ‘Here and here only!’ She indicated the exact spot and dropped quite beautifully, lying motionless. ‘Very well,’ I said, ‘faint away; but please hurry over it.’ She did not move. I began to walk home, but each time I looked behind me I saw the dark form of the modern soul prone before the hairdresser’s window. Finally I ran, and rooted out the Herr Professor from his room. ‘Fräulein Sonia has fainted,’ I said crossly. ‘Du lieber Gott! Where? How?’ ‘Outside the hairdresser’s shop in the Station Road.’ ‘Jesus and Maria! Has she no water with her?’ – he seized his carafe – ‘nobody beside her?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘Where is my coat? No matter, I shall catch a cold on the chest. Willingly, I shall catch one. . . . You are ready to come with me?’ ‘No,’ I said; ‘you can take the waiter.’ ‘But she must have a woman. I cannot be so indelicate as to attempt to loosen her stays.’

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‘Modern souls oughtn’t to wear them,’ said I. He pushed past me and clattered down the stairs. *

*

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When I came down to breakfast next morning there were two places vacant at the table. Fräulein Sonia and the Herr Professor had gone off for a day’s excursion in the woods. I wondered. Notes Text: IGP. New Age, 9: 8, 22 June 1911, pp. 183–6. 1. Edvard Grieg (1843–1907), ‘Ich Liebe Dich’, for piano and voice, Op. 5, No. 3. 2. ‘As once the blood of the redeemed hero flowed, for the sinful world of a thousand pains.’ Richard Wagner, Parsifal (1882), I, ii. 3. KM may have in mind the poem by Sappho (b. 612 bc) addressed to Atthis, where she writes of ‘the rose-fingered moon [. . .] among the stars’. 4. ‘Aus meinen grossen Schmerzen / Mach’ich die kleinen Lieder’, Heinrich Heine, XXXVI, Buch der Lieder (1827).

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The Festival of the Coronation (With apologies to Theocritus.)1 GWENNIE: Hallo, old dear! TILLY: I’d given you up. Come into the kitchen and have some tea. We’ll never be able to get a cup out. GWENNIE: Even the A.B.C.’s2 are closed. TILLY: Squatty-vous. GWENNIE: Heavens, this rushing! I couldn’t find a solitary ’bus or even a taxi – nothing in the streets but old scraps of newspaper and stray policemen. It’s quite uncanny – a sort of Sunday without church bells. TILLY: I know. The arrival of the postman seemed almost indecent. I got up this morning with a feeling of ‘early Communion’ in the air. I’d never be able to live in London if it wasn’t for the noise. GWENNIE: Pop on your things and let’s start. I read in the ‘Daily Mail’ the procession will be wonderful.

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TILLY: In the ‘Daily Mail’ everything is wonderful. Do you think I dare risk my best hat? GWENNIE: Doubtful. I’ve come out in rags. Trimmed this hat before I got into bed last night. The red velvet’s off a cushion cover, my dear, and I picked up the cornflowers for 2¾d. a bunch years and years ago. TILLY: You’re one of those people who never need good clothes. O, you know what I mean. And the hat’s sweet – awfully ducky and appropriate. . . . Where is my key? I lose the key of this flat simply through trying to find it. GWENNIE: Tilly, that skirt suits you down to the ground. Tell me, how much material is there in it? TILLY: Two yards round, and it’s all the fault of ‘Mary’.3 I hadn’t worn more than a yard and a half for months. GWENNIE: You poor darling. And I’m convinced she won’t be happy until she’s put the Court into crinolines. TILLY: Are you ready? Half a minute. I’ll just put the milk-can out before I shut the door. (They go out.) Gracious! There isn’t even a tram! We’ll have to walk all the way to the Tube: you can positively count the people. Perhaps the Coronation has been postponed after all at the last moment. Ask a policeman our quickest way to the line of route. Say ‘Officer’, it makes them so much more attentive. GWENNIE: Officer, what is the shortest way to reach the crowd? POLICEMAN: Tube to Piccadilly. No – there’s nobody at Piccadilly now. Try Dover Street. GWENNIE: Thank you. (To Tilly) Let’s cross over here. Isn’t it all ghastly? I feel as though we were treading on graves. TILLY: I’ll take the tickets. What’s that official staring at us for? He’ll split his face in half if he yawns like that. Really, you’d think they were running the Tube especially for our benefit. I am glad you came. I’d be terrified alone. GWENNIE: Isn’t it nice to be able to read all the advertisements in comfort? Look at that one – for Beeney’s new novel ‘Love and the Death’s Head’4 . . . ‘Brimming goblets of humour. Tipped with the salt foam of never malicious satire’ . . . it sounds rather fascinating. TILLY: Here’s the train. I can’t get into a perfectly empty carriage. There are two men in that ‘smoker’. Jump on. GWENNIE: I don’t like the look of them. Keep a tight hold on your bag when we get out. How they stare! Now they’ve started humming at us. TILLY: Oh, they’re harmless – humming is complimentary. The serenade dies very hard. . . . Take my arm when we get out and keep as close as possible in the crowd. If you get your arm stretched out, a push from behind, and it would be broken.

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GWENNIE: Arrived! Do look at the barricades – like a Russian siege – and that angelic horse with the leopard skin on his back. But where are the people? Ask a policeman what time the crowd is expected. TILLY: Officer, if we get through the barriers shall we be able to come out again when the crowd arrives? (To Tilly) He won’t answer. I think he’s asleep. POLICEMAN: These ’ere barricades won’t be used, mum. GWENNIE: O, there are some people this side – quite a little party – and three more horses. Let’s wait and see what happens. I adore listening to other people’s conversation. (From a window above a piece of brown paper floats on to Gwennie’s hat.) Gracious me! How dangerous! If that had struck one of the horses they’d have stampeded. What ever shall I do with it? VOICE: Make it inter a ball an’ stand on it. GWENNIE: Pooh, that’s smart! I don’t think this is at all amusing. Ask a policeman what time the procession passes. TILLY: Officer, will the procession be here soon? POLICEMAN: ’Alf past two. TILLY: And it’s not nine o’clock yet. I’m going. Let’s try Piccadilly. It’s coming on to rain – we’ll be more sheltered in the Tube. GWENNIE: Yes, and Appenrodt’s may be open.5 I’m beginning to have a sinking sensation. TILLY: We’ll never be able to get in. . . . Here’s a whole live workman in the Tube, Gwennie. I’m getting the giggles. LIFTMAN: ’Ullo Bill, out to see the troops? BILL: Wot troops? LIFTMAN: Coronation! BILL: Huh! I’m off to work, I am. GWENNIE: Did you ever! How dark these passages are. . . . I wonder if the procession has started. TILLY: Where is Piccadilly Circus? These flags make the buildings quite unfamiliar. . . . Why, we’re there, Gwennie. GWENNIE: O, do look at that old man riding round the fountain on a tricycle. Pathetic! Or do you think he’s a member of the Secret Police? TILLY: No, he looks to me like a German tourist. Shall we go and have a sandwich? There’s not a soul in the café. GWENNIE: Fed I must be! Then supposing we go to Oxford Circus and walk from there to Chancery Lane – we’d be near home. TILLY: I’m quite willing to try. Does the King wear his crown on the return journey? GWENNIE: No, an ermine thing, I believe, rather like a black and white spotted bathing cap. . . . I’ll pay, dear. You must let me – it’s

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my shout to-day, because I asked you to come with me. (They go out.) TILLY: It’s raining again. I’ll tell you an unromantic fact. I’ve got a corn on my little toe, and this weather simply makes it shoot. . . . Isn’t it a comfort to be with a woman and feel able to say those things? I’d just as soon go about with a woman as with a man. GWENNIE: Well – I – don’t – know. COSTER (wheeling a barrow): Try an apple for that faice. TILLY: Rude beast! Isn’t it Kipling who says the East End never ought to come West?6 I quite agree. GWENNIE: Come home to lunch with me. Are you keen on beef? I’ve got a delicious piece, cold, and some pickles. We could have a lie down afterwards. TILLY: I’d love it. It seems to me that on occasions like this the best thing to do is to remain quietly in the house and wait for the evening papers. Notes Text: New Age, 9: 9, 29 June 1911, p. 196. 1. As Alpers notes (p. 550), KM based her text relating to the coronation of George V on 22 June 1911 on Theocritus, Adonizusae, Idyll XV, in which the Greek poet catches the tone of suburban gossip in Alexandria in 250 bc. 2. The ABC (Aerated Bread Company) was a chain of cafés whose massproduced bread was advertised as additive-free. 3. George V’s Queen Consort, Princess Mary of Teck, encouraged the fashion for voluminous skirts. 4. A non-existent novel. 5. At the time of the Coronation, ‘Herr Appenrodt’s Continental Comestibles’ was displayed in lights in Piccadilly Circus, advertising a chain of stores and cafés. 6. A distorted reference to Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Ballad of East and West’ (1889).

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The Journey to Bruges1 ‘You got three-quarters of an hour,’ said the porter. ‘You got an hour mostly. Put it in the cloak-room, lady.’

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A German family, their luggage neatly buttoned into what appeared to be odd canvas trouser legs, filled the entire space before the counter, and a homœopathic young clergyman, his black dicky2 flapping over his shirt, stood at my elbow. We waited and waited, for the cloak-room porter could not get rid of the German family, who appeared by their enthusiasm and gestures to be explaining to him the virtue of so many buttons. At last the wife of the party seized her particular packet and started to undo it. Shrugging his shoulders, the porter turned to me. ‘Where for?’ he asked. ‘Ostend.’ ‘Wot are you putting it in here for?’ I said, ‘Because I’ve a long time to wait.’ He shouted, ‘Train’s in 2.20. No good bringing it here. Hi, you there, lump it off!’ My porter lumped it. The young clergyman, who had listened and remarked, smiled at me radiantly. ‘The train is in,’ he said, ‘really in. You’ve only a few moments, you know.’ My sensitiveness glimpsed a symbol in his eye. I ran to the book-stall. When I returned I had lost my porter. In the teasing heat I ran up and down the platform. The whole travelling world seemed to possess a porter and glory in him except me. Savage and wretched I saw them watch me with that delighted relish of the hot in the very much hotter. ‘One could have a fit running in weather like this,’ said a stout lady, eating a farewell present of grapes. Then I was informed that the train was not yet in. I had been running up and down the Folkestone express. On a higher platform I found my porter sitting on the suit case. ‘I knew you’d be doin’ that,’ he said, airily. ‘I nearly come and stop you. I seen you from ’ere.’ I dropped into a smoking compartment with four young men, two of whom were saying good-bye to a pale youth with a cane. ‘Well, good-bye, old chap. It’s frightfully good of you to have come down. I knew you. I knew the same old slouch. Now, look here, when we come back we’ll have a night of it. What? Ripping of you to have come, old man.’ This from an enthusiast, who lit a cigar as the train swung out, turned to his companion and said, ‘Frightfully nice chap, but – lord – what a bore!’ His companion who was dressed entirely in mole, even unto his socks and hair, smiled gently. I think his brain must have been the same colour: he proved so gentle and sympathetic a listener. In the opposite corner to me sat a beautiful young Frenchman with curly hair and a watch-chain from which dangled a silver fish, a ring, a silver shoe, and a medal. He stared out of the window the whole time, faintly twitching his nose. Of the remaining member there was nothing to be seen from behind his luggage but a pair of tan shoes and a copy of The Snark’s Summer Annual.3

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‘Look here, old man,’ said the Enthusiast, ‘I want to change all our places. You know those arrangements you’ve made – I want to cut them out altogether. Do you mind?’ ‘No,’ said the Mole, faintly. ‘But why?’ ‘Well, I was thinking it over in bed last night, and I’m hanged if I can see the good of us paying fifteen bob if we don’t want to. You see what I mean?’ The Mole took off his pince-nez and breathed on them. ‘Now I don’t want to unsettle you,’ went on the Enthusiast, ‘because, after all, it’s your party – you asked me. I wouldn’t upset it for anything, but – there you are – you see – what?’ Suggested the Mole: ‘I’m afraid people will be down on me for taking you abroad.’ Straightway the other told him how sought after he had been. From far and near, people who were full up for the entire month of August had written and begged for him. He wrung the Mole’s heart by enumerating those longing homes and vacant chairs dotted all over England, until the Mole deliberated between crying and going to sleep. He chose the latter procedure. They all went to sleep except the young Frenchman, who took a little pocket edition out of his coat and nursed it on his knee while he gazed at the warm, dusty country. At Shorncliffe the train stopped. Dead silence. There was nothing to be seen but a large white cemetery. Fantastic it looked in the late afternoon sun, its full-length marble angels appearing to preside over a cheerless picnic of the Shorncliffe departeds on the brown field. One white butterfly flew over the railway lines. As we crept out of the station I saw a poster advertising the Athenaeum. The Enthusiast grunted and yawned, shook himself into existence by rattling the money in his trouser pockets. He jabbed the Mole in the ribs. ‘I say, we’re nearly there! Can you get down those beastly golf-clubs of mine from the rack?’ My heart yearned over the Mole’s immediate future, but he was cheerful and offered to find me a porter at Dover, and strapped my parasol in with my rugs. We saw the sea. ‘It’s going to be beastly rough,’ said the Enthusiast. ‘Gives you a head, doesn’t it? Look here, I know a tip for sea-sickness, and it’s this: You lie on your back – flat – you know, cover your face, and eat nothing but biscuits.’ ‘Dover!’ shouted a guard. In the act of crossing the gangway we renounced England. The most blatant British female produced her mite of French: we ‘Si vous plaît’d’ one another on the deck, ‘Merci’d’ one another on the stairs, and ‘Pardon’d’ to our heart’s content in the saloon. The stewardess stood at the foot of the stairs, a stout, forbidding female, pockmarked, her hands hidden under a businesslike-looking apron. She replied to our salutations with studied indifference, mentally ticking

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off her prey. I descended to the cabin to remove my hat. One old lady was already established there. She lay on a rose and white couch, a black shawl tucked round her, fanning herself with a black feather fan. Her grey hair was half covered with a lace cap and her face gleamed from the black drapings and rose pillows with charming old-world dignity. There was about her a faint rustling and the scents of camphor and lavender. As I watched her, thinking of Rembrandt and, for some reason, Anatole France,4 the stewardess bustled up, placed a canvas stool at her elbow, spread a newspaper upon it, and banged down a receptacle rather like a baking tin. . . . I went up on deck. The sea was bright green, with rolling waves. All the beauty and artificial flower of France had removed their hats and bound their heads in veils. A number of young German men, displaying their national bulk in light-coloured suits cut in the pattern of pyjamas, promenaded. French family parties – the female element in chairs, the male in graceful attitudes against the ship’s side – talked already with that brilliance which denotes friction! I found a chair in a corner against a white partition, but unfortunately this partition had a window set in it for the purpose of providing endless amusement for the curious, who peered through it, watching those bold and brave spirits who walked ‘for’ard’ and were drenched and beaten by the waves. In the first half-hour the excitement of getting wet and being pleaded with, and rushing into dangerous places to return and be rubbed down, was all-absorbing. Then it palled – the parties drifted into silence. You would catch them staring intently at the ocean – and yawning. They grew cold and snappy. Suddenly a young lady in a white woollen hood with cherry bows got up from her chair and swayed over to the railings. We watched her, vaguely sympathetic. The young man with whom she had been sitting called to her. ‘Are you better?’ Negative expressed. He sat up in his chair. ‘Would you like me to hold your head?’ ‘No,’ said her shoulders. ‘Would you care for a coat round you? . . . Is it over? . . . Are you going to remain there?’ . . . He looked at her with infinite tenderness. I decided never again to call men unsympathetic, and to believe in the all-conquering power of love until I died – but never put it to the test. I went below to sleep. I lay down opposite the old lady, and watched the shadows spinning over the ceilings and the wave-drops shining on the portholes. In the shortest sea voyage there is no sense of time. You have been down in the cabin for hours or days or years. Nobody knows or cares. You know all the people to the point of indifference. You do not

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believe in dry land any more – you are caught in the pendulum itself, and left there, idly swinging. The light faded. I fell asleep, to wake to find the stewardess shaking me. ‘We are there in two minutes,’ said she. Forlorn ladies, freed from the embrace of Neptune, knelt upon the floor and searched for their shoes and hairpins – only the old and dignified one lay passive, fanning herself. She looked at me and smiled. ‘Grâce de Dieu, c’est fini,’ she quavered in a voice so fine it seemed to quaver on a thread of lace. I lifted up my eyes. ‘Oui, c’est fini!’ ‘Vous allez à Strasbourg, Madame?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Bruges.’ ‘That is a great pity,’ she said, closing her fan and the conversation. I could not think why, but I had visions of myself perhaps travelling in the same railway carriage with her, wrapping her in the black shawl, of her falling in love with me and leaving me unlimited quantities of money and old lace. . . . These sleepy thoughts pursued me until I arrived on deck. The sky was indigo blue, and a great many stars were shining: our little ship stood black and sharp in the clear air. ‘Have you the tickets? . . . Yes, they want the tickets. . . . Produce your tickets!’ . . . We were squeezed over the gangway, shepherded into the custom house, where porters heaved our luggage on to long wooden slabs, and an old man wearing horn spectacles checked it without a word. ‘Follow me!’ shouted the villainous-looking creature whom I had endowed with my worldly goods. He leapt on to a railway line, and I leapt after him. He raced along a platform, dodging the passengers and fruit wagons, with the security of a cinematograph figure. I reserved a seat and went to buy fruit at a little stall displaying grapes and greengages. The old lady was there, leaning on the arm of a large blond man, in white, with a flowing tie. We nodded. ‘Buy me,’ she said in her delicate voice, ‘three ham sandwiches, mon cher!’ ‘And some cakes,’ said he. ‘Yes, and perhaps a bottle of lemonade.’ ‘Romance is an imp!’ thought I, climbing up into the carriage. The train swung out of the station; the air, blowing through the open windows, smelled of fresh leaves. There were sudden pools of light in the darkness; when I arrived at Bruges the bells were ringing, and white and mysterious shone the moon over the Grand’ Place. Notes Text: New Age, 9: 17, 24 August 1911, pp. 401–2. SCOS.

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1. After a severe attack of pleurisy, KM went on holiday to Bruges in early August, then on to Geneva where she met up with Ida Baker, recently returned from visiting family in Rhodesia. 2. A false, unattached collar. 3. Starr Wood’s Annual ‘The Snark’, a yearly compilation of cartoons and amusing stories. 4. Anatole France (1844–1924), poet, novelist and social critic, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921.

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Being a Truthful Adventure ‘The little town lies spread before the gaze of the eager traveller like a faded tapestry threaded with the silver of its canals, made musical by the great chiming belfry. Life is long since asleep in Bruges; fantastic dreams alone breathe over tower and mediaeval house front, enchanting the eye, inspiring the soul and filling the mind with the great beauty of contemplation.’ I read this sentence from a guide-book while waiting for Madame in the hotel sitting-room. It sounded extremely comforting, and my tired heart, tucked away under a thousand and one grey city wrappings, woke and exulted within me . . . I wondered if I had enough clothes with me to last for at least a month. ‘I shall dream away whole days,’ I thought, ‘take a boat and float up and down the canals, or tether it to a green bush tangling the water side, and absorb mediaeval house fronts. At evensong I shall lie in the long grass of the Béguinage meadow and look up at the elm trees – their leaves touched with gold light and quivering in the blue air – listening the while to the voices of nuns at prayer in the little chapel, and growing full enough of grace to last me the whole winter.’ While I soared magnificently upon these very new feathers Madame came in and told me that there was no room at all for me in the hotel – not a bed, not a corner. She was extremely friendly and seemed to find a fund of secret amusement in the fact; she looked at me as though expecting me to break into delighted laughter. ‘To-morrow,’ she said, ‘there may be. I am expecting a young gentleman who is suddenly taken ill to move from number eleven. He is at present at the chemist’s – perhaps you would care to see the room?’ ‘Not at all,’ said I. ‘Neither shall I wish to-morrow to sleep in the bedroom of an indisposed young gentleman.’ ‘But he will be gone,’ cried Madame, opening her blue eyes wide

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and laughing with that French cordiality so enchanting to English hearing. I was too tired and hungry to feel either appreciative or argumentative. ‘Perhaps you can recommend me another hotel?’ ‘Impossible!’ She shook her head and turned up her eyes, mentally counting over the blue bows painted on the ceiling. ‘You see, it is the season in Bruges, and people do not care to let their rooms for a very short time’ – not a glance at my little suit case lying between us, but I looked at it gloomily, and it seemed to dwindle before my desperate gaze – become small enough to hold nothing but a collapsible folding tooth-brush. ‘My large box is at the station,’ I said coldly, buttoning my gloves. Madame started. ‘You have more luggage. . . .Then you intend to make a long stay in Bruges, perhaps?’ ‘At least a fortnight – perhaps a month.’ I shrugged my shoulders. ‘One moment,’ said Madame. ‘I shall see what I can do.’ She disappeared, I am sure not further than the other side of the door, for she reappeared immediately and told me I might have a room at her private house – ‘just round the corner and kept by an old servant who, although she has a wall eye, has been in our family for fifteen years. The porter will take you there, and you can have supper before you go.’ I was the only guest in the dining-room. A tired waiter provided me with an omelette and a pot of coffee, then leaned against a sideboard and watched me while I ate, the limp table napkin over his arm seeming to symbolise the very man. The room was hung with mirrors reflecting unlimited empty tables and watchful waiters and solitary ladies finding sad comfort in omelettes, and sipping coffee to the rhythm of Mendelssohn’s Spring Song1 played over three times by the great chiming belfry. ‘Are you ready, Madame?’ asked the waiter. ‘It is I who carry your luggage.’ ‘Quite ready.’ He heaved the suit case on to his shoulder and strode before me – past the little pavement cafes where men and women, scenting our approach, laid down their beer and their post-cards to stare after us, down a narrow street of shuttered houses, through the Place van Eyck, to a red-brick house. The door was opened by the wall-eyed family treasure, who held a candle like a miniature frying-pan in her hand. She refused to admit us until we had both told the whole story. ‘C’est ça, c’est ça,’ said she. ‘Jean, number five!’ She shuffled up the stairs, unlocked a door and lit another miniature frying-pan upon the bed-table. The room was papered in pink, having a pink bed, a pink door and a pink chair. On pink mats on the mantelpiece obese young cherubs burst out of pink eggshells with

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trumpets in their mouths. I was brought a can of hot water; I shut and locked the door. ‘Bruges at last,’ I thought as I climbed into a bed so slippery with fine linen that one felt like a fish endeavouring to swim over an ice pond, and this quiet house with the old ‘typical’ servant, – the Place van Eyck, with the white statue surrounded by those dark and heavy trees, – there was almost a touch of Verlaine2 in that. . . . Bang! went a door. I started up in terror and felt for the fryingpan, but it was the room next to mine suddenly invaded. ‘Ah! home at last,’ cried a female voice. ‘Mon Dieu, my feet! Would you go down to Marie, mon cher, and ask her for the tin bath and some hot water?’ ‘No, that is too much,’ boomed the answer. ‘You have washed them three times to-day already.’ ‘But you do not know the pain I suffer; they are quite inflamed. Look only!’ ‘I have looked three times already; I am tired. I beg of you come to bed.’ ‘It would be useless; I could not sleep. Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, how a woman suffers!’ A masculine snort accompanied by the sounds of undressing. ‘Then, if I wait until the morning will you promise not to drag me to a picture gallery?’ ‘Yes, yes, I promise.’ ‘But truly?’ ‘I have said so.’ ‘Now can I believe you?’ A long groan. ‘It is absurd to make that noise, for you know yourself the same thing happened last evening and this morning.’ . . . There was only one thing to be done. I coughed and cleared my throat in that unpleasant and obtrusive way of strange people in next door’ bedrooms. It acted like a charm, their conversation sifted into a whisper for female voice only! I fell asleep. ‘Barquettes for hire. Visit the Venice of the North by Boat. Explore the little known and fascinating by-ways.’ With the memory of the guide book clinging about me I went into the shop and demanded a boat. ‘Have you a small canoe?’ ‘No, Mademoiselle, but a little boat – very suitable.’ ‘I wish to go alone and return when I like.’ ‘Then you have been here before?’ ‘No.’ The boatman looked puzzled. ‘It is not safe for Mademoiselle to go without a guide for the first time.’

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‘Then I will take one on the condition that he is silent and points out no beauties to me.’ ‘But the names of the bridges?’ cried the boatman – ‘the famous house fronts?’ I ran down to the landing stage. ‘Pierre, Pierre!’ called the waterman. A burly young Belgian, his arms full of carpet strips and red velvet pillows, appeared and tossed his spoil into an immense craft. On the bridge above the landing stage a crowd collected, watching the proceedings, and just as I took my seat a fat couple who had been hanging over the parapet rushed down the steps and declared they must come too. ‘Certainly, certainly,’ said Pierre, handing in the lady with charming grace. ‘Mademoiselle will not mind at all.’ They sat in the stern, the gentleman held the lady’s hand, and we twisted among these ‘silver ribbons’ while Pierre threw out his chest and chanted the beauties of Bruges with the exultant abandon of a Latin lover. ‘Turn your head this way – to the left – to the right – now, wait one moment – look up at the bridge – observe this house front. Mademoiselle, do you wish to see the Lac d’Amour?’ I looked vague; the fat couple answered for me. ‘Then we shall disembark.’ We rowed close into a little parapet. We caught hold of a bush and I jumped out. ‘Now, Monsieur,’ who successfully followed, and, kneeling on the bank, gave Madame the crook of his walking-stick for support. She stood up, smiling and vigorous, clutched the walkingstick, strained against the boat side, and the next moment had fallen flat into the water. ‘Ah! what has happened – what has happened!’ screamed Monsieur, clutching her arm, for the water was not deep, reaching only to her waist mark. Somehow or other we fished her up on to the bank where she sat and gasped, wringing her black alpaca skirt. ‘It is all over – a little accident!’ said she, amazingly cheerful. But Pierre was furious. ‘It is the fault of Mademoiselle for wishing to see the Lac d’Amour,’ said he. ‘Madame had better walk through the meadow and drink something hot at the little cafe opposite.’ ‘No, no,’ said she, but Monsieur seconded Pierre. ‘You will await our return,’ said Pierre, loathing me. I nodded and turned my back, for the sight of Madame flopping about on the meadow grass like a large, ungainly duck, was too much. One cannot expect to travel in upholstered boats with people who are enlightened enough to understand laughter that has its wellspring in sympathy. When they were out of sight I ran as fast as I could over the meadow, crawled through a fence, and never went near the Lac d’Amour again. ‘They may think me as drowned as they please,’ thought I; ‘I have had quite enough of canals to last me a lifetime.’

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In the Béguinage meadow at evensong little groups of painters are dotted about in the grass with spindle-legged easels which seem to possess a separate individuality, and stand rudely defying their efforts and returning their long, long gaze with an unfinished stare. English girls wearing flower-wreathed hats and the promise of young American manhood give expression to their souls with a gaiety and ‘camaraderie’, a sort of ‘the world is our shining playground’ spirit – theoretically delightful. They call to one another, and throw cigarettes and fruit and chocolates with youthful naïveté, while parties of tourists who have escaped the clutches of an old woman lying in wait for them in the shadow of the chapel door, pause thoughtfully in front of the easels to ‘see and remark, and say whose?’3 I was lying under a tree with the guilty consciousness of no sketch book – watching the swifts wheel and dip in the bright air, and wondering if all the brown dogs resting in the grass belonged to the young painters, when two people passed me, a man and a girl, their heads bent over a book. There was something vaguely familiar in their walk. Suddenly they looked down at me – we stared – opened our mouths. She swooped down upon me, and he took off his immaculate straw hat and placed it under his left arm. ‘Katherine! How extraordinary! How incredible after all these years!’ cried she. Turning to the man: ‘Guy, can you believe it? – It’s Katherine, in Bruges of all places in the world!’ ‘Why not?’ said I, looking very bright and trying to remember her name. ‘But, my dear, the last time we met was in New Zealand – only think of the miles!’ Of course, she was Betty Sinclair; I’d been to school with her. ‘Where are you staying; have you been here long? Oh, you haven’t changed a day – not a day. I’d have known you anywhere.’ She beckoned to the young man, and said, blushing as though she were ashamed of the fact, but it had to be faced, ‘This is my husband.’ We shook hands. He sat down and chewed a grass twig. Silence fell while Betty recovered breath and squeezed my hand. ‘I didn’t know you were married,’ I said stupidly. ‘Oh, my dear – got a baby!’ said Betty. ‘We live in England now. We’re frightfully keen on the Suffrage, you know.’ Guy removed the straw. ‘Are you with us?’ he asked, intensely. I shook my head. He put the straw back again and narrowed his eyes. ‘Then here’s the opportunity,’ said Betty. ‘My dear, how long are you going to stay? We must go about together and have long talks.

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Guy and I aren’t a honeymoon couple, you know. We love to have other people with us sometimes.’ The belfry clashed into See the Conquering Hero Comes!4 ‘Unfortunately I have to go home quite soon. I’ve had an urgent letter.’ ‘How disappointing! You know Bruges is simply packed with treasures and churches and pictures. There’s an out-door concert tonight in the Grand’ Place, and a competition of bell ringers to-morrow to go on for a whole week.’ ‘Go I must,’ I said so firmly that my soul felt imperative marching orders, stimulated by the belfry. ‘But the quaint streets and the Continental smells, and the lace makers – if we could just wander about – we three – and absorb it all.’ I sighed and bit my underlip. ‘What’s your objection to the vote?’ asked Guy, watching the nuns wending their way in sweet procession among the trees. ‘I always had the idea you were so frightfully keen on the future of women,’ said Betty. ‘Come to dinner with us to-night. Let’s thrash the whole subject out. You know, after the strenuous life in London, one does seem to see things in such a different light in this old world city.’ ‘Oh, a very different light indeed,’ I answered, shaking my head at the familiar guide book emerging from Guy’s pocket. Notes Text: New Age, 9: 19, 7 September 1911, pp. 450–2. SCOS. 1. Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47), ‘Spring Song’, No. 6 from ‘Songs without Words’. 2. Paul-Marie Verlaine (1844–96), French Symbolist poet. See Poèmes saturniens: ‘Mélancholia III, Après trois ans’ (1866) and Fêtes galantes: ‘Claire de Lune’ (1869), as examples of poems which resonate with KM’s atmospheric description here. 3. Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’, Leaves of Grass (1855). 4. Georg Friedrich Handel, from the oratorio Judas Maccabaeus (1746), words by Thomas Morrell.

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The Advanced Lady ‘Do you think we might ask her to come with us,’ said Fräulein Elsa, retying her pink sash ribbon before my mirror. ‘You know, although

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she is so intellectual, I cannot help feeling convinced that she has some secret sorrow. And Lisa told me this morning, as she was turning out my room, that she remains hours and hours by herself, writing; in fact Lisa says she is writing a book! I suppose that is why she never cares to mingle with us, and has so little time for her husband and the child.’ ‘Well, you ask her,’ said I. ‘I have never spoken to the lady.’ Elsa blushed faintly. ‘I have only spoken to her once,’ she confessed. ‘I took her a bunch of wild flowers, to her room, and she came to the door in a white gown, with her hair loose. Never shall I forget that moment. She just took the flowers, and I heard her – because the door was not quite properly shut – I heard her, as I walked down the passage, saying “Purity, fragrance, the fragrance of purity and the purity of fragrance!” It was wonderful!’ At the moment Frau Kellermann knocked at the door. ‘Are you ready?’ she said, coming into the room and nodding to us very genially. ‘The gentlemen are waiting on the steps, and I have asked the Advanced Lady to come with us.’ ‘Na, how extraordinary!’ cried Elsa. ‘But this moment the gnädige Frau and I were debating whether –’ ‘Yes, I met her coming out of her room and she said she was charmed with the idea. Like all of us, she has never been to Schlingen.1 She is downstairs now, talking to Herr Erchardt. I think we shall have a delightful afternoon.’ ‘Is Fritzi waiting too?’ asked Elsa. ‘Of course he is, dear child – as impatient as a hungry man listening for the dinner bell. Run along!’ Elsa ran, and Frau Kellermann smiled at me significantly. In the past she and I had seldom spoken to each other, owing to the fact that her ‘one remaining joy’ – her charming little Karl – had never succeeded in kindling into flame those sparks of maternity which are supposed to glow in great numbers upon the altar of every respectable female heart; but, in view of a premeditated journey together, we became delightfully cordial. ‘For us,’ she said, ‘there will be a double joy. We shall be able to watch the happiness of these two dear children, Elsa and Fritz. They only received the letters of blessing from their parents yesterday morning. It is a very strange thing, but whenever I am in the company of newly engaged couples I blossom. Newly-engaged couples, mothers with first babies, and normal deathbeds, have precisely the same effect on me. Shall we join the others?’ I was longing to ask her why normal deathbeds should cause anyone to burst into flower, and said, ‘Yes, do let us.’ We were greeted by the little party of ‘cure guests’ on the pension

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steps, with those cries of joy and excitement which herald so pleasantly the mildest German excursion. Herr Erchardt and I had not met before that day, so, in accordance with strict pension custom, we asked each other how long we had slept during the night, had we dreamed agreeably, what time had we got up, was the coffee fresh when we had appeared at breakfast, and how had we passed the morning. Having toiled up these stairs of almost national politeness we landed, triumphant and smiling, and paused to recover breath. ‘And now,’ said Herr Erchardt, ‘I have a pleasure in store for you. The Frau Professor is going to be one of us for the afternoon. Yes,’ nodding graciously to the Advanced Lady. ‘Allow me to introduce you to each other.’ We bowed very formally, and looked each other over with that eye which is known as ‘eagle’ but is far more the property of the female than that most unoffending of birds. ‘I think you are English?’ said she. I acknowledged the fact. ‘I am reading a great many English books just now – rather, I am studying them.’ ‘Nu,’ cried Herr Erchardt. ‘Fancy that! What a bond already! I have made up my mind to know Shakespeare in his mother tongue before I die, but that you, Frau Professor, should be already immersed in those wells of English thought!’ ‘From what I have read,’ she said, ‘I do not think they are very deep wells.’ He nodded sympathetically. ‘No,’ he answered, ‘so I have heard. . . . But do not let us embitter our excursion for our little English friend. We will speak of this another time.’ ‘Nu, are we ready?’ cried Fritz, who stood, supporting Elsa’s elbow in his hand, at the foot of the steps. It was immediately discovered that Karl was lost. ‘Ka-rl, Karl-chen!’ we cried. No response. ‘But he was here one moment ago,’ said Herr Langen, a tired, pale youth, who was recovering from a nervous breakdown due to much philosophy and little nourishment. ‘He was sitting here, picking out the works of his watch with a hairpin!’ Frau Kellermann rounded on him. ‘Do you mean to say, my dear Herr Langen, you did not stop the child!’ ‘No,’ said Herr Langen; ‘I’ve tried stopping him before now.’ ‘Da, that child has such energy; never is his brain at peace. If he is not doing one thing, he is doing another!’ ‘Perhaps he has started on the dining-room clock now,’ suggested Herr Langen, abominably hopeful.

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The Advanced Lady suggested that we should go without him. ‘I never take my little daughter for walks,’ she said. ‘I have accustomed her to sitting quietly in my bedroom from the time I go out until I return!’ ‘There he is – there he is,’ piped Elsa, and Karl was observed slithering down a chestnut-tree, very much the worse for twigs. ‘I’ve been listening to what you said about me, mumma,’ he confessed, while Frau Kellermann brushed him down. ‘It was not true about the watch. I was only looking at it, and the little girl never stays in the bedroom. She told me herself she always goes down to the kitchen, and –’ ‘Da, that’s enough!’ said Frau Kellermann. We marched en masse along the station road. It was a very warm afternoon, and continuous parties of ‘cure guests’, who were giving their digestions a quiet airing in pension gardens, called after us, asked if we were going for a walk, and cried, ‘Herr Gott – happy journey’ with immense ill-concealed relish when we mentioned Schlingen. ‘But that is eight kilometres,’ shouted one old man with a white beard, who leaned against a fence, fanning himself with a yellow handkerchief. ‘Seven and a half,’ answered Herr Erchardt shortly. ‘Eight,’ bellowed the sage. ‘Seven and a half!’ ‘Eight!’ ‘The man is mad,’ said Herr Erchardt. ‘Well, please let him be mad in peace,’ said I, putting my hands over my ears. ‘Such ignorance must not be allowed to go uncontradicted,’ said he, and turning his back on us, too exhausted to cry out any longer, he held up seven and a half fingers. ‘Eight!’ thundered the greybeard, with pristine freshness. We felt very sobered, and did not recover until we reached a white signpost which entreated us to leave the road and walk through the field path – without trampling down more of the grass than was necessary. Being interpreted, it meant ‘single file’, which was distressing for Elsa and Fritz. Karl, like a happy child, gambolled ahead, and cut down as many flowers as possible with the stick of his mother’s parasol – followed the three others – then myself – and the lovers in the rear. And above the conversation of the advance party I had the privilege of hearing these delicious whispers. Fritz: ‘Do you love me?’ Elsa: ‘Nu – yes.’ Fritz passionately: ‘But how much?’ To which Elsa never replied – except with ‘How much do you love me?’ Fritz escaped that truly Christian trap2 by saying, ‘I asked you first.’

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It grew so confusing that I slipped in front of Frau Kellermann – and walked in the peaceful knowledge that she was blossoming and I was under no obligation to inform even my nearest and dearest as to the precise capacity of my affections. ‘What right have they to ask each other such questions the day after letters of blessing have been received?’ I reflected. ‘What right have they even to question each other? Love which becomes engaged and married is a purely affirmative affair – they are usurping the privileges of their betters and wisers!’ The edges of the field frilled over into an immense pine forest – very pleasant and cool it looked. Another signpost begged us to keep to the broad path for Schlingen and deposit waste paper and fruit peelings in wire receptacles attached to the benches for the purpose. We sat down on the first bench, and Karl with great curiosity explored the wire receptacle. ‘I love woods,’ said the Advanced Lady, smiling pitifully into the air. ‘In a wood my hair already seems to stir and remember something of its savage origin.’ ‘But speaking literally,’ said Frau Kellermann, after an appreciative pause, ‘there is really nothing better than the air of pine-trees for the scalp.’ ‘Oh, Frau Kellermann, please don’t break the spell,’ said Elsa. The Advanced Lady looked at her very sympathetically. ‘Have you, too, found the magic at the heart of Nature?’ she said. That was Herr Langen’s cue. ‘Nature has no heart,’ said he, very bitterly and readily, as people do who are over-philosophised and underfed. ‘She creates that she may destroy. She eats that she may spew up and she spews up that she may eat. That is why we, who are forced to eke out an existence at her trampling feet, consider the world mad, and realise the deadly vulgarity of production.’ ‘Young man,’ interrupted Herr Erchardt, ‘you have never lived and you have never suffered!’ ‘Oh, excuse me – how can you know?’ ‘I know because you have told me, and there’s an end of it. Come back to this bench in ten years’ time and repeat those words to me,’ said Frau Kellermann with an eye upon Fritz, who was engaged in counting Elsa’s fingers with passionate fervour – ‘and bring with you your young wife, Herr Langen, and watch, perhaps, your little child playing with –’ She turned towards Karl, who had rooted an old illustrated paper out of the receptacle and was spelling over an advertisement for the enlargement of Beautiful Breasts. The sentence remained unfinished. We decided to move on. As we plunged more deeply into the wood our spirits rose – reaching a point where they burst into song – on the part of the three men – ‘O Welt,

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wie bist du wunderbar!’3 – the lower part of which was piercingly sustained by Herr Langen, who attempted quite unsuccessfully to infuse satire into it in accordance with his – ‘world outlook’. They strode ahead and left us to trail after them – hot and happy. ‘Now is the opportunity,’ said Frau Kellermann. ‘Dear Frau Professor, do tell us a little about your book.’ ‘Ach, how did you know I was writing one?’ she cried playfully. ‘Elsa, here, had it from Lisa. And never before have I personally known a woman who was writing a book. How do you manage to find enough to write down?’ ‘That is never the trouble,’ said the Advanced Lady – she took Elsa’s arm and leaned on it gently. ‘The trouble is to know where to stop. My brain has been a hive for years, and about three months ago the pent-up waters burst over my soul, and since then I am writing all day until late into the night, still ever finding fresh inspirations and thoughts which beat impatient wings about my heart.’ ‘Is it a novel?’ asked Elsa shyly. ‘Of course it is a novel,’ said I. ‘How can you be so positive?’ said Frau Kellermann, eyeing me severely. ‘Because nothing but a novel could produce an effect like that.’ ‘Ach, don’t quarrel,’ said the Advanced Lady sweetly. ‘Yes, it is a novel – upon the Modern Woman. For this seems to me the woman’s hour. It is mysterious and almost prophetic, it is the symbol of the true advanced woman: not one of those violent creatures who deny their sex and smother their frail wings under . . . under –’ ‘The English tailor-made?’ from Frau Kellermann. ‘I was not going to put it like that. Rather, under the lying garb of false masculinity!’ ‘Such a subtle distinction!’ I murmured. ‘Whom then,’ asked Fräulein Elsa, looking adoringly at the Advanced Lady – ‘whom then do you consider the true woman?’ ‘She is the incarnation of comprehending Love!’ ‘But, my dear Frau Professor,’ protested Frau Kellermann, ‘you must remember that one has so few opportunities for exhibiting Love within the family circle nowadays. One’s husband is at business all day, and naturally desires to sleep when he returns home – one’s children are out of the lap and in at the university before one can lavish anything at all upon them!’ ‘But Love is not a question of lavishing,’ said the Advanced Lady. ‘It is the lamp carried in the bosom touching with serene rays all the heights and depths of –’ ‘Darkest Africa,’ I murmured flippantly. She did not hear.

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‘The mistake we have made in the past – as a sex,’ said she, ‘is in not realising that our gifts of giving are for the whole world – we are the glad sacrifice of ourselves!’ ‘Oh!’ cried Elsa rapturously, and almost bursting into gifts as she breathed – ‘how I know that! You know ever since Fritz and I have been engaged, I share the desire to give to everybody, to share everything!’ ‘How extremely dangerous,’ said I. ‘It is only the beauty of danger, or the danger of beauty,’ said the Advanced Lady – ‘and there you have the ideal of my book – that woman is nothing but a gift.’ I smiled at her very sweetly. ‘Do you know,’ I said, ‘I too would like to write a book, on the advisability of caring for daughters, and taking them for airings and keeping them out of kitchens!’ I think the masculine element must have felt these angry vibrations: they ceased from singing, and together we climbed out of the wood, to see Schlingen below us, tucked in a circle of hills, the white houses shining in the sunlight, ‘for all the world like eggs in a bird’s nest’, as Herr Erchardt declared. We descended upon Schlingen and demanded sour milk with fresh cream and bread at the Inn of the Golden Stag, a most friendly place, with tables in a rose-garden where hens and chickens ran riot – even flopping upon the disused tables and pecking at the red checks on the cloths. We broke the bread into the bowls, added the cream, and stirred it round with flat wooden spoons, the landlord and his wife standing by. ‘Splendid weather!’ said Herr Erchardt, waving his spoon at the landlord, who shrugged his shoulders. ‘What! you don’t call it splendid!’ ‘As you please,’ said the landlord, obviously scorning us. ‘Such a beautiful walk,’ said Fräulein Elsa, making a free gift of her most charming style to the landlady. ‘I never walk,’ said the landlady; ‘when I go to Mindelbau my man drives me – I’ve more important things to do with my legs than walk them through the dust!’ ‘I like these people,’ confessed Herr Langen to me. ‘I like them very, very much. I think I shall take a room here for the whole summer.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, because they live close to the earth, and therefore despise it.’ He pushed away his bowl of sour milk and lit a cigarette. We ate, solidly and seriously, until those seven and a half kilometres to Mindelbau stretched before us like an eternity. Even Karl’s activity became so full fed that he lay on the ground and removed his leather waistbelt. Elsa suddenly leaned over to Fritz and whispered, who on

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hearing her to the end and asking her if she loved him, got up and made a little speech. ‘We – we wish to celebrate our betrothal by – by – asking you all to drive back with us in the landlord’s cart – if – if it will hold us!’ ‘Oh, what a beautiful, noble idea!’ said Frau Kellermann, heaving a sigh of relief that audibly burst two hooks. ‘It is my little gift,’ said Elsa to the Advanced Lady, who by virtue of three portions almost wept tears of gratitude. Squeezed into the peasant cart and driven by the landlord, who showed his contempt for mother earth by spitting savagely every now and again, we jolted home again, and the nearer we came to Mindelbau the more we loved it and one another. ‘We must have many excursions like this,’ said Herr Erchardt to me, ‘for one surely gets to know a person in the simple surroundings of the open air – one shares the same joys – one feels friendship. What is it your Shakespeare says? One moment, I have it. The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried – grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel!’4 ‘But,’ said I, feeling very friendly towards him, ‘the bother about my soul is that it refuses to grapple anybody at all – and I am sure that the dead weight of a friend whose adoption it had tried would kill it immediately. Never yet has it shown the slightest sign of a hoop!’ He bumped against my knees and excused himself and the cart. ‘My dear little lady, you must not take the quotation literally. Naturally, one is not physically conscious of the hoops; but hoops there are in the soul of him or her who loves his fellow-men. . . . Take this afternoon, for instance. How did we start out? As strangers, you might almost say, and yet – all of us – how have we come home?’ ‘In a cart,’ said the ‘only remaining joy’, who sat upon his mother’s lap and felt sick. We skirted the field that we had passed through, going round by the cemetery. Herr Langen leaned over the edge of the seat and greeted the graves. He was sitting next to the Advanced Lady – inside the shelter of her shoulder. I heard her murmur: ‘You look like a little boy with your hair blowing about in the wind.’ Herr Langen, slightly less bitter – watched the last graves disappear. And I heard her murmur: ‘Why are you so sad? I too am very sad sometimes – but – you look young enough for me to dare to say this – I – too – know of much joy!’ ‘What do you know?’ said he. I leaned over and touched the Advanced Lady’s hand. ‘Hasn’t it been a nice afternoon?’ I said questioningly. ‘But you know, that theory of yours about woman and Love – it’s as old as the hills – oh, older!’

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From the road a sudden shout of triumph. Yes, there he was again –white beard, silk handkerchief and undaunted enthusiasm. ‘What did I say? Eight kilometres – it is!’ ‘Seven and a half!’ shrieked Herr Erchardt. ‘Why, then, do you return in carts? Eight kilometres it must be.’ Herr Erchardt made a cup of his hands and stood up in the jolting cart while Frau Kellermann clung to his knees. ‘Seven and a half!’ ‘Ignorance must not go uncontradicted!’ I said to the Advanced Lady. Notes Text: IGP. 1. As Alpers explains, p. 549, ‘Schlingen (the German for gobbling or greedy eating) is the name of a village not far from Wörishofen, where the cure guests used to go for secret lapses from the vegetarian diet prescribed by Pfarrer Kneipp.’ 2. See John, 21: 15–17. 3. KM was recalling the line from the German folk song ‘O Welt, wie bist du schön’. 4. Hamlet, I, iii, 548–9.

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The Swing of the Pendulum1 The landlady knocked at the door. ‘Come in,’ said Viola. ‘There is a letter for you,’ said the landlady, ‘a special letter’ – she held the green envelope in a corner of her dingy apron. ‘Thanks.’ Viola, kneeling on the floor poking at the little dusty stove, stretched out her hand. ‘Any answer?’ ‘No; the messenger has gone.’ ‘Oh, all right!’ She did not look the landlady in the face; she was ashamed of not having paid her rent, and wondered grimly, without any hope, if the woman would begin to bluster again. ‘About this money owing to me –’ said the landlady. ‘Oh, the Lord – off she goes!’ thought Viola, turning her back on the woman and making a grimace at the stove. ‘It’s settle – or it’s go!’ The landlady raised her voice; she began to bawl. ‘I’m a lady, I am, and a respectable woman, I’ll have you know.

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I’ll have no lice in my house, sneaking their way into the furniture and eating up everything. It’s cash – or out you go before twelve o’clock tomorrow.’ Viola felt rather than saw the woman’s gesture. She shot out her arm in a stupid, helpless way, as though a dirty pigeon had suddenly flown at her face. ‘Filthy old beast! Ugh! And the smell of her – like stale cheese and damp washing.’ ‘Very well!’ she answered shortly; ‘it’s cash down or I leave to-morrow. All right: don’t shout.’ It was extraordinary – always before this woman came near her she trembled in her shoes – even the sound of those flat feet stumping up the stairs made her feel sick, but once they were face to face she felt immensely calm and indifferent, and could not understand why she even worried about money, nor why she sneaked out of the house on tiptoe, not even daring to shut the door after her in case the landlady should hear and shout something terrible, nor why she spent nights pacing up and down her room – drawing up sharply before the mirror and saying to a tragic reflection: ‘Money, money, money!’ When she was alone her poverty was like a huge dream-mountain on which her feet were fast rooted – aching with the ache of the size of the thing – but if it came to a definite action, with no time for imaginings, her dream-mountain dwindled into a beastly ‘hold-your-nose’ affair, to be passed by as quickly as possible, with anger and a strong sense of superiority. The landlady bounced out of the room, banging the door, so that it shook and rattled as though it had listened to the conversation and fully sympathised with the old hag. Squatting on her heels, Viola opened the letter. It was from Casimir: ‘I shall be with you at three o’clock this afternoon – and must be off again this evening. All news when we meet. I hope you are happier than I. – Casimir.’

‘Huh! how kind!’ she sneered; ‘how condescending. Too good of you, really!’ She sprang to her feet, crumbling the letter in her hands. ‘And how are you to know that I shall stick here awaiting your pleasure until three o’clock this afternoon?’ But she knew she would; her rage was only half sincere. She longed to see Casimir, for she was confident that this time she would make him understand the situation. . . . ‘For, as it is, it’s intolerable – intolerable!’ she muttered. It was ten o’clock in the morning of a grey day curiously lighted by pale flashes of sunshine. Searched by these flashes her room looked tumbled and grimed. She pulled down the window-blinds – but they gave a persistent, whitish glare which was just as bad. The only thing

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of life in the room was a jar of hyacinths given her by the landlady’s daughter: it stood on the table exuding a sickly perfume from its plump petals; there were even rich buds unfolding, and the leaves shone like oil. Viola went over to the washstand, poured some water into the enamel basin, and sponged her face and neck. She dipped her face into the water, opened her eyes, and shook her head from side to side – it was exhilarating. She did it three times. ‘I suppose I could drown myself if I stayed under long enough,’ she thought. ‘I wonder how long it takes to become unconscious? . . . Often read of women drowning in a bucket. I wonder if any air enters by the ears – if the basin would have to be as deep as a bucket?’ She experimented – gripped the washstand with both hands and slowly sank her head into the water, when again there was a knock on the door. Not the landlady this time – it must be Casimir. With her face and hair dripping, with her petticoat bodice unbuttoned, she ran and opened it. A strange man stood against the lintel– seeing her, he opened his eyes very wide and smiled delightfully. ‘Excuse me – does Fräulein Schäfer live here?’ ‘No; never heard of her.’ His smile was so infectious, she wanted to smile too – and the water had made her feel so fresh and rosy. The strange man appeared overwhelmed with astonishment. ‘She doesn’t?’ he cried. ‘She is out, you mean!’ ‘No, she’s not living here,’ answered Viola. ‘But – pardon – one moment.’ He moved from the door lintel, standing squarely in front of her. He unbuttoned his greatcoat and drew a slip of paper from the breast pocket, smoothing it in his gloved fingers before handing it to her. ‘Yes, that’s the address, right enough, but there must be a mistake in the number. So many lodging-houses in this street, you know, and so big.’ Drops of water fell from her hair on to the paper. She burst out laughing. ‘Oh, how dreadful I must look – one moment!’ She ran back to the washstand and caught up a towel. The door was still open. . . . After all, there was nothing more to be said. Why on earth had she asked him to wait a moment? She folded the towel round her shoulders, and returned to the door, suddenly grave. ‘I’m sorry; I know no such name,’ in a sharp voice. Said the strange man: ‘Sorry, too. Have you been living here long?’ ‘Er – yes – a long time.’ She began to close the door slowly. ‘Well – good-morning, thanks so much. Hope I haven’t been a bother.’ ‘Good-morning.’

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She heard him walk down the passage and then pause – lighting a cigarette. Yes – a faint scent of delicious cigarette smoke penetrated her room. She sniffed at it, smiling again. Well, that had been a fascinating interlude! He looked so amazingly happy: his heavy clothes and big buttoned gloves; his beautifully brushed hair . . . and that smile. . . . ‘Jolly’ was the word – just a well-fed boy with the world for his playground. People like that did one good – one felt ‘made over’ at the sight of them. Sane they were – so sane and solid. You could depend on them never having one mad impulse from the day they were born until the day they died. And Life was in league with them – jumped them on her knee – quite rightly, too. At that moment she noticed Casimir’s letter, crumpled up on the floor – the smile faded. Staring at the letter she began braiding her hair – a dull feeling of rage crept through her – she seemed to be braiding it into her brain, and binding it, tightly, above her head. . . . Of course that had been the mistake all along. What had? Oh, Casimir’s frightful seriousness. If she had been happy when they first met she never would have looked at him – but they had been like two patients in the same hospital ward – each finding comfort in the sickness of the other – sweet foundation for a love episode! Misfortune had knocked their heads together: they had looked at each other, stunned with the conflict and sympathised. . . . ‘I wish I could step outside the whole affair and just judge it – then I’d find a way out. I certainly was in love with Casimir. . . . Oh, be sincere for once.’ She flopped down on the bed and hid her face in the pillow. ‘I was not in love. I wanted somebody to look after me – and keep me until my work began to sell – and he kept bothers with other men away. And what would have happened if he hadn’t come along? I would have spent my wretched little pittance, and then – Yes, that was what decided me, thinking about that “then”. He was the only solution. And I believed in him then. I thought his work had only to be recognised once, and he’d roll in wealth. I thought perhaps we might be poor for a month – but he said, if only he could have me, the stimulus. . . . Funny, if it wasn’t so damned tragic! Exactly the contrary has happened – he hasn’t had a thing published for months – neither have I – but then I didn’t expect to. Yes, the truth is, I’m hard and bitter, and I have neither faith nor love for unsuccessful men. I always end by despising them as I despise Casimir. I suppose it’s the savage pride of the female who likes to think the man to whom she has given herself must be a very great chief indeed. But to stew in this disgusting house while Casimir scours the land in the hope of finding one editorial open door – it’s humiliating. It’s changed my whole nature. I wasn’t born for poverty – I only flower among really jolly people, and people who never are worried.’

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The figure of the strange man rose before her – would not be dismissed. ‘That was the man for me, after all is said and done – a man without a care – who’d give me everything I want and with whom I’d always feel that sense of life and of being in touch with the world. I never wanted to fight – it was thrust on me. Really, there’s a fount of happiness in me, that is drying up, little by little, in this hateful existence. I’ll be dead if this goes on – and’ – she stirred in the bed and flung out her arms – ‘I want passion, and love, and adventure – I yearn for them. Why should I stay here and rot? – I am rotting!’ she cried, comforting herself with the sound of her breaking voice. ‘But if I tell Casimir all this when he comes this afternoon, and he says, “Go” – as he certainly will – that’s another thing I loathe about him, – he’s under my thumb – what should I do then – where should I go to?’ There was nowhere. ‘I don’t want to work – or carve out my own path. I want ease and any amount of nursing in the lap of luxury. There is only one thing I’m fitted for, and that is to be a great courtesan.’ But she did not know how to go about it. She was frightened to go into the streets – she heard of such awful things happening to those women – men with diseases – or men who didn’t pay – besides, the idea of a strange man every night – no, that was out of the question. ‘If I’d the clothes I would go to a really good hotel and find some wealthy man . . . like the strange man this morning. He would be ideal. Oh, if I only had his address – I am sure I would fascinate him. I’d keep him laughing all day – I’d make him give me unlimited money. . . .’ At the thought she grew warm and soft. She began to dream of a wonderful house, and of presses full of clothes and of perfumes. She saw herself stepping into carriages – looking at the strange man with a mysterious, voluptuous glance – she practised the glance, lying on the bed – and never another worry, just drugged with happiness. That was the life for her. Well, the thing to do was to let Casimir go on his wild-goose chase that evening, and while he was away – what? Also – please to remember – there was the rent to be paid before twelve next morning, and she hadn’t the money for a square meal. At the thought of food she felt a sharp twinge in her stomach, a sensation as though there were a hand in her stomach, squeezing it dry. She was terribly hungry – all Casimir’s fault – and that man had lived on the fat of the land ever since he was born. He looked as though he could order a magnificent dinner. Oh, why hadn’t she played her cards better? – he’d been sent by Providence –and she’d snubbed him. ‘If I had that time over again, I’d be safe by now.’ And instead of the ordinary man who had spoken with her at the door her mind created a brilliant, laughing image, who would treat her like a queen. . . . ‘There’s only one thing I could not stand – that he should be coarse or vulgar. Well, he wasn’t – he was obviously

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a man of the world –and the way he apologised . . . I have enough faith in my own power and beauty to know I could make a man treat me just as I wanted to be treated.’ . . . It floated into her dreams – that sweet scent of cigarette smoke. And then she remembered that she had heard nobody go down the stone stairs. Was it possible that the strange man was still there? . . . The thought was too absurd – Life didn’t play tricks like that – and yet – she was quite conscious of his nearness. Very quietly she got up, unhooked from the back of the door a long white gown, buttoned it on – smiling slyly. She did not know what was going to happen. She only thought: ‘Oh, what fun!’ and that they were playing a delicious game – this strange man and she. Very gently she turned the door-handle, screwing up her face and biting her lip as the lock snapped back. Of course, there he was – leaning against the banister rail. He wheeled round as she slipped into the passage. ‘Da,’ she muttered, folding her gown tightly around her, ‘I must go downstairs and fetch some wood. Brr! the cold!’ ‘There isn’t any wood,’ volunteered the strange man. She gave a little cry of astonishment, and then tossed her head. ‘You, again,’ she said scornfully, conscious the while of his merry eye, and the fresh, strong smell of his healthy body. ‘The landlady shouted out there was no wood left. I just saw her go out to buy some.’ ‘Story – story!’ she longed to cry. He came quite close to her, stood over her and whispered: ‘Aren’t you going to ask me to finish my cigarette in your room?’ She nodded. ‘You may if you want to!’ In that moment together in the passage a miracle had happened. Her room was quite changed – it was full of sweet light and the scent of hyacinth flowers. Even the furniture appeared different – exciting. Quick as a flash she remembered childish parties when they had played charades, and one side had left the room and come in again to act a word – just what she was doing now. The strange man went over to the stove and sat down in her arm-chair. She did not want him to talk or come near her – it was enough to see him in the room, so secure and happy. How hungry she had been for the nearness of someone like that – who knew nothing at all about her – and made no demands – but just lived. Viola ran over to the table and put her arms round the jar of hyacinths. ‘Beautiful! Beautiful!’ she cried – burying her head in the flowers – and sniffing greedily at the scent. Over the leaves she looked at the man and laughed. ‘You are a funny little thing,’ said he lazily. ‘Why? Because I love flowers?’

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‘I’d far rather you loved other things,’ said the strange man slowly. She broke off a little pink petal and smiled at it. ‘Let me send you some flowers,’ said the strange man. ‘I’ll send you a roomful if you’d like them.’ His voice frightened her slightly. ‘Oh no, thanks – this one is quite enough for me.’ ‘No, it isn’t’ – in a teasing voice. ‘What a stupid remark!’ thought Viola, and looking at him again he did not seem quite so jolly. She noticed that his eyes were set too closely together – and they were too small. Horrible thought, that he should prove stupid. ‘What do you do all day?’ she asked hastily. ‘Nothing.’ ‘Nothing at all?’ ‘Why should I do anything?’ ‘Oh, don’t imagine for one moment that I condemn such wisdom – only it sounds too good to be true!’ ‘What’s that?’ – he craned forward. ‘What sounds too good to be true?’ Yes – there was no denying it – he looked silly. ‘I suppose the searching after Fräulein Schäfer doesn’t occupy all your days.’ ‘Oh no’ – he smiled broadly – ‘that’s very good! By Jove! no, I drive a good bit – are you keen on horses?’ She nodded. ‘Love them.’ ‘You must come driving with me – I’ve got a fine pair of greys. Will you?’ ‘Pretty I’d look perched behind greys in my one and only hat,’ thought she. Aloud: ‘I’d love to.’ Her easy acceptance pleased him. ‘How about to-morrow?’ he suggested. ‘Suppose you have lunch with me to-morrow and I take you driving.’ After all – this was just a game. ‘Yes, I’m not busy to-morrow,’ she said. A little pause – then the strange man patted his leg. ‘Why don’t you come and sit down?’ he said. She pretended not to see and swung on to the table. ‘Oh, I’m all right here.’ ‘No, you’re not’ – again the teasing voice. ‘Come and sit on my knee.’ ‘Oh no,’ said Viola very heartily, suddenly busy with her hair. ‘Why not?’ ‘I don’t want to.’ ‘Oh, come along’ – impatiently. She shook her head from side to side. ‘I wouldn’t dream of such a thing.’

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At that he got up and came over to her. ‘Funny little puss cat!’ He put up one hand to touch her hair. ‘Don’t,’ she said – and slipped off the table. ‘I – I think it’s time you went now.’ She was quite frightened now – thinking only: ‘This man must be got rid of as quickly as possible.’ ‘Oh, but you don’t want me to go?’ ‘Yes, I do – I’m very busy.’ ‘Busy. What does the pussy cat do all day?’ ‘Lots and lots of things!’ She wanted to push him out of the room and slam the door on him – idiot – fool – cruel disappointment. ‘What’s she frowning for?’ he asked. ‘Is she worried about anything?’ Suddenly serious: ‘I say – you know, are you in any financial difficulty? Do you want money? I’ll give it to you if you like!’ ‘Money! Steady on the brake – don’t lose your head!’ – so she spoke to herself. ‘I’ll give you two hundred marks if you’ll kiss me.’ ‘Oh, boo! What a condition! And I don’t want to kiss you – I don’t like kissing. Please go!’ ‘Yes – you do! – yes, you do.’ He caught hold of her arms above the elbows. She struggled, and was quite amazed to realise how angry she felt. ‘Let me go – immediately!’ she cried – and he slipped one arm round her body, and drew her towards him – like a bar of iron across her back – that arm. ‘Leave me alone! I tell you. Don’t be mean! I didn’t want this to happen when you came into my room. How dare you?’ ‘Well, kiss me and I’ll go!’ It was too idiotic – dodging that stupid, smiling face. ‘I won’t kiss you! – you brute! – I won’t!’ Somehow she slipped out of his arms and ran to the wall – stood back against it – breathing quickly. ‘Get out!’ she stammered. ‘Go on now, clear out!’ At that moment, when he was not touching her, she quite enjoyed herself. She thrilled at her own angry voice. ‘To think I should talk to a man like that!’ An angry flush spread over his face – his lips curled back, showing his teeth – just like a dog, thought Viola. He made a rush at her, and held her against the wall – pressed upon her with all the weight of his body. This time she could not get free. ‘I won’t kiss you. I won’t. Stop doing that! Ugh! You’re like a dog you ought to find lovers round lamp-posts – you beast – you fiend!’ He did not answer. With an expression of the most absurd determination he pressed ever more heavily upon her. He did not even look at her – but rapped out in a sharp voice: ‘Keep quiet – keep quiet.’

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‘Gar–r! Why are men so strong?’ She began to cry. ‘Go away – I don’t want you, you dirty creature. I want to murder you. Oh, my God! if I had a knife.’ ‘Don’t be silly – come and be good!’ He dragged her towards the bed. ‘Do you suppose I’m a light woman?’ she snarled, and swooping over she fastened her teeth in his glove. ‘Ach! don’t do that – you are hurting me!’ She did not let go, but her heart said, ‘Thank the Lord I thought of this.’ ‘Stop this minute – you vixen – you bitch.’ He threw her away from him. She saw with joy that his eyes were full of tears. ‘You’ve really hurt me,’ he said in a choking voice. ‘Of course I have. I meant to. That’s nothing to what I’ll do if you touch me again.’ The strange man picked up his hat. ‘No thanks,’ he said grimly. ‘But I’ll not forget this – I’ll go to your landlady.’ ‘Pooh!’ She shrugged her shoulders and laughed. ‘I’ll tell her you forced your way in here and tried to assault me. Who will she believe? – with your bitten hand. You go and find your Schäfers.’ A sensation of glorious, intoxicating happiness flooded Viola. She rolled her eyes at him. ‘If you don’t go away this moment I’ll bite you again,’ she said, and the absurd words started her laughing. Even when the door was closed, hearing him descending the stairs, she laughed, and danced about the room. What a morning! Oh, chalk it up. That was her first fight, and she’d won – she’d conquered that beast – all by herself. Her hands were still trembling. She pulled up the sleeve of her gown – great red marks on her arms. ‘My ribs will be blue. I’ll be blue all over,’ she reflected. ‘If only that beloved Casimir could have seen us.’ And the feeling of rage and disgust against Casimir had totally disappeared. How could the poor darling help not having any money? It was her fault as much as his, and he, just like her, was apart from the world, fighting it, just as she had done. If only three o’clock would come. She saw herself running towards him and putting her arms round his neck. ‘My blessed one! Of course we are bound to win. Do you love me still? Oh, I have been horrible lately.’ Notes Text: IGP. 1. Alpers notes (p. 549), ‘probably offered to the New Age and declined (Orage would not have admired it, or the next). The prototype of some later pieces on the theme of the prudent wife’.

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•

A Blaze ‘Max, you silly devil, you’ll break your neck if you go careering down the slide that way. Drop it, and come to the Club House with me and get some coffee.’ ‘I’ve had enough for to-day. I’m damp all through. There, give us a cigarette, Victor, old man. When are you going home?’ ‘Not for another hour. It’s fine this afternoon, and I’m getting into decent shape. Look out, get off the track; here comes Fräulein Winkel. Damned elegant the way she manages her sleigh!’ ‘I’m cold all through. That’s the worst of this place – the mists – it’s a damp cold. Here, Forman, look after this sleigh – and stick it somewhere so that I can get it without looking through a hundred and fifty others to-morrow morning.’ They sat down at a small round table near the stove and ordered coffee. Victor sprawled in his chair, patting his little brown dog Bobo and looking, half laughingly, at Max. ‘What’s the matter, my dear? Isn’t the world being nice and pretty?’ ‘I want my coffee, and want to put my feet into my pocket – they’re like stones. . . . Nothing to eat, thanks – the cake is like underdone india-rubber here.’ Fuchs and Wistuba came and sat at their table. Max half turned his back and stretched his feet out to the oven. The three other men all began talking at once – of the weather – of the record slide – of the fine condition of the Wald See for skating. Suddenly Fuchs looked at Max, raised his eyebrows and nodded across to Victor, who shook his head. ‘Baby doesn’t feel well,’ he said, feeding the brown dog with broken lumps of sugar, ‘and nobody’s to disturb him – I’m nurse.’ ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever known him off colour,’ said Wistuba. ‘I’ve always imagined he had the better part of this world that could not be taken away from him. I think he says his prayers to the dear Lord for having spared him being taken home in seven basketsful tonight. It’s a fool’s game to risk your all that way and leave the nation desolate.’ ‘Dry up,’ said Max. ‘You ought to be wheeled about on the snow in a perambulator.’ ‘Oh, no offence, I hope. Don’t get nasty. . . . How’s your wife, Victor?’

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‘She’s not at all well. She hurt her head coming down the slide with Max on Sunday. I told her to stay at home all day.’ ‘I’m sorry. Are you other fellows going back to the town or stopping on here?’ Fuchs and Victor said they were stopping – Max did not answer, but sat motionless while the men paid for their coffee and moved away. Victor came back a moment and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘If you’re going right back, my dear, I wish you’d look Elsa up and tell her I won’t be in till late. And feed with us to-night at Luitpold,1 will you? And take some hot grog when you get in.’ ‘Thanks, old fellow, I’m all right. Going back now.’ He rose, stretched himself, buttoned on his heavy coat and lighted another cigarette. From the door Victor watched him plunging through the heavy snow – head bent – hands thrust in his pockets – he almost appeared to be running through the heavy snow towards the town. *

*

*

Someone came stamping up the stairs – paused at the door of her sitting-room, and knocked. ‘Is that you, Victor?’ she called. ‘No, it is I . . . can I come in?’ ‘Of course. Why, what a Santa Claus! Hang your coat on the landing and shake yourself over the banisters. Had a good time?’ The room was full of light and warmth. Elsa, in a white velvet teagown, lay curled up on the sofa – a book of fashions on her lap, a box of creams beside her. The curtains were not yet drawn before the windows and a blue light shone through, and the white boughs of the trees sprayed across. A woman’s room – full of flowers and photographs and silk pillows – the floor smothered in rugs – an immense tigerskin under the piano – just the head protruding – sleepily savage. ‘It was good enough,’ said Max. ‘Victor can’t be in till late. He told me to come up and tell you.’ He started walking up and down – tore off his gloves and flung them on the table. ‘Don’t do that, Max,’ said Elsa, ‘you get on my nerves. And I’ve got a headache to-day; I’m feverish and quite flushed. . . . Don’t I look flushed?’ He paused by the window and glanced at her a moment over his shoulder. ‘No,’ he said; ‘I didn’t notice it.’ ‘Oh, you haven’t looked at me properly, and I’ve got a new

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tea-gown on, too.’ She pulled her skirts together and patted a little place on the couch. ‘Come along and sit by me and tell me why you’re being naughty.’ But standing by the window, he suddenly flung his arm across his eyes. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I can’t. I’m done – I’m spent – I’m smashed.’ Silence in the room. The fashion-book fell to the floor with a quick rustle of leaves. Elsa sat forward, her hands clasped in her lap; a strange light shone in her eyes, a red colour stained her mouth. Then she spoke very quietly. ‘Come over here and explain yourself. I don’t know what on earth you are talking about.’ ‘You do know – you know far better than I. You’ve simply played with Victor in my presence that I may feel worse. You’ve tormented me – you’ve led me on – offering me everything and nothing at all. It’s been a spider-and-fly business from first to last – and I’ve never for one moment been ignorant of that – and I’ve never for one moment been able to withstand it.’ He turned round deliberately. ‘Do you suppose that when you asked me to pin your flowers into your evening gown – when you let me come into your bedroom when Victor was out while you did your hair – when you pretended to be a baby and let me feed you with grapes – when you have run to me and searched in all my pockets for a cigarette – knowing perfectly well where they were kept – going through every pocket just the same – I knowing too – I keeping up the farce – do you suppose that now you have finally lighted your bonfire you are going to find it a peaceful and pleasant thing – you are going to prevent the whole house from burning?’ She suddenly turned white and drew in her breath sharply. ‘Don’t talk to me like that. You have no right to talk to me like that. I am another man’s wife.’ ‘Hum,’ he sneered, throwing back his head, ‘that’s rather late in the game, and that’s been your trump card all along. You only love Victor on the cat-and-cream principle – you, a poor little starved kitten that he’s given everything to, that he’s carried in his breast, never dreaming that those little pink claws could tear out a man’s heart.’ She stirred, looking at him with almost fear in her eyes. ‘After all’ – unsteadily – ‘this is my room; I’ll have to ask you to go.’ But he stumbled towards her, knelt down by the couch, burying his head in her lap, clasping his arms round her waist. ‘And I love you – I love you; the humiliation of it – I adore you. Don’t – don’t – just a minute let me stay here – just a moment in a whole life – Elsa! Elsa!’

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She leant back and pressed her head into the pillows. Then his muffled voice: ‘I feel like a savage. I want your whole body. I want to carry you away to a cave and love you until I kill you – you can’t understand how a man feels. I kill myself when I see you – I’m sick of my own strength that turns in upon itself, and dies, and rises new born like a Phoenix out of the ashes of that horrible death. Love me just this once, tell me a lie, say that you do – you are always lying.’ Instead, she pushed him away – frightened. ‘Get up,’ she said; ‘suppose the servant came in with the tea?’ ‘Oh, ye gods!’ He stumbled to his feet and stood staring down at her. ‘You’re rotten to the core and so am I. But you’re heathenishly beautiful.’ The woman went over to the piano – stood there – striking one note – her brows drawn together. Then she shrugged her shoulders and smiled. ‘I’ll make a confession. Every word you have said is true. I can’t help it. I can’t help seeking admiration any more than a cat can help going to people to be stroked. It’s my nature. I’m born out of my time. And yet, you know, I’m not a common woman. I like men to adore me – to flatter me – even to make love to me – but I would never give myself to any man. I would never let a man kiss me . . . even.’ ‘It’s immeasurably worse – you’ve no legitimate excuse. Why, even a prostitute has a greater sense of generosity!’ ‘I know,’ she said, ‘I know perfectly well – but I can’t help the way I’m built. . . . Are you going?’ He put on his gloves. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what’s going to happen to us now?’ Again she shrugged her shoulders. ‘I haven’t the slightest idea. I never have – just let things occur.’ *

*

*

‘All alone?’ cried Victor. ‘Has Max been here?’ ‘He only stayed a moment, and wouldn’t even have tea. I sent him home to change his clothes. . . . He was frightfully boring.’ ‘You poor darling, your hair’s coming down. I’ll fix it, stand still a moment . . . so you were bored?’ ‘Um-m – frightfully. . . . Oh, you’ve run a hairpin right into your wife’s head – you naughty boy!’ She flung her arms round his neck and looked up at him, half laughing, like a beautiful, loving child. ‘God! What a woman you are,’ said the man. ‘You make me so infernally proud – dearest, that I . . . I tell you!’

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Notes Text: IGP. 1. See ‘At Lehmann’s’, n. 1, p. 184.

•

The Green Tree – A Fairy Tale Once upon a time the Boy planted a seed in a little plot of ground that his Father had given him for his very own. And because he shielded it from the rough winds, watered it every evening, built a little glass frame so that it might have the benefit of each ray of sunlight, it sprang out of the warm earth in less time than it takes to tell, a sturdy green twig. ‘Come’ said the Boy, ‘this is bound to be Exceedingly Special. I truly believe it will grow into a tall tree.’ But his Father and Mother and the Neighbours and the Village People laughed and shook with laughter. ‘It’s a weed, you greenhorn’ they cried. ‘Leave it alone and play football.’ The Boy scarcely heard them. Hours he spent each day tending it. At night he dreamed of it, waking sometimes in an agony of fear that a wind had arisen and blown upon it, that a hailstorm had spattered upon its green leaves. But the Tree grew strong and green and beautiful. The house where the Boy lived was mean and tumble-down, and his Father and Mother had lived there so long that they had grown mean and tumble-down too – the spirit of the Cottage seemed to have grown upon them as a lichen upon an old stone. Indeed, the Boy standing in the garden by his tree and looking at the outside of the house could trace a most curious resemblance – the shrunken door, so like their withered mouths – the blank, uncurtained windows, so like their vacant eyes. Even the projecting porch like the peak of his Father’s nose. ‘It’s quite as good as an enlarged photograph’ mused the Boy, nodding gravely. One summer night, he could not sleep, but lay tossing to and fro upon his narrow bed. The blankets seemed to weigh him down, even the roof, he felt, was pressing upon his forehead. He was like the brown seed longing to burst through all these coverings and out into the cool air, and stretch up and up and up. A little breeze swung the

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window blinds to and fro, and the tassel tapping on the glass was to him a secret knocking from the garden – a call to come out. He sprang up in his little white nightdress, feeling his way out of the room along the narrow passage, unbolting the low door, and so reaching the splendid magic of the night garden. Ah, his tree. The boy stood beside it, flung his arms round it, kissed it with his young mouth again and again. It bruised his lips, there was a strange bitter taste in his mouth, and he looked so young and small in his white night-shirt that two stars shot from Heaven into his eyes, and the Moon who was walking through the garden laid her white hands upon his brow, and the nightingale singing upon a rose bush for one moment nestled against his little bosom. ‘This is a fairy child’ said the Moon. ‘He belongs to us now.’ The Boy slept in the garden, and when he woke in the morning on his pale face gleamed the dew like tears, and his heart sang over and over the song of the Nightingale. That night seemed to be the beginning of his mysterious life with the Green Tree. All the love of his young soul, all the strength of his young body he spent upon it. He grew pale and thin, sleeping but little, speaking hardly at all. His parents at last grew tired of jeering at him. They agreed with the Neighbours and Village People that he was mad and let him be. ‘Yet it seems a criminal shame’ said the Village people, ‘that he is not supporting his aged parents instead of growing a tree. Of course it may be beautiful, but that’s no reason to spend his life over it. There are forests of trees – so what’s the good of that.’ But about this time a terrible thing happened. It was winter, and the ground was smothered in snow. The Boy sat by the fire with his parents. He was looking into the fire and thinking, thinking – he did not know of what. Suddenly he listened to his parents speaking together. ‘We have no money’ they said, ‘no hope of any money, and what shall we do? It is Winter; there is only one thing – to cut down the boy’s tree, and sell it for firewood in the village.’ He gave a great cry and started up, his face aflame. ‘You shall not touch a leaf or a twig, I tell you it is mine, you shall not.’ Words choked him. He looked out of the window; the snow seemed to fall upon his cold heart; terror gripped him with an icy hand. And his beautiful strong tree – bare now, but full of sap – stood outlined against the winter sky. He flung out his arms towards it. ‘Not a twig shall you touch.’ In the early afternoon of the next day the Boy went to the village. Hardly had he left the house when his mother flung on her long cloak and, trembling with excitement, went to the Neighbour’s house and told her story.

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‘You have two strong sons’ she said, ‘who have supported you these many a year. I pray you send them to cut down the branches of this Tree while my son is away. My husband and I are old and our arms are weak.’ ‘Dear God, what a creature!’ cried the two young men, ‘we shall come immediately.’ They snatched up ropes and an axe and a saw. ‘Go you inside’ they said to the Boy’s mother, ‘and stay by the fire. You shall have some fine wood soon.’ So she went. The two great hulking fellows climbed up a branch, balancing themselves firmly they began to cut at a great bough that spread very high and strong beyond the tree. ‘This is short work, Brother’ one said, cutting and sawing. ‘Work for men like us, and not for boys.’ The branch swayed and bent and shivered like a live thing, and the old people inside, hearing the noise, smiled together. Soon it creaked and groaned, then swung from one side to the other. ‘Steady does it, Brother, we must find our rope. Climb down.’ But it was too late. Hardly had their feet touched the ground when the great bough, a tree in itself, crashed down, not straight to the ground, but right through the cottage. Crash! The Cottage fell into a thousand pieces, and the old people, buried underneath, were killed by the weight of the falling timber. The Neighbour’s sons, shrieking like demented children, rushed back to their father and mother, and stammered out their tale. Soon a crowd assembled, the women all shrieking and wringing their hands. They dug out the bodies of the old people, covered them decently, and took them to the vicarage. ‘It is all his cursed tree’ said the Village People, ‘his cursed tree. First he has ruined them with it, and now he has killed them . . . Where is the Boy?’ They found him lying as though dead, upon the village street. No one dared to take him in, but the village lads built a little shelter under the Green Tree, filled it with food and water and a straw pallet and left him, crossing themselves, and praying as they went. ‘This is very strange’ said the Boy. ‘At first I felt a terrible pain in my arm, and now this numbness . . . I cannot move my arm and – this weakness of my body . . .’ He did not know of what had happened, but he saw that the cottage was pulled down and said ‘That is good. Now the branches can grow longer and the roots more deeply. It is as it should be.’ All day long he lay still, watching the light come through the opening in the top, faint, then clear, then golden, and then fading. It seemed to rise and fall like the song that the Nightingale had sung

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in his heart so long ago. And, lying there so long, he began almost unconsciously to fashion songs of the Green Tree – of its growth, of the colour of its leaves, how it looked in the morning, how it moved at night. And he sang of how it clung to its last golden leaves, as though afraid of the subtle beauty of nudity, and of how the golden leaves had floated into his bosom and lay there, fairy gold, always shining. Song after song he made, and sang to himself through the Winter and the Spring. As the bough of the Tree had healed so he was well again, but had no wish to leave his shelter. He could watch the Green Tree and tend it – that was all he cared for . . . except that in this Spring weather he was haunted by a thought that ran hot in his veins like the sap in the budding tree. ‘Who will tend the Tree when I am gone. Now if I only had some sons who would promise me – alas – alas – I am alone.’ So the thought haunted him, and the songs that he made grew passionate and restless. Flinging his arms round the Green Tree he sang as though his heart would break. One night a Wandering Minstrel who was passing through the Village heard his passionate songs and amazed at the beauty of them, he unlatched the gate and came through the Garden. ‘Who is he that sings in the night to the Green Tree’ he cried, and the Boy, crying out, ‘It is the Green Tree’s Lover.’ ‘I pray you write down the songs that I may bear them with me into all lands and to all people.’ ‘Alas’ answered the Boy, ‘I have no parchment.’ ‘That is easy’ said the Wandering Minstrel, ‘for I have a scroll in my pack. But yet no ink and no pen.’ ‘Those I can supply’ said the Boy, and taking the parchment from the Wandering Minstrel he went into his hut and found his knife. He pierced himself with it on the wrist and dipping the sharpened end of the twig into the blood he wrote down the First Song. For all that Summer the Wandering Minstrel stayed with the Boy, learning his songs, and then when they were all written, he journeyed far and away into the country, singing the songs of the Green Tree, until all the world knew and loved them. They were sung in castles and concert-halls, and played upon the barrel-organs in the street – that is Fame indeed! But the Writer’s name the Wandering Minstrel told to nobody, except to one girl who had promised him a kiss for it and her red mouth tempted him to distraction. It was not long after this that the Boy, one fine morning, saw the Girl with the Red Mouth leaning over his garden fence. She nodded and smiled at him. ‘Why are you come’ he said, ‘I live alone.’

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‘I wanted to see for myself the Green Tree’ she said, ‘I have heard your songs, and they seem to call to my heart. Was it of a Tree that you wrote, or a Maid, or . . .’ She smiled. And suddenly the same thought which had haunted the Boy in early Spring, thrummed in his blood. In her smile he seemed to know her as the mother of his strong sons, she so tall and slim, so like a young tree herself. ‘It was to the Green Tree that I wrote these songs’ he said, ‘but, Girl with the Red Mouth, I wrote them that you might hear. Go not back the long way you have come, but stay here with me, and I shall write you many songs.’ So she stayed, and at first they were happy together, but when the strangeness of it had worn off, when she had tired of the Boy’s young strength, she said to him one day ‘Boy, I am tired of living under the shadow of this great Green Tree. Let us travel.’ ‘Travel’ he said, ‘but I go journeys every day, seeking and seeking. Every day I find something strange and wonderful. Look up among the branches – see among the boughs . . .’ ‘Nothing’ she said, ‘but leaves, and leaves, and leaves. Boy, let me travel, I hate this damp Green Tree.’ Then he left her. ‘Go’ he said, ‘you are spoiling my songs.’ She told one of the neighbour’s sons of what had happened with so many tears and her red mouth trembling that he took her to wed instead. At first the Boy did not notice her absence, he was busy with a new song, but lying down at night, he found her place empty and cold, and all that he had wished for in her smote his heart. ‘Alas’ he cried, ‘I seem curiously fated.’ Again, as so many years ago, it was a hot night. Again the Boy rose. He had not eaten all that day, and felt dizzy and light-headed. Out of his hut he crept. The Green Tree waved above and around him. Looking up in the branches it was like looking into a great Sea Cavern, cool and deep. ‘You would not leave me’ he said, love in his heart. ‘Oh Green Tree, you would not leave me . . . Have you nothing to give.’ He looked up among the branches and, lo, on the topmost bough, a golden flower, a great golden fruit. ‘At last’ said the Boy, ‘my Green Tree has borne fruit.’ It was easy for the Boy to climb – he knew every step, every foothold. Higher and higher he swung, until it seemed that the stars were tangled just above him and the earth, a mist, miles away. Higher and higher still – the yellow fruit was just above him. He reached out his hands for it – what – nothing there . . . He fell and lay still on the grass. ‘The young Greenhorn has done for himself at last’ said the Village people, ‘he always was looking for the Moon.’

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And they cut down the Green Tree and sold it in little bundles of firewood, so that next Winter children clapped their hands and cried ‘See, see what wonderful colours. See, see what is in the fire.’ But even that wood was burnt away and, at last . . . a little handful of ashes was thrown to the four winds. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 114–18. There is no way from the TS to date this story, although the fact that it is finished and typed suggests KM may have sent it for publication, but it was not accepted. There is an unavoidable arbitrariness in placing it here. A year or more earlier would seem as likely.

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A Marriage of Passion1 On the stroke of nine o’clock Mr. and Mrs. De Voted took their places on either side of the drawing-room fire, in attitudes of gracefully combined hospitality and unconcern, Vivian De Voted wearing a black beard and black velvet jacket buttoned over his Bohemian bosom, his lady in a flowing purple gown embroidered in divers appropriate places with pomegranates and their leaves. The long room was decorated in that shade of blue known and loved by our youngest poet bloods as ineffable; the ceiling was black, having a gold crescent over the grand piano, and the gold-plush curtains shrouding three windows were meant to convey – I quote Vivian De V. – something of the desert’s dusty glare and the somewhat somnolent richness of eastern light-languor! ‘Doesn’t the room look beautiful,’ sighed Mrs. De Voted, caressing the little tables and chairs and couches as though she loved them and would fain take them all to her vast expanse of pink bosom. ‘While I remember, do be careful, dear, not to let anybody sit at the table with crystallised violets; I’m keeping it, for the girls. Mirabelle sent me a card this morning saying their colour scheme was to be violet.’ Mr. De Voted took a black silk handkerchief from his pocket, shook it, blew his nose upon it, and replaced it. ‘By the way,’ said he, ‘you might ask me to sing “Loosen Your Girdles, Ye Rosebuds”; my voice is very good – I tried it in my bath this evening.’ There was a ring at the front door bell, followed almost immediately by a little fluttering rush, and Miss Mirabelle and Miss Ambergris, the two unmarried sisters of Mrs. De Voted, laughing and upbraiding each other with the delicious innocence of Herrick virgins.2 ‘We haven’t taken off our outside ta-tas yet,’ cried Mirabelle. ‘But we just ran in to kiss Sister and Big Brother and say we were the first.’ ‘How heavenly you look, Angel,’ cooed Ambergris. ‘Did Vivian design it?’ ‘Well, it’s partly Vivian and partly some fifteenth century South Kensington Museum tapestry.’ ‘I got the inspiration from that 261

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line; it is full summer now,’3 said Vivian, and he smiled and laid his hand a moment on the back of his wife’s neck. ‘It suits her ample beauty.’ ‘Oh,’ said Mirabelle clapping her hands, ‘have the babes gone to seep-sum-bye yet? Don’t say they have!’ ‘Selysette’s cutting her teeth – she’s been asleep for hours; and Rose Mary and Madeleine are both in the Land of Nod, but Vivian is going to bring down Cedric first for a moment when everybody’s arrived – just one round the room on his shoulder.’ ‘I adore babies.’ Ambergris the innocent becoming warm – ‘Best of all to bath them and feel the little things squiggling about on my lap: they’re nicer than pussies.’ Another ring at the door-bell and the prettiest dismay on the part of the girls. ‘Fly!’ cried Mrs. De Voted; ‘slip through Vivian’s study and leave your things in our room. Look, that’s where you’re to sit – by the crystallised violets.’ They flew, and a maid announced ‘Mr. Carrington Faber.’ He was tall and lean, with a habit of caressing his chin as though to make certain he had one. Greetings over – ‘Do you know,’ he cried, ‘the shadow cast by the tree to the left of the streetlamp upon the blind of your kitchen window?’ They did not know. ‘It’s quite wonderful. Japanese, you know, with a touch of Sime and just a suggestion of Aubrey Beardsley in the tassel.4 I’ve been watching it for ages. In fact, I knocked off a little thing to it,’ he shrugged and smiled; ‘borrowed a pencil from a policeman and wrote it on my cuff – had nothing else with me.’ He dreamed over to an electric light and shot out his tablets. ‘Oh, yes, it’s here right enough.’ ‘Do read it,’ said Mrs. De Voted. ‘Fancy! the kitchen window!’ Carrington Faber looked up gravely. ‘It’s quite short, you know, Japanese style. I think I’ll call it “Autumn”:– ‘A wild goose honked. My soul flew into the ashy bosom Of the furthest star And faded, shivering. . . .’

‘Mr. and Mrs. Vane Catchpole,’ announced the maid, and two forlorn creatures, who appeared to have issued from a cupboard undusted and unshaken, shook hands with the De Voteds. ‘Didn’t see you at my lecture last Friday, Catchpole.’ Vivian De Voted shook a perfectly kept finger at him. ‘No, no – unfortunately,’ replied the little man, wrinkling up his face as though he felt a spider’s web upon it. ‘I meant to turn up, but the wife had one of her nervous headaches – psychic they are. What was the theme?’ ‘The Infant at Nature’s Fount, or Shall the Modern Mother Suckle?’ ‘Oh, yes, yes, I recollect.’ Mr. Catchpole frowned, pursing his lips: ‘Very interesting indeed. And Vital. But poor Min was quite laid low, and when those attacks

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come on the only thing I can do is to sit by her and read her statistics. Sounds queer, don’t it? But she says they remove the ache from the sub-conscious by quickening the nerve centres of the objective mind.’ Mrs. De Voted, confidentially to Mrs. Catchpole, ‘No use at all, my dear, unless you lie down immediately after taking it. I’ve used it for years and about a month ago I gave it to my friend Mrs. Ffork Carving – they’re coming this evening, the Ffork Carvings – of course, it’s the rarest thing for them to go out in the evenings, but Mr. Carving and my husband are so intimate – really, like two boys together – and Vivian is writing a series of articles for Mr. Carving’s latest venture on “Fruit Diet and the Birth Rate.”’ The girls made their reappearance in violet dresses with their arms and a silver scarf entwining. They sat on a little couch and fed each other with violet petals, the which artless game so ensnared Mr. Carrington Faber that he hung over the back of their couch and cried them Pre-Raphaelite, to be rewarded by Mirabelle with a sweetie – (she called him ‘my big white pony,’ and let him eat the morsel from the palm of her hand). Madame Seduction and Mr. Hering Bohn were announced. ‘You darling, darling Pet,’ gurgled Madame Seduction, turning first one powdered cheek and then the other to be kissed. ‘And how’s your beautiful big husband? I’m going to sing you the loveliest song to-night – all about the passions of two married lovers. No, but tell me truly – do you still adore each other?’ Mrs. De Voted caught the lapels of Vivian’s coat. ‘Are you tired of your wife?’ she asked, gently shaking him. The company felt the tension of the moment – was silent – thrilled. It is not every day that one can witness a passion which had endured for nine full years, and was still – again I quote Mr. Vivian De V. in lighter vein – ‘on the wax with no hint of waning.’ He caught her face in his hand: ‘I am still thy worshipper,’ he boomed. ‘Mr. and Mrs. Ffork Carving.’ ‘How do you do, Mrs. De Voted?’ – ‘So pleased, Mr. Carving.’ ‘Glad to see you, Carving’ – ‘Well, De Voted! I’m afraid we’re a little late; the fact is – if I may plead not only freedom but truths of speech – our maids were out to-night, and I had to fasten my wife’s hooks between the paragraphs of to-morrow’s leader.’ Appreciative laughter. ‘Oh, Fford, darling, how can you?’ from her. ‘Well, you’d better retort by telling them I’ve never knotted my own ties for the last – let me see, dare I say how long we’ve been married?’ ‘No,’ she cried, ‘certainly not’ – and she said to Mrs. De Voted: ‘Come away from these men – I want to tell you something. I’ve entirely given up heating soup for Ffork in the evenings. Horlick’s Malted Milk, my dear, after he’s in bed.’ But Vivian pursued them and, apologising, whispered in his wife’s ear. ‘Oh, very well,’ said she, ‘your baby boy.’ He retired a moment reappearing with Cedric on his

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shoulder – Cedric in a flannel nighty with his hair in a cockatoo curl. Oh, rapture of the ladies! Oh, despair of them when Cedric, catching sight of Madame Seduction’s red silk gloves, howled with fury and hid in his father’s beard. ‘All right, my lamb; all right, my poppet. I’ll have to take him away, mother,’ shouted Mr. De Voted above the storm. ‘Yes, darling, please’ – and when the door was shut – ‘Cedric worships his father; it really is quite extraordinary. He won’t look at other people or go near them, but he responds to his father’s touch like a little – a little –’ ‘sensitive plant,’ suggested Carrington Faber. ‘The mentality of young children is as significant to me as the mentality of young gods,’ said De Voted, reappearing with his beard freshly brushed. ‘What about some music? I say, Bohn, will you accompany Madame Seduction?’ ‘Delighted!’ The gentleman bowed and unfastened the lady’s music-case which lay on the piano. ‘What shall I sing?’ she said, standing behind him and breathing faintly down his neck. ‘Whatever you like’ – and he whispered: ‘You look adorable to-night.’ ‘Do I?’ she murmured. ‘Are the red gloves a success?’ ‘Irresistibly evil. You are like a poison-flower growing in some stagnant jungle!’ ‘Ah, you dear man, thank you for that,’ and swaying forward she leaned her bosom against his shoulder. ‘If these horrid people were away I think I could sing to-night, but I’m in the mood for such passion – and they don’t understand it, you know.’ ‘I can feel it: you’re all woman, to-night – half cat, half snake, wholly tigress. Be careful, I’m intoxicated!’ She had a triumph: She sang the room into such a state of inflammability that Carrington Faber reeled over to the piano, and drooping against it like a long yellow and black Iceland poppy, recited his latest poem to Mirabelle:– Breath and bosom aflame At a name: Mirabelle, Mirabelle. Mouth and eyes agape At a shape, Hands of me body-warm At a form: Mirabelle, Mirabelle. On the shores of my heart The pink feet dancing, From the seas of Desire The mad waves glancing At spoil so entrancing, Foam in their swell: Mirabelle, Mirabelle, Mirabelle.

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The emotion was too profound for applause, and Mrs. De Voted informed Mrs. Ffork Carving that ‘they met at our house. Vivian and I have been watching them for months. He says that he is sure the symptoms are genuine and serious. We are so longing for the final understanding to be come to under our roof.’ ‘Isn’t your husband going to sing?’ inquired the other. ‘I’ll ask him.’ She called across the room. ‘Darling!’ ‘Yes, dearest!’ ‘Can we have “Loosen Your Girdles, Ye Rose Buds”?’ ‘Certainly, pet’ – and he stood in an attitude of indolent Eastern grace. In the pause of the first verse, eyeing his wife, he observed her shiver – and whispered, ‘Draught?’ in tones of agony. ‘No,’ she protested, and when the song was over reproached him: ‘You know I always shiver when you sing; it’s – it’s emotion.’ Ffork Carving pulled his wife’s ear. ‘I know one little girl who ought to be thinking of bed,’ he said, playfully. ‘Oh, Ffork!’ ‘Well, who said they hadn’t closed their eyes at five o’clock this morning? You can’t deny it darling.’ ‘Supper is served,’ announced the maid, reinforced by a young foreigner in a dirty shirt from the Tottenham Court Road. The girls refused to be separated at supper – they would stay together; and do you know what they learned in the summer? – to coo like two doves – quite a little conversation, too swell to listen to! ‘Listen, Mr. Carrington Faber – sometimes we keep it up for hours.’ Madame Seduction bit into a peach; the juice ran through her fingers. ‘O-o-h,’ she pouted, ‘what am I going to do with this poor wet hand?’ And Hering Bohn dried it. ‘My dear, no hansom –’ bus – at corner,’ flustered Mrs. Vane Catchpole to her lord, who nodded, wiping a spot of consommé from his waistcoat. ‘Ffork, you’re not to touch salmon at this hour,’ said Mrs. Ffork. ‘We men are the veriest slaves,’ Ffork smiled at De Voted. When the ladies retired to the De Voteds’ room to re-wrap themselves in coats and scarves and powder their noses and steal an invisible hairpin or two, they had the benefit of seeing yet another sign and token – of feeling yet another thrill. For pink-shaded lights glowed in the bedroom and the big pink velvet bed was unfolded like ‘a great rose,’ said childlike Ambergris. A fire burned on the hearth – and there was even a suspicion of pink silk and ribbon and lace. Marriage! Mirabelle shook Carrington Faber’s arm in the hall, of her own accord, and pressed it – the little dear! The De Voteds watched the departing party from their door-step – he with his arm about her, she leaning upon him – the light from the hall strong on their loving forms, and above, through closed curtains, the pink light of their sacred shrine. Mrs. De Voted, as the door closed, gave a little yawn. Vivian helped her up the stairs.

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Notes Text: New Age, 10: 19, 7 March 1912, pp. 447–8. 1. A story that anticipates aspects of ‘Bliss’ (1918), with its satire on fashionable affectations, literary preciosity and current health fads. 2. Robert Herrick (1591–1674) wrote numerous poems celebrating love and warning of time’s brevity, with such titles as ‘To the Virgins to make much of Time’. 3. ‘It is full summer now, the heart of June’, the opening line of Oscar Wilde’s long poem, ‘The Garden of Eros’, Poems (1881). 4. Sidney Sime (1867–1941), English illustrator and designer, whose fantastical, elaborate style carried sharp satirical commentary; Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98), artist and author, his black and white drawings the most celebrated of English fin de siècle art.

•

At the Club Viewed from the drawing-room door, the members of the ‘Advanced’ presented a fantastic appearance, for they crouched in chintz-covered armchairs, their heads only being visible, for all the world like a company of garish snails browsing on the Brussels roses. One man stood in an upright position guarding the fire, his eyes following a little maidservant who wandered familiarly among the tables, turning over newspapers and magazines as though they were pieces of bread in the process of toasting. Voice from a lady decorated with red quills: ‘Oh , they’re much worse abroad.’ ‘My dear, you can’t go out of your hotel in comfort. Followed everywhere. And the eyes! There is really only one word to describe them.’ ‘But,’ leaning forward, ‘I suppose they never make any definite . . . ?’ The red quills quivered. ‘Of course they do. I was walking underneath a railway bridge . . .’ – followed a whisper proper, on receipt of which the tense companion fell back into her chair. ‘No!’ ‘Perfectly true, my dear; you can imagine my horror.’ She took up a cigarette and smiled at it. ‘He was frightfully good-looking.’ ‘What type?’ asked the tense companion, feigning indifference. ‘Oh, dark – you know awfully passionate! Foreigners are good-looking; I rather like the way Russians have of parting their beards down the middle, don’t you?’ A lady in a grey motor veil approached the masculine fireguard. ‘So sorry to hear about poor dear Mamie,’ she said, in a voice of great satisfaction. ‘Hey? What’s

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that? Oh, she’s all right,’ answered the fireguard, taking some eyeglasses from a waistcoat pocket and blowing on them. ‘Do her good. Cure her indigestion. Last time she was there she never had a touch of it until that wretched ‘welcome breakfast’ at the Holborn. Girl got excited – stodged, and started the whole game again.’ The motor veil looked damped, but said nothing. ‘By the way – saw your husband at the club last night: he’s looking very white about the gills. I told him about those charcoal biscuits again, but he doesn’t seem keen on ’em; says they stick to his teeth.’ She murmured confidingly: ‘Harry hasn’t any teeth of his own, you know. They’re very good, aren’t they?’ He looked in the eyeglasses, and looked thunderstruck. ‘By Jove, you do surprise me! That’s an astonishing thing! But that seems to me to simplify the biscuit trouble. He could take them out afterwards and pour the tap over ’em. What?’ ‘I hardly consider that suggestion appropriate or feasible,’ she said. And she thinned her lips and drifted away from him towards a copy of ‘Votes for Women.’ ‘Did you hear that man by the fire?’ whispered one of two young green things without collars; ‘aren’t men extraordinarily coarse? Fancy having to – to share a room with a person who might grate on your soul like that.’ ‘Yes, but I wouldn’t. At any rate, I’ve always decided ever since I was about fifteen to have separate beds. Have you read Masefield’s last poem?1 Isn’t it marvellous?’ ‘Yes, simply wonderful. Did you see that picture of him? I don’t know why, but it reminds me of a dandelion.’ ‘Oh, my dear, how wonderful of you. I never thought of it before, but I can see it immediately you say so. Quite ordinary in a way, and yet with a sort of glowing beauty in it.’ ‘Not ordinary. I’d rather say wistful. There is only seed cake in this tray. Do you hate it?’ ‘Not me!’ exclaimed an elderly lady with a moustache. ‘They think they have but they haven’t, and I don’t think they ever will. As our lovers they are too occupied in getting us into their arms; as our husbands they are too busy in endeavouring to escape from our legalised embraces: they never see us in a normal state at all. Supposing we don’t succumb to or pursue their fascinating qualities their pride is hurt and we’re voted cold-blooded or physiological freaks.’ She sat up and punched a leather cushion. ‘The fact is, sex is the only weapon we’ve got, and the sooner we realise that the better. Acceptance isn’t subservience. As the slave ministers to his master so must we make man minister to our needs. I’m all against this suppression of the subject. The pangs of sex are as natural and as inevitable as the pangs of hunger.’ ‘Oh, but Mrs. Cartwright,’ said a Bright Creature, ‘that almost reaches the Oriental standpoint. We can’t lie about on Persian pillows nowadays and kiss our loves between mouthfuls of Turkish delight. Men can choose to realise it or not, but we’re on the battlefield as surely as they are – all of us here, for instance!’ she waved her glove, embracing by gesture

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the entire room. ‘Why,’ cried a Laughing Voice, ‘just imagine if we sat here in chintz-covered chairs and talked about nothing but men all the afternoon. Pooh, they’re not worth it! Preposterous idea!’ Notes Text: New Age, 10: 19, 7 March 1912, pp. 449–50. 1. John Masefield, The Everlasting Mercy (1912).

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The Woman at the Store All that day the heat was terrible. The wind blew close to the ground – it rooted among the tussock grass – slithered along the road, so that the white pumice dust swirled in our faces – settled and sifted over us and was like a dry-skin itching for growth on our bodies. The horses stumbled along, coughing and chuffing. The pack horse was sick – with a big, open sore rubbed under the belly. Now and again she stopped short, threw back her head, looked at us as though she were going to cry, and whinnied. Hundreds of larks shrilled – the sky was slate colour, and the sound of the larks reminded me of slate pencils scraping over its surface. There was nothing to be seen but wave after wave of tussock grass – patched with purple orchids and manuka bushes covered with thick spider webs. Jo rode ahead. He wore a blue galatea shirt,1 corduroy trousers and riding boots. A white handkerchief, spotted with red – it looked as though his nose had been bleeding on it – knotted round his throat. Wisps of white hair straggled from under his wideawake2 – his moustache and eyebrows were called white – he slouched in the saddle – grunting. Not once that day had he sung ‘I don’t care, for don’t you see, my wife’s mother was in front of me!’ . . . It was the first day we had been without it for a month, and now there seemed something uncanny in his silence. Hin rode beside me – white as a clown, his black eyes glittered, and he kept shooting out his tongue and moistening his lips. He was dressed in a Jaeger3 vest – a pair of blue duck trousers, fastened round the waist with a plaited leather belt. We had hardly spoken since dawn. At noon we had lunched off fly biscuits4 and apricots by the side of a swampy creek. ‘My stomach feels like the crop of a hen,’ said Jo. ‘Now then, Hin, you’re the bright boy of the party – where’s this ’ere store you kep’

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on talking about. “Oh, yes,” you says, “I know a fine store, with a paddock for the horses an’ a creek runnin’ through, owned by a friend of mine who’ll give yer a bottle of whisky before ’e shakes hands with yer.” I’d like ter see that place – merely as a matter of curiosity – not that I’d ever doubt yer word – as yer know very well – but. . . .’ Hin laughed. ‘Don’t forget there’s a woman too, Jo, with blue eyes and yellow hair, who’ll promise you something else before she shakes hands with you. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.’ ‘The heat’s making you balmy,’ said Jo. But he dug his knees into his horse. We shambled on. I half fell asleep, and had a sort of uneasy dream that the horses were not moving forward at all – then that I was on a rocking-horse, and my old mother was scolding me for raising such a fearful dust from the drawing-room carpet. ‘You’ve entirely worn off the pattern of the carpet,’ I heard her saying, and she gave the reins a tug. I snivelled and woke to find Hin leaning over me, maliciously smiling. ‘That was a case of all but,’ said he, ‘I just caught you. What’s up, been bye-bye?’ ‘No!’ I raised my head. ‘Thank the Lord we’re arriving somewhere.’ We were on the brow of the hill, and below us there was a whare5 roofed in with corrugated iron. It stood in a garden, rather far back from the road – a big paddock opposite, and a creek and a clump of young willow trees. A thin line of blue smoke stood up straight from the chimney of the whare, and as I looked, a woman came out, followed by a child and a sheep dog – the woman carrying what appeared to me a black stick. She made frantic gestures at us. The horses put on a final spurt, Jo took off his wideawake, shouted, threw out his chest, and began singing, ‘I don’t care, for don’t you see. . . .’ The sun pushed through the pale clouds and shed a vivid light over the scene. It gleamed on the woman’s yellow hair, over her flapping pinafore and the rifle she was carrying. The child hid behind her, and the yellow dog, a mangy beast, scuttled back into the whare, his tail between his legs. We drew rein and dismounted. ‘Hallo,’ screamed the woman. ‘I thought you was three ’awks. My kid comes runnin’ in ter me. “Mumma,” says she, “there’s three brown things comin’ over the ’ill,” says she. An’ I comes out smart, I can tell yer. They’ll be ’awks, I says to her. Oh, the ’awks about ’ere, yer wouldn’t believe.’ The ‘kid’ gave us the benefit of one eye from behind the woman’s pinafore – then retired again. ‘Where’s your old man,’ asked Hin. The woman blinked rapidly, screwing up her face. ‘Away shearin’. Bin away a month. I suppose yer not goin’ to stop, are yer? There’s a storm comin’ up.’

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‘You bet we are,’ said Jo. ‘So you’re on your lonely, missis?’ She stood, pleating the frills of her pinafore, and glancing from one to the other of us, like a hungry bird. I smiled at the thought of how Hin had pulled Jo’s leg about her. Certainly her eyes were blue, and what hair she had was yellow, but ugly. She was a figure of fun. Looking at her, you felt there was nothing but sticks and wires under that pinafore – her front teeth were knocked out, she had red pulpy hands, and she wore on her feet a pair of dirty ‘Bluchers’.6 ‘I’ll go and turn out the horses,’ said Hin. ‘Got any embrocation? Poi’s rubbed herself to hell!’ ‘Arf a mo!’ The woman stood silent a moment, her nostrils expanding as she breathed. Then she shouted violently, ‘I’d rather you didn’t stop – you can’t and there’s the end of it. I don’t let out that paddock any more. You’ll have to go on; I ain’t got nothing!’ ‘Well, I’m blest!’ said Jo, heavily. He pulled me aside. ‘Gone a bit off ’er dot,’ he whispered, ‘too much alone, you know,’ very significantly. ‘Turn the sympathetic tap on ’er, she’ll come round all right.’ But there was no need – she had come round by herself. ‘Stop if yer like!’ she muttered, shrugging her shoulders. To me – ‘I’ll give yer the embrocation if yer come along.’ ‘Right-o, I’ll take it down to them.’ We walked together up the garden path. It was planted on both sides with cabbages. They smelled like stale dishwater. Of flowers there were double poppies and sweet-williams. One little patch was divided off by pawa7 shells – presumably it belonged to the child – for she ran from her mother and began to grub in it with a broken clothes peg. The yellow dog lay across the doorstep, biting fleas; the woman kicked him away. ‘Gar-r, get away, you beast . . . the place ain’t tidy. I ’aven’t ’ad time ter fix things to-day – been ironing. Come right in.’ It was a large room, the walls plastered with old pages of English periodicals. Queen Victoria’s Jubilee8 appeared to be the most recent number – a table with an ironing board and wash tub on it – some wooden forms – a black horsehair sofa, and some broken cane chairs pushed against the walls. The mantelpiece above the stove was draped in pink paper, further ornamented with dried grasses and ferns and a coloured print of Richard Seddon.9 There were four doors – one, judging from the smell, let into the ‘Store’, one on to the ‘back yard’, through the third I saw the bedroom. Flies buzzed in circles round the ceiling, and treacle papers and bundles of dried clover were pinned to the window curtains. I was alone in the room – she had gone into the store for the embrocation. I heard her stamping about and muttering to herself: ‘I got some, now where did I put that bottle? . . . It’s behind the pickles . . . no, it ain’t.’ I cleared a place on the table and sat there, swinging my legs. Down in the

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paddock I could hear Jo singing and the sound of hammer strokes as Hin drove in the tent poles. It was sunset. There is no twilight to our New Zealand days, but a curious half-hour when everything appears grotesque – it frightens – as though the savage spirit of the country walked abroad and sneered at what it saw. Sitting alone in the hideous room I grew afraid. The woman next door was a long time finding that stuff. What was she doing in there? Once I thought I heard her bang her hands down on the counter, and once she half moaned, turning it into a cough and clearing her throat. I wanted to shout ‘Buck up,’ but I kept silent. ‘Good Lord, what a life!’ I thought. ‘Imagine being here day in, day out, with that rat of a child and a mangy dog. Imagine bothering about ironing – mad, of course she’s mad! Wonder how long she’s been here – wonder if I could get her to talk.’ At that moment she poked her head round the door. ‘Wot was it yer wanted,’ she asked. ‘Embrocation.’ ‘Oh, I forgot. I got it, it was in front of the pickle jars.’ She handed me the bottle. ‘My, you do look tired, you do! Shall I knock yer up a few scones for supper? There’s some tongue in the store, too, and I’ll cook yer a cabbage if you fancy it.’ ‘Right-o.’ I smiled at her. ‘Come down to the paddock and bring the kid for tea.’ She shook her head, pursing up her mouth. ‘Oh no. I don’t fancy it. I’ll send the kid down with the things and a billy of milk. Shall I knock up a few extry scones to take with you ter-morrow?’ ‘Thanks.’ She came and stood by the door. ‘How old is the kid?’ ‘Six – come next Christmas. I ’ad a bit of trouble with ’er one way an’ another. I ’adn’t any milk till a month after she was born and she sickened like a cow.’ ‘She’s not like you – takes after her father?’ Just as the woman had shouted her refusal at us before, she shouted at me then. ‘No, she don’t; she’s the dead spit of me. Any fool could see that. Come on in now, Els, you stop messing in the dirt.’ I met Jo climbing over the paddock fence. ‘What’s the old bitch got in the store?’ he asked. ‘Don’t know – didn’t look.’ ‘Well, of all the fools. Hin’s slanging you. What have you been doing all the time?’ ‘She couldn’t find this stuff. Oh, my shakes, you are smart!’

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Jo had washed, combed his wet hair in a line across his forehead, and buttoned a coat over his shirt. He grinned. Hin snatched the embrocation from me. I went to the end of the paddock where the willows grew and bathed in the creek. The water was clear and soft as oil. Along the edges held by the grass and rushes, white foam tumbled and bubbled. I lay in the water and looked up at the trees that were still a moment, then quivered lightly, and again were still. The air smelt of rain. I forgot about the woman and the kid until I came back to the tent. Hin lay by the fire, watching the billy boil. I asked where Jo was and if the kid had brought our supper. ‘Pooh,’ said Hin, rolling over and looking up at the sky. ‘Didn’t you see how Jo had been tittivating – he said to me before he went up to the whare, “Dang it! she’ll look better by night light – at any rate, my buck, she’s female flesh!”’ ‘You had Jo about her looks – you had me, too.’ ‘No – look here. I can’t make it out. It’s four years since I came past this way, and I stopped here two days. The husband was a pal of mine once, down the West Coast – a fine, big chap, with a voice on him like a trombone. She’d been barmaid down the Coast – as pretty as a wax doll. The coach used to come this way then once a fortnight, that was before they opened the railway up Napier way, and she had no end of a time! Told me once in a confidential moment that she knew one hundred and twenty-five different ways of kissing!’ ‘Oh, go on, Hin! She isn’t the same woman!’ ‘Course she is. . . . I can’t make it out. What I think is the old man’s cleared out and left her: that’s all my eye about shearing. Sweet life! The only people who come through now are Maoris and sundowners!’10 Through the dark we saw the gleam of the kid’s pinafore. She trailed over to us with a basket in her hand, the milk billy in the other. I unpacked the basket, the child standing by. ‘Come over here,’ said Hin, snapping his fingers at her. She went, the lamp from the inside of the tent cast a bright light over her. A mean, undersized brat, with whitish hair, and weak eyes. She stood, legs wide apart and her stomach protruding. ‘What do you do all day?’ asked Hin. She scraped out one ear with her little finger, looked at the result and said – ‘Draw.’ ‘Huh! What do you draw? – leave your ears alone.’ ‘Pictures.’ ‘What on?’ ‘Bits of butter paper an’ a pencil of my Mumma’s.’ ‘Boh! What a lot of words at one time!’ Hin rolled his eyes at her. ‘Baa-lambs and moo-cows?’

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‘No, everything. I’ll draw all of you when you’re gone, and your horses and the tent, and that one’ – she pointed to me – ‘with no clothes on in the creek. I looked at her where she wouldn’t see me from.’ ‘Thanks very much! How ripping of you,’ said Hin. ‘Where’s Dad?’ The kid pouted. ‘I won’t tell you because I don’t like yer face!’ She started operations on the other ear. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Take the basket, get along home and tell the other man supper’s ready.’ ‘I don’t want to.’ ‘I’ll give you a box on the ear if you don’t,’ said Hin, savagely. ‘Hie! I’ll tell Mumma. I’ll tell Mumma’ – the kid fled. We ate until we were full and had arrived at the smoke stage before Jo came back, very flushed and jaunty, a whisky bottle in his hand. ‘’Ave a drink – you two!’ he shouted, carrying off matters with a high hand. ‘’Ere, shove along the cups.’ ‘One hundred and twenty-five different ways,’ I murmured to Hin. ‘What’s that? Oh! stow it!’ said Jo. ‘Why ’ave you always got your knife into me. You gas like a kid at a Sunday School beano. She wants us to go up there to-night, and have a comfortable chat. I’ – he waved his hand airily – ‘I got ’er round.’ ‘Trust you for that,’ laughed Hin. ‘But did she tell you where the old man’s got to?’ Jo looked up. ‘Shearing! You ’eard ’er, you fool!’ The woman had fixed up the room, even to a light bouquet of sweet-williams on the table. She and I sat one side of the table, Jo and Hin the other. An oil lamp was set between us, the whisky bottle and glasses, and a jug of water. The kid knelt against one of the forms, drawing on butter paper. I wondered, grimly, if she was attempting the creek episode. But Jo had been right about night time. The woman’s hair was tumbled – two red spots burned in her cheeks – her eyes shone – and we knew that they were kissing feet under the table. She had changed the blue pinafore for a white calico dressing jacket and a black skirt– the kid was decorated to the extent of a blue sateen hair ribbon. In the stifling room with the flies buzzing against the ceiling and dropping on to the table – we got slowly drunk. ‘Now listen to me,’ shouted the woman, banging her fist on the table. ‘It’s six years since I was married, and four miscarriages. I says to ’im, I says, what do you think I’m doin’ up ’ere? If you was back at the Coast, I’d ’ave you lynched for child murder. Over and over I tells ’im – you’ve broken my spirit and spoiled my looks, and wot for – that’s wot I’m driving at.’ She clutched her head with her hands and stared round at us. Speaking rapidly, ‘Oh, some days – an’ months of them I ’ear them two words knockin’ inside me all the time

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– “Wot for,” but sometimes I’ll be cooking the spuds an’ I lifts the lid off to give ’em a prong and I ’ears, quite sudden again, “Wot for.” Oh! I don’t mean only the spuds and the kid – I mean – I mean,’ she hiccoughed – ‘you know what I mean, Mr Jo.’ ‘I know,’ said Jo, scratching his head. ‘Trouble with me is,’ she leaned across the table, ‘he left me too much alone. When the coach stopped coming, sometimes he’d go away days, sometimes he’d go away weeks, and leave me ter look after the store. Back ’e’d come – pleased as Punch. “Oh, ’allo,” ’e’d say. “Ow are you gettin’ on. Come and give us a kiss.” Sometimes I’d turn a bit nasty, and then ’e’d go off again, and if I took it all right, ’e’d wait till ’e could twist me round ’is finger, then ’e’d say, “Well, so long, I’m off,” and do you think I could keep ’im? – not me!’ ‘Mumma,’ bleated the kid, ‘I made a picture of them on the ’ill, an’ you an’ me, an’ the dog down below.’ ‘Shut your mouth,’ said the woman. A vivid flash of lightning played over the room – we heard the mutter of thunder. ‘Good thing that’s broke loose,’ said Jo. ‘I’ve ’ad it in me ’ead for three days.’ ‘Where’s your old man now?’ asked Hin slowly. The woman blubbered and dropped her head on to the table. ‘Hin, ’e’s gone shearin’ and left me alone again,’ she wailed. ‘’Ere, look out for the glasses,’ said Jo. ‘Cheer-o, ’ave another drop. No good cryin’ over spilt ’usbands! You Hin, you blasted cuckoo!’ ‘Mr Jo,’ said the woman, drying her eyes on her jacket frill, ‘you’re a gent, an’ if I was a secret woman, I’d place any confidence in your ’ands. I don’t mind if I do ’ave a glass on that.’ Every moment the lightning grew more vivid and the thunder sounded nearer. Hin and I were silent – the kid never moved from her bench. She poked her tongue out and blew on it as she drew. ‘It’s the loneliness,’ said the woman, addressing Jo – he made sheep’s eyes at her – ‘and bein’ shut up ’ere like a broody ’en.’ He reached his hand across the table and held hers, and though the position looked most uncomfortable when they wanted to pass the water and whisky, their hands stuck together as though glued. I pushed back my chair and went over to the kid, who immediately sat flat down on her artistic achievements and made a face at me. ‘You’re not to look,’ said she. ‘Oh, come on, don’t be so nasty!’ Hin came over to us, and we were just drunk enough to wheedle the kid into showing us. And those drawings of hers were extraordinary and repulsively vulgar. The creations of a lunatic with a lunatic’s cleverness. There was no doubt about it, the kid’s mind was diseased. While she showed them to us,

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she worked herself up into a mad excitement, laughing and trembling, and shooting out her arms. ‘Mumma,’ she yelled. ‘Now I’m going to draw them what you told me I never was to – now I am.’ The woman rushed from the table and beat the child’s head with the flat of her hand. ‘I’ll smack you with yer clothes turned up if yer dare say that again,’ she bawled. Jo was too drunk to notice, but Hin caught her by the arm. The kid did not utter a cry. She drifted over to the window and began picking flies from the treacle paper. We returned to the table – Hin and I sitting one side, the woman and Jo, touching shoulders, the other. We listened to the thunder, saying stupidly, ‘That was a near one,’ ‘There it goes again,’ and Jo, with a heavy hit, ‘Now we’re off,’ ‘Steady on the brake,’ until rain began to fall, sharp as cannon shot on the iron roof. ‘You’d better doss here for the night,’ said the woman. ‘That’s right,’ assented Jo, evidently in the know about this move. ‘Bring up yer things from the tent. You two can doss in the store along with the kid – she’s used to sleep in there and won’t mind you.’ ‘O, Mumma, I never did,’ interrupted the kid. ‘Shut yer lies! An’ Mr Jo can ‘ave this room.’ It sounded a ridiculous arrangement, but it was useless to attempt to cross them, they were too far gone. While the woman sketched the plan of action, Jo sat, abnormally solemn and red, his eyes bulging, and pulled at his moustache. ‘Give us a lantern,’ said Hin. ‘I’ll go down to the paddock.’ We two went together. Rain whipped in our faces, the land was as light as though a bush fire was raging – we behaved like two children let loose in the thick of an adventure – laughed and shouted to each other, and came back to the whare to find the kid already bedded in the counter of the store. The woman brought us a lamp. Jo took his bundle from Hin, the door was shut. ‘Good-night all,’ shouted Jo. Hin and I sat on two sacks of potatoes. For the life of us we could not stop laughing. Strings of onions and half-hams dangled from the ceiling –wherever we looked there were advertisements for ‘Camp Coffee’ and tinned meats. We pointed at them, tried to read them aloud – overcome with laughter and hiccoughs. The kid in the counter stared at us. She threw off her blanket and scrambled to the floor where she stood in her grey flannel night gown, rubbing one leg against the other. We paid no attention to her. ‘Wot are you laughing at,’ she said, uneasily. ‘You!’ shouted Hin, ‘the red tribe of you, my child.’

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She flew into a rage and beat herself with her hands. ‘I won’t be laughed at, you curs – you.’ He swooped down upon the child and swung her on to the counter. ‘Go to sleep, Miss Smarty – or make a drawing – here’s a pencil – you can use Mumma’s account book.’ Through the rain we heard Jo creak over the boarding of the next room – the sound of a door being opened – then shut to. ‘It’s the loneliness,’ whispered Hin. ‘One hundred and twenty-five different ways – alas! my poor brother!’ The kid tore out a page and flung it at me. ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Now I done it ter spite Mumma for shutting me up ’ere with you two. I done the one she told me I never ought to. I done the one she told me she’d shoot me if I did. Don’t care! Don’t care!’ The kid had drawn the picture of the woman shooting at a man with a rook rifle and then digging a hole to bury him in. She jumped off the counter and squirmed about on the floor biting her nails. Hin and I sat till dawn with the drawing beside us. The rain ceased, the little kid fell asleep, breathing loudly. We got up, stole out of the whare, down into the paddock. White clouds floated over a pink sky – a chill wind blew; the air smelled of wet grass. Just as we swung into the saddle, Jo came out of the whare – he motioned to us to ride on. ‘I’ll pick you up later,’ he shouted. A bend in the road, and the whole place disappeared. Notes Text: Rhythm,11 1: 4, Spring 1912, pp. 7–21, corrections see Alpers, p. 551. SCOS. Nothing better illustrates KM’s ability to switch and assume various styles than the distance between the self-consciously smart satirical sketches in the New Age, and the first story she wrote for Rhythm, in response to its slogan, taken from J. M. Synge, that ‘Before art can be human again it must learn to be brutal.’ (Synge in fact had written ‘verse’, not ‘art’, Preface to Poems, 1909.) KM drew on her memories of the camping trip through the central North Island in December 1907, her record of which was published in The Urewera Notebook, ed. I. A. Gordon, 1978. The story is set in the rough country out from Taupo, off the Napier Road. 1. Made from blue striped cotton. 2. A hat with a wide brim and a low flat crown. 3. A brand named from a London store, for an all-wool jacket.

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4. Raisins between two layers of pastry. 5. Originally a Maori house or building, a word used after European settlement for a makeshift shelter or shack. 6. Leather half-boots. 7. Usually spelled paua, a large abalone-like shellfish with an iridescent inner shell. 8. Celebrating, in 1897, Queen Victoria’s sixty years on the throne. 9. See p. 97, n. 4. 10. Tramps, swagmen. 11. JMM, still an undergraduate at Oxford, and his friend Michael Sadleir, founded Rhythm, with its determined bid to be England’s avant-garde literary journal. KM and JMM met at the end of 1911, and began living together in April 1912. By June KM was assistant editor of Rhythm, contributing poems, reviews and essays, as well as stories. KM’s allegiance to the new magazine provoked bitter attacks from her recently close friends at the New Age, its editor A. R. Orage and his South African mistress, Beatrice Hastings. See Hastings’ reminiscences, The Old New Age – Orage and Others (1935).

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Green Goggles ‘Green goggles, green goggles, The glass is so green . . .’ (Russian Folk Song)

The servant girl, wearing a red, sleeveless blouse, brought in the samovar. ‘But it is impossible to speak of a concrete ideal,’ thought Dimitri Tchernikofskoi. ‘In the first place, concrete is a composition. It is not a pure substance. Therefore it must be divided against itself.’ ‘There is a gentleman in the passage,’ bawled the servant girl. Dimitri Tchernikofskoi disguised his nervousness by frowning deeply and plucking at the corners of his collar, as though the starch were permeating his skin and stiffening the throat muscles. ‘Show him in,’ he muttered, ‘and’ – he closed his eyes for a moment – ‘bring some cucumbers.’ ‘Even so, Little Father.’ A young man, wearing a bear-skin coat and brown top boots, entered the room. His head was completely covered in an astrachan

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cap, having enormous ear-flaps, and his pale, kind eyes smiled timidly from behind a pair of green goggles. ‘Please to sit down,’ said Dimitri Tchernikofskoi; and he thought: ‘How do I know those eyes? Are they green? Da, if they were green I should not know them. I feel that they are blue. Lord help me! I must try to keep calm, at all events.’ The young man sat down and pulled his coat over his knees. Twice he opened his mouth and twice he closed it. A round spot of red, about the size of a five-rouble piece, shone on his cheek-bones. Dimitri Tchernikofskoi fumbled in his waistcoat pocket for his watch, and then he remembered that he had pawned it three months before – or sold it, he could not remember which – to Ivan Dvorsniak. And he saw again the little evil-smelling shop and the grotesque, humped figure of the Jew, bending over a green-shaded lamp, weighing the watch on the index finger of his right hand. He fancied he heard it ticking quite sharply and distinctly. Then he realised it was the voice of the young man. ‘My name is Olga Petrovska.’ ‘Eh? What’s that? What’s that you are saying?’ Olga Petrovska raised her hand. ‘Please do not speak so loudly. You must remember we are only on the fifth floor, and the servant girl may be listening in the basement.’ Her brilliant grasp of the technique of the house calmed him. He waited for her to explain. ‘I came to see you,’ she said, ‘because I could not stay away, Dimitri Tchernikofskoi. I am leaving Russia to-night, and I felt that I owed it to you to explain my reasons. For I shall not return – at least, not for a long time. And – people speak so falsely. Truth must be first-hand.’ Her words fell upon his soul like flakes of snow; he counted them – one, two, three, four – wondering, grimly, how large his soul was, how many flakes it would take to cover it completely. ‘Why are you going?’ he asked gently. The young girl stiffened. ‘I am going because they will not arrest me. Think of it! I have killed five officials, I have kidnapped the children of three noblemen – and look at me!’ She stretched out her arms, lifting her bosom so that it strained the buttons of her coat. ‘Ah, it is shameful – shameful! I do not mind about the noblemen, but the children’ – she suddenly spoke in French – ‘je sais ce que je dis; even the noblest soul does not care to have three children thrust upon him without. . . .’ She paused, and for the first time in his life Dimitri saw her smile. It caught his heart; it was miraculous, as the unfolding of a lily on a desolate sea. His emotion was so terrible that he turned up his coat collar and began to pace the room.

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Olga Petrovska continued speaking: ‘But that is all over now. Da, da; I am free again.’ ‘But,’ stammered the unfortunate man, pouring out a glass of tea and thoughtlessly stirring into it a spoonful of peach preserve, ‘what have you done with the children?’ ‘Now that was quite simple. I borrowed this suit from a young coachman, then I hired a sleigh, and, having carefully labelled the little ones with their correct names and addresses, I drove them to the chief Post Office. They were very good. Only Ani cried a little – the darling – she bit off the fingers of her gloves and her hands grew quite cold. When we arrived I told them to wait for me while I posted a letter, and I simply disappeared round a corner. They are bound to be found, you know,’ she added confidently. His admiration for her knew no bounds. Taking a book from a shelf covered in black ‘American cloth’, bound in red cotton, he turned the pages feverishly. ‘The women of Russia do not only bear children, they keep them alive,’ he read. Yes, that was deep! Olga Petrovska removed her cap. He sat down opposite to her and searched her face; the red colour had faded, giving place to green shadows cast by the goggles. ‘Where are you going?’ She did not know. All she knew was that, like all of them, ‘she was going on.’ ‘But,’ he cried, ‘you must take a ticket, Olga Petrovska.’ With a quick movement she seized his hands and bent her face over them. He felt her tears falling – her tears on his hands. ‘Ah,’ he thought, with fierce, intense joy, ‘they must never be washed again. They are purified. They must never know sweeter water.’ ‘Sometimes,’ she whispered, ‘it seems to me that the universe itself is nothing but an infernal machine hurtling through space and destined to shiver’ – a crack of laughter, harsh as blood, burst from his lips – ‘the hosts of heaven.’ He did not answer; he was infinitely troubled at this. In the silence they heard the servant girl wiping down the stair rails with a greasy rag. Olga raised her head. ‘Have I white hairs?’ The fringe of her stiff black hair was covered in fine, white snow-crystals. ‘They will melt, Olga Petrovska.’ At that she laid her cheek a moment against his hands. ‘What a child you are,’ she murmured; ‘I did not mean that.’ And suddenly all that he had imagined and thought and dreamed – the values and revalues and supervalues of good and evil, his hopes, his ambitions – faded away.

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That settled, action became easy. He drew his handkerchief from his pocket and spread it on the table. She watched him. He went over to the washstand and, taking a toothbrush and a half-used cake of some yellowish soap, he wrapped them neatly in the handkerchief. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, vaguely troubled. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘it is time.’ Notes Text: New Age, 11: 10, 4 July 19121, p. 237. 1. Alpers notes (p. 550), ‘probably contributed a good deal earlier and held in type, since K.M. had broken with Orage in May. It is entirely characteristic of her that a penchant for the Russians should be heralded by a send-up. Its targets could be anyone from the Gogol of its title to Tolstoy, Chekhov or Dostoevsky.’

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Tales of a Courtyard I.–EARLY SPRING. We seem to have been up since early morning. We seem to have been astir and busy like people preparing for something pleasant – a feast or a wedding party. As the postman stumbled down our stairs this morning he bawled to the servant girl: ‘That chestnut tree is a mass of buds this morning. I tell you, it’s a mass.’ We heard him. We opened the windows. He must have told the other three houses for windows flew up and heads came through to stare at the chestnut tree with the sticky buds shining in the sun as though coated with honey. The chestnut tree grows in the middle of the court. There is a stone bench round it where the children chatter and scuffle by day and where the old people sit in the evening time, very quiet and close, counting the stars shining through the leaves as though the chestnut tree were their own fruit tree growing in a moonshiny orchard. On dark, warm nights the boys and girls meet there. They are quieter than the old people. We leaned far out of the windows. We shouted and laughed. ‘Good morning – yes, the postman spoke the truth.’ ‘Yes, indeed the sun is shining, praise the Lord.’ ‘Now the warm days won’t be long.’ ‘That tree will be green before we can take off our coats.’ ‘Oh, my soul, what a winter it has been!’ Only the old people were silent. They stood at the windows, nodding to one another, and sipping the air.

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Each moment the sun grew warmer. It fell on our starved hair and lips and hands like kisses. It made us drunk with joy. ‘It’s going to be a fine year: the spring has started early. That’s a sign.’ ‘One has a chance when the sun shines.’ ‘We’ll be sitting outside within a week.’ ‘I must alter Marya’s cotton pelisse.’ ‘As for me I never cough in the summer.’ ‘You know that’s a very fine tree, even as trees go.’ We talked like rich people; we preened ourselves like birds. Suddenly some one shouted. ‘Hoo! I say, look at the students’ window.’ The Russian students had a room in the top floor of the biggest house. Three of them shared it – two men and a girl. They were scarcely ever seen, except behind the window, pacing up and down and talking with great gestures, or at dusk half running across the court. They were desperately poor. We had not seen them all through the winter. To-day their window was closed. A coat hung across it. The sleeves of the coat must have been pinned to the walls. It looked very strange as though trying to shield the room from our view. It made us angry. ‘Now that’s a disgraceful room,’ bawled a woman. ‘Pretty goings on there must be inside there.’ ‘We don’t want to see their filthiness.’ ‘Nice thing for a girl to live with two fellows and no curtain on the window.’ ‘Garr! who’s seen them lately?’ And a child yelled, laughing, ‘perhaps they’re all dead.’ The high little squeaking voice silenced and frightened us suddenly quiet. After all why shouldn’t they be dead. Nobody went near them. And the window closed down and the coat stretched across it wasn’t natural on a day like this. You never knew what students might do. The girl always looked funny, too. A wind blew into the court shaking the boughs of the chestnut tree. The long shadow of it quivered on the stones. And then while we gloomed and wondered the door of the biggest house opened. The Russian girl came out. She wore a black jersey and a skirt up to the knees. She blinked and peered at the light like a little animal. When she saw the people leaning from the windows she drew back – just for a moment, then she set her lips and walked out of the shadow. She looked at nobody. She kept her dark eyes fixed on the chestnut tree and the shining buds. And at the sight of her we leaned out, laughed, shook and screamed with laughter, holding our sides. Dead – were they! God in Heaven, that was good! The swine – they’d take some killing. ‘Look at her. There she goes!’ And we jeered and pointed at the swollen distorted body of the girl moving through the sunlight. II.–THE FOLLOWING AFTER. ‘That’s enough – that’s enough!’ he shouted. He sprang from his seat, pulled his coat from the door peg and began dragging it on. For a moment she was so amazed and terrified that she could not speak. Then she stuttered ‘where are you g-going to, Mark?’ ‘Gar-r!’ he

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cried, throwing up his arms. ‘I’m going to end the whole bloody business.’ He turned to her. She saw his face, grey and quivering. With the effort not to cry his face looked distorted; he stood grimacing at her. ‘Mark! Mark, come here! Mark – listen!’ He was gone. She heard his steps clatter down the stone stairs. She heard the outer door rattle and burst open and slam to. She ran to the window and saw him crossing the court in the falling snow – running, with head bent, and making wide foolish gestures as he ran. It was not until he was out of sight that the whole world changed. It died the moment he disappeared. Yes, that was the court, with the three white houses, and the white chestnut tree and the ground white and thick under the snow. And behind her the clock on the shelf was ticking and the fire bars clinking in a dead room. All – gone, all gone, all – gone! ticked the clock. Her heart beat to it, but faster. She began walking round the room on tiptoe keeping time to the ticking of the clock and then keeping time to her heart until suddenly she brushed against his indoor jacket hanging on the door peg. She flung her arms round it. She buried her face in it. Long dry sobs dragged from deep in her body, shaking and tearing. ‘Darling ! darling, darling!’ she sobbed, walking to and fro. And then she stood upright and tossed her head. ‘I cannot bear this. I must go and find him.’ She flung a shawl over her head and ran from the room. It was cold outside: the air smelled of ice. And the snow shook over, blinding, persistent. Lamps were lighted in the road. On either side the road seemed to wind away for ever, white with yellow pools. She had never seen a road like that before. The crazy thought jagged in her brain – it’s like a white sauce with spots of melted butter. Some one laughed – very close beside her – down her own throat. Terrified, she started to run and she did not stop running until she came to the bridge where she and Mark used to linger on their way home, leaning over the parapet and watching the fairy fishes in the water – the long, wavering lights. Tonight the river was dark. It was dead. So were the fairy fish. She dug her nails against the stone parapet and called out ‘Mark, Mark!’ and again the long dry sobs dragged from deep in her body, shaking and tearing. Suddenly she saw some one walking towards her from the other side of the bridge. With swift, light steps he came. It was Mark. He did not speak to her – but he smiled upon her and beckoned her to follow. She followed him down a long street and past great houses, and through a frozen park, up and down, in and out of doorways, through little squares, past high walls and towering buildings – often she longed to cry to him to stop, but her mouth and chin were frozen and she could not catch up to him however hard she tried – she just could not touch him and beg him to wait a moment. On and on. She saw him raise his head and she looked

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up and saw that the sky was light. They were crossing a little court. They passed through a door up some stairs into a room. The room was touched with the pink light of morning. Mark lay on the bed – straight and still. She was so tired that for a moment she thought it was the sunrise staining the pillow so red. III.–BY MOONLIGHT. Feodor was passionately fond of poetry. He had written some pieces himself from time to time and he was resolved to write a great many more. ‘Just wait a bit,’ he would say, ‘Just wait until I get enough money to go off into the country with nothing to do but lie in a field all day, or sail in a little boat on a river and sleep in a haystack as snug as a bee in a hive. I’ll come back with enough poems to last you a lifetime. Once I get the money.’ . . . But it seemed quite impossible that Feodor should ever have any money at all. Each day, from nine o’clock in the morning until seven o’clock in the evening, he stood outside a large drapery establishment and swung the door to the right for customers to enter and swung the door to the left for customers to pass out. He was tall and dark. He wore a bright blue coat with red trimmings and a cap of black patent leather. Sometimes the same ladies would go in and out of the shop several times in the day. But they made no impression on Feodor. In the evenings he walked by the river or strolled through the town until it was late. Then he went home to his tiny room at the top of the house and lay down on his bed, staring at the ceiling until he fell asleep. One summer night he came out of the street into the courtyard. The moon was shining and the tops of the houses shone like silver. The houses themselves, half in light, half in shadow, looked as though they were draped in velvet. White like marble shone the courtyard and the chestnut tree stood like an immense bird with green wings in the pool of its own shadow. Feodor breathed deeply with delight. He walked over to the chestnut tree and sat down on the little stone bench, folding his arms. He was not alone there. An old man with white hair sat at the other end of the bench, crouched forward, his hands held between his knees. Feodor glanced at him once and then forgot about him. He began composing a poem. A feeling of divine happiness possessed him; his heart seemed to expand as he breathed. Suddenly he saw the old man fumble in a pocket. He brought out something wrapped in a linen handkerchief and laid it on his knees. With infinite care he slowly parted the folds of the handkerchief and Feodor saw a book bound in parchment and tied with purple silk ribbons. He moved a little nearer the old man, who untied the ribbons and spread the book open. The pages were printed with large, black letters. Each page had a blue letter at the top embroidered in gold and by the bright

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moonlight it was quite easy to read what was written. Feodor moved nearer still. Then he saw that each page was a poem. He leaned over the old man’s shoulder and read for himself poems such as he had never dreamed of – poems that sounded in his ears like bells ringing in some splendid tower – like waves beating on warm sands – like dark rivers falling down forest-clad mountains. The old man suddenly put his hand over the page and turned to Feodor. His lips and his eyes smiled but his face drenched in the white light of moon looked unreal, like a face gleaming through water. ‘So you like poetry, young man,’ he said, in a gentle, sad voice. Feodor nodded twice without replying. Still smiling the old man looked him up and down. ‘Strange,’ he muttered, ‘Strange.’ He took up his book and he began to read aloud. Without moving, scarcely breathing, his eyes dark and shining, Feodor listened to the old man. A long time passed until the last poem was read and the old man closed the book and tied again the faded silk ribbons and laid it on the bench beside him. Silence fell between the two. Feodor slowly came to consciousness of his surroundings, and with this consciousness to the realization of his own poverty and helplessness and of his own longing for a different life – of his craving to go away from the city – far away – into that country place with fields and rivers and big yellow haystacks. ‘And soon it will all be too late,’ he thought, ‘soon I shall be sitting on this bench – an old man with white hair – but with no book of poems – with empty hands I’ll be sitting here, and all will be over.’ He began to breathe sharply and painfully as though he had been running a very long way, and tears gushed into his eyes and flowed down his trembling face. The old man paid no attention. He sat smoothing the book under his hand as though it were a little animal, and talking to the book as though it were a little child. ‘My own, my treasure, core of my heart, I will not part with thee. They think I am a fool because I am old, but all my years I have longed for thee and thou art mine for ever. Sell us this, they say, sell us this and you shall be a rich man for a year. Bah! I spit in their faces. No one shall buy thee. Thou art my all in all until the end.’ It was like a knife – the quick thought stabbing him. The book is valuable. Now’s your chance. He recoiled in horror. No, there were things a fellow did not do – steal from an old man was one. But what can the old man do with it. He must be nearly a hundred years old. An old brain is too feeble to feel a loss. How can I get it? Ha! that’s the question. One can’t fight an old man. . . . Perhaps if I told him – if I explained he might give it to me – no, I’m mad to think that. Yet he must have taken a fancy to me. Why did he start reading aloud? The memory of the poems and of the old man’s voice made it impossible again for him to think of taking the book. Ask him for it – that’s what he’d do. He turned to the old man. ‘You say your book is valuable,’ he

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said politely. ‘That’s interesting.’ The old man’s head was sunk on his breast. He was asleep. Soft as a cat Feodor seized the book and crept away from the chestnut tree – across the court – up to his tiny room. ‘I have done the right thing – that’s certain. To-morrow I shall sell it, and to-morrow evening I shall be gone from here for ever.’ He put the book under his pillow and went to bed. Feodor could not sleep. Hours passed – slowly passed. His bed was hard as a dry field. And the darkness moved as he moved, breathed to his breath, watched him with a swarm of narrow eyes. Finally he got up, lit a candle and taking the book crept downstairs with it. ‘If the old man is not there I shall keep the book – I shall have to keep the book – but if he is there I shall put it back again or give it to him.’ He was perfectly confident that the old man would not be there. He’d have gone hours ago. But this was a good idea of his, otherwise he’d never have rested in peace again. He slipped the bolt of the door and as the door opened he saw in the deep shadow the old man still there – under the tree. Feodor went back to his room – threw the book into a corner and fell fast asleep. Maria Schulz ran down the passage. Her face was red, her hair tumbled. ‘What’s the matter,’ shouted Feodor. ‘There’s an old man,’ said Maria. ‘The police are in the courtyard now. An old man – found on the bench this morning, dead and cold as a stone.’ Notes Text: Rhythm, 2: 3, August 1912, pp. 99–105.

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How Pearl Button was Kidnapped1 Pearl Button swung on the little gate in front of the House of Boxes. It was the early afternoon of a sunshiny day with little winds playing hide-and-seek in it. They blew Pearl Button’s pinafore frill into her mouth and they blew the street dust all over the House of Boxes. Pearl watched it – like a cloud – like when mother peppered her fish and the top of the pepper-pot came off. She swung on the little gate, all alone, and she sang a small song. Two big women came walking down the street. One was dressed in red and the other was dressed in yellow and green. They had pink handkerchiefs over their heads,

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and both of them carried a big flax basket of ferns. They had no shoes and stockings on and they came walking along, slowly, because they were so fat, and talking to each other and always smiling. Pearl stopped swinging and when they saw her they stopped walking. They looked and looked at her and then they talked to each other waving their arms and clapping their hands together. Pearl began to laugh. The two women came up to her, keeping close to the hedge and looking in a frightened way towards the House of Boxes. ‘Hallo, little girl!’ said one. Pearl said, ‘Hallo!’ ‘You all alone by yourself?’ Pearl nodded. ‘Where’s your mother?’ ‘In the kitching, ironing-because-itsTuesday.’ The women smiled at her and Pearl smiled back. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘haven’t you got very white teeth indeed! Do it again.’ The dark women laughed and again they talked to each other with funny words and wavings of the hands. ‘What’s your name?’ they asked her. ‘Pearl Button.’ ‘You coming with us, Pearl Button? We got beautiful things to show you,’ whispered one of the women. So Pearl got down from the gate and she slipped out into the road. And she walked between the two dark women down the windy road, taking little running steps to keep up and wondering what they had in their House of Boxes. They walked a long way. ‘You tired?’ asked one of the women, bending down to Pearl. Pearl shook her head. They walked much further. ‘You not tired?’ asked the other woman. And Pearl shook her head again, but tears shook from her eyes at the same time and her lips trembled. One of the women gave over her flax basket of ferns and caught Pearl Button up in her arms and walked with Pearl Button’s head against her shoulder and her dusty little legs dangling. She was softer than a bed and she had a nice smell – a smell that made you bury your head and breathe and breathe it. . . . They set Pearl Button down in a long room full of other people the same colour as they were – and all these people came close to her and looked at her, nodding and laughing and throwing up their eyes. The woman who had carried Pearl took off her hair ribbon and shook her curls loose. There was a cry from the other women and they crowded close and some of them ran a finger through Pearl’s yellow curls, very gently, and one of them, a young one, lifted all Pearl’s hair and kissed the back of her little white neck. Pearl felt shy but happy at the same time. There were some men on the floor, smoking, with rugs and feather mats round their shoulders. One of them made a funny face at her and he pulled a great big peach out of his pocket and set it on the floor, and flicked it with his finger as though it were a marble. It rolled right over to her. Pearl picked it up. ‘Please can I eat it?’ she asked. At that they all laughed and clapped their hands and the man with the funny face made another at her and pulled a pear out of his pocket and sent it bobbling over the floor. Pearl laughed. The women sat on

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the floor and Pearl sat down too. The floor was very dusty. She carefully pulled up her pinafore and dress and sat on her petticoat as she had been taught to sit in dusty places, and she ate the fruit, the juice running all down her front. ‘Oh,’ she said, in a very frightened voice to one of the women, ‘I’ve spilt all the juice!’ ‘That doesn’t matter at all,’ said the woman, patting her cheek. A man came into the room with a long whip in his hand. He shouted something. They all got up, shouting, laughing, wrapping themselves up in rugs and blankets and feather mats. Pearl was carried again, this time into a great cart, and she sat on the lap of one of her women with the driver beside her. It was a green cart with a red pony and a black pony. It went very fast out of the town. The driver stood up and waved the whip round his head. Pearl peered over the shoulder of her woman. Other carts were behind like a procession. She waved at them. Then the country came. First fields of short grass with sheep on them and little bushes of white flowers and pink briar rose baskets – then big trees on both sides of the road – and nothing to be seen except big trees. Pearl tried to look through them but it was quite dark. Birds were singing. She nestled closer in the big lap. The woman was warm as a cat and she moved up and down when she breathed, just like purring. Pearl played with a green ornament round her neck and the woman took the little hand and kissed each of her fingers and then turned it over and kissed the dimples. Pearl had never been happy like this before. On the top of a big hill they stopped. The driving man turned to Pearl and said ‘Look, look!’ and pointed with his whip. And down at the bottom of the hill was something perfectly different – a great big piece of blue water was creeping over the land. She screamed and clutched at the big woman. ‘What is it, what is it?’ ‘Why,’ said the woman, ‘it’s the sea.’ ‘Will it hurt us – is it coming?’ ‘Ai-e, no, it doesn’t come to us. It’s very beautiful. You look again.’ Pearl looked. ‘You’re sure it can’t come,’ she said. ‘Ai-e, no. It stays in its place,’ said the big woman. Waves with white tops came leaping over the blue. Pearl watched them break on a long piece of land covered with garden-path shells. They drove round a corner. There were some little houses down close to the sea, with wood fences round them and gardens inside. They comforted her. Pink and red and blue washing hung over the fences and as they came near more people came out and five yellow dogs with long thin tails. All the people were fat and laughing, with little naked babies holding on to them or rolling about in the gardens like puppies. Pearl was lifted down and taken into a tiny house with only one room and a veranda. There was a girl there with two pieces of black hair down to her feet. She was setting the dinner on the floor. ‘It is a funny place,’ said Pearl, watching the pretty girl while the woman unbuttoned her little drawers for her. She was very hungry. She ate

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meat and vegetables and fruit and the woman gave her milk out of a green cup. And it was quite silent except for the sea outside and the laughs of the two women watching her. ‘Haven’t you got any Houses in Boxes?’ she said. ‘Don’t you all live in a row? Don’t the men go to offices? Aren’t there any nasty things?’ They took off her shoes and stockings, her pinafore and dress. She walked about in her petticoat and then she walked outside with the grass pushing between her toes. The two women came out with different sorts of baskets. They took her hands. Over a little paddock, through a fence, and then on warm sand with brown grass in it they went down to the sea. Pearl held back when the sand grew wet, but the women coaxed. ‘Nothing to hurt, very beautiful. You come.’ They dug in the sand and found some shells which they threw into the baskets. The sand was wet as mud pies. Pearl forgot her fright and began digging too. She got hot and wet and suddenly over her feet broke a little line of foam. ‘Oo, oo!’ she shrieked, dabbling with her feet, ‘Lovely, lovely!’ She paddled in the shallow water. It was warm. She made a cup of her hands and caught some of it. But it stopped being blue in her hands. She was so excited that she rushed over to her woman and flung her little thin arms round the woman’s neck, hugging her, kissing. . . . Suddenly the girl gave a frightful scream. The woman raised herself and Pearl slipped down on the sand and looked towards the land. Little men in blue coats – little blue men came running, running towards her with shouts and whistlings – a crowd of little blue men to carry her back to the House of Boxes. Notes Text: Rhythm, 2: 4, September 1912, pp. 136–9. Signed ‘Lili Heron’. SCOS. 1. KM’s idealised contrast between her Maori and Pakeha fellow countrymen.

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Spring in a Dream I sat at the table writing letters. In a corner of the room, beside the stove, Konrad and the Little Father were playing ‘sixty-six.’1 It was very warm in the room. On a long bench, before the side windows, there were pink and brown chrysanthemums growing in a china trough. They seemed to be expanding before my eyes in the autumn

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sunshine that streamed over everything – their patterned leaves painted a grotesque shadow on the floor – a shadow that seemed too delicate and fine for the heavy room, the massive furniture and our health and laughter. It quivered as though longing to go back and hide among the petals of the plants. Curious fancy, this, the terror of captive shadow. For a moment I wanted to write about it to F. Instead, I told him that Gertrud had baked a ‘zwetschgentorte’2 to await his arrival, that twice the Little Father had been caught in the act of stealing a piece; it was beautiful, and covered with the thick sort of sugar that he loved! Michael’s couch was drawn up before the front windows. He alone was silent. He lay back, his knees covered with a little quilted rug, reading the newspaper, and frowning at the pages. I caught the other two watching him, we three glanced at one another, smiled and nodded superciliously. We knew that any moment we might be the victims of an outburst – a tirade against Russia – denunciation of Germany – that it would end in a storm of tears and maudlin sentiment until I got up and dried his eyes and said: ‘But Michael dear, truly it is not so bad as you think – wait a little.’ Then, exhausted, he would leave us in peace. ‘Michael is much weaker,’ I wrote to F., ‘and so difficult to manage. You could not believe it to be the same boy who climbed over the roof with us and threw stones down the Police Prefect’s chimney – then was so adorable to the Police Prefect, do you remember, that he asked us all to supper. How long ago that is! The Little Mother is the only one of us who does not lose patience with him. After all, he ought to realize that we have so short a holiday at home and no time to be eternally sympathetic. Konrad and I let off steam by long walks only to come back and find the Little Father in tears because he was not allowed to lose his temper and Michael had been so idiotic.’ I paused and nibbled the penholder. ‘Blood of a dog,’ cried the Little Father. ‘How many devils have you got among the cards – you wretched fellow.’ ‘Youth against age,’ laughed Konrad. He beckoned to me. ‘Come over and look at these cards.’ I went. Standing beside him I put my arms round his neck, rested my chin on his shoulder and watched the play. He had the most amazing luck, kept rubbing his head against my cheek and chuckling. ‘Tak-Tak,’ the Little Father spitting out the word. The newspaper rustled to the floor. We glanced carelessly at Michael – outburst presumably postponed. He was lying back on the couch, his eyes closed. The door opened and the Little Mother came in, her apron gathered up in one hand, her round face red with excitement.

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‘After the gale last night,’ she said, ‘the orchard is full of fruit, one cannot walk a step. And such a fine crop, see children!’ She spread out her apron and showed us the great apples and pears. She tumbled them on to the table; started polishing them one by one. ‘You must spend the whole afternoon gathering them. Dimitri can’t stoop because of his back, but it will do you young things good to stretch yourselves a little.’ ‘Mother,’ said Michael. He sat up. ‘Give them to me, I’ll polish them. I’ve got a clean handkerchief. Put them on the quilt here.’ She suddenly bit her lip, the tears started to her eyes. I saw that she felt she had been unkind in speaking so before the invalid. With trembling hands she carried the fruit to him and then, not trusting herself to speak, hurried from the room. Michael’s persistent frown deepened. We all felt uncomfortable, and the Little Father, throwing down his cards asked Konrad to go with him, and help poultice the horse. I gathered up my writing things, but felt a decent interval must elapse before I left Michael alone. He picked up an apple and held it in the palm of his hand. ‘I know what tree you grew on,’ he said. ‘You’re one of the ‘pink all through’ sort. Father thrashed me once for cutting my name on the bark of that tree.’ I sat staring in front of me. I noticed that the sun had moved round the corner of the house. Michael’s voice: ‘And these pears, there’s the bench round that pear tree where we used to have tea after school in the summer. I carried the samovar for Gertrud. Once I carried the cups, and dropped them all. We used to have to fish out the little pieces of leaf and petal before we drank. . . . I helped Dimitri cut the orchard grass one year – I smelt of it for days. I remember, at night, the trees in the moonlight looked as though they were standing in pools, sometimes like immense white birds; there was that cherry tree we always called the stork. . . .’ He gathered all the fruit up and sat with his hands spread over it. He began to cry, very slowly, the tears dripping down his face – And now the sun, shining through the front windows painted on the bare floor the shadow of Michael with his lap full of fruit. Notes Text: Rhythm, 2: 4, September 1912, pp. 161–5. 1. Schnapsen, a German card game, whose winner is the first to reach sixtysix points. 2. Plum cake.

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New Dresses Frau Binzer and her mother sat at the dining-room table putting the finishing touches to some green cashmere dresses. They were to be worn by the two Fräulein Binzers at church on the following day, with apple-green sashes, and straw hats with ribbon tails. Frau Binzer had set her heart on it, and this being a late night for Andreas, who was attending a meeting of the Political League, she and the old mother had the dining-room to themselves, and could make ‘a peaceful litter’ as she expressed it. The red cloth was taken off the table – where stood the wedding present sewing machine, a brown work basket, the ‘material,’ and some torn fashion journals. Frau Binzer worked the machine, slowly, for she feared the green thread would give out, and had a sort of tired hope that it might last longer if she was careful to use a little at a time – the old woman sat in a rocking chair, her skirt turned back, and her felt slippered feet on a hassock, tying the machine threads and stitching some narrow lace on the necks and cuffs. The gas jet flickered. Now and again the old woman glanced up at the jet and said, ‘There’s water in the pipe, Anna, that’s what’s the matter,’ then was silent, to say again a moment later, ‘There must be water in that pipe, Anna,’ and again, with quite a burst of energy, ‘Now there is – I’m certain of it.’ Anna frowned at the sewing machine. ‘The way mother harps on things – it gets frightfully on my nerves,’ she thought. ‘And always when there’s no earthly opportunity to better a thing. . . . I suppose it’s old age – but most aggravating.’ Aloud she said: ‘Mother, I’m having a really substantial hem in this dress of Rosa’s – the child has got so leggy, lately. And don’t put any lace on Elena’s cuffs; it will make a distinction, and besides she’s so careless about rubbing her hands on anything grubby.’ ‘O, there’s plenty,’ said the old woman. ‘I’ll put it a little higher up.’ And she wondered why Anna had such a down on Elena – Andreas was just the same – they seemed to want to hurt Elena’s feelings – the distinction was merely an excuse. ‘Well,’ said Frau Binzer, ‘you didn’t see Elena’s clothes when I took them off to–night. Black from head to foot after a week. And when I compared them before her eyes with Rosa’s she merely shrugged, you know that habit she’s got, and began stuttering. I really shall have to see Erb about her stuttering, even to give her a good fright, I believe that it’s merely an affectation she’s picked up at school – that she can help it.’

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‘Anna, you know she’s always stuttered. You did just the same when you were her age, she’s highly strung.’ The old woman took off her spectacles, breathed on them, and rubbed them with a corner of her sewing apron. ‘Well, the last thing in the world to do her any good is to let her imagine that,’ answered Anna, shaking out one of the green frocks, and pricking at the pleats with her needle. ‘She is treated exactly like Rosa, and the Boy hasn’t a nerve. Did you see him when I put him on the rocking horse to-day, for the first time. He simply gurgled with joy. He’s more the image of his father every day.’ ‘Yes, he certainly is a thorough Binzer,’ asserted the old woman, nodding her head. ‘Now that’s another thing about Elena,’ said Anna, ‘the peculiar way she treats Boy, staring at him and frightening him as she does. You remember when he was a baby how she used to take away his bottle to see what he would do? Rosa is perfect with the child – but Elena . . .’ The old woman put down her work on the table. A little silence fell, and through the silence the loud ticking of the diningroom clock. She wanted to speak her mind to Anna once and for all about the way she and Andreas were treating Elena, ruining the child, but the ticking noise distracted her. She could not think of the words and sat there stupidly, her brain going ‘tick, tick,’ to the dining-room clock. ‘How loudly that clock ticks,’ was all she said. ‘O, there’s mother – off the subject again – giving me no help or encouragement,’ thought Anna. She glanced at the clock. ‘Mother, if you’ve finished that frock, would you go into the kitchen and beat up some coffee, and perhaps cut a plate of ham. Andreas will be in directly. I’m practically through with this second frock by myself.’ She held it up for inspection. ‘Aren’t they charming! They ought to last the children a good two years, and then I expect they’ll do for school – lengthened, and perhaps dyed.’ ‘I’m glad we decided on the more expensive material,’ said the old woman. Left alone in the dining-room Anna’s frown deepened, and her mouth drooped – a sharp line showed from nose to chin. She breathed deeply, and pushed back her hair. There seemed to be no air in the room, she felt stuffed up, and it seemed so useless to be tiring herself out with fine sewing for Elena. One never got through with children, and never had any gratitude from them – except Rosa – who was exceptional. Another sign of old age in mother was her absurd point of view about Elena, and her ‘touchiness’ on the subject. There was one thing. She was determined to keep Elena apart from Boy. He had all his father’s sensitiveness to unsympathetic influences – a blessing that the girls were at school all day!

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At last the dresses were finished and folded over the back of the chair. She carried the sewing machine over to the book-shelves, spread the table-cloth, and went over to the window. The blind was up, she could see the garden quite plainly: there must be a moon about. And then she caught sight of something shining on the garden seat. A book, yes it must be a book, left there to get soaked through by the dew. She went out into the hall, put on her goloshes, gathered up her skirt, and ran into the garden. Yes, it was a book. She picked it up carefully – damp already – and the cover bulging. She shrugged her shoulders in the way that her little daughter had caught from her. In the shadowy garden that smelled of grass and rose leaves, Anna’s heart hardened. Then the gate clicked and she saw Andreas striding up the front path. ‘Andreas,’ she called. ‘Hello,’ he cried, ‘what on earth are you doing down there . . . Moon gazing, Anna.’ She ran forward and kissed him. ‘O, look at this book,’ she said. ‘Elena’s been leaving it about, again. My dear, how you smell of cigars.’ Said Andreas: ‘You’ve got to smoke a decent cigar when you’re with these other chaps. Looks so bad if you don’t. But come inside, Anna; you haven’t got anything on. Let the book go, hang! you’re cold, my dear, you’re shivering.’ He put his arm round her shoulder. ‘See the moon over there, by the chimney? Fine night. By jove! I had the fellows roaring to-night – I made a colossal joke.’ One of them said: ‘Life is a game of cards, and I, without thinking, just straight out . . .’ Andreas paused by the door and held up a finger. ‘I said . . . well I’ve forgotten the exact words, but they shouted, my dear, simply shouted. No, I’ll remember what I said in bed to-night; you know I always do.’ ‘I’ll take this book into the kitchen to dry on the stove rack,’ said Anna, and she thought, as she banged the pages – ‘Andreas has been drinking beer again, that means indigestion to-morrow. No use mentioning Elena to-night.’ When Andreas had finished the supper, he lay back in the chair, picking his teeth, and patted his knee for Anna to come and sit there. ‘Hallo,’ he said, jumping her up and down, ‘what’s the green fandangles on the chair back? What have you and mother been up to, eh?’ Said Anna, airily, casting a most careless glance at the green dresses, ‘Only some frocks for the children. Remnants for Sunday.’ The old woman put the plate and cup and saucer together, then lighted a candle. ‘I think I’ll go to bed,’ she said, cheerfully. ‘O dear me, how unwise of mother,’ thought Anna. ‘She makes Andreas suspect by going away like that, as she always does if there’s any unpleasantness brewing.’

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‘No, don’t go to bed yet, mother,’ cried Andreas, jovially. ‘Let’s have a look at the things.’ She passed him over the dresses, faintly smiling. Andreas rubbed them through his fingers. ‘So these are the remnants, are they, Anna? Don’t feel much like the Sunday trousers my mother used to make me out of an ironing blanket. How much did you pay for this a metre, Anna?’ Anna took the dresses from him, and played with a button of his waistcoat. ‘Forget the exact price, darling, mother and I rather skimped them, even though they were so cheap. Da, what can great big men bother about clothes . . . Was Schäfer there, to-night?’ ‘Yes, he says their kid was a bit bandy-legged, at just the same age as Boy. He told me of a new kind of chair for children that the draper has just got in – makes them sit with their legs straight. By the way, have you got this month’s draper’s bill?’ She had been waiting for that – had known it was coming. She slipped off his knee and yawned. ‘O, dear me,’ she said, ‘I think I’ll follow mother. Bed’s the place for me.’ She stared at Andreas, vacantly. ‘Bill – Bill did you say, dear? O, I’ll look it out in the morning.’ ‘No, Anna, hold on.’ Andreas got up and went over to the cupboard where the bill file was kept. ‘To-morrow’s no good – because it’s Sunday. I want to get that account off my chest before I turn in. Sit down there – in the rocking-chair – you needn’t stand!’ She dropped into the chair, and began humming, all the while her thoughts coldly busy, and her eyes fixed on her husband’s broad back as he bent over the cupboard door. He dawdled over finding the file. ‘He’s keeping me in suspense on purpose,’ she thought. ‘We can afford it – otherwise why should I do it? I know our income and our expenditure. I’m not a fool. They’re a hell upon earth every month, these bills.’ And she thought of her bed upstairs, yearned for it, imagining she had never felt so tired in her life. ‘Here we are,’ said Andreas. He slammed the file on to the table. ‘Draw up your chair. . . .’ ‘Bruckner, seven metres green cashmere at five marks a metre – thirty-five marks.’ He read the item twice – then folded the sheet over, and bent towards Anna. He was flushed and his breath smelt of beer. She knew exactly how he took things in that mood, and she raised her eyebrows and nodded. ‘Do you mean to tell me,’ stormed Andreas, ‘that lot over there cost thirty-five marks – that stuff you’ve been mucking up for the children. Good God! Anybody would think you’d married a millionaire. You could buy your mother a trousseau with that money. You’re making yourself a laughing stock for the whole town. How do you think I

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can buy Boy a chair or anything else – if you chuck away my earnings like that? Time and again you impress upon me the impossibility of keeping Elena decent; and then you go decking her out the next moment in thirty-five marks worth of green cashmere. . . .’ On and on stormed the voice. ‘He’ll have calmed down in the morning, when the beer’s worked off,’ thought Anna, and later, as she toiled up to bed, ‘When he sees how they’ll last, he’ll understand. . . .’ *

*

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A brilliant Sunday morning. Andreas and Anna quite reconciled, sitting in the dining-room waiting for church time to the tune of Binzer junior, who steadily thumped the shelf of his high-chair, with a gravy spoon given him from the breakfast table by his father. ‘That beggar’s got muscle,’ said Andreas, proudly. ‘I’ve timed him by my watch. He’s kept that up for five minutes without stopping.’ ‘Extraordinary,’ said Anna, buttoning her gloves. I think he’s had that spoon almost long enough now, dear, don’t you. I’m so afraid of him putting it into his mouth.’ ‘O, I’ve got an eye on him.’ Andreas stood over his small son. ‘Go it, old man. Tell mother boys like to kick up a row.’ Anna kept silent. At any rate it would keep his eye off the children when they came down in those cashmeres. She was still wondering if she had drummed into their minds often enough the supreme importance of being careful and of taking them off immediately after church before dinner, and why Elena was fidgetty when she was pulled about at all, when the door opened and the old woman ushered them in, complete to the straw hats with ribbon tails. She could not help thrilling, they looked so very superior – Rosa carrying her prayer book in a white case embroidered with a pink woollen cross. But she feigned indifference immediately, and the lateness of the hour. Not a word more on the subject from Andreas even with the thirty-five marks worth walking hand in hand before him all the way to church. Anna decided that was really generous and noble of him. She looked up at him, walking with the shoulders thrown back, how fine he looked in that long black coat with the white silk tie just showing, and the children looked worthy of him. She squeezed his hand in church – conveying by that silent pressure – it was for your sake I made the dresses, of course you can’t understand that, but really Andreas. And she fully believed it. On their way home the Binzer family met Doctor Erb, out walking with a black dog carrying his stick in its mouth. Doctor Erb stopped and asked after Boy so intelligently that Andreas invited him to dinner.

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‘Come and pick a bone with us and see Boy for yourself,’ he said. And Doctor Erb accepted. He walked beside Herr Binzer and shouted over his shoulder, ‘Elena, keep an eye on my boy baby, will you, and see he doesn’t swallow that walking stick. Because if he does a tree will grow right out of his mouth or it will go to his tail and make it so stiff that a wag will knock you into kingdom come!’ ‘Oh, Doctor Erb!’ laughed Elena, stooping over the dog, ‘Come along, doggie, give it up, there’s a good boy!’ ‘Elena, your dress!’ warned Anna. ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Doctor Erb. ‘They are looking top notchers today – the two young ladies.’ ‘Well, it really is Rosa’s colour,’ said Anna. ‘Her complexion is so much more vivid than Elena’s.’ Rosa blushed. Doctor Erb’s eyes twinkled, and he kept a tight rein on himself from saying she looked like a tomato in a lettuce salad. ‘That child wants taking down a peg,’ he decided. ‘Give me Elena every time. She’ll come to her own yet, and lead them just the dance they need.’ Boy was having his mid-day sleep when they arrived home, and Doctor Erb begged that Elena might show him round the garden. Andreas, repenting already of his generosity, gladly assented, and Anna went into the kitchen to interview the servant girl. ‘Mumma, let me come too and taste the gravy,’ begged Rosa. ‘Huh!’ muttered Doctor Erb, ‘good riddance.’ He established himself on the garden bench – put up his feet and took off his hat, to give the sun ‘a chance of growing a second crop,’ he told Elena. She asked, soberly: ‘Doctor Erb, do you really like my dress.’ ‘Of course I do, my lady. Don’t you?’ ‘O yes. I’d like to be born and die in it. But it was such a fuss – tryings on, you know, and pullings, and “don’ts.” I believe mother would kill me if it got hurt. I even knelt on my petticoat all through church because of dust on the hassock.’ ‘Bad as that,’ asked Doctor Erb, rolling his eyes at Elena. ‘O far worse,’ said the child, then burst into laughter and shouted ‘Hellish!’ dancing over the lawn. ‘Take care, they’ll hear you, Elena.’ ‘O booh! It’s just dirty old cashmere – serve them right. They can’t see me if they’re not here to see and so it doesn’t matter. It’s only with them I feel funny.’ ‘Haven’t you got to remove your finery before dinner.’ ‘No, because you’re here.’ ‘O, my prophetic soul,’1 groaned Doctor Erb.

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Coffee was served in the garden. The servant girl brought out some cane chairs and a rug for Boy. The children were told to go away and play. ‘Leave off worrying Doctor Erb, Elena,’ said Andreas. ‘You mustn’t be a plague to people who are not members of your own family.’ Elena pouted, and dragged over to the swing for comfort. She swung high, and thought Doctor Erb was a most beautiful man – and wondered if his dog had finished the plate of bones in the back yard. Decided to go and see. Slower she swung, then took a flying leap; her tight skirt caught on a nail – there was a sharp, tearing sound – quickly she glanced at the others – they had not noticed – and then at the frock – at a hole big enough to stick her hand through. She felt neither frightened nor sorry. I’ll go and change it, she thought. ‘Elena, where are you going to,’ called Anna. ‘Into the house for a book.’ The old woman noticed that the child held her skirt in a peculiar way. Her petticoat string must have come untied. But she made no remark. Once in the bedroom Elena unbuttoned the frock, slipped out of it, and wondered what to do next. Hide it somewhere – she glanced all round the room – there was nowhere safe from them. Except the top of the cupboard – but even standing on a chair she could not throw so high – it fell back on top of her every time – the horrid, hateful thing. Then her eyes lighted on her school satchel hanging on the end of the bed post. Wrap it in her school pinafore – put it in the bottom of the bag with the pencil case on top. They’d never look there. She returned to the garden in the every-day dress – but forgot about the book. ‘N n-n,’ said Anna smiling, ironically. ‘What a new leaf for Doctor Erb’s benefit. Look, mother, Elena has changed without being told to.’ ‘Come here, dear, and be done up properly.’ She whispered to Elena: ‘Where did you leave your dress?’ ‘Left it on the side of the bed. Where I took it off,’ sang Elena. Doctor Erb was talking to Andreas of the advantages derived from public school education for the sons of commercial men, but he had his eye on the scene, and watching Elena, he smelt a rat – smelt a Hamelin2 tribe of them. *

*

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Confusion and consternation reigned. One of the green cashmeres had disappeared – spirited off the face of the earth – during the time that Elena took it off and the children’s tea. ‘Show me the exact spot,’ scolded Frau Binzer for the twentieth time. ‘Elena, tell the truth.’

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‘Mumma, I swear I left it on the floor.’ ‘Well, it’s no good swearing if it’s not there. It can’t have been stolen!’ ‘I did see a very funny looking man in a white cap walking up and down the road and staring in the windows as I came up to change.’ Sharply Anna eyed her daughter. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘I know you are telling lies.’ She turned to the old woman, in her voice something of pride and joyous satisfaction – ‘you hear, mother, this cock-and-bull story?’ When they were near the end of the bed Elena blushed and turned away from them. And now and again she wanted to shout ‘I tore it, I tore it,’ and she fancied she had said it and seen their faces, just as sometimes in bed she dreamed she had got up and dressed. But as the evening wore on she grew quite careless – only glad of one thing – people had to go to sleep at night. Viciously she stared at the sun shining through the window space and making a pattern of the curtain on the bare nursery floor. And then she looked at Rosa, painting a text at the nursery table with a whole egg cup full of water to herself. . . . Andreas visited their bedroom the last thing. She heard him come creaking into their room and hid under the bedclothes. But Rosa betrayed her. ‘Elena’s not asleep,’ piped Rosa. Andreas sat by the bedside pulling his moustache. ‘If it were not Sunday, Elena, I would whip you. As it is, and I must be at the office early to-morrow, I shall give you a sound smacking after tea in the evening. . . . Do you hear me?’ She grunted. ‘You love your father and mother, don’t you?’ No answer. Rosa gave Elena a dig with her foot. ‘Well,’ said Andreas, sighing deeply, ‘I suppose you love Jesus?’ ‘Rosa’s scratched my leg with her toe nail,’ answered Elena. Andreas strode out of the room and flung himself on to his own bed, with his outdoor boots on the starched bolster, noticed Anna, but he was too overcome for her to venture a protest. The old woman was in the bedroom too, idly combing the hairs from Anna’s brush. Andreas told them the story, and was gratified to observe Anna’s tears. ‘It is Rosa’s turn for her toe nails after the bath next Saturday,’ commented the old woman. In the middle of the night Andreas dug his elbow in Frau Binzer. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ he said, ‘Erb’s at the bottom of this.’

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‘No . . . how . . . why . . . where . . . bottom of what?’ ‘Those damned green dresses.’ ‘Wouldn’t be surprised,’ she managed to articulate, thinking – ‘imagine his rage if I woke him up to tell him an idiotic thing like that!’ *

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‘Is the gnädige Frau at home,’ asked Doctor Erb. ‘No, sir, gnädige Frau is out visiting,’ answered the servant girl. ‘Is Herr Binzer – anywhere about?’ ‘O no, sir, he’s never home midday.’ ‘Show me in to the drawing-room.’ The servant girl opened the drawing-room door, cocked her eye at the doctor’s bag. She wished he would leave it in the hall – even if she could feel the outside without opening it. . . . But the doctor kept it in his hand. The old woman sat in the drawing-room, a roll of knitting on her lap. Her head had fallen back – her mouth was open – she was asleep – and quietly snoring. She started up at the sound of the doctor’s footsteps and straightened her cap. ‘O Doctor – you did take me by surprise. I was dreaming that Andreas had bought Anna five little canaries. Please to sit down!’ ‘No thanks. I just popped in on the chance of catching you alone. . . . You see this bag.’ The old woman nodded. ‘Now are you any good at opening bags, gnädige Frau?’ ‘Well, my husband was a great traveller and once I spent a whole night in a railway train.’ ‘Well, have a go at opening this one.’ The old woman knelt on the floor – her fingers trembled. ‘There’s nothing startling inside?’ she asked. ‘Well it won’t bite exactly,’ said Doctor Erb. The catch sprang open – the bag yawned like a toothless mouth and she saw, folded in its depths – green cashmere – with narrow lace on the neck and sleeves. ‘Fancy that!’ said the old woman mildly. ‘May I take it out, Doctor.’ She professed neither astonishment nor pleasure – and Erb felt disappointed. ‘Elena’s dress,’ he said, and, bending towards her, raised his voice: ‘that young spark’s Sunday rig out.’ ‘I’m not deaf, Doctor,’ answered the old woman. ‘Yes, I thought it looked like it. I told Anna only this morning it was bound to turn up somewhere.’ She shook the crumpled frock, and looked it over.

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‘Things always do if you give them time; I’ve noticed that so often – it’s such a blessing.’ ‘You know, Brechenmacher – the postman – gastric ulcers – called there this morning – and saw this brought in by Lena who’d got it from Elena on her way to school. Said the kid fished it out of her satchel rolled in a pinafore and said her mother had told her to give it away because it did not fit her. When I saw the tear I understood yesterday’s ‘new leaf,’ as Frau Anna put it. Was up to the dodge in a jiffy. Got the dress – bought some stuff at Brückners and made my sister Bertha sew it while I had dinner. I knew what would be happening this end of the line – and I knew you’d see Elena through for the sake of getting one at Andreas.’ ‘How thoughtful of you, Doctor,’ said the old woman, ‘I’ll tell Anna I found it under my dolman.’ ‘Yes, that’s your ticket,’ said Doctor Erb. ‘But of course Elena would have forgotten the whipping by to-morrow morning, and I’d promised her a new doll. . . .’ the old woman spoke regretfully. Doctor Erb snapped his bag together. ‘It’s no good talking to the old bird,’ he thought. ‘She doesn’t take in half I say. Don’t seem to have got any forrader than doing Elena out of a doll.’ *

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On the following Sunday the two Fräulein Binzers in green cashmere dresses with apple green sashes and straw hats with ribbon tails sat in church between their father and mother. Elena knelt on the dusty hassock without lifting her skirt. But it did not matter – Anna quite forgot to notice. Notes Text: Rhythm, 2: 9, October 1912, pp. 189–201. SCOS. Another of the stories in which KM uses German names for what clearly is based on her own family life in Thorndon. Such stories presumably were either intended for In a German Pension and discarded, or to be consistent with others published in the New Age. JMM’s later changing the names of characters, e.g. Binzer to Carsfield, for collections published after KM’s death, has no textual authority. 1. Hamlet, I, v, 40. 2. The Grimm brothers, in Deutsche Sagen (1816), told of the thirteenthcentury piper hired to rid the town of rats; when the citizens failed to pay him adequately, piped their children into the mountains, where they disappeared. See also Robert Browning’s poem, ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ (1842).

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•

The Little Girl To the little girl he was a figure to be feared and avoided. Every morning before going to business he came into the nursery and gave her a perfunctory kiss to which she responded with ‘Good-bye, Father’. And oh, the glad sense of relief when she heard the noise of the buggy growing fainter and fainter down the long road! In the evening, leaning over the banisters at his home-coming, she heard his loud voice in the hall. ‘Bring my tea into the smoking room. . . . Hasn’t the paper come yet? Have they taken it into the kitchen again? Mother, go and see if my paper’s out there – and bring me my slippers.’ ‘Kass,’ mother would call to her, ‘if you’re a good girl you can come down and take off Father’s boots.’ Slowly the little girl would slip down the stairs, holding tightly to the banisters with one hand – more slowly still, across the hall and push open the smoking-room door. By that time he had his spectacles on and looked at her over them in a way that was terrifying to the little girl. ‘Well, Kass, get a move on and pull off these boots and take them outside. Been a good girl to-day?’ ‘I d-d-don’t know, Father.’ ‘You d-d-don’t know? If you stutter like that Mother will have to take you to the doctor.’ She never stuttered with other people – had quite given it up – only with Father because then she was trying so hard to say the words properly. ‘What’s the matter? What are you looking so wretched about? Mother, I wish you would teach this child not to appear on the brink of suicide. . . . Here, Kass, carry my teacup back to the table – carefully; your hands jog like an old lady. And try to keep your handkerchief in your pocket, not up your sleeve.’ ‘Y-y-yes, Father.’ On Sundays she sat in the same pew with him in church, listening while he sang in a loud, clear voice, watching while he made little notes during the sermon with the stump of a blue pencil on the back of an envelope – his eyes narrowed to a slit – one hand beating a silent tattoo on the pew ledge. He said his prayers so loudly that she was certain God heard him above the clergyman. He was so big – that was what frightened the little girl – his hands

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and his neck – especially his mouth when he yawned. Thinking about him alone in the nursery was like thinking about a giant. On Sunday afternoons Grandmother sent her down to the drawingroom, dressed in her ‘brown velvet’, to have a ‘nice talk with Mother and Father’. But the little girl always found Mother reading the Sketch and Father stretched out on the couch, his handkerchief on his face, feet propped on one of the best sofa pillows, and so soundly sleeping that he snored. She, perched on the piano stool, gravely watched him until he woke and stretched, and asked the time – then looked round at her. ‘Don’t stare so, Kass. You look like a little brown owl.’ One day, when she was kept indoors with a cold, the Grandmother told her that Father’s birthday was next week and suggested she should make him a pincushion for a present out of a beautiful piece of yellow silk. Laboriously, with a double cotton, the little girl stitched three sides. But what to fill it with? That was the question. The Grandmother was out in the garden, and she wandered into Mother’s bedroom to look for ‘scraps’. On the bed table she discovered a great many sheets of fine paper, gathered them up, shredded them into tiny pieces and stuffed her case, then sewed up the fourth side. That night there was a hue and cry over the house. Father’s great speech for the Harbour Board1 had been lost. Rooms were ransacked – servants questioned. Finally Mother came into the nursery. ‘Kass, I suppose you didn’t see some papers on a table in our room?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I tore them up for my s’prise.’ ‘What!’ screamed Mother. ‘Come straight down to the dining-room this instant.’ And she was dragged down to where Father was pacing to and fro, hands behind his back. ‘Well?’ sharply. Mother explained. He stopped and stared in a stupefied manner at the child. ‘Did you do that?’ ‘N-n-no,’ she whispered. ‘Mother, go up to the nursery and fetch down the damned thing – see that the child’s put to bed this instant.’ Crying too much to explain she lay in the shadowed room watching the evening light sift through the venetian blinds and trace a sad little pattern on the floor. Then Father came into the room with a ruler in his hands. ‘I am going to whip you for this,’ he said. ‘Oh, no, no,’ she screamed, cowering down under the bedclothes. He pulled them aside.

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‘Sit up,’ he commanded, ‘and hold out your hands. You must be taught once and for all not to touch what does not belong to you.’ ‘But it was for your b-b-birthday.’ . . . Down came the ruler on her little, pink palms. Hours later, when the Grandmother had wrapped her in a shawl and rocked her in the rocking chair the child cuddled close to her soft body. ‘Why did Jesus make Fathers for?’ she snivelled. ‘Here’s a clean “hanky”, darling, with some of my lavender water on it. Go to sleep, pet, you’ll forget all about it in the morning. I tried to explain to Father but he was too upset to listen to-night.’ But the child never forgot. Next time she saw him she whipped both hands behind her back, and a red colour flew into her cheeks. The Macdonalds lived in the next door house. Five children there were. Looking through a hole in the vegetable garden fence the little girl saw them playing ‘tag’ in the evening – the Father with the ‘baby Mac’ on his shoulders, two little girls hanging on to his coat tails – ran round and round the flower beds, shaking with laughter. Once she saw the boys turn the hose on him – turn the hose on him – and he made a great grab at them, tickling them until they got hiccoughs. Then it was she decided there were different sorts of Fathers. Suddenly, one day, Mother became ill, and she and Grandmother drove into town in a closed carriage. The little girl was left alone in the house with Alice, the ‘general’. That was all right in the daytime, but while Alice was putting her to bed she grew suddenly afraid. ‘What’ll I do if I have nightmare?’ she asked. ‘I often have nightmare and then Grannie takes me into her bed – I can’t stay in the dark – it all gets “whispery” . . . What’ll I do if I do?’ ‘You just go to sleep, child,’ said Alice, pulling off her socks and whacking them against the bedrail, ‘and don’t you holler out and wake your poor Pa.’ But the same old nightmare came – the butcher with a knife and a rope who grew nearer and nearer, smiling that dreadful smile, while she could not move – could only stand still, crying out ‘Grandma, Grandma’. She woke shivering, to see Father beside her bed, a candle in his hand. ‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Oh, a butcher – a knife – I want Grannie.’ He blew out the candle, bent down and caught up the child in his arms, carrying her along the passage to the big bedroom. A newspaper was on the bed – a half-smoked cigar balanced against his reading lamp. He pitched the paper on to the floor – threw the cigar into the fireplace – then carefully tucked up the child. He lay down beside her. Half asleep still,

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still with the butcher’s smile all about her, it seemed, she crept close to him, snuggled her head under his arm, held tightly to his pyjama jacket. Then the dark did not matter; she lay still. ‘Here, rub your feet against my legs and get them warm,’ said Father. Tired out, he slept before the little girl. A funny feeling came over her. Poor Father! Not so big after all – and with no one to look after him. . . . He was harder than the Grandmother, but it was a nice hardness. . . . And every day he had to work and was too tired to be a Mr Macdonald. . . . She had torn up all his beautiful writing. . . . She stirred suddenly, and sighed. ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Father. ‘Another dream?’ ‘Oh,’ said the little girl, ‘my head’s on your heart; I can hear it going. What a big heart you’ve got, Father dear.’ Notes Text: Rhythm, 2: 9, October 1912, pp. 218–21. Signed ‘Lili Heron’. SCOS. 1. Harold Beauchamp was appointed to the Wellington Harbour Board in 1895.

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The House Rain came suddenly from a swollen sky and with it a cold, whipping wind blowing in her face. She buttoned her coat collar, thrust her hands into her pockets, and head bent, battled on. Another day ended! Darkness was pouring into the world like grey fluid into a greyer cup – no amethyst twilight this, no dropping of a chiffon scarf – no trailing of a starbroidered mantle . . . a sense of smudging over – that was all. Fallen leaves spattered the pavement. Still over wall and house-front the Virginia creeper draggled her tousled tresses. And the cold wind was full of the shuddering breath of winter. Rain fell faster – a downpour now. She had no umbrella . . . remembered leaving it behind the office door . . . so stupid – careless. With a hat, too, that ‘spotted’! And then, looking up, she saw an iron gate swinging idly on its hinges leading to a stone house placarded ‘To be Let or Sold,’ with

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a wide, empty porch covered in by a creeping plant and a little glass partition. She decided to wait there a moment to see if the weather showed any signs of passing over. Also she was suddenly and unaccountably tired . . . to sit on that top step just a moment . . . the wind seemed to take all your breath – and so cold, to eat into your bones. What a piece of luck! An old basket chair in one corner of the porch! She sat down, felt the bottom of her skirt, soaked already, lifted up her foot and made a little grimace at the burst shoe, half laughing. Her veil was sticking to her face – there was no more abominable. sensation – and this parcel was pretty – madeira cake sodging through the brown paper – oh, very pretty indeed. She stripped off her gloves and sat, hands folded in her lap, looking up at the green blistered door, and a little octagonal lamp hanging over the doorway. Found herself staring at the lamp . . . now where had she seen it before? What trick of memory . . . had she seen it? She remembered so well hearing a girl saying ‘An octagonal lamp over the doorway – that settles the question!’ . . . Too tired to remember. Rain seemed to be falling now so violently that it must wear itself out in a moment, she decided, leaning her head against the wall. . . . Quick, light steps down the street, the iron gate swung open, a man strode up the gravel walk, up the steps, taking a key from his pocket. A tall thin man in a fur coat, with an immense umbrella hooked over one arm, flowers in his hand, and a long oddly shaped box. She sat up hastily, the basket chair creaking. What could he be doing there at this hour – a House Agent – a purchaser? And at the sound of the basket chair he wheeled round. ‘Good heavens, you ridiculous child,’ he said, peering through the gloom. ‘Marion, we’re too old to play “hide and seek” – no, not too old, darling, but too cold. Or have you lost the last key and Alice has gone stone-deaf, or . . .’ his laughing voice ended in real laughter; he caught hold of her hand, ‘Ups-a-daisy, Honey, and I want my tea.’ A rose colour sweetened her tired face into bloom. ‘I was just waiting,’ she faltered, ‘such a strange effect in the darkness – and autumn rain and falling leaves in the hollow darkness – you know?’ He put his arm round her, together they crossed the threshold. The hall was full of firelight with a lovely scent of logs burning. The flames seemed to leap up to meet them – to show them again that fascinating hall – to light the pictures – the pottery – old oak settles – their ‘Bruges’ brass and the standard rose-tree in its green tub. The grandfather clock struck six.

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‘We’re late,’ said the man laconically, taking up a pile of visitingcards, handing them to her, ‘Testifying to your youth and beauty, my child. Do ask Alice to hurry tea; I’ve got caverns and wet feet and all sorts of horrors. Will you take long to change?’ She was unbuttoning her coat when she suddenly remembered with thankfulness that she had left the ‘madeira’ cake on the verandah. ‘Five minutes,’ she said, pushing a bell, then, as the maid appeared, ‘tea in the library, please, and we would like some toasted buns.’ ‘Yes, Madam.’ The maid stepped forward, taking their wet coats. Marion sat down and the girl removed her rubbers. ‘I lighted the fire in your bedroom at five o’clock, Madam.’ When she had gone Marion stood up and looked across at the man who stood before the fire kicking a piece of wood into place with his boot, sending up a little shower of sparks. ‘Don’t do that, darling,’ she said, ‘be good and go and take off your wet things’ – she caught him by the arm – ‘this coat’s quite damp, and, my child, look at the mud on your trousers.’ He looked down. ‘Do you mean to say I’ve to change before tea,’ he protested. ‘Right away, now,’ she slipped her arm through his. Together they slowly walked up the broad stairs. How beautiful the faded tones of the Japanese prints lining the staircase wall, in this faded light! And how mysterious the great Buddha on the half-landing, set about the creeping plant they called ‘orchidaceous.’ A fire, too, on the landing, showing on warm rugs, low couch and little flat Persian pillows; from their room she saw a reflected brightness. She paused just a moment – her lip quivering – John led her in. ‘What a fire,’ he cried, ‘if Alice wasn’t such an angel you’d be bound to think she had an intimate acquaintance with the place where angels do truly fear to tread.’1 Marion went on to the oval mirror, unpinned her hat and veil, threw them down on a chair and looked round, smiling. ‘Do run away like a good boy and get ready!’ ‘Oh, I feel I haven’t seen you for a thousand years,’ he came up behind her, drawing her head on to his shoulder, putting his arms round her neck, and catching her hands. ‘Look at yourself, you beautiful woman,’ and then, suddenly whispering, ‘When I look in the mirror, so, and see you – know that this is no dream, that through the years, I have but to look to find you, always there, my darling, and every time it seems to me, more beautiful – more adorable, I wonder what I can have done . . . why this is my portion – this life with you. Baby,’ he cried, suddenly laughing,

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and pulling the pins from her hair, ‘you don’t look more than sixteen! You ought to be ashamed of yourself and you – the . . .’ She turned round, slipped her arms round his neck and buried her face on his shoulder. ‘Oh, John, when I am away from you, my body aches for this, it’s resting place – for the pillow of your heart. I never feel safe further from you than this; you hold the anchor to this drifting being. In the security of your arms, dearest, I am –’ her voice suddenly broke a little, ‘such a willing prisoner.’ He held her to him, trembling. ‘I cannot hold you close enough,’ he said, ‘I shall never make you feel my love which grows in the giving – a Faery purse, the more I give – the more I have to give – and all that is mine so all yours – just mine that it may the more truly belong to you.’ ‘Oh, husband,’ she suddenly laughed, releasing herself, ‘and people question miracles . . . fly along, dear.’ ‘Well.’ he said, reluctantly, ‘can I leave the door open?’ ‘Yes of course. Do go.’ His dressing-room led from their bedroom. When he was gone she pushed back the loosened masses of her hair, and looked round her. At the great bed, the heavy rugs, and curtains drawn across the windows and patterned with pomegranate trees. The low mantelpiece was covered in photographs – Roger, Frank, Virginia, Otto, Valerie with her new baby. She glanced at the shelf of books just above their bed, bound in white leather, with the ‘Crane’ design,2 and everywhere flowers and a confusion of fascinating perfumes – jars and little odd-shaped cases on her dressing-table. ‘Marion,’ John’s voice from the next room – she heard him pouring water into a basin. ‘I’ve had such a day.’ ‘Have you, dear,’ brushing her long hair, and gazing tremulously at the flushed girlish face that smiled back at her. ‘Yes. Do you know the sort of day when everybody seems a bore, and yourself the greatest.’ ‘Oh, I know . . . horrid.’ ‘And then I had no lunch . . . just tore round the corner and bolted something.’ ‘I do wish you would not over-work like that.’ He was speaking between splashes. ‘But two new people came in this evening, darling, and asked for the benefit of your humble servant’s genius.’ ‘Goody-o – that’s fine, John. Did you see anything of Roger?’ ‘No; he ’phoned me, though; he’s coming round this evening to play with . . .’

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‘Oh, I’m glad,’ she cried, quickly interrupting; her fingers trembled with the fastenings of her grey chiffon gown. ‘And, Marion – Oh, the Lord! I’ve lost a slipper again; the brute’s hiding under the bed – darling, we must ask two more people to that dinner; we’d forgotten – the Simpsons!’ ‘My dear – so we had.’ Mechanically she opened a little box and took out a long silver chain set with opals. ‘What a blessing you remembered; we’d have been in their black books for ever.’ ‘I know – how about the work to-day?’ ‘Finished, finished – I’ll read you some after dinner. Don’t ask my opinion; I’m still at the cackling stage, the successfully-laid-for-allthe-world-to-see stage. Are you ready?’ ‘Yes. May I come in?’ ‘Do, Boy dear.’ He had changed into a lounge coat, and on his feet he wore extraordinary Japanese stork-embroidered slippers. He sat on the edge of the bed, swinging one foot and whistling. A low clear note struck from downstairs. Standing on the landing this time she noticed a little gate at the foot of the next flight of stairs, and the walls were covered in brilliant posters – French, Belgian, English, Italian, and, too, a little picture of a boy in blue trousers standing in a daisy field. John paused. ‘Shall we go up a minute,’ he said. ‘Oh, afterwards,’ she answered, hurriedly. Each time he mentioned the . . . each time she felt he was going to speak of their . . . she had a terrible, suffocating sensation of fear. If that should prove untrue, if that should prove its dream origin – and at the thought something within her cried out and trembled. ‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘later. Perhaps it’s better not to disturb . . .’ ‘Much better,’ said Marion. In the library a rose-coloured lamp lighted the round table holding the tray with its delicate china and silver. The soft sound of the kettle, the great leather chairs – yes, even the smell of the toasted buns – every moment created in her a greater happiness. ‘One small lump of sugar,’ carefully selecting it for his cup. ‘Did you remember to bring home cigarettes?’ ‘In the hall with my flowers for you. I brought a surprise for . . .’ ‘Bring the flowers, dear. I’m just greedy for them this weather. Um – how good the tea is.’

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They sat almost silently, one on either side of the table, drinking their tea – eating – occasionally looking up, smiling, and then looking into the fire – each occupied with thoughts, perfectly content – rested after the long day. ‘Why does lamplight shed such peace?’ he said, in a low tone: ‘it so shuts us in together; I love a lamp.’ And again, as she leaned forward to light her cigarette at the little silver fire-breathing ‘Devil’s Head’ – ‘Marion.’ ‘Yes, John.’ ‘What makes me almost laugh, times, is that the novelty never ceases. I feel each day is our first day together.’ ‘Oh, it is the sense of “home” which is so precious to me – it is the wonderful sense of peace – of the rooms sanctified – of the quiet permanence – it is that which is so precious after – –’ In the silence she heard the sweet sound of the rain against the window. John put down his cup and lighted a cigarette. ‘Let’s go up. I’ll race you to the top of the house.’ ‘I can’t run in this long gown.’ ‘Well, wait a minute – my parcel’ He brought from the hall the oddly shaped box. ‘I won’t undo the string – half the excitement gone – –’ So again they went up the stairs, and together, and this time through the little gate. Her heart was beating in her throat – her hands were cold – a curious sensation in her breast and arms – but the fear vanished when she saw the old nurse at the top of the stairs putting away linen into a green cupboard. ‘Yes, sir, he’s in the day nursery.’ John opened the door and Marion, swaying forward, saw the child banging the wooden head of a Dutch doll on the floor, and singing to himself. He wore a blue pinafore, tan socks and black patent leather slippers fastened with a strap and button. ‘Darling,’ she cried, swooping down upon him. ‘Little son!’ The child cried ‘Mummy, Mummy,’ and clung to her dress, She sat in a low rocking-chair and held him on her lap. Oh, the comfortable feeling of the child in her arms, against her breast! John was explaining something marvellous about the odd-shaped box. She twined one of his curls round her finger – felt the little neck-band of his pinafore – a tiny frown between her brows – to see if it were too tight – he moved his head as though it was not quite comfortable, and then, out of the box came another bear, a black one with a white nose! The child slipped off her lap, and went over to the toy-cupboard to show his treasure to the rest of the ‘Teddy family.’

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‘An’ you’ve got to shake hands, an’ you’ve got to give him a nice kiss, an’ you’ve got to say “thank you, dear Daddy,” I never did see such a nice daddy.’ The man looked over at the woman, she was rocking to and fro, a sweet brightness in her eyes. ‘Sometimes,’ she whispered, ‘I think my heart will break for joy.’ ‘Oh, Daddy – do be a gallopin’ pony.’ John went down on hands and knees – the child clambered on to his back. ‘I don’t know which is the younger of you,’ she cried. ‘John, I’ll have to knit you a little pair of kneecaps . . .’ Suddenly as she watched them, she heard her name being called from the lower part of the house. Whose voice was that? What, what was he doing there – yes, it was he. Something within her seemed to crash and give way – she went white to the lips. Oh, please God, they would not hear until she had silenced that voice. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ But they were almost too gay to notice. ‘Marion . . . Marion . . . Marion!’ Please God, she could stop that voice. Down the stairs she ran into the hall. Where was it coming from – calling and calling she wrung her hands. Once listening, she heard the high, laughing voice of the child. ‘Marion . . . Marion . . . Marion!’ From the porch. Yes, it came from the porch. She pulled the heavy door open – wind and rain rushed in upon her – out into the porch she stepped – and the door banged to behind her. It was dark and cold . . . and . . . silent . . . cold. *

*

*

‘I seen ’er come up ’ere last evening – thinkin’ she was a friend of your missus.’ ‘What she come to front door for then – with the airy steps. Look out, wot’s in that bag, Take care, you leave that bag alone –. . . there’ll be a clue there . . . Bags and things, they always let the cat out.’ ‘Go on; it’s a madeiry cake and all sodgin’ through the paper . . . Why don’t they ’urry-up?’ ‘They’ll be ’ere soon . . . ain’t she young, too . . . Look ’ere, ’er veil’s slipping off.’ ‘You leave ’er alone – you’ll ketch it when they know.’ ‘Oh, Lord, it’s fallen off . . . Oh, Lord, I seen ’er before. I remember ’er face as pline as yestiday. She come with a young feller to look over this ’ouse. I’ll bet you anythink yer like it’s ’er. It’s ’er alright – Thet’s ’er face; she gave me ’arf a crown and they stayed foolin’ round and

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me ’anging on their ’eels and listening to them fixin’ up nurseries and rose-trees and turkeys carpets, ’er ’anging on ’is arm.’ ‘You’d better look out what yer say. It’ll go down.’ ‘I can’t ’elp it; people ain’t got no right to go around dyin’ as if they owned the ’ole plice. It’ll be called ’aunted now. Oh, Lord, it’s ’er, straight, the names they called me too. St. Peter and H’Eros and ’Yman – it’s like yestiday. And when ’e’d gone, she comes back, laughin’, and says – ‘We ain’t got enough money to furnish a cottage,’ she says, ‘we’re just dreamin’ true,’ she says, ‘and ’ere’s half a crown, Peter dear.’ I never ’eard people laugh the way they did – and she, so set on this ’ere lamp . . .’ ‘It’ll always be empty now.’ ‘Yes, always empty now . . .’ere They come!’ Notes Text: Hearth and Home, 44: 1124, 28 November 1912, pp. 233–4. At this time KM and JMM were eager admirers of Frank Harris (1856–1931), abrasive editor and biographer, and currently editor of Hearth and Home. 1. ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’, Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1709). 2. Walter Crane (1845–1915), prolific illustrator and designer of children’s books.

•

Old Cockatoo Curl ‘Well, now, what have you written down?’ said Adrian, standing behind her and digging his chin into her round little shoulder. Kitti straightened out the paper. ‘Pound of bread, some herrings, packet of hairpins, cheese and – do you want pickled cucumbers, Adrian?’ Adrian clapped his hand to his forehead. ‘Heavens above – hold on! You’ve forgotten cigarettes again. Look here, darling, I must have cigarettes, I haven’t smoked –’ ‘For the last half-hour,’ she laughed, and she bent over the writing table and printed ‘cigarettes’ in thick, black letters, with the stump of an old pencil, grave as a child, the tip of her little pink tongue showing.

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It was a delicious day, warm and sunny with a little wind that seemed to leap at Kitti like a friendly dog, ruffling and tumbling her. She could taste the sun in her mouth. Pink colour flew in her cheeks – she had to run. Laughing and rosy she danced in and out of the shops, and she carried away the parcels like a child with an armful of presents. But the brown fur round her neck, that ridiculous fur which Adrian called the ‘puppy dog’s tail’, would persist in flying loose in the wind until finally she stopped to knot it – stopped in front of a yellow shop with bright green shutters and a green sign swinging, ‘Yelski, Cigarette Maker’ – the letters seemed to laugh at her. ‘Da, I’d nearly forgotten again,’ and she turned to go into the shop. But the doorway was quite filled by a very fat man, wearing a white coat and waistcoat. His immense, shaven face was perfectly serious, the eyes bulged, the mouth was half open. She thought she had never seen anything so funny. His head seemed to wake out of his clothes – yes, he looked just like a baby with its head out of bed. Even to the Cockatoo curl! Her eye caught his. With preposterous gravity he moved from the doorway and bowed to Kitti, and she bit her lip to keep from laughing outright as she went into the shop. The fat man squeezed his way behind the counter. She felt his eyes upon her as she took out her tiny red purse and counted the money she had left over. ‘I want some very nice cigarettes, but really good ones,’ she said emptying the contents of the red purse into a glass dish on the counter. The tinkling woke the fat man with a start and a smile spread slowly upward over his face. He looked at the money and then at her. ‘Yes,’ she dimpled, ‘it’s all I’ve got, every penny.’ ‘Well, Mam’selle, I think we can manage.’ The cigarettes were arranged in yellow boxes behind the counter. With infinite caution the fat man took down several, glanced at the contents and put them back again. Finally he selected a big, yellow leather box, parted the silver papers, and held the cigarettes to Kitti to smell. She bent over them and sniffed. ‘These are cigarettes!’ he rolled the word over on his tongue. ‘Oh, but they smell most frightfully expensive,’ said she, opening her eyes at him. ‘Not at all, not at all.’ He blew into a little paper bag. ‘I think we can manage it,’ said the fat man again. Her red purse, lying on the counter, caught his eye. ‘One moment.’ The fat man padded to the back of the shop, stooped to rummage in a cupboard and emerged with a red box. He placed it beside the purse with an air of triumph. ‘Quite a little artistic scheme,’ he wheezed.

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‘Oh, thank you very much indeed,’ said Kitty, ‘r-really very good of you.’ He accompanied her to the door, he hoped that she would honour him again. Kitti flew breathless up the stairs and into their room. Adrian sat at the table pretending to work. She threw her parcels among his papers and books and kissed the top of his head. ‘Ah-ha! what have we here?’ said Adrian. ‘You little monkey, you’ve been spending my long lost fortune.’ ‘Not at all, they were as cheap as cheap. I bought them from a fat man with a Cockatoo curl.’ Adrian sat on the edge of the table. He lit a cigarette, inhaled, half closing his eyes. ‘Ah, these are cigarettes.’ ‘Why, that’s what the fat man said,’ she laughed. But Adrian was serious. ‘Look here now, joking apart, what did you pay for these, puss cat?’ ‘Fifty kopecks.’ ‘But there are a hundred here.’ ‘I know, fifty kopecks.’ ‘Oh, don’t be silly.’ Adrian flicked the ash. ‘These cigarettes cost a rouble a hundred at the very least.’ ‘I’m not being silly. I’m telling the truth.’ He caught hold of her, pulled a curl of her hair. ‘Have it your own way,’ he teased, ‘but you know you really are a little liar!’ *

*

*

Through the swing doors of the University poured the students at noon. They leapt down the steps, books under their arms, laughing and shouting. Dmitri and Ian caught sight of Adrian, and Ian made a rush at him and leapt on his back. ‘Coming home, old man?’ ‘Yes.’ The three walked off arm-in-arm. ‘My God! I want a smoke; give us a cigarette, my dear,’ said Ian. Dmitri had none – Adrian just three. ‘Last us down the street. Keep your eye open for a shop. Here’s a light.’ They swung on down the street, until Ian suddenly stopped short. ‘Steady on! You’ve been having a birthday present from your grandmother. These cigarettes cost a fortune – I haven’t had such a smoke for months. Where did you get them?’

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‘I didn’t,’ Adrian smiled. ‘Some of Kitti’s work’ – he spelt out the name on the paper, ‘Y-e-l-ski’ – ‘and she says they cost fifty kopecks a hundred.’ ‘Oh, ho! that’s very good.’ Dmitri and Ian laughing. ‘Three roubles a hundred, more likely.’ Adrian shrugged, looking very pleased. ‘Psiacrow!1 here’s the very shop.’ Dmitri gave the two men a tug. They were standing opposite the yellow shop with the green shutters and the swinging sign. ‘Adrian, you’ve got the money.’ ‘Here goes.’ Adrian dashed in, leaving Ian and Dmitri playing leap frog, flying across the road. ‘And your pleasure?’ A very fat man leaned over the counter. ‘I want some cigarettes; same quality as I’m smoking.’ ‘Oh, yes; two roubles a hundred,’ said the fat man, with intense satisfaction. ‘Don’t give me a hundred,’ said Adrian hastily; ‘fifty’ll do.’ He rejoined the others, shaking his head over the paper bag. ‘Just as I thought,’ he grimaced. ‘Oh, you’re a lucky dog, you are,’ said Ian and Dmitri. He swarmed up their stairs four at a time. Kitti, in a pink pinafore, opened the door. He hugged and kissed her. ‘It’s all up now, you are a little liar.’ ‘I am? What do you mean?’ ‘Two roubles a hundred, you little darling. Look here,’ suddenly serious, he tugged the bag out of his pocket. She looked at them in amazement. ‘Oh, they can’t be the same cigarettes, Adrian.’ ‘No good pretending, I’ve seen the fat man, Cockatoo curl and all.’ Kitti shook her head at him. ‘But, Adrian, r-really I only paid fifty.’ She pouted, she flushed, looked as if she was going to cry. ‘Don’t you believe me?’ Adrian laughed. ‘You won’t do it again,’ he mocked. At that she tossed back her hair and stamped. ‘But I will, this very minute, before dinner, now.’ She held out her hand. ‘Give me fifty kopecks.’ ‘Oh, Kitti, don’t be a baby; I’m hungry.’ ‘Give them to me.’ ‘Oh, very well.’

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He handed her the money. ‘Where’s your purse, you little fraud.’ ‘There on the table; you can keep it.’ And Kitti was gone. *

*

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‘Adrian! Adrian!’ He had left the door open; he heard her laughing voice. He ran into the passage and leant over the banisters. ‘What?’ ‘I’ve got them – a whole hundred – and only fifty kopecks.’ She came up the stairs, waving the red box at him. ‘Well I’m damned!’ said Adrian. *

*

*

It was a grey day, an ugly day. The yellow shop looked grimed and dusty. Cold wind tormented the creaking sign, and blew through the opening door. The fat man standing behind the counter drummed with his podgy fingers on the glass case. He had a fit of the shivers. He shook like jelly. It was nerves. It was that sign creaking. He was growing thinner. His flesh was goosy. Cold draughts of air crept about him where there had been no room before. Through the window of the door he saw figures pass, wavering as in water. And the sign creaked. Ugh! that creaking. . . . But at the thought of Kitti he felt himself fill out and grow warm. Ah, what a little beauty she was. Fine – you could pull her through a ring. And the way she laughed – laughed with every bit of her. Why, even her money laughed on the counter. And didn’t she enjoy laughing. You could see her taste it, running her tongue over her lips. The fat man braced himself. Yes, that was what a man wanted – a little woman to laugh and make him feel alive. She’d sit in the back room behind the glass door, and drum with her little red heels on the floor. Why, that was poetry – the first poetry he’d ever made. He grinned and straightened his tie. He’d tell that to her one day. Yes, yes; and customers would come in, and he’d say to them: ‘Excuse me, I think I hear my wife calling.’ And he’d put his head round the glass door and say to her, ‘Not now, darling; I’m busy,’ just long enough to see her delicious little pout. And then he’d look over the top and see her cooking – soups, cream soups, with fresh eggs in them. Dejected, he put both hands inside the top of his trousers and flapped them emptily like the fins of a fish. He’d fill that out again pretty soon. A business man had no dignity without a stomach. That was all very well, but he hadn’t told her yet. He’d have to get that over. He’d do it that very day. It was nearly time she came in. He saw himself

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taking both her hands very gravely and kissing them. ‘Kitti, I love you.’ Now his arms were round her. She felt like a frightened bird. He was leading her behind the counter, showing her the little back room. His gestures were magnificent. Here they would have a table, big enough for a family to dine off. She’d grow pink over that to her ears. There’d be a sofa here for them to sit on in the evening. They might even run to a piano, with their photographs in wedding clothes on the top of it. The door swung open. Kitti tripped in, so quickly and lightly she might have been blown by the wind; and there she stood asking for cigarettes. He felt the blood flow in his face. He reached for the box with clumsy, shaking fingers, and knocked it down. ‘Oh, dear me,’ said Kitti, ‘r-really, that is too bad.’ Before he could stoop, she had run behind the counter and was kneeling on the floor. He stood absurd and helpless. There was no room for both of them to kneel behind the counter. He looked down at her and saw her shoulders shaking. They were shaking as though she was laughing at something. He stepped to the other side of the counter, and leant over, watching those shaking shoulders. When she stood up, her face was very serious. As he stepped back behind the counter she came to the front again. It was like playing a game. ‘No, not this afternoon. I can’t tell her after this.’ Instead he said, ‘You’ll kill yourself, if you smoke so many cigarettes, mam’selle. Never have I known a young lady smoke so many – no, nor a man either. A hundred a day, week in, week out. It’s impossible.’ ‘Well, you see,’ said Kitti, putting on a glove, ‘they’re so cheap, and I’ve such a lot of friends.’ Her words hurt him. The fat man knotted and snapped the string viciously. *

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The fat man’s face was very red. He was kneeling on the counter delicately balancing a tall pyramid of red boxes. There was a big roll of red velvet on the counter, too, to be festooned round his shop window. The morning sunlight streamed over the red boxes, over the fat man, and over a pillar swathed yesterday in yellow velvet, but now dismantled. But it was all right; it would be ready by the afternoon by the time she came. Just as he poised the last red box he heard the door; but did not dare to look round. Suddenly he heard Kitti’s laugh. He sat back on his heels like a huge bear. ‘But so early,’ he stammered, ‘I never expected . . . nothing’s ready. . . .’

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Self-conscious and crestfallen, he climbed slowly from the counter on to a chair and so to the floor. ‘But it doesn’t matter,’ said Kitti. ‘I can’t stay. I want one thousand cigarettes, please.’ ‘Eh, what’s that? What’s that?’ said the fat man. She explained, speaking very fast. Her voice was excited. ‘You see, we’re – I’m going away tomorrow. The University closed yesterday. I’m going into the country for months and months.’ He seemed to crumple like a pricked balloon. He managed to say, ‘You’re a student, then?’ He felt he was going to cry. ‘Well, not exactly.’ Laughter trembled in her throat. With pressed lips and breathing noisily the fat man made up the package, and pushed it across the counter. ‘Good-bye,’ said she. He turned and walked into the little back room. He was thinking very quickly now, and hard – hard, as his hand clenched on the table like a white ball. He’d have to write to her – and, what’s more, send the letter by messenger. In a bouquet of flowers. Red flowers – and this idea was so beautiful to him that he wanted to cry again. But he must be firm. After all, this was a crisis. The letter written, the fat man struggled into his coat and went out, locking the shop door. After all, there was no real custom that afternoon, now. His chin began to tremble. He mustn’t think. ‘I want some red roses,’ he said to the florist; ‘five roubles’ worth.’ It seemed to him a grim and terrible idea to buy the roses with the money she had given him. ‘And this note to be pinned with the flowers and sent express.’ Out in the street again the fat man felt quite faint. He felt as though he was walking on feathers. He hadn’t the vaguest idea where he was going. He wanted a drink – that would set him right – a nervebracer. He turned into the big café opposite the University. Inside the café were little partitions. ‘Loose-boxes’ the students called them. He made his way to one of them, feeling very miserable among the excited crowd. He ordered some vodka and sat leaning against the wooden partition. He was almost tired; he must have dozed away some time; and then the words ‘red roses’ shocked him awake. The café was emptier now, but from behind the partition rose wave upon wave of laughter, and cries of, ‘No; let Adrian read it.’ ‘Pass it round here.’ ‘Dear, God; it’s too funny.’ And then he heard a woman’s voice. ‘Be quiet, you boys. Adrian will tell it.’ The voice was Kitti’s. ‘Old Cockatoo Curl has done us proud for months and months. Why, Ian and Dmitri, you were with me that day we bought the cigarettes; the day I first saw him. Every single day since then Kitti’s been

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getting one hundred cigarettes for fifty kopecks, instead of a couple of roubles. And the reason, my children – Old Cockatoo in love with Kitti – which is all to his credit. Who wouldn’t be? Look at her. We’ve sold you these same cigarettes for months at one twenty-five – and dirt cheap. Kitty bought as many as we dared. We’ve all lived like lords on old Cockatoo’s passion. Here’s to the Fat Man! The grand finale happened to-day. I sent Kitti this morning to buy a thousand cigarettes. She’d hardly got to the top of the stairs when up came a messenger staggering under a bunch of roses – tons of ’em – the fattest roses you ever saw. Just look at them. Observe, also, my children, this declaration of passion. A genuine human document. Pass it round, gentlemen.’ High and clear above the shouting of the men rang Kitti’s laughter. The fat man could bear no more. He pushed back his chair – stumbled like a wounded bull. ‘Oo-oh, oh! Stop! Look! There he goes.’ Kitti clutched at Adrian and pointed with her roses to the stumbling figure. It silenced them. Kitty stared at the drooping roses. ‘I don’t think it’s funny at all.’ Notes Text: TP’s Weekly, Christmas Number, 27 December 1912, pp. 46, 48, 50. Signed ‘Katherine Mansfield and J. Middleton Murry’.2 1. A Polish mild expletive, meaning ‘Blood of a dog!’. 2. Although signed with both names, this last story in KM’s assumed ‘Russian’ manner reads as though she was by far the dominant hand. In the public mocking of a private letter, and the consequences of an overheard conversation, it anticipates ‘Miss Brill’ (1920) and ‘Marriage à la Mode’ (1921).

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Ole Underwood Down the windy hill stalked Ole Underwood. He carried a black umbrella in one hand, in the other a red and white spotted handkerchief knotted into a lump. He wore a black peaked cap like a pilot; gold rings gleamed in his ears and his little eyes snapped like two sparks. Like two sparks they glowed in the smoulder of his bearded face. On one side of the hill grew a forest of pines from the road right down to the sea. On the other side short tufted grass and little bushes of white manuka flower. The pine-trees roared like waves in their topmost branches, their stems creaked like the timber of ships; in the windy air flew the white manuka flower. Ah – k! shouted Ole Underwood, shaking his umbrella at the wind bearing down upon him, beating him, half strangling him with his black cape. Ah – k! shouted the wind a hundred times as loud, and filled his mouth and nostrils with dust. Something inside Ole Underwood’s breast beat like a hammer. One two – one two – never stopping, never changing. He couldn’t do anything. It wasn’t loud. No, it didn’t make a noise – only a thud. One, two – one, two – like someone beating on an iron in a prison – someone in a secret place – bang – bang – bang – trying to get free. Do what he would, fumble at his coat, throw his arms about, spit, swear, he couldn’t stop the noise. Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Ole Underwood began to shuffle and run. Away below the sea heaving against the stone walls, and the little town just out of its reach close packed together, the better to face the grey water. And up on the other side of the hill the prison with high red walls. Over all bulged the grey sky with black web-like clouds streaming. Ole Underwood slackened his pace as he neared the town, and when he came to the first house he flourished his umbrella like a herald’s staff and threw out his chest, his head glancing quickly from right to left. They were ugly little houses leading into the town, built of wood – two windows and a door, a stumpy veranda and a green mat of grass before. Under one veranda yellow hens huddled out of 319

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the wind. Shoo! shouted Ole Underwood, and laughed to see them fly, and laughed again at the woman who came to the door and shook a red, soapy fist at him. A little girl stood in another yard untwisting some rags from a clothes line. When she saw Ole Underwood she let the clothes prop fall and rushed screaming to the door, beating it, screaming ‘Mum-ma – Mum-ma!’ That started the hammer in Ole Underwood’s heart. Mum-ma – Mum-ma! He saw an old face with a trembling chin and grey hair nodding out of the window as they dragged him past. Mum-ma – Mum-ma! He looked up at the big red prison perched on the hill and he pulled a face as if he wanted to cry. At the corner in front of the pub some carts were pulled up, and some men sat in the porch of the pub drinking and talking. Ole Underwood wanted a drink. He slouched into the bar. It was half full of old and young men in big coats and top boots with stock whips in their hands. Behind the counter a big girl with red hair pulled the beer handles and cheeked the men. Ole Underwood sneaked to one side, like a cat. Nobody looked at him, only the men looked at each other, one or two of them nudged. The girl nodded and winked at the fellow she was serving. He took some money out of his knotted handkerchief and slipped it on to the counter. His hand shook. He didn’t speak. The girl took no notice; she served everybody, went on with her talk, and then as if by accident shoved a mug towards him. A great big jar of red pinks stood on the bar counter. Ole Underwood stared at them as he drank and frowned at them. Red – red – red – red! beat the hammer. It was very warm in the bar and quiet as a pond, except for the talk and the girl. She kept on laughing. Ha! ha! That was what the men liked to see, for she threw back her head and her great breasts lifted and shook to her laughter. In one corner sat a stranger. He pointed at Ole Underwood. ‘Cracked!’ said one of the men. ‘When he was a young fellow, thirty years ago, a man ’ere done in ’is woman, an ’e foun’ out an’ killed ’er [’im]. Got twenty year in quod up on the ’ill. Came out cracked’. ‘Oo done ’er in?’ asked the man. ‘Dunno. ’E don’ no, nor nobody. ’E was a sailor till ’e marrid ’er. Cracked!’ The man spat and smeared the spittle in the floor, shrugging his shoulders. ‘’E’s ’armless enough.’ Ole Underwood heard; he did not turn, but he shot out an old claw and crushed up the red pinks. ‘Uh-Uh! You ole beast! Uh! You ole swine!’ screamed the girl, leaning across the counter and banging him with a tin jug. ‘Get art! Get art! Don’ you never come ’ere no more!’ Somebody kicked him: he scuttled like a rat. He walked past the Chinamen’s shops. The fruit and vegetables were all piled up against the windows. Bits of wooden cases, straw, and old newspapers were strewn over the pavement. A woman flounced out of a shop and slushed a pail of slops over his feet. He peered in at the windows, at the Chinamen sitting in little groups

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on old barrels playing cards. They made him smile. He looked and looked, pressing his face against the glass and sniggering. They sat still with their long pigtails bound round their heads and their faces yellow as lemons. Some of them had knives in their belts and one old man sat by himself on the floor plaiting his long crooked toes together. The Chinamen didn’t mind Ole Underwood. When they saw him they nodded. He went to the door of a shop and cautiously opened it. In rushed the wind with him, scattering the cards. ‘Ya-Ya! Ya-Ya!’ screamed the Chinamen, and Ole Underwood rushed off, the hammer beating quick and hard. Ya-Ya! He turned a corner out of sight. He thought he heard one of the Chinks after him and he slipped into a timber-yard. There he lay panting. . . . Close by him, under another stack there was a heap of yellow shavings. As he watched them they moved and a little grey cat unfolded herself and came out waving her tail. She trod delicately over to Ole Underwood and rubbed against his sleeve. The hammer in Ole Underwood’s heart beat madly. It pounded up into his throat, and then it seemed to half stop and beat very, very faintly. ‘Kit! Kit! Kit!’ That was what she used to call the little cat he brought her off the ship. Kit! Kit! Kit! and stoop down with the saucer in her hands. ‘Ah! my God! – my Lord!’ Ole Underwood sat up and took the kitten in his arms and rocked to and fro, crushing it against his face. It was warm and soft, and it mewed faintly. He buried his eyes in its fur. My God! My Lord! He tucked the little cat in his coat and stole out of the wood-yard, and slouched down towards the wharves. As he came near the sea, Ole Underwood’s nostrils expanded. The mad wind smelled of tar and ropes and slime and salt. He crossed the railway line, he crept behind the wharf-sheds and along a little cinder path that threaded through a patch of rank fennel to some stone drain pipes carrying the sewage into the sea. And he stared up at the wharves and at the ships with flags flying and suddenly the old, old lust swept over Ole Underwood. ‘I will! I will! I will!’ he muttered. He tore the little cat out of his coat and swung it by its tail and flung it out to the sewer opening. The hammer beat loud and strong. He tossed his head, he was young again. He walked on to the wharves, past the wool-bales, past the loungers and the loafers to the extreme end of the wharves. The sea sucked against the wharf-poles as though it drank something from the land. One ship was loading wool. He heard a crane rattle and the shriek of a whistle. So he came to the little ship lying by herself with a bit of plank for a gangway and no sign of anybody – anybody at all. Ole Underwood looked once back at the town, at the prison perched like a red bird, at the black, webby clouds trailing. Then he went up the gangway and on to the slippery deck. He grinned, and rolled in his walk, carrying high in his hand the red and white handkerchief. His

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ship! Mine! Mine! Mine! beat the hammer. There was a door latched open on the lee-side, labelled ‘State-room’. He peered in. A man lay sleeping on a bunk – his bunk – a great big man in a seaman’s coat with a long fair beard and hair on the red pillow. And looking down upon him from the wall there shone her picture – his woman’s picture – smiling and smiling at the big sleeping man. Notes Text: Rhythm, 2: 12, January 1913, pp. 334–7. SCOS. The story is loosely based on KM’s memory of a Wellington figure, and the anecdote persists that he was brought before Harold Beauchamp, in his role as Justice of the Peace, and charged with vagrancy. The murder and its details are invented. The story was dedicated to the American painter Anne Estelle Rice (later Drey), who later worked on the well-known portrait of KM (now in the National Museum, Te Papa Tongarewa, in Wellington), when the two women were on holiday together in Cornwall in the summer of 1918.

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Epilogue I: Pension Seguin1 The servant who opened the door was twin sister to that efficient and hideous creature bearing a soup tureen into the First French Picture.2 Her round red face shone like freshly washed china. She had a pair of immense bare arms to match, and a quantity of mottled hair arranged in a sort of bow. I stammered in a ridiculous, breathless fashion, as though a pack of Russian wolves were behind me rather than five flights of beautifully polished French stairs. ‘Have you a room?’ The servant girl did not know. She would ask Madame. Madame was at dinner. ‘Will you come in, please?’ Through the dark hall, guarded by a large black stove that had the appearance of a headless cat with one red all-seeing eye in the middle of its stomach, I followed her into the salon. ‘Please to sit down,’ said the servant girl, closing the door behind her. I heard her list slippers3 shuffle along the corridor, the sound of another door opening – a little clamour – instantly suppressed. Silence followed. The salon was long and narrow, with a yellow floor dotted with white mats. White muslin curtains hid the windows: the walls were white, decorated with pictures of pale ladies drifting down cypress avenues to forsaken temples, and moons rising over boundless oceans. You would have thought that all the long

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years of Madame’s virginity had been devoted to the making of white mats – that her childish voice had lisped its numbers in crochet work stitches. I did not dare to begin counting them. They rained upon me from every possible place, like impossible snowflakes. Even the piano stool was buttoned into one embroidered with P.F. I had been looking for a resting place all the morning. At the start I flew up innumerable stairs as though they were major scales – the most cheerful things in the world – but after repeated failures the scales had resolved into the minor, and my heart which was quite cast down by this time, leapt up again at these signs and tokens of virtue and sobriety. ‘A woman with such sober passions,’ thought I, ‘is bound to be quiet and clean, with few babies and a much absent husband. Mats are not the sort of things that lend themselves in their making to cheerful singing. Mats are essentially the fruits of pious solitude. I shall certainly take a room here.’ And I began to dream of unpacking my clothes in a little white room, and getting into a kimono and lying on a white bed, watching the curtains float out from the window in the delicious autumn air that smelled of apples and honey . . . until the door opened and a tall thin woman in a lilac pinafore came in, smiling in a vague fashion. ‘Madame Seguin?’ ‘Yes, Madame.’ I repeated the familiar story. A quiet room. Removed from any church bells, or crowing cocks, or little boys’ schools, or railway stations. ‘There are none of such things anywhere near here,’ said Madame, looking very surprised. ‘I have a very beautiful room to let, and quite unexpectedly. It has been occupied by a young gentleman from Buenos Ayres whose father died, unfortunately, and implored him to return home immediately. Quite natural, indeed.’ ‘Oh, very!’ said I, hoping that the Hamlet-like apparition was at rest again and would not invade my solitude to make certain of his son’s obedience. ‘If Madame will follow me.’ Down a dark corridor, round a corner I felt my way. I wanted to ask Madame if this was where Buenos Ayres père appeared unto his son, but I did not dare to. ‘Here – you see. Quite away from everything,’ said Madame. I have always viewed with a proper amount of respect and abhorrence those penetrating spirits who are not susceptible to appearances. What is there to believe in except appearances? I have nearly always found that they are the only things worth enjoying at all, and if ever an innocent child lays its head upon my knee and begs for the truth of the matter, I shall tell it the story of my one and only nurse, who, knowing my horror of gooseberry jam, spread a coating of apricot over the top of the jam jar. As long as I believed it apricot I was happy, and learning wisdom, I contrived to eat the apricot and leave the gooseberry behind. ‘So, you see, my little innocent creature,’ I shall end, ‘the great thing to learn in this life is to be content with appearances, and shun the vulgarities of the grocer and the philosopher.’

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Bright sunlight streamed through the windows of the delightful room. There was an alcove for the bed, a writing table was placed against the window, a couch against the wall. And outside the window I looked down upon an avenue of gold and red trees and up at a range of mountains white with fresh fallen snow. ‘One hundred and eighty francs a month,’ murmured Madame, smiling at nothing, but seeming to imply by her manner ‘of course this has nothing to do with the matter’. I said, ‘That is too much. I cannot afford more than one hundred and fifty francs.’ ‘But,’ explained Madame, ‘the size! the alcove. And the extreme rarity of being overlooked by so many mountains.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And then the food. There are four meals a day, and breakfast in your room if you wish it.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, more feebly. ‘And my husband a professor at the Conservatoire – that again is so rare.’ Courage is like a disobedient dog. Once it starts running away, it flies all the faster for your attempts to recall it. ‘One hundred and sixty,’ I said. ‘If you agree to take it for two months I will accept,’ said Madame very quickly. I agreed. Marie helped to unstrap my boxes. She knelt on the floor, grinning and scratching her big red arms. ‘Ah, how glad I am Madame has come,’ she said. ‘Now we shall have some life again. Monsieur Arthur, who lived in this room – he was a gay one. Singing all day, and sometimes dancing. Many a time Mademoiselle Ambatielos would be playing and he’d dance for an hour without stopping.’ ‘Who is Mademoiselle Ambatielos?’ I asked. ‘A young lady, studying at the Conservatoire,’ said Marie, sniffing in a very friendly fashion. ‘But she gives lessons, too. Ah, mon Dieu, sometimes when I’m dusting her room I think her fingers will drop off. She plays all day long. But I like that – that’s life, noise is. That’s what I say. You’ll hear her soon. Up and down she goes!’ said Marie, with extreme heartiness. ‘But,’ I cried, loathing Marie, ‘how many other people are staying here?’ Marie shrugged. ‘Nobody to speak of. There’s the Russian gentleman, a priest he is, and Madame’s three children – and that’s all. The children are lively enough,’ she said, filling the washstand pitcher, ‘but then, there’s the baby – the boy! Ah, you’ll know about him, poor little one, soon enough!’ She was so detestable, I would not ask her anything further. I waited until she had gone, and leaned against the window-sill, watching the sun deepen in the trees until they seemed full and trembling with gold, and wondering what was the matter with the mysterious baby. All through the afternoon Mademoiselle Ambatielos and the piano warred with the Appassionata Sonata.4 They shattered it to bits and remade it to their heart’s desire – they unpicked it – and tried it

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in various styles. They added a little touch – caught up something. Finally they decided that the only thing of importance was the loud pedal. The mysterious baby, hidden behind Heaven knows how many doors, cried with such curious persistence that I had to strain my ears, wondering if it was a baby or an engine or a far-off whistle. At dusk Marie, accompanied by the two little girls, brought me a lamp. My appearance disturbed these charming children to such an extent that they rushed up and down the corridor in a frenzied state for half an hour afterwards, bumping themselves against the walls, and shrieking with derisive laughter. At eight the gong sounded for supper. I was hungry. The corridor was filled with the warm, strong smell of cooked meat. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘at any rate, judging by the smell the food must be good.’ And feeling very frightened I entered the dining room. Two rows of faces turned to watch me. M. Seguin introduced me, rapped on the table with the soup spoon, and the two little girls, impudent and scornful, cried ‘Bon soir, madame,’ while the baby, half washed away by his afternoon performance, emptied his cup of milk over his head while Madame Seguin showed me my seat. In the confusion caused by this last episode, and by his being carried away by Marie, screaming and spitting with rage, I sat down next to the Russian priest and opposite Mademoiselle Ambatielos. M. Seguin took a loaf of bread from a three-legged basket at his elbow and carved it against his chest. Soup was served – with vermicelli letters of the alphabet floating in it. These were last straws to the little Seguins’ table manners. ‘Maman, Yvonne’s got more letters than me.’ ‘Maman, Hélène keeps taking my letters out with her spoon.’ ‘Children! Children! Quiet, quiet!’ said Madame Seguin gently. ‘No, don’t do it.’ Hélène seized Yvonne’s plate and pulled it towards her. ‘Stop,’ said M. Seguin, who was like a rat, with spectacles all misted over with soup steam. ‘Hélène, leave the table. Go to Marie.’ Exit Hélène, with her apron over her head. Soup was followed by chestnuts and brussels sprouts. All the time the Russian priest, who wore a pale blue tie with a buttoned frock coat and a moustache fierce as a Gogol novel, kept up a flow of conversation with Mademoiselle Ambatielos. She looked very young. She was stout, with a high firm bust decorated with a spray of artificial roses. She never ceased touching the roses or her blouse or hair, or looking at her hands – with a smile trembling on her mouth and her blue eyes wide and staring. She seemed half intoxicated with her fresh young body. ‘I saw you this morning when you didn’t see me,’ said the priest. ‘You didn’t.’ ‘I did.’ ‘He didn’t, did he, Madame?’ Madame Seguin smiled, and carried away the chestnuts, bringing back a dish of pears.

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‘I hope you will come into the salon after dinner,’ she said to me. ‘We always chat a little – we are such a small family party.’ I smiled, wondering why pears should follow chestnuts. ‘I must apologise for baby,’ she went on. ‘He is so nervous. But he spends his day in a room at the other end of the appartement to you. You will not be troubled. Only think of it. He passes whole days banging his little head against the floors and walls. The doctors cannot understand it at all.’ M. Seguin pushed back his chair, said grace. I followed desperately into the salon. ‘I expect you have been admiring my mats,’ said Madame Seguin, with more animation than she had hitherto shown. ‘People always imagine they are the product of my industry. But alas, no! They are all made by my friend Madame Kummer, who has the pension on the first floor.’ Notes Text: Blue Review,5 1: 1, May 1913, pp. 37–42. SCOS. 1. KM had again visited Geneva in February 1912. 2. Rather than having a particular painting in mind, KM may be imagining the sort of scene to be found in a typical French genre picture. 3. Slippers made from woven cloth, recommended for their quietness. 4. Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 23, Op. 57. 5. After the financial collapse of Rhythm, JMM established the Blue Review, which ran to only three issues, with KM as Associate Editor. See Life, Ch. VIII, pp. 153–61.

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Millie Millie stood leaning against the verandah until the men were out of sight. When they were far down the road Willie Cox turned round on his horse and waved. But she didn’t wave back. She nodded her head a little and made a grimace. Not a bad young fellow, Willie Cox, but a bit too free and easy for her taste. Oh, my word! it was hot. Enough to fry your hair! Millie put her handkerchief over her head and shaded her eyes with her hand. In the distance along the dusty road she could see the horses – like brown spots dancing up and down, and when she looked away from them and over the burnt paddocks she could see them still – just before her eyes, jumping like mosquitoes. It was halfpast two in the afternoon. The sun hung in the faded blue sky like a

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burning mirror, and away beyond the paddocks the blue mountains quivered and leapt like sea. Sid wouldn’t be back until half-past ten. He had ridden over to the township with four of the boys to help hunt down the young fellow who’d murdered Mr Williamson. Such a dreadful thing! And Mrs Williamson left all alone with all those kids. Funny! she couldn’t think of Mr Williamson being dead! He was such a one for a joke. Always having a lark. Willie Cox said they found him in the barn, shot bang through the head, and the young English ‘johnny’ who’d been on the station learning farming1 – disappeared. Funny! she wouldn’t think of anyone shooting Mr Williamson, and him so popular and all. My word! when they caught that young man! Well – you couldn’t be sorry for a young fellow like that. As Sid said, if he wasn’t strung up where would they all be? A man like that doesn’t stop at one go. There was blood all over the barn. And Willie Cox said he was that knocked out he picked a cigarette up out of the blood and smoked it. My word! he must have been half dotty. Millie went back into the kitchen. She put some ashes on the stove and sprinkled them with water. Languidly, the sweat pouring down her face, and dropping off her nose and chin, she cleared away the dinner, and going into the bedroom, stared at herself in the fly-specked mirror, and wiped her face and neck with a towel. She didn’t know what was the matter with herself that afternoon. She could have had a good cry – just for nothing – and then change her blouse and have a good cup of tea. Yes, she felt like that! She flopped down on the side of the bed and stared at the coloured print on the wall opposite, ‘Garden Party at Windsor Castle’. In the foreground emerald lawns planted with immense oak trees, and in their grateful shade, a muddle of ladies and gentlemen and parasols and little tables. The background was filled with the towers of Windsor Castle, flying three Union Jacks, and in the middle of the picture the old Queen, like a tea cosy with a head on top of it. ‘I wonder if it really looked like that.’ Millie stared at the flowery ladies, who simpered back at her. ‘I wouldn’t care for that sort of thing. Too much side. What with the Queen an’ one thing an’ another.’ Over the packing case dressing-table there was a large photograph of her and Sid, taken on their wedding day. Nice picture that – if you do like. She was sitting down in a basket chair, in her cream cashmere and satin ribbons, and Sid, standing with one hand on her shoulder, looking at her bouquet. And behind them there were some fern trees, and a waterfall, and Mount Cook2 in the distance, covered with snow. She had almost forgotten her wedding day; time did pass so, and if you hadn’t any one to talk things over with, they soon dropped out of your mind. ‘I wunner why we never had no kids. . . .’ She shrugged her shoulders – gave it up. ‘Well, I’ve never missed them. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sid had, though. He’s softer than me.’

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And then she sat, quiet, thinking of nothing at all, her red swollen hands rolled in her apron, her feet stuck out in front of her, her little head with the thick screw of dark hair, drooped on her chest. ‘Ticktick’ went the kitchen clock, the ashes clinked in the grate, and the venetian blind knocked against the kitchen window. Quite suddenly Millie felt frightened. A queer trembling started inside her – in her stomach – and then spread all over to her knees and hands. ‘There’s somebody about.’ She tiptoed to the door and peered into the kitchen. Nobody there; the verandah doors were closed, the blinds were down, and in the dusky light the white face of the clock shone, and the furniture seemed to bulge and breathe . . . and listen, too. The clock – the ashes – and the venetian – and then again – something else – like steps in the back yard. ‘Go an’ see what it is, Millie Evans.’ She started to the back door, opened it, and at the same moment someone ducked behind the wood pile. ‘Who’s that,’ she cried in a loud, bold voice. ‘Come out o’ that. I seen yer. I know where you are. I got my gun. Come out from behind of that wood stack.’ She was not frightened any more. She was furiously angry. Her heart banged like a drum. ‘I’ll teach you to play tricks with a woman,’ she yelled, and she took a gun from the kitchen corner, and dashed down the verandah steps, across the glaring yard to the other side of the wood stack. A young man lay there, on his stomach, one arm across his face. ‘Get up! You’re shamming!’ Still holding the gun she kicked him in the shoulders. He gave no sign. ‘Oh, my God, I believe he’s dead.’ She knelt down, seized hold of him, and turned him over on his back. He rolled like a sack. She crouched back on her haunches, staring, her lips and nostrils fluttered with horror. He was not much more than a boy, with fair hair, and a growth of fair down on his lips and chin. His eyes were open, rolled up, showing the whites, and his face was patched with dust caked with sweat. He wore a cotton shirt and trousers with sandshoes on his feet. One of the trousers stuck to his leg with a patch of dark blood. ‘I can’t,’ said Millie, and then, ‘You’ve got to.’ She bent over and felt his heart. ‘Wait a minute,’ she stammered, ‘wait a minute,’ and she ran into the house for brandy and a pail of water. ‘What are you going to do, Millie Evans? Oh, I don’t know. I never seen anyone in a dead faint before.’ She knelt down, put her arm under the boy’s head and poured some brandy between his lips. It spilled down both sides of his mouth. She dipped a corner of her apron in the water and wiped his face, and his hair and his throat, with fingers that trembled. Under the dust and sweat his face gleamed, white as her apron, and thin, and puckered in little lines. A strange dreadful feeling gripped Millie Evans’ bosom – some seed that had never flourished there, unfolded, and struck deep roots and burst into painful leaf. ‘Are yer coming round?

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Feeling all right again?’ The boy breathed sharply, half choked, his eyelids quivered, and he moved his head from side to side. ‘You’re better,’ said Millie, smoothing his hair. ‘Feeling fine now again, ain’t you?’ The pain in her bosom half suffocated her. ‘It’s no good you crying, Millie Evans. You got to keep your head.’ Quite suddenly he sat up and leaned against the wood pile, away from her, staring on the ground. ‘There now!’ cried Millie Evans, in a strange, shaking voice. The boy turned and looked at her, still not speaking, but his eyes were so full of pain and terror that she had to shut her teeth and clench her hand to stop from crying. After a long pause he said in the little voice of a child talking in his sleep, ‘I’m hungry.’ His lips quivered. She scrambled to her feet and stood over him. ‘You come right into the house and have a set down meal,’ she said. ‘Can you walk?’ ‘Yes,’ he whispered, and swaying he followed her across the glaring yard to the verandah. At the bottom step he paused, looking at her again. ‘I’m not coming in,’ he said. He sat on the verandah step in the little pool of shade that lay round the house. Millie watched him. ‘When did yer last ’ave anythink to eat?’ He shook his head. She cut a chunk off the greasy corned beef and a round of bread plastered with butter; but when she brought it he was standing up, glancing round him, and paid no attention to the plate of food. ‘When are they coming back?’ he stammered. At that moment she knew. She stood, holding the plate, staring. He was Harrison. He was the English johnny who’d killed Mr Williamson. ‘I know who you are,’ she said, very slowly, ‘yer can’t fox me. That’s who you are. I must have been blind in me two eyes not to ’ave known from the first.’ He made a movement with his hands as though that was all nothing. ‘When are they coming back?’ And she meant to say, ‘Any minute. They’re on their way now.’ Instead she said to the dreadful, frightened face, ‘Not till ’arf past ten.’ He sat down, leaning against one of the verandah poles. His face broke up into little quivers. He shut his eyes and tears streamed down his cheeks. ‘Nothing but a kid. An’ all them fellows after ’im. ’E don’t stand any more of a chance than a kid would.’ ‘Try a bit of beef,’ said Millie. ‘It’s the food you want. Something to steady your stomach.’ She moved across the verandah and sat down beside him, the plate on her knees. ‘’Ere – try a bit.’ She broke the bread and butter into little pieces, and she thought, ‘They won’t ketch ’im. Not if I can ’elp it. Men is all beasts. I don’ care wot ’e’s done, or wot ’e ’asn’t done. See ’im through, Millie Evans. ’E’s nothink but a sick kid.’ *

*

*

Millie lay on her back, her eyes wide open, listening. Sid turned over, hunched the quilt round his shoulders, muttered ‘Good night,

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ole girl.’ She heard Willie Cox and the other chap drop their clothes on to the kitchen floor, and then their voices, and Willie Cox saying, ‘Lie down, Gumboil. Lie down, yer little devil,’ to his dog. The house dropped quiet. She lay and listened. Little pulses tapped in her body, listening, too. It was hot. She was frightened to move because of Sid. ‘’E must get off. ’E must. I don’ care anythink about justice an’ all the rot they’ve bin spouting to-night,’ she thought, savagely. ‘’Ow are yer to know what anythink’s like till yer do know. It’s all rot.’ She strained to the silence. He ought to be moving. . . . Before there was a sound from outside Willie Cox’s Gumboil got up and padded sharply across the kitchen floor and sniffed at the back door. Terror started up in Millie. ‘What’s that dog doing? Uh! What a fool that young fellow is with a dog ’anging about. Why don’t ’e lie down an’ sleep.’ The dog stopped, but she knew it was listening. Suddenly, with a sound that made her cry out in horror the dog started barking and rushing to and fro. ‘What’s that? What’s up?’ Sid flung out of bed. ‘It ain’t nothink. It’s only Gumboil. Sid, Sid.’ She clutched his arm, but he shook her off. ‘My Christ, there’s somethink up. My God.’ Sid flung into his trousers. Willie Cox opened the back door. Gumboil in a fury darted out into the yard, round the corner of the house. ‘Sid, there’s someone in the paddock,’ roared the other chap. ‘What’s it – what’s that?’ Sid dashed out on to the front verandah. ‘Here, Millie, take the lantin. Willie, some skunk’s got ’old of one of the ’orses.’ The three men bolted out of the house and at the same moment Millie saw Harrison dash across the paddock on Sid’s horse and down the road. ‘Millie, bring that blasted lantin.’ She ran in her bare feet, her nightdress flicking her legs. They were after him in a flash. And at the sight of Harrison in the distance, and the three men hot after, a strange mad joy smothered everything else. She rushed into the road – she laughed and shrieked and danced in the dust, jigging the lantern. ‘A – ah! Arter ’im, Sid! A – a – a – h! ketch ’im, Willie. Go it! Go it! A – ah, Sid! Shoot ’im down. Shoot ‘im!’ Notes Text: Blue Review, 1: 2, June 1913, pp. 82–7. SCOS. 1. ‘Johnny’, a term for a recent arrival in the country; ‘station’, a sheep station, usually a large grazing property with a homestead and farm buildings. 2. Now also known by its Maori name, Aorangi, the country’s highest peak at over 12,000 ft.

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Epilogue II1 ‘I met a young virgin Who sadly did moan . . .’

There is a very unctuous and irritating English proverb to the effect that ‘Every cloud has a silver lining’. What comfort can it be to one steeped to the eyebrows in clouds to ponder over their linings, and what an unpleasant picture-postcard seal it sets upon one’s tragedy – turning it into a little ha’penny monstrosity with a moon in the left-hand corner like a vainglorious threepenny bit! Nevertheless, like most unctuous and irritating things, it is true. The lining woke me after my first night at the Pension Seguin and showed me over the feather bolster a room as bright with sunlight, as if every goldenhaired baby in Heaven were pelting the earth with buttercup posies. ‘What a charming fancy!’ I thought. ‘How much prettier than the proverb. It sounds like a day in the country with Katherine Tynan.’2 . . . And I saw a little picture of myself and Katherine Tynan being handed glasses of milk by a red-faced woman with an immensely fat apron, while we discussed the direct truth of proverbs as opposed to the fallacy of playful babies. But in such a case imaginary I was ranged on the side of the proverbs. ‘There’s a lot of sound sense in ’em,’ said that coarse being. ‘I admire the way they put their collective foot down upon the female attempt to embroider everything. ‘The pitcher goes to the well till it breaks.’ Also gut. Not even a loophole for a set of verses to a broken pitcher. No possible chance of the well being one of those symbolic founts to which all hearts in the forms of pitchers are carried. ‘The only proverb I disapprove of,’ went on this impossible creature, pulling a spring onion from the garden bed and chewing on it, ‘is the one about a bird in the hand. I naturally prefer birds in bushes.’ ‘But,’ said Katherine Tynan, tender and brooding, as she lifted a little green fly from her milk glass. ‘But if you were Saint Francis, the bird would not mind being in your hand. It would prefer the white nest of your fingers to any bush.’. . . I jumped out of bed and ran over to the window and opened it wide and leaned out. Down below in the avenue a wind shook and swung the trees; the scent of leaves was on the lifting air. The houses lining the avenue were small and white. Charming, chaste looking little houses, showing glimpses of lace and knots of ribbon, for all the world like country children in a row, about to play ‘Nuts and May’.3 I began

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to imagine an adorable little creature named Yvette who lived in one and all of these houses. . . . She spends her morning in a white lace boudoir cap, worked with daisies, sipping chocolate from a Sèvres cup with one hand, while a faithful attendant polishes the little pink nails of the other. She spends the afternoon in her tiny white and gold boudoir, curled up, a Persian kitten on her lap, while her ardent, beautiful lover leans over the back of the sofa, kissing and kissing again that thrice fascinating dimple on her left shoulder. . . . when one of the balcony windows opened, and a stout servant swaggered out with her arms full of rugs and carpet strips. With a gesture expressing fury and disgust she flung them over the railing, disappeared, reappeared again with a long-handled cane broom and fell upon the wretched rugs and carpets. Bang! Whack! Whack! Bang! Their feeble, pitiful jigging inflamed her to ever greater effort. Clouds of dust flew up round her, and when one little rug escaped and flopped down to the avenue below, like a fish, she leaned over the balcony, shaking her fist and the broom at it. Lured by the noise, an old gentleman came to a window opposite and cast an eye of approval upon the industrious girl and yawned in the face of the lovely day. There was an air of detachment and deliberation about the way he carefully felt over the muscles of his arms and legs, pressed his throat, coughed, and shot a jet of spittle out of the window. Nobody seemed more surprised at this last feat than he. He seemed to regard it as a small triumph in its way, buttoning his immense stomach into a white piqué waistcoat with every appearance of satisfaction. Away flew my charming Yvette in a black and white check dress, an alpaca apron, and a market basket over her arm. I dressed, ate a roll and drank some tepid coffee, feeling very sobered. I thought how true it was that the world was a delightful place if it were not for the people, and how more than true it was that people were not worth troubling about, and that wise men should set their affections upon nothing smaller than cities, heavenly or otherwise, and countrysides, which are always heavenly. With these reflections, both pious and smug, I put on my hat, groped my way along the dark passage and ran down the five flights of stairs into the Rue St. Léger.4 There was a garden on the opposite side of the street, through which one walked to the University and the more pretentious avenues fronting the Place du Théâtre. Although autumn was well advanced, not a leaf had fallen from the trees, the little shrubs and bushes were touched with pink and crimson, and against the blue sky the trees stood sheathed in gold. On stone benches nursemaids in white cloaks and stiff white caps chattered and wagged their heads like a company of cockatoos, and, up and down, in the sun,

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some genteel babies bowled hoops with a delicate air. What peculiar pleasure it is to wander through a strange city and amuse oneself as a child does, playing a solitary game. ‘Pardon, Madame, mais voulez-vous’ . . . and then the voice faltered and cried my name as though I had been given up for lost times without number; as though I had been drowned in foreign seas, and burnt in American hotel fires, and buried in a hundred lonely graves. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ Before me, not a day changed, not a hairpin altered, stood Violet Burton. I was flattered beyond measure at this enthusiasm, and pressed her cold, strong hand, and said ‘Extraordinary!’ ‘But what are you here for?’ ‘. . . nerves.’ ‘Oh, impossible, I really can’t believe that.’ ‘It is perfectly true,’ I said, my enthusiasm waning. There is nothing more annoying to a woman than to be suspected of nerves of iron. ‘Well, you certainly don’t look it,’ said she, scrutinising me with that direct English frankness that makes one feel as though sitting in the glare of a window at breakfast-time. ‘What are you here for,’ I said, smiling graciously to soften the glare. At that she turned and looked across the lawns, and fidgeted with her umbrella like a provincial actress about to make a confession. ‘I’ – in a quiet affected voice – ‘I came here to forget. . . . But,’ facing me again, and smiling energetically, ‘don’t let’s talk about that. Not yet. I can’t explain. Not until I know you all over again.’ Very solemnly – ‘not until I am sure you are to be trusted.’ ‘Oh, don’t trust me, Violet,’ I cried. ‘I’m not to be trusted. I wouldn’t if I were you.’ She frowned and stared. ‘What a terrible thing to say. You can’t be in earnest.’ ‘Yes, I am. There’s nothing I adore talking about so much as another person’s secret.’ To my surprise, she came to my side and put her arm through mine. ‘Thank you,’ she said gratefully. ‘I think it’s awfully good of you to take me into your confidence like that. Awfully. And even if it were true . . . but no, it can’t be true, otherwise you wouldn’t have told me. I mean it can’t be psychologically true of the same nature to be frank and dishonourable at the same time. Can it? But then . . . I don’t know. I suppose it is possible. Don’t you find that the Russian novelists have made an upheaval of all your conclusions?’ We walked, bras dessus bras dessous, down the sunny path. ‘Let’s sit down,’ said Violet. ‘There’s a fountain quite near this bench. I often come here. You can hear it all the time.’ The faint noise of the water sounded like a half-forgotten tune, half sly, half laughing. ‘Isn’t it wonderful,’ breathed Violet. ‘Like weeping in the night.’

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‘Oh Violet,’ said I, terrified at this turn. ‘Wonderful things don’t weep in the night. They sleep like tops and “know nothing more till again it is day”.’ She put her arm over the back of the bench and crossed her legs. ‘Why do you persist in denying your emotions? Why are you ashamed of them?’ she demanded. ‘I’m not. But I keep them tucked away, and only produce them very occasionally, like special little pots of jam, when the people whom I love come to tea.’ ‘There you are again! Emotions and jam! Now, I’m absolutely different. I live on mine. Sometimes I wish I didn’t – but then again I would rather suffer through them – suffer intensely, I mean; go down into the depths with them, for the sake of that wonderful upward swing on to the pinnacles of happiness.’ She edged nearer to me. ‘I wish I could think where I get my nature from,’ she said. ‘Father and Mother are absolutely different. I mean – they’re quite normal – quite commonplace.’ I shook my head and raised my eyebrows. ‘But it is no use fighting it. It has beaten me. Absolutely – once and for all.’ A pause, inadequately filled by the sly, laughing water. ‘Now,’ said Violet, impressively, ‘you know what I meant when I said I came here to forget.’ ‘But I assure you I don’t, Violet. How can you expect me to be so subtle? I quite understand that you don’t wish to tell me until you know me better. Quite!’ She opened her eyes and her mouth. ‘I have told you! I mean – not straight out. Not in so many words. But then – how could I? But when I told you of my emotional nature, and that I had been in the depths and swept up to the pinnacles . . . surely, surely you realised that I was telling you, symbolically. What else can you have thought?’ No young girl ever performs such gymnastic feats by herself. Yet in my experience I had always imagined that the depths followed the pinnacles. I ventured to suggest so. ‘They do,’ said Violet gloomily. ‘You see them, if you look, before and after.’ ‘Like the people in Shelley’s skylark,’5 said I. Violet looked vague, and I repented. But I did not know how to sympathise, and I had no idea of the relative sizes. ‘It was in the summer,’ said Violet. ‘I had been most frightfully depressed. I don’t know what it was. For one thing I felt as though I could not make up my mind to anything. I felt so terribly useless – that I had no place in the scheme of things – and worst of all, nobody who understood me. . . . It may have been what I was reading at the time . . . but I don’t think . . . not entirely. Still one never knows. Does one? And then I met . . . Mr Farr, at a dance –’

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‘Oh, call him by his Christian name, Violet. You can’t go on telling me about Mr Farr and you . . . on the heights.’ ‘Why on earth not? Very well – I met – Arthur. I think I must have been mad that evening. For one thing there had been a bother about going. Mother didn’t want me to, because she said there wouldn’t be anybody to see me home. And I was frightfully keen. I must have had a presentiment, I think. Do you believe in presentiments. . . . I don’t know, we can’t be certain, can we? Anyhow, I went. And he was there.’ She turned a deep scarlet and bit her lip. Oh, I really began to like Violet Burton – to like her very much indeed. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘We danced together seven times and we talked the whole time. The music was very slow – we talked of everything. You know . . . about books and theatres and all that sort of thing at first, and then – about our souls.’ ‘. . . What?’ ‘I said – our souls. He understood me absolutely. And after the seventh dance . . . No, I must tell you the first thing he ever said to me. He said, “Do you believe in Pan?” Quite quietly. Just like that. And then he said, “I knew you did.” Wasn’t that extra-or-din-ary! After the seventh dance we sat out on the landing. And . . . shall I go on?’ ‘Yes, go on.’ ‘He said, “I think I must be mad. I want to kiss you” – and – I let him.’ ‘Do go on.’ ‘I simply can’t tell you what I felt like. Fancy! I’d never kissed out of the family before. I mean – of course – never a man. And then he said: “I must tell you – I am engaged.”’ ‘Well?’ ‘What else is there? Of course I simply rushed upstairs and tumbled everything over in the dressing-room and found my coat and went home. And next morning I made Mother let me come here. I thought,’ said Violet, ‘I thought I would have died of shame.’ ‘Is that all?’ I cried. ‘You can’t mean to say that’s all?’ ‘What else could there be? What on earth did you expect. How extraordinary you are – staring at me like that.’ And in the long pause I heard again the little fountain, half sly, half laughing – at me, I thought, not at Violet. Notes Text: Blue Review, 1: 2, June 1913, pp. 103–9. Published by JMM as ‘Violet’ in SCOS.

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1. KM wrote to JMM on 19 May 1913, in response to his request that she trim her story to a particular length: I’ve nursed the epilogue to no purpose. Every time I pick it up and hear ‘you’ll keep it to six’, I cant cut it. To my knowledge there aren’t any superfluous words: I mean every line of it. I don’t ‘just ramble on’ you know, [. . .] you cant cut it without making an ugly mess somewhere. Im a powerful stickler for form in this style of work. I hate the sort of license that English people give themselves – – to spread over and flop and roll about. I feel as fastidious as though I wrote with acid. All of which will seem, I suppose unconvincing and an exaggeration. [. . .] But I’d rather it wasn’t there at all than sitting in the Blue Review with a broken nose and one ear as though it had jumped into an editorial dog fight. (CLKM, 1, p. 124) 2. Katharine Tynan (1861–1931), Irish author of numerous novels and volumes of poetry. KM had written a verse parody of her rustic enthusiasms in ‘Love Cycle (Spring in the wood!)’, New Age, 9: 25, 19 October 1911, p. 586. 3. ‘Here we go gathering nuts in May [. . .] / On a cold and frosty morning.’ Traditional nursery rhyme. 4. KM stayed at 8 rue Saint-Léger while in Geneva. 5. ‘We look before and after, / And pine for what is not.’ Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Ode to a Skylark’ (1820), ll. 86–7.

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Bains Turcs1 ‘Third storey – to the left, Madame,’ said the cashier, handing me a pink ticket. ‘One moment – I will ring for the elevator.’ Her black satin skirt swished across the scarlet and gold hall, and she stood among the artificial palms, her white neck and powdered face topped with masses of gleaming orange hair – like an over-ripe fungus bursting from a thick, black stem. She rang and rang. ‘A thousand pardons, Madame. It is disgraceful. A new attendant. He leaves this week.’ With her fingers on the bell she peered into the cage as though she expected to see him, lying on the floor, like a dead bird. ‘It is disgraceful!’ There appeared from nowhere a tiny figure disguised in a peaked cap and dirty white cotton gloves. ‘Here you are!’ she scolded. ‘Where have you been? What have you been doing?’ For answer the

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figure hid its face behind one of the white cotton gloves and sneezed twice. ‘Ugh! Disgusting! Take Madame to the third storey!’ The midget stepped aside, bowed, entered after me and clashed the gates to. We ascended, very slowly, to an accompaniment of sneezes and prolonged, half whistling sniffs. I asked the top of the patent leather cap: ‘Have you a cold?’ ‘It is the air, Madame,’ replied the creature, speaking through its nose with a restrained air of great relish, ‘one is never dry here. Third floor – if you please,’ sneezing over my ten-centime tip. I walked along a tiled corridor decorated with advertisements for lingerie and bust improvers – was allotted a tiny cabin and a blue print chemise and told to undress and find the Warm Room as soon as possible. Through the matchboard walls and from the corridor sounded cries and laughter and snatches of conversation. ‘Are you ready?’ ‘Are you coming out now?’ ‘Wait till you see me!’ ‘Berthe – Berthe!’ ‘One moment! One moment! Immediately!’ I undressed quickly and carelessly, feeling like one of a troupe of little schoolgirls let loose in a swimming bath. The Warm Room was not large. It had terra cotta painted walls with a fringe of peacocks, and a glass roof, through which one could see the sky, pale and unreal as a photographer’s background screen. Some round tables strewn with shabby fashion journals, a marble basin in the centre of the room, filled with yellow lilies, and on the long, towel enveloped chairs, a number of ladies, apparently languid as the flowers. . . . I lay back with a cloth over my head, and the air, smelling of jungles and circuses and damp washing made me begin to dream. . . . Yes, it might have been very fascinating to have married an explorer . . . and lived in a jungle, as long as he didn’t shoot anything or take anything captive. I detest performing beasts. Oh . . . those circuses at home . . . the tent in the paddock and the children swarming over the fence to stare at the waggons and at the clown making up with his glass stuck on the waggon wheel – and the steam organ playing the Honeysuckle and the Bee2 much too fast . . . over and over . . . I know what this air reminds me of – a game of follow my leader among the clothes hung out to dry . . . The door opened. Two tall blonde women in red and white check gowns came in and took the chairs opposite mine. One of them carried a box of mandarins wrapped in silver paper and the other a manicure set. They were very stout, with gay, bold faces, and quantities of exquisite whipped fair hair. Before sitting down they glanced round the room, looked the other women up and down, turned to each other, grimaced, whispered something, and one of them said, offering the box, ‘Have a

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mandarin?’ At that they started laughing – they lay back and shook, and each time they caught sight of each other broke out afresh. ‘Ah, that was too good,’ cried one, wiping her eyes very carefully, just at the corners. ‘You and I, coming in here, quite serious, you know, very correct – and looking round the room – and – and as a result of our careful inspection – I offer you a mandarin. No, it’s too funny. I must remember that. It’s good enough for a music hall. Have a mandarin?’ ‘But I cannot imagine,’ said the other, ‘why women look so hideous in Turkish baths – like beef steaks in chemises. Is it the women – or is it the air? Look at that one, for instance – the skinny one, reading a book and sweating at the moustache – and those two over in the corner, discussing whether or not they ought to tell their non-existent babies how babies come – and . . . Heavens! Look at this one coming in. Take the box, dear. Have all the mandarins.’ The newcomer was a short stout little woman with flat, white feet and a black mackintosh cap over her hair. She walked up and down the room, swinging her arms, in affected unconcern, glanced contemptuously at the laughing women and rang the bell for the attendant. It was answered immediately by ‘Berthe’, half naked and sprinkled with soapsuds. ‘Well, what is it, Madame. I’ve no time. . . .’ ‘Please bring me a hand towel,’ said the Mackintosh Cap, in German. ‘Pardon? I do not understand. Do you speak French?’ ‘Non,’ said the Mackintosh Cap. ‘Ber – the!’ shrieked one of the blonde women, ‘have a mandarin. Oh, mon Dieu, I shall die of laughing.’ The Mackintosh Cap went through a pantomime of finding herself wet and rubbing herself dry. ‘Verstehen Sie.’ ‘Mais non, Madame,’ said Berthe, watching with round eyes that snapped with laughter, and she left the Mackintosh Cap, winked at the blonde women, came over, felt them as though they had been a pair of prize poultry, said ‘You are doing very well,’ and disappeared again. The Mackintosh Cap sat down on the edge of a chair, snatched a fashion journal, smacked over the crackling pages and pretended to read and the blonde women leaned back eating the mandarins and throwing the peelings into the lily basin. A scent of fruit, fresh and penetrating, hung on the air. I looked round at the other women. Yes, they were hideous, lying back, red and moist, with dull eyes and lank hair, the only little energy they had vented in shocked prudery at the behaviour of the two blondes. Suddenly I discovered Mackintosh Cap staring at me over the top of her fashion journal, so intently that I took flight and went into the hot room. But in vain! Mackintosh Cap followed after and planted herself in front of me. ‘I know,’ she said, confident and confiding, ‘that you can speak German. I saw it in your face just now. Wasn’t that a scandal about the attendant refusing me a towel? I shall speak to the management

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about that and I shall get my husband to write them a letter this evening. Things always come better from a man, don’t they? No,’ she said, rubbing her yellowish arms, ‘I’ve never been in such a scandalous place – and four francs fifty to pay! Naturally, I shall not give a tip. You wouldn’t, would you? Not after that scandal about a hand towel. . . . I’ve a great mind to complain about those women as well. Those two that keep on laughing and eating. Do you know who they are?’ She shook her head. ‘They’re not respectable women – you can tell at a glance. At least I can, any married woman can. They’re nothing but a couple of street women. I’ve never been so insulted in my life. Laughing at me, mind you! The great big fat pigs like that! And I haven’t sweated at all properly, just because of them. I got so angry that the sweat turned in instead of out; it does in excitement, you know, sometimes, and now instead of losing my cold, I wouldn’t be surprised if I brought on a fever.’ I walked round the hot room in misery pursued by the Mackintosh Cap until the two blonde women came in, and seeing her, burst into another fit of laughter. To my rage and disgust Mackintosh Cap sidled up to me, smiled meaningly, and drew down her mouth. ‘I don’t care,’ she said, in her hideous German voice. ‘I shouldn’t lower myself by paying any attention to a couple of street women. If my husband knew he’d never get over it. Dreadfully particular he is. We’ve been married six years. We come from Salzburg. It’s a nice town. Four children I have living, and it was really to get over the shock of the fifth that we came here. The fifth,’ she whispered, padding after me, ‘was born, a fine healthy child, and it never breathed! Well, after nine months, a woman can’t help being disappointed, can she?’ I moved towards the vapour room. ‘Are you going in there?’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t if I were you. Those two have gone in. They may think you want to strike up an acquaintance with them. You never know, women like that.’ At that moment they came out, wrapping themselves in the rough gowns, and passing Mackintosh Cap like disdainful queens. ‘Are you going to take your chemise off in the vapour room?’ asked she. ‘Don’t mind me, you know. Woman is woman, and besides, if you’d rather, I won’t look at you. I know – I used to be like that. I wouldn’t mind betting,’ she went on savagely, ‘those filthy women had a good look at each other. Pooh! women like that. You can’t shock them. And don’t they look dreadful. Bold and all that false hair. That manicure box one of them had was fitted up with gold. Well, I don’t suppose it was real, but I think it was disgusting to bring it. One might at least cut one’s nails in private, don’t you think? I cannot see,’ she said, ‘what men see in such women. No, a husband and children and a home to look after, that’s what a woman needs. That’s what my husband says. Fancy one of

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these hussies peeling potatoes or choosing the meat! Are you going already?’ I flew to find Berthe and all the time I was soaped and smacked and sprayed and thrown in a cold water tank I could not get out of my mind the ugly, wretched figure of the little German with a good husband and four children railing against the two fresh beauties who had never peeled potatoes nor chosen the right meat. In the anteroom I saw them once again. They were dressed in blue. One was pinning on a bunch of violets, the other buttoning a pair of ivory suède gloves. In their charming feathered hats and furs they stood talking. ‘Yes, there they are,’ said a voice at my elbow. And Mackintosh Cap, transformed, in a blue and white check blouse and crochet collar, with the little waist and large hips of the German woman and a terrible bird nest, which Salzburg doubtless called Reise Hut on her head. ‘How do you suppose they can afford clothes like that? The horrible, low creatures. No, they’re enough to make a young girl think twice.’ And as the two walked out of the anteroom, Mackintosh Cap stared after them, her sallow face all mouth and eyes, like the face of a hungry child before a forbidden table. Notes Text: Blue Review, 1: 3, July 1913, pp. 181–5. SCOS. 1. The third of the ‘Epilogues’. 2. From the stage play Bluebell in Fairyland (1901), by William H. Penn and Albert H. Fitz.

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Old Tar Old Tar1 must have begun building his house when he was about five years old. Every Sunday morning after church his father and he, hand in hand, went for a bit of a stroll while Mother got dinner, up the new road, through a barbed-wire fence, and on to the great green shoulders of Makra Hill.2 There they sat down on the blowing grass and pink ‘fairy trumpets’ or on the white and yellow daisies and dandelions, and while his father had a chew of tobacco, Old Tar (who was very young Tar indeed then) sat quiet and strained his little panting chest against his tight Sunday clothes. Far below, the sea ran with a crashing laugh up Makra beach and slipped back again, stealthy, quiet, and gathered

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together and came again, biting over the rocks and swallowing the sand. They could snuff it in their nostrils and taste it on their lips. There was nothing to be seen to left or right of them but other hill-tops bounded by dark, high masses of bush. Behind them there was the new road leading to Wadesville, and a further drop to the township, Karori; but all that was hidden, and might have been the length of days away. ‘By gum!’ the old man would mutter, lifting his worn head. ‘It’s a durn fine place . . . it’s a place to shake yer lungs out in – yer know, boy, my Pap bought this from the Maoris – he did. Ye–es! Got it off Ole Puhui for a “suit of clothes an’ a lookin’-glass of yer Granmaw’s.” My stars! He had an eye! Larst thing the ole man says to me was – “James,” ’e says, “don’t you be muckin’ about with that bit of land top of Makra Hill. Don’t you sell it. ’And it on,” ’e says, “to you an’ yours.”’ ‘Wot d’you mean?’ asked the little boy one day, sitting, his legs straight out, making finger gloves of the fairy trumpets. ‘Why, wot I mean is – when I’m put away it’ll be yours. See?’ ‘Wot – all this?’ cried the little boy, frightened, clutching the hill, as though he expected it to jump away with him on its back, like a great green camel. ‘All this!’ echoed the father, solemn. ‘All yours – once you’re through the fence.’ Nothing more was said until dinner. He sat with his bib round his neck, drinking tinned soup with Worcester sauce. ‘Pop,’ he said, ‘I’m goin’ to build an ’ouse on my hill. Big as . . .’ and he stretched his arms wide. Tar was an only child. His father was fifty when he was born, and his mother forty-three. They were strict, upright people, owners of the Wadesville general store and post office. They did brisk business, and every Saturday night Tar helped his father fasten the wooden shutter on which was printed ‘Closed in God’s name. Those whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.’3 He was brought up so severely that his animal spirits never bubbled at all, and he lived in a sober manner, behind his mother’s skirts and his father’s counter. The first thing that he remembered was that Sunday morning when his father told him Makra Hill would be his, and the telling took such strange hold of him that there was no room in his mind for anything else. All his plans and plots, all his games and dreams were of what he would do when he had it, and of the fine house he’d build. Sometimes it would be bigger than Government House in Wellington, with its hundred bedrooms and fine red carpets, with palm trees growing out of them, and other times it would be a little house, just room enough to hold him and ‘something to set’. Then it would be a farm with all animals on it – even white pigs. At fourteen his father put him behind the counter – a little, pale, freckled boy, with a flop of black hair falling into his eyebrows. After the shop was shut he’d pull off his apron and get a hunk of bread and jam and be off at a run, not stopping to take

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breath or to look this side or that until he reached the windy hill with the brimming sea below. Every stone of the hill he thought he knew; every pocket and cranny he marched over, lord and master. Swelled up with pride he’d dig with his heel: ‘I’ll have me front door here, and the rain tanks here, under the balcony scuppers.’ And on winter nights in the iron chapel when the rain beat with a million hammers on the roof and walls, and the preacher with a stuck-out beard boomed, ‘An’ the mountains shall skip like r-rams and the little hills like young sheep,’4 something jumped in Tar, like a flare in the dark. He saw himself running away from the place and through the fence on the top of it. And the Day of Judgement was come and the hill leaping. . . . When Tar was twenty his mother died. She was chopping up a candle-box in the backyard, and suddenly the tomahawk fell from her hand and she dropped. Just like that. Not a word. He thought quick, ‘If it’d been Pop I’d have had my hill – here,’ and hid away the money she left him and began to save every penny for the house. He married at thirty a quiet girl who bossed him. And the business grew and grew, and by-and-by they were well off. They had to add a room now and again at the back of the shop for the children. ‘Oh, why can’t you build a nice place somewhere, Father?’ the wife used to scold. ‘You wait, my girl,’ said Tar, his eyes suddenly fierce. At last, when he was fifty, and his father ninety-five, the old man stretched out, creaked his bones, and died. That was on a Sunday night. Monday morning, Old Tar hitched the buggy and drove off to Karori, like a man drunk or to his wedding-feast. He wore his best black suit, he cut at the trees as he passed, and greeted people with a grin and a chuckle, and stopped at the builder’s. ‘Look ’ere, Mr. Stubbs. Will you come back with me? There’s a piece of ground I want to show you. I’ve decided to build.’ Not until they were half-way home he remembered to tell Stubbs the old man had gone. All Wadesville and Karori watched the building of Tar’s house. Parties drove up to see it, and picnicked on the piles of yellow, sweetsmelling wood. The store brimmed over with customers, and Mrs. Tar, in black, with her troop of black alpaca children, turned into a fine lady, and talked of nothing but the hinconvenience she’d suffered living in the shop for the sake of her ’usband’s father and his sentimentalness. Old Tar, after one day’s burst of excitement, kept his grim joy to himself. But he was mad inside, so hot that he felt all the hard years in him melting away. He spent half the day with the workmen, and a great big barn began to grow out of the scooped and jagged hole dug in the side of the hill. It grew quickly. The stairs were up. The flooring was done upstairs. He could creep up at evening to the front room and look through the window-hole at the sea. He would go up and take a lantern and walk from room to room, silent as a cat,

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feeding his delight. . . . And at last it was finished. Old Tar’s house, painted white with green ‘pickings’, reared up ready at the top of the hill. ‘We’ll make a party an’ all go up this evening,’ said his wife, ‘an’ have a fair look’. ‘No you don’t,’ said Old Tar. ‘I got to be there. Business. Measuring. I got to have my ’ead quiet. You kin go termorrow.’ She shrugged and obeyed. Tar left the shop early. The setting sun was drawing from the earth the strong, sweet scents of day. There was no wind; just a breeze rippled over the grass and shook the manuka flowers, like tiny white stars down the yellow clay banks of the new road. He walked slowly. No need to get through the fence – the fence was down and carted away. Heavy ruts were carved in the side of the hill, and there was a path to the front door strewn already with a load of white shells. The big white house, with all its hollow eyes, glared at Old Tar. ‘It’s big,’ he thought, and he said as though he prayed, ‘Oh, Lord, it is big!’ The builders had left the key under the verandah. He felt and found it, and let himself in. At first the house was very still, then it creaked a little, and he heard a tap drip. It smelt strongly of paint and varnish and fine ripe wood. A pencil ray of sun shone across the stairs. As he watched, it shifted and disappeared. The sun had set. Old Tar, tip-toe in his creaking boots, walked through his dream, up and down, in and out, prying like a woman, conscious as a lover, wondering and touching things, and knocking them with his knuckles to hear how thick they sounded. At last he felt a bit tired. He sat down on the stairs. It had begun to grow dusky. The shadows of the door lay across the front hall, sharp and long. He took off his hard hat and leaned his head with the boyish flop of hair against the stair-rail. In the quiet he heard the sea beat, beat up, and then he heard the wind, very slow, snuffling round the house like a lonely dog. ‘Ooh Hee! Oooh Hee!’ it sounded. ‘A rare, sad noise,’ thought Old Tar, shaking his head to it. ‘Sounds as if it’d lost something an’ couldn’t find it again.’ ‘Lost for evermore,’ and the sad words fell into his quiet heart and started strange, uneasy ripples. Sitting by himself like that, he felt queer and frightened, somehow. ‘Ooh Hee! Ooh Hee!’ sounded the wind, rattling the window sashes. ‘Tain’t like it used to sound up here,’ he thought. ‘Tain’t like it was in the old man’s time.’ ‘Shake out yer lungs, me lad,’ he heard old Pop say. Clear as a dream Old Tar saw his Pop and himself sitting where the house stood now, he with the pink, sticky flowers in his fingers, the hill shining and the sea shining below. And then, like a man in a dream, he took off his boots, and stole down into the hall, out of the house. It was getting darker every minute. Thin clouds flew over an ashen sky. The grass between his feet, Old Tar stepped back from the house and looked up at it. He saw in the dusky light the pits the workmen had dug in his hill.

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He saw the great trampled patches the timber piles had made, and he saw, between him and the sea, the white house perched, the big white nest for his wife and her brood on the top of his hill. As though he saw it for the first time. Old Tar muttered in a strange voice, ‘Wot’s it doing there – wot’s it for?’ and ‘Oh, Lord, wot ’ave I done – wot ’ave I done, Lord?’ A long time Old Tar stood there, while the dark sifted over him and the house paled and stretched up to the sky. His feet seemed to freeze into the cold grass of the hill, and dark thoughts flew across his mind, like clouds, never quiet, never breaking. Notes Text: Saturday Westminster Gazette, 42: 6365, 25 October 1913, p. 9. 1. Printed with its original subtitle ‘A Karori story’ in the NZ Times on 11 December. KM drew on the real-life Jack Tar, a far less eccentric man than is portrayed here, whose large and isolated house stood on the hill at the end of the Karori Road. 2. Makara Hill, often pronounced as KM spelled it, separating the end of Karori valley where she lived as a child at ‘Chesney Wold’, and the wild southern coast. 3. Hebrews, 12:6. 4. Psalms, 114:4.

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Maata Chapter I The sound of rain woke Rhoda Bendall. It fell, quick and sharp, through the open window on to the polished floor. ‘Dear me’, she thought, ‘it’s raining’, and she lay still, mild and sleepy, listening to the quick patter. Every morning the effort to get up seemed greater and more dreadful. She dropped asleep like a tired beast dropping into a dark soft pit and her heart turned faint before the struggle to raise up this long, heavy body once again. ‘I must wake up. I must. It’s raining. The curtains will be quite wet, and so will the floor.’ She opened her eyes and stared into the dusky room. Her clothes lay in the middle of the floor, fan-shaped, white and grey. ‘They are like the plumage of some great bird’ she thought, staring at the untidy bundle. ‘I am going to get up now and shut the window.’ But she did not move. Nothing helped her. There was no sound from the house. Her room, at the very

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top, and overlooking garden strips and the backs of other houses, was remote as an empty nest in a bare tree. ‘I wonder what the time is. I ought to have a clock in this room: that would be a great help. It’s dark but I’m sure it’s late.’ A little puff of damp air blew in with the rain, making her shiver. She turned, sighed and sat up. At the moment of raising herself Rhoda Bendall remembered. She flung out of bed, her eyes dilated, her nostrils quivered. Stretching out her arms, smiling in ecstasy, she staggered forward. ‘Maata, my beloved, Maata, my adored one. It is your day – today we meet again.’ She leaned out of the window, feeling the rain whip up her sleepy blood. ‘A-ah’, she breathed, in a surge of ecstasy. ‘I am baptized. I am baptized into a new day.’ Down in the garden the ivy wall gleamed like bronze; some birds fluffed their feathers in the broken fountain bowl. She could see each shining spear of grass. She saw herself walking down there in her white gown, with flowing hair – a saint in a holy picture of a garden, glorying and triumphant. ‘Maata! Maata! Can you hear me? My treasure, my beloved one, the day is beautiful with you. Your breath is in this wind and the same rain falls on us both. On us both. Oh God, bring her quickly. Bring her quickly, God. Yes; I think you must,’ crooned Rhoda Bendall, walking up and down, ‘for she is of you. She is your spirit, your essence. She is God in woman.’ In rapture she stopped before the mirror and stared in to it, dreamily smiling. ‘I wish you could see me now, Maata mine. I am almost beautiful. I look – I look –’ and she parted her hair, holding it tight to her face with her large hands ‘– like a Botticelli. Very nearly worthy of you. I have changed very much. I think, my soul, I am more what you would have me – a strong, silent force of Love.’ A picture of Maata stood on the writing desk and before it a shell with some incense dust. Rhoda kneeled down, her arms along the desk, her chin in her hands. ‘Good morning, beloved’ she whispered, rocking to and fro on heavy unbreaking waves of love. ‘Why – so – sad? There is a shadow on your brow and eyes, and your mouth’ she said, drawing her lips along the backs of her hands, ‘has kissed sorrow.’ She crouched back. ‘Maata has never kissed me on the mouth, but I know what her lips feel like – they feel like carnations. I can see them’, she fluttered her eyelids – ‘exquisite, exquisite, every little curve. Do not be sad, my darling. Let me keep away from you everything that is not beautiful and fitting. You are perfection. How can you help being hurt by this world, Maata. It is my destiny to serve you. I was dead when you found me and without you I am nothing. Let me serve.’ While she pleaded a strange sensation of blind, tireless strength filled every particle of her. ‘Yes, Yes,’ she stammered, ‘I know you are near me, beloved. And I am here, waiting. Let me serve. Oh, Maata, I can tell you now there is only one thing left that has any

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terror for me . . . it is that you have grown too strong to need me. You are so terribly strong.’ She cringed before the picture and opened her hands. ‘I cannot follow you on to the heights. Stoop sometimes to me. I know you cannot belong wholly to me – the great world needs you – but I am all yours.’ She sat quiet while the ecstasy ebbed away, leaving her cold and hungry, with all the long hours to wear through, somehow, until the late afternoon when Maata would arrive. ‘I must go and find the time’ she decided. But she did not move. ‘I don’t feel strong enough to bear the ordinary world today – I shrink from it. Not until I have seen you again, Maata. You see, Maata, it’s two years. What a long breath of you I had to take to last me two whole years!’ Her slow mind began rebuilding the parting with Maata. They had taken a four-wheeler to the station because of the luggage. Maata’s voice: ‘The old ramshackle, Rhody. It’s like sitting on the lap of an old clothes woman.’ It had been a lovely day. Virginia creeper moved over the houses. ‘Look at my flags, Rhody – all bloody.’ And a great many people at the station – crowds and crowds – such noise and confusion. And through it all Maata had laughed. ‘I shall always be the same, Rhody – I can’t help it. Don’t be angry with me. It’s just at the last moment anything makes one happy – just at the moment of jumping you aren’t frightened any more – only terribly happy. Happy. And I’m coming back. Listen.’ She put her little warm hands on Rhoda’s shoulders. ‘I’m coming back. Yes, believe me. I’ll be back in 2 years – you do believe me.’ And she had answered ‘I have faith, beloved, but I can’t believe. I’m too broken just now.’ Remembering, Rhoda struck her right palm with her clenched fist. ‘Fool. What weakness!’ She got up from the floor, dressed in the grey and white clothes and braided her hair round her head, burning with scorn for herself. ‘And I’ve forgotten to shut the window – the floor is soaking. Oh, well – it doesn’t matter.’ She hesitated, stepped to the window, stopped and turned to the door. ‘No – it’s no matter. Little, little trivial things. And besides, why shouldn’t rain come in through the windows. It has as much right as wind or scent, surely – surely.’ All the way down the gloomy stairs, past her Mother’s bedroom door, past the deserted silent rooms, she carried the silly thought as a weapon against her dread. In the breakfast room the clock pointed to half past eleven. So late! She hovered over the untidy breakfast table and wished, as she always wished, that she had the courage to ask for some fresh tea. But it was unreasonable to be two hours late. ‘I will drink all the milk instead,’ she decided, ‘and eat. Yes – eat.’ She cut some rounds of bread, buttered them thickly and spread them with jam, and ate, stuffing her mouth full, washing it down with milk.

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‘Dare I go on, dare I?’ The same battle was fought each morning between her violent bodily hunger and a wavering sense of shame. ‘I wonder why I have to eat so much. I suppose it is because I am so big and heavy. I never have enough to eat – never.’ She dropped some lumps of sugar in the milk jug and ate them with a spoon. ‘Now I shall just have one more round of bread and butter to take away the taste of the sugar.’ As she finished the last crust the housemaid came in. ‘Telegram for you, Miss Rhoda.’ ‘Thank you, Nellie.’ She tore it out of the envelope. ‘Pouring with rain. Arrive Charing X 4.30. Love. Maata.’ A–Ah! It had come. How like her to have put pouring with rain first – just like her. She read and reread it, walking up the stairs, thrust it into her blouse, took her hat and gloves and purse and walked out of the house to spend the day buying flowers for Maata’s new room and walking about and idly and slowly, slowly dragging through the hours until it was time to go to the station. Chapter II They walked up and down the platform – a curious couple. Philip very tall and thin in a buttoned frock-coat and top hat; Maisie very short and fat in a blue sailor suit and a wide straw hat with a wreath round it. She held her brother’s arm and half danced and gazed up at him with big eyes of admiration. ‘Oh Pip, you do look fine – you look simply ripping. Much the handsomest man here. Ah! I wish you always wore a frock coat. And that blue tie. It makes your eyes all blacky.’ He gave her arm a squeeze and laughed at her. ‘Don’t, kid – you’re making me blush. People’ll think we’re a newly married couple.’ ‘Pip!’ Maisie shrieked with joy. ‘Don’t be so absurd. I haven’t even got my hair tied back. And look at my skirt! Very short. I wish you could make Mum lengthen my skirts. She won’t realise I’m fourteen. It’s awful to wear these short things.’ ‘Well you are a Miss Blinge. If you could see your knees you wouldn’t want to wear any skirt at all.’ ‘What do you mean? My knees are different to other people’s are they?’ ‘Aren’t they? You look at most girls – they’re pigeon-kneed. Knees turn in like this.’ He stopped and showed her. ‘A fright. You’ve got knees like a little boy statue.’ ‘Have I?’ said Maisie, very pleased. ‘Well, fancy! I never knew.’ The station platform was crowded with people waiting for the boat train to come in. They stood together in little groups, the women

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talking with a great show of animation, the men silent and bored looking. In and out among them trundled the porters. ‘By your leave. By your leave. IF you please!’ The clarion of voices that seemed to resolve curiously, if you listened, into one insistent strident voice, was broken by the sound of bells and whistles and the shuffling blaring noise of the trains. White smoke floated up from somewhere and hung below the station roof like misty fires, dissolved, came again in swaying wreaths. ‘Wonderfully beautiful,’ thought Philip, ‘and so full of life.’ He pointed it out to Maisie. ‘Look, girlie, look at that smoke.’ But Maisie was tortured with impatience. ‘What’s the time, Philip, what’s the time. Why doesn’t that stupid old train come in. I’ll never come and wait for anybody again – as long as I live – never.’ ‘It won’t be long now’ and he said, to distract her, ‘Bet you won’t know Maata again!’ ‘Do you mean I’ll have forgotten what she looks like? You can’t mean that!’ ‘Yes I do. It’s five years since you saw her. If you jump back five times it makes you only nine.’ They stood still together and he put his hand on her soft little shoulder and rubbed his fingers against her neck and tiny ear. ‘You can’t think what a sweet you were then, kid.’ ‘Tell me’ she said, basking like a kitten in his warm love. ‘Well, you were only about up to your own shoulder, and your hair was fairer than it is now – not half so apricotty – more like butter beans. Mum used to tie it back with two yellow bows. And you had a white cashmere dress with a yellow sash and tan stockings and tan shoes and a paper umbrella with canaries flying round it. And you used to walk up and down Kitchener Road and then Hal and I knew to come strolling up pretending to be two photographers.’ ‘Yes, go on’ said Maisie. ‘Oh, I remember.’ The platform was getting very crowded. The train was expected. The pitch of the excited voices rose higher and stronger. Some broad beams of late sun struck through the glass roof of the station. Philip’s heart began to beat quickly. ‘Go on’ said Maisie. ‘We would come up to you and then suddenly start back – like this –’ He started and put his hand to his heart, staring at Maisie. ‘And then we would take off our hats and say “Pardon Mamselle. May we ’ave ze honour of photographing you. We are ze court photographers of ze Kaiser of Chermany on tour.” And then we’d set up the camera. Three clothes props and a soap box and the bit of black velvet off the top of the piano, and you would pose against old Mr Williams’ gate that had two stone jars on top of it. I took the photographs and

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Hal used to arrange you. “Ver’ good, ver’ good,”’ said Philip, acting the part. ‘ “A leetle to the left foreground. Ze parasol oblique to foreshorten ze elbow –”’ A bell clanged. There was a cry of ‘Here comes the train.’ ‘Philip, Philip – the train – look, look.’ She jumped up and down, tugging his arm. A huge express swung into the station, slowed down, stopped. There were heads at every window – hundreds it seemed to Maisie. ‘We’ll never find her’ she wailed, ‘we’ll never find her, Phil.’ ‘Yes we will. Here, take my hand. We’ll run up and down. I’ve got an idea. Take off your hat. She’ll see your hair.’ Up and down they ran, dodging the greeting, kissing groups. No sign, no sign. Suddenly Maisie felt two hands round her neck. She turned and was caught up tight, trembling, into Maata’s arms. ‘Maata, Maata, is it really you?’ and a laughing voice between kisses stammered ‘You darling, you darling, I knew you by your hair.’ For ever afterwards Philip had only to shut his eyes and he saw the two again – in a world of people – Maata stooping and Maisie given to her – he felt again that furious unbearable expectation until Maata straightened up and turned to him her warm beautiful face. She was dressed in grey. She wore a little hat with a wing in it and a dark silky veil pushed up just above her eyebrows. A bright colour shone beneath her brown skin, her lips were trembling, but her eyes laughed. Simply from access of amazement he could say nothing but ‘Yes, you’ve come, you’ve come’ and press her hands and laugh back at her. He had never in life imagined anyone could look so radiant and so triumphant. ‘Are you really Phil?’ she said, in a shy voice, speaking very slowly. ‘I – I wouldn’t have known you. Oh – yes I would. When you smile – oh yes – but you’ve changed – changed –. He’s very nearly frightening, isn’t he Maisie?’ But Maisie had turned aside and seen Rhoda Bendall, standing apart, very pale, with a thin smile on her lips, waiting. She determined to capture Maata before Rhoda could speak to her. ‘Maata you’re coming home with us now, aren’t you? They’re all expecting you – we promised to bring you.’ ‘Look here, dear girl, what about your luggage,’ asked Philip, grave and practical all of a sudden. At that Maata’s laughter bubbled up again, so sweet and delicious to hear that it started Pip and Maisie off, and the three, looking at each other, laughed like little children. ‘Of course, my luggage. I’d forgotten all about it. I’m a nice person to travel about all over the wicked world. It’s in the van I think. Which is the van – back or front – I can’t remember.’ ‘Why’ said Philip, waving his hand, ‘here’s Miss Bendall.’

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What an extraordinary thing! How could it have happened. From the moment she had found Maisie and Phil Maata had quite forgotten Rhoda – forgotten all about her. ‘Rhody dear’, kissing Rhoda’s cold cheek. ‘Where have you been? Have you been looking for me all this time? I’d – I’d forgotten all about you.’ At the gay cruel words Rhoda grew paler and when she spoke it was in a rising[?] affected voice to hide her horrible agitation. ‘I didn’t see you at first and then – you had found Maisie and Mr Close. So I ran after your luggage. Two big yellow boxes and a hat box and a roll of rugs – I had them put in a hansom. It’s waiting. Was there anything else?’ ‘No, that was all. Oh Rhody dear how wonderful of you to have found them. Let me see. Now what had I better do – –’ ‘Come to us, come to us’ said Maisie, ‘and let Miss Bendall take your luggage.’ ‘What do you want to do?’ said Pip. She looked at him while she spoke. ‘I really ought to go off with Rhoda now and see my new rooms and unpack a little and come to you for supper if I may? Otherwise I shall have to go back late at night into a strange room, not even knowing where the matches are kept, Maisie. Yes, that’s my best plan.’ ‘But the cake,’ said Maisie. ‘There’s a cake with your name on it for tea.’ ‘We’ll hide it till supper,’ Philip consoled her. ‘Yes, that’s best. You’ll – come as soon as you can, Maata.’ ‘As soon as I can,’ she answered. ‘Where’s the hansom, Rhoda?’ ‘Here quite close.’ Rhoda and Maata were alone, side by side in the jolting, swaying hansom. ‘We have a long way to go,’ said Rhoda. ‘Have you enough room? Are you quite comfortable?’ Fearing to touch Maata she squeezed up [in] a corner and tried to stop the exhausted trembling of her body. Those moments at the station hurt her still. Her throat ached and tears pressed in her eyeballs. Courage, courage, she said to herself. You have her – she is here. ‘Ah’ breathed Maata, lying back and folding her hands. ‘It’s good to be here at last, Rhody, and look – the sun’s shining. Has it been raining all day?’ ‘I’m – I’m not quite sure. I think it has.’ Rhoda frowned at herself, but Maata did not seem to notice the stupid reply. She went on questioning Rhoda. Had Rhoda found her a nice room, was there a piano, how much did it cost, was the landlady pleasant, what did it look out on? And her manner and voice were so composed – almost

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languid – that Rhoda became calm. Her heart lifted and began to feed on joy. She wanted to be out of the hansom with Maata in her room. To help Maata off with her coat and hat, to do all the little things for her, to see her, to watch her move. All the while she drank that lovely voice. ‘We are nearly there now. Look, here is the river’, as though she had put the river there so that Maata might care for it. ‘Your sitting room faces the river. In the winter the birds come right up to the window – sometimes they fly through, so Mrs Banks your landlady told me.’ Maata said, ‘I like rivers.’ The hansom slowed down before a big grey stone house. ‘This is your key’ said Rhoda. ‘Your rooms are on the first floor. Will you go straight up and let me settle with the man and see about the luggage.’ Maata gave Rhoda her purse. On the first floor, when she had finished with the boxes she knocked at the sitting room door. ‘Come in.’ Maata stood at the window. She had not even raised her veil or taken off her gloves. ‘You – you do not like it,’ stammered Rhoda. ‘You’re disappointed.’ For answer, Maata stepped forward and laid her hands on Rhoda’s shoulders. ‘Thank you my friend’ she said. The sitting room was a studio, scantily furnished, with brown paper walls and black paint. It was very pleasant in a detached, unlittered way. A little fire burned in the grate and some pots of flowering heath, pink and white, gave it a still, chaste charm. A bedroom, a kitchen completed the tiny flat. Each bore evidence of Rhoda’s devotion. There was even hot water in the wash basin covered in a pink and white towel, and a tea tray was ready in the kitchen and the kettle sang on a pinch of gas. ‘Yes, oh yes,’ said Maata, walking about, ‘I shall be happy here. This is quite right, Rhody. It’s all lovely. And when I have my piano in the studio and cover the couch and have my books and pictures about it will be a good room to work in. There – take my bags – undo their locks and give me what I want. I’m going to wash and change into that green dress near the top.’ Rhoda knelt on the floor and handled her darling’s possessions as though these were all – every one – more precious than gold. Then she crouched back watching Maata step out of her grey skirt, slip off her blouse, and, standing before the mirror, let down her torrent of black silky hair. There was not very much light in the bedroom and Maata’s skin flamed like yellow roses. The scent of her, like musk and spice, was on the air. When she brushed her hair she talked to Rhoda, to that silent adoring image crouched on the floor with wide eyes and pale lips. At last Maata, shaking her powder puff, noticed.

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‘What is the matter dear?’ she said, and smiled at Rhoda who clasped her hands and smiled back. ‘I never dreamed – no I never ever dreamed that you were so beautiful, Maata. I never ever dreamed that your voice was so wonderful nor your movements – every supple movement – nor your skin so gleaming nor your hair – your – your [. . .] hair. I’d forgotten or just dimly remembered the way your little hands move, so sure and dainty, my little angel – everything about you – – –’ But Maata sat forward and took Rhoda’s heavy head in her hands and laughed. ‘You mustn’t flatter me so, darling, really not’ and she said, still laughing, ‘Oh, it’s so good to be spoiled, Rhody! But help me to dress now and bring me some of those violets out of the sitting room. I’ll wear them.’ ‘Yes, dear.’ ‘Thank you. How nice to feel your capable hands again. Were you surprised that Maisie and Philip were down at the station.’ ‘Yes, perhaps a little,’ said Rhoda. ‘I telegraphed them from Plymouth. I don’t know why exactly but you know they are such darlings – all of them – and they and you are my only people in London.’ ‘Of course, dear, I quite understand.’ ‘And then, at Plymouth today, England suddenly stopped being Queen Victoria and turned into a most unworthy creature and I got homesick for some of my own people.’ Rhoda brought her the violets. ‘I suppose you’re dreadfully disappointed that I’m going out tonight’ said Maata. ‘But I can come with you to the gate can’t I?’ said Rhoda. ‘Of course you can. But tell me – are you disappointed?’ Rhoda looked down into Maata’s half shut eyes. ‘I do not allow myself to be disappointed. You are not to bother your wise head over me and my concerns. I am here to make you happy and to be with you when you want me, but I am not here to be like any other member of the world – just considered – because –’ Her eyes brimmed and an expression of tragic caresses came into her face. ‘Don’t you understand, little sweetheart, I love you – – – That merely to see you, to be able to – to put my hand on your coat like that and know it is warm with you – – –’ *

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T. sat at the piano striking vague empty chords with the soft pedal down and watching with narrowed brilliant eyes like a malicious elf. She pushed open the iron gate that jarred on the loose pebbles as it swung back. The house was in darkness, but standing on the doorstep she heard the faint voice of T’s violin. Sadder than her heart

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the sound, and like her heart speaking so faintly from behind closed doors in a darkened house. She paused on the step, her hand touching the doorbell. Even then it was not [too] late to run away – yes it was too late. He might not love her, might not have need of her, but she loved him – she had terrible need of him – he understood. By his presence and quiet gestures, by that almost tragic dignity that wrapt his youth in its folds, by that mysterious vibration in his quiet voice, by his childish laughter and his quaint delight and wonder in the simplest things, by his hair and hands, his very clothes – oh God, by everything about him, every atom, every particle. What on earth was she doing? She looked up at the dark house, shivering. How long had she been standing there. What was the use of this absurd litany? Had anybody seen her – had she spoken aloud? She rang the bell sharply. O believe me he does not care for you. You are nothing to him – now or ever. Grant your sorrow worthy in accepting it with dignity. Be brave – courage! So the poor child, standing pale and cold in the gathering dusk, all the youth drained out of her face. Jenny opened the door smiling and voluble [?], and at the same moment Maisie danced into the hall, her wild curls flying about her, and flung herself into Maata’s arms. ‘You’re late, you’re late, you bad wicked child – you said you’d be here at five and I’m angry and offended with you, you darling.’ Maata felt half suffocated by the strain of the child’s little eager body, her smothering kisses, her fumbling [?] hands – and yet it comforted her – – it was something real and human and safe. ‘I couldn’t get here any earlier’ she said. ‘O Maisie, how wonderful your hair is, dear. You’ve been washing [it].’ The child flushed with joy, urged at a little blue ribbon and shook her curls into wilder confusion. ‘I washed it this afternoon and it’s not dry yet. I’m finishing it by the kitchen fire. Come downstairs, mummy’s there, she’s making an apple pie for dinner and I’m going to prick your name in the pastry with a fork. Can’t take your arm going down the stairs, it is too narrow – I’ll go first though – it’s one of my flying days. I can jump for steps at a time in the dark even.’ ‘O be careful’ said Maata. The child’s happy laughter answered her. In the bright hot kitchen Mrs Close, an apron tied over her black dress, shook the rolling pin at Maata. ‘No,’ she said, ‘you shan’t kiss me. Don’t come near me, you bad girl. You’ve broken your promise – you said you’d come early. Get away. Go and play with Maisie in the dining room. We won’t speak to you will we Jenny?’ But Maata made a dive forward, caught her round the waist and hugged her. ‘O you blessed angel, I’m glad to be here. I’ve been such

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a cross grumpy miserable pig all day – nearly sat on the doorstep and put my coat over my head and cried before coming in this evening. Be nice to me – give me a little bit of the apple before it’s cooked.’ She looked round the room, a bright colour grew in her cheeks. ‘I love this kitchen – I’m all cured.’ And she believed it. The tide had turned with a swing that turned her up breathless. She looked at the big black stove, shedding so bright a light from behind the open bars, at all the homely cooking things on the table, at the blue dinner set on the dresser, at Jenny peeling potatoes with a penny book of fortune-telling propped against the water bowl, at everything – so real and simple and human. ‘Perhaps you’ve caught a little chill on the liver,’ suggested Mrs Close, dusting the squat lump of dough with the flourcaster and kneading it smoothly with her quick little hands. ‘A nice hot dinner will put you right, won’t it Maisie? Now Jenny, my girl, hurry up with the spuds and hide your book before Miss Maata gets hold of it or we won’t hear a word more out of her – – – what have you been doing all day dearie – – – Maisie, take a peep at the joint. Use the oven cloth, child.’ ‘I’ – Maata sat on the table edge and nibbled her quarter of apple. She had done nothing at all, she reflected, except go deeper and deeper. Aloud: ‘O, working out a story, dabbling and worrying my foggy little brain. Is Father in?’ ‘No, he and Hal have gone for a walk. They won’t be back till seven. I made the boy take the old man out for an airing, they were both getting so snappy, but he did not want to go because you were coming.’ ‘Bless his heart. How many miracles has he performed since yesterday?’ ‘He finished his quintet this morning,’ cried Maisie, ‘and do you know who he’s dedicated it to – you and Philip.’ ‘Not really, Maisie.’ At his name, spoken so carelessly, her heart quivered in her breast. ‘True as death. Pip said it was an en-ig-matical honour. What does that mean Mummy?’ ‘Don’t know, my dear – ask Maata. Maata, you mustn’t sit about in your coat. Go upstairs and take your things off in my bedroom – there is a peep of gas and a clean brush on the dressing table.’ ‘I’ll go with you and turn it up,’ said Maisie. Half way up the stairs Mrs Close called to the child. ‘Come back here Maisie. You haven’t time. You must set the table, there’s a good girl. You’ll have Maata all the evening.’ ‘O Mother.’

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‘Do as you’re told, darling,’ whispered Maata, only half [wondering] why she did not plead for the child. ‘Well, well don’t be long. I’ve got such lots to tell you.’ At the corner of the staircase the plaster figure of Penelope1 holding the red gas globe in her hand. The face seemed to be smiling at Maata, seemed to guess her secret, to know quite well why she wished to run upstairs alone. And in the bedroom with the flickering gaslight on wall and ceiling Maata smiled too – the blind smile of the plaster figure – she saw the resemblance in the glass. Why not? She would surprise him just for one moment, would say ‘Good evening’ and run down to the others. Louder now the voice of the violin from the room above and miles away the warm bright kitchen – the staircase a dark journey separating her from the others leading him up to her. Even in that moment alone her sorrow returned, she saw herself playing a game with Maisie and the Mother, she knew that under her laughter – give it one moment’s being – her heart still cried and was lonely. Lightly, on tiptoe she crept up the stairs. She stood a moment outside his door, she heard him pacing slowly up and down as he played, she turned the handle of the door, slipped in, stood her back against it. Philip started – she heard his quick breath. Then he nodded and went on playing a moment, never looking at her. The wailing music filled the room. There was no light except a pale gleaming from the window space, and his long shadow on the ceiling like a cross. She could see the outlines of the pictures on the dark walls, some flowers in a glass on the mantelpiece. With the frightened eyes of a little captive child, with the eager eyes of a lover she strained to see more of the room. The violin case lying open on the white bed was like a little coffin. On the table by the window she saw his books heaped. She was leaning against his coat that hung on the door peg. All these vague thing[s] seemed clearer than his figure – he was just the shadow of herself, pacing up and down – the shadow she had lost or never found that cried her sorrow. Suddenly he took his violin from his chin, wrapped it in a silk handkerchief, laid it in the case, clipped the bow through the loops, locked it up and stood the case in a corner. He came over to her, running his hands through his hair as though to free his thoughts, and stood before her smiling. Still she did not speak or move. He fingered her coat, and his smile deepened. ‘I thought you were a real ghost, girl’ he said. ‘Come over to the window and sit down.’ ‘Pip, have I disturbed you?’ ‘No – I’ve finished. Have you been here long?’ She sat down, leaned her elbows on the table and cupped her chin in her hands. He took a pillow from the narrow bed, propped

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it behind him and sat down, knees crossed, one hand on the table beating a finger exercise. They were quiet again. She looked out at the dark street and the tree branches that grew along the wall of the house opposite and seemed to grow outwards instead of upwards as though they strained to hold one another in the dark. She heard the ticking of his watch in his waistcoat pocket and [at] that she looked up at him and laughed. ‘What a very loud watch.’ ‘Only just now,’ he said gravely. ‘There’s a sort of secret conspiracy between it and the heart it beats over. What have you been doing all day?’ She turned slightly away from him. She meant to speak quite lightly, to prevaricate. But the truth trembled against the gates of her lips – forced its way through. ‘I – have been unhappy.’ ‘So have I.’ He spoke very simply. ‘I knew you had been.’ The words came from her in a breathless broken voice. ‘You know sometimes I feel I am pursued by a sort of Fate – you know – by an impending disaster that spreads its wings over my heart – or maybe only the shadow of its wings – but it’s so black and terrible I can’t describe it. Sometimes I think it is [. . .], foreboding, telling me that what I am facing in the future – is –’ she shrugged her shoulders – ‘just darkness.’ His hand on the table lay still – he clenched it. She saw the thin pale hand and to that she spoke as though it held her in its grip and forced from her . . . ‘It seems so ridiculous, so childish, to say with the countless thousands – I am misunderstood – and [. . .] – my youth I suppose – there the fact is. I feel like a prisoner condemned to penal servitude, without the option of – anything more sudden. I do not know who has condemned me, tried me, and so I – to all intents and purposes – walk abroad with people who love me and are good to me – miserable myself. Whenever I remember that I am quite quite apart from them – the real me I mean, Pip – there aren’t any words. I can’t explain myself.’ He got up, leaned against the window frame and looked down at her. ‘Don’t trouble,’ he said. ‘I can tell you – in your words in my own expression – “a lonely prisoner” – that is what I am, that is what you are.’ She nodded. ‘But’ she said, comforted, inexpressibly comforted by him, ‘don’t think I always feel this way. I think that when I am happy I am more happy than anybody. The rareness of my depression does not make it any the less terrible though.’

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‘I know, I know, Maata.’ In the pause that followed she felt that their speech had sunk into a deep unknown gulf that had separated her from him – that the confused words had filled up the gulf. The door burst open. Hal came in, flicking his table napkin in his hand. ‘Dinner bell’s rung three times. Jenny has called you. Mother is in a wax, meat’s cold. What are you two birds doing? Out with it, Pip, you sly dog.’ ‘O I must fly down,’ said Maata. ‘No – no’ Hal spread out his arms to catch her. ‘Not until I know what you two have been up to.’ ‘Don’t be absurd, Hal. Let me go. Pip, your hair’s wild even in this light – they’ll be so angry.’ ‘Not so fast, my sweet sister.’ ‘Don’t be a fool Hal,’ said Philip, laughing, ‘we’ve been looking at the trees on the house wall opposite – that’s all.’ ‘What!’ laughed Hal. ‘The ones that Maata said yesterday were holding each other’s hands in the dark. Shame on you. Go down to your betters, Miss.’ ‘O you baby,’ she said, running down the stairs. Hal went up and nudged Pip in the ribs. ‘Lucky fellow,’ he said and shouted after them all the way to the dining room ‘I knew it, I knew it.’ *

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Maata knelt by the dining room fire helping Maisie roast chestnuts. They had a packet of the little hard nuts beside them and a hat pin to prick them with [and] an old Daily Mirror leaf to hold the charred peelings. In the rosy glow of the fire the two children, leaning against each other, laughed and whispered, very absorbed, very intent. By the table sat Mrs Close, darning whole new feet into a pair of Hal’s socks. Her skirt was turned back over her lap, her little slippered feet curled round the chair legs. Now and again she leant forward and opened her mouth for Maisie to pop in a ‘beautifully soft one’, but she was, for the most part, pale and tired. With a drawing board propped against the table, sheets of manuscript surrounding the big untidy inkstand, some pink blotting paper, the old man busied himself copying out Hal’s latest score. Sometimes he whistled, sometimes he heaved great windy sighs, scratched his head with the pen end, rapped the rhythm of the score on the table. The room was warm and all pleasantly scented with the roasting nuts. The window curtains in the flickering light looked heavier, and quite profound their ugly red colour, as though they wished for a little space to hold these four together . . .

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Now and again, in the hush, they heard Hal’s piano. He was busy with something – a theme that had seized him at dinner and made him refuse pudding but carry an apple with him to the drawing room. Very strange it sounded. He played it over and over in different keys, varying the tempo, suddenly and wonderfully enriching the accompaniment. And sometimes it sounded uneasy and terrified, cried that it was being tortured in his hands, did not want to yield him its secret, and sometimes it sounded as though it were in love with itself and could not give him enough of its treasure. ‘Mum’ said Maisie suddenly, ‘where’s our Philip?’ ‘Don’t know, dearie – ask Maata,’ Mrs Close, doubling a strand of wool and laboriously threading the needle. ‘Do you know where he is – he’d love some of these chestnuts. O, do you remember how he used to love chestnuts when he was a little thing, Mum, and roast them in the bonfire in the back yard, and dirty his handkerchiefs with them?’ ‘That I do – – Do you know Maata I’ll never forget one day finding the boys after they’d been having a bonfire, washing their handkerchiefs and their little white “duckies” at the garden tap on the front lawn. For everybody to see – – – you know. I didn’t keep a girl then – did all the washing myself, and I had to give them what for if they dirtied their clothes. I couldn’t bear ironing, and children make enough work. There were little Maisie’s pinafores then too . . . But to see these kids with a bit of soap and some pumice stone they’d found on the esplanade, scrubbing their hankies and hanging them to dry on a flax bush – I thought I’d have died laughing.’ ‘O, the darlings. I can see them’ laughed Maata. ‘So serious, you know.’ She shook her skirts, crept over to Mrs Close and sat leaning against her, her bright hair between the older woman’s knees. ‘Tell me about when they were little’ she coaxed – ‘Anything.’ ‘O do Mother. About the time they had their photo taken and Philip lost the hairpin out of his [. . .] curl and cried so awfully,’ Maisie pleaded, standing a row of four fat soldiers on the second fire bar. Mrs Close put her darning on the table; settled herself, and rested her hands on Maata’s hair. The tired dragged look left her face – it sweetened and grew happy – – ‘Well that’s all there is of that story,’ she said, ‘except that being twins and feeling everything together, you know, Hal started crying too, and they made such a dreadful noise that people stopped in the street and looked in at the shop. O, I did feel ashamed. And the photographer – a fine fellow he was, with a game leg, unfortunately, said “Well, Mrs Close, at any rate your children know how to attract a public,” and I would not have thought twice about the remark if I hadn’t taken them to a phrenologist the

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week before who told me crowds and crowds of people all listening to them –’ ‘Just what they will do, of course,’ interrupted Maisie. ‘– and my boys being very famous. Well, thought I, as I tied the string of Hal’s white muslin hat – the one you had afterwards Maisie, with the lace frill – they’ve begun early enough, and a little too early for me.’ ‘Do you mean old Wrigglesworth the photographer?’ asked Mr Close, not pausing in his work, speaking slowly and half to the rhythm of his work. ‘He went bust he did – the same year and set fire to his own shop to get the insurance money, so they say. Had a fine bass voice in his time and sang “Vittoria”2 in the Town Hall at a charity concert.’ ‘That’s the man. His wife was a flashy woman – she ruined him. I never saw another woman wear the clothes she put on her back on Sundays.’ A voice from the door. Phil had slipped quietly in and stood against the lintel, hands in his pockets, looking at them with laughter. ‘O I remember her, Mother – Hal and I used to shout at her – compliments of the season, where did you get that hat!’ ‘Pure little wretches,’ said the Mother, ‘come to the fire and warm your hands, dear. Where have you been?’ ‘Up in my room,’ said Phil. ‘Maisie – give me one. I came down to steal Maata. It’s such a beautiful night. Do you want to go for a walk, dearest?’ ‘No,’ said Mrs Close, answering for her, ‘she’s not to be disturbed, she’s just got comfy. You go and talk to your brother, my son.’ She was eager with recollection – she had her little audience about her, sympathising – she did not want them to get up and leave her with the old man and that sock to be darned by gaslight. She was tired with a dragging tiredness of middle age, and the feeling of Maata pressed up so closely seemed to relieve some pain – no definite pain – just a sensation. But Philip was restless and not to be denied. He went over to the window, parted the curtain and blind and looked out. Maata from her comfortable place, watching him, saw his eyes lift to the stars – and understood. ‘Fine night darling?’ she asked softly. ‘Wonderful! There are clouds, you know, hurrying, and stars above them shining in pools of still light. I think there is a warm wind blowing – the leaves are shaking in the bushes out here. It’s the sort of night for Primrose Hill – just because of the name – you know that sort of night?’ He turned round from the window, speaking almost indifferently. ‘Well, if you don’t want to, I’ll go by myself. I must get some air – –’

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Maata was longing to go – knew she was going – but just how to leave Mrs Close happy worried her. ‘Mother, I suppose it’s my duty to go out with this bad boy,’ she said, in her baby voice. And Mrs Close knew the spell was over, her battle lost, drew away her knees and took up the torn sock. ‘Well go if you want to,’ she said, ‘don’t stay here talking about it and interrupt your father.’ ‘Me too, me too’ from Maisie. ‘No,’ replied the Mother firmly – she still had the whip hand here. ‘You go off to bed my girl, and don’t sit any longer scorching your face and getting indigestion with all that rubbish. Off you go!’ Maisie made a face and shrugged her shoulders. In the hall Maata unhooked Hal’s greatcoat and pulled it on. It was immense for her, the astrakhan collar halfway up her head. From a pocket she took out a torn pair of gloves, two empty cigaret boxes and some cherry stones. She left them in a pile on the hall chair. ‘O the child’ she breathed. But Phil did not answer. He took her arm, half dragged her down the steps, through the little gate and on to the forsaken, half-lighted road. Then he walked slowly. She said, lightly, ‘We’re in Mother’s bad books you know, my darling.’ His hand tightened on her arm, he turned his grave intense gaze to her. ‘O I can’t help it,’ he said, with a sort of desperation in his voice. ‘I wanted you tonight, terribly – just you to myself. I’ve been in my room ever since dinner, without a light, sitting on the side of the bed. I took out my fiddle and went to play but couldn’t – just thought. And – do you know that sensation, beloved – the darkness seemed to close about me, utterly engulf me. I couldn’t get away from it, or fight it, or move, lift a finger – it was like being drowned in a dream, but unlike a dream were my Thoughts. They were like most sure arrows winged into my heart from the dead past and tearing open the old wounds, poisoning the present. I felt –’ his voice sank to a whisper ‘– too ugly for words. And something outside myself and yet the essence of me, seemed to point and sneer, saying “Yes look – there you are. You’re nothing but a dummy figure set up as a target for these most sure arrows. It’s your own fault – you provided the weapons yourself, and now you’re surprised they should be used against you, you [. . .] fool. And whatever you try to do you are helpless. Everything you hold will pass at last, be turned and twisted into one of these arrows, and winged against you. For that is the Law of your life. You are one of those for whom – – –”’ Maata, listening, now raised her head to the sky where around the hurrying clouds the little bright stars shone fantastically – like arrows,

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thousands of arrows – under which they walked like lost children, close together and yet not safe. The fear entered her heart, the wind blew about them both. She heard their footsteps on the paving stones. They quickened their pace, pressing forward. She wanted terribly to run away with him to some secret place and hide him as a brooding bird so that if one of them had to be struck it must be her. Intolerable the thought that Philip was sad. She began to pray to nobody and nothing as they half ran up the hill – ‘If one of us has to bear anything let that one be me. Not that I’m stronger or anything like that, but it’s easier for me, I would rather have it. It doesn’t hurt me – anything passes off me like water off a duck’s back. My nature’s different. I don’t need so much – but he needs everything. O give him everything. O make and keep him happy, he flowers in happiness, he can only work when he is happy. His greatness is not the kind that needs grief. Help! Help!’ They turned into a street of irregular large houses with gardens full of autumn flowers. She saw michaelmas daisies pressing through a white fence and there was a great bush of chrysanthemums growing by quite a country gate. Lights shone in these houses – the glow of fire and shaded lamps. From one came the voice of a woman singing. Maata stopped and whispered ‘Listen’. It was not because of the music she paused, but that house had a beautiful garden. She wanted Philip to see it. There was a round lawn like a great pool and a very big tree of dark leaves curling and drooped over the grass – the voice of the woman might have floated to them out of the tree! It was a deep voice, secret and full. They waited until her song had ceased and then walked further. By and bye he said, ‘We shall have just such a house one day.’ ‘Of course’ she replied, smiling wistfully. Then ‘Philip – isn’t Patience a dreadful thing. Well – I just haven’t any, where you are concerned. And I don’t want to have any. Everything must happen now, here. We ought you know to have walked through that gate and in at the front door, and found –’ ‘Maisie sitting on the stairs waiting for us.’ He laughed. ‘O, my blessed darling what a beast I am. I don’t know how I dared to come into the dining room, take you out like this, and talk all that rubbish. Heaven knows it seemed true enough, but now – laughable. I’ll explain it. I hadn’t seen you for at least two hours. Now do you wonder I cried instinctively like a baby – a very young baby who’s been too short a time with you to be left alone yet. But I promise and promise, Maata, it won’t happen again!’ ‘What do you suppose I was doing in the dining room,’ she said, ‘making Mother talk about you. I was worse than a crying baby – I was a starving one. And never make promises to me, sweetheart. I refuse to take them – I have no need of such things.’

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On Primrose Hill there were many lovers, wandering aimlessly through the tousled grass, sitting on little benches, pressed against the trees. Curious the silence of these people – the children were silent too. It was like walking into the middle of a service, thought Maata, and felt ashamed, as though she and Philip had arrived a little too late and were disturbing the others. But the others did not appear disturbed – they were as indifferent as the trees. She and Philip found a little place against some railings and looked out over London. Mist floated over the streets and houses. The lights shone silver with fanlike wings – it was all most perfectly unreal. ‘These people are ghosts – there is only you and me,’ whispered Philip. ‘And that city – nothing but a mirage from which they have floated – flung up in the tide of it and plain for us to see just for one moment, and then drawn back again . . . Can’t you hear the mirage wave?’ ‘O yes, I hear it. I love it. What friendly ghosts, little brother.’ ‘They wouldn’t be if they knew we were here. They’d turn upon us, darkly powerful. Don’t be afraid. That is only a ruse of mine to get your other hand as well. Do you suppose I dare to kiss you?’ ‘You have to, it’s part of the service,’ she laughed. On the way home she had a beautiful idea. They found a little grocer’s shop still open and bought a bottle of stout for Mother and some Kola for Hal and themselves – – – The light still burned in the dining room but Mr Close was not there. His work was put away. Hal lay full length on the green sofa. Mrs Close poked viciously at the little dusty fire. She raised her head as they came in and looked up rather glumly. But Maata produced the stout bottle. Philip took some glasses from the table. It was impossible to resist the gaiety of the two children. Mrs Close and Hal who had been talking ‘money worries’ drew up to the table. ‘What a colour you’ve got from the air,’ said Mrs Close, holding the glass to Philip. ‘That’s enough, my boy – don’t fill it too full – I only want a sip.’ ‘The air. I like that.’ said Hal, drinking out of the bottle. ‘Look at old Pip’s hand shaking. You’ve been giving that hand too much exercise, my lad. Which side does she walk on? Don’t pour any out of mine – I’ll have the bottle.’ ‘No you won’t,’ cried Maata. ‘Fair does, my child. There are only two bottles of kola between the three of us!’ ‘O Mum aren’t they pigs. Here have I been sitting at that cold cold piano playing for hours and hours – to them – and now they won’t even let me have a bottle of kola. O, aren’t they sneaks – aren’t they beasts. And they pretend to be in Love.’ ‘O let the infant play with it then,’ said Phil. ‘We’ll share a bottle

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and you can have a whole one. Don’t swallow the marble unless you really want to, old Horse. Have some more stout, Mother and I’ll promise you the best dream in the dream book tomorrow morning.’ ‘Well I don’t mind – just a drop. I hope your Father’s asleep – I feel so lively I could kick him out of bed. How a drop of stout in the evening perks me up – like nothing else. When you get to my age you’ll need it, Maata, though I must say you don’t look as if you did just now. I always did have a fondness for stout. I remember the first nurse I had when the twins were born started me off. And there is nothing like it when you’re that way. Just wait till my first grandchild begins to come along!’ Hal adored his mother in this vein. He ran over to her with the bottle in his hand and began kissing her face and neck and hair. ‘She’s in her cups,’ he laughed. ‘Now’s the time for confidential intimacies, my friends. Give her her head. Philip – run out and get her 6d of gin.’ But Phil was taking off Maata’s shoes and whispering to her. ‘Let’s get them to bed, and I’ll make up the fire. Come down again.’ So Maata yawned and smiled across at Mrs Close. ‘If you popped into bed now, Mummy,’ she said, ‘you’d sleep like a top, while you’re warm.’ ‘I’m going, I’m going.’ The little woman got up, set down her glass and gave Hal a great hug. She pulled down his head and murmured something. Hal winked at the others. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose we’d better. They’ll drive us away from our own fireside, but we’ll go, won’t we, little Mummy, and come down in half an hour and look at them through the keyhole.’ ‘You little silly, come and kiss me goodnight,’ said Maata. ‘What were you playing this evening?’ ‘Shan’t say. O how nice your face feels – so cool. I wouldn’t mind betting you my collection of apple cores that in half an hour . . .’ ‘Mother take him away.’ Maata and Philip listened to the others going up the stairs. To Hal pretending to be a baby and asking to have his hand held, and saying he was frightened – could he be tucked up, and where did the dark go in the daytime. To Mrs Close in answer, scolding and loving, and then laughing as Maisie laughed. Then the sound of the two doors closing. Philip put out the gas and gathered the beloved Maata into his arms. *

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Chapter X They did not fall like leaves – they fell like feathers, fluttering and floating from the trees that lined the road where Mally lived. Who

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was it used to say that every leaf you caught meant a happy month? Rhody of course. She saw Rhody, the tall schoolgirl, break from the ‘crocodile’ when they walked in the Park, and run after the leaves, with big, far too big, gestures, as though she expected the whole tree to fall into her arms. Rhody used to keep the leaves in her bible and take them out and hold them up to the light and gaze at them in scripture lessons. And she always said she knew each one apart. Well, if she said so, she did. Just like her. The clock in the big church opposite Mally’s flat struck five. But Maata did not hurry. Idle and happy she walked under the falling leaves. A sharp sweet scent was in the air, and a stronger more wintry smell of damp earth. She could feel the mist on her eyelids and lips. That sensation of boundless strength and happiness flowed over her again. It was almost physical – her lungs felt like wings – she could fly away on a deep breath, light and strong – but I am glad I am going to Mally. Tonight I can ‘Now I am myself again, now I am quite safe,’ she said, like a little child that was in its bed after a nightmare. And she thought – ‘if I could only remember always that under everything there is only this; that everything that is not this is on the surface and will not really matter in the end. What is life really? What is real and unreal. Oh God.’ And troubled sounds familiar yet unreal like the memory and the promise of sadness. They shook her heart. She did not want to listen. She could have listened for ever. Standing there in the dark she drifted away to that shadowy loneliness which sometimes seemed to her to be her only true life, the only changeless truth – the thing that she was never really certain was not reality after all. How extraordinary! She saw herself all these last weeks, playing a part – being Maata, being herself, caring for things that after all don’t matter at all. Why, only that afternoon, a minute or two ago, she had believed in it all – and it was all nothing, nothing. Notes U Text: KMN, I, pp. 237–47, pp. 255–61. KM drew up a careful plan for the novel she intended to write, based on her relationship with the Trowell twins and their family [see Appendix A, pp. 520–8]. While in Wellington on her return from London she was infatuated with Thomas (Arnold), then in love with Garnet once they met again in England in 1908. The surviving fragments of the intended novel, some in NLC, others in ATL, depart considerably from the synopsis, and are transcribed in KMN, 1, with no attempt to present them sequentially.

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Although puzzles remain, they are rearranged here to preserve the time-line KM intended. The parallels with events and persons in her own life are apparent. Maata, the name taken from her Maori friend and lover in Wellington, Maata Mahupuku, is KM herself; Rhoda Bendall is KM’s astute portrait of Ida Baker’s passionate devotion to her. The Close family depict the Trowells and their home in St John’s Wood, from which KM was then expelled, when the young daughter Dolly (Maisie in the story) discovered and revealed KM’s affair with her brother. Philip is drawn from Garnet, Hal from his brother Arnold. 1. The wife of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, a figure of enduring fidelity. 2. ‘Vittoria, Vittoria’, Baroque Italian song by Giacomo Corissimi (1605– 1674).

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Young Country1 Mrs Preston sat at the window waiting for Rachael to return from school. The day was cold and loud with the South wind. She sat in the rocking chair with a piece of pink knitting in her lap – her feet rested on the blue hassock and she was very still. Rachael was late and Mrs Preston felt vaguely anxious. Behind her crouched the little house – quite silent except for the kitchen clock and the dripping of the scullery tap. She thought, ‘I must go and turn off that tap’ but she did not move. ‘Oh dear,’ she thought mournfully, watching the scrubby garden bushes beat in the wind, ‘I wish that child would come. I wish this wind would go down. Tch! Tch! What a day. I wonder if the kitchen fire is alight. I ought to go and see’. But she was too heavy and tired to go. On days like this she knew that she was old. Her heart beat in a faint, muffled way, and sigh as often as she might she could not fill her body with enough breath to make it beat faster. ‘Yes I am an old woman.’ ‘Old,’ hooted the wind, shaking the wooden house like a matchbox. And her thoughts recalled again the image that kept such stern vigil with her – her husband lying in his coffin, with the grey hair brushed off his brow and his face pale and watchful, pressed between the banks of wet clay – and waiting for her. She drew her heliotrope shawl closer with fingers that trembled. The window where she sat looked out upon the road and then

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on to a street that ran sheer up the side of a hill. It had houses on either side – ugly houses with concrete walls covered with terrible nasturtiums. The town was on the other side of the hill and beyond the town the wharfs and the harbour with its two humped islands. Hawk Street2 was a poor ragged edge of the blowy place. The houses were built alike and painted alike – brown with red fittings. Each had a little front garden and an asphalt yard with clothes lines strung across it. Beyond the yards another hill and a wilder reared up like a huge wave. A queer yellow light flickered over Hawk Street and over Town, Hills, like the light of windy candles, and dark shadows blotted out the room where Mrs Preston sat. Suddenly, on the brow of the hill she saw Rachael. Ah, there she was. Mrs Preston got up and nodded and waved her knitting. How the child ran – with her blue cape flying about her she swooped down upon the little house, kicked open the gate, over the crunchy gravel and into Mrs Preston’s arms. ‘Oh my little Gran,’ she cried, dropping her kit and pushing her hat on to her neck. ‘Did you think I was lost? I was kept in. I got nought for arithmetic again, my darling girl, and I’ve sat in that horrible cold classroom waiting to come home till I nearly burst.’ ‘You are a little late,’ said Mrs Preston mildly, ‘but I thought it was something like that. Come into the kitchen and get warm, child. Your cheeks are like ice.’ ‘Oh, don’t you pretend,’ said Rachael, swinging on to the kitchen table, ‘that you haven’t been waiting and waiting here for me and listening to the wretched old wind, and making up your mind that you’re an old woman now and that nobody loves you. I know you too well by this time, Miss.’ ‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Preston, turning with the lamp, ‘nothing of the kind.’ Warm bright lamplight painted the kitchen, and Rachael leaned forward unlacing her boots, with her curls a red shower over her shoulders. ‘I’m so hungry – starving. Ugh – they’re off. Pull up my stockings at the top. Grannie can I have something to eat? She was simply starving[?]. Let’s have a quiet cup of tea together – I’ll make it.’ ‘No, you go and fetch the gingerbread out of the tin in the pantry’ said the grandmother, fitting her darling’s little thin feet into woollen slippers. ‘Alright, and give me a candle. I want to go upstairs a minute.’ While Mrs Preston made the tea, laid a cloth across a corner of the kitchen table, she heard Rachael running about upstairs, pulling open drawers, and Rachael’s voice floated down – ‘What sort of a day have you had?’ ‘Oh quite ordinary.’

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‘Haven’t you hated this old wind?’ ‘Yes, it has been dreadful.’ ‘I suppose Queen Victoria or His Excellency the Governor didn’t drop in this afternoon.’ ‘No, dear, nobody’s been.’ ‘Grandma, where are my clean handkies.’ ‘In their usual place.’ ‘That’s a clever answer, isn’t it? Can I have some of your lavender water?’ The house was alive with her. *

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All that day school seemed unreal and silly to Rachael. Round and round, like a musical box with only one tune, went her mind on what had happened the evening before. Her head ached with trying to remember every little detail and every word. She did not want to remember, but somehow, she could not stop trying. She answered questions and made mistakes in her sums and recited ‘How Horatius Kept the Bridge’3 like a little girl in a dream. The day crawled by. ‘That was the first time I’ve ever stood up to him,’ she thought. ‘I wonder if everything will always be different now. We can’t even pretend to like each other again.’ Bottlenose! Bottlenose! She smiled again remembering the word but at the same time she felt frightened. She had not seen her Father that morning. The grandmother told her that he had promised not to mention the subject again. ‘But I don’t believe that,’ thought Rachael. ‘I wish it hadn’t happened. No, I’m glad it has. I wish that he was dead – Oh, what Heaven that would be for us!’ But she could not imagine that sort of person dying. She remembered suddenly the way he sucked in his moustache when he drank and the long hairs he had on his hands, and the noises he made when he had indigestion. No, that sort of person seemed too real to die. She worried the thought of him until she was furious with rage. ‘How I detest him – detest him!’ The class stood up to sing. Rachael shared a book with Tui. ‘Oh forest, green and fair Oh pine trees waving high How sweet their cool retreat How full of rest’

sang the little girls. Rachael looked out through the big bare windows to the wattle trees, their gold tassels nodding in the sunny air, and suddenly the sad tune and the trees moving so gently made her feel quite calm. She looked down at the withered sweet pea that drooped

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from her blouse. She saw herself sitting on the grandmother’s lap and leaning against the grandmother’s bodice. That was what she wanted. To sit there and hear grannie’s watch ticking against her ear and bury her face in the soft warm place smelling of lavender and put up her hand and feel the five owls sitting on the moon . . . Mrs Preston was in the garden when she came home – stooping over the pansies. She had a little straw basket on her arm, half filled with flowers. Rachael went up to her and leant against her and played with her spectacle case. ‘Sweetheart, listen,’ she said. ‘It’s no good saying I’m sorry because I am not. And I’m not ashamed either. It’s no good trying to make me.’ Her face grew hard. ‘I hate that man and I won’t pretend. But because you’re more –’ she hesitated, groping for the words – ‘more valuable than he is, I won’t behave like that again – not unless I absolutely feel I can’t help it, Grannie.’ She looked up and smiled. ‘See?’ ‘I can’t make you do what you don’t want to, Rachael,’ said Mrs Preston. ‘No,’ said she. ‘Nobody can. Can they? Otherwise it wouldn’t be any good wanting anything for your own self – would it? Aren’t the pansies pretties, Grannie. I’d like to make pets of them.’ ‘I think they’re rather like my little scaramouch in the face,’ said Mrs Preston smiling and pulling Rachael’s pink ear. ‘Oh, thank Goodness,’ sighed Rachael. ‘You’re yourself again. We’ve made it up. Haven’t we? I can’t bear being serious for a long time together. Oh my Grannie, I’ve got to be happy with you. When I go thinking of serious things I could poke out my tongue at myself.’ She took Mrs Preston’s hand and stroked it. ‘You do love me, don’t you?’ ‘Of course, you silly billy.’ ‘We-ll’, laughed Rachael, ‘That’s the only real thing, isn’t it?’ ‘There are two bits of cold pudding inside for you and Tui,’ said Mrs Preston. ‘Run along and take it to her while I finish the ironing. I only came out while the iron was getting hot.’ ‘You won’t be wretched if I leave you alone?’ asked Rachael. She danced in to the house, found the pudding, and danced over to Beads. ‘Mrs Bead. Tui. Where are you?’ she called stepping over a saucepan, two big cabbages and Tui’s hat and coat inside the kitchen door. ‘We’re upstairs. I’m washing my hair in the bathroom. Come up, darling,’ cooed Tui. Ray bounded up the stairs. Mrs Bead in a pink flannel dressing gown sat on the edge of the bath; and Tui stood in torn calico drawers, a towel round her shoulders and her head in a basin. ‘Hallo, Mrs Bead’ said Rachael. She buried her head in the Maori woman’s neck and put her teeth in a roll of soft fat. Mrs Bead pulled Ray between her knees and had a good look at her.

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‘Well, Tui,’ she said, ‘you are a little fibber. Tui told me you’d had a fight with your Father and he’d given you two black eyes.’ ‘I didn’t – I didn’t,’ cried Tui, stamping. ‘No one is looking after me. Pour a jug of water over my head, Mummy. Oh Ray, don’t listen to her.’ ‘Pooh! It’s nothing new’ said Ray. ‘You’re always lying. I’ll pour the water over your head.’ She rolled up her sleeves and deluged Tui who gave little moaning cries. ‘I’m drowned, drowned, drowned,’ she said, wringing out her long black hair. ‘You have got a lot of it,’ said Ray. ‘Yes.’ Tui twisted it round her head. ‘But I shan’t be content till it is down to my knees. Don’t you think it would be nice to be able to wrap yourself up in your hair?’ ‘What funny ideas you have,’ said Ray, considering Tui. ‘Mrs Bead, don’t you think Tui’s getting awfully conceited.’ ‘Oh not more than she ought to’ said Mrs Bead, stretching herself and yawning. ‘I believe in girls thinking about their appearance and Tui could do a lot with herself if she liked.’ ‘Well she doesn’t think about anything else, do you Tui?’ ‘No, darling,’ Tui smiled. ‘Well, why should she,’ remarked Mrs Bead easily. ‘She’s not like you, Ray. She hasn’t got any brain for books, but she’s real smart in making up complexion mixtures and she keeps her feet as neat as her hands.’ ‘When I grow up’ said Tui, ‘I mean to be a terri-fic beauty. Mother’s going to take me to Sydney when I’m sixteen – but I mean to be the rage if I die for it. And then I’m going to marry a rich Englishman and have five little boys with beautiful blue eyes.’ ‘Well, you never know,’ said Mrs Bead. ‘And if you turn out into a raging beauty, Tui, I’ll take you to Sydney, sure. What a pity you couldn’t come too Ray.’ ‘We’d make such an uncommon pair,’ suggested Tui. Rachael shook her head. ‘No, Grannie and I are going to live by ourselves when I grow up, and I’m going to make money out of flowers and vegetables and bees.’ ‘But don’t you want to be rich?’ cried Ray [Tui], ‘and travel all over the world and have perfect clothes? Oh, dear. If I thought I was going to live all my life with Mummy in this piggy little house I believe I’d die of grief.’ ‘Yes, that’s a good thing about you Tui,’ said Mrs Bead. ‘Though you’re lazy like me you want a lot to be lazy on, and you’re quite right, dearie, quite right. I made a great mistake coming to a little town like this, but then I’d got sick of things and I had enough money

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to keep us and once I got the furniture in here I seemed to lose heart, somehow. You ought to have ambitions, Ray, but I think you’ll come on slower than Tui. You do keep skinny, don’t you,’ said Mrs Bead. ‘Why, Tui’s got quite a figure beside you.’ ‘She hasn’t got any front at all, Mummy,’ gurgled Tui. ‘Have you, chérie? Mummy, go downstairs and make us some cocoa, and I’ll get dressed and come down to finish my hair at the fire.’ Mrs Bead left the two little [girls]. They went into Tui’s bedroom. ‘Look!’ said Tui. ‘Doesn’t it surprise you? Mummy and I fixed it yesterday.’ The shabby untidy little room had changed to suit Tui’s romantic mood. White muslin curtains made out of an old skirt of her mother’s adorned the bed, and everywhere Rachael looked there were pink sateen bows. Over the looking glass, on the back of the chair, on the gas bracket and the four black iron bed poles. ‘Why don’t you put a bow on each of the knobs of the chest of drawers’ said Ray sarcastically, ‘and round the washstand jug, too.’ ‘Oh!’ Tui’s face fell. ‘Don’t you like it, darling? We thought it was lovely. Mummy thought you’d think it fearfully artistic.’ ‘I think it looks awful,’ said Ray, ‘and just like you. You’re off your head lately, Tui Bead.’ ‘Really and truly you think so?’ said Tui, making tragic eyes at herself in the looking glass. ‘Yes. Besides if I were you I would mend my drawers first,’ she answered, scorning Tui’s eyes. ‘I wonder what makes you so hard hard hard. You’re never nice to me, now, Ray.’ ‘Yes I am. But you’re so dotty. You seem to be getting all different.’ ‘Darling,’ Tui put her arm round Ray’s waist, ‘in my heart I’m just the same. Feel my hair. Do you think I’ve washed it successfully. Feel this bit. Is it silky?’ Ray gave it a pull. ‘It’s nearly as soft as you.’ ‘Come along downstairs, you kids’ called Mrs Bead. ‘And Ray you can take a piece of my cocoanut cake to your Grandma. It hasn’t ris at all and it’s a little damp in the middle, but the ingredients are all the best quality.’ It was dark when she left the Beads. She went home by the front way through their weedy garden and out of the gate into their own. Hawk Street was quiet. All over the sky there were little stars and the garden with its white flowers looked as though it were steeped in milk. The blinds were pulled down in their house but lamplight shone from the sitting room and she knew her Father was there. But she did not care. ‘What a lovely thing night is’ thought Rachael. ‘I wish I could stay out here and watch it.’ She bent her face over the spicy arum lilies

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and could not have enough of their scent. ‘I shall remember just this moment,’ decided the little girl. ‘I shall always remember what I like and forget what I don’t like.’ How still and quiet it was. She could hear the dew dripping off the leaves. ‘I wonder’ she thought, dreamy and grave, looking up at the stars, ‘I wonder if there really is a God!’ Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 261–3, KMN, 2, pp. 63–6. Scrapbook.4 1. KM’s brief plan for the story read (KMN, 1, pp. 261–2): Chapter I. Mrs Preston sits at the window waiting for Rachael to return from school. It is a cold, windy afternoon. She is tired and sad. As the shadows fall in the room she sits thinking of her past life – of her married life and of her son and grandchild. R. comes home, is very happy. She does her homework while the grandmother knits. Then she sets supper. Fred comes home drunk and upsets the hash in his rage. ‘God damn hash!’ R. in a furious temper curses him and runs away – out of the house and down the road to the sea. Finally she returns. She comes in at the back door. Her father is asleep. The grandmother is waiting for her. The two go up to bed. Chapter II. Hawk Street. The Houses. Mrs Bead and Tui. Ray and Tui go to the same school and are sworn friends. They keep themselves to themselves. Tui is idle and vain but Ray is clever. 2. Hawkstone Street, between Tinakori Road and Molesworth Street, Thorndon, Wellington. 3. ‘How well Horatius kept the bridge / In the brave days of old,’ the concluding lines to Thomas Babbington Macauley’s ‘Horatius’ (1842). 4. JMM published the piece as ‘Kezia and Tui’, altering KM’s names.

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Rose Eagle1 It was wonderful how quickly Rose Eagle forgot the first fourteen years of her life. They were nothing but a dream out of which she wakened to find herself sitting on her yellow tin box in the kitchen of her ‘first place’, with a queer shaking in her hands and knees and the hot blood burning and lightening her cheeks. She and the yellow tin box might have been washed through the back door into Mrs Taylor’s kitchen on the last wave of a sea-storm – so forlorn and unfamiliar

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they appeared, and she turned her head from side to side as though she were sensing quiet and stillness for the first time . . . It was late in the afternoon of a hot December day. The sun shone through the drawn blind in long pencil rays of light over the floor and the face of the dresser and a church calendar picture of a dreamy young Jesus with an armful of lambs, and facing her sat Mrs Taylor, changing the baby who sprawled on her lap waving his hands and blowing bubbles. Mrs Taylor kept on talking to Rose in a vague, singing voice, the clock on the mantelpiece ticked sharply and a tap in the scullery tip-tipped like stealthy footsteps. ‘Yes m’m’ said Rose Eagle, and ‘no, m’m’, to all that Mrs Taylor said. ‘You will share Reggie’s room, Rose. Reggie is my eldest boy. He is four and he has just started school. And now that you have come I’ll give up having baby at night – he keeps me awake so. You’re used to babies.’ ‘Oh yes, m’m!’ ‘I really don’t feel well enough to tell you your duties today’, said Mrs Taylor, languidly sticking safety pins into the gurgling baby. Rose Eagle got up and bent over Mrs Taylor. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘give ’im to me,’ and as she straightened herself with the warm, fat lump in her arms she felt frightened no longer. Baby Taylor was to Rose Eagle the saucer of milk to the stray cat – the fact of acceptance proved resignation. ‘My word! What ’air ’e’s got!’ said Rose Eagle, cuddling, ‘it’s like black feathers.’ Mrs Taylor rose with her hands to her head. Tall and thin in her lilac cotton dress, she pushed back from her forehead the heaping black hair, with eyes half shut and quivering lips. ‘My! You do look bad’, said Rose, relishing this performance. ‘You go an ’ave a lie down on your bed, m’m, and I’ll bring you a cup of tea in a minute. I’ll manage best ways I can.’ She followed her mistress out of the kitchen, along the little passage into the best bedroom. ‘Lie down! Take yer shoes off!’ Mrs Taylor submitted, sighing, and Rose Eagle tiptoed back into the kitchen. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 263–4. Journal, 1927. 1. Immediately after ‘Rose Eagle’ KM wrote at the end of Notebook 2, ATL, what more probably applies to ‘Maata’, much of which is in the same notebook: This story seems to me to lack coherence and sharpness. It’s like eating a bunch of grapes instead of a grain of caviar . . . I have a pretty bad habit of spreading myself at times, of overwriting and understating – it’s just carelessness. (KMN, 1, p. 264)

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Something Childish But Very Natural1 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,

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something childish but very natural To you I’d fly, my dear, But thoughts like these are idle things, And I stay here. But in my sleep to you I fly, I’m always with you in my sleep, The world is all one’s own, But then one wakes and where am I? All, all alone. Sleep stays not though a monarch bids, So I love to wake at break of day, For though my sleep be gone, Yet while ’tis dark one shuts one’s lids, And so, dreams on.

He could not have done with the little poem. It was not the words so much as the whole air of it that charmed him! He might have written it lying in bed, very early in the morning, and watching the sun dance on the ceiling. ‘It is still, like that,’ thought Henry. ‘I am sure he wrote it when he was half-awake some time, for it’s got a smile of a dream on it.’ He stared at the poem and then looked away and repeated it by heart, missed a word in the third verse and looked again, and again until he became conscious of shouting and shuffling, and he looked up to see the train moving slowly. ‘God’s thunder!’ Henry dashed forward. A man with a flag and a whistle had his hand on a door. He clutched Henry somehow. . . . Henry was inside with the door slammed, in a carriage that wasn’t a ‘smoker’, that had not a trace of his straw hat or the black portfolio or his Aunt B’s Christmas-present gloves. Instead, in the opposite corner, close against the wall, there sat a girl. Henry did not dare to look at her, but he felt certain she was staring at him. ‘She must think I’m mad,’ he thought, ‘dashing into a train without even a hat, and in the evening, too.’ He felt so funny. He didn’t know how to sit or sprawl. He put his hands in his pockets and tried to appear quite indifferent and frown at a large photograph of Bolton Abbey. But feeling her eyes on him he gave her just the tiniest glance. Quick she looked away out of the window, and then Henry, careful of her slightest movement, went on looking. She sat pressed against the window, her cheek and shoulder half hidden by a long wave of marigold-coloured hair. One little hand in a grey cotton glove held a leather case on her lap with the initials E. M. on it. The other hand she had slipped through the window-strap, and Henry noticed a silver bangle on the wrist with a Swiss cow-bell and a silver shoe and fish. She wore a green coat and a hat with a wreath round it. All this Henry saw while the title of the new

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poem persisted in his brain – Something Childish but very Natural. ‘I suppose she goes to some school in London,’ thought Henry. ‘She might be in an office. Oh, no, she is too young. Besides she’d have her hair up if she was. It isn’t even down her back.’ He could not keep his eyes off that beautiful waving hair. ‘ “My eyes are like two drunken bees. . . .” Now, I wonder if I read that or made it up?’ That moment the girl turned round and, catching his glance, she blushed. She bent her head to hide the red colour that flew in her cheeks, and Henry, terribly embarrassed, blushed too. ‘I shall have to speak – have to – have to!’ He started putting up his hand to raise the hat that wasn’t there. He thought that funny; it gave him confidence. ‘I’m – I’m most awfully sorry,’ he said, smiling at the girl’s hat. ‘But I can’t go on sitting in the same carriage with you and not explaining why I dashed in like that, without my hat even. I’m sure I gave you a fright, and just now I was staring at you – but that’s only an awful fault of mine; I’m a terrible starer! If you’d like me to explain – how I got in here – not about the staring, of course,’ – he gave a little laugh – ‘I will.’ For a minute she said nothing, then in a low, shy voice – ‘It doesn’t matter.’ The train had flung behind the roofs and chimneys. They were swinging into the country, past little black woods and fading fields and pools of water shining under an apricot evening sky. Henry’s heart began to thump and beat to the beat of the train. He couldn’t leave it like that. She sat so quiet, hidden in her fallen hair. He felt that it was absolutely necessary that she should look up and understand him – understand him at least. He leant forward and clasped his hands round his knees. ‘You see I’d just put all my things – a portfolio – into a third-class ‘smoker’ and was having a look at the book-stall,’ he explained. As he told the story she raised her head. He saw her grey eyes under the shadow of her hat and her eyebrows like two gold feathers. Her lips were faintly parted. Almost unconsciously he seemed to absorb the fact that she was wearing a bunch of primroses and that her throat was white – the shape of her face wonderfully delicate against all that burning hair. ‘How beautiful she is! How simply beautiful she is!’ sang Henry’s heart, and swelled with the words, bigger and bigger and trembling like a marvellous bubble – so that he was afraid to breathe for fear of breaking it. ‘I hope there was nothing valuable in the portfolio,’ said she, very grave. ‘Oh, only some silly drawings that I was taking back from the office,’ answered Henry, airily. ‘And – I was rather glad to lose my hat. It had been hurting me all day.’

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‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s left a mark,’ and she nearly smiled. Why on earth should those words have made Henry feel so free suddenly and so happy and so madly excited? What was happening between them? They said nothing, but to Henry their silence was alive and warm. It covered him from his head to his feet in a trembling wave. Her marvellous words, ‘It’s made a mark,’ had in some mysterious fashion established a bond between them. They could not be utter strangers to each other if she spoke so simply and so naturally. And now she was really smiling. The smile danced in her eyes, crept over her cheeks to her lips and stayed there. He leant back. The words flew from him. – ‘Isn’t life wonderful!’ At that moment the train dashed into a tunnel. He heard her voice raised against the noise. She leant forward. ‘I don’t think so. But then I’ve been a fatalist for a long time now’ – a pause – ‘months.’ They were shattering through the dark. ‘Why?’ called Henry. ‘Oh. . . .’ Then she shrugged, and smiled and shook her head, meaning she could not speak against the noise. He nodded and leant back. They came out of the tunnel into a sprinkle of lights and houses. He waited for her to explain. But she got up and buttoned her coat and put her hands to her hat, swaying a little. ‘I get out here,’ she said. That seemed quite impossible to Henry. The train slowed down and the lights outside grew brighter. She moved towards his end of the carriage. ‘Look here!’ he stammered. ‘Shan’t I see you again?’ He got up, too, and leant against the rack with one hand. ‘I must see you again.’ The train was stopping. She said breathlessly, ‘I come down from London every evening.’ ‘You – you – you do – really?’ His eagerness frightened her. He was quick to curb it. Shall we or shall we not shake hands? raced through his brain. One hand was on the door-handle, the other held the little bag. The train stopped. Without another word or glance she was gone. *

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Then came Saturday – a half day at the office – and Sunday between. By Monday evening Henry was quite exhausted. He was at the station far too early, with a pack of silly thoughts at his heels as it were driving him up and down. ‘She didn’t say she came by this train!’ ‘And supposing I go up and she cuts me.’ ‘There may be somebody with her.’ ‘Why do you suppose she’s ever thought of you again?’ ‘What are you going to say if you do see her?’ He even prayed, ‘Lord if it be Thy will, let us meet.’

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But nothing helped. White smoke floated against the roof of the station – dissolved and came again in swaying wreaths. Of a sudden, as he watched it, so delicate and so silent, moving with such mysterious grace above the crowd and the scuffle, he grew calm. He felt very tired – he only wanted to sit down and shut his eyes – she was not coming – a forlorn relief breathed in the words. And then he saw her quite near to him walking towards the train with the same little leather case in her hand. Henry waited. He knew, somehow, that she had seen him, but he did not move until she came close to him and said in her low, shy voice – ‘Did you get them again?’ ‘Oh, yes, thank you, I got them again,’ and with a funny half gesture he showed her the portfolio and the gloves. They walked side by side to the train and into an empty carriage. They sat down opposite to each other, smiling timidly but not speaking, while the train moved slowly, and slowly gathered speed and smoothness. Henry spoke first. ‘It’s so silly,’ he said, ‘not knowing your name.’ She put back a big piece of hair that had fallen on her shoulder, and he saw how her hand in the grey glove was shaking. Then he noticed that she was sitting very stiffly with her knees pressed together – and he was, too – both of them trying not to tremble so. She said ‘My name is Edna.’ ‘And mine is Henry.’ In the pause they took possession of each other’s names and turned them over and put them away, a shade less frightened after that. ‘I want to ask you something else now,’ said Henry. He looked at Edna, his head a little on one side. ‘How old are you?’ ‘Over sixteen,’ she said, ‘and you?’ ‘I’m nearly eighteen. . . .’ ‘Isn’t it hot?’ she said suddenly, and pulled off her grey gloves and put her hands to her cheeks and kept them there. Their eyes were not frightened – they looked at each other with a sort of desperate calmness. If only their bodies would not tremble so stupidly! Still half hidden by her hair, Edna said: ‘Have you ever been in love before?’ ‘No never! Have you?’ ‘Oh, never in all my life.’ She shook her head. ‘I never even thought it possible.’ His next words came in a rush. ‘Whatever have you been doing since last Friday evening? Whatever did you do all Saturday and all Sunday and to-day?’ But she did not answer – only shook her head and smiled and said, ‘No, you tell me.’ ‘I?’ cried Henry – and then he found he couldn’t tell her either. He couldn’t climb back to those mountains of days, and he had to shake his head, too.

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‘But it’s been agony,’ he said, smiling brilliantly – ‘agony.’ At that she took away her hands and started laughing, and Henry joined her. They laughed until they were tired. ‘It’s so – so extraordinary,’ she said. ‘So suddenly, you know, and I feel as if I’d known you for years.’ ‘So do I. . . .’ said Henry. ‘I believe it must be the Spring. I believe I’ve swallowed a butterfly – and it’s fanning its wings just here.’ He put his hand on his heart. ‘And the really extraordinary thing is,’ said Edna, ‘that I had made up my mind that I didn’t care for – men at all. I mean all the girls at College –’ ‘Were you at College?’ She nodded. ‘A training college, learning to be a secretary.’ She sounded scornful. ‘I’m in an office,’ said Henry. ‘An architect’s office – such a funny little place up one hundred and thirty stairs. We ought to be building nests instead of houses, I always think.’ ‘Do you like it?’ ‘No, of course I don’t. I don’t want to do anything, do you?’ ‘No, I hate it. . . . And,’ she said, ‘my mother is a Hungarian – I believe that makes me hate it even more.’ That seemed to Henry quite natural. ‘It would,’ he said. ‘Mother and I are exactly alike. I haven’t a thing in common with my father; he’s just . . . a little man in the City – but mother has got wild blood in her and she’s given it to me. She hates our life just as much as I do.’ She paused and frowned. ‘All the same, we don’t get on a bit together – that’s funny – isn’t it? But I’m absolutely alone at home.’ Henry was listening – in a way he was listening, but there was something else he wanted to ask her. He said, very shyly, ‘Would you – would you take off your hat?’ She looked startled. ‘Take off my hat?’ ‘Yes – it’s your hair. I’d give anything to see your hair properly.’ She protested. ‘It isn’t really. . . .’ ‘Oh, it is,’ cried Henry, and then, as she took off the hat and gave her head a little toss, ‘Oh, Edna! it’s the loveliest thing in the world.’ ‘Do you like it?’ she said, smiling and very pleased. She pulled it round her shoulders like a cape of gold. ‘People generally laugh at it. It’s such an absurd colour.’ But Henry would not believe that. She leaned her elbows on her knees and cupped her chin in her hands. ‘That’s how I often sit when I’m angry and then I feel it burning me up. . . . Silly?’ ‘No, no, not a bit,’ said Henry. ‘I knew you did. It’s your sort of weapon against all the dull horrid things.’

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‘However did you know that? Yes, that’s just it. But however did you know?’ ‘Just knew,’ smiled Henry. ‘My God!’ he cried, ‘what fools people are! All the little pollies2 that you know and that I know. Just look at you and me. Here we are – that’s all there is to be said. I know about you and you know about me – we’ve just found each other – quite simply – just by being natural. That’s all life is – something childish and very natural. Isn’t it?’ ‘Yes – yes,’ she said eagerly. ‘That’s what I’ve always thought.’ ‘It’s people that make things so – silly. As long as you can keep away from them you’re safe and you’re happy.’ ‘Oh, I’ve thought that for a long time.’ ‘Then you’re just like me,’ said Henry. The wonder of that was so great that he almost wanted to cry. Instead he said very solemnly: ‘I believe we’re the only two people alive who think as we do. In fact, I’m sure of it. Nobody understands me. I feel as though I were living in a world of strange beings – do you?’ ‘Always.’ ‘We’ll be in that loathsome tunnel again in a minute,’ said Henry. ‘Edna! can I – just touch your hair?’ She drew back quickly. ‘Oh, no, please don’t,’ and as they were going into the dark she moved a little away from him. *

*

*

‘Edna! I’ve bought the tickets. The man at the concert hall didn’t seem at all surprised that I had the money. Meet me outside the gallery doors at three, and wear that cream blouse and the corals – will you? I love you. I don’t like sending these letters to the shop. I always feel those people with “Letters received” in their window keep a kettle in their back parlour that would steam open an elephant’s ear of an envelope. But it really doesn’t matter, does it, darling? Can you get away on Sunday? Pretend you are going to spend the day with one of the girls from the office, and let’s meet at some little place and walk or find a field where we can watch the daisies uncurling. I do love you, Edna. But Sundays without you are simply impossible. Don’t get run over before Saturday, and don’t eat anything out of a tin or drink anything from a public fountain. That’s all, darling.’ ‘My dearest, yes, I’ll be there on Saturday – and I’ve arranged about Sunday, too. That is one great blessing. I’m quite free at home. I have just come in from the garden. It’s such a lovely evening. Oh, Henry, I could sit and cry, I love you so to-night. Silly – isn’t it? I either feel so happy I can hardly stop laughing or else so sad I can hardly stop crying and both for the same reason. But we are so young to have

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found each other, aren’t we? I am sending you a violet. It is quite warm. I wish you were here now, just for a minute even. Good–night, darling. I am Edna.’ *

*

*

‘Safe,’ said Edna, ‘safe! And excellent places, aren’t they, Henry?’ She stood up to take off her coat and Henry made a movement to help her. ‘No – no – it’s off.’ She tucked it under the seat. She sat down beside him. ‘Oh, Henry, what have you got there? Flowers?’ ‘Only two tiny little roses.’ He laid them in her lap. ‘Did you get my letter all right?’ asked Edna, unpinning the paper. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and the violet is growing beautifully. You should see my room. I planted a little piece of it in every corner and one on my pillow and one in the pocket of my pyjama jacket.’ She shook her hair at him. ‘Henry, give me the programme.’ ‘Here it is – you can read it with me. I’ll hold it for you.’ ‘No, let me have it.’ ‘Well, then, I’ll read it for you.’ ‘No, you can have it after.’ ‘Edna,’ he whispered. ‘Oh, please don’t,’ she pleaded. ‘Not here – the people.’ Why did he want to touch her so much and why did she mind? Whenever he was with her he wanted to hold her hand or take her arm when they walked together, or lean against her – not hard – just lean lightly so that his shoulder should touch her shoulder – and she wouldn’t even have that. All the time that he was away from her he was hungry, he craved the nearness of her. There seemed to be comfort and warmth breathing from Edna that he needed to keep him calm. Yes, that was it. He couldn’t get calm with her because she wouldn’t let him touch her. But she loved him. He knew that. Why did she feel so curiously about it? Every time he tried to or even asked for her hand she shrank back and looked at him with pleading frightened eyes as though he wanted to hurt her. They could say anything to each other. And there wasn’t any question of their belonging to each other. And yet he couldn’t touch her. Why, he couldn’t even help her off with her coat. Her voice dropped into his thoughts. ‘Henry!’ He leaned to listen, setting his lips. ‘I want to explain something to you. I will – I will – I promise – after the concert.’ ‘All right.’ He was still hurt. ‘You’re not sad, are you?’ she said. He shook his head. ‘Yes, you are, Henry.’

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‘No, really not.’ He looked at the roses lying in her hands. ‘Well, are you happy?’ ‘Yes. Here comes the orchestra.’ It was twilight when they came out of the hall. A blue net of light hung over the streets and houses, and pink clouds floated in a pale sky. As they walked away from the hall Henry felt they were very little and alone. For the first time since he had known Edna his heart was heavy. ‘Henry!’ She stopped suddenly and stared at him. ‘Henry, I’m not coming to the station with you. Don’t – don’t wait for me. Please, please leave me.’ ‘My God!’ cried Henry, and started, ‘what’s the matter – Edna – darling – Edna, what have I done?’ ‘Oh, nothing – go away,’ and she turned and ran across the street into a square and leaned up against the square railings – and hid her face in her hands. ‘Edna – Edna – my little love – you’re crying. Edna, my baby girl!’ She leaned her arms along the railings and sobbed distractedly. ‘Edna – stop – it’s all my fault. I’m a fool – I’m a thundering idiot. I’ve spoiled your afternoon. I’ve tortured you with my idiotic mad bloody clumsiness. That’s it. Isn’t it, Edna? For God’s sake.’ ‘Oh,’ she sobbed, ‘I do hate hurting you so. Every time you ask me to let – let you hold my hand or – or kiss me I could kill myself for not doing it – for not letting you. I don’t know why I don’t even.’ She said wildly, ‘It’s not that I’m frightened of you – it’s not that – it’s only a feeling, Henry, that I can’t understand myself even. Give me your handkerchief, darling.’ He pulled it from his pocket. ‘All through the concert I’ve been haunted by this, and every time we meet I know it’s bound to come up. Somehow I feel if once we did that – you know – held each other’s hands and kissed it would be all changed – and I feel we wouldn’t be free like we are – we’d be doing something secret. We wouldn’t be children any more . . . silly, isn’t it? I’d feel awkward with you, Henry, and I’d feel shy, and I do so feel that just because you and I are you and I, we don’t need that sort of thing.’ She turned and looked at him, pressing her hands to her cheeks in the way he knew so well, and behind her as in a dream he saw the sky and half a white moon and the trees of the square with their unbroken buds. He kept twisting, twisting up in his hands the concert programme. ‘Henry! You do understand me – don’t you?’ ‘Yes, I think I do. But you’re not going to be frightened any more, are you?’ He tried to smile. ‘We’ll forget, Edna. I’ll never mention it again. We’ll bury the bogy in this square – now – you and I – won’t we?’

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‘But,’ she said, searching his face – ‘will it make you love me less?’ ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Nothing could – nothing on earth could do that.’ *

*

*

London became their play-ground. On Saturday afternoons they explored. They found their own shops where they bought cigarettes and sweets for Edna – and their own tea-shop with their own table – their own streets – and one night when Edna was supposed to be at a lecture at the Polytechnic they found their own village. It was the name that made them go there. ‘There’s white geese in that name,’ said Henry, telling it to Edna. ‘And a river and little low houses with old men sitting outside them – old sea captains with wooden legs winding up their watches, and there are little shops with lamps in the windows.’ It was too late for them to see the geese or the old men, but the river was there and the houses and even the shops with lamps. In one a woman sat working a sewing-machine on the counter. They heard the whirring hum and they saw her big shadow filling the shop. ‘Too full for a single customer,’ said Henry. ‘It is a perfect place.’ The houses were small and covered with creepers and ivy. Some of them had worn wooden steps leading up to the doors. You had to go down a little flight of steps to enter some of the others; and just across the road – to be seen from every window – was the river, with a walk beside it and some high poplar trees. ‘This is the place for us to live in,’ said Henry. ‘There’s a house to let, too. I wonder if it would wait if we asked it. I’m sure it would.’ ‘Yes, I would like to live there,’ said Edna. They crossed the road and she leaned against the trunk of a tree and looked up at the empty house, with a dreamy smile. ‘There is a little garden at the back, dear,’ said Henry, ‘a lawn with one tree on it and some daisy bushes round the wall. At night the stars shine in the tree like tiny candles. And inside there are two rooms downstairs and a big room with folding doors upstairs and above that an attic. And there are eight stairs to the kitchen – very dark, Edna. You are rather frightened of them, you know. “Henry, dear, would you mind bringing the lamp? I just want to make sure that Euphemia has raked out the fire before we go to bed.”’ ‘Yes,’ said Edna. ‘Our bedroom is at the very top – that room with the two square windows. When it is quiet we can hear the river flowing and the sound of the poplar trees far, far away, rustling and flowing in our dreams, darling.’ ‘You’re not cold – are you?’ he said, suddenly. ‘No – no, only happy.’

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‘The room with the folding doors is yours.’ Henry laughed. ‘It’s a mixture – it isn’t a room at all. It’s full of your toys and there’s a big blue chair in it where you sit curled up in front of the fire with the flames in your curls – because though we’re married you refuse to put your hair up and only tuck it inside your coat for the church service. And there’s a rug on the floor for me to lie on, because I’m so lazy. Euphemia – that’s our servant – only comes in the day. After she’s gone we go down to the kitchen and sit on the table and eat an apple, or perhaps we make some tea, just for the sake of hearing the kettle sing. That’s not joking. If you listen to a kettle right through it’s like an early morning in Spring.’ ‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘All the different kinds of birds.’ A little cat came through the railings of the empty house and into the road. Edna called it and bent down and held out her hands – ‘Kitty! Kitty!’ The little cat ran to her and rubbed against her knees. ‘If we’re going for a walk just take the cat and put it inside the front door,’ said Henry, still pretending. ‘I’ve got the key.’ They walked across the road and Edna stood stroking the cat in her arms while Henry went up the steps and pretended to open the door. He came down again quickly. ‘Let’s go away at once. It’s going to turn into a dream.’ The night was dark and warm. They did not want to go home. ‘What I feel so certain of is,’ said Henry, ‘that we ought to be living there, now. We oughtn’t to wait for things. What’s age? You’re as old as you’ll ever be and so am I. You know,’ he said, ‘I have a feeling often and often that it’s dangerous to wait for things – that if you wait for things they only go further and further away.’ ‘But, Henry, – money! You see we haven’t any money.’ ‘Oh, well, – perhaps if I disguised myself as an old man we could get a job as caretakers in some large house – that would be rather fun. I’d make up a terrific history of the house if anyone came to look over it and you could dress up and be the ghost moaning and wringing your hands in the deserted picture gallery, to frighten them off. Don’t you ever feel that money is more or less accidental – that if one really wants things it’s either there or it doesn’t matter?’ She did not answer that – she looked up at the sky and said, ‘Oh dear, I don’t want to go home.’ ‘Exactly – that’s the whole trouble – and we oughtn’t to go home. We ought to be going back to the house and find an odd saucer to give the cat the dregs of the milk-jug in. I’m not really laughing – I’m not even happy. I’m lonely for you, Edna – I would give anything to lie down and cry’ . . . and he added limply, ‘with my head in your lap and your darling cheek in my hair.’

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‘But, Henry,’ she said, coming closer, ‘you have faith, haven’t you? I mean you are absolutely certain that we shall have a house like that and everything we want – aren’t you?’ ‘Not enough – that’s not enough. I want to be sitting on those very stairs and taking off these very boots this very minute. Don’t you? Is faith enough for you?’ ‘If only we weren’t so young. . . .’ she said miserably. ‘And yet,’ she sighed, ‘I’m sure I don’t feel very young – I feel twenty at least.’ *

*

*

Henry lay on his back in the little wood. When he moved the dead leaves rustled beneath him, and above his head the new leaves quivered like fountains of green water steeped in sunlight. Somewhere out of sight Edna was gathering primroses. He had been so full of dreams that morning that he could not keep pace with her delight in the flowers. ‘Yes, love, you go and come back for me. I’m too lazy.’ She had thrown off her hat and knelt down beside him, and by and by her voice and her footsteps had grown fainter. Now the wood was silent except for the leaves, but he knew that she was not far away and he moved so that the tips of his fingers touched her pink jacket. Ever since waking he had felt so strangely that he was not really awake at all, but just dreaming. The time before, Edna was a dream and now he and she were dreaming together and somewhere in some dark place another dream waited for him. ‘No, that can’t be true because I can’t ever imagine the world without us. I feel that we two together mean something that’s got to be there just as naturally as trees or birds or clouds.’ He tried to remember what it had felt like without Edna, but he could not get back to those days. They were hidden by her; Edna, with the marigold hair and strange, dreamy smile filled him up to the brim. He breathed her; he ate and drank her. He walked about with a shining ring of Edna keeping the world away or touching whatever it lighted on with its own beauty. ‘Long after you have stopped laughing,’ he told her, ‘I can hear your laugh running up and down my veins – and yet – are we a dream?’ And suddenly he saw himself and Edna as two very small children walking through the streets, looking through windows, buying things and playing with them, talking to each other, smiling – he saw even their gestures and the way they stood, so often, quite still, face to face – and then he rolled over and pressed his face in the leaves – faint with longing. He wanted to kiss Edna, and to put his arms round her and press her to him and feel her cheek hot against his kiss and kiss her until he’d no breath left and so stifle the dream. ‘No, I can’t go on being hungry like this,’ said Henry, and jumped up and began to run in the direction she had gone. She had wan-

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dered a long way. Down in a green hollow he saw her kneeling, and when she saw him she waved and said – ‘Oh, Henry – such beauties! I’ve never seen such beauties. Come and look.’ By the time he had reached her he would have cut off his hand rather than spoil her happiness. How strange Edna was that day! All the time she talked to Henry her eyes laughed; they were sweet and mocking. Two little spots of colour like strawberries glowed on her cheeks and ‘I wish I could feel tired,’ she kept saying. ‘I want to walk over the whole world until I die. Henry – come along. Walk faster – Henry! If I start flying suddenly, you’ll promise to catch hold of my feet, won’t you? Otherwise I’ll never come down.’ And ‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘I am so happy. I’m so frightfully happy!’ They came to a weird place, covered with heather. It was early afternoon and the sun streamed down upon the purple. ‘Let’s rest here a little,’ said Edna, and she waded into the heather and lay down. ‘Oh, Henry, it’s so lovely. I can’t see anything except the little bells and the sky.’ Henry knelt down by her and took some primroses out of her basket and made a long chain to go round her throat. ‘I could almost fall asleep,’ said Edna. She crept over to his knees and lay hidden in her hair just beside him. ‘It’s like being under the sea, isn’t it, dearest, so sweet and so still?’ ‘Yes,’ said Henry, in a strange husky voice. ‘Now I’ll make you one of violets.’ But Edna sat up. ‘Let’s go in,’ she said. They came back to the road and walked a long way. Edna said, ‘No, I couldn’t walk over the world – I’m tired now.’ She trailed on the grass edge of the road. ‘You and I are tired, Henry! How much further is it?’ ‘I don’t know – not very far,’ said Henry, peering into the distance. Then they walked in silence. ‘Oh,’ she said at last, ‘it really is too far, Henry, I’m tired and I’m hungry. Carry my silly basket of primroses.’ He took them without looking at her. At last they came to a village and a cottage with a notice ‘Teas Provided’. ‘This is the place,’ said Henry. ‘I’ve often been here. You sit on the little bench and I’ll go and order the tea.’ She sat down on the bench, in the pretty garden all white and yellow with spring flowers. A woman came to the door and leaned against it watching them eat. Henry was very nice to her, but Edna did not say a word. ‘You haven’t been here for a long spell,’ said the woman. ‘No – the garden’s looking wonderful.’ ‘Fair,’ said she. ‘Is the young lady your sister?’ Henry nodded Yes, and took some jam.

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‘There’s a likeness,’ said the woman. She came down into the garden and picked a head of white jonquils and handed it to Edna. ‘I suppose you don’t happen to know anyone who wants a cottage,’ said she. ‘My sister’s taken ill and she left me hers. I want to let it.’ ‘For a long time?’ asked Henry, politely. ‘Oh,’ said the woman vaguely, ‘that depends.’ Said Henry, ‘Well – I might know of somebody – could we go and look at it?’ ‘Yes, it’s just a step down the road, the little one with the apple trees in front – I’ll fetch you the key.’ While she was away Henry turned to Edna and said, ‘Will you come?’ She nodded. They walked down the road and in through the gate and up the grassy path between the pink and white trees. It was a tiny place – two rooms downstairs and two rooms upstairs. Edna leaned out of the top window, and Henry stood at the doorway. ‘Do you like it?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ she called, and then made a place for him at the window. ‘Come and look. It’s so sweet.’ He came and leant out of the window. Below them were the apple trees tossing in a faint wind that blew a long piece of Edna’s hair across his eyes. They did not move. It was evening – the pale green sky was sprinkled with stars. ‘Look!’ she said – ‘stars, Henry.’ ‘There will be a moon in two T’s,’ said Henry. She did not seem to move and yet she was leaning against Henry’s shoulder; he put his arm round her – ‘Are all those trees down there – apple?’ she asked in a shaky voice. ‘No, darling,’ said Henry. ‘Some of them are full of angels and some of them are full of sugar almonds – but evening light is awfully deceptive.’ She sighed. ‘Henry – we mustn’t stay here any longer.’ He let her go and she stood up in the dusky room and touched her hair. ‘What has been the matter with you all day?’ she said – and then did not wait for an answer but ran to him and put her arms round his neck, and pressed his head into the hollow of her shoulder. ‘Oh,’ she breathed, ‘I do love you. Hold me, Henry.’ He put his arms round her, and she leaned against him and looked into his eyes. ‘Hasn’t it been terrible, all to-day?’ said Edna. ‘I knew what was the matter and I’ve tried every way I could to tell you that I wanted you to kiss me – that I’d quite got over the feeling.’ ‘You’re perfect, perfect, perfect,’ said Henry. *

*

*

‘The thing is,’ said Henry, ‘how am I going to wait until evening?’ He took his watch out of his pocket, went into the cottage and popped it

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into a china jar on the mantelpiece. He’d looked at it seven times in one hour, and now he couldn’t remember what time it was. Well, he’d look once again. Half-past four. Her train arrived at seven. He’d have to start for the station at half-past six. Two hours more to wait. He went through the cottage again – downstairs and upstairs. ‘It looks lovely,’ he said. He went into the garden and picked a round bunch of white pinks and put them in a vase on the little table by Edna’s bed. ‘I don’t believe this,’ thought Henry. ‘I don’t believe this for a minute. It’s too much. She’ll be here in two hours and we’ll walk home, and then I’ll take that white jug off the kitchen table and go across to Mrs Biddie’s and get the milk, and then come back, and when I come back she’ll have lighted the lamp in the kitchen and I’ll look through the window and see her moving about in the pool of lamplight. And then we shall have supper, and after supper (Bags I washing up!) I shall put some wood on the fire and we’ll sit on the hearth-rug and watch it burning. There won’t be a sound except the wood and perhaps the wind will creep round the house once. . . . And then we shall change our candles and she will go up first with her shadow on the wall beside her, and she will call out, Goodnight, Henry – and I shall answer – Good-night, Edna. And then I shall dash upstairs and jump into bed and watch the tiny bar of light from her room brush my door, and the moment it disappears will shut my eyes and sleep until morning. Then we’ll have all to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow night. Is she thinking all this, too? Edna, come quickly! Had I two little wings, And were a little feathery bird, To you I’d fly, my dear –

No, no, dearest. . . . Because the waiting is a sort of Heaven, too, darling. If you can understand that. Did you ever know a cottage could stand on tip-toe. This one is doing it now.’ He was downstairs and sat on the doorstep with his hands clasped round his knees. That night when they found the village – and Edna said, ‘Haven’t you faith, Henry?’ ‘I hadn’t then. Now I have,’ he said, ‘I feel just like God.’ He leaned his head against the lintel. He could hardly keep his eyes open, not that he was sleepy, but . . . for some reason . . . and a long time passed. Henry thought he saw a big white moth flying down the road. It perched on the gate. No, it wasn’t a moth. It was a little girl in a pinafore. What a nice little girl, and he smiled in his sleep, and she smiled, too, and turned in her toes as she walked. ‘But she can’t be living here,’ thought Henry. ‘Because this is ours. Here she comes.’

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When she was quite close to him she took her hand from under her pinafore and gave him a telegram and smiled and went away. There’s a funny present! thought Henry, staring at it. ‘Perhaps it’s only a make-believe one, and it’s got one of those snakes inside it that fly up at you.’ He laughed gently in the dream and opened it very carefully. ‘It’s just a folded paper.’ He took it out and spread it open. The garden became full of shadows – they span a web of darkness over the cottage and the trees and Henry and the telegram. But Henry did not move. Notes U Text: SCOS. 1. The title is taken from the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Something Childish, but Very Natural’ (1800). According to JMM, the story was written during the time he and KM rented an apartment in Paris, 31 rue de Tournon, from December 1913 to February 1914. 2. Unadventurous day-dreamers, a word KM derives from the main character in H. G. Wells, The Life of Mr Polly (1910).

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K.T. and her Sister1 K.T. and her sister were walking down a road that was bounded on one side by a high hill and had on the other a deep ravine. So deep was the ravine that the cliffs at its base shone like the points of teeth, sharp and tiny. Her sister was very frightened and clung to her arm trembling and crying so K.T. hid her terror and said, ‘It is alright. It is perfectly alright.’ She had a little black fur muff slipped over one hand. Suddenly there came driving towards them a chariot like the one in her blue Latin book, drawn by six stumpy horses and driven by a charioteer in a skull cap. They came at a furious gallop but the charioteer was calm, a quiet evil smile dyed his lips. ‘Oh K.T. Oh K.T. I’m frightened’, sobbed her sister. ‘It’s quite alright, it’s perfectly alright,’ scolded K.T. But as she watched the chariot a strange thing took place. Though the horses maintained their tearing gallop they were not coming towards her and her sister but were galloping backwards while the charioteer smiled as though with deep satisfaction. K.T. put her little black muff over her sister’s face. ‘They’re gone, they’re quite gone.’ But now the deafening clatter

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came from behind them like the sound of an army of horsemen in clashing armour. Louder and louder and nearer and nearer came the noise. ‘Oh K.T. Oh K.T.,’ moaned the sister, and K.T. shut her lips, only pressing her sister’s arm. The noise was upon them – in a moment – now. And nothing passed but a black horse as tall as a house with a dark serene rider in a wide hat gliding past them like a ship through dark water and gliding importantly down the hill. The sight was so fearful that K.T. knew she dreamed. ‘I must wake up at once’, and she made every effort to shut her eyes and shake away the scene – but it would not go. She tried to call and she felt her lips open but no sound would come. She shouted and screamed without a sound until at last she felt her bed and lifted her head into the burning dark of the bedroom. . . . lifted her poor face all stained and patched with crying. Her body was obedient but how slowly and gravely it obeyed as though protesting against the urge of her brave spirit. There was no sound in the room but her quiet breathing and the fluttering rush of the fire and the sting of rain on the glass. Outside lights appeared at one and then another window. The sky was grey and folded except for one lane of pale red fringed with little clouds. Content to stand outside and bathe and bask in the light that fell from Katie’s warm bright windows, content to listen to the voice of her darling among other voices and to look for her darling’s gracious shadow. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, p. 277. Published in part by JMM as ‘A Dream’, Journal (1954), pp. 52–3. 1. Among the few pages used in Notebook 23, ATL, on the cover of which KM had written ‘Commenced March 6th 1914’.

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Hydrangeas1 She lay in bed, still, straight, her hands clasped above her head, her lips faintly parted and her eyes wide open. Now all the doors were

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shut in the house, and now Mr Derry had wound up his watch, leapt into his side of the bed, lying down straight, the sheet to his chin beside his frail wife. Her little face framed in springing light hair lay pressed in the pillow, her hands half hidden in the long frilled sleeves were folded over the quilt. ‘Ready?’ ‘Yes dear’. He turned out the light and was asleep ‘like a shot’. She would have fallen asleep too, but her heart was a little ‘dicky’. It would not go quite fast enough and that made breathing so difficult. ‘If I could only take a long deep breath’. She closed her eyes and a tiny line appeared between her brows and she drank the air in little sips. And it’s not worth while disturbing Henry to get my heart mixture. He’s been so wonderfully good and patient, loathing these affairs as I know he does. Full of love she listened to his strong even breathing – the Darling. In some strange way the sound of Henry’s breathing eased her. Oh, soothed her wonderfully . . . Now Vera read the last verse appointed for that night by the Bible Society ‘For he mightily convinced the Jews and that publickly, showing by the scriptures that Jesus was Christ’,2 and put the handpainted Jerusalem-lily book mark in her bible and blew out the candle and tried not to remember ‘La Faute des Roses’3 but to think over what she had read until she fell asleep, and Mary decided not to bother about plaiting her hair that night but curled up and hugged her and began to dream almost before she fell asleep. In fact she answered ‘Yes very exciting’ out loud in the dream and it woke her and she had to go to sleep again. In his little room at the back Hans sat in his shirt on the edge of the bed, eating some patties, a leg of chicken and a chunk of almond icing out of a napkin stained with claret spread on his knees. He had had supper with the women servants but these were his pickings. ‘Ha Ha! das war lustig.’ He munched and licked his fingers and he felt an oily glow all over him. Then he too lay down, and began to snore, thrashing about in his sleep. His toes stuck out from the blanket like a comic picture. The servants lay side by side in the narrow iron beds. Cook blew out the candle and sighed and settled. ‘I must say I do feel that lively,’ said Zaidee and tittered a bit. ‘You know that young feller brought the champagne. He is a farm boy, I think. Gave him the rough side of my tongue I did. See is tie stud! Flashy, I called him. “Keep off it Flashy,” I said. He did look silly.’ But Cook hadn’t seen his tie. She had been too busy bending over the oven. Yes that was her job. She never got a sight of anything and small thanks too. Where would they be without her she’d like to know. And she saw herself bending over the oven, stooping over

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the table, cutting things, bringing things out, stirring, never looking up and everybody laughing and having jokes round her. But she was frightened of answering Zaidee crossly. If you answered a person crossly and they died in the night you’d be blamed for ever afterwards. She was always believing things like that. ‘Oh Life, I am tired’ said Cook and turned to the wall. Now everybody in the house was [asleep] except Eleanor. I shall never go to sleep again. She clasped her arms over her head – she had a strange feeling that she floated floated in the dark. Her eyes shone, she could not stop smiling and she could not grow calm. Calm – yes, I must grow calm. But it was impossible. I shall never grow calm again. Her heart beat Philip plainly Philip like a bell ringing in the alarm of battle. Yes, love was a battle. All confusion and excitement – a breathless, desperate thing. Looking into the future Eleanor saw only Philip and she, young and strong and shining, fighting the whole world, and turning and crying to each other we have won. No, that didn’t matter – it was the fighting that counted. I have been a dark feeble thing like a house lighted with one candle – but now there is a fire in every part of me and I am strong, my love, my dear. Silence hung over the garden, but the garden was awake. Its fruit and its flowers filled the air with a sweet and a wild scent. White and grey moths flew over the silvery mantle of the syringa bushes. On the dark camellia trees the flowers were poised like white and red birds. The tall trees hung their boughs over pools that were shadows. So still and mysterious appeared the house under this old, changeless light of moon, it seemed that the music and the dancing night had happened hundreds and hundreds of years ago. They who lay so quietly in its bosom might never wake again. Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 297–9. Edited and published by JMM as ‘Sleeping House’, Scrapbook, pp. 15–18. 1. Most of Notebook 10, ATL, is made up of quotations from Shakespeare. ‘Hydrangeas’ is written between two domestic accounts, each dated in 1914. Beneath the draft story KM wrote, presumably at a different time, ‘Oh, if only I could make a celebration and do a bit of writing. I long and long to write and the words just won’t come. It’s a queer business, yet when I read people like Gorky, for instance, I realize how streets ahead of them I be. . . .’ 2. Acts, 18: 28. 3. KM may be referring either to Rodolphe Berger, La Faute des roses, valse lente (1903), or the novel by Félicien Champsaur, La Faute des roses (1899).

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‘There is always something wonderfully touching’ There is always something wonderfully touching in the sight of a young mother with a delicate child, and when the mother is beautiful and radiant, and when the child is like her but terribly unlike – a little shadow page carrying with bird-like hands his mother’s glory – then the sight is enough to melt the most frozen heart. Not a heart had withstood Elena and Peter throughout the Journey. Arms had shot out to lift little Peter up and down steps, in and out of railway carriages, eyes had caressed them, Peter had been offered flowers and cakes – even some silver cachous from a minute flask dragged out of her red pocket by a French baby wearing long yellow boots. Now it was the end of the day and the last stage of their journey. They had only one hour more, one town more. From her dressing case Elena took out a bottle of eau de cologne, shook some on to her handkerchief, and raising her veil slightly she held the handkerchief to her lips and nostrils. She did not really want the eau de cologne. She was not really exhausted but her perfect sense of the dramatic fitness of things prompted the action. She could not bear that even so small an audience – half a dozen people in a railway carriage – should go away indifferent or unsatisfied. She felt bound to play exquisitely for them. Why she even took the trouble to play exquisitely for Peter when he and she were alone together. Sometimes in front of her mirror she played most exquisitely of all. She quite realised it, she would have acknowledged the fact frankly. You see, as a singer I am more or less a public woman and I find it really frightfully difficult to keep my private and my public life apart. Also – I feel so much myself on the stage that perhaps I only act when I am off. Yes, well there was some truth in that. It was sunset. They were going through fields of tall gleaming flowers. In the deep bright light they looked more silver and gold than white and yellow. There were blue flowers like lapis lazuli, and a tall red plant with flowers like plumes. In the distance the horizon was banked by forests of fir and pine black against a glittering golden sky. The sun sets to a fanfare of trumpets, thought Elena and she longed to compose a hymn to the departing sun – in French. Soleil – it was lovely – it has a wonderful [. . .] sound. Suddenly she felt a soft pressure on her arm. Peter was leaning against her, his head lying on his chest. There was hardly anything to be seen of him but the charming back of his white neck and the

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faint V of hair between the two neckbones. She bent over him – and just for a moment she caught the tender glance and smile of the old woman opposite. ‘He has gone to sleep. I know I have had them too. Many many children this old lap has carried,’ said the glance and the smile. ‘Asleep darling?’ asked Elena. Peter looked up, his wonderful grey eyes blind, hidden by the curly lashes. She said, ‘Come, come on to my lap.’ With a long graceful supple movement she gathered up her little son and held him in her arms. Like all children he was not merely asleep, he was drowned in sleep. Helpless, his arms and legs dangling, his head jerking to the train. She put his head in the hollow of her neck and rested her own on his silky black hair. ‘That’s better, isn’t it’ she whispered. Peter gave a sigh, and again Elena caught the glance of the old woman opposite – kindly, envious. The old woman looked sadly at her hands as though she asked – remembrance. Again she looked out of the window. A breeze flew among the daisies, ruffling their petals – she fancied she could smell their bitter scent. And suddenly she remembered a year in her childhood when the hills and the valleys of her home had been smothered under these same flowers, and the school children had dragged a toboggan to the top of the tallest hills and made a slide. She heard again their shrieks and screams of excitement. They had been too excited to wait their turn in the toboggan. They had rolled and tumbled among the feathery snow, and jumped up and down, running through the daisies, pulling each other, until all the side of the hill lay in green tatters. She remembered now the agony she had felt and been ashamed to show. Yes, to this very day she regretted her part in it. It had left a wound for life. Ugh! What little men and women children are! thought Elena – and she turned from the window and wondered how on earth she could bear any more of this journey. Really the last moments of a journey are intolerable. If she could only share the state of apathy that these people were sunk in. The noise of the train seemed to act upon them like a drug. They were content to be carried away. But their stupid country faces, so lulled, so soothed, revolted her faintly as she watched them. No, she would rather suffer these strange pangs of excitement that set upon her at the end of a journey. Any journey – it was always the same. Though more than half her life had been spent in travelling the thrill remained. The unknown place to which she travelled had in her head a fanciful image. It was a town. Ah, it was always the poor quarter that she saw first. The narrow streets, the tall houses teeming with careless unruly life. Footsteps ran through them ceaselessly, they ran through the narrow dark vein of the houses. Strange doors banged

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open, banged shut. In the basements lived the dregs of humanity – old men who kept birds in tiny cages or bought rabbit skins or sold little paper bags of coal and wood. On the roofs there were lean cats and pigeons and vulgar clothes hanging out to dry. And the shops, the little shops that she loved brimmed over on to the pavement. They were lighted with long whistling flares of gas – or stalls lighted by candles in round glass globes, or by lamps benign in spreading shades like haymakers’ hats. And then there were the cafés and the little [. . .] bars. The swing doors opened, the sound of a gramophone rushed out mingled with the clink of glasses and girls’ laughter and men’s voices very loud. I will go there, I will go there. To the fringe of the town, to the new roads sticky with clay where the railways thrust out roots of iron, where new houses, dark and blind, reared up in the air as though for the first time or the last. Yes, there she was walking, her coat collar turned up, her hands in her pockets. A little fox terrier dog rooted in the gutters full of dead leaves. Or it was a village of white and green houses with red geraniums at the windows and lilac bushes in the garden. She was leaning out of the window in the evening. Below her the hay carts were passing and the air smelt of hay. Behind the haycarts came the girls with scarlet cheeks. One of them carried a cornflower bush in her hands, one of them carried poppies. And although these things never came to pass it did not matter. Faced with reality she did not even regret them. They faded out of her mind until they were forgotten, then on the torn web of the old dream the new dream began silently to spin. But what was the quality in them that excited her so, that [made] her tremble. Her mouth burned. Her heart beat so powerfully she had scarcely room in her body for her quick breath. Like a woman on the way to her lover who stifles her own despairing impatience by crying to him, ‘Yes, yes, I am coming, I am coming as fast as I can. I am on my way now, I am hurrying, hurrying to you’ – so Elena cried out to herself. And Peter, the unfamiliar burden, did not see the gold burn out of the sky. He did not see the forest rush to surround the train like an army, and then fall back leaving fields again, and more fields threaded with streams and spanned with wooden bridges. Not even the shrill toy-like whistling of the engine waked him as the train drew up at the station. Then he rubbed his eyes and staggered as Elena set him down like a bird fallen out of a nest. ‘Try and wake up for a little while Peter,’ she said. ‘You shall go to bed’. It was evening. The lamp was lighted on the round table. The frau tapped, came in and took away the supper tray.

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‘Shall I draw the curtains gnädige Frau?’ she whispered. Her face very scarlet from cooking and her eyes burnt by the fire made her look like a little girl who has been playing in the wind. ‘No,’ said Elena, ‘I will draw them later. The light is so lovely.’ The frau smiled at her and went out setting down the tray in the hall that she might close the door more quietly. Elena heard her steps on the stairs, heard the eager babble that greeted her as she opened the kitchen door, that always greeted her. She is like a bird flying back to her nest, thought Elena, and then the house was quiet again. The lovely light shone in the window. She loved to think of the world outside white under the mingled snow and moonlight. White trees, white fields, the heaps of stones by the roadside white, snow in all the furrows. Mon Dieu how quiet it was. There is nobody except the moon, she thought, and she saw the moon walking over the snow, walking slowly through the heavy forests like a hunter, landing upon the tops of hills as though she stood upon a wave crest, bending over the sleeping gardens, gathering from the sleeping gardens white and green roses, slipping through the frozen bushes and looking into tiny houses, smiling strangely. She had a feeling that two wings rushed to open in her breast. ‘Oh I want to sing.’ She got up quickly and walked across the room to Peter’s bed. She sat down on the edge of it. Peter was not asleep. Propped up against the pillows, his arms along the sheet, he looked as beautiful a little boy as ever ran away from Heaven. His straight black hair was tumbled. There were two little spots like cherry stains on his cheeks, his red lips were parted, the collar of his cream flannel nightgown stood up in two peaks to his chin. ‘Sleepy?’ asked Elena, smiling. He shook his head. Of course he was not sleepy. How could he have been sleepy with eyes like that. Oh how she longed to sing! ‘What are you thinking about Peter?’ ‘Nothing my Mother,’ said Peter, giving the lie to his imploring beseeching eyes. ‘Really nothing?’ She bent down the better to see him. Suddenly he lifted his hands and then clasped them and let them fall – so – but still he did not speak. Only his eyes implored her – troubled terrified eyes. How strange he looked – he must be feverish. She put her pretty caressing hand on his forehead and brushed his fringe to the outside. Yes he was feverish. A little web of sweat hung on his face. ‘Do you feel quite well?’ she asked tenderly. He nodded ‘yes’ and at the same time she knew what his eyes were saying. ‘Mother, do not sing. Mother I could not bear you to sing tonight.’

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She never doubted his feeling for an instant. She knew, more plainly than if he had spoken, whether he were conscious of it or not, Peter was imploring her not to sing. But the knowledge did not take away her longing – her longing pushed in her breast. It was wild, it would not be denied. Free me, free me! ‘Mother’ implored Peter’s eyes, ‘do not sing tonight.’ But I must sing, Peter. The longing is far stronger than I. And when she had asserted the fact to herself it became so, it leapt up, cruel and eager. If he did not want me to sing he would say so, she thought – he is not a baby – not such a baby as that. She took his hand between hers – tenderly, tenderly she stroked. She carried it to her eager bosom as though to make him feel how her desire pressed. A mysterious fascinating smile parted her lips, her nostrils quivered. She breathed deeply and with the breath her beauty flowered. Rich[?] she was and powerful. ‘You ought to be asleep,’ she whispered fondly. ‘It’s long past your sleeping time, darling. Would you like Mother to sing you to sleep Peter?’ Her words flew, explaining. Deliberately she veiled her eyes and did not meet his. ‘But not really sing. Just make up as I go along – a song for a sleepy boy – about the moon, darling, about the moon.’ The hand she held did not quiver. She put it down. She looked about her at the shadowy room, at the window where the strange light beckoned. As in a dream she saw the dark head on the white pillows. Beautiful! Beautiful! And she lifted her bosom to those urgent wings. But she would only sing gently, only softly, Peter. Listen – snow is falling, out of the sky falls the snow, like green and white roses and nobody sees but the moon. From her cloud pillows the moon arises and floats with the falling snow and gathers the green and white roses, the little white buds of snow, in her gleaming fingers. Softly, softly. As she sang she stood up and singing still she went to the window and put her arms along the frame. Peter shut his eyes. He floated into his mother’s singing bosom and rose and fell to her breath. His wonderful mother had wings. Yes, yes, she could fly. She flew with him out of the window to show him the snow and to give him some of the roses. He felt the snow on his chest and creeping up to his throat it formed a little necklace round his neck. It crept up. ‘But not to my mouth Mother. Mother, not over my eyes.’ In the middle of her singing there came a knock at the door. Two sharp knocks, they were like a blow on the heart to her. Still half under the spell of her singing, like a queen she flung the door open. The doctor stood on the landing in his big driving coat. He was beating his fur hat against the stair rail.

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‘I am afraid I am interrupting,’ he said, and from his voice she thought he was accusing her. Her lips curled. ‘Not at all,’ she said coldly. He strode into the room pulling off his big coat. She shut the door and leaned against it. ‘The young man’s never asleep, is it?’ said the doctor. Still the same tone. ‘Yes he is asleep,’ said Eleanor [sic], and she felt her glow ebb away from her like a retreating wave. The doctor went over to the bed. He parted the sheets and caught hold of Peter’s arm to raise him. Suddenly she saw an extraordinary alertness in his face, in his movements. He dropped on one knee and put his arm under Peter’s shoulder. ‘Bring over that lamp’ he commanded, ‘and take off the globe. Quick now!’ She held the lamp in her two hands. She felt the blood creep creep away from her body. She saw the doctor give Peter a long searching glance, and then put him back on the pillows and straighten the sheet. ‘So that’s it,’ he said, shooting out his lower lip and frowning. ‘What?’ The word dropped from her lips like a pebble. The young doctor barely glanced at her. This time the sneer was unmistakeable. ‘You know as well as I do,’ he said. ‘Here, give me that lamp.’ And as he took the lamp from her he said quite calmly, ‘He is dead of course.’ Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 302–5, pp. 300–2.1 1. In KMN, 1, the first section of the draft was printed after the second, following the order of KM’s MS. Here the story’s correct sequence is restored.

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Brave Love1 I. As Mitka turned into Wyndham Square he heard a beautiful clock strike ten. The sound seemed to come from far away, from high up in the air. Mitka stopped to listen and to look up and about him. It was a warm, still night. The sky was studded with big stars and moonlight lay on the white houses and on the trees and little lawns of the square. Some of the houses had pink and white awnings spread over the balconies. The windows of all of them were filled with boxes of flowering plants, and through the open, lighted windows there came the sound of voices and laughter. Under the warm, white light the place looked strangely gay and lovely, but not quite real. It was like a place in a dream with a dream’s aloofness and security in its own unreality. But then, thought Mitka walking on in the steps of his sharp shadow, the land is always like a dream to me. I shall long all my life to live on the land and while I am longing my life will pass in little ships and big ships . . . As he came to number ‘34’ he heard the sound of a piano and then Mildred West’s voice floated to him. ‘It is all in vain – I implore thee.’ Ah, thought Mitka, she is singing to my brother. My brother is there – my darling Paddy! And he ran up the steps and gave the bell a pull that sent the German waiter rushing up from the dirty bowels of the house. Before Mitka had time to ask for his brother he heard Mildred’s voice from the drawing room landing. ‘Who is there? Hans, who is it?’ Mitka ran into the hall past the German waiter and shouted gaily, ‘It is I, Mitka.’ ‘Mitka!’ Mildred sounded very pleased. She came rustling down the stairs. ‘Really Mitka!’ and into the hall. ‘Where have you come from?’ She put her bare scented arms round his neck and kissed him and then held him away from her. ‘Let me look at you.’ Which meant at the same time – ‘You may look at me, I am as lovely as ever.’ She 398

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wore a black dress and no ornaments except a pair of black pearl ear rings and a black rose dropping from her pale coloured hair. Her red lips and her beautiful painted eyes smiled at Mitka and he recognised the perfume that always clung about his brother – the perfume like sweet dry wood. ‘Heavens, child, how brown you are! You are brown as a nut,’ said Mildred. She put her hand under his chin and tilted his face. ‘Grown a moustache, too. But I can’t quite believe in it, Mitka. You look as young as ever.’ He crinkled up his eyes. ‘Ah, you are going to push fun at me again,’ he said. ‘But I do not mind now. Since I leave here – for three years nobody is pulling my leg. I am quite forgetting how it feels.’ ‘Come up to the drawing room,’ she said, laughing at him. ‘You speak worse English than ever. Come up to the drawing room. Paddy is there. He’ll be amazed at seeing you.’ Mitka hesitated. ‘Couldn’t I see him in some more private spot first,’ he suggested. But Mildred was firm. ‘No, you’re not to be let off. We’d love to see you kiss Paddy. There is no one to be afraid of. Come along,’ and she took his hand and ran upstairs with him crying ‘Paddy, Paddy, guess who’s here? Look who I’ve brought you.’ For the moment Mitka forgot everything but his beautiful tall brother, all black and white, moving across the room to him. Tears started to his eyes. He ran and embraced Paddy and squeezed his arms. ‘Why didn’t you let me know, little one,’ said Paddy, almost as touched as Mitka. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I wanted to be a surprise for you. If I come back so suddenly it’s as though I’m never quite gone.’ ‘Listen to him.’ Mildred put her arm round his shoulder and pinched his ear. ‘Now you must be a little gentleman and say “Good evening,” to Mother and be introduced to your audience.’ The drawing room was just as he had remembered it – all pink and white, with lamp shades like swollen roses and dozens of photographs in silver frames. Old Mrs Farmer, Mildred’s mother, sat in her accustomed corner, with a ravel of wool and needles on her lap and just as before the little table beside her holding the parrot’s cage, covered in a red and white check cloth. She looked withered and trembling as he bent over her tiny yellow hand. ‘Well now!’ she quavered. ‘Well, well, well! I know you, young man, I know you,’ and peeped up slyly at him out of her puzzled eyes. ‘Miss Valerie Brandon,’ and Mitka bowed to a tall girl who stood at the grand piano, playing chords with the soft pedal down. She was wrapped in a gauze scarf and her neck and hair were steeped in candlelight. ‘Colonel Foster’ – an old man at the fire place, his feet towards the empty grate, and his plump, purplish hands, folded over

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his round stomach. ‘And these are my two boys.’ Mildred pointed, mocking, to two very dark young men playing cards in a corner. They grinned at Mitka, shuffled their feet, half rose, then subsided. ‘That’s all over.’ Mildred gave an affected sigh, put her hand in Paddy’s waistcoat pocket and took out his cigarette case. ‘Sit down on the sofa and hold Paddy’s hand.’ She stood by the tall lamp looking down at them and each time she blew the smoke from her lips she lifted her head and seemed to offer to them her milky throat and breast. ‘First thing of all,’ said Mitka, watching her in his naive admiring way, ‘I must deeply apologise for my clothes. But you know, being so seldom on land I have not got an evening dress. I know – it’s a shocking confession.’ ‘We’ll forgive you,’ laughed Mildred. ‘It’s a very nice blue serge dress, anyhow. Where have you come from? How long are you staying?’ ‘I came from Alexandria,’ he said, ‘and I am staying five days. Then I go to Marseilles, and,’ he shrugged, ‘Alexandria again. Back and forward, you know, all the time.’ ‘And have you had any wonderful adventures?’ teased Mildred. ‘Oh, no,’ said Mitka simply. ‘It’s very quiet at sea, you know.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘Very quiet indeed.’ In the little pause they heard the soft muffled chords from the piano and the sound of the parrot walking over the roof of his cage. ‘Stay with us, won’t you,’ said Paddy. ‘Stay the five days here. There’s an extra bed in my room that you can have.’ ‘What! May I really – Oh, Paddy how sweet of you.’ Mitka longed to embrace him again. He wondered if Paddy had really changed or if it was only the people and the English room that made him feel so far away and so foreign. ‘I’ll lend you a nightdress for tonight,’ said Mildred. A snigger came from the dark young men in the corner and the hop-hop-hop of the ivory cribbage pegs. But nobody paid any attention. The Colonel was asleep, his baggy chin settled in his collar, Mrs Farmer’s little eyes flew from Mildred to the brothers and back to Mildred, her face screwed tight in the effort to hear what they were saying, and Valerie Brandon sat down on the piano stool and began to play as softly as ever – she was all wrapped up in a gold net of quivering candle light. ‘Oh,’ said Mitka, ‘how glad I am to be here. How beautiful it is. How full of peace.’ He smiled at Mildred and Paddy. ‘You’re easily satisfied, my son,’ said she and made a little grimace. ‘He’s young,’ shrilled Mrs Farmer, suddenly. ‘Let him be, Mildred. He’ll learn soon enough. He’s young.’ Her lace cap trembled to her talking and she clicked open a large black fan and beat the air with it.

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‘Dear me, Mother,’ drawled Mildred. ‘We are a-going it tonight, aren’t we?’ Mitka saw Paddy frown and heard him whisper, ‘Let her alone, Mildred.’ ‘Well, she’s got no right to interfere.’ Mildred shrugged her shoulders as Mrs Farmer gathered up and burst out again. ‘You wait, young man,’ she said. ‘You just wait a bit before you’re so pleased with the outside of the glass.’ Mitka felt very uncomfortable. What a fool I am, he thought. My silly happiness always makes a scene. Now Paddy will be cross with me. I know he will. But Paddy, as if he read Mitka’s thoughts and wanted to reassure him, put his hand on Mitka’s knee and said kindly, ‘So here’s my little brother again.’ Mildred leaned back in her chair and smoked with half shut eyes. ‘Oh, Val,’ she drawled, ‘do stop that melancholy stuff. You’re melting all my bones, darling. Do stop.’ Mitka looked over at the piano. The girl stopped playing. She folded herself in her white gauze scarf and wheeled round on the piano stool, facing them. ‘Very well,’ she said, ‘I’ll stop. I’ve been crying myself for the last half hour.’ As she spoke she smiled faintly, her head a little on one side. She looked very slim and young perched on the little stool. She had black hair and long grey eyes. ‘I wonder,’ she said, still mocking, ‘if the parrot’s asleep.’ She slipped off the stool with a little rustle of silk and went over to the cage and raised the cloth. ‘Polly – Polly –’ she called and the parrot answered, copying her low voice. ‘Polly, Polly.’ ‘Valerie, don’t. He’ll pull you to pieces,’ protested Mildred. But the girl opened the cage and put her hand in and drew it out with the red and grey parrot on her finger. Crouching back on her heels she held the bird up in her hand and stroked it and raised its wings. ‘Does he hate his silly old cage,’ she said, ‘and does the silly old light make him blink?’ The parrot walked up her arm on to her shoulder and flapped its wings. ‘There, I told you so. He’ll ruin your scarf,’ said Mildred. ‘No, he won’t,’ said Valerie Brandon, ‘and I rather like the feeling of his sharp old claws in my shoulder. It amuses me,’ she added slowly and slowly turned and smiled at Mitka, who sat quite still watching the curious girl. ‘Would you like to nurse the pretty parrot?’ she asked. ‘Oh, Val, don’t be a little fool.’ ‘Who’d like to dandle our pretty Poll?’ and she laughed and bit her under lip. ‘Oh, shut up,’ said Mildred. But Valerie did not take her eyes off Mitka.

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The room and the lamps and the people all faded before the girl with the parrot who looked and looked at him so strangely that his heart shivered. ‘Pretty Polly,’ she mocked, coaxing the parrot. ‘He’ll muss her in a minute,’ shrieked Mrs Farmer with infinite relish. ‘It’s your bed-time, Mother,’ said Mildred. ‘Come along.’ Paddy took out his watch. ‘I’m going too, and so is Mitka.’ Mildred nodded. ‘I’ll wake the old C. and toddle him off. Now, boys,’ she said to the two dark young gentlemen, ‘off with you. And leave your windows open.’ Valerie put back the parrot and dropped the check cloth. She stood smiling, her finger on her lips as though she were listening to something going on inside the cage until Mildred went up and put her arm round her. ‘Come up to my room and let’s have a drink – the four of us,’ she said. The rooms on the top floor of the house belonged to Mildred and Paddy. When the two brothers entered she was sitting on the side of the bed in a blue silk kimono embroidered in white wings. Valerie Brandon was beside her and they were smiling at each other. On a little table stood a bottle of wine and four glasses. ‘In honour of Mitka,’ said Mildred. ‘Open it, Paddy.’ For some silly reason Mitka felt shy. He could hardly bear to look at the two women and at the room which seemed so full of an unknown Mildred. Her slippers and her dress lay on a couch. A powder puff was on the table with the glasses, the big, soft bed was half turned down. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ said Mildred. ‘Mitka feels shy. Don’t you? You’re rather frightened, aren’t you, Mitka? You think we’re improper.’ ‘Don’t tease him,’ said Paddy. ‘You’re horrid tonight, Mildred.’ ‘Am I?’ said Mildred, and as he handed her a glass she put her fingers round his. ‘Am I really, Paddy?’ ‘Well – no – not really,’ and Mitka heard the strange laugh of content that Paddy had for his woman. By slow degrees and scarcely knowing why he avoided her and yet wanted to look, Mitka glanced at Valerie. She was looking at him again but now her eyes were changed. She only looked kind and sweet and gentle and she seemed to be saying ‘Don’t be shy. We’re only playing.’ She drank her wine in tiny sips, and he drank from his glass when she did and felt quite free and gay again. Suddenly there was a sound of steps on the stairs. Someone whistled. ‘That’s Evershed home,’ said Mildred lightly, looking at Valerie. The girl put down her glass.

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‘Bon soir, mes amis,’ she said. ‘Who’s Evershed?’ asked Mitka. II When Mitka came down to breakfast next morning there was nobody in the dining room except Mildred and old Colonel Foster. The Colonel sat in the sunny window with a copy of the morning Post spread across his knees, but Mildred was just pouring out her tea. ‘Hallo, you nice child to wait for me,’ she said. ‘Why, has everybody gone?’ asked Mitka. ‘Yes, thank the Lord. Breakfast is a baleful time in this house. The boys have to be off to the office early and Paddy has to go to the city. Later Evershed wants things specially cooked and –’ she nodded in the direction of the window ‘– has to be fed with a spoon, nearly. I wait till they’re gone and then feed in peace. Help yourself, dear. Did you sleep alright?’ ‘Like tops,’ said Mitka. ‘Good,’ said Mildred absently. She looked tired and pale. ‘Don’t stare at me, my child,’ she said. ‘I always look a rag in the mornings. I loathe mornings – especially ones like these – indecently bright, when the sun changes into a housepainter.’ Mitka looked at her anxiously. ‘I think you must be suffering from a nerve,’ he said. ‘Really, frankly, the morning is lovely, but you do not feel strong enough to dress yourself up in it like you do the night.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Like this,’ said Mitka. ‘When I see you at night I always think this woman she wears the night as though it were her covering. She smells of it and her eyes are full of it and her voice has a thrill . . . you know how exciting the night is, and how unknown. That is how you look too. I told Paddy that in bed last night and he said yes – I was right. He said he had never lost that feeling of you too. Well,’ he shrugged his shoulders and crinkled his eyes at her, ‘you ought to wear the daytime in the same way. You know I have an idea that women, beautiful women, are the spirits of nature in that way. I mean that nature reflects herself in them as she does in ponds or flowers.’ As Mildred listened to him she laughed. ‘How absurd you are,’ said she, but grace flowed back in her gestures and her smile and she looked very sweetly at Mitka. ‘Mitka, tell me something.’ ‘What?’ ‘Have you ever been in love?’ ‘This is no place for me,’ said a voice at the door and Valerie Brandon strolled to the table and leaned her hands on it. ‘Good morning,’ said she, and leaning forward she kissed Mildred’s hair.

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‘Good morning. How interesting you look in that white dress with the black lace shawl.’ ‘Don’t I’ she said. ‘Like a Spanish waitress in a café chantant! Isn’t it hot. Hot already.’ She sat down at the table and put her hands up to her cheeks. ‘Can I get you some breakfast?’ said Mitka politely. She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t eat it. What on earth were you talking about, Mildred, with Mr –’ she hesitated ‘– Mr Mitka over the toast and bacon – the difference between Love and passion, or should women be as free as men? I don’t know what I didn’t hear as I came in.’ ‘No.’ Mildred pushed back her chair. ‘Got a cigarette, Mitka? Thank you. They smell delicious. They’re the sort you had before.’ ‘Give me one too,’ said Valerie and she took the case from Mildred. ‘I was having a good look at him in the morning light,’ went on Mildred. ‘And I thought there is really something awfully attractive about Mitka. I mean, although he does look young in spite of the moustache, he looks as though extraordinary things might happen to him. Don’t you think . . .’ ‘I’m not sure,’ said Valerie, considering him seriously. Mitka looked up at her and smiled. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Mildred is pulling my leg again. She loves to tease me. Really her opinion is this is not a bad little fellow. I put up with him for a few days.’ ‘I expect you’re right,’ answered Valerie. ‘Here! What am I doing? I’m pinching your cigarette case.’ ‘Go and smoke up in the drawing room,’ said Mildred. ‘I must get all this cleared away. Go on both of you.’ She went to the door and called, ‘Hans, Hans.’ ‘Madame,’ said the German waiter appearing from nowhere with a thick bandage round his neck. ‘What is the matter now?’ said Mildred in a disgusted voice. ‘More boils again, Hans. Ugh! How dreadful you look.’ ‘Come along,’ said Valerie. ‘Ah, Madame, please to excuse,’ mumbled the German waiter. ‘No I won’t excuse you Hans. I’m sure it’s because you don’t wash.’ She scolded him in a hard angry voice that Valerie and Mitka heard all the way up the stairs. ‘No one could stand this room in the daytime,’ said Valerie. ‘Come on to the balcony.’ There she unfolded a canvas chair and lay back, one arm behind her head. Mitka sat on a little stool, smoking. They were quiet. Then Valerie spoke. ‘I like being with you,’ she said. ‘You make me feel so good. No, I’m not joking. I mean it quite seriously. You can’t think’ – she snapped off a geranium from the balcony rail

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and bit the stalk – ‘what a relief you are, how rare it is to see someone like you who isn’t either false or – ugly.’ Mitka opened his eyes very wide. ‘Are you really not making jokes?’ he said. ‘No of course I’m not.’ She sounded quite cross, and began to bite the head of the flower. ‘Why should I bother to? But if you only knew what the whole crowd of us was like – my heavens you’d welcome someone like yourself for a change. It’s not that we’re bad or wicked,’ she said, throwing away the geranium stalk, ‘but we’re ever so dull – so out of the way of real life.’ ‘What does that last mean?’ asked Mitka softly. ‘We’re not alive,’ she said. ‘Ugh! What a houseful we are! What a crew! You can’t imagine,’ she turned to Mitka again and smiled, ‘how absurd you looked in the drawing room last night with Mrs Farmer and the Colonel and the two South Americans and Mildred and I. I shall never forget the way you ran in with your eyes dancing – nor the way you looked round and said ‘How beautiful it is here’. I nearly screamed!’ ‘But,’ said Mitka in a puzzled voice, ‘what’s the matter with the house? Isn’t it like other houses?’ ‘Oh, I suppose so,’ she said. ‘Like heaps of others suppose. Yes, I’m sure it is. I can feel the dust of hundreds of them in the hem of my skirt.’ ‘But why do you stay here if you hate it so,’ asked Mitka, more and more astonished. ‘Ah,’ Valerie laughed, ‘that’s quite a different story. Ask me another. Yes, why do I? I wonder –’ and she got up out of her chair and leant against the rail looking down at Mitka. ‘After all, it’s rather an easy question. Why does anyone do anything. Because they can’t help it, I suppose. You get caught in a wheel and round and round you go.’ ‘I don’t think that,’ said Mitka. ‘I don’t believe in wheels. If you really look yourself in the open face and say what you want to do you can do it. Otherwise, why not jump off the balcony? What’s the good of anything else.’ ‘Do you really think that people can do what they like,’ asked Valerie slowly. ‘Oh dear, I’m afraid Mildred’s right in calling you young. I believed it once – and acted on it, too. That really was funny.’ Mitka said wisely, ‘That depends, doesn’t it, on what you want to do.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘there is only one thing. To get free and to keep free. Oh well,’ she said, bitterly, ‘I see myself doing it. But that’s what I noticed about you, I think. You looked really and truly free.’ Mitka nodded. ‘That’s quite true,’ he said. ‘Yes, I am.’

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‘But supposing,’ she began, and then stopped. ‘Oh dear, what’s the good. What on earth am I talking like this for. It’s such nonsense, such hopeless nonsense,’ she cried desperately. ‘There’s old Mrs Farmer down there going tata in a bath chair. She’s seen us. Wave your hand to the baby.’ ‘Don’t,’ cried Mitka in a troubled voice. ‘Please, please don’t. You make me dreadfully sad.’ He took the ends of her scarf and fingered them while he talked, his head bent. ‘I cannot bear to think of anyone being so dreadfully unhappy. Perhaps I am, as you say, young – a ‘silly boy’ – but I would do anything in my power to help you. Believe me – I would.’ If he had looked up he would have been amazed to see her face. There was such a strange mingling of relief and scorn and amusement painted upon it. But he did not look up. ‘Then be my friend,’ she said in a low, reflecting voice. ‘I don’t know why but immediately I saw you I wanted you for my friend. I knew that somehow or other you could help me infinitely – infinitely – and that I – in a way – don’t misunderstand me – had been waiting for your help. Be my friend, my –’ her voice dropped, ‘– my secret friend. Will you?’ Ah God, what bliss is this! thought Mitka. At last someone is asking for the gift of my friendship. I who have never had a friend, who have never had anyone to wholly love. He took her hand kissed it eagerly, humbly. ‘I will be yours to my heart,’ he said. III ‘Val. Are you there. Can I come in?’ ‘Yes do. I’m manicuring. What’s the time, Mildred?’ ‘About half past three. Paddy’s just rung up from the city. He wants me to go for a run into the country with him. He’s hired a motor.’ ‘Dear me, what extravagance,’ said Valerie putting a little dab of red on each nail. ‘Isn’t it, my dear. I think it’s for Mitka chiefly. Will you make a fourth? We’ll be back for dinner.’ ‘Yes, I’d like to,’ said Valerie slowly. ‘You and Evershed aren’t going out this evening are you?’ asked Mildred. The girl shook her head. ‘No, not that I know of. Yes, I’d like to come. What time?’ ‘Well, he’s starting now. He’ll be here in about half an hour, I suppose. You’d better get dressed. I know the hours it takes you. How frightfully hot it is still. You lucky little creature, I believe you’ve got the coolest room in the house.’ ‘Well I boiled in it last night,’ said Valerie and, looking up from her polishing, she and Mildred burst out laughing.

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‘What do you think of Mitka?’ asked Mildred. ‘Here, lend me those things. I’ll have a go at my hands while you get dressed.’ ‘He’s a nice little boy,’ said Valerie lightly. ‘Yes, isn’t he. Paddy’s devoted to him. He’s amusing too – don’t you think?’ ‘Yes, he is rather.’ ‘You’ve made an extraordinary impression on him,’ said Mildred. ‘I have? Oh rot!’ ‘My dear, it’s perfectly true. I watched him at lunch today. He couldn’t keep his eyes off you.’ ‘You’ll be pairing off the Colonel with your dear Mother next,’ said Valerie, powdering her neck and arms. ‘Not a bad idea either. But I’m quite serious about Mitka. I’d tell you anything.’ ‘Oh well, what does it matter. He’ll be gone in five days. I’ll draw him on, I’ve half a mind to. What shall I wear? I never have a rag to put on. I’m frightfully wild with Evershed.’ ‘That’s all very well,’ said Mildred. ‘But you’re a fool to talk like that. Where on earth would you be without Evershed? I don’t say he is particularly fascinating but he’s worth any amount of money and he’s mad about you and he’s awfully decent – and talk about spoiling you! Don’t you quarrel with your luck, my dear. Eversheds don’t grow on trees.’ ‘But Mildred I’m so bored bored bored! You know as well as I do I’ve never been in love with Evershed and he knows it too. That’s what keeps him so keen on me I suppose. But – perhaps it’s the hot weather’s brought things to a crisis with me. I’m seeking for a romantic passion . . .’ ‘And Mitka’s to be sacrificed,’ said Mildred shrewdly. ‘Merci Madame.’ Valerie made a little face. ‘Je n’aime pas les petits bébés.’ ‘I don’t believe you. But you won’t listen to me.’ ‘Yes I will, darling.’ Valerie kissed Mildred very lightly on the eyelids. ‘I always listen to you, especially when you wear that blue veil and look like a Parisian madonna.’ ‘Oh get along with you.’ ‘Catch hold of his coat, Paddy. Don’t let him stand on the seat,’ said Mildred. ‘Mitka, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. People will say you’ve never been in a motor before. Just look at him, Valerie.’ Do what he would Mitka could not stop smiling. He did not mind Mildred teasing him. Nobody could upset his happiness. He sat very still beside Paddy. He felt rather than saw his friend opposite to him,

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her little gloved hands clasped in her lap. This wonderful change in a few hours, he thought. Who am I? Am I the same man who came here last night? I am not at all the same. I belong to someone – the woman who sits opposite to me has asked me to be her – her secret friend. Now when I am at sea I shall always have someone to talk to in my thoughts and to look at the stars with me and to share my sadness. But I cannot be sad like that any more – I can have that precious lovely feeling. Wherever I go my friend is thinking perhaps of me, and whenever I come back there is she to come to. I will come running up from my ship. One thing I must learn – how to make her happy. And then one day she will say, you did this for me Mitka. You gave me this joy. Yes Valerie, this will happen, believe me it will. He said her name over so often in his heart that he felt certain she must hear. But she sat quiet, her eyes half closed, the faint breeze fluttering her long purple veil. Mildred, too, lay back, smiling, soothed by the air and the quick movement to sleepy delight. ‘Don’t they look lovely,’ said Mitka to Paddy. Paddy nodded. ‘Yes, lovely.’ He leant across put his hand over Mildred’s. ‘Are you happy Dredy’ he said. I know why he does that, thought Mitka. He is longing for her to look at him a moment. And he was glad for his brother when Mildred pressed his hand and smiled at him. They were in the country flying down the silvered dusty lanes, past fields and fields of hay. The scent of it was in the air like honey. I feel a little drunk, thought Mitka. I wonder is this country really what I see? If so it is the most beautiful – They drew up at some big iron gates. ‘Where are we Paddy?’ ‘It’s a place to have tea.’ Although he was really so brave and made long speeches to her in his heart and called her by her name, Mitka felt shy of his friend. She seemed to keep him away from her, to join with Mildred in teasing him like a little boy. Quite quite different to the girl of the morning. The afternoon might have been a failure if Mildred had not teased him so much. ‘Now’s your chance,’ she said, when tea was over. ‘Take Valerie away into the garden and lose yourselves. You’ll never get such a chance again – she’s dying of sentiment.’ ‘Very well,’ said Valerie. ‘Come along Mitka. We won’t be long. We’ll come back for you two here.’ And he was actually walking with her out of sight of the others down little paths with flowers on either side. They came to a lawn hedged round with holly. A tree covered with yellow flowers grew in one corner. Valerie walked over the grass

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and sat down under the tree. ‘Wasn’t I clever to take Mildred at her word,’ she said. ‘Wonderfully.’ Mitka lay down beside her, his face propped in his hands. Flecks of sun and shadow fell on her from the tree and she took up some of the little bell-like flowers that had fallen in the grass and poured them from one hand to the other. ‘And now,’ said Mitka, ‘you will tell me all about you, won’t you. You see, ever since this morning I keep having trembles facing only five days. That is like a clock in me – five days, five days, and then I am gone. Well I must know a lot of you. I can’t know enough in five days of a friend, can I?’ ‘Too much,’ she said, pouring the flowers through her fingers. ‘Please not to laugh,’ said Mitka seriously. She bit her lip and glanced at him, sideways. ‘Well, what do you want me to tell you.’ ‘All,’ he said eagerly. ‘As much as possible.’ She shook her head. ‘You’ll be sorry.’ ‘No I won’t. I can’t be. I can only be glad. Oh, please begin – so little time.’ Then she was silent and let the flowers fall in her lap and picked them up again and shut them in her hands. ‘There’s nothing to tell you, Mitka,’ she said. His heart gave a great thud when she spoke his name. ‘First time you ever call me by my name is under this tree,’ he said, and he stared up into the bright branches of this yellow wonder. ‘Ah, but please please be good to me. Tell me about you.’ ‘What do you want to know?’ she said. ‘You ask me – and I promise to answer.’ He had to be satisfied with that. When she had told him, and she told him little enough and all toned down and made fair in the telling, he lay still in the grass and did not look at her. Very slowly he felt his heart beat close to the ground. ‘And you hate him,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t bear him,’ Valerie shivered. Mitka put out his hand and stroked her little shoe. ‘Oh my poor friend, my poor friend,’ he said. ‘How terribly brave you are. But surely, surely,’ he said, ‘there’s some place that you can get away.’ She shook her head. ‘There isn’t any. It’s not possible. Don’t you think if there had been I’d have thought of it by now?’ ‘To hold you in his power like that. My God!’ cried Mitka sitting up and clenching his fists. ‘What a devil this man must be.’ She bent her head. ‘What makes it so terrible is that he – he –’ ‘Oh,’ said Mitka. ‘Yes, I understand. Oh Valerie – my friend. How am I going to free you? How am I going to make you happy?’ She shook her head and looked at him with her long grey eyes.

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‘How wonderful you are – how simply marvellous,’ said Mitka, ‘and you really are my friend.’ ‘Really.’ She put a check on his eagerness. ‘But Mitka you must understand that I have to be careful. We must be secret friends. We mustn’t let the world touch us. When you think I am changed and cold you must realize that I have to be like that.’ ‘Once you have explained,’ he said, ‘of course I shall never not understand you – and –’ he smiled timidly. ‘Believe me dear friend, we will find out a way.’ She brushed the petals off her lap and stood up, looking away from him. ‘And you don’t – despise me,’ she said. ‘I hold you,’ he said, ‘like God.’ They walked back slowly through the shadowy garden. ‘Is it peculiar in friendship,’ said Mitka, ‘for me to tell you how beautiful you are, to voice out loud the way you walk and lift your little head, then smile with your eyes and – all those things?’ IV On the following evening when Paddy went up to his room to dress for dinner he found his little brother sitting on the side of the bed – in the dark. As he switched on the light Mitka rolled over with his arm across his eyes. ‘What’s up? What are you doing?’ asked Paddy curiously. ‘Is something the matter, Mitka?’ ‘No,’ said a muffled voice. ‘Only the sudden light, Paddy. It makes me blink.’ But Paddy was not satisfied. He stooped down and picked up Mitka’s handkerchief from the floor, raised his eyebrows as he felt it, and sat down beside him. It was like old times to come upon Mitka like that – like the days that Paddy never had time or desire to recall except when he saw his little brother. What a child he is, thought Paddy – and Mitka, as though he had heard his words, said, ‘Yes Paddy, I’m not ashamed before you. I’ve been crying.’ He sat up and caught hold of Paddy’s arm. ‘But not because I am sad,’ he stammered. ‘No, that’s not why. It’s because I hate someone so – so fiercely. I have been crying with rage!’ ‘I thought you were going to say just the opposite,’ said Paddy. ‘I thought, Mitka, you were crying because you were in love. Sure not?’ ‘Oh no,’ said Mitka – his lips quivering – ‘not a bit – not in the way you mean. I couldn’t be. No, I’ve been crying in despair, Paddy, in such awful rage. Ah’ – he put up his hands and clutched his head – ‘terrible, terrible!’ ‘You won’t tell me who it is you hate’ and Paddy added to himself: of course I know.

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‘No,’ Mitka shook his head. ‘I can’t do that. Don’t ask me. But Paddy – the sweet and the bitter are such an awful mixture in Life, aren’t they? I almost think it would be better if you couldn’t have both at the same time – if you had all bitter or all sweet. It would be much more bearable – and juster, I think. Yes really.’ He looked up at Paddy through his tumbled black hair. ‘It’s so – impossible,’ he said, ‘to be torn by your head and your feet at the same time – you can’t move either way. Tonight,’ he said, ‘I don’t think God is cruel or merciful or loving – I think he’s really silly, Paddy, and a silly God is a horrible one to have. I would like to throw up my hands at him and say what an old fool you are – you imbecile! I suppose you – never – feel like that!’ Paddy shook his head. ‘Never, Mitka. I’m too hard. I’m too busy thinking about myself to worry over God. You see, little brother,’ said Paddy, and he put his arm round Mitka’s shoulders, ‘you’re really in an unfortunate position – you’ve never grown a shell. Now to be able to go through Life you’ve got to have one, and a thick one too. Everything that touches you makes a mark – hurts you – or delights you, and as Life isn’t all sweet as you say you’re bound to be hurt as well as delighted. Now I’m nearly all shell, Mitka. I couldn’t keep open heart for the world like you do. I want to be powerful – that is, rich and loved by one woman – and I just fight for those two things on the quiet and keep myself guarded against everything that can get in the way of them. So Life’s pretty simple for me. But for you,’ he said, ‘oh Mitka, you’re like a naked baby on a battlefield.’ Mitka rubbed his cheek on Paddy’s sleeve. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re not quite right. I’ll tell you how it is with me. All my life, ever since I can remember, Paddy, I’ve had what you call a shell – it’s been loneliness. Things have hurt and delighted me, that’s true, but never really badly because I’ve not been near them. I’ve kept quite by myself – lonely, Paddy. Then you see, the life I chose – to go to sea – I chose because it expressed my lonely feelings better than any other. Not that I didn’t hate and loathe this thing that covered me up – in a way I did. But in another way, if you can understand me, it was the most precious thing I could have. You know, although I’ve known such a lot of people I’ve never had any friends because – except for laughing and joking and being on acquaintance terms – I can’t understand people, properly. People are too complicated for me and I don’t feel at all complicated. I feel – just one thing or another thing as I used to when I was a little boy, that’s all.’ ‘And now,’ said Paddy, ‘you’re not lonely any more, is that it?’ ‘In a way – yes, I suppose so.’ ‘And you hate the person who’s done this to you?’ ‘Oh my God no,’ said Mitka quickly. ‘How could I? No, no, it’s not that.’

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‘Oh Mitka,’ laughed Paddy, ‘if I sit here any longer with you a long white beard will flow over my chest. You make me feel hundreds of years old. I think I’d better shut you up in a box and take you back to your ship again.’ V And then came Sunday. Mitka remembered the Sundays at Wyndham Square – the untidy idle morning, and then the great dinner at half past one with everybody at the table and then the sleepy hush that fell on the house till tea time. He used to think it a very amusing day. But somehow that Sunday was not today. The dinner was the same, from half past one to half past two – they sat at the long clean table while the German waiter, white and sweating, handed the steaming food. Old Mrs Farmer in a high white cap with a coloured silk butterfly on it pecked at her food just as she used to. The Colonel’s shaking hands, the whispering of the South American boys, and Mildred’s clear ringing laughter jarred his nerves. What is the matter with me he thought. Why is it all so ugly. And Valerie Brandon sat, proud and mocking by Evershed’s side. Mildred would not leave him alone. ‘Oh Mitka, you do make me laugh today. I can’t keep a serious face when I look at you. What’s the matter Paddy, have you been scolding him.’ Paddy would not stop her. ‘Mitka your face is as long as – a double bass. Isn’t it, Evershed.’ ‘He is in love,’ cackled old Mrs Farmer, spilling custard down her black silk bodice. ‘That’s the only reason young people get the dumps.’ ‘Clever mother,’ mocked Mildred. ‘Look what a piggy mess you’re making of yourself, too.’ ‘You wait,’ said old Mrs Farmer. It was her everlasting retort. ‘Just you wait.’ It was her only defence and she seemed to scent a triumph in it. She munched it over and over in her old mouth – ‘You wait. Just wait, my lady, that’s all.’ Is this going on for ever, thought Mitka desperately. But it was over at last, and by and by as on those former amusing Sundays the house grew quiet. What am I going to do now? He went up to Paddy’s room but Mildred was there. He peeped into the drawing room – the old people were going to sleep – and on the balcony Evershed and the South American boys were reading out bits from the Sunday papers. There is no place for me, thought Mitka. His heart said, ‘Where is she, where is Valerie?’ Yes, he was miserable, and tired too. He wanted to lean up against things. I’d like to sit on these stairs with my head against the wall, he thought. Then I could be sure of . . .

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He heard her door open and the soft rustle of her silk skirts. She came down the stairs with a pink parasol and a book in her hands. ‘What are you doing?’ she said. ‘I’m not quite certain.’ ‘I’m going into the Square to read. Would you like to come?’ And so they walked out of the house in the hot afternoon sun into the Square. Valerie sat down on a little green bench shaded with her pink parasol. ‘You haven’t got a hat,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it too hot?’ ‘Oh no, not for me,’ said Mitka, screwing up his eyes at the sun. ‘I have a very thick head.’ She smiled at him. ‘You do say funny things.’ ‘Do I?’ he said anxiously. ‘You mean silly things.’ ‘No, no, no. I mean funny – and charming – things. I shouldn’t like you to talk any other way . . . What was the matter with you at dinner today?’ ‘Ah,’ began Mitka. ‘Let me think back. It’s such a long way away now, I’ve forgotten it . . . Yes, I remember. I don’t know. I felt just miserable.’ ‘But why,’ she insisted, ‘why?’ ‘I think perhaps a little piece of your hatred of the house dropped in my heart. And at the same time – there was something else.’ ‘What,’ said her low kind voice. ‘Tell me Mitka.’ ‘I’m such a disgusting doubter,’ he said. ‘Ever since we walked in that garden I have wanted to ask you again – are you still my friend. You haven’t changed? I know you haven’t. I hate myself for wanting to hear – and yet when I see you with other people – though I understand why you must be different, I get a sort of fright all the same, and I think: She has forgotten you. It was all a dream! And then I feel I must run to you and ask you and beg you to say it over and over, “No, not changed – just the same – I am your friend, Mitka.” I won’t always be such a fool,’ said Mitka. ‘But perhaps it is the newness that makes it so awfully sweet and terrible at the same time. Please don’t be offended with me.’ ‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘But Mitka –’ (what a heavenly name I have, he thought) ‘– you are content with my friendship, aren’t you. I mean if I felt I had made you sad –’ ‘Oh my God, no. Oh Valerie – if only I could tell you – how all life is changed for ever.’ She did not seem quite content with his answer. She frowned a little and half shut her eyes as though she were puzzled a little. ‘But here’s another thing,’ he said, not noticing. ‘I’m terrified when I think of the letters I want to write to you – you will write to me, often, often.’ ‘Often,’ she promised, shortly. ‘You’ll really tell me things.’

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‘Of course I shall.’ He moved restlessly. ‘I go on Tuesday – on Tuesday morning,’ said Mitka. ‘For how long,’ she asked absently, fingering her rings. ‘For – you lied,’ cried Mitka, catching sight of her drawn brows. ‘You’re tired, Valerie.’ ‘Yes, I believe I am a little. It’s the sun.’ And Mitka had a sudden vision of himself as an immense giant pulling it out of the sky and smashing it because it shone too warmly on Valerie. That evening was like the first evening. They were all in the drawing room – except Evershed – and Valerie was at the piano again. But Mitka sat alone in a corner and watched, tired and happy. Sometimes as she played she looked across at him. ‘I am your friend,’ said her grey eyes – until Evershed came into the drawing room and leant over the piano talking to her in a low voice. Her head was bent. Mitka heard her voice, then saw her look up and smile at Evershed and shrug her shoulders. From his corner Mitka watched the two. All this is nothing, he said to himself. She is your friend. She told you so today. All this does not matter – not at all really. It’s nothing to do with you and with her. You are going away on Tuesday and then you need not ever see her with other people. Your thoughts can be quite alone with her. He scolded and comforted his heart, but all to no purpose. His heart began to cry and cry and then to sink in despair in his little shaking body. VI ‘And so you’re going to leave us today,’ said Mildred. ‘I don’t think you’re a very nice boy, Mitka. What were you doing all yesterday. You must have gone out after breakfast – and when did you come in.’ ‘I walked,’ said Mitka. ‘I came to a sudden conclusion early in the morning and walked all over London.’ ‘What on earth for?’ ‘To see it. It isn’t anything though. Old webs with no spiders,’ he said, smiling at her. ‘Oh well,’ said Mildred, ‘a Mother’s blessing. Run along. I must dress. I shan’t see you again, shall I?’ She had been having breakfast in bed and she had called to Mitka to come and say goodbye. ‘No, I suppose not.’ ‘Run along and say goodbye to your little sweetheart,’ said Mildred. He had packed his leather bag. He took it downstairs, put it in the hall and then went up again to the drawing room. He knew Valerie would be there. She sat on the sofa with her hands in her lap. The blinds were down and the drawing room was very cool and dark.

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Mitka shut the door and went up to her and stood like a little boy about to say a lesson. ‘So you’re going,’ said Valerie. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me what I did all yesterday’ he said in a husky voice. ‘Well, I tell you. I made up my mind to say to you: no, please don’t write me letters. No, please take back this friendship. I don’t want it. I am very sorry.’ Valerie opened her eyes at him. ‘Why,’ she whispered, watching him keenly, with a sort of delighted surprise waking in her face. ‘Because –’ he shrugged his shoulders ‘– I haven’t a reason,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I haven’t a reason at all – except I am not what you thought I was really, and I am a fraud.’ ‘Mitka.’ He went over to the piano and leant against it away from her. ‘Mitka, if you’ve changed and you don’t want me any longer – if I’m to lose my friend,’ she said, ‘well,’ she gave a little breathless laugh, ‘I can’t help that, can I – I can’t plead for you, can I, Mitka. But I do think that I’ve got the right to know why – you are – breaking our secret.’ He shook his head quickly. ‘No – I can’t tell you. No good asking. The thing to do,’ he said, speaking slowly, ‘is for me to say my goodbye and then to go. Goodbye, just like that. Not turn.’ He turned and looked at her and the words died on his lips. She sat very quiet, her eyes upon him. He could see her little breast rising and falling and he could see her hands half hidden in the black lace shawl. Slowly she seemed to grow and fill the world as he watched her. What did anything else matter? What was anything? Nothing but her remained. ‘It’s no good,’ he cried sharply. ‘I can’t. I can’t tell you,’ and he stumbled forward and sat beside [her] and put his head in her lap. ‘I love you, love you, love –’ ‘Ah,’ she breathed – in the mirror opposite she smiled at the radiant lovely face that smiled at her, and then she bent over Mitka and laid her hand lightly, lightly on his dark head. ‘Mitka, are you sure?’ He raised his head and looked up at her, frightened and desperate. His eyes were full of tears and his mouth was set hard. He could not speak – only nod his head; his breath came in shaking sobs. ‘Don’t,’ she said tenderly. With infinite gentleness and sweetness she looked at Mitka. ‘I love you too,’ whispered Valerie. ‘What is that you have said’ he stammered. ‘Say it again. Quickly, quickly.’ ‘I love you too.’ He seized her hands and kissed them over and over, the backs of her hands, the palms of her hands – each little finger, never taking his eyes

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off her face. He said in awe and wonder, ‘You love me,’ and again, holding her hand against his heart, ‘You love me!’ She nodded. Smiles flew over her lips. How radiant she was, and yet there was a kind of tired languor in her gestures and her voice. ‘Oh, for a long time. Didn’t you . . . really know?’ ‘If God had appeared to me and told me I should not have believed him. How could I believe that this world could hold such a heaven.’ He gave a queer run-away laugh. ‘I’m not dreaming, am I? This is I, Mitka, and you are Valerie – and you have said you love me.’ Suddenly he put his arms around her. She leaned to him and they kissed each other. In that long kiss Mitka gave himself and his brave love and his hopes and all his being into the keeping of Valerie. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘Forgive me.’ ‘Why’ she whispered, looking at him in ecstasy – and yet she was calm and he trembled violently. ‘I am so unworthy and I am so weak. I can hardly bear my joy. What have I done to be this happy man. Ah!’ he cried, ‘how beautiful you are, my love – how marvellously beautiful – there’s a light shining from every little finger in you like the light from a saint. Valerie, Valerie.’ She lay among the cushions and smiled at him. He bent over her. ‘And you will be my wife.’ Came a tiny pause – long enough for a throb of surprise in Valerie’s bosom. Then she said, ‘Yes, your wife, Mitka.’ He made as if to kiss her again then he drew away and clasped his hands together. ‘No, no!’ he said in a strained voice. ‘Don’t let me. Help me, Valerie. Don’t let me kiss you too much. If I do I shall go mad and I shall not be able to leave you – and we have to part now. Yes yes we must – if only to come together again, dearest. I must leave you soon.’ ‘So soon as that?’ she whispered – and she put her arms round him and drew him to her and pressed his head on her breast. ‘Forget everything,’ she whispered, ‘everything except that we love each other my dearest, my dearest.’ He broke away from her arms. ‘That’s just what I can’t do,’ he stammered. ‘Don’t you understand.’ And he got up and walked quickly up and down the room. ‘I am lost if I do that. You see this sudden joy, and you, so sweet to me, and my thoughts on fire, and all the future to be settled in just this breath of time – suddenly, you understand. My angel,’ said Mitka, ‘my beloved soul, I have to leave you, and we must wait for our caresses and for our happiness until I come back quickly, as quickly as I can, and take you away and we are married. Now,’ he said, ‘we have to decide everything, to make our plans.’ He stopped in front of her and took her hands and began kissing them again. ‘Already, Valerie, my head is full of plans. I can

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even see our house already, and our child.’ She sat quite still with her head bent. ‘Listen to me, my darling –’ and he began to talk and to arrange and plot and settle these marvellous happenings. He was going now to Alexandria to get money. Then he would go to Marseilles. He had friends there. He could get something to do in Marseilles. In the meantime he would borrow enough money for them both and she would come to him there. That was the best. They would start a new life together, far away from everybody, from everything. Now Evershed and his threats did not matter. Nothing and nobody could touch or harm them. Life unfolded like a sweet flower as he spoke. He smelled its fragrance, he leaned over it and the dazzling miracle of its beauty and colour intoxicated him – he spoke on and on, for years it seemed to the listening Valerie – who never moved or looked up, whose hands lay in his without warmth or pressure. Just once when he knelt by her and said ‘Ah Valerie, our life together, our children,’ a little smile crooked her lips and she raised her eyebrows faintly. Otherwise she gave no sign. VII One morning a few weeks later Mildred walked into Valerie’s room. The young girl was in bed and asleep. Mildred stood looking down upon her and wondering in a vague way how or why Valerie kept her childishness of appearance. She lay on her back; the sleeves of her nightgown had fallen back leaving her arms bare to the shoulders. Long curls of black hair lay on either side of her cheeks, her eyelashes and brows cast a faint shadow, her lips were parted to her gentle breathing. Yes, she’s lovely! thought Mildred. Good Lord how innocent she looks. I expect she’s as passionate a little devil as they make them. Mildred drew the curtains from the window but Valerie did not stir. On the dressing table lay her scarf, long white gloves, a fan, and a big bunch of bruised yellow roses. The room was littered and disordered with her clothes and toilet jars, but Mildred realized this untidiness as something careless and fascinating, a part of Valerie. Yes, if I were a man I’d be in love with this little minx, too. She’s so certain of herself and so utterly careless, and yet she keeps her secret. Yes, she’s cold and passionate. With her thumb and finger Mildred flicked the envelope she held in her hand, glanced at the writing and postage mark, and made a little grimace. Valerie sighed, flung out her arms, half rolled over and sat up, shaking her head. ‘I’m not at all awake yet,’ she said in a clear unreal voice (children who talk in their sleep speak so).

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‘Well, it’s high time you were,’ said Mildred. ‘It’s after eleven o’clock. There’s a letter for you,’ and she gave it to Valerie. ‘You’re an angel,’ said Valerie, just glancing at the letter. ‘We didn’t get in until four. Went to one of those idiotic clubs.’ She smiled. ‘Ah, come and sit down a tiny minute by me,’ she coaxed. Mildred sat down and Valerie put her arms round her. ‘So it’s still going on, is it?’ asked Mildred, running her finger up one of Valerie’s curls. ‘What? You mean these pathetic effusions?’ said Valerie. ‘Mm. I was in your room the other day when the housemaid was turning it round and she pulled dozens from behind the white paper frill of the fireplace. I knew they were from the same – the poor child uses such funny paper. Do you read them?’ But Valerie did not answer. Instead she said, ‘Well what am I to do? I can’t stop him. I’ve written and told him it’s hopeless until I’m tired. It’s all very well for you to laugh, but it’s boring – and so stupid. There’s something humiliating in a boy’s letters. Gaucherie can be rather delightful when you’re with a person – charming eyes, a baby mouth, silky hair can carry it off. But by letter – oh dear no. What are you laughing at?’ ‘You. I am laughing at you troubling to play for me. I know perfectly well you’re up to some game with Mitka. I’d love to know what it is. He’s a queer little creature. I am sure that if you had told him to stop writing he wouldn’t write. He’s too proud and too sensitive to do that. Well I don’t believe you’ve told him. But then you’re not in love with him, so why keep him on the hop?’ Valerie lay down in bed, threw the letter up in the air and caught it again. ‘Bother me,’ she said lightly, ‘I don’t know. But if once I’ve touched a thing I can’t let it go until I’ve tried to break it or to see if it can break me. It’s my one principle – snatched from a weary world –’ Then she sat up and tore open the letter. The envelope slipped off the sheet on to the floor. There were pages and pages of fine careful writing. ‘Like to hear?’ she said, making a face at Mildred. But Mildred moved away from the bed. ‘No, no. I loathe hearing things being killed – and babies cry worse than pigs. Bon appétit, you little witch.’ She drifted out of the room. Dearest of all Do not be frightened. I am writing to you in my bed. I have caught a fever of some kind on the top of some pleurisy and therefore I am not well. Excuse my stupidity. What a fool I am. I believe it was anxiousness. It is so long since I have had a letter from you and the waiting and thinking from the first to hear has made me a little tired. There have been so many things to do and I am not the man of affairs that Paddy is. But people have been

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angels. That is because I love you. I have carried you in my heart wherever I went and I do not believe a person has seen me – it is you they have seen in my looks, and it is for you they have been kind. As I told you last week, my father has sent me the money. Everything is ready and waiting for you. I am staying here until you come and we find where you should wish to live. Of course where I am now would not do for you, but for me it is all right, and it saves me money. Besides, everywhere is heaven with you in my heart. In the first days of my illness the room was so full of you I stretched out my arms to it like a child does to a garden. I know there is a good reason why you don’t write. I know I must not try you – and you are wise – but still I am so stupid, every time the postman sounds in the street I rush to the staircase and my heart beats up. Lying here among all other steps I know his now. Even if I lie asleep my heart hears them and wakes me and I run out of bed. Come, my darling. Everything waits for you. Come soon. It will not be hard. I know you are very delicate and fine, but do not be afraid. Such foolishness to write but my head burns. Valerie, Valerie. I kiss your little feet. I implore them to bring you quickly to me. I adore you.

However, I shall burn it, she thought. She got out of bed and dropped this letter too behind the white paper frill in the fireplace. Yes, she was really curious, and the idea of Marseilles was exciting, decidedly. Of course she had never meant to go. Not really, but just for a time. And she saw herself in a white room overlooking a garden of pink waxy flowers that reached down to the sea. Mitka was with her, lying on his back with his eyes closed, very flushed, his ears and lips very pink. Yes, he’d look just like that. He’d be an awfully charming lover – after my commercial bulldog. But you couldn’t live up to [it], my child, she said, staring at herself in the glass. Because, you see, my lady, that’s what’s the matter with you. Her lips smiled gaily, but her eyes said Yes, that is true – you’re too clever to be found out, but you’d kill him, you know you would – and oh what complications! But Marseilles. Well – and maybe I can buy white carnations from a dark musky-smelling flower seller who could not keep his eyes off her whiteness. You’re a perfect little thing being loving to this boy, she scolded herself, or you’re degenerating – choose which one you like the better. I am sure he has [. . .] VIII Again he heard the sound of those footsteps. Again he rushed to the door, opened it and hung over the iron stair rail. They were coming up the stairs, they were quite near. Again he made that tremendous effort to speak above the throbbing of his heart. ‘Anything for me?’ Oh my God – what had happened? The postman looked up at him,

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grinned, came up further, dipped into his satchel and Mitka bent and took the letter through the bars. ‘V’la M’sieu’,’ said the postman, passing the letter into the trembling hands as though it were bread he carried. But Mitka did not answer. He straightened up and holding the stair rail he went slowly, slowly back into his room, shut the door, leant against it, the letter pressed to his heart. There was a piece of mirror on the wall opposite the door. As he raised his eyes he saw himself reflected in it, so transfigured, so mysteriously joyful. Mitka is dead, he thought. Mitka is a saint. For a long time he stood there. And a strange thing happened. He forgot all about the letter that lay on his heart. With wondering eyes he looked at his little room. A funny little room under the roof of a huge building. In one corner stood a bed covered with a red quilt patterned with yellow flowers. In another an iron wash-stand. A table stood in the middle with a chair pushed against it. His luggage was piled against a wall. On a shelf by the bed there were bottles – bottles of all colours. A pencil ray of sun shining on these bottles made them wonderfully beautiful. Over the window hung a battered blind but it did not keep the sun out. The sun shone in rays and big soft spots of gold light on the floor and walls. Tenderly, he smiled at the room and walked to the table and sat down by it. Yes, I lived here, said Mitka. He tapped with the letter on the dusty table. It’s rather nice, he said dreamily. The blind lifted and tapped to a little breeze. Through the window there came the sound of long-drawn cries and lazy shouting. AAAI drawled a voice, and then EEEEEE – just the same sound their old gardener made with his tongue when he chased a swarm of bees. AAAI came in lazy shouts – and then the old gardener answered, angry and bustling. He wanted very much to get up from his chair and look out of the window but no, his body would not move. It was no use trying. He sat still. He felt very peaceful, almost as if he were at sea again. Yes, his little room with the spots of sun and beautiful bottles floated in the sea, and those were the voices of sailors. Why do I feel so frail? Yes, I know. It is because I have not been to sleep such a long time – and at the thought he began to breathe slowly but not too profoundly because a deep breath moved a knife that had fallen into the bottom of his lung. But it was good even to breathe like that. How long was it since he had been to sleep? Well, he could not remember. Perhaps he had not been to sleep for years. Now he could move. He got up from the table and lifted his arms above his head, and walking carefully so as not to step upon the quivering spots of lovely light that danced on the floor he reached the bed and lay down, pressing his head into the pillow. Away floated Mitka in the room in the roof. Away he floated. AAAA–iiii came fainter and fainter now and the sun danced on Valerie’s letter.

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That was how she found him. An African servant with a slop pail had met her at the bottom of the stairs, had struggled in front of her up the five flights, the stinking pail still in her hand. Valerie opened the door and came in – quite quietly. But when she saw Mitka lying on the bed she ran over to him – terribly frightened for a moment. No – nothing like that had happened. He was only sound asleep, his face covered with beads of sweat, lying on his back, his lips and his ears very pink. Had she dreamed this. But not this disgusting dreadful room, not this vile house, that awful African woman, the smells. So this was where he expected her to come – it was to this place. She looked at the flowers she carried – white carnations bought from a musky-smelling flower seller. She held them to her face. She saw the red and blue bottles, the ugly blobs of sun spilling through the broken blind – and then she saw on the dusty table her unopened letter to him. Her presence of mind never deserted her a moment. Deliberately and making no attempt to hush her steps she walked across to the table, picked up her letter. She even took care to see the petals of her flowers had fallen. I loathe the cheap properties of tragedy, thought Valerie, shutting the door after her. IX Evershed was waiting in the room of the hotel, striding up and down, his face dark red, his eyes immense and glazed. When she opened the door he started violently. ‘Where in God’s hell have you been,’ said Evershed. ‘You’ve given me a pretty turn. Here I go out for a jiffy to get some cigarettes and come back to find this – this bloody little note Back in an hour’s time. Look here, Valerie, you can’t do that sort of thing you know. It’s – it’s not cricket. It’s – it’s a damnable trick to play on a man.’ He was trembling all over and wiping his eyelids and his moustache with a folded handkerchief. ‘What did you do it for? Why didn’t you tell me? Did you want to buy something? What was it?’ She looked at him in amazement, a childish smile on her lips. ‘You poor old boy, I never dreamed you’d feel like that. I merely thought while you were away I’d like to go for a walk after that train. I’d got a headache. And I felt cross. I wanted air and I wanted to walk off my black monkey. Did I really give you a fright?’ She put up her hands to untie her veil. ‘You’re joking.’ ‘Joking!’ He gave a great sigh of relief and flopped on to the bed. ‘I never thought a man could be such a fool about a woman. I nearly howled. I was half mad, Valerie. Everything you could imagine rushed into my brain. Why, I thought you’d done it on purpose. Brought me here and then skeedaddled – no not quite as bad as that, but I –

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well it’s no good going over it again. Was that really all. You weren’t chippy with me or anything. I thought you seemed a bit quiet in the train. Thunder!’ said Evershed, ‘that was a nasty scare.’ ‘On the contrary,’ said Valerie. She had taken off her hat. She lifted her hair off her face and went over to him and perched on his knee looking up at him with a strange wistful smile. She put her hands on his hot cheeks. ‘I believe I’m really falling in love with you,’ she whispered. ‘Valerie, my Queen,’ said Evershed. ‘I knew you’d come round, little girl.’ Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 35–55. 1. KM’s diary entry, [January] 12, 1915: ‘Actually finished the story Brave Love and I don’t know what to think of it even now. Read it to Jack who was also puzzled’ (KMN, 2, p. 4). This long story of female duplicity and male naïveté was written while KM was corresponding with Francis Carco, with whom she believed herself in love. See Life, Ch. IX, ‘Indiscreet Journeys’, pp. 162–79.

•

The Little Governess1 Oh dear, how she wished that it wasn’t night-time. She’d have much rather travelled by day, much much rather. But the lady at the Governess Bureau had said: ‘You had better take an evening boat and then if you get into a compartment for “Ladies Only” in the train you will be far safer than sleeping in a foreign hotel. Don’t go out of the carriage; don’t walk about the corridors and be sure to lock the lavatory door if you go there. The train arrives at Munich at eight o’clock, and Frau Arnholdt says that the Hotel Grünewald is only one minute away. A porter can take you there. She will arrive at six the same evening, so you will have a nice quiet day to rest after the journey and rub up your German. And when you want anything to eat I would advise you to pop into the nearest baker’s and get a bun and some coffee. You haven’t been abroad before, have you?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, I always tell my girls that it’s better to mistrust people at first rather than trust them, and it’s safer to suspect people of evil intentions rather than good ones. . . . It sounds rather hard but we’ve got to be women of the world, haven’t we?’

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It had been nice in the Ladies’ Cabin. The stewardess was so kind and changed her money for her and tucked up her feet. She lay on one of the hard pink-sprigged couches and watched the other passengers, friendly and natural, pinning their hats to the bolsters, taking off their boots and skirts, opening dressing-cases and arranging mysterious rustling little packages, tying their heads up in veils before lying down. Thud, thud, thud, went the steady screw of the steamer. The stewardess pulled a green shade over the light and sat down by the stove, her skirt turned back over her knees, a long piece of knitting on her lap. On a shelf above her head there was a water-bottle with a tight bunch of flowers stuck in it. ‘I like travelling very much,’ thought the little governess. She smiled and yielded to the warm rocking. But when the boat stopped and she went up on deck, her dressbasket in one hand, her rug and umbrella in the other, a cold, strange wind flew under her hat. She looked up at the masts and spars of the ship black against a green glittering sky and down to the dark landing stage where strange muffled figures lounged, waiting; she moved forward with the sleepy flock, all knowing where to go to and what to do except her, and she felt afraid. Just a little – just enough to wish – oh, to wish that it was daytime and that one of those women who had smiled at her in the glass, when they both did their hair in the Ladies’ Cabin, was somewhere near now. ‘Tickets, please. Show your tickets. Have your tickets ready.’ She went down the gangway balancing herself carefully on her heels. Then a man in a black leather cap came forward and touched her on the arm. ‘Where for, Miss?’ He spoke English – he must be a guard or a stationmaster with a cap like that. She had scarcely answered when he pounced on her dress-basket. ‘This way,’ he shouted, in a rude, determined voice, and elbowing his way he strode past the people. ‘But I don’t want a porter.’ What a horrible man! ‘I don’t want a porter. I want to carry it myself.’ She had to run to keep up with him, and her anger, far stronger than she, ran before her and snatched the bag out of the wretch’s hand. He paid no attention at all, but swung on down the long dark platform, and across a railway line. ‘He is a robber.’ She was sure he was a robber as she stepped between the silvery rails and felt the cinders crunch under her shoes. On the other side – oh, thank goodness! – there was a train with Munich written on it. The man stopped by the huge lighted carriages. ‘Second class?’ asked the insolent voice. ‘Yes, a Ladies’ compartment.’ She was quite out of breath. She opened her little purse to find something small enough to give this horrible man while he tossed her dress-basket into the rack of an empty carriage that had a ticket, Dames Seules, gummed on the window. She got into the train and handed him twenty centimes. ‘What’s this?’ shouted the man, glaring at the money and then at her, holding it up to his nose, sniffing at it as

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though he had never in his life seen, much less held, such a sum. ‘It’s a franc. You know that, don’t you? It’s a franc. That’s my fare!’ A franc! Did he imagine that she was going to give him a franc for playing a trick like that just because she was a girl and travelling alone at night? Never, never! She squeezed her purse in her hand and simply did not see him – she looked at a view of St Malo on the wall opposite and simply did not hear him. ‘Ah, no. Ah, no. Four sous. You make a mistake. Here, take it. It’s a franc I want.’ He leapt on to the step of the train and threw the money on to her lap. Trembling with terror she screwed herself tight, tight, and put out an icy hand and took the money – stowed it away in her hand. ‘That’s all you’re going to get,’ she said. For a minute or two she felt his sharp eyes pricking her all over, while he nodded slowly, pulling down his mouth: ‘Ve-ry well. Trrrès bien.’ He shrugged his shoulders and disappeared into the dark. Oh, the relief! How simply terrible that had been! As she stood up to feel if the dress-basket was firm she caught sight of herself in the mirror, quite white, with big round eyes. She untied her ‘motor veil’ and unbuttoned her green cape. ‘But it’s all over now,’ she said to the mirror face, feeling in some way that it was more frightened than she. People began to assemble on the platform. They stood together in little groups talking; a strange light from the station lamps painted their faces almost green. A little boy in red clattered up with a huge tea wagon and leaned against it, whistling and flicking his boots with a serviette. A woman in a black alpaca apron pushed a barrow with pillows for hire. Dreamy and vacant she looked – like a woman wheeling a perambulator – up and down, up and down – with a sleeping baby inside it. Wreaths of white smoke floated up from somewhere and hung below the roof like misty vines. ‘How strange it all is,’ thought the little governess, ‘and the middle of the night, too.’ She looked out from her safe corner, frightened no longer but proud that she had not given that franc. ‘I can look after myself – of course I can. The great thing is not to –’ Suddenly from the corridor there came a stamping of feet and men’s voices, high and broken with snatches of loud laughter. They were coming her way. The little governess shrank into her corner as four young men in bowler hats passed, staring through the door and window. One of them, bursting with the joke, pointed to the notice Dames Seules and the four bent down the better to see the one little girl in the corner. Oh dear, they were in the carriage next door. She heard them tramping about and then a sudden hush followed by a tall thin fellow with a tiny black moustache who flung her door open. ‘If mademoiselle cares to come in with us,’ he said, in French. She saw the others crowding behind him, peeping under his arm and over his shoulder, and she sat very straight and still. ‘If mademoiselle will do us the honour,’ mocked the

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tall man. One of them could be quiet no longer; his laughter went off in a loud crack. ‘Mademoiselle is serious,’ persisted the young man, bowing and grimacing. He took off his hat with a flourish, and she was alone again. ‘En voiture. En voi-ture!’ Some one ran up and down beside the train. ‘I wish it wasn’t night-time. I wish there was another woman in the carriage. I’m frightened of the men next door.’ The little governess looked out to see her porter coming back again – the same man making for her carriage with his arms full of luggage. But – but what was he doing? He put his thumb nail under the label Dames Seules and tore it right off and then stood aside squinting at her while an old man wrapped in a plaid cape climbed up the high step. ‘But this is a ladies’ compartment.’ ‘Oh, no, Mademoiselle, you make a mistake. No, no, I assure you. Merci, Monsieur.’ ‘En voi-turre!’ A shrill whistle. The porter stepped off triumphant and the train started. For a moment or two big tears brimmed her eyes and through them she saw the old man unwinding a scarf from his neck and untying the flaps of his Jaeger cap. He looked very old. Ninety at least. He had a white moustache and big gold-rimmed spectacles with little blue eyes behind them and pink wrinkled cheeks. A nice face – and charming the way he bent forward and said in halting French: ‘Do I disturb you, Mademoiselle? Would you rather I took all these things out of the rack and found another carriage?’ What! that old man have to move all those heavy things just because she. . . . ‘No, it’s quite all right. You don’t disturb me at all.’ ‘Ah, a thousand thanks.’ He sat down opposite her and unbuttoned the cape of his enormous coat and flung it off his shoulders. The train seemed glad to have left the station. With a long leap it sprang into the dark. She rubbed a place in the window with her glove but she could see nothing – just a tree outspread like a black fan or a scatter of lights, or the line of a hill, solemn and huge. In the carriage next door the young men started singing ‘Un, deux, trois.’ They sang the same song over and over at the tops of their voices. ‘I never could have dared to go to sleep if I had been alone,’ she decided. ‘I couldn’t have put my feet up or even taken off my hat.’ The singing gave her a queer little tremble in her stomach and, hugging herself to stop it, with her arms crossed under her cape, she felt really glad to have the old man in the carriage with her. Careful to see that he was not looking she peeped at him through her long lashes. He sat extremely upright, the chest thrown out, the chin well in, knees pressed together, reading a German paper. That was why he spoke French so funnily. He was a German. Something in the army, she supposed – a Colonel or a General – once, of course, not now; he was too old for that now. How spick and span he looked for an

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old man. He wore a pearl pin stuck in his black tie and a ring with a dark red stone on his little finger; the tip of a white silk handkerchief showed in the pocket of his double-breasted jacket. Somehow, altogether, he was really nice to look at. Most old men were so horrid. She couldn’t bear them doddery – or they had a disgusting cough or something. But not having a beard – that made all the difference – and then his cheeks were so pink and his moustache so very white. Down went the German paper and the old man leaned forward with the same delightful courtesy: ‘Do you speak German, Mademoiselle?’ ‘Ja, ein wenig, mehr als Französisch,’ said the little governess, blushing a deep pink colour that spread slowly over her cheeks and made her blue eyes look almost black. ‘Ach, so!’ The old man bowed graciously. ‘Then perhaps you would care to look at some illustrated papers.’ He slipped a rubber band from a little roll of them and handed them across. ‘Thank you very much.’ She was very fond of looking at pictures, but first she would take off her hat and gloves. So she stood up, unpinned the brown straw and put it neatly in the rack beside the dress-basket, stripped off her brown kid gloves, paired them in a tight roll and put them in the crown of the hat for safety, and then sat down again, more comfortably this time, her feet crossed, the papers on her lap. How kindly the old man in the corner watched her bare little hand turning over the big white pages, watched her lips moving as she pronounced the long words to herself, rested upon her hair that fairly blazed under the light. Alas! how tragic for a little governess to possess hair that made one think of tangerines and marigolds, of apricots and tortoiseshell cats and champagne! Perhaps that was what the old man was thinking as he gazed and gazed, and that not even the dark ugly clothes could disguise her soft beauty. Perhaps the flush that licked his cheeks and lips was a flush of rage that anyone so young and tender should have to travel alone and unprotected through the night. Who knows he was not murmuring in his sentimental German fashion: ‘Ja, es ist eine Tragœdie! Would to God I were the child’s grandpapa!’ ‘Thank you very much. They were very interesting.’ She smiled prettily handing back the papers. ‘But you speak German extremely well,’ said the old man. ‘You have been in Germany before, of course?’ ‘Oh no, this is the first time’ – a little pause, then – ‘this is the first time that I have ever been abroad at all.’ ‘Really! I am surprised. You gave me the impression, if I may say so, that you were accustomed to travelling.’ ‘Oh, well – I have been about a good deal in England, and to Scotland, once.’ ‘So. I myself have been in England once, but I could not learn English.’ He raised one hand and shook his head, laughing. ‘No, it was too difficult for me. . . . “Ow-do-you-do. Please vich is ze vay to Leicestaire Squaare.”’ She laughed too. ‘Foreigners

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always say. . . .’ They had quite a little talk about it. ‘But you will like Munich,’ said the old man. ‘Munich is a wonderful city. Museums, pictures, galleries, fine buildings and shops, concerts, theatres, restaurants – all are in Munich. I have travelled all over Europe many, many times in my life, but it is always to Munich that I return. You will enjoy yourself there.’ ‘I am not going to stay in Munich,’ said the little governess, and she added shyly, ‘I am going to a post as governess to a doctor’s family in Augsburg.’ Ah, that was it. Augsburg he knew. Augsburg – well – was not beautiful. A solid manufacturing town. But if Germany was new to her he hoped she would find something interesting there too. ‘I am sure I shall.’ ‘But what a pity not to see Munich before you go. You ought to take a little holiday on your way’ – he smiled – ‘and store up some pleasant memories.’ ‘I am afraid I could not do that,’ said the little governess, shaking her head, suddenly important and serious. ‘And also, if one is alone. . . .’ He quite understood. He bowed, serious too. They were silent after that. The train shattered on, baring its dark, flaming breast to the hills and to the valleys. It was warm in the carriage. She seemed to lean against the dark rushing and to be carried away and away. Little sounds made themselves heard; steps in the corridor, doors opening and shutting – a murmur of voices – whistling. . . . Then the window was pricked with long needles of rain. . . . But it did not matter . . . it was outside . . . and she had her umbrella . . . she pouted, sighed, opened and shut her hands once and fell fast asleep. ‘Pardon! Pardon!’ The sliding back of the carriage door woke her with a start. What had happened? Someone had come in and gone out again. The old man sat in his corner, more upright than ever, his hands in the pockets of his coat, frowning heavily. ‘Ha! ha! ha!’ came from the carriage next door. Still half asleep, she put her hands to her hair to make sure it wasn’t a dream. ‘Disgraceful!’ muttered the old man more to himself than to her. ‘Common, vulgar fellows! I am afraid they disturbed you, gracious Fräulein, blundering in here like that.’ No, not really. She was just going to wake up, and she took out her silver watch to look at the time. Half-past four. A cold blue light filled the window panes. Now when she rubbed a place she could see bright patches of fields, a clump of white houses like mushrooms, a road ‘like a picture’ with poplar trees on either side, a thread of river. How pretty it was! How pretty and how different! Even those pink clouds in the sky looked foreign. It was cold, but she pretended that it was far colder and rubbed her hands together and shivered, pulling at the collar of her coat because she was so happy. The train began to slow down. The engine gave a long shrill whistle. They were coming to a town. Taller houses, pink and yellow,

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glided by, fast asleep behind their green eyelids, and guarded by the poplar trees that quivered in the blue air as if on tiptoe, listening. In one house a woman opened the shutters, flung a red and white mattress across the window frame and stood staring at the train. A pale woman with black hair and a white woollen shawl over her shoulders. More women appeared at the doors and at the windows of the sleeping houses. There came a flock of sheep. The shepherd wore a blue blouse and pointed wooden shoes. Look! look what flowers – and by the railway station too! Standard roses like bridesmaids’ bouquets, white geraniums, waxy pink ones that you would never see out of a greenhouse at home. Slower and slower. A man with a wateringcan was spraying the platform. ‘A-a-a-ah!’ Somebody came running and waving his arms. A huge fat woman waddled through the glass doors of the station with a tray of strawberries. Oh, she was thirsty! She was very thirsty! ‘A-a-a-ah!’ The same somebody ran back again. The train stopped. The old man pulled his coat round him and got up, smiling at her. He murmured something she didn’t quite catch, but she smiled back at him as he left the carriage. While he was away the little governess looked at herself again in the glass, shook and patted herself with the precise practical care of a girl who is old enough to travel by herself and has nobody else to assure her that she is ‘quite all right behind’. Thirsty and thirsty! The air tasted of water. She let down the window and the fat woman with the strawberries passed as if on purpose; holding up the tray to her. ‘Nein, danke,’ said the little governess, looking at the big berries on their gleaming leaves. ‘Wie viel?’ she asked as the fat woman moved away. ‘Two marks fifty, Fräulein.’ ‘Good gracious!’ She came in from the window and sat down in the corner, very sobered for a minute. Half a crown! ‘H-o-o-o-o-o-e-e-e !’ shrieked the train, gathering itself together to be off again. She hoped the old man wouldn’t be left behind. Oh, it was daylight – everything was lovely if only she hadn’t been so thirsty. Where was the old man – oh, here he was – she dimpled at him as though he were an old accepted friend as he closed the door and, turning, took from under his cape a basket of the strawberries. ‘If Fräulein would honour me by accepting these. . . .’ ‘What for me?’ But she drew back and raised her hands as though he were about to put a wild little kitten on her lap. ‘Certainly, for you,’ said the old man. ‘For myself it is twenty years since I was brave enough to eat strawberries.’ ‘Oh, thank you very much. Danke bestens,’ she stammered, ‘sie sind so sehr schön!’ ‘Eat them and see,’ said the old man looking pleased and friendly. ‘You won’t have even one?’ ‘No, no, no.’ Timidly and charmingly her hand hovered. They were so big and juicy she had to take two bites to them – the juice ran all down her fingers – and it was while she munched the

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berries that she first thought of the old man as a grandfather. What a perfect grandfather he would make! Just like one out of a book! The sun came out, the pink clouds in the sky, the strawberry clouds were eaten by the blue. ‘Are they good?’ asked the old man. ‘As good as they look?’ When she had eaten them she felt she had known him for years. She told him about Frau Arnholdt and how she had got the place. Did he know the Hotel Grünewald? Frau Arnholdt would not arrive until the evening. He listened, listened until he knew as much about the affair as she did, until he said – not looking at her – but smoothing the palms of his brown suède gloves together: ‘I wonder if you would let me show you a little of Munich to-day. Nothing much – but just perhaps a picture gallery and the Englischer Garten. It seems such a pity that you should have to spend the day at the hotel, and also a little uncomfortable . . . in a strange place. Nicht wahr? You would be back there by the early afternoon or whenever you wish, of course, and you would give an old man a great deal of pleasure.’ It was not until long after she had said ‘Yes’ – because the moment she had said it and he had thanked her he began telling her about his travels in Turkey and attar of roses – that she wondered whether she had done wrong. After all, she really did not know him. But he was so old and he had been so very kind – not to mention the strawberries. . . . And she couldn’t have explained the reason why she said ‘No,’ and it was her last day in a way, her last day to really enjoy herself in. ‘Was I wrong? Was I?’ A drop of sunlight fell into her hands and lay there, warm and quivering. ‘If I might accompany you as far as the hotel,’ he suggested, ‘and call for you again at about ten o’clock.’ He took out his pocket-book and handed her a card. ‘Herr Regierungsrat. . . .’ He had a title! Well, it was bound to be all right! So after that the little governess gave herself up to the excitement of being really abroad, to looking out and reading the foreign advertisement signs, to being told about the places they came to – having her attention and enjoyment looked after by the charming old grandfather – until they reached Munich and the Hauptbahnhof. ‘Porter! Porter!’ He found her a porter, disposed of his own luggage in a few words, guided her through the bewildering crowd out of the station down the clean white steps into the white road to the hotel. He explained who she was to the manager as though all this had been bound to happen, and then for one moment her little hand lost itself in the big brown suède ones. ‘I will call for you at ten o’clock.’ He was gone. ‘This way, Fräulein,’ said a waiter, who had been dodging behind the manager’s back, all eyes and ears for the strange couple. She followed him up two flights of stairs into a dark bedroom. He dashed down her dress-basket and pulled up a clattering, dusty blind. Ugh!

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what an ugly, cold room – what enormous furniture! Fancy spending the day in here! ‘Is this the room Frau Arnholdt ordered?’ asked the little governess. The waiter had a curious way of staring as if there was something funny about her. He pursed up his lips about to whistle, and then changed his mind. ‘Gewiss,’ he said. Well, why didn’t he go? Why did he stare so? ‘Gehen Sie,’ said the little governess, with frigid English simplicity. His little eyes, like currants, nearly popped out of his doughy cheeks. ‘Gehen Sie sofort,’ she repeated icily. At the door he turned. ‘And the gentleman,’ said he, ‘shall I show the gentleman upstairs when he comes?’ Over the white streets big white clouds fringed with silver – and sunshine everywhere. Fat, fat coachmen driving fat cabs; funny women with little round hats cleaning the tramway lines; people laughing and pushing against one another; trees on both sides of the streets and everywhere you looked almost, immense fountains; a noise of laughing from the footpaths or the middle of the streets or the open windows. And beside her, more beautifully brushed than ever, with a rolled umbrella in one hand and yellow gloves instead of brown ones, her grandfather who had asked her to spend the day. She wanted to run, she wanted to hang on his arm, she wanted to cry every minute, ‘Oh, I am so frightfully happy!’ He guided her across the roads, stood still while she ‘looked’, and his kind eyes beamed on her and he said ‘just whatever you wish’. She ate two white sausages and two little rolls of fresh bread at eleven o’clock in the morning and she drank some beer, which he told her wasn’t intoxicating, wasn’t at all like English beer, out of a glass like a flower vase. And then they took a cab and really she must have seen thousands and thousands of wonderful classical pictures in about a quarter of an hour! ‘I shall have to think them over when I am alone.’ . . . But when they came out of the picture gallery it was raining. The grandfather unfurled his umbrella and held it over the little governess. They started to walk to the restaurant for lunch. She, very close beside him so that he should have some of the umbrella, too. ‘It goes easier,’ he remarked in a detached way, ‘if you take my arm, Fräulein. And besides it is the custom in Germany.’ So she took his arm and walked beside him while he pointed out the famous statues, so interested that he quite forgot to put down the umbrella even when the rain was long over. After lunch they went to a café to hear a gipsy band, but she did not like that at all. Ugh! such horrible men were there with heads like eggs and cuts on their faces, so she turned her chair and cupped her burning cheeks in her hands and watched her old friend instead. . . . Then they went to the Englischer Garten.

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‘I wonder what the time is,’ asked the little governess. ‘My watch has stopped. I forgot to wind it in the train last night. We’ve seen such a lot of things that I feel it must be quite late.’ ‘Late!’ He stopped in front of her laughing and shaking his head in a way she had begun to know. ‘Then you have not really enjoyed yourself. Late! Why, we have not had any ice cream yet!’ ‘Oh, but I have enjoyed myself,’ she cried, distressed, ‘more than I can possibly say. It has been wonderful! Only Frau Arnholdt is to be at the hotel at six and I ought to be there by five.’ ‘So you shall. After the ice cream I shall put you into a cab and you can go there comfortably.’ She was happy again. The chocolate ice cream melted – melted in little sips a long way down. The shadows of the trees danced on the table cloths, and she sat with her back safely turned to the ornamental clock that pointed to twenty-five minutes to seven. ‘Really and truly,’ said the little governess earnestly, ‘this has been the happiest day of my life. I’ve never even imagined such a day.’ In spite of the ice cream her grateful baby heart glowed with love for the fairy grandfather. So they walked out of the garden down a long alley. The day was nearly over. ‘You see those big buildings opposite,’ said the old man. ‘The third storey – that is where I live. I and the old housekeeper who looks after me.’ She was very interested. ‘Now just before I find a cab for you, will you come and see my little “home” and let me give you a bottle of the attar of roses I told you about in the train? For remembrance?’ She would love to. ‘I’ve never seen a bachelor’s flat in my life,’ laughed the little governess. The passage was quite dark. ‘Ah, I suppose my old woman has gone out to buy me a chicken. One moment.’ He opened a door and stood aside for her to pass, a little shy but curious, into a strange room. She did not know quite what to say. It wasn’t pretty. In a way it was very ugly – but neat, and, she supposed, comfortable for such an old man. ‘Well, what do you think of it?’ He knelt down and took from a cupboard a round tray with two pink glasses and a tall pink bottle. ‘Two little bedrooms beyond,’ he said gaily, ‘and a kitchen. It’s enough, eh?’ ‘Oh, quite enough.’ ‘And if ever you should be in Munich and care to spend a day or two – why there is always a little nest – a wing of a chicken, and a salad, and an old man delighted to be your host once more and many many times, dear little Fräulein!’ He took the stopper out of the bottle and poured some wine into the two pink glasses. His hand shook and the wine spilled over the tray. It was very quiet in the room. She said: ‘I think I ought to go now.’ ‘But you will have a tiny glass of wine with me – just one before you go?’ said the old man. ‘No, really no. I never drink wine. I – I have promised never to touch wine or anything like that.’ And though he pleaded and though she felt dreadfully rude, especially when he seemed to take it to heart

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so, she was quite determined. ‘No, really, please.’ ‘Well, will you just sit down on the sofa for five minutes and let me drink your health?’ The little governess sat down on the edge of the red velvet couch and he sat down beside her and drank her health at a gulp. ‘Have you really been happy to-day?’ asked the old man, turning round, so close beside her that she felt his knee twitching against hers. Before she could answer he held her hands. ‘And are you going to give me one little kiss before you go?’ he asked, drawing her closer still. It was a dream! It wasn’t true! It wasn’t the same old man at all. Ah, how horrible! The little governess stared at him in terror. ‘No, no, no!’ she stammered, struggling out of his hands. ‘One little kiss. A kiss. What is it? Just a kiss, dear little Fräulein. A kiss.’ He pushed his face forward, his lips smiling broadly; and how his little blue eyes gleamed behind the spectacles! ‘Never – never. How can you!’ She sprang up, but he was too quick and he held her against the wall, pressed against her his hard old body and his twitching knee and, though she shook her head from side to side, distracted, kissed her on the mouth. On the mouth! Where not a soul who wasn’t a near relation had ever kissed her before. . . . She ran, ran down the street until she found a broad road with tram lines and a policeman standing in the middle like a clockwork doll. ‘I want to get a tram to the Hauptbahnhof,’ sobbed the little governess. ‘Fräulein?’ She wrung her hands at him. ‘The Hauptbahnhof. There – there’s one now,’ and while he watched very much surprised, the little girl with her hat on one side, crying without a handkerchief, sprang on to the tram – not seeing the conductor’s eyebrows, nor hearing the hochwohlgebildete Dame talking her over with a scandalized friend. She rocked herself and cried out loud and said ‘Ah, ah!’ pressing her hands to her mouth. ‘She has been to the dentist,’ shrilled a fat old woman, too stupid to be uncharitable. ‘Na, sagen Sie ’mal, what toothache! The child hasn’t one left in her mouth.’ While the tram swung and jangled through a world full of old men with twitching knees. When the little governess reached the hall of the Hotel Grünewald the same waiter who had come into her room in the morning was standing by a table, polishing a tray of glasses. The sight of the little governess seemed to fill him out with some inexplicable important content. He was ready for her question; his answer came pat and suave. ‘Yes, Fräulein, the lady has been here. I told her that you had arrived and gone out again immediately with a gentleman. She asked me when you were coming back again – but of course I could not say. And then she went to the manager.’ He took up a glass from the table, held it up to the light, looked at it with one eye closed, and started

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polishing it with a corner of his apron. ‘. . . ?’ ‘Pardon, Fräulein? Ach, no, Fräulein. The manager could tell her nothing – nothing.’ He shook his head and smiled at the brilliant glass. ‘Where is the lady now?’ asked the little governess, shuddering so violently that she had to hold her handkerchief up to her mouth. ‘How should I know?’ cried the waiter, and as he swooped past her to pounce upon a new arrival his heart beat so hard against his ribs that he nearly chuckled aloud. ‘That’s it! that’s it!’ he thought. ‘That will show her.’ And as he swung the new arrival’s box on to his shoulders – hoop! – as though he were a giant and the box a feather, he minced over again the little governess’s words, ‘Gehen Sie. Gehen Sie sofort. Shall I! Shall I!’ he shouted to himself. Notes Text: BOS. First published in the Signature in two parts: Part I, No. 2, 18 October 1915, pp. 11–18; Part II, No. 3, 1 November 1915, pp. 11–18. Signed ‘Matilda Berry’. 1. KM wrote to S. S. Koteliansky on 10 March 1915, ‘I am glad that you like the Little Governess – but wait. Ive written such different things just lately – much much better – and I am going on writing them’ (CLKM, 1, p. 153).

•

The Beautiful Miss Richardson1 Why can’t I change my hair ribbon on Wednesday afternoons. All the other girls are allowed to – and it can’t be because Mother really thinks I shall lose my best one. I know a way to tie a hair ribbon so that it simply can’t possibly come off – and she knows I do because she taught me herself. But ‘No,’ says Mother – ‘you may put on your threadwork pinafore, but you may not put on your blue satin hair ribbon. Your ordinary brown velvet one is perfectly neat, suitable and unobtrusive as it is.’ (Mother loves sentences like this.) ‘I can’t help what all the other girls do. Have you got your thimble?’ ‘Yes Mother, in my pocket.’ ‘Show it to me, dear.’ ‘I said, Mother, it was in my pocket.’ ‘Well, show it to me so that I can be perfectly sure.’

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‘Oh Mother, why do you treat me like a baby. You always seem to forget on purpose that I’m in my teens. None of the other girls’ Mothers . . .’ Oh well, I’ll take my blue satin hair ribbon in my pocket and change when I get to school. It serves Mother right. I don’t want to deceive her but she makes me deceive her and she doesn’t really care a bit – she only wants to show her power. It’s Wednesday afternoon. I love Wednesday afternoons. I simply adore them. We don’t have any real school – only sewing class and elocution in the drawing room for the girls who take private lessons. Everything is different on Wednesdays. Some of the older ones even wear Japanese silk blouses, and we change into our slippers and we all wash our hands at the lavatory basin in the passage. The inkpots are put away by the monitors, the desks pushed against the walls. There is a long table down the middle of the room with two big straw baskets on it, the chairs are arranged in little groups, the windows are opened wide. Even the garden outside with its beaten paths and its flowery bushes tumbled and draggled because the little ones will root under for their balls – seems to change, to become real on Wednesdays. When we lift our heads to thread our needles and look out through the windows the fuchsia is wafting and the camellias are white and red in the bright sun. We are making cheap flannelette chemises for the Maori Mission. They are as long as nightdresses, very full, with huge armholes and a plain band round the neck – not even a lace edging. Those poor Maoris. They can’t all be as fat as these chemises! But Mrs Wallis, the Bishop’s wife, said when she gave the newspaper pattern to the headmistress ‘It is wiser to reckon on them being fat.’ The headmistress laughed very much and told Miss Dunston [?] our class mistress but Miss Dunston is very fat herself, so she blushed frightfully – of course it was pure spite on the headmistress’s part. Skinny little thing! I know she thinks she’s got a lovely slim figure – you should see her pressing her little grey alpaca hips when she is talking to the curate before Scripture lesson – – – But even she is not the same on Wednesday afternoon. Her grey alpaca dress is adorned with a black tulle bow, she wears a tall comb in her hair. When she is not inspecting the sewing she sits at the end of the long table, her gold-rimmed eyeglasses hooked on her long peaked nose that has such funny little red veins in the end of it, and she reads Dickens aloud. Our classroom is very big. The walls are pale, so are the window sashes and the doors – and all the girls sit on their little cane chairs, their faces hanging above a froth of cream flannelette. On their heads their best hair ribbons perch and quiver. Their hands lift and fall as

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they sew those Maori Mission seams. Sometimes they sigh or Mary Swainson sneezes. Ever since she had an operation on her nose she is always sneezing . . . or Madge Rothschild who wears a glacé silk petticoat gets up and rustles to the table for the scissors or some more thread, or to ask if she has to turn down a selvedge. But all the same it is quiet in the room, it is very quiet, and when the headmistress reads Dickens aloud there is something so fascinating in her voice that I could listen for years and years. She is reading David Copperfield. When there is a full page illustration she passes the book round for us to look. One by one we put our sewing down. ‘Quickly girls – don’t dawdle over it.’ How funny! The headmistress herself is exactly like one of these illustrations – so tiny, so spry. While she waits for the book to come back she sits polishing her eyeglasses on a handkerchief that is tucked between two hooks of her grey alpaca bodice. What does she remind me of? She reminds me of a bird and a donkey mixed. ‘Bring me that hem to look at, will you Katherine?’ Notes U Text KMN, 2, pp. 25–6. An edited version titled ‘The Sewing Class’ was published by JMM, Scrapbook, pp. 54–7. 1. The sketch was written in Notebook 45, ATL, most of which is given to part of ‘The Aloe’. The cover was dated ‘Commencé March 12th’ [1915].

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Spring Pictures1 I It is raining. Big soft drops splash on the people’s hands and cheeks; immense warm drops like melted stars. ‘Here are roses! Here are lilies! Here are violets!’ caws the old hag in the gutter. But the lilies, bunched together in a frill of green, look more like faded cauliflowers. Up and down she drags the creaking barrow. A bad, sickly smell comes from it. Nobody wants to buy. You must walk in the middle of the road, for there is no room on the pavement. Every single shop brims over; every shop shows a tattered frill of soiled lace and dirty ribbon to charm and entice you. There are tables set out with toy cannons and soldiers and Zeppelins and photograph frames complete with ogling beauties. There are immense baskets of yellow straw hats piled up like pyramids of pastry, and strings of coloured boots and

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shoes so small that nobody could wear them. One shop is full of little squares of mackintosh, blue ones for girls and pink ones for boys with Bébé printed in the middle of each. . . . ‘Here are lilies! Here are roses! Here are pretty violets!’ warbles the old hag, bumping into another barrow. But this barrow is still. It is heaped with lettuces. Its owner, a fat old woman, sprawls across, fast asleep, her nose in the lettuce roots. . . . Who is ever going to buy anything here . . . ? The sellers are women. They sit on little canvas stools, dreamy and vacant looking. Now and again one of them gets up and takes a feather duster, like a smoky torch, and flicks it over a thing or two and then sits down again. Even the old man in tangerine spectacles with a balloon of a belly, who turns the revolving stand of ‘comic’ postcards round and round cannot decide. . . . Suddenly, from the empty shop at the corner a piano strikes up, and a violin and flute join in. The windows of the shop are scrawled over – New Songs. First Floor. Entrance Free. But the windows of the first floor being open, nobody bothers to go up. They hang about grinning as the harsh voices float out into the warm rainy air. At the doorway there stands a lean man in a pair of burst carpet slippers. He has stuck a feather through the broken rim of his hat; with what an air he wears it! The feather is magnificent. It is gold epaulettes, frogged coat, white kid gloves, gilded cane. He swaggers under it and the voice rolls off his chest, rich and ample. ‘Come up! Come up! Here are the new songs! Each singer is an artiste of European reputation. The orchestra is famous and second to none. You can stay as long as you like. It is the chance of a lifetime, and once missed never to return!’ But nobody moves. Why should they? They know all about those girls – those famous artistes. One is dressed in cream cashmere and one in blue. Both have dark crimped hair and a pink rose pinned over the ear. . . . They know all about the pianist’s button boots – the left foot – the pedal foot – burst over the bunion on his big toe. The violinist’s bitten nails, the long, far too long cuffs of the flute player – all these things are as old as the new songs. . . . For a long time the music goes on and the proud voice thunders. Then somebody calls down the stairs and the showman, still with his grand air, disappears. The voices cease. The piano, the violin and the flute dribble into quiet. Only the lace curtain gives a wavy sign of life from the first floor. . . . It is raining still; it is getting dusky. . . . Here are roses! Here are lilies! Who will buy my violets? . . . II Hope! You misery – you sentimental, faded female. Break your last string and have done with it. I shall go mad with your endless

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thrumming; my heart throbs to it and every little pulse beats in time. It is morning. I lie in the empty bed – the huge bed big as a field and as cold and unsheltered. Through the shutters the sunlight comes up from the river and flows over the ceiling in trembling waves. I hear from outside a hammer tapping and far below in the house a door swings open and shut. . . . Is this my room? Are those my clothes folded over an armchair? Under the pillow, sign and symbol of a lonely woman, ticks my watch. The bell jangles. Ah! At last! I leap out of bed and run to the door. Play faster – faster – Hope! ‘Your milk, Mademoiselle,’ says the concierge, gazing at me severely. ‘Ah, thank you,’ I cry, gaily swinging the milk bottle. ‘No letters for me?’ ‘Nothing, mademoiselle.’ ‘But the postman – he has called already?’ ‘A long half-hour ago, mademoiselle.’ Shut the door. Stand in the little passage a moment. Listen – listen for her hated twanging. Coax her – court her – implore her to play just once that charming little thing for one string only. In vain. III Across the river, on the narrow stone path that fringes the bank a woman is walking.2 She came down the steps from the Quay, walking slowly, one hand on her hip. It is a beautiful evening; the sky is the colour of lilac and the river of violet leaves. There are big bright trees along the path full of trembling light, and the boats, dancing up and down, send heavy curls of foam rippling almost to her feet. Now she has stopped. Now she has turned suddenly. She is leaning up against a tree, her hands over her face; she is crying. And now she is walking up and down wringing her hands. Again she leans against the tree, her back against it, her head raised and her hands clasped as though she leaned against someone dear. Round her shoulders she wears a little grey shawl; she covers her face with the ends of it and rocks to and fro. But one cannot cry for ever, so at last she becomes serious and quiet, patting her hair into place, smoothing her apron. She walks a step or two. No, too soon – too soon! Again her arms fly up – she runs back – again she is blotted against the tall tree. Squares of gold light show in the houses; the street lamps gleam through the new leaves; yellow fans of light follow the dancing boats. For a moment she is a blur against the tree, white, grey and black, melting into the stones and the shadows. And then she is gone.

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Notes U Text: SCOS. 1. Alpers notes, ‘If a literary ancestor is to be sought for these products of KM’s quest for modern forms, it must surely be Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose, “Le Spleen de Paris”’ (p. 554). 2. A description of the view across the Seine from Francis Carco’s flat in Paris at 13 quai aux Fleurs, near Notre Dame, where KM stayed alone during the second half of March, and the first half of May 1915.

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Rough Sketch This family began very modest with Mamma, extremely fat, with a black moustache and a little round toque covered with poached pansies, and the baby boy, bursting out of an English tweed suit that was intended for a norfolk1 but denied its county at the second seam. They had barely settled in their places and pinched every separate piece of bread in the basket and chosen the crustiest when two young men in pale blue uniforms with about as much moustache as mother appeared at the doorway of the restaurant and were hailed with every appearance of enthusiasm by Sonny who waved a serviette about the size of a single bedsheet at them. Mother was embraced; they sat down side by side and were presently joined by an unfortunate overgrown boy whose complexion had enjoyed every possible form of Frühlingserwachen2 and who looked as though he spent his nights under an eiderdown eating chocolate biscuits with the window shut and reading L’Histoire des Petits Pantalons pas tout à fait fermé. Five single bedsheets were tucked into five collars. Five pairs of eyes roamed over the menu. Suddenly with a cry of delight up flew Mamma’s arms – up flew Sonny’s. The two young soldiers sprang to their feet, the étudiant came out in no end of a perspiration as a stout florid man appeared and walked towards them. The waitress hovered round the table delighted beyond words at this exhibition of vie de famille. She felt like their own bonne. She felt she had known them for years. Heaven knows what memories she had of taking M. Roue his hot water, of being found by M. Paul, looking for his shirt stud on his bedroom floor on her charming little hands and her still more delicious knees.

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Notes U Text: KMN,3 2, p. 57. Published by JMM as ‘Père de famille’, Journal (1954), pp. 81–2. 1. A loose, belted tweed jacket with pleats. 2. Frühlings Erwachen (1906), a play by Frank Wedekind. ‘Spring Awakening’ depicts children growing into adolescent confusion. 3. JMM noted on MS, ‘Paris, May 1915.’

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An Indiscreet Journey1 She is like St Anne. Yes, the concierge is the image of St Anne, with that black cloth over her head, the wisps of grey hair hanging, and the tiny smoking lamp in her hand. Really very beautiful, I thought, smiling at St Anne, who said severely: ‘Six o’clock. You have only just got time. There is a bowl of milk on the writing table.’ I jumped out of my pyjamas and into a basin of cold water like any English lady in any French novel. The concierge, persuaded that I was on my way to prison cells and death by bayonets, opened the shutters and the cold clear light came through. A little steamer hooted on the river; a cart with two horses at a gallop flung past. The rapid swirling water; the tall black trees on the far side, grouped together like negroes conversing. Sinister, very, I thought, as I buttoned on my age-old Burberry. (That Burberry was very significant. It did not belong to me. I had borrowed it from a friend. My eye lighted upon it hanging in her little dark hall. The very thing! The perfect and adequate disguise – an old Burberry. Lions have been faced in a Burberry. Ladies have been rescued from open boats in mountainous seas wrapped in nothing else. An old Burberry seems to me the sign and the token of the undisputed venerable traveller, I decided, leaving my purple peg-top with the real seal collar and cuffs in exchange.) ‘You will never get there,’ said the concierge, watching me turn up the collar. ‘Never! Never!’ I ran down the echoing stairs – strange they sounded, like a piano flicked by a sleepy housemaid – and on to the Quai. ‘Why so fast, ma mignonne?’ said a lovely little boy in coloured socks, dancing in front of the electric lotus buds that curve over the entrance to the Métro. Alas! there was not even time to blow him a kiss. When I arrived at the big station I had only four minutes to spare, and the platform entrance was crowded and packed with soldiers, their yellow papers in one hand and big untidy bundles. The

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Commissaire of Police stood on one side, a Nameless Official on the other. Will he let me pass? Will he? He was an old man with a fat swollen face covered with big warts. Horn-rimmed spectacles squatted on his nose. Trembling, I made an effort. I conjured up my sweetest early-morning smile and handed it with the papers. But the delicate thing fluttered against the horn spectacles and fell. Nevertheless, he let me pass, and I ran, ran in and out among the soldiers and up the high steps into the yellow-painted carriage. ‘Does one go direct to X?’ I asked the collector who dug at my ticket with a pair of forceps and handed it back again. ‘No, Mademoiselle, you must change at X.Y.Z.’ ‘At – ?’ ‘X.Y.Z.’ Again I had not heard. ‘At what time do we arrive there if you please?’ ‘One o’clock.’ But that was no good to me. I hadn’t a watch. Oh, well – later. Ah! the train had begun to move. The train was on my side. It swung out of the station, and soon we were passing the vegetable gardens, passing the tall blind houses to let, passing the servants beating carpets. Up already and walking in the fields, rosy from the rivers and the redfringed pools, the sun lighted upon the swinging train and stroked my muff and told me to take off that Burberry. I was not alone in the carriage. An old woman sat opposite, her skirt turned back over her knees, a bonnet of black lace on her head. In her fat hands, adorned with a wedding and two mourning rings, she held a letter. Slowly, slowly she sipped a sentence, and then looked up and out of the window, her lips trembling a little, and then another sentence, and again the old face turned to the light, tasting it. . . . Two soldiers leaned out of the window, their heads nearly touching – one of them was whistling, the other had his coat fastened with some rusty safety-pins. And now there were soldiers everywhere working on the railway line, leaning against trucks or standing hands on hips, eyes fixed on the train as though they expected at least one camera at every window. And now we were passing big wooden sheds like rigged-up dancing halls or seaside pavilions, each flying a flag. In and out of them walked the Red Cross men; the wounded sat against the walls sunning themselves. At all the bridges, the crossings, the stations, a petit soldat, all boots and bayonet. Forlorn and desolate he looked, – like a little comic picture waiting for the joke to be written underneath. Is there really such a thing as war? Are all these laughing voices really going to the war? These dark woods lighted so mysteriously by the white stems of the birch and the ash – these watery fields with the big birds flying over – these rivers green and blue in the light – have battles been fought in places like these?

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What beautiful cemeteries we are passing! They flash gay in the sun. They seem to be full of cornflowers and poppies and daisies. How can there be so many flowers at this time of the year? But they are not flowers at all. They are bunches of ribbons tied on to the soldiers’ graves. I glanced up and caught the old woman’s eye. She smiled and folded the letter. ‘It is from my son – the first we have had since October. I am taking it to my daughter-in-law.’ ‘. . . ?’ ‘Yes, very good,’ said the old woman, shaking down her skirt and putting her arm through the handle of her basket. ‘He wants me to send him some handkerchieves and a piece of stout string.’ What is the name of the station where I have to change? Perhaps I shall never know. I got up and leaned my arms across the window rail, my feet crossed. One cheek burned as in infancy on the way to the seaside. When the war is over I shall have a barge and drift along these rivers with a white cat and a pot of mignonette to bear me company. Down the side of the hill filed the troops, winking red and blue in the light. Far away, but plainly to be seen, some more flew by on bicycles. But really, ma France adorée, this uniform is ridiculous. Your soldiers are stamped upon your bosom like bright irreverent transfers. The train slowed down, stopped. . . . Everybody was getting out except me. A big boy, his sabots tied to his back with a piece of string, the inside of his tin wine cup stained a lovely impossible pink, looked very friendly. Does one change here perhaps for X? Another whose képi had come out of a wet paper cracker swung my suit-case to earth. What darlings soldiers are! ‘Merci bien, Monsieur, vous êtes tout à fait aimable. . . .’ ‘Not this way,’ said a bayonet. ‘Nor this,’ said another. So I followed the crowd. ‘Your passport, Mademoiselle. . . .’ ‘We, Sir Edward Grey2 . . . I ran through the muddy square and into the buffet. A green room with a stove jutting out and tables on each side. On the counter, beautiful with coloured bottles, a woman leans, her breasts in her folded arms. Through an open door I can see a kitchen, and the cook in a white coat breaking eggs into a bowl and tossing the shells into a corner. The blue and red coats of the men who are eating hang upon the walls. Their short swords and belts are piled upon chairs. Heavens! what a noise. The sunny air seemed all broken up and trembling with it. A little boy, very pale, swung from table to table, taking the orders, and poured me out a glass of purple coffee. Ssssh, came from the eggs. They were in a pan. The woman rushed from behind the counter and began to help the boy. Toute de suite, tout’suite! she chirruped to the loud impatient voices. There came a clatter of plates and the pop-pop of corks being drawn.

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Suddenly in the doorway I saw someone with a pail of fish – brown speckled fish, like the fish one sees in a glass case, swimming through forests of beautiful pressed sea-weed. He was an old man in a tattered jacket, standing humbly, waiting for someone to attend to him. A thin beard fell over his chest, his eyes under the tufted eyebrows were bent on the pail he carried. He looked as though he had escaped from some holy picture, and was entreating the soldiers’ pardon for being there at all. . . . But what could I have done? I could not arrive at X with two fishes hanging on a straw; and I am sure it is a penal offence in France to throw fish out of railway-carriage windows, I thought, miserably climbing into a smaller, shabbier train. Perhaps I might have taken them to – ah, mon Dieu – I had forgotten the name of my uncle and aunt again! Buffard, Buffon – what was it? Again I read the unfamiliar letter in the familiar handwriting. ‘My dear niece, ‘Now that the weather is more settled, your uncle and I would be charmed if you would pay us a little visit. Telegraph me when you are coming. I shall meet you outside the station if I am free. Otherwise our good friend, Madame Grinçon, who lives in the little toll-house by the bridge, juste en face de la gare, will conduct you to our home. Je vous embrasse bien tendrement, JULIE BOIFFARD.’3 A visiting card was enclosed: M. Paul Boiffard. Boiffard – of course that was the name. Ma tante Julie et mon oncle Paul – suddenly they were there with me, more real, more solid than any relations I had ever known. I saw tante Julie bridling, with the soup-tureen in her hands, and oncle Paul sitting at the table, with a red and white napkin tied round his neck. Boiffard – Boiffard – I must remember the name. Supposing the Commissaire Militaire should ask me who the relations were I was going to and I muddled the name – Oh, how fatal! Buffard – no, Boiffard. And then for the first time, folding Aunt Julie’s letter, I saw scrawled in a corner of the empty back page: Venez vite, vite. Strange impulsive woman! My heart began to beat. . . . ‘Ah, we are not far off now,’ said the lady opposite. ‘You are going to X, Mademoiselle?’ ‘Oui, Madame.’ ‘I also. . . . You have been there before?’ ‘No, Madame. This is the first time.’ ‘Really, it is a strange time for a visit.’ I smiled faintly, and tried to keep my eyes off her hat. She was quite an ordinary little woman, but she wore a black velvet toque, with an incredibly surprised looking sea-gull camped on the very top of it. Its round eyes, fixed on me so inquiringly, were almost too much to

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bear. I had a dreadful impulse to shoo it away, or to lean forward and inform her of its presence. . . . ‘Excusez-moi, madame, but perhaps you have not remarked there is an espèce de sea-gull couché sur votre chapeau.’ Could the bird be there on purpose? I must not laugh. . . . I must not laugh. Had she ever looked at herself in a glass with that bird on her head? ‘It is very difficult to get into X at present, to pass the station,’ she said, and she shook her head with the sea-gull at me. ‘Ah, such an affair. One must sign one’s name and state one’s business.’ ‘Really, is it as bad as all that?’ ‘But naturally. You see the whole place is in the hands of the military, and’ – she shrugged – ‘they have to be strict. Many people do not get beyond the station at all. They arrive. They are put in the waitingroom, and there they remain.’ Did I or did I not detect in her voice a strange, insulting relish? ‘I suppose such strictness is absolutely necessary,’ I said coldly, stroking my muff. ‘Necessary,’ she cried. ‘I should think so. Why, mademoiselle, you cannot imagine what it would be like otherwise! You know what women are like about soldiers’ – she raised a final hand – ‘mad, completely mad. But –’ and she gave a little laugh of triumph – ‘they could not get into X. Mon Dieu, no! There is no question about that.’ ‘I don’t suppose they even try,’ said I. ‘Don’t you?’ said the sea-gull. Madame said nothing for a moment. ‘Of course the authorities are very hard on the men. It means instant imprisonment, and then – off to the firing-line without a word.’ ‘What are you going to X for?’ said the sea-gull. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ ‘Are you making a long stay in X, mademoiselle?’ She had won, she had won. I was terrified. A lamp-post swam past the train with the fatal name upon it. I could hardly breathe – the train had stopped. I smiled gaily at Madame and danced down the steps to the platform. . . . It was a hot little room completely furnished with two colonels seated at two tables. They were large grey-whiskered men with a touch of burnt red on their cheeks. Sumptuous and omnipotent they looked. One smoked what ladies love to call a heavy Egyptian cigarette, with a long creamy ash, the other toyed with a gilded pen. Their heads rolled on their tight collars, like big over-ripe fruits. I had a terrible feeling, as I handed my passport and ticket, that a soldier would step forward and tell me to kneel. I would have knelt without question.

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‘What’s this?’ said God I., querulously. He did not like my passport at all. The very sight of it seemed to annoy him. He waved a dissenting hand at it, with a ‘Non, je ne peux pas manger ça’ air. ‘But it won’t do. It won’t do at all, you know. Look, – read for yourself,’ and he glanced with extreme distaste at my photograph, and then with even greater distaste his pebble eyes looked at me. ‘Of course the photograph is deplorable,’ I said, scarcely breathing with terror, ‘but it has been viséd and viséd.’ He raised his big bulk and went over to God II. ‘Courage!’ I said to my muff and held it firmly, ‘Courage!’ God II. held up a finger to me, and I produced Aunt Julie’s letter and her card. But he did not seem to feel the slightest interest in her. He stamped my passport idly, scribbled a word on my ticket, and I was on the platform again. ‘That way – you pass out that way.’ Terribly pale, with a faint smile on his lips, his hand at salute, stood the little corporal. I gave no sign, I am sure I gave no sign. He stepped behind me. ‘And then follow me as though you do not see me,’ I heard him half whisper, half sing. How fast he went, through the slippery mud towards a bridge. He had a postman’s bag on his back, a paper parcel and the Matin in his hand. We seemed to dodge through a maze of policemen, and I could not keep up at all with the little corporal who began to whistle. From the toll-house ‘our good friend, Madame Grinçon’, her hands wrapped in a shawl, watched our coming, and against the toll-house there leaned a tiny faded cab. Montez vite, vite! said the little corporal, hurling my suit-case, the postman’s bag, the paper parcel and the Matin on to the floor. ‘A-ie! A-ie! Do not be so mad. Do not ride yourself. You will be seen,’ wailed ‘our good friend, Madame Grinçon’. ‘Ah, je m’en f. . . .’ said the little corporal. The driver jerked into activity. He lashed the bony horse and away we flew, both doors, which were the complete sides of the cab, flapping and banging. ‘Bon jour, mon amie.’ ‘Bon jour, mon ami.’ And then he swooped down and clutched at the banging doors. They would not keep shut. They were fools of doors. ‘Lean back, let me do it!’ I cried. ‘Policemen are as thick as violets everywhere.’ At the barracks the horse reared up and stopped. A crowd of laughing faces blotted the window.

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‘Prends ça, mon vieux,’ said the little corporal, handing the paper parcel. ‘It’s all right,’ called someone. We waved, we were off again. By a river, down a strange white street, with little houses on either side, gay in the late sunlight. ‘Jump out as soon as he stops again. The door will be open. Run straight inside. I will follow. The man is already paid. I know you will like the house. It is quite white, and the room is white, too, and the people are –’ ‘White as snow.’ We looked at each other. We began to laugh. ‘Now,’ said the little corporal. Out I flew and in at the door. There stood, presumably, my aunt Julie. There in the background hovered, I supposed, my uncle Paul. ‘Bon jour, madame!’ ‘Bon jour, monsieur!’ ‘It is all right, you are safe,’ said my aunt Julie. Heavens, how I loved her! And she opened the door of the white room and shut it upon us. Down went the suit-case, the postman’s bag, the Matin. I threw my passport up into the air, and the little corporal caught it. *

*

*

What an extraordinary thing. We had been there to lunch and to dinner each day; but now in the dusk and alone I could not find it. I clop-clopped in my borrowed sabots through the greasy mud, right to the end of the village, and there was not a sign of it. I could not even remember what it looked like, or if there was a name painted on the outside, or any bottles or tables showing at the window. Already the village houses were sealed for the night behind big wooden shutters. Strange and mysterious they looked in the ragged drifting light and thin rain, like a company of beggars perched on the hill-side, their bosoms full of rich unlawful gold. There was nobody about but the soldiers. A group of wounded stood under a lamp-post, petting a mangy, shivering dog. Up the street came four big boys singing: Dodo, mon homme, fais vit’ dodo . . .4

and swung off down the hill to their sheds behind the railway station. They seemed to take the last breath of the day with them. I began to walk slowly back. ‘It must have been one of these houses. I remember it stood far back from the road – and there were no steps, not even a porch – one seemed to walk right through the window.’ And then quite suddenly the waiting-boy came out of just such a place. He saw me and grinned cheerfully, and began to whistle through his teeth.

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‘Bon soir, mon petit.’ ‘Bon soir, madame.’ And he followed me up the café to our special table, right at the far end by the window, and marked by a bunch of violets that I had left in a glass there yesterday. ‘You are two?’ asked the waiting-boy, flicking the table with a red and white cloth. His long swinging steps echoed over the bare floor. He disappeared into the kitchen and came back to light the lamp that hung from the ceiling under a spreading shade, like a haymaker’s hat. Warm light shone on the empty place that was really a barn, set out with dilapidated tables and chairs. Into the middle of the room a black stove jutted. At one side of it there was a table with a row of bottles on it, behind which Madame sat and took the money and made entries in a red book. Opposite her desk a door led into the kitchen. The walls were covered with a creamy paper patterned all over with green and swollen trees – hundreds and hundreds of trees reared their mushroom heads to the ceiling. I began to wonder who had chosen the paper and why. Did Madame think it was beautiful, or that it was a gay and lovely thing to eat one’s dinner at all seasons in the middle of a forest. . . . On either side of the clock there hung a picture: one, a young gentleman in black tights wooing a pear-shaped lady in yellow over the back of a garden seat, Premier Rencontre; two, the black and yellow in amorous confusion. Triomphe d’Amour. The clock ticked to a soothing lilt, C’est ça, C’est ça. In the kitchen the waiting-boy was washing up. I heard the ghostly chatter of the dishes. And years passed. Perhaps the war is long since over – there is no village outside at all – the streets are quiet under the grass. I have an idea this is the sort of thing one will do on the very last day of all – sit in an empty café and listen to a clock ticking until –. Madame came through the kitchen door, nodded to me and took her seat behind the table, her plump hands folded on the red book. Ping went the door. A handful of soldiers came in, took off their coats and began to play cards, chaffing and poking fun at the pretty waiting-boy, who threw up his little round head, rubbed his thick fringe out of his eyes and cheeked them back in his broken voice. Sometimes his voice boomed up from his throat, deep and harsh, and then in the middle of a sentence it broke and scattered in a funny squeaking. He seemed to enjoy it himself. You would not have been surprised if he had walked into the kitchen on his hands and brought back your dinner turning a catherine-wheel. Ping went the door again. Two more men came in. They sat at the table nearest Madame, and she leaned to them with a birdlike movement, her head on one side. Oh, they had a grievance! The Lieutenant

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was a fool – nosing about – springing out at them – and they’d only been sewing on buttons. Yes, that was all – sewing on buttons, and up comes this young spark. ‘Now then, what are you up to?’ They mimicked the idiotic voice. Madame drew down her mouth, nodding sympathy. The waiting-boy served them with glasses. He took a bottle of some orange-coloured stuff and put it on the table-edge. A shout from the card-players made him turn sharply, and crash! over went the bottle, spilling on the table, the floor – smash! to tinkling atoms. An amazed silence. Through it the drip-drip of the wine from the table on to the floor. It looked very strange dropping so slowly, as though the table were crying. Then there came a roar from the cardplayers. ‘You’ll catch it, my lad! That’s the style! Now you’ve done it! . . . Sept, huit, neuf.’ They started playing again. The waiting-boy never said a word. He stood, his head bent, his hands spread out, and then he knelt and gathered up the glass, piece by piece, and soaked the wine up with a cloth. Only when Madame cried cheerfully, ‘You wait until he finds out,’ did he raise his head. ‘He can’t say anything, if I pay for it,’ he muttered, his face jerking, and he marched off into the kitchen with the soaking cloth. ‘II pleure de colère,’ said Madame delightedly, patting her hair with her plump hands. The café slowly filled. It grew very warm. Blue smoke mounted from the tables and hung about the haymaker’s hat in misty wreaths. There was a suffocating smell of onion soup and boots and damp cloth. In the din the door sounded again. It opened to let in a weed of a fellow, who stood with his back against it, one hand shading his eyes. ‘Hullo! you’ve got the bandage off?’ ‘How does it feel, mon vieux?’ ‘Let’s have a look at them.’ But he made no reply. He shrugged and walked unsteadily to a table, sat down and leant against the wall. Slowly his hand fell. In his white face his eyes showed, pink as a rabbit’s. They brimmed and spilled, brimmed and spilled. He dragged a white cloth out of his pocket and wiped them. ‘It’s the smoke,’ said someone. ‘It’s the smoke tickles them up for you.’ His comrades watched him a bit, watched his eyes fill again, again brim over. The water ran down his face, off his chin on to the table. He rubbed the place with his coat-sleeve, and then, as though forgetful, went on rubbing, rubbing with his hand across the table, staring in front of him. And then he started shaking his head to the movement of his hand. He gave a loud strange groan and dragged out the cloth again.

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‘Huit, neuf, dix,’ said the card-players. ‘P’tit, some more bread.’ ‘Two coffees.’ ‘Un Picon!’ The waiting-boy, quite recovered, but with scarlet cheeks, ran to and fro. A tremendous quarrel flared up among the card-players, raged for two minutes, and died in flickering laughter. ‘Ooof!’ groaned the man with the eyes, rocking and mopping. But nobody paid any attention to him except Madame. She made a little grimace at her two soldiers. ‘Mais vous savez, c’est un peu dégoûtant, ça,’ she said severely. ‘Ah, oui, Madame,’ answered the soldiers, watching her bent head and pretty hands, as she arranged for the hundredth time a frill of lace on her lifted bosom. ‘V’là monsieur!’ cawed the waiting-boy over his shoulder to me. For some silly reason I pretended not to hear, and I leaned over the table smelling the violets, until the little corporal’s hand closed over mine. ‘Shall we have un peu de charcuterie to begin with?’ he asked tenderly. *

*

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‘In England,’ said the blue-eyed soldier, ‘you drink whiskey with your meals. N’est-ce pas, mademoiselle? A little glass of whiskey neat before eating. Whiskey and soda with your bifteks, and after, more whiskey with hot water and lemon.’ ‘Is it true, that?’ asked his great friend who sat opposite, a big red-faced chap with a black beard and large moist eyes and hair that looked as though it had been cut with a sewing-machine. ‘Well, not quite true,’ said I. ‘Si, si,’ cried the blue-eyed soldier. ‘I ought to know. I’m in business. English travellers come to my place, and it’s always the same thing.’ ‘Bah, I can’t stand whiskey,’ said the little corporal. ‘It’s too disgusting the morning after. Do you remember, ma fille, the whiskey in that little bar at Montmartre?’ ‘Souvenir tendre,’ sighed Blackbeard, putting two fingers in the breast of his coat and letting his head fall. He was very drunk. ‘But I know something that you’ve never tasted,’ said the blue-eyed soldier pointing a finger at me; ‘something really good.’ Cluck he went with his tongue. ‘É-pa-tant! And the curious thing is that you’d hardly know it from whiskey except that it’s’ – he felt with his hand for the word – ‘finer, sweeter perhaps, not so sharp, and it leaves you feeling gay as a rabbit next morning.’ ‘What is it called?’

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‘Mirabelle!’5 He rolled the word round his mouth, under his tongue. ‘Ah-ha, that’s the stuff.’ ‘I could eat another mushroom,’ said Blackbeard. ‘I would like another mushroom very much. I am sure I could eat another mushroom if Mademoiselle gave it to me out of her hand.’ ‘You ought to try it,’ said the blue-eyed soldier, leaning both hands on the table and speaking so seriously that I began to wonder how much more sober he was than Blackbeard. ‘You ought to try it, and to-night. I would like you to tell me if you don’t think it’s like whiskey.’ ‘Perhaps they’ve got it here,’ said the little corporal, and he called the waiting-boy. ‘P’tit!’ ‘Non, monsieur,’ said the boy, who never stopped smiling. He served us with dessert plates painted with blue parrots and horned beetles. ‘What is the name for this in English?’ said Blackbeard, pointing. I told him ‘Parrot’. ‘Ah, mon Dieu! . . . Pair-rot.’ He put his arms round his plate. ‘I love you, ma petite pair-rot. You are sweet, you are blonde, you are English. You do not know the difference between whiskey and mirabelle.’ The little corporal and I looked at each other, laughing. He squeezed up his eyes when he laughed, so that you saw nothing but the long curly lashes. ‘Well, I know a place where they do keep it,’ said the blue-eyed soldier. ‘Café des Amis. We’ll go there – I’ll pay – I’ll pay for the whole lot of us.’ His gesture embraced thousands of pounds. But with a loud whirring noise the clock on the wall struck halfpast eight; and no soldier is allowed in a café after eight o’clock at night. ‘It is fast,’ said the blue-eyed soldier. The little corporal’s watch said the same. So did the immense turnip that Blackbeard produced, and carefully deposited on the head of one of the horned beetles. ‘Ah, well, we’ll take the risk,’ said the blue-eyed soldier, and he thrust his arms into his immense cardboard coat. ‘It’s worth it,’ he said. ‘It’s worth it. You just wait.’ Outside, stars shone between wispy clouds, and the moon fluttered like a candle flame over a pointed spire. The shadows of the dark plume-like trees waved on the white houses. Not a soul to be seen. No sound to be heard but the Hsh! Hsh! of a far-away train, like a big beast shuffling in its sleep. ‘You are cold,’ whispered the little corporal. ‘You are cold, ma fille.’ ‘No, really not.’ ‘But you are trembling.’

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‘Yes, but I’m not cold.’ ‘What are the women like in England?’ asked Blackbeard. ‘After the war is over I shall go to England. I shall find a little English woman and marry her – and her pair-rot.’ He gave a loud choking laugh. ‘Fool!’ said the blue-eyed soldier, shaking him; and he leant over to me. ‘It is only after the second glass that you really taste it,’ he whispered. ‘The second little glass and then – ah! – then you know.’ Café des Amis gleamed in the moonlight. We glanced quickly up and down the road. We ran up the four wooden steps, and opened the ringing glass door into a low room lighted with a hanging lamp, where about ten people were dining. They were seated on two benches at a narrow table. ‘Soldiers!’ screamed a woman, leaping up from behind a white soup-tureen – a scrag of a woman in a black shawl. ‘Soldiers! At this hour! Look at that clock, look at it.’ And she pointed to the clock with the dripping ladle. ‘It’s fast,’ said the blue-eyed soldier. ‘It’s fast, madame. And don’t make so much noise, I beg of you. We will drink and we will go.’ ‘Will you?’ she cried, running round the table and planting herself in front of us. ‘That’s just what you won’t do. Coming into an honest woman’s house this hour of the night – making a scene – getting the police after you. Ah, no! Ah, no! It’s a disgrace, that’s what it is.’ ‘Sh!’ said the little corporal, holding up his hand. Dead silence. In the silence we heard steps passing. ‘The police,’ whispered Blackbeard, winking at a pretty girl with rings in her ears, who smiled back at him, saucy. ‘Sh!’ The faces lifted, listening. ‘How beautiful they are!’ I thought. ‘They are like a family party having supper in the New Testament. . . .’ The steps died away. ‘Serve you very well right if you had been caught,’ scolded the angry woman. ‘I’m sorry on your account that the police didn’t come. You deserve it – you deserve it.’ ‘A little glass of mirabelle and we will go,’ persisted the blue-eyed soldier. Still scolding and muttering she took four glasses from the cupboard and a big bottle. ‘But you’re not going to drink in here. Don’t you believe it.’ The little corporal ran into the kitchen. ‘Not there! Not there! Idiot!’ she cried. ‘Can’t you see there’s a window there, and a wall opposite where the police come every evening to. . . . ‘Sh!’ Another scare. ‘You are mad and you will end in prison, – all four of you,’ said the woman. She flounced out of the room. We tiptoed after her into a dark smelling scullery, full of pans of greasy water, of salad leaves and meat-bones.

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‘There now,’ she said, putting down the glasses. ‘Drink and go!’ ‘Ah, at last!’ The blue-eyed soldier’s happy voice trickled through the dark. ‘What do you think? Isn’t it just as I said? Hasn’t it got a taste of excellent – ex-cellent whiskey?’ Notes U Text: SCOS. 1. Based on KM’s visit to Carco at Gray, near Dijon, where he was serving as a corporal, and where she stayed with him for four days in the Zone des Armées. The fact that she chose not to publish the story in her lifetime probably relates to its following so closely the events of that brief affair. A letter from KM to Frieda Lawrence, dated 20 February 1915, gives her first impressions of the visit to Gray (see CLKM, 1, p. 150), while more personal details were entered into a notebook. See KMN, 2, pp. 9–12. 2. Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary at that time, whose name appeared on authorised passports. 3. Carco in fact invented the name ‘Marguerite Bombard’, under whose name he sent KM a postcard to show to military authorities, purporting to come from the aunt she claimed to be visiting. 4. The opening line of a popular wartime song, ‘Idylle rouge’, words by Saint Gilles and Paul Gay, music by Georges Picquet. 5. An alcoholic drink made from yellow plums.

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Autumns: I I There were two orchards belonging to the old house. One, that we called the ‘wild’ orchard lay beyond the vegetable garden; it was planted with bitter cherries and damsons and transparent yellow plums. For some reason it lay under a cloud; we never played there, we did not even trouble to pick up the fallen fruit; and there, every Monday morning, to the round open space in the middle, the servant girl and the washerwoman carried the wet linen; grandmother’s nightdresses, father’s striped shirts, the hired man’s cotton trousers and the servant girl’s ‘dreadfully vulgar’ salmon pink flannelette drawers jigged and slapped in horrid familiarity. But the other orchard, far away and hidden from the house, lay at the foot of a little hill and stretched right over to the edge of the

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paddocks – to the clumps of wattles bobbing yellow in the bright and the blue gums with their streaming sickle-shaped leaves. There, under the fruit trees the grass grew so thick and coarse that it tangled and knotted in your shoes as you walked and even on the hottest day it was damp to touch when you stopped and parted it this way and that looking for windfalls – the apples marked with a bird’s beak, the big bruised pears, the quinces, so good to eat with a pinch of salt, but so delicious to smell that you could not bite for sniffing . . . One year the orchard had its Forbidden Tree. It was an apple discovered by father and a friend during an after-dinner prowl one Sunday afternoon. ‘Great Scott!’ said the friend, lighting upon it with every appearance of admiring astonishment: ‘Isn’t that a – – ?’ And a rich, splendid name settled like an unknown bird on the tree. ‘Yes, I believe it is,’ said father lightly. He knew nothing whatever about the names of fruit trees. ‘Great Scott!’ said the friend again: ‘They’re wonderful apples. Nothing like ’em – and you’re going to have a tip-top crop. Marvellous apples! You can’t beat ’em!’ ‘No, they’re very fine – very fine,’ said father carelessly, but looking upon the tree with new and lively interest. ‘They’re rare – they’re very rare. Hardly ever see ’em in England nowadays,’ said the visitor and set a seal on father’s delight. For father was a self-made man and the price he had to pay for everything was so huge and so painful that nothing rang so sweet to him as to hear his purchase praised. He was young and sensitive still. He still wondered whether in the deepest sense he got his money’s worth. He still had hours when he walked up and down in the moonlight half deciding to ‘chuck this confounded rushing to the office every day – and clear out – clear out once and for all.’ And now to discover that he’d a valuable apple tree thrown in with the orchard – an apple tree that this Johnny from England positively envied. ‘Don’t touch that tree. Do you hear me, children!’ said he, bland and firm; and when the guest had gone, with quite another voice and manner: ‘If I catch either of you touching those apples you shall not only go to bed – you shall each have a good sound whipping!’ Which merely added to its magnificence. Every Sunday morning after church father with Bogey and me tailing after walked through the flower garden, down the violet path, past the lace-bark tree, past the white rose and syringa bushes, and down the hill to the orchard. The apple tree – like the Virgin Mary – seemed to have been miraculously warned of its high honour, standing apart from its fellow, bending a little under its rich clusters, fluttering its

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polished leaves, important and exquisite before father’s awful eye. His heart swelled to the sight – we knew his heart swelled. He put his hands behind his back and screwed up his eyes in the way he had. There it stood – the accidental thing – the thing that no one had been aware of when the hard bargain was driven. It hadn’t been counted on, hadn’t in a way been paid for. If the house had been burned to the ground at that time it would have meant less to him than the destruction of his tree. And how we played up to him, Bogey and I, Bogey with his scratched knees pressed together, his hands behind his back, too, and a round cap on his head with ‘H.M.S. Thunderbolt’ printed across it. The apples turned from pale green to yellow; then they had deep pink stripes painted on them, and then the pink melted all over the yellow, reddened, and spread into a fine clear crimson. At last the day came when father took out of his waistcoat pocket a little pearl pen-knife. He reached up. Very slowly and very carefully he picked two apples growing on a bough. ‘By Jove! They’re warm’ cried father in amazement. ‘They’re wonderful apples! Tiptop! Marvellous!’ he echoed. He rolled them over in his hands. ‘Look at that!’ he said. ‘Not a spot – not a blemish!’ And he walked through the orchard with Bogey and me stumbling after, to a tree-stump under the wattles. We sat, one on either side of father. He laid one apple down, opened the pearl pen-knife and neatly and beautifully cut the other in half. ‘By Jove! Look at that!’ he exclaimed. ‘Father!’ we cried, dutiful but really enthusiastic, too. For the lovely red colour had bitten right through the white flesh of the apple; it was pink to the shiny black pips lying so justly in their scaly pods. It looked as though the apple had been dipped in wine. ‘Never seen that before,’ said father. ‘You won’t find an apple like that in a hurry!’ He put it to his nose and pronounced an unfamiliar word. ‘Bouquet! What a bouquet!’ And then he handed to Bogey one half, to me the other. ‘Don’t bolt it!’ said he. It was agony to give even so much away. I knew it, while I took mine humbly and humbly Bogey took his. Then he divided the second with the same neat beautiful little cut of the pearl knife. I kept my eyes on Bogey. Together we took a bite. Our mouths were full of a floury stuff, a hard, faintly bitter skin – a horrible taste of something dry . . . ‘Well?’ asked father, very jovial. He had cut his two halves into quarters and was taking out the little pods. ‘Well?’ Bogey and I stared at each other, chewing desperately. In that second of chewing and swallowing a long silent conversation passed

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between us – and a strange meaning smile. We swallowed. We edged near father, just touching him. ‘Perfect!’ we lied. ‘Perfect – father! Simply lovely!’ But it was no use. Father spat his out and never went near the apple tree again. Notes Text: Signature,1 1, 4 October 1915, pp. 15–18, signed ‘Matilda Berry’. Published by JMM as ‘The Apple Tree’, Scrapbook, pp. 21–5. 1. JMM and D. H. Lawrence established the periodical the Signature, which survived for only three issues, in early October 1915. An advertising leaflet promised ‘satirical sketches by Matilda Berry’, although in fact none of KM’s contributions was satire.

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Autumns: II1 Suddenly – dreadfully – I wake up. What has happened? Something dreadful has happened! No – nothing has happened – it is only the wind shaking the house, rattling the windows, banging a piece of iron on the roof and making my bed tremble. Leaves flutter past the window, up and away; down in the avenue a whole newspaper wags in the air like a lost kite and falls, spiked on a pine tree. It is cold. Summer is over – it is autumn – everything is ugly. The carts rattle by, swinging from side to side; two Chinamen lollop along under their wooden yokes with the straining vegetable baskets – their pigtails and blue blouses fly out in the wind. A white dog on three legs yelps past our gate. It is all over! What is? Oh, everything! And I begin to plait my hair with shaking fingers, not daring to look in the glass. Mother is talking to grandmother in the hall. ‘A perfect idiot! Imagine leaving anything out on the line in weather like this . . . Now my best little Teneriffe-work2 tea-cloth is simply in ribbons. What is that extraordinary smell? It’s the porridge burning. Oh, heavens – this wind!’ I have a music lesson at ten o’clock. At the thought the minor movement of my Beethoven begins to play in my head, the trills long and terrible like little rolling drums . . . Marie Swainson runs into the garden next door to pick the ‘chrysanths’ before they are ruined. Her skirt flies up above her waist; she tries to beat it down, to tuck it

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between her legs while she stoops, but it is no use – up it flies. All the trees and the bushes beat about her. She picks as quickly as she can, but she is quite distracted. She doesn’t mind what she does – she pulls the plants up by the roots and bends and twists them, stamping her foot and swearing. ‘For heaven’s sake keep the front door shut! Go round to the back,’ shouted someone. And then I hear Bogey: ‘Mother, you’re wanted on the telephone. Telephone, Mother. It’s the butcher!’ How hideous life is – revolting, simply revolting . . . And now my hat-elastic’s snapped. Of course it would, I’ll wear my old red tam and slip out the back way. But mother has seen. ‘Matilda! Matilda! Come back im-me-diately! What on earth have you got on your head? It looks like a tea cosey. And why have you got that mane of hair on your forehead?’ ‘I can’t come back, Mother. I’ll be late for my lesson.’ ‘Come back im-me-diately!’ I won’t. I won’t. I hate Mother. ‘Go to hell,’ I shout, running down the road. In waves, in clouds, in big round whirls the dust comes stinging, and with it little bits of straw and chaff and manure. There is a loud roaring sound from the trees in the gardens, and standing at the bottom of the road outside Mr Bullen’s3 gate I can hear the sea sob: ‘Ah! . . . Ah! . . . Ah-h!’ But Mr Bullen’s drawing-room is as quiet as a cave. The windows are closed, the blinds half pulled, and I am not late. The-girl-before-me has just started playing MacDowell’s ‘To an Iceberg’.4 Mr Bullen looks over at me and half smiles. ‘Sit down,’ he says. ‘Sit over there in the sofa corner, little lady.’ How funny he is. He doesn’t exactly laugh at you . . . but there is just something . . . Oh, how peaceful it is here. I like this room. It smells of art serge and stale smoke and chrysanthemums . . . there is a big vase of them on the mantelpiece behind the pale photograph of Rubinstein5 . . . à mon ami Robert Bullen . . . Over the black glittering piano hangs ‘Solitude’ – a dark tragic woman draped in white sitting on a rock, her knees crossed, her chin on her hands. ‘No, no!’ says Mr Bullen, and he leans over the other girl, puts his arms over her shoulders and plays the passage for her. The stupid – she’s blushing! How ridiculous! Now the-girl-before-me has gone; the front door slams behind her. Mr Bullen comes back and walks up and down, very softly, waiting for me. What an extraordinary thing! My fingers tremble so that I can’t undo the knot in my music satchel. It’s the wind . . . And my

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heart beats so hard I feel it must lift my blouse up and down. Mr Bullen does not say a word. The shabby red piano seat is long enough for two people to sit side by side. Mr Bullen sits down by me. ‘Shall I begin with scales?’ I ask, squeezing my hands together. ‘I had some arpeggios, too.’ But he does not answer. I don’t believe he even hears . . . and then suddenly his fresh hand with the ring on it reaches over and opens Beethoven. ‘Let’s have a little of the old master,’ he says. But why does he speak so kindly – so awfully kindly – and as though we had known each other for years and years and knew everything about each other. He turns the page slowly. I watch his hand – it is a very nice hand and always looks as though it had just been washed. ‘Here we are,’ says Mr Bullen. Oh, that kind voice – Oh, that minor movement! Here comes the little drums . . . ‘Shall I take the repeat?’ ‘Yes, dear child.’ His voice is far, far too kind. The crotchets and quavers are dancing all up and down the stave like little black boys on a fence. Why is he so . . . I will not cry – I have nothing to cry about . . . ‘What is it, dear child?’ Mr Bullen takes my hands. His shoulder is there – just by my head. I lean on it ever so little, my cheek against the springy tweed. ‘Life is so dreadful,’ I murmur, but I don’t feel it’s dreadful at all. He says something about ‘waiting’ and ‘marking time’ and ‘that rare thing a woman’, but I do not hear. It is so comfortable . . . for ever . . . Suddenly the door opens and in pops Marie Swainson, hours before her time. ‘Take the allegretto a little faster,’ says Mr Bullen, and gets up and begins to walk up and down again. ‘Sit in the sofa corner, little lady,’ he says to Marie. *

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The wind, the wind! It’s frightening to be here in my room by myself. The bed, the mirror, the white jug and basin gleam like the sky outside. It’s the bed that is frightening. There it lies, sound asleep . . . Does Mother imagine for one moment that I am going to darn all those stockings knotted up on the quilt like a coil of snakes? I’m not. No, Mother. I do not see why I should . . . The wind – the wind! There’s a funny smell of soot blowing down the chimney. Hasn’t anybody written poems to the wind? ‘I bring fresh flowers to the leaves and showers.’6 . . . What rubbish!

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‘Is that you, Bogey?’ ‘Come for a walk round the esplanade, Matilda. I can’t stick this any longer.’ ‘Right-o! I’ll put on an ulster. Isn’t it an awful day.’ Bogey’s ulster is just like mine. Hooking the collar I look at myself in the glass. My face is white, we have the same excited eyes and hot lips. Ah, we know those two in the glass. Good-bye, dears, we shall be back soon! ‘This is better, isn’t it?’ ‘Hook on,’ says Bogey. We cannot walk fast enough. Our heads bent, our legs just touching, we stride like one eager person through the town, down the asphalte zigzag where the fennel grows wild and on to the esplanade. It is dusky – just getting dusky. The wind is so strong that we have to fight our way through it rocking like two old drunkards. All the poor little pahutukawas7 on the esplanade are bent to the ground. ‘Come on! Come on! Let’s get near.’ Over by the breakwater, the sea is very high. We pull off our hats and my hair blows across my mouth, tasting of salt. The sea is so high that the waves do not break at all: they thump against the rough stone wall and suck up the weedy, dripping steps. A fine spray skims from the water right across the esplanade. We are covered with drops; the inside of my mouth tastes wet and cold. Bogey’s voice is breaking. When he speaks he rushes up and down the scale. It’s funny – it makes you laugh – and yet it just suits the day. The wind carries our voices – away fly the sentences like little narrow ribbons. ‘Quicker – quicker!’ It is getting very dark. In the harbour the coal hulks show two lights – one high on a mast, and one from the stern. ‘Look, Bogey! Look over there!’ A big black steamer with a long loop of smoke streaming, with the portholes lighted, with lights everywhere, is putting out to sea. The wind does not stop her; she cuts through the waves, making for the open gate between the pointed rocks that leads to . . . It’s the light that makes her look so awfully beautiful and mysterious . . . We are on board leaning over the rail arm in arm. ‘. . . Who are they?’ ‘. . . Brother and Sister.’ ‘Look, Bogey, there’s the town. Doesn’t it look small? There’s the post-office clock chiming for the last time. There’s the esplanade where we walked that windy day. Do you remember? I cried at my music lesson that day – How many years ago! Good-bye, little island, good-bye . . .

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Now the dark stretches a wing over the tumbling water. We can’t see those two any more. Good-bye, good-bye – Don’t forget . . . but the ship is gone, now. The wind – the wind! Notes Text: Signature, 1, 4 October 1915, pp. 18–23. Signed ‘Matilda Berry’. 1. KM would revise the story as ‘The Wind Blows’, transcribed into the third person, for the Athenaeum, 4713, 27 August 1920, pp. 262–3. See Vol. 2, pp. 226–9. 2. Handmade lace from the Canary Islands. 3. KM’s portrait of Robert Parker, her music teacher in Wellington. 4. ‘From a Wandering Iceberg’, from Sea Pieces, Op. 55/2, 1898, by Edward MacDowell, the American composer who was a favourite of the young KM. 5. Arthur Rubinstein (1887–1982), the celebrated Polish–American pianist. 6. The opening line from Shelley’s ‘The Cloud’ (1820), which KM seems to attribute to his ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1819). 7. Native evergreen coastal tree (Metrosideros excelsa) whose spectacular red blossoms appear in December.

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Stay-Laces1 MRS BUSK: I do hope I’m not late dear, but I’ve just had my hair washed, and you know what that means for me. Even with that huge electric thing with the elephant’s trunk for the air to come through it takes hours and hours to dry. The man said to-day he had never seen longer or thicker hair. MRS BONE: . . . ! MRS BUSK: On the contrary. Good Heavens! I’d give anything on earth to get rid of it. You see, I can’t do it fashionably; I can’t pack it away and scrape it all up into a wisp like you can, darling. . . . You’ve cut one little military side-whisker since I saw you. . . . Awfully dinky! But you ought to put a spot of spirit gum under it to make it lie flat on your cheek. Otherwise, it doesn’t look the real thing. I mean it doesn’t look intentional in the slightest. Well, you see, I didn’t notice it myself until just this moment, and I’m awfully observant, as you know. . . . New hat, too, isn’t it?

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MRS BONE: . . . ? MRS BUSK: Oh, sweet! Oh, perfectly sweet little absurdity! I love its weeness and the way it perches. Oh, my dear, imagine if we could have seen one of these hats two years ago. How we would have screamed! . . . Oughtn’t that one of yours be worn a little further over the face. I mean, rather more over one eye? Try it. Oh, no, darling, not as much as that. . . . A little more to the right – a little tug to the left – now just a shade further off your head. That’s alright. I mean that will do until you get to a glass. MRS BONE: . . . ! . . . ! MRS BUSK: Oh, no, not a bit conspicuous. But if I were you, I’d try wearing it with the back to the front. That ducky little bird thing is lost at the back, and I believe you are one of those rare women who can wear a bird over your nose. MRS BONE:. . . . MRS BUSK: We had better take a penny ’bus. Oh, how I do loathe getting on ’buses – keep close to me. It’s no good your getting on if I don’t, dear. Look at that enormous man in front of me – just look. And he simply won’t move. He simply won’t make any effort to get out of my way. Don’t push so, please. Pushing won’t help you. Who is pushing like this? LADY IN GREY: Let me pass, please. Kindly move to one side, and let me assist my Mother on to the bus. My Mother is an in-va-leed. Carefully, please. A lady wishes to get by. Move quite to one side, please. Do not suffocate an in-va-leed lady! (The ’bus goes off.) MRS BUSK: How ridiculous! How absurd – behaving as though it was a shipwreck. She should have waited for an empty ’bus. She can’t be in a hurry if the Mother really is an invalid. Which I’m not at all sure of. Look! What do you think? Right at the bottom of the ’bus. . . . Perfectly well and strong, I should say. Of course, her head wobbles; but, then, whose head wouldn’t at that age? No, I’m not suspicious by nature; in fact, I’m not suspicious enough; but, at the same time, women like that. . . . STOUT LADY: You have heard about poor Muriel? FRIEND: Oh, my dear, not another! Why the last is not more than ten months old. Why does she have them like this one after the other? And she is so young, and she was so pretty – such a sweet, slight figure. And that pokey little passage of her flat continually jammed up with a hideous pram. It is too bad, and especially at a time like this, when everything is so frightfully expensive, and there is always the chance of the nurse failing you at the last moment. When does she expect? STOUT LADY: Nothing of the kind.

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FRIEND: What do you mean, dear? I thought you said quite definitely a moment ago. STOUT LADY: Nothing of the kind. (Mysteriously.) She was operated on yesterday morning. FRIEND: Oh, how dreadful! Oh, what ever for? STOUT LADY: A frightful operation. She was two hours under the chloroform, and the surgeon had to Stand On A Chair. FRIEND: But what ever was it, dear? STOUT LADY: Internal, of course. FRIEND: But, what, love? STOUT LADY (triumphant): I cannot possibly tell you in a ’bus. FRIEND: How too frightful. Whisper! STOUT LADY: Im-possible! CONDUCTOR: Selfridges! Sel-fridges. MRS BUSK: Jump, dear, jump. It’s easy to see you’re not a Londoner. Wasn’t that fearfully interesting? I wonder what it really was. But such extraordinary things do happen nowadays, that I don’t see why she couldn’t say it, even in a ’bus. I thought the war had done away with the idea that there was anything you couldn’t speak about. I mean the things one reads in the papers, and the wounded that one even sees in the streets have made such a difference, haven’t they? I love the wounded, don’t you? Oh, I simply love them. And their sweet blue and red uniforms are so cheerful and awfully effective, aren’t they? I can’t think who thought of that bright red tie against that bright blue. It’s such a note, isn’t it? . . . Let me see, what is it I really do want to see first! MRS BONE: . . . ! MRS BUSK: It’s always the same at this shop. It’s always packed. I was only saying to Cecil at breakfast this morning that I really think it’s awfully bad taste to go on buying just as usual at a time like this. Don’t you? He absolutely agreed. Of course, there are necessary things that you simply can’t do without – like corsets, for instance. Do you know where the corset department is in this place? Ask that woman in blue with the earrings. Aren’t the assistants extraordinary here? I mean lots of them are university women, or daughters of very wealthy men – stockbrokers, you know, whose thing-mabobs have fallen so dreadfully since the war started. That woman in blue – really – you might see her photograph in the ‘Sketch’. Which is the Corset Department, please? ACID LADY: Ask an assistant. I am trying on a hat. MRS BUSK: Good heavens! What an awful mistake! But, really, she had something of the shop assistant about her, hadn’t she? The earrings – and that enormous coloured comb. . . . SWEET THING: Corsets, madam?

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MRS BUSK: Yes. I want to see some corsets that fasten down in the front. MRS BONE: . . . ! MRS BUSK: Oh, my dear, haven’t you seen them? They’ve been in the newspapers for weeks. They lace down the front with just a little bit of elastic to give you a grip just where you want it. I should think they would be a very good idea, and so easy to get in and out of. SWEET THING: We are selling a lot of this model, madam. You see it has the slashed hip as well, and it washes beautifully. In fact, it is far better after it has been washed. Some of our clients wash them even before they put them on. They wash so beautifully. MRS BUSK: Really! But is there any advantage in washing them immediately? SWEET THING: Oh, no advantage, of course, madam, except, of course, that they do, as I say – wash beautifully. And here is another style a little higher, to grip the bust as well as the hips and the back. MRS BUSK: Does that wash, too? SWEET THING: Well, not as well as the first I showed you. And here is a French model, madam. Sweet, isn’t it, with two little forget-menots on each side of the front. MRS BUSK: How is that for washing? SWEET THING: We couldn’t guarantee the flowers from fading, madam. MRS BUSK: Oh, wouldn’t you, really? What a pity. It’s the only pair that I really like very much. I think, then, I’d better leave it and think it over. Thank you. It’s no good getting them if they are really not reliable. Good-morning. MRS BONE: . . . ! MRS BUSK: Neither do I, my dear. I’ve never had a pair washed in my life. How extraordinary! I never thought of that. But perhaps it is just as well. I don’t think it is a good idea to have them fastening down the front. You see, I don’t see what is to prevent little blobs of flesh from poking through the holes. One is so much softer in front than at the back. MRS BONE: . . . ! MRS BUSK: Yes, that’s what I thought. The support would be a great comfort. Shall we go back and have another look? I didn’t feel we exhausted the problem a bit, did you? The girl wasn’t really helpful – with all that rubbish about washing or not washing. MRS BONE:. . . . MRS BUSK: A very good idea. We’ll go up to the palm court, have a quiet lunch, and go back after. The thing to do at lunch is to order

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two sixpenny dishes, and each have half of the other’s. . . . Look at that enormous Indian creature in khaki. . . . Do you think you could ever be attracted by a dark man? I mean. Oh, you know. . . . Notes Text: New Age, 28: 1, 4 November 1915, pp. 14–15. 1. Alpers writes ‘The crudity of its satire can only be explained as a savage reaction to the war’s destruction of her brother’ (p. 555). The twentyone-year-old Leslie Beauchamp, serving as a lieutenant with the South Lancashire Regiment, ‘The Prince of Wales’s Volunteers’, was killed while demonstrating hand-grenade procedure at Ploegsteert Wood, near Armentières, on 6 October 1915.

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The Dark Hollow1 ‘You’re a sweet creature, aren’t you,’ said Nina, getting on to a chair so that she could see her waist in front and behind in the little mirror. ‘What are you staring at the ceiling for? Money won’t fall through the ceiling on to the quilt, you know.’ She got off the chair and suddenly such a flame of rage leapt up in her that she trembled all over. ‘And you bloody well won’t milk me any longer’ she muttered. He did not move even his eyes. ‘I’ve done with you.’ She jerked open a drawer and grubbing among the bits of finery for a little black lace veil – ‘done with you,’ she repeated. Just as she was going out of the door there came a sort of chuckle from the bed. ‘Toodle-oo!’ said the voice. She flounced round and tossed her head. ‘What’s that? What’s that you say?’ But he was staring at the ceiling again. She turned to go and the chuckle was repeated. ‘Toodle-oo!’ mocked the voice. Her knees trembled so horribly that she could hardly walk down the five flights of dark winding stairs. It was dusk in the streets and a fine misty rain was falling. The lights from the cafés and street lamps showed like great blurred splodges of blue and yellow. The traffic trailed up and down the greasy road and people, muffled up to the eyes, passed and repassed Nina, all going quickly to – somewhere or other. She too walked quickly, copying them, pretending. It was very cold. She felt the rain on her face and

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hands and then on her shoulders and knees. ‘And I haven’t even an umbrella!’ Good God, that seemed the last straw. Not even an umbrella! She walked faster still, holding her handkerchief up to her lips. Where she was going to or what she was going to do she had not the slightest idea. She would walk until she was tired and then – her thoughts dropped into a dark hollow. But a faint voice came from the hollow. ‘This has happened to you before and will happen again and again and again.’ Oh, how tired she was! ‘I wonder where I am.’ She stopped under the awning of a flower shop and peered into the road. But how could she tell. ‘It’s a street, ma chérie, and that’s all there is to be said for it.’ With a faint smile on her lips she turned and looked in at the flower shop window. As she watched an arm was thrust among the flowers and a hand hovered over some bunches of violets, closing finally on the very smallest. ‘Someone’s busting the bank. I wouldn’t mind betting you the money I haven’t got – that’s a woman.’ She was quite silly with tiredness. ‘Right, of course!’ At that moment a girl came to the shop door with the violets tucked in her jacket and stood fumbling with the catch of her umbrella. Nina’s eyes widened. She moved nearer, staring. Was it? . . . It couldn’t be . . . Yes it was! ‘Louise!’ she cried. ‘Nina!’ cried the girl in a charming happy voice. ‘How extraordinary! Is it really Nina?’ ‘Yes, really’ and Nina nodded, her eyes very big and black behind the lace veil. ‘But,’ said Louise, ‘are you living here? Where are you going to, now?’ She wanted to answer ‘Nowhere in particular’ but somehow her voice had gone and she could only point to her throat with a strange, quivering smile. ‘What’s the matter? Are you ill?’ She managed to whisper ‘A little bit tired,’ and Louise saw big bright tears falling down her cheeks. ‘Come home with me,’ she said quickly. ‘Come home with me, now. I live quite close here.’ She put her arm round Nina. ‘Child, you’re wet through. Don’t tremble so, you poor little thing. It’s just down this road and across the court – in here.’ She half carried Nina up the stairs to the door of her flat. At the door Nina held back a moment. ‘Is there anybody . . .’ ‘No’, said Louise, ‘no, dear, you needn’t see anybody. Come,’ and she opened a door at the end of a narrow passage into a room half alight with an open fire. ‘Take off your things while I go and get the lamp,’ said Louise. But Nina crouched down by the fire and her

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weeping changed to sobbing, to a dreadful half sobbing half coughing that she could not stop. Without a word Louise knelt down. She took off Nina’s hat, raised her a little and pulled off the wet jacket. She slipped down beside her and took Nina’s dark head on her lap and stroked her hair and her cheeks with firm, loving fingers. Ah! How good that felt! Her sobbing changed to long sighs and finally she lay still with her eyes shut, her head pressed against Louise. ‘And she doesn’t even wear a corset. Quel courage!’ thought Nina. ‘Now you’re better aren’t you. Are you feeling warmer?’ said the kind, charming voice. Nina nodded and under her sleepy content her brain began to be busy with . . . what to tell Louise. She sat up, half opened her eyes and smiled shyly. ‘I’m dreadfully ashamed’ she said. Louise got up and leaned against the mantelpiece and looked at the fire. ‘Don’t bother to apologise’ she said, ‘and don’t bother to explain. You’d only – make up a story – you know, and neither of us would be any the wiser.’ ‘Oh no’ said Nina, ‘no I shouldn’t, not to you. Why should I make up stories to you? But there’s nothing to tell,’ she said – nothing. Louise put out her foot and kicked a piece of wood into sparks. In the quiet they heard the rain threshing against the window. ‘What I mean is,’ said Nina, ‘there’s no sort of a story.’ Louise was still silent and unseen by her Nina made a little grimace. ‘She thinks it will do me good to get it off my mind,’ she thought, slyly. ‘Louise,’ she put her hand lightly on the other’s arm. ‘Let me tell you.’ Louise nodded but did not look up. ‘Well, you know, after I left school,’ said Nina, speaking in a low rapid voice, ‘I hadn’t any home to go to – you remember I never really knew who my people were – someone paid for me, c’était tout. And – you heard, didn’t you? – I went on the stage.’ ‘Yes, I heard that,’ said Louise. ‘I had – pretty good luck at first,’ said Nina, ‘but then I got ill and my voice went – and – a hard time came,’ she said. ‘And then you know out of pure cowardice – yes really – I couldn’t fight any more and I hadn’t the courage to – I married.’ Louise turned her grave glance to her. ‘I didn’t love him a bit’ said Nina, shaking her head, ‘just because I was afraid.’ ‘Alright. I understand’ said Louise. Nina looked away from her – her voice hardened. ‘And then – oh well it served me right – he was a brute and my’ she just hesitated a second, ‘my baby died and I left him.’ ‘Ah,’ whispered Louise. ‘And I went on the stage again, and worked and had a bigger fight than before, because – I was – lonely in a different way –

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until –’ She walked right away from Louise and over to the window and lifted the curtain and looked out – ‘until now,’ she said and laughed shortly. ‘How do you mean?’ said Louise. ‘Oh, my dear,’ said Nina, very flippant, ‘I’ve been out of work six weeks – I’ve not got a sou. I’m so tired that the agents won’t look at me and now this afternoon the crisis came. The landlady told me she’d let my room. She kept all the clothes I had left to pay for my rent, and turned me out with one shilling which I gave to the poor little chambermaid as I walked down the stairs. Pretty – isn’t it?’ and she looked out into the rainy court. ‘Mon Dieu! have I overdone it,’ she thought. ‘Was the shilling a mistake?’ Said Louise, very thoughtfully, ‘I say Nina, how old are you?’ ‘Twenty two’ said Nina. ‘Why?’ ‘Well, you left school when you were sixteen and you’ve been married to a beast and had a baby and been earning your living for six years. Not exactly gay, is it?’ Thank God she had believed it all. ‘No I don’t suppose it is’ said Nina. Another pause. ‘Well, what are you going to do now,’ said Louise, and she came up to Nina and put her hand on the back of Nina’s neck and ruffled up her short black hair. ‘Stay with us for a while, will you,’ she said, ‘and see how things turn out. Us is I and a man called David Field. We’ve been living together for the last three years.’ She was very cool. ‘But – but how can I’ said Nina. ‘I don’t believe you realise Louise. I haven’t anything at all. No clothes’ she said, ‘no money. I’m just as I am. I might be a kitten.’ ‘Yes I do realise that,’ said Louise, ‘and I can quite understand you don’t want to be a charity child. Well you needn’t. But I’ve got a little money put by – there’s a tiny room here with a camp bed in it and you can pay me back whatever you cost me when you’re in luck again. That’s simple enough. It’s no good being sentimental when one is really in a tight place – is it? And, quite apart from that’ said Louise, ‘I’d like to have you. I think you’ve had a rotten time. I’d like to feed you up and make you happy and spoil you and turn you into the old Nina again.’ ‘But Mr . . .’ Nina hesitated. ‘Oh, David?’ laughed Louise, ‘David’s alright. Don’t bother about him. Tell me what you want to do.’ Nina said, very frankly, looking straight into Louise’s eyes, ‘I want to stay. You know I’ll pay you back. Yes I want to stay.’ ‘Good’ said Louise, ‘I’m glad. Now we needn’t talk about it again.

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Come away from that rainy window. I don’t know what you feel like but I want some tea.’ ‘Oh, look,’ said Nina tragically, ‘look at my dress.’ Her little dark blue silk frock was stained with black patches of rain. ‘Take it off,’ said Louise. ‘I’ll go and find you something to put on. Bother!’ She looked at Nina standing in her short petticoat by the fire. ‘I’m too staid for you. You’re such a little beauty. You are a lovely little being.’ ‘Oh,’ Nina protested. ‘I’d like to wrap you up in David’s chinese silk portière. Well – wait – I’ll find you something.’ II They were spreading over the camp bed a red and white Indian cover when they heard the front door open and steps in the hall. ‘That’s David’ whispered Louise, smiling. ‘Stay here while I go and explain – you don’t mind?’ ‘Of course not.’ Nina curled up on the bed. She heard voices. ‘Hallo Davy.’ ‘Hallo Lou. Hasn’t it been a rotten day.’ ‘Yes, there’s a lovely fire in your room.’ ‘Good, come on in and talk.’ Then the sound of a door shutting. Quiet as a little cat crouched Nina. She scarcely seemed to breathe but her eyes were busy, taking in every detail of her room – the low chair with its pretty striped pillows, the gold paper screen hiding the washstand, the black chest of drawers covered with a strip of Indian embroidery, the books, the long blue curtains drawn across the window. A lamp stood on the table by the bed. It had a green shade with tiny red apples painted on it, and she looked at her hands lying small and rosy in the ring of soft light. ‘I must come of a good stock,’ she decided. ‘My wrists and my ankles are so fine.’ A mysterious sense of wellbeing filled her. It did not matter how long this lasted. At any rate for the time she had dropped out of her own world and all its beastliness, and that was enough. Never look to the future or you will find the future is looking at you. The funny thing was that Louise had believed her story – had taken it all so simply and naturally that Nina began to have a faint feeling that it was true. She saw herself, little and brave, going to agent after agent. Quite plainly she saw the brute of a husband. There wasn’t any difficulty in imagining him – but even the baby was there, pale, with big solemn eyes, lying across her lap. ‘But the crying. I did not put that on. No, I could not help that. How I sobbed!’ she thought admiringly, and yawned and stretched herself thinking of nothing at all until Louise called ‘Come and show yourself, Nina.’

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III David sat down at the piano and struck a succession of quick light chords. He looked at Louise. ‘What shall I play?’ he said, half petulantly, in the voice of a spoilt child. ‘Play the Sibelius Sonata.’2 ‘Do you want that?’ She nodded, and he smiled at her, and began to play. Louise lay back in her chair, her arms stretched along the sides and her hands drooping. In the dim light her face with half shut eyes was like a beautiful soft mask. But although she wanted to listen to David her thoughts would not attend her wishes. They beckoned her with strange sweet smiles to half remembered places. She was very lovely lying and listening, but – I am happy. I am at peace with myself. I am safe. In the very way she breathed one could tell that of Louise. ‘It is love’ thought Nina. Of course it is love that gives her that air. But what sort of love? What can there be in that conceited boy to keep one satisfied three years. She doesn’t mother him and no he’s not the grand bébé type. Is Louise frightfully passionate? Do those two when they are alone – oh no, it isn’t possible. And besides Louise has not the chic and the uncertainty for a really great affair. I do not understand them at all – at all – thought Nina, half angry, folding herself up in a corner of the sofa. David had come to the second movement – the slow movement that is based on a folksong and is so sad and so lovely. His proud head was tilted back a little the better to listen. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 18–22. Scrapbook, pp. 54–7. 1. Dated by JMM as 1915. 2. Jean Sibelius (1865–1957), piano sonata, opus 12 (1893).

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The Aloe Chapter I There was not an inch of room for Lottie and Kezia1 in the buggy. When Pat swung them on top of the luggage they wobbled; the

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Grandmother’s lap was full and Linda Burnell could not possibly have held a lump of a child on hers for such a distance. Isabel, very superior, perched beside Pat on the driver’s seat. Hold-alls, bags and band boxes were piled upon the floor. ‘These are absolute necessities that I will not let out of my sight for one instant,’ said Linda Burnell, her voice trembling with fatigue and over excitement. Lottie and Kezia stood on the patch of lawn just inside the gate all ready for the fray in their reefer coats with brass anchor buttons and little round caps with battle ship ribbons. Hand in hand. They stared with round inquiring eyes, first at the ‘absolute necessities’ and then at their Mother. ‘We shall simply have to leave them. That is all. We shall simply have to cast them off,’ said Linda Burnell. A strange little laugh flew from her lips; she leaned back upon the buttoned leather cushions and shut her eyes . . . laughing silently. Happily, at that moment, Mrs. Samuel Josephs, who lived next door and had been watching the scene from behind her drawing room blind, rustled down the garden path. ‘Why nod leave the children with be for the afterdoon, Brs. Burnell? They could go on the dray with the storeban when he comes in the eveding. Those thigs on the path have to go. Dodn’t they?’ ‘Yes, everything outside the house has to go,’ said Linda Burnell, waving a white hand at the tables and chairs that stood, impudently, on their heads in front of the empty house. ‘Well, dodn’t you worry, Brs. Burnell. Loddie and Kezia can have tea with by children and I’ll see them safely on the dray afterwards.’ She leaned her fat, creaking body across the gate and smiled reassuringly. Linda Burnell pretended to consider. ‘Yes, it really is quite the best plan. I am extremely obliged to you, Mrs. Samuel Josephs, I’m sure. Children, say “Thank you” to Mrs. Samuel Josephs.’ . . . (Two subdued chirrups: ‘Thank you, Mrs. Samuel Josephs.’) ‘And be good, obedient little girls and – come closer –’ – they advanced – ‘do not forget to tell Mrs. Samuel Josephs when you want to’ . . . ‘Yes, Mother.’ ‘Dodn’t worry, Brs. Burnell.’ At the last moment Kezia let go Lottie’s hand and darted towards the buggy. ‘I want to kiss Grandma “good-bye” again.’ Her heart was bursting. ‘Oh, dear me!’ wailed Linda Burnell. But the grandmother leant her charming head in the lilac flowery bonnet towards Kezia, and when Kezia searched her face she said – ‘It’s

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all right, my darling. Be good.’ The buggy rolled off up the road, Isabel, proudly sitting by Pat, her nose turned up at all the world, Linda Burnell, prostrate and crying behind her veil, and the Grandmother rumminaging among the curious oddments she had put in her black silk reticule at the last moment for lavender smelling salts to give her daughter. The buggy twinkled away in the sunlight and fine golden dust – up the hill and over. Kezia bit her lip hard, but Lottie, carefully finding her handkerchief first, set up a howl. ‘Mo-ther! Gran’ma!’ Mrs. Samuel Josephs, like an animated black silk tea-cosy, waddled to Lottie’s rescue. ‘It’s all right, by dear. There-there, ducky! Be a brave child. You come and blay in the nursery.’ She put her arm round weeping Lottie and led her away. Kezia followed, making a face at Mrs. Samuel Josephs’ placket, which was undone as usual with two long pink corset laces hanging out of it. The Samuel Josephs were not a family. They were a swarm. The moment you entered the house they cropped up and jumped out at you from under the tables, through the stair rails, behind the doors, behind the coats in the passage. Impossible to count them: impossible to distinguish between them. Even in the family groups that Mrs. Samuel Josephs caused to be taken twice yearly – herself and Samuel in the middle – Samuel with parchment roll clenched on knee and she with the youngest girl on hers – you never could be sure how many children really were there. You counted them, and then you saw another head or another small boy in a white sailor suit perched on the arm of a basket chair. All the girls were fat, with black hair tied up in red ribbons and eyes like buttons. The little ones had scarlet faces but the big ones were white, with blackheads and dawning moustaches. The boys had the same jetty hair, the same button eyes, but they were further adorned with ink black finger nails. (The girls bit theirs, so the black didn’t show.) And every single one of them started a pitched battle as soon as possible after birth with every single other. When Mrs. Samuel Josephs was not turning up their clothes or down their clothes (as the sex might be) and beating them with a hair brush, she called this pitched battle ‘airing their lungs.’ She seemed to take a pride in it and to bask in it from far away like a fat General watching through field glasses his troops in violent action . . . Lottie’s weeping died down as she ascended the Samuel Josephs’ stairs, but the sight of her at the nursery door with swollen eyes and a blob of a nose gave great satisfaction to the little S.J.’s, who sat on two benches before a long table covered with American cloth and set out with immense platters of bread and dripping and two brown jugs that fairly steamed.

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‘Hullo! You’ve been crying!’ ‘Ooh! Your eyes have gone right in!’ ‘Doesn’t her nose look funny!’ ‘You’re all red-an’-patchy!’ Lottie was quite a success. She felt it and swelled, smiling timidly. ‘Go and sit by Zaidee, ducky,’ said Mrs. Samuel Josephs. ‘And Kezia – you sit at the end by Boses.’ Moses grinned and pinched her behind as she sat down, but she pretended to take no notice. She did hate boys! ‘Which will you have?’ asked Stanley (a big one), leaning across the table very politely and smiling at Kezia. ‘Which will you have to begin with – Strawberries and cream or bread and dripping?’ ‘Strawberries and cream, please,’ said she. ‘Ah-h-h!’ How they all laughed and beat the table with their teaspoons! ‘Wasn’t that a take in! Wasn’t it! Wasn’t it, now! Didn’t he fox her! Good old Stan!’ ‘Ma! She thought it was real!’ Even Mrs. Samuel Josephs, pouring out the milk and water, smiled indulgently. It was a merry tea. After tea the young Samuel Josephs were turned out to grass until summoned to bed by their servant girl standing in the yard and banging on a tin tray with a potato masher. ‘Know what we’ll do,’ said Miriam. ‘Let’s go an’ play hide-an’-seek all over Burnell’s. Their back door is still open, because they haven’t got the sideboard out yet. I heard Ma tell Glad Eyes she wouldn’t take such ole rubbish to a new house! Come on! Come on!’ ‘No, I don’t want to,’ said Kezia, shaking her head. ‘Ooh! Don’t be soft. Come on – do!’ Miriam caught hold of one of her hands. Zaidee snatched at the other. ‘I don’t not want to either, if Kezia doesn’t,’ said Lottie, standing firm. But she, too, was whirled away. Now, the whole fun of the game for the S.J.’s was that the Burnell kids didn’t want to play. In the yard they paused. Burnell’s yard was small and square with flower beds on either side. All down one side big clumps of arum lilies aired their rich beauty, on the other side there was nothing but a straggle of what the children called ‘Grandmother’s pincushions’, a dull, pinkish flower, but so strong it would push its way and grow through a crack of concrete. ‘You’ve only got one w. at your place,’ said Miriam scornfully. ‘We’ve got two at ours. One for men and one for ladies. The one for men hasn’t got a seat.’ ‘Hasn’t got a seat!’ cried Kezia. ‘I don’t believe you.’

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‘It’s-true-it’s-true-it’s-true! Isn’t it, Zaidee?’ And Miriam began to dance and hop showing her flannelette drawers. ‘Course it is,’ said Zaidee. ‘Well, you are a baby, Kezia!’ ‘I don’t not believe it either if Kezia doesn’t,’ said Lottie, after a pause. But they never paid any attention to what Lottie said. Alice Samuel Josephs tugged at a lily leaf, twisted it off, turned it over. It was covered on the under side with tiny blue and grey snails. ‘How much does your Pa give you for collecting snails?’ she demanded. ‘Nothing!’ said Kezia. ‘Reely? Doesn’t he give you anything? Our Pa gives us ha’penny a hundred. We put them in a bucket with salt and they all go bubbly like spittle. Don’t you get any pocket money?’ ‘Yes, I get a penny for having my hair washed,’ said Kezia. ‘An’ a penny a tooth,’ said Lottie, softly. ‘My! Is that all? One day Stanley took the money out of all our money boxes and Pa was so mad he rang up the police station.’ ‘No, he didn’t. Not reely,’ said Zaidee. ‘He only took the telephone down an’ spoke in it to frighten Stan.’ ‘Ooh, you fibber! Ooh, you are a fibber,’ screamed Alice, feeling her story totter. ‘But Stan was so frightened he caught hold of Pa and screamed and bit him and then he lay on the floor and banged with his head as hard as ever.’ ‘Yes,’ said Zaidee, warming. ‘And at dinner when the door bell rang an’ Pa said to Stan ‘There they are – they’ve come for you,’ do you know what Stan did?’ Her button eyes snapped with joy. ‘He was sick – all over the table!’ ‘How perfeckly horrid,’ said Kezia, but even as she spoke she had one of her ‘ideas.’ It frightened her so that her knees trembled, but it made her so happy she nearly screamed aloud with joy. ‘Know a new game,’ said she. ‘All of you stand in a row and each person holds a narum lily head. I count one – two – three, and when ‘three’ comes all of you have to bite out the yellow bit and scrunch it up – and who swallows first – wins.’ The Samuel Josephs suspected nothing. They liked the game. A game where something had to be destroyed always fetched them. Savagely they broke off the big white blooms and stood in a row before Kezia. ‘Lottie can’t play,’ said Kezia. But any way it didn’t matter. Lottie was still patiently bending a lily head this way and that – it would not come off the stem for her. ‘One – two – three!’ said Kezia. She flung up her hands with joy as the Samuel Josephs bit, chewed,

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made dreadful faces, spat, screamed, and rushed to Burnell’s garden tap. But that was no good – only a trickle came out. Away they sped, yelling. ‘Ma! Ma! Kezia’s poisoned us.’ ‘Ma! Ma! Me tongue’s burning off.’ ‘Ma! Ooh, Ma!’ ‘Whatever is the matter?’ asked Lottie, mildly, still twisting the frayed, oozing stem. ‘Kin I bite my lily off like this, Kezia?’ ‘No, silly.’ Kezia caught her hand. ‘It burns your tongue like anything.’ ‘Is that why they all ran away?’ said Lottie. She did not wait for an answer. She drifted to the front of the house and began to dust the chair-legs on the lawn with a corner of her pinafore. Kezia felt very pleased. Slowly she walked up the back steps and through the scullery into the kitchen. Nothing was left in it except a lump of gritty yellow soap in one corner of the window-sill and a piece of flannel stained with a blue bag in another. The fireplace was choked with a litter of rubbish. She poked among it for treasure, but found nothing except a hair-tidy with a heart painted on it that had belonged to the servant girl. Even that she left lying, and she slipped through the narrow passage into the drawing room. The venetian blind was pulled down but not drawn close. Sunlight, piercing the green chinks, shone once again upon the purple urns brimming over with yellow chrysanthemums that patterned the walls – The hideous box was quite bare, so was the dining room except for the sideboard that stood in the middle, forlorn, its shelves edged with a scallop of black leather. But this room had a ‘funny’ smell. Kezia lifted her head and sniffed again, to remember. Silent as a kitten she crept up the ladderlike stairs. In Mr. and Mrs. Burnell’s room she found a pill box, black and shiny outside and red in, holding a blob of cotton wool. ‘I could keep a bird’s egg in that,’ she decided. The only other room in the house (the little tin bathroom did not count) was their room where Isabel and Lottie had slept in one bed and she and Grandma in another. She knew there was nothing there – she had watched Grandma pack. Oh, yes, there was! A stay button stuck in a crack of the floor and in another crack some beads and a long needle. She went over to the window and leaned against it, pressing her hands against the pane. From the window you saw beyond the yard a deep gully filled with tree ferns and a thick tangle of wild green, and beyond that there stretched the esplanade bounded by a broad stone wall against which the sea chafed and thundered. (Kezia had been born in that room. She had come forth squealing out of a reluctant mother in the teeth of a

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‘Southerly Buster.’ The Grandmother, shaking her before the window, had seen the sea rise in green mountains and sweep the esplanade – The little house was like a shell to its loud booming. Down in the gully the wild trees lashed together and big gulls wheeling and crying skimmed past the misty window.) Kezia liked to stand so before the window. She liked the feeling of the cold shining glass against her hot little palms and she liked to watch the funny white tops that came on her fingers when she pressed them hard against the pane. As she stood the day flickered out and sombre dusk entered the empty house, thievish dusk stealing the shapes of things, sly dusk painting the shadows. At her heels crept the wind, snuffling and howling. The windows shook, a creaking came from the walls and floors, a piece of loose iron on the roof banged forlornly – Kezia did not notice these things severally, but she was suddenly quite, quite still with wide open eyes and knees pressed together – terribly frightened. Her old bogey, the dark, had overtaken her, and now there was no lighted room to make a despairing dash for. Useless to call ‘Grandma’ – useless to wait for the servant girl’s cheerful stumping up the stairs to pull down the blinds and light the bracket lamp . . . There was only Lottie in the garden. If she began to call Lottie now and went on calling her loudly all the while she flew down the stairs and out of the house she might escape from It in time. It was round like the sun. It had a face. It smiled, but It had no eyes. It was yellow. When she was put to bed with two drops of aconite in a medicine glass It breathed very loudly and firmly and It had been known on certain particularly fearful occasions to turn round and round. It hung in the air. That was all she knew and even that much had been very difficult to explain to the Grandmother. Nearer came the terror and more plain to feel the ‘silly’ smile. She snatched her hands from the window pane, opened her mouth to call Lottie, and fancied that she did call loudly, though she made no sound . . . It was at the top of the stairs; It was at the bottom of the stairs, waiting in the little dark passage, guarding the back door – But Lottie was at the back door, too. ‘Oh, there you are!’ she said cheerfully. ‘The storeman’s here. Everything’s on the dray – and three horses, Kezia. Mrs. Samuel Josephs has given us a big shawl to wear round us, and she says button up your coat. She won’t come out because of asthma, and she says “never do it again”’ – Lottie was very important – ‘Now then, you kids,’ called the storeman. He hooked his big thumbs under their arms. Up they swung. Lottie arranged the shawl ‘most beautifully,’ and the storeman tucked up their feet in a piece of

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old blanket. ‘Lift up – easy does it.’ They might have been a couple of young ponies. The storeman felt over the cords holding his load, unhooked the brake chain from the wheel, and whistling, he swung up beside them. ‘Keep close to me,’ said Lottie, ‘because otherwise you pull the shawl away from my side, Kezia.’ But Kezia edged up to the storeman. He towered beside her, big as a giant, and he smelled of nuts and wooden boxes. Chapter II It was the first time that Lottie and Kezia had ever been out so late. Everything looked different – the painted wooden houses much smaller than they did by day, the trees and the gardens far bigger and wilder. Bright stars speckled the sky and the moon hung over the harbour dabbling the waves with gold. They could see the lighthouse shining from Quarantine Island, the green lights fore and aft the old black coal hulks. ‘There comes the Picton boat,’ said the storeman, pointing with his whip to a little steamer all hung with bright beads. But when they reached the top of the hill and began to go down the other side, the harbour disappeared and although they were still in the town they were quite lost. Other carts rattled past. Everybody knew the storeman. ‘Night, Fred!’ ‘Night-o!’ he shouted. Kezia liked very much to hear him. Whenever a cart appeared in the distance she looked up and waited for his voice. In fact, she liked him altogether; he was an old friend; she and the Grandmother had often been to his place to buy grapes. The storeman lived alone in a cottage with a glass house that he had built himself leaning against it. All the glasshouse was spanned and arched over with one beautiful vine. He took her brown basket from her, lined it with three large leaves, and then he felt in his belt for a little horn knife, reached up and snipped off a big blue cluster and laid it on the leaves as tenderly as you might put a doll to bed. He was a very big man. He wore brown velvet trousers and he had a long brown beard, but he never wore a collar – not even on Sundays. The back of his neck was dark red. ‘Where are we now?’ Every few minutes one of the children asked him the question, and he was patient – ‘Why! this is Hawkstone Street,’ or ‘Hill Street,’ or ‘Charlotte Crescent.’

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‘Of course it is.’ Lottie pricked up her ears at the last name; she always felt that Charlotte Crescent belonged specially to her. Very few people had streets with the same name as theirs – ‘Look, Kezia! There is Charlotte Crescent. Doesn’t it look different?’ They reached their last boundary marks – the fire alarm station – a little wooden affair painted red and sheltering a huge bell – and the white gates of the Botanical Gardens, gleaming in the moonlight. Now everything familiar was left behind; now the big dray rattled into unknown country, along the new roads with high clay banks on either side, up the steep towering hills, down into valleys where the bush drew back on either side just enough to let them past, through a wide shallow river – the horses pulled up to drink, and made a rare scramble at starting again – on and on – further and further. Lottie drooped; her head wagged, she slipped half into Kezia’s lap and lay there. But Kezia could not open her eyes wide enough. The wind blew on them; she shivered, but her cheeks and her ears burned. She looked up at the stars. ‘Do stars ever blow about?’ she asked. ‘Well, I never noticed ’em,’ said the storeman. Came a thin scatter of lights and the shape of a tin church, rising out of a ring of tombstones. ‘They call this we’re coming to – “The Flats”,’ said the storeman. ‘We got a nuncle and a naunt living near here,’ said Kezia –’ Aunt Doady and Uncle Dick. They’ve got two children, Pip the eldest is called, and the youngest’s name is Rags. He’s got a ram. He has to feed it with a nenamel teapot and a glove top over the spout. He’s going to show us. What is the difference between a ram and a sheep?’ ‘Well, a ram has got horns and it goes for you.’ Kezia considered. ‘I don’t want to see it frightfully,’ she said. ‘I hate rushing animals like dogs and parrots – don’t you? I often dream that animals rush at me – even camels, and while they’re rushing, their heads swell – e-nor-mous!’ ‘My word!’ said the storeman. A very bright little place shone ahead of them, and in front of it was gathered a collection of traps and carts. As they drew near someone ran out of the bright place and stood in the middle of the road, waving his apron – ‘Going to Mr. Burnell’s?’ shouted the some one. ‘That’s right,’ said Fred, and drew rein. ‘Well I got a passel for them in the store. Come inside half a jiffy, will you? ‘We-ell! I got a couple of little kids along with me,’ said Fred. But the someone had already darted back, across his verandah and

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through the glass door. The storeman muttered something about ‘stretching their legs’ and swung off the dray. ‘Where are we?’ said Lottie, raising herself up. The bright light from the shop window shone over the little girls; Lottie’s reefer cap was all on one side and on her cheek there was the print of an anchor button she had pressed against while sleeping. Tenderly the storeman lifted her, set her cap straight and pulled down her crumpled clothes. She stood blinking on the verandah, watching Kezia, who seemed to come flying through the air to her feet. Into the warm, smoky shop they went. Kezia and Lottie sat on two barrels, their legs dangling. ‘Ma!’ shouted the man in the apron. He leaned over the counter. ‘Name of Tubb!’ he said, shaking hands with Fred. ‘Ma!’ he bawled. ‘Gotter couple of young ladies here.’ Came a wheeze from behind a curtain. ‘Arf a mo, dearie.’ Everything was in that shop. Bluchers and sand shoes, straw hats and onions were strung across the ceiling, mixed with bunches of cans and tin teapots and broom heads and brushes. There were bins and canisters against the walls and shelves of pickles and jams and things in tins. One corner was fitted up as a draper’s – you could smell the rolls of flannelette – and one as a chemist’s with cards of rubber dummies and jars of worm chocolate. One barrel brimmed with apples – one had a tap and a bowl under it half full of molasses, a third was stained deep red inside, and a wooden ladle with a crimson handle was balanced across it. It held raspberries. And every spare inch of space was covered with a flypaper or an advertisement. Sitting on stools or boxes or lounging against things a collection of big untidy men yarned and smoked. One, very old one with a dirty beard sat with his back half turned to the other, chewing tobacco and spitting a long distance into a huge round spittoon pepered with sawdust. After he had spat he combed his beard with a shaking hand. ‘We-ell! that’s how it is!’ or – ‘That’s ’ow it ’appens’ – or ‘There you’ve got it, yer see,’ he would quaver. But nobody paid any attention to him but Mr. Tubb, who cocked an occasional eye and roared ‘Now, then, Father!’ And then the combing hand would be curved over the ear, and the silly face screwed up – ‘Ay?’ – to droop again and then start chewing. From the store the road completely changed – very slowly, twisting as if loath to go, turning as if shy to follow it slipped into a deep valley. In front and on either side there were paddocks and beyond them bush covered hills thrust up into the moonlit air like dark heaving water – you could not imagine that the road led beyond the valley. Here it seemed to reach its perfect end – the valley knotted upon the bend of the road like a big jade tassel –

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‘Can we see the house from here the house from here’ – piped the children. Houses were to be seen – little houses – they counted three – but not their house. The storeman knew – He had made the journey twice before that day – At last he raised his whip and pointed. ‘That’s one of your paddocks belonging,’ he said, ‘and the next, and the next’ – over the edge of the last paddock pushed tree boughs and bushes from an immense garden – A corrugated iron fence painted white held back the garden from the road. In the middle there was a gap – the iron gates were open wide – They clanked through up a drive cutting through the garden like a whip lash, looping suddenly an island of green and behind the island, out of sight until you came upon it, was the house. It was long and low built, with a pillared verandah and balcony running all the way round – shallow steps led to the door – The soft white bulk of it lay stretched upon the green garden like a sleeping beast – and now one, and now another, of the windows leapt into light – Someone was walking through the empty rooms, carrying a lighted candle. From a window downstairs the light of a fire flickered – a strange, beautiful excitement seemed to stream from the house in quivering ripples. Over its roofs the verandah poles, the window sashes, the moon swung her lantern. ‘Ooh!’ Kezia flung out her arms – The Grandmother had appeared on the top step – she carried a little lamp – she was smiling. ‘Has this house got a name’ – asked Kezia fluttering for the last time out of the storeman’s hands. ‘Yes,’ said the Grandmother, ‘it is called Tarana.’ ‘Tarana,’ she repeated, and put her hands upon the big glass door knob. ‘Stay where you are one moment, children!’ The Grandmother turned to the storeman. ‘Fred, these things can be unloaded and left on the verandah for the night. Pat will help you’ – She turned and called into the hollow hall – ‘Pat are you there’ – ‘I am’ came a voice and the Irish handy man squeaked in new boots over the bare boards. But Lottie staggered over the verandah like a bird fallen out of a nest. If she stood still for a moment, her eyes closed – if she leaned – she fell asleep. She could not walk another step. ‘Kezia,’ said the Grandmother, ‘can I trust you to carry the lamp.’ ‘Yes, my Grandma’ – The old woman knelt and gave the bright breathing thing into her hands, and then she raised herself and caught up Lottie. ‘This way’ – Through a square hall filled with furniture bales and hundreds of parrots (but the parrots were only on the wallpaper) down a narrow passage where the parrots persisted on either side, walked Kezia with her lamp. ‘You are to have some supper before you go to bed’ said the Grandmother putting down Lottie to open the dining room door. ‘Be very quiet,’ she warned – ‘poor little mother has got such a headache.’

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Linda Burnell lay before a crackling fire, in a long cane chair her feet on a hassock a plaid rug over her knees – Burnell and Beryl sat at a table in the middle of the room eating a dish of fried chops and drinking tea out of a brown china teapot – Over the back of her Mother’s chair leaned Isabel. She had a white comb in her fingers and in a gentle absorbed way, she was combing back the curls from her Mother’s forehead – Outside the pool of lamp and firelight the room stretched dark and bare to the hollow windows – ‘Are those the children –’ Mrs. Burnell did not even open her eyes – her voice was tired and trembling – ‘Have either of them been maimed for life?’ ‘No, dear, perfectly safe and sound.’ ‘Put down that lamp Kezia,’ said Aunt Beryl, ‘or we shall have the house on fire before we’re out of the packing cases. More tea – Stan?’ ‘Well, you might just give me 5⁄8 of a cup,’ said Burnell, leaning across the table – ‘Have another chop, Beryl – Tip top meat, isn’t it? First rate First rate. Not too lean – not too fat –’ He turned to his wife – ‘Sure you won’t change your mind – Linda, darling?’ ‘Oh, the very thought of it’ . . . She raised one eyebrow in a way she had – The Grandmother brought the children 2 bowls of bread and milk, and they sat up to the table, their faces flushed and sleepy behind the waving steam – ‘I had meat for my supper,’ said Isabel, still combing gently. ‘I had a whole chop for my supper – the bone an’ all, an’ worcestershire sauce. Didn’t I, Father –’ ‘Oh, don’t boast, Isabel,’ said Aunt Beryl. Isabel looked astounded – ‘I wasn’t boasting was I mummy? I never thought of boasting – I thought they’d like to know. I only meant to tell them –’ ‘Very well. That’s enough’ said Burnell. He pushed back his plate, took a toothpick out of his waistcoat pocket, and began picking his strong, white teeth. ‘You might see that Fred has a bite of something in the kitchen before he goes, will you, Mother.’ ‘Yes, Stanley.’ The old woman turned to go – ‘Oh, and hold on a jiffy. I suppose nobody knows where my slippers were put. I suppose I shan’t be able to get at ’em for a month or two, eh?’ ‘Yes,’ came from Linda. ‘In the top of the canvas hold all marked Urgent Necessities.’ ‘Well, you might bring them to me will you Mother.’ ‘Yes, Stanley.’ Burnell got up, stretched himself and went over to the fire to warm his bottom and lifted up his coat tail – ‘By Jove this is a pretty pickle, eh, Beryl.’ Beryl, sipping tea, her elbow on the table, smiled over the cup at him – She wore an unfamiliar pink pinafore. The sleeves of her blouse were rolled up to her shoulders, showing her lovely freckled arms, and she had let her hair fall down her back in a long pigtail. ‘How long do you think it will take you to get straight – couple of weeks? eh –’ he chaffed. ‘Good Heavens no,’ said Beryl. ‘The worst is over already. All the beds are up – Everything’s in the house – yours and Linda’s room is finished already. The servant girl

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and I have simply slaved all day, and ever since Mother came she’s worked like a horse, too. We’ve never sat down for a moment. We have had a day.’ Stamping he scented a rebuke. ‘Well, I suppose you didn’t expect me to tear away from the office and nail carpets, did you –’ ‘Certainly not’ said Beryl airily. She put down her cup and ran out of the dining room. ‘What the hell did she expect to do,’ asked Stanley. ‘Sit down and fan herself with a palm leaf fan while I hired a gang of professionals to do the job? Eh? By Jove, if she can’t do a hand’s turn occasionally without shouting about it in return for – –’ and he glared as the chops began to fight the tea in his sensitive stomach. But Linda put up a hand and dragged him down – on to the side of her long cane chair. ‘This is a wretched time for you, old boy,’ she said fondly – Her cheeks were very white, but she smiled and curled her fingers round the big red hand she held – ‘And with a wife about as bright and gay as a yesterday’s buttonhole,’ she said – ‘You’ve been awfully patient, darling.’ ‘Rot,’ said Burnell, but he began to whistle The Holy City2 a good sign – ‘Think you’re going to like it?’ he asked – ‘I don’t want to tell you, but I think I ought to, Mother,’ said Isabel. ‘Kezia’s drinking tea out of Aunt Beryl’s cup –’ They were trooped off to bed by the Grandmother – She went first with a candle – the stairs rang to their climbing feet. Isabel and Lottie lay in a room to themselves – Kezia curled in the Grandmother’s big bed. ‘Aren’t there any sheets, my Grandma?’ ‘No, not to-night.’ ‘It’s very tickly,’ said Kezia. ‘It’s like Indians. Come to bed soon an be my Indian brave.’ ‘What a silly you are,’ said the old woman, tucking her in as she loved to be tucked. ‘Are you going to leave the candle.’ ‘No. Hush, go to sleep.’ ‘Well, kin I have the door left open?’ She rolled herself into a round, but she did not go to sleep. From all over the house came the sound of steps – The house itself creaked and popped – Loud whispery voices rose and fell. Once she heard Aunt Beryl’s – rush of high laughter. Once there came a loud trumpeting from Burnell blowing his nose. Outside the windows hundreds of black cats with yellow eyes sat in the sky watching her, but she was not frightened – Lottie was saying to Isabel – ‘I’m going to say my prayers in bed to-night –’ ‘No, you can’t, Lottie.’ Isabel was very firm. ‘God only excuses you saying your prayers in bed if you’ve got a temperature.’ So Lottie yielded: ‘Gentle Jesus meek an’ mile Look ’pon little chile Pity me simple Lizzie Suffer me come to Thee.

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the aloe Fain would I to Thee be brought Dearest Lor’ forbid it not In the Kinkdom of Thy grace Make a little chile a place – Amen.’

And then they lay down back to back just touching and fell asleep. Standing in a pool of moonlight Beryl Fairfield undressed herself – she was tired but she pretended to be more tired than she really was – letting her clothes fall – pushing back with a charming gesture her warm heavy hair – ‘Oh, how tired I am very tired’ – she shut her eyes a moment but her lips smiled – her breath rose and fell in her breast like fairy wings. The window was open it was warm and still. Somewhere out there in the garden a young man dark and slender with mocking eyes, tip toed among the bushes and gathered the garden into a big bouquet and slipped under her window and held it up to her. She saw herself bending forward – He thrust his head among the white waxy flowers – ‘No, no.’ said Beryl. She turned from the window she dropped her nightgown over her head – ‘How frightfully unreasonable Stanley is sometimes,’ she thought, buttoning – And then as she lay down came the old thought, the cruel, leaping thought, ‘If I had money’ only to be shaken off and beaten down by calling to her rescue her endless pack of dreams – A young man immensely rich just arrived from England, meets her quite by chance. The new Governor is married. There is a ball at Government House to celebrate his wedding. Who is that exquisite creature in eau de nil satin? . . . Beryl Fairfield. ‘The thing that pleases me’ said Stanley, leaning against the side of the bed in his shirt and giving himself a good scratch before turning in – ‘is that, on the strict q.T. Linda, I’ve got the place dirt cheap. I was talking about it to little Teddy Dean today, and he said he simply couldn’t understand why they’d accepted my figure you see land about here is bound to become more and more valuable – look in about 10 years time . . . Of course we shall have to go very slow from now on and keep down expenses – cut ’em as fine as possible. Not asleep, are you.’ ‘No dear I’m listening –’ said Linda. He sprang into bed leaned over her and blew out the candle. ‘Good-night, Mr. Business man’ she said, and she took hold of his head by the ears and gave him a quick kiss. Her faint, far away voice seemed to come from a deep well –‘Good-night, darling.’ He slipped his arm under her neck and drew her to him . . . ‘Yes, clasp me,’ she said faintly, in her far away sleeping voice. . . . Pat the handy man sprawled in his little room behind the kitchen. His sponge bag coat and trousers hung from the door peg like a hanged man. From the blanket edge his twisted feet protruded – and

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on the floor of his room there was an empty cane bird cage. He looked like a comic picture. ‘Honk – honk,’ came from the snoring servant girl next door she had adenoids. Last to go to bed was the Grandmother. ‘What – not asleep yet.’ ‘No – I’m waiting for you,’ said Kezia. The old woman sighed and lay down beside her. Kezia thrust her head under the Grandmother’s arm. ‘Who am I –’ she whispered – this was an old established ritual to be gone through between them. ‘You are my little brown bird,’ said the Grandmother. Kezia gave a guilty chuckle. The Grandmother took out her teeth and put them in a glass of water beside her on the floor. Then the house was still. In the garden some owls called – perched on the branches of a lace bark tree, More pork more pork, and far away from the bush came a harsh rapid chatter – Ha Ha Ha Ha. Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha!’ Dawn came sharp and chill. The sleeping people turned over and hunched the blankets higher – They sighed and stirred, but the brooding house all hung about with shadows held the quiet in its lap a little longer – A breeze blew over the tangled garden dropping dew and dropping petals – shivered over the drenched paddock grass lifted the sombre bush and shook from it a wild and bitter scent. In the green sky tiny stars floated a moment and then they were gone, they were dissolved like bubbles. The cocks shrilled from the neighbouring farms – the cattle moved in their stalls – the horses grouped under the trees lifted their heads and swished their tails – and plainly to be heard in the early quiet was the sound of the creek in the paddock running over the brown stones – running in and out of the sandy hollows – hiding under clumps of dark berry bushes – spilling into a swamp full of yellow water flowers and cresses – All the air smelled of water – The lawn was hung with bright drops and spangles – And then quite suddenly – at the first glint of sun – the birds began to sing – Big cheeky birds, starlings and minors whistled on the lawns; the little birds, the goldfinches and fantails and linnets, twittered flitting from bough to bough – and from tree to tree, hanging the garden with bright chains of song – a lovely king fisher perched on the paddock fence preening his rich beauty – ‘How loud the birds are’ said Linda in her dream. She was walking with her father through a green field sprinkled with daisies – and suddenly he bent forward and parted the grasses and showed her a tiny ball of fluff just at her feet. ‘Oh Papa the darling.’ She made a cup of her hands and caught the bird and stroked its head with her finger. It was quite tame. But a strange thing happened. As she stroked it, it began to swell – It ruffled and pouched – it grew bigger

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and bigger and its round eyes seemed to smile at her – Now her arms were hardly wide enough to hold it – she dropped it in her apron. It had become a baby with a big naked head and a gaping bird mouth – opening and shutting – Her father broke into a loud clattering laugh and Linda woke to see Burnell standing by the windows rattling the venetian blinds up to the very top – ‘Hullo!’ he said – ‘didn’t wake you, did I? Nothing much the matter with the weather this morning.’ He was enormously pleased – weather like this set a final seal upon his bargain – he felt somehow –that he had bought the sun too got it chucked in, dirt cheap, with the house and grounds – He dashed off to his bath and Linda turned over, raised herself on one elbow to see the room by daylight. It looked wonderfully lived in already; all the furniture had found a place – all the old ‘paraphernalia’ as she expressed it – even to photographs on the mantelpiece and medicine bottles on a shelf over the washstand. But this room was much bigger than their other room had been – that was a blessing. Her clothes lay across a chair – her outdoor things – a purple cape and a round sable with a plume on it – were tossed on the box ottoman – Looking at them a silly thought brought a fleeting smile into her eyes – ‘perhaps I’m going away again to-day’ and for a moment she saw herself driving away from them all in a little buggy – driving away from every one of them, and waving – Back came Stanley girt with a towel, glowing and slapping his thighs. He pitched the wet towel on top of her cape and hat and standing firm in the exact centre of a square of sunlight he began to do his exercises – deep breathing – bending – squatting like a frog and shooting out his legs. He was so saturated with health that everything he did delighted him, but this amazing vigour seemed to set him miles and worlds away from Linda – she lay on the white tumbled bed, and leaned towards him, laughing as if from the sky – ‘Oh, hang! Oh, damn!’ said Stanley who had butted into a crisp shirt only to find that some idiot a woman had fastened the neckband and he was caught – He stalked over to her waving his arms. ‘Now you look the image of a fat turkey,’ said she – ‘Fat! I like that,’ said Stanley – ‘why I haven’t got a square inch of fat on me. Feel that –’ ‘My dear – hard as nails,’ mocked she – ‘You’d be surprised –’ said Stanley, as though this were intensely interesting, ‘at the number of chaps at the club who’ve got a corporation – young chaps, you know – about my own age –’ He began parting and brushing his strong ginger hair, his blue eyes fixed and round in the glass – bent at the knees, because the dressing table was always – confound it – a bit too low for him. ‘Little Teddy Dean for example’ and he straightened, describing upon himself an enormous curve with the hair brush. ‘Of course they’re sitting on their hindquarters all day in the office and when they’re away from it – as far as I can make out, they stodge

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and they snooze – I must say I’ve got a perfect horror.’ ‘Yes, my dear, don’t worry, you’ll never be fat – You’re far too energetic,’ repeating the familiar formula that he never tired of hearing. ‘Yes. Yes I suppose that’s true,’ and taking a mother of pearl penknife out of his pocket he began to pare his nails – ‘Breakfast, Stanley’ Beryl was at the door – ‘Oh Linda Mother says don’t get up – Stay where you are until after lunch, won’t you?’ She popped her head in at the door. She had a big piece of syringa stuck through a braid of her hair. ‘Everything we left on the verandah last night is simply sopping this morning. You should see poor dear Mother wringing out the sofa and chairs – However, no harm done – not a pennorth’s of harm’ this with the faintest glance at Stanley – ‘Have you told Pat what time to have the buggy round? It’s a good six-and-a-half miles – from here to the office – –’ ‘I can imagine what his morning start off for the office will become’ – thought Linda. Even when they lived in town – only half an hour away – the house had to slow down each morning – had to stop like a steamer – every soul on board summoned to the gangway to watch Burnell descending the ladder and into the little cockle shell – They must wave when he waved – give him good-bye for good-bye and lavish upon him unlimited sympathy as though they saw on the horizon’s brim the untamed land to which he curved his chest so proudly, the line of leaping savages ready to fall upon his valiant sword – ‘Pat, Pat,’ she heard the servant girl calling – But Pat was evidently not to be found – the silly voice went baaing all over the garden. ‘It will be very high pressure indeed’ – she decided – and she did not rest again until the final slam of the front door sounded – and Stanley was gone. Later she heard her children playing in the garden. Lottie’s stolid, compact little voice – cried: ‘Kezia Isabel’ – Lottie was always getting lost or losing people and finding them again – astonished – round the next tree or the next corner – ‘Oh there you are’ – They had been turned out to grass after breakfast with strict orders not to come near the house until they were called – Isabel wheeled a neat pram load of prim dolls and Lottie was allowed for a great treat to walk beside holding the doll parasols over the face of the wax one – ‘Where are you going to, Kezia,’ asked Isabel, who longed to find some light and menial duty that Kezia might perform and so be roped in under her government. ‘Oh, just away,’ said Kezia. ‘Come back, Kezia. Come back. You’re not to go on the wet grass until it’s dry, Grandma says,’ called Isabel. ‘Bossy! Bossy!’ Linda heard Kezia answer. ‘Do the children’s voices annoy you, Linda?’ asked old Mrs. Fairfield, coming in at that moment with a breakfast tray. ‘Shall I tell them to go further away from the house?’

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‘No, don’t bother,’ said Linda. ‘Oh, Mother, I do not want any breakfast.’ ‘I have not brought you any,’ said Mrs. Fairfield, putting down the tray on the bed table. ‘A spot of porridge, a finger of toast – – –’ ‘The merest sensation of marmalade –’ mocked Linda. But Mrs. Fairfield remained serious. ‘Yes, dearie, and a little pot of fresh tea.’ She brought from the cupboard a white woolen jacket trimmed with red bows and buttoned it round her daughter. ‘Must I?’ pouted Linda, making a face at the porridge. Mrs. Fairfield walked about the room. She lowered the blinds, tidied away the evidences of Burnell’s toilet, and gently she lifted the dampened plume of the little round hat. There was a charm and a grace in all her movements. It was not that she merely ‘set in order’; there seemed to be almost a positive quality in the obedience of things to her fine old hands. They found not only their proper but their perfect place. She wore a grey foulard dress patterned with large purple pansies, a white linen apron and one of those high caps, shaped like a jelly mould of white tulle. At her throat a big silver brooch shaped like a crescent moon with five owls sitting on it, and round her neck a black bead watch chain. If she had been a beauty in her youth and she had been a very great beauty – (indeed, report had it that her miniature had been painted and sent to Queen Victoria as the belle of Australia) – old age had touched her with exquisite gentleness. Her long curling hair was still black at her waist, grey between her shoulders, and it framed her head in frosted silver. The late roses – the last roses, that frail pink kind, so reluctant to fall, such a wonder to find – still bloomed in her cheeks and behind big gold rimmed spectacles her blue eyes shone and smiled. And she still had dimples. On the backs of her hands, at her elbows – one in the left hand corner of her chin. Her body was the colour of old ivory. She bathed in cold water summer and winter, and she could only bear linen next to her skin and suède gloves on her hands. Upon everything she used there lingered a trace of Cashmère bouquet perfume. ‘How are you getting on downstairs?’ asked Linda, playing with her breakfast. ‘Beautifully. Pat has turned out a treasure – He has laid all the linoleum and the carpets and Alice seems to be taking a real interest in the kitchen and pantries.’ ‘Pantries! There’s grandeur, after that bird cage of a larder in the other cubby hole!’ ‘Yes, I must say the house is wonderfully convenient and ample in every way. You should have a good look round when you get up.’ Linda smiled, shaking her head.

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‘I don’t want to. I don’t care. The house can bulge cupboards and pantries, but other people will explore them. Not me.’ ‘But why not?’ asked Mrs. Fairfield, anxiously watching her. ‘Because I don’t feel the slightest crumb of interest, my Mother.’ ‘But why don’t you, dear? You ought to try – to begin – even for Stanley’s sake. He’ll be so bitterly disappointed if . . .’ Linda’s laugh interrupted. ‘Oh, trust me – I’ll satisfy Stanley. Besides, I can rave all the better over what I haven’t seen.’ ‘Nobody asks you to rave, Linda,’ said the old woman, sadly. ‘Don’t they?’ Linda screwed up her eyes. ‘I’m not so sure. If I were to jump out of bed now, fling on my clothes, rush downstairs, tear up a ladder, hang pictures, eat an enormous lunch, romp with the children in the garden this [afternoon], and be swinging on the gate, waving, when Stanley hove in sight this evening, I believe you’d be delighted – A normal, healthy day for a young wife and mother – A – –’ Mrs. Fairfield began to smile. ‘How absurd you are – How you exaggerate! What a baby you are,’ said she. But Linda sat up suddenly and jerked off the ‘wooly’. ‘I’m boiling. I’m roasting,’ she declared. ‘I can’t think what I’m doing in this big, stuffy old bed – I’m going to get up.’ ‘Very well, dear,’ said Mrs. Fairfield – Getting dressed never took her long. Her hands flew. She had beautiful hands, white and tiny. The only trouble with them was that they could not keep her rings on them. Happily she only had two rings: her wedding ring and a peculiarly hideous affair, a square slab with four pin opals in it that Stanley had ‘stolen from a cracker,’ said Linda, the day they were engaged. But it was her wedding ring that disappeared so. It fell down every possible place and into every possible corner. Once she even found it in the crown of her hat. It was a familiar cry in the house ‘Linda’s wedding ring has gone again’– Stanley Burnell could never hear that without a horrible sense of discomfort. Good Lord! He wasn’t superstitious – He left that kind of rot to people who had nothing better to think about – but all the same it was devilishly annoying. Especially as Linda made so light of the affair and mocked him and said, ‘are they as expensive as all that’ and laughed at him and cried, holding up her bare hand –’ Look, Stanley, it has all been a dream.’ He was a fool to mind things like that, but they hurt him – they hurt like sin. ‘Funny I should have dreamed about Papa last night,’ thought Linda, brushing her cropped hair that stood up all over her head in little bronzy rings. ‘What was it I dreamed?’ No, she’d forgotten – ‘Something or other about a bird.’ But Papa was very plain – his lazy, ambling walk. And she laid down the brush and went over to

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the marble mantelpiece and leaned her arms along it, her chin in her hands, and looked at his photograph. In his photograph he showed severe and imposing – a high brow, a piercing eye, clean shaven except for long ‘piccadilly weepers’3 draping his bosom. He was taken in the fashion of that time, standing, one arm on the back of a tapestry chair, the other clenched upon a parchment roll. ‘Papa!’ said Linda. She smiled. ‘There you are, my dear,’ she breathed, and then she shook her head quickly and frowned, and went on with her dressing. Her Father had died the year that she married Burnell, the year of her sixteenth birthday. All her childhood had been passed in a long white house perched on a hill overlooking Wellington harbour – a house with a wild garden full of bushes and fruit-trees, long, thick grass and nasturtiums. Nasturtiums grew everywhere – there was no fighting them down. They even fell in a shower over the paling fence on to the road. Red, yellow, white, every possible colour; they lighted the garden like swarms of butterflies. The Fairfields were a large family of boys and girls; with their beautiful mother and their gay, fascinating father (for it was only in his photograph that he looked stern) they were quite a ‘show’ family and immensely admired. Mr. Fairfield managed a small insurance business that could not have been very profitable, yet they lived plentifully. He had a good voice; he liked to sing in public, he liked to dance and attend pic-nics – to put on his ‘bell topper’4 and walk out of Church if he disapproved of anything said in the sermon – and he had a passion for inventing highly impracticable things, like collapsible umbrellas or folding lamps. He had one saying with which he met all difficulties. ‘Depend upon it, it will all come right after the Maori war.’5 Linda, his second to youngest child, was his darling, his pet, his playfellow. She was a wild thing, always trembling on the verge of laughter, ready for anything and eager. When he put his arm round her and held her he felt her thrilling with life. He understood her so beautifully and gave her so much love for love that he became a kind of daily miracle to her and all her faith centred in him – People barely touched her; she was regarded as a cold, heartless little creature, but she seemed to have an unlimited passion for that violent sweet thing called life – just being alive and able to run and climb and swim in the sea and lie in the grass. In the evenings she and her Father would sit on the verandah – she on his knees – and ‘plan.’ ‘When I am grown up we shall travel everywhere – we shall see the whole world – won’t we, Papa?’ ‘We shall, my dear.’ ‘One of your inventions will have been a great success. Bring you in a good round million yearly.’ ‘We can manage on that.’

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‘But one day we shall be rich, and the next poor. One day we shall dine in a palace and the next we’ll sit in a forest and toast mushrooms on a hatpin . . . We shall have a little boat – we shall explore the interior of China on a raft – you will look sweet in one of those huge umbrella hats that Chinamen wear in pictures. We won’t leave a corner of anywhere unexplored – shall we?’ ‘We shall look under the beds and in all the cupboards and behind every curtain.’ ‘And we shan’t go as father and daughter,’ she tugged at his ‘piccadilly weepers’ and began kissing him. ‘We’ll just go as a couple of boys together – Papa.’ By the time Linda was fourteen, the big family had vanished; only she and Beryl, who was two years younger, were left. The girls had married; the boys had gone far away – Linda left off attending the Select Academy for Young Ladies presided over by Miss Clara Finetta Birch (From England), a lady whose black hair lay so flat on her head that everybody said it was only painted on, and she stayed at home to be a help to her mother. For three days she laid the table and took the mending basket on to the verandah in the afternoon, but after that she ‘went mad-dog again,’ as her father expressed it, and there was no holding her. ‘Oh, Mother, life is so fearfully short,’ said Linda. That summer Burnell appeared. Every evening a stout young man in a striped shirt, with fiery red hair, and a pair of immature mutton chop whiskers, passed their house, quite slowly, four times. Twice up the hill he went, and twice down he came. He walked with his hands behind his back, and each time he glanced once at the verandah where they sat – Who was he? None of them knew – but he became a great joke. ‘Here she blows,’ Mr. Fairfield would whisper. The young man came to be called the ‘Ginger Whale.’ Then he appeared at Church, in a pew facing theirs, very devout and serious. But he had that unfortunate complexion that goes with his colouring and every time he so much as glanced in Linda’s direction a crimson blush spread over his face to his ears. ‘Look out, my wench,’ said Mr. Fairfield. ‘Your clever Papa has solved the problem. That young fellow is after you.’ ‘Henry! What rubbish. How can you say such things,’ said his wife. ‘There are times,’ said Linda, ‘when I simply doubt your sanity, Papa.’ But Beryl loved the idea. The ‘ginger whale’ became ‘Linda’s beau’. ‘You know as well as I do that I am never going to marry,’ said Linda. ‘How can you be such a traitor, Papa –’ A social given by the Liberal Ladies’ Political League ripened matters a little. Linda and her Papa attended. She wore a green sprigged muslin with little capes on the shoulders that stood up like wings, and he wore a frock coat and a wired buttonhole as big as a

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soup plate. The Social began with a very ‘painful’ concert. ‘She wore a Wreath of Roses’ – ‘They played in the Beautiful Garden’ – ‘A Mother sat Watching’ – ‘Flee Like a Bird to the Fountain’ – sang the political ladies with forlorn and awful vigour – The gentlemen sang with far greater vigour and a kind of defiant cheerfulness which was almost terrifying. They looked very furious, too. Their cuffs shot over their hands, or their trousers were far too long . . . Comic recitations about flies on bald heads and engaged couples sitting on porch steps spread with glue were contributed by the chemist. Followed an extraordinary meal, called upon the hand printed programme Tea and Coffee, and consisting of ham-beef-or-tongue, tinned salmon oyster patties, sanwiches, col’ meat, jellies, huge cakes, fruit salads in wash hand bowls, trifles bristling with almonds, and large cups of tea, dark brown in colour, tasting faintly of rust. Helping Linda to a horrible-looking pink blanc-mange, which Mr. Fairfield said was made of strangled baby’s head, he whispered – ‘The ginger whale is here. I’ve just spotted him blushing at a sanwich. Look out, my lass. He’ll sandbag you with one of old Ma Warren’s rock cakes.’ Away went the plates – away went the table. Young Mr. Fantail, in evening clothes with brown button boots sat down at the piano, and crashed into the ‘Lancers.’ Diddle dee dum tee tum te tum Diddle dee um te tum te tum ––– Diddle dee tum tee diddle tee tum!

And half way through the ‘evening’ it actually came to pass – Smoothing his white cotton gloves, a beetroot was pale compared to him a pillar box was a tender pink. Burnell asked Linda for the pleasure, and before she realised what had happened his arm was round her waist and they were turning round and round to the air of ‘Three Blind Mice’ (arranged by Mr. Fantail même). He did not talk while he danced, but Linda liked that. She felt a ‘silly’ – When the dance was over they sat on a bench against the wall. Linda hummed the waltz tune and beat time with her glove – She felt dreadfully shy and she was terrified of her father’s merry eye – At last Burnell turned to her. ‘Did you ever hear the story of the shy young man who went to his first ball. He danced with a girl and then they sat on the stairs – and they could not think of a thing to say – And after he’d picked up everything she dropped from time to time – after the silence was simply unbearable he turned round and stammered “d-do you always w-wear fl f flannel next to the skin?” I feel rather like that chap,’ said Burnell.

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Then she did not hear them any more. What a glare there was in the room. She hated blinds pulled up to the top at any time – but in the morning, in the morning especially! She turned over to the wall and idly, with one finger, she traced a poppy on the wallpaper with a leaf and a stem and a fat bursting bud. In the quiet, under her tracing finger, the poppy seemed to come alive. She could feel the sticky, silky petals, the stem, hairy like a gooseberry skin, the rough leaf and the tight glazed bud. Things had a habit of coming alive in the quiet; she had often noticed it. Not only large, substantial things, like furniture, but curtains and the patterns of stuffs, and fringes of quilts and cushions. How often she had seen the tassel fringe of her quilt change into a funny procession of dancers, with priests attending . . . For there were some tassels that did not dance at all, but walked stately, bent forward as if praying or chanting . . . How often the medicine bottles had turned into a row of little men with brown top hats on; and often the wash stand jug sat in the basin like a fat bird in a round nest. ‘I dreamed about birds last night’ thought Linda. What was it? No, she’d forgotten . . . But the strangest part about this coming alive of things was what they did. They listened; they seemed to swell out with some mysterious important content and when they were full she felt that they smiled – Not for her (although she knew they ‘recognised’ her) their sly, meaning smile; They were members of a secret order and they smiled among themselves. Sometimes, when she had fallen asleep in the daytime, she woke and could not lift a finger, could not even turn her eyes to left or right . . . they were so strong; sometimes when she went out of a room and left it empty she knew as she clicked the door to that they were coming to life. And Ah, there were times, especially in the evenings when she was upstairs, perhaps, and everybody else was down when she could hardly tear herself away from ‘them’ – when she could not hurry, when she tried to hum a tune to show them she did not care, when she tried to say ever so carelessly –’ Bother that old thimble! Where ever have I put it!’ but she never never deceived them. They knew how frightened she was; ‘they’ saw how she turned her head away as she passed the mirror. For all their patience they wanted something of her. Half unconsciously she knew that if she gave herself up and was quiet – more than quiet, silent, motionless, something would happen . . . ‘It’s very very quiet now,’ thought Linda. She opened her eyes wide; she heard the stillness spinning its soft endless web. How lightly she breathed – She scarcely had to breathe at all . . . Yes, everything had come alive down to the minutest, tiniest particle and she did not feel her bed – She floated, held up in the air. Only she seemed to be listening with her wide open watchful eyes, waiting for someone to come who just did not come, watching for something to happen that just did not happen.

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In the kitchen at the long deal table under the two windows old Mrs. Fairfield was washing the breakfast dishes. The kitchen windows looked out on to a big grass patch that led down to the vegetable garden and the rhubarb beds – On one side the grass patch was bordered by the scullery and washhouse and over this long white washed ‘lean to’ there grew a big knotted vine. She had noticed yesterday that some tiny corkscrew tendrils had come right through some cracks in the scullery ceiling and all the windows of the ‘lean to’ had a thick frill of dancing green. ‘I am very fond of a grape vine,’ decided Mrs. Fairfield, ‘but I do not think that the grapes will ripen here. It takes Australian sun . . .’ and she suddenly remembered how when Beryl was a baby she had been picking some white grapes from the vine on the back verandah of their Tasmanian house and she had been stung on the leg by a huge red ant. She saw Beryl in a little plaid dress with red ribbon ‘tie ups’ on the shoulders screaming so dreadfully that half the street had rushed in . . . and the child’s leg had swelled to an enormous size. ‘T-t-t-t’ Mrs. Fairfield caught her breath, remembering. ‘Poor child – how terrifying it was!’ and she set her lips tight in a way she had and went over to the stove for some more hot water – The water frothed up in the big soapy bowl with pink and blue bubbles on top of the foam. Old Mrs. Fairfield’s arms were bare to the elbow and stained a bright pink. She wore a grey foulard dress patterned with large purple pansies, a white linen apron and a high cap shaped like a jelly mould of white tulle. At her throat there was a silver crescent moon with five little owls seated on it and round her neck she wore a watch guard made of black beads. It was very hard to believe that they had only arrived yesterday and that she had not been in the kitchen for years – she was so much a part of it, putting away the clean crocks with so sure and precise a touch, moving, leisurely and ample from the stove to the dresser, looking into the pantry and the larder as though there were not an unfamiliar corner. When she had finished tidying everything in the kitchen had become part of a series of patterns. She stood in the middle of the room, wiping her hands on a check towel and looking about her, a tiny smile beamed on her lips; she thought it looked very nice, very satisfactory. If only servant girls could be taught to understand that it did not only matter how you put a thing away it mattered just as much where you put it – or was it the other way about – – –. But at any rate they never would understand; she had never been able to train them . . . ‘Mother, Mother, are you in the kitchen?’ called Beryl. ‘Yes, dear, Do you want me?’ ‘No, I’m coming,’ and Beryl ran in, very flushed, dragging with her two big pictures. ‘Mother whatever can I do with these hideous awful Chinese paintings that Chung Wah gave Stanley when he went bankrupt. It’s absurd to say they were valuable because they

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were hanging in Chung Wah’s fruit shop for months before. I can’t understand why Stanley doesn’t want them to be thrown away – I’m sure he thinks they’re just as hideous as we do, but it’s because of the frames –’ she said, spitefully. ‘I suppose he thinks the frames might fetch something one day. Ugh! What a weight they are.’ ‘Why don’t you hang them in the passage’ suggested Mrs. Fairfield. ‘They would not be much seen there.’ ‘I can’t. There isn’t room. I’ve hung all the photographs of his office before and after rebuilding there, and the signed photographs of his business friends and that awful enlargement of Isabel lying on a mat in her singlet. There isn’t an inch of room left there.’ Her angry glance flew over the placid kitchen. ‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll hang them here – I’ll say they got a little damp in the moving and so I put them up here in the warm for the time being.’ She dragged forward a chair, jumped up on it, took a hammer and a nail out of her deep apron pocket and banged away – ‘There! That’s high enough. Hand me up the picture, Mother.’ ‘One moment, child –’ she was wiping the carved ebony frame – ‘Oh, Mother, really you need not dust them. It would take years to dust all those winding little holes’ and she frowned at the top of her Mother’s head and bit her lip with impatience. Mother’s deliberate way of doing things was simply maddening. It was old age, she supposed, loftily. At last the two pictures were hung, side by side. She jumped off the chair, stowing back the little hammer. ‘They don’t look so bad there, do they’ said she – ‘And at any rate nobody need ever see them except Pat and the servant girl – Have I got a spider’s web on my face, Mother? I’ve been poking my head into that cupboard under the stairs, and now something keeps tickling me.’ But before Mrs. Fairfield had time to look Beryl had turned away again. ‘Is that clock right? Is it really as early as that? Good Heavens it seems years since breakfast?’ ‘That reminds me,’ said Mrs. Fairfield. ‘I must go upstairs and fetch down Linda’s tray’ . . . ‘There!’ cried Beryl. ‘Isn’t that like the servant girl. Isn’t that exactly like her. I told her distinctly to tell you that I was too busy to take it up and would you please instead. I never dreamed she hadn’t told you!’ Someone tapped on the window. They turned away from the pictures. Linda was there, nodding and smiling. They heard the latch of the scullery door lift and she came in. She had no hat on; her hair stood up on her head in curling rings and she was all wrapped up in an old Kashmir shawl. ‘Please can I have something to eat,’ said she. ‘Linnet dear I am so frightfully sorry. It’s my fault,’ cried Beryl. ‘But I wasn’t hungry. I would have screamed if I had been,’ said Linda. ‘Mummy, darling, make me a little pot of tea in the brown china teapot.’ She went into the pantry and began lifting the lids off a row of tins. ‘What grandeur, my dears,’ she cried, coming back with a

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brown scone and a slice of gingerbread – ‘a pantry and a larder.’ ‘Oh, but you haven’t seen the outhouses yet,’ said Beryl. ‘There is a stable and a huge barn of a place that Pat calls the feedroom and a woodshed and a tool house – all built round a square courtyard that has big white gates to it! Awfully grand!’ ‘This is the first time I’ve even seen the kitchen,’ said Linda. ‘Mother has been here. Everything is in pairs.’ ‘Sit down and drink your tea,’ said Mrs. Fairfield, spreading a clean table napkin over a corner of the table. ‘And Beryl, have a cup with her. I’ll watch you both while I’m peeling the potatoes for dinner. I don’t know what has happened to the servant girl.’ ‘I saw her on my way downstairs, Mummy. She’s lying practically at full length on the bathroom floor laying linoleum. And she was hammering it so frightfully hard that I am sure the pattern will come through on to the dining-room ceiling. I told her not to run any more tacks than she could help into herself but I am afraid that she will be studded for life all the same. Have half my piece of gingerbread, Beryl. Beryl, do you like the house now that we are here?’ ‘Oh, yes, I like the house immensely and the garden is simply beautiful, but it feels very far away from anything to me. I can’t imagine people coming out from town to see us in that dreadful rattling ’bus and I am sure there isn’t anybody here who will come and call . . . Of course it doesn’t matter to you particularly because you never liked living in town.’ ‘But we’ve got the buggy,’ said Linda. ‘Pat can drive you into town whenever you like. And after all it’s only six miles away.’ That was a consolation, certainly, but there was something unspoken at the back of Beryl’s mind, something she did not even put into words for herself. ‘Oh, well at any rate it won’t kill us,’ she said, dryly, putting down her cup and standing up and stretching. ‘I am going to hang curtains.’ And she ran away singing: ‘How many thousand birds I see, That sing aloft in every tree.’ But when she reached the dining room she stopped singing. Her face changed – hardened, became gloomy and sullen. ‘One may as well rot here as anywhere else,’ she said savagely digging the stiff brass safety pins into the red serge curtains . . . The two left in the kitchen were quiet for a little. Linda leaned her cheek in her fingers and watched her Mother. She thought her Mother looked wonderfully beautiful standing with her back to the leafy window – There was something comfortable in the sight of her Mother that Linda felt she could never do without. She knew everything about her – just what she kept in her pocket and the sweet smell of her flesh and the soft feel of her cheeks and her arms and shoulders, still softer – the way the breath rose and fell in her bosom and the way her hair curled silver round her forehead, lighter at her neck and bright brown still in the big coil under the tulle cap. Exquisite were

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her Mother’s hands and the colour of the two rings she wore seemed to melt into her warm white skin – her wedding ring and a large old fashioned ring with a dark red stone in it that had belonged to Linda’s father . . . And she was always so fresh so delicious. ‘Mother, you smell of cold water,’ she had said – The old woman could bear nothing next to her skin but fine linen, and she bathed in cold water summer and winter – even when she had to pour a kettle of boiling water over the frozen tap. ‘Isn’t there anything for me to do, Mother,’ she asked. ‘No, darling. Run and see what the garden is like. I wish you would give an eye to the children but that I know you will not do.’ ‘Of course I will, but you know Isabel is much more grown up than any of us.’ ‘Yes, but Kezia is not’ said Mrs. Fairfield. ‘Oh, Kezia’s been tossed by a wild bull hours ago’ said Linda, winding herself up in her shawl again. But no, Kezia had seen a bull through a hole in a notch of wood in the high paling fence that separated the tennis lawn from the paddock, but she had not liked the bull frightfully and so she had walked away back through the orchard up the grassy slope, along the path by the lace bark tree and so into the spread tangled garden. She did not believe that she would ever not get lost in this garden. Twice she had found her way to the big iron gates they had driven through last night and she had begun to walk up the drive that led to the house, but there were so many little paths on either side – – on one side they all led into a tangle of tall dark trees and strange bushes with flat velvety leaves and feathery cream flowers that buzzed with flies when you shook them – this was a frightening side and no garden at all. The little paths were wet and clayey with tree roots spanned across them, ‘like big fowls’ feet’, thought Kezia. But on the other side of the drive there was a high box border and the paths had box edgings and all of them led into a deeper and deeper tangle of flowers. It was summer. The camellia trees were in flower, white and crimson and pink and white striped with flashing leaves–you could not see a leaf on the syringa bushes for the white clusters. All kinds of roses – gentlemen’s button hole roses, little white ones but far too full of insects to put under anybody’s nose, pink monthly roses with a ring of fallen petals round the bushes, cabbage roses on thick fat stalks, moss roses, always in bud, pink smooth beauties opening curl on curl, red ones so dark that they seemed to turn black as they fell and a certain exquisite cream kind with a slender red stem and bright red leaves. Kezia knew the name of that kind: it was her grandmother’s favourite. There were clumps of fairy bells and cherry pie and all kinds of geraniums and there were little trees of verbena and bluish lavender bushes and a bed of pelagoniums, with velvet eyes and leaves like moth’s wings. There was a bed of nothing but mignonette and

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another of nothing but pansies – borders of double and single daisies, all kinds of little tufty plants she never ???? The red hot pokers were taller than she; the Japanese sunflowers grew in a tiny jungle. She sat down on one of the box borders. By pressing hard at first it made a very pleasant springy seat but how dusty it was inside – She bent down to look and sneezed and rubbed her nose. And then she found herself again at the top of the rolling grassy slope that led down to the orchard and beyond the orchard to an avenue of pine trees with wooden seats between bordering one side of the tennis court . . . She looked at the slope a moment; then she lay down on her back gave a tiny squeak and rolled over and over into the thick flowery orchard grass. As she lay still waiting for things to stop spinning round she decided to go up to the house and ask the servant girl for an empty match-box. She wanted to make a surprise for the grandmother. First she would put a leaf inside with a big violet lying on it – then she would put a very small little white picotee perhaps, on each side of the violet and then she would sprinkle some lavender on the top, but not to cover their heads. She often made these surprises for the grandmother and they were always most successful. ‘Do you want a match, my Granny?’ ‘Why, yes, child. I believe a match is the very thing I am looking for –’ The Grandmother slowly opened the box and came upon the picture inside. ‘Good gracious child! how you astonished me!’ ‘Did I – did I really astonish you?’ Kezia threw up her arms with joy. ‘I can make her one every day here’ she thought, scrambling up the grassy slope on her slippery shoes. But on her way to the house she came to the island that lay in the middle of the drive, dividing the drive into two arms that met in front of the house. The island was made of grass banked up high. Nothing grew on the green top at all except one huge round plant, with thick grey-green thorny leaves and out of the middle there sprang up a tall stout stem. Some of the leaves of this plant were so old that they curved up in the air no longer, they turned back – they were split and broken – some of them lay flat and withered on the ground – but the fresh leaves curved up into the air with their spiked edges; some of them looked as though they had been painted with broad bands of yellow. Whatever could it be? She had never seen anything like it before – She stood and stared. And then she saw her mother coming down the path with a red carnation in her hand – ‘Mother, what is it?’ asked Kezia. Linda looked up at the fat swelling plant with its cruel leaves its towering fleshy stem. High above them, as though becalmed in the air, and yet holding so fast to the earth it grew from it might have had claws and not roots. The curving leaves seemed to be hiding something; the big blind stem cut into the air as if no wind could ever shake it. ‘That is an aloe, Kezia,’ said Linda. ‘Does it ever have any flowers’ ‘Yes my child’

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said her Mother and she smiled down at Kezia, half shutting her eyes, ‘once every hundred years.’ Chapter III On his way home from the office Stanley Burnell stopped the buggy at the ‘Bodega’, got out and bought a large bottle of oysters. At the Chinaman’s shop next door he bought a pine apple in the pink of condition, and noticing a basket of fresh black cherries he told John to put him up a pound of those as well. The oysters and pineapple he stowed away in the box under the front seat – but the cherries he kept in his hand. Pat, the handy man, leapt off the box and tucked him up again in a brown rug. ‘Lift yer feet, Mr. Burnell while I give her a fold under,’ said he. ‘Right, right – first rate!’ said Stanley – ‘you can make straight for home now.’ ‘I believe this man is a first rate chap,’ thought he, as Pat gave the grey mare a touch and the buggy sprang forward. He liked the look of him sitting up there in his neat dark brown coat and brown bowler – he liked the way Pat had tucked him in and he liked his eyes – There was nothing servile about him, – and if there was one thing he hated more than another in a servant it was servility – and he looked as though he were pleased with his job – happy and contented. The grey mare went very well. Burnell was impatient to be out of the town. He wanted to be home. Ah, it was splendid to live in the country – to get right out of this hole of a town once the office was closed, and this long drive in the fresh warm air knowing all the time that his own home was at the other end with its garden and paddocks, its three tip top cows and enough fowls and ducks to keep them in eggs and poultry, was splendid, too. As they left the town finally and bowled away up the quiet road his heart beat hard for joy – He rooted in the bag and began to eat the cherries, three or four at a time chucking the stones over the side of the buggy. They were delicious, so plump and cold without a spot or a bruise on them. Look at these two now – black one side and white the other – perfect – a perfect little pair of siamese twins – and he stuck them in his buttonhole – By Jove, he wouldn’t mind giving that chap up there a handful, but no, better not! Better wait until he had been with him a bit longer. He began to plan what he would do with his Saturday afternoons and Sundays. He wouldn’t go to the Club for lunch on Saturday. No, cut away from the office as soon as possible and get them to give him a couple of slices of cold meat and half a lettuce when he got home. And then he’d get a few chaps out from town to play tennis in the afternoons. Not too many – three at most. Beryl was a good player too. He stretched out his right arm and slowly bent it, feeling the muscles. A bath, a good rub down, a cigar on the verandah after dinner. On Sunday morning they would go to Church – children and all – which reminded him

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that he must hire a pew, in the sun if possible – and well forward so as to be out of the draught from the door – In fancy he heard himself intoning, extremely well: ‘When-thou-didst-overcome the sharpness of death Thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to All Believers’6 and he saw the neat brass edged card on the corner of the pew ‘Mr. Stanley Burnell and Family.’ The rest of the day he’d loaf about with Linda. Now she was on his arm; they were walking about the garden together and he was explaining to her at length what he intended doing at the office the week following. He heard her saying: ‘My dear, I think that is most wise.’ Talking things out with Linda was a wonderful help, even though they were apt to drift away from the point . . . Hang it all! They weren’t getting along very fast. Pat had put the brake on again. ‘He’s a bit too ready with that brake! Ugh! What a brute of a thing it is – I can feel it in the pit of my stomach.’ A sort of panic overtook Burnell whenever he approached near home. Before he was well inside the gate he would shout to anyone in sight – ‘is everything all right?’ and then he did not believe it was until he heard Linda cry, ‘Hullo, you old boy!’ That was the worst, of living in the country. It took the deuce of a long time to get back. But now they weren’t far off. They were on top of the last hill – it was a gentle slope all the way now and not more than ½ a mile. Pat kept up a constant trailing of the whip across the mare’s back and he coaxed her – ‘goop now, goop now!’ It wanted a few moments to sunset, everything stood motionless, bathed in bright metallic light and from the paddocks on either side there streamed the warm milky smell of ripe hay. The iron gates were open. They dashed through and up the drive and round the island stopping at the exact middle of the verandah. ‘Did she satisfy yer, sir,’ said Pat, getting off the box and grinning at his master. ‘Very well indeed, Pat,’ said Stanley. Linda came out of the glass door – out of the shadowy hall – her voice rang in the quiet. ‘Hullo, you’re home again.’ At the sound of it his happiness beat up so hard and strong that he could hardly stop himself dashing up the steps and catching her in his arms – ‘Yes home again. Is everything all right.’ ‘Perfect’ said she. Pat began to lead the mare round to the side gate that gave on to the courtyard. ‘Here half a moment’ said Burnell. ‘Hand me those two parcels – will you.’ And he said to Linda ‘I’ve brought you back a bottle of oysters and a pine apple’ as though he had brought her back all the harvest of the earth. They went into the hall; Linda carried the oysters under one arm and the pineapple under the other – Burnell shut the glass door threw his hat on the hall stand and put his arms round her, straining her to him kissing the top of her head, her ears her lips – her eyes – ‘Oh dear Oh dear’ she said. ‘Wait a minute let me put down these silly things’ and she put down the bottle of

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oysters and the pine apple on a little carved chair – ‘What have you got in your buttonhole, cherries?’ – and she took them out and hung them over his ear. ‘No don’t do that, darling. They’re for you.’ So she took them off his ear and ran them through her brooch pin – ‘You don’t mind if I don’t eat them now. Do you? They’ll spoil my appetite for dinner – Come and see your children. They’re having tea.’ The lamp was lighted on the nursery table: Mrs. Fairfield was cutting and spreading bread and butter and the three little girls sat up to table wearing large bibs embroidered with their names. They wiped their mouths as their Father came in ready to be kissed. There was jam on the table too a plate of home made knobbly buns and cocoa steaming in a Dewar’s Whisky Advertisement jug – a big toby jug, half brown half cream with a picture of a man on it smoking a long clay pipe. The windows were wide open. There was a jar of wild flowers on the mantelpiece and the lamp made a big soft bubble of light on the ceiling. ‘You seem pretty snug Mother’ said Burnell, looking round and blinking at the light [and smiling at the] little girls. They sat Isabel and Lottie on either side of the table, Kezia at the bottom – the place at the top was empty – ‘That’s where my boy ought to sit’ thought Stanley – He tightened his arm round Linda’s shoulder. By God! he was a perfect fool to feel as happy as this – – ‘We are Stanley. We are very snug,’ said Mrs. Fairfield, cutting Kezia’s bread and jam into fingers. ‘Like it better than town eh children’ said Burnell. ‘Oh yes, Daddy,’ said the three little girls, and Isabel added as an afterthought, ‘Thank you very much indeed, Father dear.’ ‘Come upstairs and have a wash,’ said Linda. ‘I’ll bring your slippers.’ But the stairs were too narrow for them to go up arm in arm. It was quite dark in their room – He heard her ring tapping the marble as she felt along the mantelpiece for matches. ‘I’ve got some darling. I’ll light the candles.’ But, instead, he came up behind her and caught her put his arms round her and pressed her head into his shoulder. ‘I’m so confoundedly happy’ he said. ‘Are you?’ She turned and put her two hands flat on his breast and looked up at him – ‘I don’t know what’s come over me’ he protested. It was quite dark outside now and heavy dew was falling. When she shut the window the dew wet her finger tips. Far away a dog barked. ‘I believe there’s going to be a moon’ said she. At the words and with the wet cold dew touching her lips and cheeks she felt as though the moon had risen – that she was being bathed in cold light – she shivered she came away from the window and sat down on the box ottoman beside Stanley – In the dining room, by the flickering glow of a wood fire Beryl sat on a hassock playing the guitar. She had bathed and changed all her clothes. Now she wore a white muslin dress with big black spots on it and in her hair she had pinned a black rose –

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She played and sang half to herself – for she was watching herself playing and singing she saw the fire light on her shoes and skirt on the ruddy belly of the guitar on her white fingers. ‘If I were outside the window and looked in and saw myself I really would be rather struck’ she thought – Still more softly she played the accompaniment not singing – ‘The first time I ever saw you little girl you had no idea that you weren’t alone! You were sitting with your little feet up on a hassock playing the guitar – I can never forget . . .’ and she flung back her head at the imaginary speaker and began to sing again Even the moon is aweary –

But there came a loud knock at the door. The servant girl popped in her flushed face. ‘If you please Miss – kin I come and lay the dinner’ – ‘Certainly Alice’ said Beryl, in a voice of ice. She put the guitar in a corner – Alice lunged in with a heavy black iron tray. ‘Well, I ’ave had a job with that oving,’ said she. ‘I can’t get nothing to brown.’ ‘Really’ said Beryl. But no, she could not bear that fool of a girl – She went into the dark drawing room and began walking up and down – She was restless, restless restless. There was a mirror over the mantelpiece she leaned her arms along and looked at her pale shadow in it – ‘I look as though I have been drowned’ – said she – Chapter 4 Good Morning Mrs. Jones.’ ‘Oh, good morning Mrs. Smith. I’m so glad to see you. Have you brought your children?’ ‘Yes, I’ve brought both my twins. I have had another baby since I saw you last but she came so suddenly that I haven’t had time to make her any new clothes yet and so I left her at home. How’s your husband.’ ‘Oh, he’s very [well] thank you. At least he had an awful sore throat but Queen Victoria (she’s my grandmother you know) sent him a case of pineapples and they cured it immediately – Is that your new servant.’ ‘Yes, her name’s Gwen. I’ve only had her two days – Oh, Gwen, this is my friend, Mrs. Smith.’ ‘Good morning Mrs. Smith. Dinner won’t not be ready for about ten minutes.’ ‘I don’t think you ought to introduce me to the servant, I think I ought to just begin talking to her.’ ‘Well she isn’t really quite a servant. She’s more of a lady help than a servant and you do introduce Lady Helps I know because Mrs. Samuel Josephs had one.’ ‘Oh, well,

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it doesn’t matter’ said the new servant airily, beating up a chocolate custard with half a broken clothes peg. The dinner was baking beautifully on a concrete step – She began to lay the cloth on a broad pink garden seat. In front of each person she put 2 geranium leaf plates, a pine needle fork and a twig knife. There were three daisy heads on a laurel leaf for poached eggs, some slices of fuchsia petals for cold meat, some beautiful little rissoles made of earth and water and dandelion seeds, and the chocolate custard. Which she decided to serve in the pawa shell she had cooked it in – ‘You needn’t trouble about my children,’ said Mrs. Smith graciously – ‘If you’ll just take this bottil and fill it at the tap – I mean in the dairy.’ ‘Oh all right’ said Gwen and she whispered to Mrs. Jones ‘Shall I go an ask Alice for a little bit of real milk?’ But some one called from the front of the house ‘children children’ and the luncheon party melted away leaving the charming table leaving the rissoles and the eggs on the stove – to the little ants and to an old snail who pushed his quivering horns over the edge of the pink garden seat and began slowly to nibble a geranium plate. ‘Come round to the front door children. Rags and Pip have come.’ The Trout Boys were cousins to the Burnells. They lived about a mile away in a house called Monkey Tree Cottage. Pip was tall for his age with lank black hair and a white face but Rags was very small, and so thin that when he was undressed his shoulder blades stuck out like two little wings. They had a mongrel dog too with pale blue eyes and a long tail that turned up at the end who followed them everywhere; he was called Snooker. They were always combing and brushing Snooker and treating him with various extraordinary mixtures concocted by Pip and kept secretly by him in a broken jug to be diluted in a kerosene tin of hot water and applied to the shivering [creature] – but Snooker was always full of fleas and he stank abominably. He would see Pip mix some carbolic tooth powder and a bit of sulphur powdered fine and perhaps a pinch of starch to stiffen up Snooker’s coat but he knew that was not all. There was something else added that Pip wouldn’t tell him of covered with an old kettle lid. Rags privately thought it was gunpowder. Even Rags was not allowed to share the secret of these mixtures. And he was never never on any account permitted to help or to look on because of the danger – ‘Why, if a spot of this flew up’ Pip would say, stirring the mixture with an iron spoon ‘you’d be blinded to death and there’s always the chance – just the chance of it exploding – if you whack it hard enough. Two spoon fulls of this will be enough in a kerosene tin of water to kill thousands of fleas.’ Nevertheless, Snooker spent all his leisure biting and nudging himself, and he stank abominably – ‘It’s because he’s such a grand fighting dog’ Pip would say, ‘All fighting dogs smell –’ The Trout boys had often gone into town and spent the day with the Burnells but

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now that they had become neighbours and lived in this big house and bonzer garden they were inclined to be very friendly. Besides both of them liked playing with girls Pip because he could fox them so and because Lottie Burnell was so easily frightened and Rags for a shameful reason because he adored dolls. The way he would look at a doll as it lay asleep, speaking in a whisper and smiling timidly and the great treat it was to him to stretch out his arms and be given a doll to hold! ‘Curl your arms around her. Don’t keep them stiff out like that. You’ll drop her,’ Isabel would command sternly. Now they were standing on the verandah and holding back Snooker who wanted to go into the house but wasn’t allowed to because Aunt Linda hated decent dogs. ‘We came over on the bus with Mum,’ they said ‘and we’re going to spend the afternoon and stay to tea. We brought over a batch of our gingerbread for Aunt Linda. Our Minnie made it. It’s all over nuts – much more than yours ever has.’ ‘I shelled the almonds’ said Pip. ‘I just stuck my hand in a saucepan of boiling water and grabbed them out and gave them a kind of pinch and the nuts flew out of the shells some of them as high as the ceiling. Didn’t they, Rags?’ ‘When they make cakes at our place,’ said Pip ‘we always stay in the kitchen Rags and me and I get the bowl and he gets the spoon and the egg beater – Sponge cake’s best – it’s all frothy stuff then.’ He ran down the verandah steps on to the lawn, planted his hands on the grass bent forward and just did not stand on his head – ‘Pooh!’ he said ‘that lawn’s all bumpy, you have to have a flat place for standing on your head – I can walk all round the monkey tree on my head at our place – nearly, can’t I, Rags?’ ‘Nearly!’ said Rags faintly. ‘Stand on your head on the verandah. That’s quite flat,’ said Lottie. ‘No, smarty,’ said Pip, ‘you have to do it on something soft see? Because if you give a jerk – just a very little jerk and fall over like that bump yourself something in your neck goes click and it breaks right off. Dad told me . . .’ ‘Oh do let’s have a game,’ said Kezia – ‘Do let’s play something or other –’ ‘Very well’ said Isabel quickly ‘we’ll play hospitals. I’ll be the nurse and Pip can be the doctor and you and Rags and Lottie can be the sick people’ – But No, Lottie didn’t not want to play that because last time Pip squirted something down her throat and it hurt awfully. ‘Pooh!’ said Pip ‘it was only the juice out of a bit of orange peel –’ ‘Well, let’s play ladies’ said Isabel ‘and Pip can be my husband and you can be my three dear little children – Rags can be the baby –’ ‘I hate playing ladies’ said Kezia, ‘because you always make us go to church hand in hand and come home again an go to bed’ – Suddenly Pip took a filthy handkerchief out of his pocket – ‘Snooker, here sir’ he called, but Snooker as usual, began to slink away with his long bent tail between his legs. Pip leapt on top of him – and held him by his knees – ‘Keep his head firm Rags’ he said as he

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tied the handkerchief round Snooker’s head with a big funny sticking up knot at the top. ‘What ever is that for’ – asked Lottie. ‘It’s to train his ears to grow more close to his head – see’ said Pip. ‘All fighting dogs have ears that lie kind of back and they prick up – But Snooker’s got rotten ears they’re too soft.’ ‘I know’ said Kezia. ‘They’re always turning inside out I hate that.’ ‘Oh it isn’t that’ said Pip ‘but I’m training his ears to look a bit more fierce see’ – Snooker lay down and made one feeble effort with his paw to get the handkerchief off but finding he could not he trailed after the children with his head bound up in the dirty rag – shivering with misery. Pat came swinging by. In his hand he held a little tomahawk that winked in the sun. ‘Come with me now’ he said to the children ‘and I’ll show you how the Kings of Ireland chop off the head of a duck.’ They held back – they didn’t believe him it was one of his jokes, and besides the Trout boys had never seen Pat before –‘Come on now’ he coaxed, smiling and holding out his hand to Kezia. ‘A real duck’s head’ she said. ‘One from ours in the paddock where the fowls and ducks are’ – ‘It is’ said Pat. She put her hand in his hard dry one, and he stuck the tomahawk in his belt and held out the other to Rags – He loved little children. ‘I’d better keep hold of Snooker’s head, if there’s going to be any blood about’ said Pip – trying not to show his excitement ‘because the sight of blood makes him awfully wild sometimes’ – He ran ahead dragging Snooker by the knot in the handkerchief. ‘Do you think we ought to’ whispered Isabel to Lottie. ‘Because we haven’t asked Grandma or anybody have we?’ ‘But Pat’s looking after us,’ said Lottie. At the bottom of the orchard a gate was set in the paling fence. On the other side there was a steep bank leading down to a bridge that spanned the creek and once up the bank on the other side you were on the fringe of the paddocks. A little disused stable in the first paddock had been turned into a fowl house. All about it there spread wire netting chicken runs new made by Pat. The fowls strayed far away across the paddock down to a little dumping ground in a hollow on the other side but the ducks kept close to the part of the creek that flowed under the bridge and ran hard by the fowl house – Tall bushes overhung the stream with red leaves and dazzling yellow flowers and clusters of red and white berries, and a little further on there were cresses and a water plant with a flower like a yellow foxglove. At some places the stream was wide and shallow enough to cross by stepping stones but at other places it tumbled suddenly into a deep rocky pool like a little lake with foam at the edge and big quivering bubbles. It was in these pools that the big white ducks loved to swim and guzzle along the weedy banks. Up and down they swam, preening their dazzling breasts and other ducks with yellow bills and yellow feet swam upside down below them in the clear still

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water. ‘There they are’ said Pat. ‘There’s the little Irish Navy, and look at the old Admiral there with the green neck and the grand little flagstaff on his tail.’ He pulled a handful of grain out of his pocket and began to walk towards the fowl house lazily, his broad straw hat with the broken crown pulled off his eyes. ‘Lid-lid lid lid-lid lid’ he shouted – ‘Qua! Qua Qua!’ answered the ducks, making for land and flopping and scrambling up the bank – They streamed after him in a long waddling line – He coaxed them pretending to throw the grain shaking it in his hands and calling to them until they swept round him close round him quacking and pushing against each other in a white ring – From far away the fowls heard the clamour and they too came across the paddock, their heads crooked forward, their wings spread, turning in their feet in the silly way fowls run and scolding as they came. Then Pat scattered the grain and the greedy ducks began to gobble – Quickly he bent forward, seized two, tucked them quacking and struggling one under each arm and strode across to the children. Their darting heads, their flat beaks and round eyes frightened the children – and they drew back all except Pip. ‘Come on sillies’ he cried, ‘They can’t hurt, they haven’t got any teeth have they Pat – they’ve only got those 2 little holes in their beaks to breathe through.’ ‘Will you hold one while I finish with the other’ asked Pat. Pip let go of Snooker – ‘Won’t I! Won’t I! Give us one – I’ll hold him. I’ll not let him go. I don’t care how much he kicks – give us give us!’ He nearly sobbed with delight when Pat put the white lump in his arms – There was an old stump beside the door of the fowlshed – Pat carried over the other duck, grabbed it up in one hand, whipped out his little tomahawk – lay the duck flat on the stump and suddenly down came the tomahawk and the duck’s head flew off the stump – up and up the blood spurted over the white feathers, over his hand – When the children saw it they were frightened no more – they crowded round him [and] began to scream – even Isabel leaped about and called out ‘The blood the blood’ – Pip forgot all about his duck – He simply threw it away from him – and shouted ‘I saw it, I saw it’ and jumped round the wood block – Rags with cheeks as white as paper ran up to the little head and put out a finger as if he meant to touch it then drew back again and again put out a finger. He was shivering all over. Even Lottie frightened Lottie began to laugh and point to the duck and shout ‘Look Kezia look look look’ – ‘Watch it’ shouted Pat and he put down the white body and it began to waddle – with only a long spurt of blood where the head had been – it began to pad along dreadfully quiet towards the steep ledge that led to the stream – It was the crowning wonder. ‘Do you see that – do you see it?’ yelled Pip and he ran among the little girls pulling at their pinafores – ‘It’s like an engine – it’s like a

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funny little darling engine –’ squealed Isabel – But Kezia suddenly rushed at Pat and flung her arms round his legs and butted her head as hard as she could against his knees; ‘Put head back put head back’ she screamed – When he stooped to move her she would not let go or take her head away – She held as hard as ever she could and sobbed ‘head back head back’ until it sounded like a loud, strange hiccough. ‘It’s stopped it’s tumbled over it’s dead’ – said Pip. Pat dragged Kezia up into his arms. Her sunbonnet had fallen back but she would not let him look at her face. No she pressed her face into a bone in his shoulder and put her arms round his neck – The children stopped squealing as suddenly as they had begun – they stood round the dead duck. Rags was not frightened of the head any more. He knelt down and stroked it with his finger and said ‘I don’t think perhaps the head is quite dead yet. It’s warm Pip. Would it keep alive if I gave it something to drink –’ But Pip got very cross and said – ‘Bah! you baby –’ He whistled to Snooker and went off – and when Isabel went up to Lottie, Lottie snatched away. ‘What are you always touching me for Is a bel.’ ‘There now’ said Pat to Kezia ‘There’s the grand little girl’ – She put up her hands and touched his ear. She felt something – Slowly she raised her quivering face and looked – Pat wore little round gold earrings. How very funny – She never knew men wore ear rings. She was very much surprised! She quite forgot about the duck. ‘Do they come off and on,’ she asked huskily? Up at the house, in the warm, tidy kitchen Alice the servant girl had begun to get the afternoon tea ready – She was dressed. She had on a black cloth dress that smelt under the arms, a white apron so stiff that it rustled like paper to her every breath and movement – and a white muslin bow pinned on top of her head by 2 large pins – and her comfortable black felt slippers were changed for a pair of black leather ones that pinched the corn on her little toe ‘Somethink dreadful.’ It was warm in the kitchen – A big blow fly buzzed round and round in a circle bumping against the ceiling – a curl of white steam came out of the spout of the black kettle and the lid kept up a rattling jig as the water bubbled – The kitchen clock ticked in the warm air slow and deliberate like the click of an old woman’s knitting needles and sometimes, for no reason at all, for there wasn’t any breeze outside the heavy venetians swung out and back, tapping against the windows. Alice was making water cress sanwitches. She had a plate of butter on the table before her and a big loaf called a ‘barracouta’ and the cresses tumbled together in the white cloth she had dried them in – But propped against the butter dish there was a dirty greasy little book – half unstitched with curled edges – And while she mashed some

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butter soft for spreading she read – ‘To dream of four black beetles dragging a hearse is bad. Signifies death of one you hold near or dear either father husband brother son or intended. If the beetles crawl backwards as you watch them it means death by fire or from great height, such as flight of stairs, scaffolding, etc. Spiders. To dream of spiders creeping over you is good. Signifies large sum of money in the near future. Should party be in family way an easy confinement may be expected but care should be taken in sixth month to avoid eating of probable present of shell fish . . .’ ‘How Many Thousand Birds I see’. Oh Life, there was Miss Beryl – Alice dropped the knife and stuffed her Dream Book under the butter dish but she hadn’t time to hide it quite for Beryl ran into the kitchen and up to the table and the first thing her eye lighted on – although she didn’t say anything were the grey edges sticking out from the plate. Alice saw Miss Beryl’s scornful meaning little smile and the way she raised her eyebrows and screwed up her eyes as though she couldn’t quite make out what that was under the plate – She decided to answer if Miss Beryl should ask her what it was – ‘Nothing as belongs to you Miss’ ‘no business of yours Miss’ but she knew Miss Beryl would not ask her –. Alice was a mild creature in reality but she always had the most marvellous retorts ready for the questions she knew would never be put to her – The composing of them and the turning of them over and over in her brain comforted her just as much as if she’d really expressed them and kept her self respect alive in places where she had been that chivvied she’d been afraid to go to bed at night with a box of matches on the chair by her in case she bit the tops off in her sleep – as you might say. ‘Oh Alice,’ said Miss Beryl ‘there’s one extra to tea, so heat a plate of yesterday’s scones please and put on the new Victoria sanwich as well as the coffee cake. And don’t forget to put little doyleys under the plates will you – You did yesterday again you know and the tea looked so ugly and common. And Alice please don’t put that dreadful old pink and green cosy on the afternoon teapot again. That is only for the mornings and really I think it had better be kept for kitchen use – it’s so shabby and quite smelly – Put on the Chinese one out of the drawer in the dining room sideboard – You quite understand – don’t you. We’ll have tea as soon as it is ready –’ Miss Beryl turned away – ‘That sing aloft on every tree’ she sang as she left the kitchen very pleased with her firm handling of Alice. Oh, Alice was wild! She wasn’t one to mind being told, but there was something in the way Miss Beryl had of speaking to her that she couldn’t stand. It made her curl up inside as you might say and she fair trembled. But what Alice really hated Miss Beryl for was – she made her feel low: she talked to Alice in a special voice as though she wasn’t quite all there and she never lost her temper – never, even

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when Alice dropped anything or forgot anything she seemed to have expected it to happen . . . ‘If you please Mrs. Burnell,’ said an imaginary Alice, as she went on buttering the scones, ‘I’d rather not take my orders from Miss Beryl. I may be only a common servant girl as doesn’t know how to play the guitar.’ This last thrust pleased her so much that she quite recovered her temper. She carried her tray along the passage to the dining room. ‘The only thing to do,’ she heard as she opened the door ‘is to cut the sleeves out entirely and just have a broad band of black velvet over the shoulders and round the arms instead.’ Mrs. Burnell with her elder and younger sister leaned over the table in the act of performing a very severe operation upon a white satin dress spread out before them. Old Mrs. Fairfield sat by the window in the sun with a roll of pink knitting in her lap. ‘My dears’ said Beryl, ‘here comes the tea at last’ and she swept a place clear for the tray. ‘But, Doady’ she said to Mrs. Trout, ‘I don’t think I should dare to appear without any sleeves at all, should I?’ ‘My dear’ said Mrs. Trout ‘all I can say is that there isn’t one single evening dress in Mess’ Reading’s last catalogue that has even a sign of a sleeve. Some of them have a rose on the shoulder and a piece of black velvet but some of them haven’t even that – and they look perfectly charming! What would look very pretty on the black velvet straps of your dress would be red poppies. I wonder if I can spare a couple out of this hat –’ She was wearing a big cream leghorn hat7 trimmed with a wreath of poppies and daisies – and as she spoke she unpinned it and laid it on her knee and ran her hands over her dark silky hair. ‘Oh I think two poppies would look perfectly heavenly –’ said Beryl, ‘and just be the right finish but of course I won’t hear of you taking them out of that new hat, Doady – Not for worlds.’ ‘It would be sheer murder,’ said Linda, dipping a water cress sandwich into the salt cellar – and smiling at her sister – ‘But I haven’t the faintest feeling about this hat, or any other for the matter of that,’ said Doady – and she looked mournfully at the bright thing on her knees and heaved a profound sigh. The three sisters were very unlike as they sat round the table – Mrs. Trout, tall and pale with heavy eyelids that drooped over her grey eyes, and rare, slender hands and feet was quite a beauty. But Life bored her. She was sure that something very tragic was going to happen to her soon – She had felt it coming on for years – What it was she could not exactly say but she was ‘fated’ somehow. How often, when she had sat with Mother Linda and Beryl, as she was sitting now her heart had said ‘How little they know’ – or as it had then – ‘What a mockery this hat will be one day,’ and she had heaved just such a profound sigh. . . . And each time before her children were born she had thought that the tragedy would be fulfilled then – her child would be born dead or she saw the nurse

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going in to Richard her husband, and saying: ‘Your child lives but’ – and here the nurse pointed one finger upwards like the illustration of Agnes in David Copperfield8 – ‘your wife is no more’ – – But no, nothing particular had happened except that they had been boys and she had wanted girls, tender little caressing girls, not too strong with hair to curl and sweet little bodies to dress in white muslin threaded with pale blue – Ever since her marriage she had lived at Monkey Tree Cottage – Her husband left for town at 8 o’clock every morning and did not return until half-past six at night. Minnie was a wonderful servant. She did everything there was to be done in the house and looked after the little boys and even worked in the garden – – So Mrs. Trout became a perfect martyr to headaches. Whole days she spent on the drawing room sofa with the blinds pulled down and a linen handkerchief steeped in eau de cologne on her forehead. And as she lay there she used to wonder why it was that she was so certain that life had something terrible for her and to try to imagine what that terrible thing could be – – – until by and by she made up perfect novels with herself for the heroine, all of them ending with some shocking catastrophe. ‘Dora’ (for in these novels she always thought of herself in the third person: it was more ‘touching’ somehow) ‘Dora felt strangely happy that morning. She lay on the verandah looking out on the peaceful garden and she felt how sheltered and how blest her life had been after all. Suddenly the gate opened: A working man, a perfect stranger to her pushed up the path and standing in front of her, he pulled off his cap, his rough face full of pity. “I’ve bad news for you, Mam” . . . “Dead?” cried Dora, clasping her hands. “Both dead?”’ . . . Or since the Burnells had come to live at Tarana . . . She woke at the middle of the night. The room was full of a strange glare. ‘Richard! Richard wake! Tarana is on fire’ – – At last all were taken out – they stood on the blackened grass watching the flames rage. Suddenly – the cry went up, Where was Mrs. Fairfield? God! Where was she. ‘Mother!’ cried Dora, dropping onto her knees on the wet grass. ‘Mother.’ And she saw her Mother appear at an upper window – Just for a moment she seemed to faintly waver – – There came a sickening crash. . . . These dreams were so powerful that she would turn over buried her face in the ribbon work cushion and sobbed. But they were a profound secret – and Doady’s melancholy was always put down to her dreadful headaches . . . ‘Hand over the scissors Beryl and I’ll snip them off now.’ ‘Doady! You are to do nothing of the kind,’ said Beryl, handing her 2 pairs of scissors to choose from – The poppies were snipped off. ‘I hope you will really like Tarana’ she said, sitting back in her chair and sipping her tea. ‘Of course it is at its best now but I can’t help feeling a little afraid that it will be very damp in the

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winter. Don’t you feel that, Mother? The very fact that the garden is so lovely is a bad sign in a way – and then of course it is quite in the valley – isn’t it – I mean it is lower than any of the other houses.’ ‘I expect it will be flooded from the autumn to the spring’ said Linda: ‘we shall have to set little frog traps Doady, little mouse traps in bowls of water baited with a sprig of watercress instead of a piece of cheese – And Stanley will have to row to the office in an open boat. He’d love that. I can imagine the glow he would arrive in and the way he’d measure his chest twice a day to see how fast it was expanding.’ ‘Linda, you are very silly – very,’ said Mrs. Fairfield. ‘What can you expect from Linda,’ said Dora ‘she laughs at everything. Everything. I often wonder if there will ever be anything that Linda will not laugh at.’ ‘Oh, I’m a heartless creature!’ said Linda. She got up and went over to her Mother. ‘Your cap is just a tiny wink crooked, Mamma,’ said she, and she patted it straight with her quick little hands and kissed her Mother. ‘A perfect little icicle’ she said, and kissed her again. ‘You mean you love to think you are’ said Beryl, and she blew into her thimble, popped it on and drew the white satin dress towards her – and in the silence that followed she had a strange feeling – she felt her anger like a little serpent dart out of her bosom and strike at Linda. ‘Why do you always pretend to be so indifferent to everything,’ she said. ‘You pretend you don’t care where you live, or if you see anybody or not, or what happens to the children or even what happens to you. You can’t be sincere and yet you keep it up – you’ve kept it up for years. In fact’ – and she gave a little laugh of joy and relief to be so rid of the serpent – she felt positively delighted – ‘I can’t even remember when it started now – Whether it started with Stanley or before Stanley’s time or after you’d had rheumatic fever or when Isabel was born –’ ‘Beryl’ said Mrs. Fairfield sharply. ‘That’s quite enough, quite enough!’ But Linda jumped up. Her cheeks were very white. ‘Don’t stop her Mother,’ she cried, ‘she’s got a perfect right to say whatever she likes. Why on earth shouldn’t she.’ ‘She has not’ said Mrs. Fairfield. ‘She has no right whatever.’ Linda opened her eyes at her Mother. ‘What a way to contradict anybody,’ she said. ‘I’m ashamed of you – And how Doady must be enjoying herself! The very first time she comes to see us at our new house we sit hitting one another over the head –’ The door handle rattled and turned. Kezia looked tragically in. ‘Isn’t it ever going to be tea time’ – she asked – ‘No, never!’ said Linda. ‘Your Mother doesn’t care Kezia whether you ever set eyes upon her again. She doesn’t care if you starve. You are all going to be sent to a Home for Waifs and Strays to-morrow.’ ‘Don’t tease’ said Mrs. Fairfield. ‘She believes every word.’ And she said to Kezia, ‘I’m coming darling. Run upstairs to the bathroom and wash your face your hands and your knees.’

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On the way home with the children Mrs. Trout began an entirely new ‘novel’. It was night. Richard was out somewhere. (He always was on these occasions.) She was sitting in the drawing room by candlelight playing over ‘Solveig’s Song,’9 when Stanley Burnell appeared – hatless – pale – at first he could not speak. ‘Stanley tell me what is it’ . . . and she put her hands on his shoulders. ‘Linda has gone!’ he said hoarsely. Even Mrs. Trout’s imagination could not question this flight. She had to accept it very quickly and pass on. ‘She never cared,’ said Stanley – ‘God knows I did all I could – but she wasn’t happy I knew she wasn’t happy.’ ‘Mum,’ said Rags, ‘which would you rather be if you had to be a duck or a fowl – I’d rather be a fowl, much rather.’ The white duck did not look as if it had ever had a head when Alice placed it in front of Stanley Burnell that evening. It lay, in beautifully basted resignation, on the blue dish; its legs tied together with a piece of string and a wreath of little balls of stuffing round it. It was hard to say which of the two, Alice or the duck looked the better basted. They were both such a rich colour and they both had the same air of gloss and stain – Alice a peony red and the duck a Spanish magohanay. Burnell ran his eye along the edge of the carving knife; he prided himself very much upon his carving; upon making a first-class job of it – He hated seeing a woman carve; they were always too slow and they never seemed to care what the meat looked like after they’d done with it. Now, he did, he really took it seriously – he really took a pride in cutting delicate shaves of beef, little slices of mutton just the right thickness in his dividing a chicken or a duck with nice precision – so that it could appear a second time and still look a decent member of society. ‘Is this one of the home products’ he asked, knowing perfectly well that it was. ‘Yes dear, the butcher didn’t come; we have discovered that he only comes three times a week.’ But there wasn’t any need to apologise for it; it was a superb bird – it wasn’t meat at all, it was a kind of very superior jelly. ‘Father would say’ said Burnell ‘that this was one of those birds whose mother must have played to it in infancy upon the german flute and the sweet strains of the dulcet instrument acted with such effect upon the infant mind – Have some more Beryl. Beryl you and I are the only people in this house with a real feeling for food – I am perfectly willing to state in a court of law, if the necessity arises that I love good food’ – Tea was served in the drawing room after dinner and Beryl who for some reason had been very charming to Stanley ever since he came home suggested he and she should play a game of crib. They sat down at a little table near one of the open windows. Mrs. Fairfield had gone upstairs, and Linda lay in a rocking chair her arms above her head – rocking to

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and fro. ‘You don’t want the light do you, Linda’ said Beryl and she moved the tall lamp to her side, so that she sat under its soft light. How remote they looked those two – from where Linda watched and rocked – The green table, the bright polished cards, Stanley’s big hands and Beryl’s tiny white ones, moving the tapping red and white pegs along the little board seemed all to be part of one united in some mysterious movement. Stanley himself resting at ease big and solid in his loose fitting dark suit had a look of health and wellbeing about him – and there was Beryl in the white and black muslin dress with her bright head bent under the lamp light. Round her throat she wore a black velvet ribbon – It changed her – altered the shape of her face and throat somehow – but it was very charming – Linda decided. The room smelled of lilies – There were 2 big jars of white arums in the fireplace – ‘Fifteen two – fifteen four – and a pair is six, and a run of three is nine,’ said Stanley so deliberately he might have been counting sheep. ‘I’ve nothing but 2 pairs’ said Beryl, exaggerating her woefulness, because she knew how he loved winning. The cribbage pegs were like 2 little people going up the road together, turning round the sharp corner coming down the road again. They were pursuing each other. They did not so much want to get ahead as to keep near enough to talk – to keep near – perhaps that was all. But no, there was one always who was impatient and hopped away as the other came up and wouldn’t listen perhaps one was frightened of the other or perhaps the white one was cruel and did not want to hear and would not even give him a chance to speak. In the bosom of her dress Beryl wore a bunch of black pansies, and once just as the little pegs were close side by side – as she bent over – the pansies dropped out and covered them – ‘What a shame to stop them,’ said she – as she picked up the pansies, ‘just when they had a moment to fly into each other’s arms!’ ‘Goodbye, my girl,’ laughed Stanley and away the red peg hopped – – The drawing room was long and narrow with 2 windows and a glass door that gave on to the verandah. It had a cream paper with a pattern of gilt roses, and above the white marble mantelpiece was the big mirror in a gilt frame wherein Beryl had seen her drowned reflection. A white polar bear skin lay in front of the fireplace and the furniture which had belonged to old Mrs. Fairfield was dark and plain – A little piano stood against the wall with yellow pleated silk let into the carved back. Above it there hung an oil painting by Beryl of a large cluster of surprised looking clematis – for each flower was the size of a small saucer with a centre like an astonished eye fringed in black. But the room was not ‘finished’ yet – Stanley meant to buy a Chesterfield and two decent chairs and – goodness only knows – Linda liked it best as it was. Two big moths flew in through the window and round and round the circle of lamplight. ‘Fly away sillies

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before it is too late. Fly out again’ but no – round and round they flew. And they seemed to bring the silence of the moonlight in with them on their tiny wings . . . ‘I’ve two Kings’ said Stanley ‘any good?’ ‘Quite good’ said Beryl. Linda stopped rocking and got up. Stanley looked across. ‘Anything the matter, darling?’ He felt her restlessness. ‘No nothing I’m going to find Mother.’ She went out of the room and standing at the foot of the stairs she called ‘Mother –’ But Mrs. Fairfield’s voice came across the hall from the verandah. The moon that Lottie and Kezia had seen from the storeman’s wagon was nearly full – and the house, the garden, old Mrs. Fairfield and Linda – all were bathed in a dazzling light – ‘I have been looking at the aloe’ said Mrs. Fairfield. ‘I believe it is going to flower – this year. Wouldn’t that be wonderfully lucky! Look at the top there! All those buds – or is it only an effect of light.’ As they stood on the steps the high grassy bank on which the aloe rested rose up like a wave and the aloe seemed to ride upon it like a ship with the oars lifted – bright moonlight hung upon those lifted oars like water and on the green wave glittered the dew –‘Do you feel too,’ said Linda and she spoke, like her mother with the ‘special’ voice that women use at night to each other, as though they spoke in their sleep or from the bottom of a deep well – ‘don’t you feel that it is coming towards us?’ And she dreamed that she and her mother were caught up on the cold water and into the ship with the lifted oars and the budding mast. And now the oars fell, striking quickly quickly and they rowed far away over the tops of the garden trees over the paddocks and the dark bush beyond. She saw her mother, sitting quietly in the boat, ‘sunning’ herself in the moonlight as she expressed it. No, after all, it would be better if her mother did not come, for she heard herself cry faster faster to those who were rowing. How much more natural this dream was than that she should go back to the house where the children lay sleeping and where Stanley and Beryl sat playing cribbage – ‘I believe there are buds,’ said she. ‘Let us go down into the garden Mother – – I like that Aloe. I like it more than anything else here, and I am sure I shall remember it long after I’ve forgotten all the other things.’ She put her hand on her Mother’s arm: and they walked down the steps, round the island and on to the main ‘drive’ that led to the front gates – Looking at it from below she could see the long sharp thorns that edged the Aloe leaves, and at sight of them her heart grew hard. She particularly liked the long sharp thorns. Nobody would dare to come near her ship or to follow after. ‘Not even my New Foundland dog’ thought she ‘whom I’m so fond of in the day time.’ For she really was fond of him. She loved and admired and respected him tremendously – and she understood him.

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Oh, better than anybody else in the world, she knew him through and through – He was the soul of truth and sincerity and for all his practical experience he was awfully simple, easily pleased and easily hurt – If only he didn’t jump at her so and bark so loudly and thump with his tail and watch her with such eager loving eyes! He was too strong for her. She always had hated things that rushed at her even when she was a child. There were times when he was frightening – really frightening, when she just hadn’t screamed at the top of her voice – ‘you are killing me’ – and when she had longed to say the most coarse, hateful things. ‘You know I’m very delicate. You know as well as I do that my heart is seriously affected and Doctor Dear has told you that I may die at any moment – I’ve had three great lumps of children already.’ Yes, yes it was true – and thinking of it, she snatched her hand away from her mother’s arm for all her love and respect and admiration she hated him. It had never been so plain to her as it was at this moment – There were all her ‘feelings’ about Stanley one just as true as the other – sharp defined – She could have done them up in little packets – and there was this other – just as separate as the rest, this hatred and yet just as real. She wished she had done them up in little packets and given them to Stanley – especially the last one – she would like to watch him while he opened that . . . And how tender he always was after times like that, how submissive – how thoughtful. He would do anything for her he longed to serve her. Linda heard herself say in a weak voice, ‘Stanley would you light a candle’ and she heard his joyful eager answer ‘My darling of course I shall’ and through he went giving a leap out of bed and drawing the moon out of the night sky for her – She hugged her folded arms and began to laugh silently. Oh dear Oh dear how absurd it all was! It really was funny – simply funny, and the idea of her hating Stanley (she could see his astonishment if she had cried out or given him the packet) was funniest of all. Yes it was perfectly true what Beryl had said that afternoon. She didn’t care for anything – but it wasn’t a pose – Beryl was wrong there – She laughed because she couldn’t help laughing. – And why this mania to keep alive? For it really was mania! What am I guarding myself so preciously for she thought mocking and silently laughing? I shall go on having children and Stanley will go on making money and the children and the houses will grow bigger and bigger, with larger and larger gardens – and whole fleets of aloe trees in them – for me to choose from – – Why this mania to keep alive indeed? In the bottom of her heart she knew that now she was not being perfectly sincere. She had a reason but she couldn’t express it, no not even to herself. She had been walking with her head bent looking at nothing – now she looked up and about her. Her mother

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and she were standing by the red and white camellia trees. Beautiful were the rich dark leaves spangled with light and the round flowers that perched among the leaves like red and white birds. Linda pulled a piece of verbena and crumbled it and held up the cup of her hands to her mother – ‘Delicious’ said Mrs. Fairfield bending over to smell – ‘Are you cold, child are you trembling? Yes, your hands are cold. We had better go back to the house’ – ‘What have you been thinking of’ said Linda – ‘Tell me’ – But Mrs. Fairfield said ‘I haven’t really been thinking of anything at all. I wondered as we passed the orchard what the fruit trees were like, whether we should be able to make much jam this autumn – There are splendid black currant and gooseberry bushes in the vegetable garden. I noticed them to-day. I should like to see the pantry shelves thoroughly well stocked with our own jam –’ Dearest Nancy I am sure you are calling me names but I’m not a little pig, dear. This is really and truly the first moment I’ve had to myself for over a fortnight. As it is I’m so exhausted I can hardly hold a pen and my head still jars because of the strain and of packing cases, for we’ve been moving dear – In the spring my brother in law decided he could not bear the giddy whirl of Hiltonville any longer (!!) As he has decided this at least twice a year ever since I have lived with them I didn’t really pay much attention. Saturday morning. Tarana My dearest Nan I know you are calling me names, but this really is the first moment I’ve had to myself for over a fortnight. The dreadful deed is done, my dear. We have actually moved! In a way it’s an awful relief for my brother in law has been threatening to tear us away from the giddy whirl of town (!) for years. In fact I got so used to hearing his sighs for the country that when he began this spring I never dreamed of taking it seriously – But while he was sighing this house came onto the market and practically without saying a word to us he went and had a look at it, bought the house and told us to pack. Men are thoughtful creatures. Linda, as usual, sat and smiled, and Mother said she was very glad for the children’s sakes, so there was nothing left for poor little B. to do but grin and bear it – We had a simply awful fortnight. I picnicked here for the first week with a new servant girl and a new handyman and got things more or less ready for the house is much bigger than those [that] wretched letter box in town was – and we had to have cartloads of new furniture and interesting things like linoleum and lamps. And after an awful time, at the end of the week the others came with the remains of the old furniture trailing before and after them –

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A letter from Beryl Fairfield to her friend Nan Fry. My Darling Nan, Don’t think me a piggy-wig because I haven’t written before: I haven’t had a moment dear and even now I feel so exhausted that I can hardly hold a pen – Well, the dreadful deed is done. We have actually left the giddy whirl of town (!) and I can’t see how we shall ever go back again, for my brother-in-law has bought this house ‘lock stock and barrel’ to use his own words. In a way it’s an awful relief for he’s been threatening to take a place in the country ever since I’ve lived with them – and I must say the house and garden are awfully nice – a million times better than that dreadful cubby hole in town – But buried – my dear – buried isn’t the word! We have got neighbours but they’re only farmers – big louts of boys who always seem to be milking and two dreadful females with protruding teeth who came over when we were moving and brought us some scones and said they were sure they’d be very willing to help. My sister, who lives a mile away says she doesn’t really know a soul here, so I’m sure we never never shall and I’m certain no body will ever come out from town to see us because though there is a bus it’s an awful old rattling thing with black leather sides that any decent person would rather die than ride in for six miles! Such is life! It’s a sad ending for poor little B. I’ll get to be a most frightful frump in a year or two and come and see you in a mackintosh with a sailor hat tied on with a white china silk motor veil! Stanley says that now we’re settled, for after the most ghastly fortnight of my life we really are settled, he is going to bring out a couple of men from the club each week for tennis – on Saturday afternoons – In fact two are promised us as a great treat today – But my dear if you could see Stanley’s men from the club, rather fattish – the type who look frightfully indecent without waistcoats – always with toes that turn in rather – so conspicuous, too, when you’re walking about a tennis court in white shoes and pulling up their trousers, every minute – don’t you know and whacking at imaginary things with their racquets. I used to play with them at the Club Court last summer – and I’m sure you’ll know the type when I tell you that after I’d been there about 3 times they all called me Miss Beryl! It’s a weary world. Of course Mother simply loves this place, but then when I am Mother’s age I suppose I shall be quite content to sit in the sun and shell peas into a basin. But I’m not not not. What Linda really thinks about the whole affair, per usual I haven’t the slightest idea. She is as mysterious as ever. My dear, you know that white satin dress of mine, I’ve taken the sleeves out entirely put straps of black velvet across the shoulders and two big red poppies off my dear sister’s chapeau. It’s a great success, though when I shall wear it I do not know . . .

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Beryl sat writing this letter at a little table in front of the window in her room. In a way of course it was all perfectly true but in another way it was all the greatest rubbish and she didn’t mean a word of it. No, that wasn’t right – She felt all those things but she didn’t really feel them like that – The Beryl who wrote that letter might have been leaning over her shoulder and guiding her hand – so separate was she: and yet in a way, perhaps she was more real than the other, the real Beryl. She had been getting stronger and stronger for a long while. There had been a time when the real Beryl had just really made use of the false one to get her out of awkward positions – to glide her over hateful moments – to help her to bear the stupid ugly sometimes beastly things that happened – She had as it were called to the unreal Beryl, and seen her coming, and seen her going away again, quite definitely and simply – But that was long ago. The unreal Beryl was greedy and jealous of the real one – Gradually she took more and stayed longer – Gradually she came more quickly and now the real Beryl was hardly certain sometimes if she were there or not – Days, weeks at a time passed without her ever for a moment ceasing to act a part, for that was really what it came to and then, quite suddenly, when the unreal self had forced her to do something she did not want to do at all she had come into her own again and for the first time realised what had been happening. Perhaps it was because she was not leading the life that she wanted to – She had not a chance to really express herself – she was always living below her power – and therefore she had no need of her real self, her real self only made her wretched. In a way of course it was all perfectly true, but in another way it was all the greatest rubbish and she didn’t believe a word of it. No, that wasn’t right: she felt all those things, but she didn’t really feel them like that. It was her other self, whose slave or whose mistress she was which? who had written that letter. It not only bored – it rather disgusted her real self. ‘Flippant and silly’ said her real self, yet she knew she’d send it and that she’d always write that kind of twaddle to Nan Fry – In fact it was a very mild example of the kind of letter she generally wrote. Beryl leaned her elbows on the table and read it through again – the voice of the letter seemed to come up to her from the page – faint already like a voice heard over a telephone wire, high, gushing – with something bitter in the sound – Oh, she detested it today. ‘You’ve always got so much animation B’ said Nan Fry – ‘That’s why men are so keen on you’ – and she had added, rather mournfully – (for men weren’t keen on Nan – she was a solid kind of girl with fat hips and a high colour) ‘I can’t understand how you keep it up, but it’s your nature, I suppose.’ What rot! What nonsense! But it wasn’t her nature at all! Good Heavens! If she’d ever been her real

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self with Nan Fry Nannie would have jumped out of the window with surprise. My dear, you know that white satin dress of mine – Ugh! Beryl slammed her letter case to. She jumped up and half consciously – half unconsciously she drifted over to the looking glass – There stood a slim girl dressed in white – a short white serge skirt – a white silk blouse and a white leather belt drawn in tight round her tiny waist – She had a heart shaped face – wide at the brows and with a pointed chin – but not too pointed – – Her eyes – her eyes were perhaps her best feature – such a strange uncommon colour too, greeny blue with little gold spots in them. She had fine black eyebrows and long black lashes – so long that when they lay on her cheeks they positively caught the light some [one] or other had told her – Her mouth was rather large – too large? No, not really. Her underlip protruded a little. She had a way of sucking it in that somebody else had told her was awfully fascinating. Her nose was her least satisfactory feature – Not that it was really ugly – but it wasn’t half as fine as Linda’s. Linda really had a perfect little nose. Hers spread rather – not badly – and in all probability she exagerated the spreadness of it just because it was her nose and she was so awfully critical of herself. She pinched it with her thumb and second finger and made a little face – Lovely long hair. And such a mass of it. It was the colour of fresh fallen leaves – brown and red, with a glint of yellow. Almost it seemed to have a life of its own – it was so warm and there was such a deep ripple in it. When she plaited it in one thick plait it hung on her back just like a long snake – she loved to feel the weight of it drag her head back– she loved to feel it loose covering her bare arms. It had been the fashion among the girls at Miss Beard’s to brush Beryl’s hair. ‘Do do let me brush your hair darling Beryl,’ but nobody brushed it as beautifully as Nan Fry. Beryl would sit in front of the dressing table in her cubicle – wearing a white linen wrapper – and behind her stood Nannie in a dark red woolen gown buttoned up to her chin – Two candles gave a pointing, flickering light – Her hair streamed over the chair back – she shook it out – she yielded it up to Nannie’s adoring hands. In the glass Nannie’s face above the dark gown was like a round sleeping mask. Slowly she brushed, with long, caressing strokes – her hand and the brush were like one thing upon the warm hair. She would say with a kind of moaning passion, laying down the brush and looping the hair in her hands – ‘it’s more beautiful than ever B. It really is lovelier than last time’ – and now she would brush again – she seemed to send herself to sleep with the movement and the gentle sound – she had something of the look of a blind cat – – as though it were she who was being stroked and not Beryl – But nearly always these brushings came to an unpleasant ending. Nannie did something silly. Quite suddenly she would snatch up Beryl’s hair and bury her

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face in it and kiss it, or clasp her hands round Beryl’s head and press Beryl’s head back against her firm breast sobbing – ‘you are so beautiful. You don’t know how beautiful you are beautiful beautiful.’ And at these moments Beryl had such a feeling of horror such a violent thrill of physical dislike for Nan Fry – ‘That’s enough – that’s quite enough. Thank you. You’ve brushed it beautifully. Good night Nan.’ She didn’t even try to suppress a contempt and her disgust – – And the curious thing was that Nan Fry seemed to understand this – even to expect it, never protesting but stumbling away out of the cubicle – and perhaps whispering ‘forgive me’ at the door – And the more curious thing was that Beryl let her brush her hair again – and let this happen again, – – and again there was this ‘silly scene’ between them always ending in the same way more or less, and never never referred to in the day time. But she did brush hair so beautifully. Was her hair less bright now? No, not a bit – ‘Yes, my dear, there’s no denying it, you really are a lovely little thing’ – At the words her breast lifted, she took a long breath, smiling with delight, half closing her eyes as if she held a sweet sweet bouquet up to her face – a fragrance that made her faint. But even as she looked the smile faded from her lips and eyes – and, oh God! There she was, back again, playing the same old game – False, false as ever! False as when she’d written to Nan Fry – False even when she was alone with herself now. What had that creature in the glass to do with her really and why on earth was she staring at her? She dropped down by the side of her bed and buried her head in her arms. ‘Oh,’ she said ‘I’m so miserable, so frightfully miserable. I know I’m silly and spiteful and vain. I’m always acting a part, I’m never my real self for a minute’10 – And plainly, plainly she saw her false self running up and down the stairs, laughing a special trilling laugh if they had visitors, standing under the lamp if a man came to dinner so that he should see how the light shone on her hair, pouting and pretending to be a little girl when anybody asked her to play the guitar – Why she even kept it up for Stanley’s benefit! Only last night when he was reading the paper – she had stood beside him and leaned against him on purpose and she had put her hand over his pointing out something and said at the same time – ‘Heavens! Stanley how brown your hands are’ – only that he should notice how white hers were! How despicable! Her heart grew cold with rage! ‘It’s marvellous how you keep it up!’ she said to her false self! but then it was only because she was so miserable – so miserable! If she’d been happy – if she’d been living her own life all this false life would simply cease to be – and now she saw the real Beryl a radiant shadow – – – a shadow – – – Faint and unsubstantial shone the real self – what was there of her except that radiance? And for what tiny moments she was really she. Beryl could almost remember every one of them – – She did

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not mean that she was exactly happy then it was a ‘feeling’ that overwhelmed her at certain times – – certain nights when the wind blew with a forlorn cry and she lay cold in her bed wakeful and listening certain lovely evenings when she passed down a road where there were houses and big gardens and the sound of a piano came from one of the houses – and then certain Sunday nights in Church, when the gas flickered and the pews were shadowy and the lines of the hymns were almost too sweet and sad to bear. And rare rare times, rarest of all, when it was not the voice of outside things that had moved her so – she remembered one of them, when she had sat up one night with Linda. Linda was very ill – she had watched the pale dawn come in through the blinds and she had seen Linda – lying, propped up high with pillows, her arms outside the quilt and the shadow of her hair dusky against the white – and at all these times she had felt: Life is wonderful – life is rich and mysterious. But it is good too, and I am rich and mysterious and good. Perhaps that is what she might have said – – but she did not say those things – then she knew her false self was quite quite gone and she longed to be always as she was just at that moment – to become that Beryl for ever – – ‘Shall I? How can I? and did I ever not have a false self?’ But just when she had got that far she heard the sound of wheels coming up the drive and little steps running along the passage to her door and Kezia’s voice calling ‘Aunt Beryl. Aunt Beryl!’ She got up – Botheration! How she had crumpled her skirt. Kezia burst in. ‘Aunt Beryl – Mother says will you please come down because Father’s home and lunch is ready –’ ‘Very well Kezia.’ She went over to the dressing table and powdered her nose. Kezia crossed over too and unscrewed a little pot of cream and sniffed it. Under her arm Kezia carried a very dirty calico cat. When Aunt Beryl had run out of the room she sat the cat up on the dressing table and stuck the top of the cream jar over one of its ears. Now look at yourself said she sternly. The calico cat was so appalled at the effect that it toppled backwards and bumped and bounced on the floor and the top of the cream jar flew through the air and rolled like a penny in a round on the linoleum and did not break. But for Kezia it had broken the moment it flew through the air; and she picked it up, hot all over, put it on the dressing table and walked away, far too quickly – and airily. Notes U Text: The Aloe, 1983, pp. 22–158, evenly numbered pages. The year 1915 was a difficult one for KM. She was increasingly aware of the limitations of living with JMM, contrasting his ‘kind of melodramatic, intellectual sentimentality’ with the life she believed she might find with the

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French novelist, Francis Carco (KMN, 2, p. 2). After a brief affair, when she visited Carco in the war zone at Gray (see p. XXX), she accepted the offer of using his apartment in Paris, close to Notre Dame and overlooking the Seine, where she spent several weeks alone at different times between February and May. On 24 March she made the notebook entry, ‘Kick off.’ It was the beginning of her long story, The Aloe. The next day she explained to JMM how ‘I fell into the open arms of my first novel. I have finished a huge chunk [. . .]. I expect you will think I am a dotty when you read it [. . .]. Its queer stuff. Its the spring makes me write like this’ (CLKM, 1, pp. 167–8). Perhaps her recent meeting with her brother Leslie, who had come to England to enlist with the British Army, revived so vividly her childhood memories of Karori and its crammed family house. A few weeks after beginning on it, she could tell JMM, ‘My book marche bien – I feel I could write it anywhere – it goes so easily – and I know it so well. It will be a funny book.’ She had written as far as the dance scene in Chapter II when she announced on 14 May, ‘I have only to polish my work now; its all really accompli’ (CLKM, 1, p. 186, p. 188). She meant that was as much as she intended doing before returning to London. She did not come back to it until the beginning of the next year. She and JMM were once more living together, now in St John’s Wood, at number 5 Acacia Road. Her brother stayed with her in August, and they reminisced endlessly about their lives as children. When Leslie was killed, just across the border in Belgium, at the beginning of October, KM was inconsolable. A month later she moved to Bandol in the South of France, noting soon after she arrived, I am just as much dead as he is. The present and the future mean nothing to me. I am no longer ‘curious’ about people; I do not wish to go anywhere and the only possible value anything can have for me is that it should put me in mind of something that happened or was when we were alive. Then early in the New Year, she noted how ‘I want to write about my own country until I simply exhaust my store,’ but felt ‘the form that I would choose has changed utterly. I feel no longer concerned with the same appearance of things’ (KMN, 2, p. 16, p. 32). To commemorate, yet to find a way freshly to do so, became the same quest. ‘I want for one moment to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the old world [. . .] but all must be told [. . .] in a kind of special prose.’ Then in mid-February 1916, she came back to the story she had put aside the previous May. She realised that what she wanted to do was already begun. ‘The Aloe is right. The Aloe is lovely. It simply fascinates me, and I know that is what you would wish me to write’ (KMN, 2, p. 60). For the next few weeks she filled one school exercise book and then another, until by the middle of March she completed the story that

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in fact would be the draft for Prelude. For the moment, however, it stood as the story she had promised Leslie. The story’s characters are drawn from KM’s siblings, parents and extended family, and its setting is the two houses she had lived in during the first decade of her life. The Samuel Josephs were based on the Nathan family who lived next door in Tinakori Road, whose father was an early business partner of Harold Beauchamp. Nan Fry and her hair brushing once more owe much to Ida Baker. 1. The name Kezia that KM took for the child (often read as a self-portrait) may have derived from several sources. In her Bible she had underlined Kezia, the second daughter of Job. There was a social column in a Wellington paper written by ‘Kezia’. Perhaps more importantly, among KM’s numerous Australian relatives, one forebear, Kezia Bedford Iredale, was legendary for her intrepid adventure in going out to New Zealand as a single woman in the 1820s, as a Wesleyan lay teacher with the Church Missionary Society. She seems to have caused discomfort among unmarried missionaries, and was obliged to relinquish the missions for Sydney. 2. Music by Michael Maybrick, words by Frederic Wetherly (1892). 3. Long side whiskers, worn without a beard. 4. A kind of top hat. 5. The New Zealand Land Wars in the 1860s, to impose British rule. 6. From the ‘Te Deum’, also known as the Ambrosian hymn. 7. Plaited straw hat, originally from Legorno, later known as Livorno. 8. KM’s memory of the illustration by ‘Phiz’ in Chapter 53, Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850), showing David sitting by the fire with Jip, Dora’s dog, at his feet. Agnes is in the doorway in shadow, but her hands are clasped in front of her. Jip dies at apparently the same moment as Dora. 9. From Edvard Grieg, Incidental music to Peer Gynt (1874–76). 10. While writing ‘The Aloe’ KM made the note: Beryl Fairfield. What is it that I’m getting at? It is really Beryl’s ‘Sosie’. The fact that for a long time now, she really hasn’t been even able to control her second self: it’s her second self who now controls her. There was [a] kind of radiant being who wasn’t either spiteful or malicious of whom she’d had a glimpse whose very voice was different to hers who was grave who never would have dreamed of doing the things that she did. Had she banished this being or had it really got simply tired and left her. I want to get all this through her just as I got at Linda through Linda. To suddenly merge her into herself. (KMN, 2, p. 27)

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MAATA: PLAN 1913. Maisie 14, Philip 19, Maata 19, Hal 17, Rhoda 19, Max 18. Chapter I. 1 9 Aug 13th

9 November 16th Chapter III. Evening at the Closes. The old ghost wandering up and down. Ma, so excited. Father very flushed, and wheezing. Hal malicious and Maisie romping. They watched her run up the steps. The door flew open. She was in Janey’s arms. She is introduced to May and Debussy. A tour of the house. Supper and stout and ale in the dining room. Before they go Hal plays his latest. She sits against the window curtain in the blue chair, her arms along the sides, a bunch of violets falling from her fingers. Philip leans against the mantelpiece watching her, breathing to the rise and fall of her breath. Chapter IV. The arrival of the piano. The room transformed. The blue bed cover stitched with gold towers and minarets and a border of leopards. Chrysanthemums. A tiny fire. Maata in a grey and pink gown, in a cur-ious mood. She had spent yesterday shopping. She felt 520

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like she used to when she was a little girl and spoke her name and address outside the sweet shop. She pokes up the fire and sits down at the piano. ‘Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix.’2 ‘I had no idea. I did not dream – and that you should need anything – you with your voice.’ ‘Listen, listen a moment, darling.’ ‘To the Forest’. She ran forward and: took Rhoda’s hand and her arm. ‘But that is nothing to what my voice is going to be like – nothing. Just wait. I promise, promise –’ She reverts always to money. ‘But you have some haven’t you? . . . I can’t explain but my spirit seems to need luxury. I can only expand among beautiful things.’ ‘I understand – of course – it must be so.’ ‘And the absurd thing is that it’s only a question of time . . . and when I do have it I’ll have no more need of it.’ Rhoda left her. On the canal bridge for the first time she refused a beggar. Chapter V. Sunday at the Close family. Hot and fine. The boys are late to breakfast – they do not wear collars and ties. Maisie in mignonette green. Be it known . . . that they have hereby decided to envelop the capillary substance of our illustrious craniums in the folds of the pellucid aqua purissima! The great event dinner. A joint and greens and plum pie. Debussy wears a bow tie. May’s strange dream. The knock at the area door. Maata is very fine in a wine dark cloth dress with an astrakhan coat . . . Afterwards she goes up and puts on a big apron and washes Hal’s hair. A walk to the Heath, Hal, Maisie, Maata and Philip. And after tea, while Mum and Dad are playing Halma3 and Maisie reads Dickens, she and Philip play cribbage. In the evening, Music. The old man holds her ‘trembling with life’. Chapter VI. The singing lesson and the concert. In the middle she leaves and wanders about, exhausted, unhappy. It is cold and windy. Why hadn’t she said she could not afford to pay so much. She arrives home draggled. Rhoda is there. She tells Rhoda. Rhoda persuades her to allow her to pay. Chapter VII. Maata at the Closes. Only the Mother is in. They have a long talk in the ugly dining room with the darning basket. The family come in for tea. It brightens. She and Philip have another game and Maata is persuaded to stay for dinner. Hal sees her home. ‘What do you think of my brother?’ The letter from Rhoda. Chapter VIII. Philip surveys his life and his prospects. His loneliness – his lack of faith in himself. He hears Maisie singing in her room. He goes in to her. ‘No, I can’t go on with you listening.’ ‘Don’t be such a baby, kid.’ In his desire to stamp out the image of Maata he sits on Maisie’s bed with her curled up in his arms and plans her gorgeous

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life. She is happy beyond words. ‘And we’ll have a little house, girlie, on the shores of the Mediterranean and travel all over the world.’ ‘Just you and I, Pip.’ ‘Yes, yes, just you and I.’ He denies Maata. He hugs and kisses her. ‘Not enough, not enough.’ Chapter IX. Maata meets at the flat the dark strange boy, Max Castello. Mally does not arrive. They sit and talk among the garden baskets of artificial flowers. Passion is the only thing in life. It is to dare everything. They are bitter and cold. His eyes shine as though by candlelight. They arrange to meet. Chapter X. What rubbish is this what rubbish, she stammered, clenching her little hands in her astrakhan muff. It grows foggy. Outside the house Rhoda stands like a forlorn tree with a big box in her hands. She lights the fire for Maata and the box is opened. ‘How could you know – you fairy godmother?’ A black astrakhan coat lined with silver brocade sprigged with mignonette. It had little side pockets and a high collar. ‘I wanted to give you one that would cover your whole precious body but the pennies would not be found. You can wear this in the house too.’ Maata puts it on. ‘Yes’, very satisfied, ‘that is you.’ She protests. ‘No, it is my Xmas present.’ She is sweet, sweet to Rhoda. Maisie and Hal arrive, Hal very jolly. She is to go home to dinner. The fog deepens. They go out, arm in arm, coughing, and Rhoda disappears. ‘Extraordinary girl.’ Chapter XI. For three days the fog hung thick. Maata stayed in her room. She would see nobody. A hatred of the place and the people was on her. She told Mally she had a cold. She denied Rhoda. Walked up and down, up and down, staring in front of her. On the afternoon of the 3rd day Mally came. She had a lesson in her room, and all her burdens somehow changed. She sang. Mally. ‘No, you need not look at me. Start where you like.’ She sings. ‘Ah, you’re in love. Go on.’ She sang, lifting, lifting in song. Her colour came back. She went over to Mally, put her arm round her neck and hugged her, and when she had gone she ran up to the Closes. Janey was in the kitchen making an apple pie. Maata bubbled with joy. She inspected the whole house. Philip’s gratitude and adoration wrapped her. They played cribbage again, laughing. They walked home together arm in arm. ‘Hook on, dear girl,’ said Philip. They lost their way and she held close to him, under cover of laughter and cold. It took them a long time to get home. He left her on the doorstep. She promised faithfully to go again tomorrow at three. Chapter XII. When Maisie came in next morning to wake Philip, she found he was already up and dressed. He was sorting his music.

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Maisie had a duster in her hands and a blue handkerchief like a turban on her head. She was dusting the drawing room. She was amazed to see Pip dressed and sat down on the floor to help him. He was rather quiet, very pale, with shaking hands. ‘Well, you are queer – what’s the matter?’ There was nothing. He says ‘When Maata comes this afternoon tell her to come straight up to my room. I’m going to work all day – and Pussy – see that nobody else butts in. I want to see her alone.’ Maisie makes big eyes of surprise. Then she blushes and says ‘Oh alright. I think it’s rather mean of you though.’ She won’t help him any more. All day she watched her brother. He does not eat, he laughs stupidly, his hands shake. He roams up and down his room, up and down. Seven times during the morning he tiptoes downstairs to look at the clock. Maata is very late coming. It is five o’clock. She goes straight to Philip. His room is in dark. He is practising. The violin case on the bed is like a tiny coffin. They comfort the loneliness in each other, she sitting at the table by the window, Philip on the bed. They grow very peaceful and quiet. He lights the gas for her to look at the shell he found when he was tidying up. They stand close together. Her hands shake. She holds it and turns it over. They look up at each other. He puts his arm round her shoulder. They smile timidly and kiss. He puts his arms round her and she lays her hands upon his cheeks and gazes at him. He says ‘I worship you girl’ and she nods and says breathlessly ‘I too, I too.’ ‘Maata – do you love me?’ Still with that mysterious smile she says ‘Of course I do.’ Hal interrupts. They tell the delighted family. Only Maisie bursts into tears and rushes to her room. ‘I can’t understand Maisie’ said Philip, puzzled. ‘Oh well, it will be a great change for her’ said the Mother. ‘But why, Mum. How?’ ‘Oh well, least said spoils the broth, my son. You’ll understand some day.’ They have a merry dinner with Kola and stout. Mrs Close gets very confidential. Hal, too. ‘Wait till you see the old ghost’s big toe, Maata.’ The family leave them the dining room. They turn the gas low and lie down on the little green sofa, their bodies touching. Chapter XIII. Rhoda spends the night with her Mother. ‘I never seem to see you at all. You are always out or creeping about the staircase like a thief. What about that friend of yours? Why hasn’t she been to see me? Why can’t you be like other girls?’ She spends a dreadful night. When the Mother sleeps she creeps into the drawing room and pulls up the blind and sees the night clear with stars. Life seems empty and horrible. She cries out for Maata. The moon comes through the window. She lies flat on her back with her arms wide and stares up at the big round moon. I wish I was a spirit. Why have I got this body

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– – I would like to be a spirit and watch near my darling. Maata you are not happy, some danger is near you. Maata what are you doing now? I shall draw some more money tomorrow and buy her that black scarf with moonstones. This moon is like me – so white and cold. Maata will wrap us round her little breast – in the black night of her scarf. Chapter XIV. She was at the bank before it opened and with Maata before 10. Maata was dressing. Leaning forward to tie her shoes. ‘I’ve something to tell you. You’ll be surprised. I’m going to marry Philip.’ Rhoda is opposite a mirror. She watches herself. ‘Oh when was it arranged.’ ‘Late last evening.’ Rhoda: ‘I knew.’ Maata is intensely annoyed. ‘How could you know.’ They walk together to the Closes. But something has happened. ‘No, I won’t come in. When shall I see you again?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know. Sometime next week – – or come to tea on Sunday. Do.’ Chapter XV. The two children in love. Playing ball in the garden, in Pip’s room, going for walks. Raspberry Nose and old Winter. It seems that everybody loves us. They cannot bear to be separated. He tries for and obtains a position in a theatre orchestra. Steak sandwiches. They all prepare for Christmas. Maata is to spend it with them. Maisie is not well. She gets very thin. Chapter XVI. Mally goes to Rome until February to give singing lessons. At Maata’s last lesson Max is there. They have lentil soup with pieces of sausage in it. She wears her engagement ring. She is very happy but Mally shakes her head. ‘You couldn’t be poor.’ ‘But why not? I’ll make money with my singing, Mally.’ ‘You are not made for such a marriage, my dear. You want a man who would throw you across the room and beat you. Nobody else will ever keep a woman like you.’ Max listens. ‘Where would you be without your fine clothes now.’ ‘I – I haven’t got any.’ ‘Pooh! I’ve been watching. Look at your coat – £10.10.0. Your hat – £5.5.0. Your shoes and gloves and today a gold purse. Monsieur ton mari won’t be able to provide such luxuries. Better stay as you are.’ ‘But surely you aren’t suggesting . . .’ ‘Nothing at all, my dear, except that your own money does not buy them.’ Maata bristled. She was defiant. ‘I need these things. They help me. I can’t sing if I’m draggled and poor.’ ‘Tell it to somebody else – Pooh! What do you know of such things. What has money to do with it. Fine feathers don’t make fine artists, my dear.’ Mally gets into a terrible rage. Max leans back and laughs. Maata goes, half crying. Max and Mally are left alone. He soothes her, and strokes and strokes her, maliciously smiling.

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Chapter XVII. Christmas Eve leading to Xmas day. By the gas fire in Maata’s room, wrapped in a rug. Low wind outside. Christmas Day. Happy fooling and a sad, lovely evening. Rhoda comes in the afternoon. Maisie fondles Rhoda. The two seem like friends. It is arranged that Maata shall go and stay at the Closes. Chapter XVIII. Next day Rhoda packs for her. They spend the day together in the old happy way. They go out to tea and it is not until evening that they say goodbye. ‘Now I shall see even less of you. May I write?’ ‘Of course.’ Her room is very clean with mats everywhere. ‘Now I won’t even be surprised if you and Philip sleep in that very bed after you’re married.’ ‘Oh Mother, dear.’ ‘Well, there’s no need to blush about it.’ She and Maisie make it up. Chapter XIX. The visit to Covent Garden. The return, heaped with flowers. Philip is asleep. They cover his bed. She gets frightened and wakes him and kisses and kisses him. Invitation to the wedding. Mrs Close doesn’t want to accept. Hal to go too and Father. Chapter XX. The departure of the three. The three are left in the house. Their happiness. It is early spring, and the sun shines on the drawing room carpet. Philip goes out, comes in late. They are lovers. Chapter XXI. Maisie discovers them, but says nothing – she thinks they have been secretly married. She is full of the secret, and she can afford now to be nice to Maata and kiss her and hug her and help her to make Pip’s bed. Chapter XXII. The old people return, very crochety. Everything goes wrong and Philip goes away. She begins taking lessons again. Max Castello sees her home. She feels shaken. Hal disapproves utterly of Max Castello. ‘I don’t think you’re fair on the old ghost, Maata.’ ‘Oh how absurd you are. What a baby you are!’ They start quarrelling. An uneasy gloom settles on the house. May is dismissed. They are sick of Maata’s fine ways. And she is sick of their commonness. She goes away for the weekend and comes back to find Ma wants the money for the washing. No, she won’t give it. How silent they are all growing. Only Maisie looks better and turns from Maata to her Mother. Chapter XXIII. Maisie tells of their love episode. The silence explodes. They are violent, hysterical, half mad. She is denied the house immediately and she goes away to Rhoda who finds her a horrible little poor room.

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Chapter XXIV. She cannot stand it and goes to Philip, to the theatre. He comes in and stands resining his bow, looking over the house. He sees her. They go back to the dirty ugly house and are wonderfully happy. Chapter XXV. The morning he goes she finds his Mother’s letter. There is a scene. He leaves her early in the morning and on the train journey back to London she meets Marion West. They become very intimate. High falutin, false, and talk as the train shatters through the dark. Chapter XXVI. Rhoda prepares for her home. Soothing sentimentality[?] Her children. The fire. The white lilac in a jar. Maata is cold and abstracted. Very beautiful. Before she goes to bed she writes Pip a letter. She wants him, wants him. Pip I’m frightened. Chapter XXVII. Next morning after the post has come and brought her no letter she leaves for Rachael West. What a fine house! And the jolly people. In the evening she sings ‘I met my love’. She wears a yellow chrysanthemum in her hair. Rachael fusses and pets her to the hilt. She meets Mr Evershed. Chapter XXVIII. I cannot come to London. Come here if you can. We have very good digs and Ma cooks poached egg O.R. She shows the letter to Rachael who poisons her mind. But go. I would if I were you – you need to go this time and see just how you stand. Rachael is smoking, her head thrown back, the lovely lines of her milky throat in the light. Mr Evershed sees her to the station. Books, flowers – everything she wants. Chapter XXIX. But it is raining, pouring with rain as Philip sets out to meet Maata. He is suspicious and cold, his heart eaten with fatigue. She is changed. Only when they are going to bed that night and her young husband takes her into his arms . . . I think my heart will break for joy. They spend the week in gloom – what is the matter with you. On the morning of going away she wakes early and sees the sheep. She is cruel. ‘You’re your Mother’s boy. And Maisie’s. What’s the good of pretending. I am not made to be poor.’ She scolds, scolds all the way home from Charlies Aunt4 in the soaking rain. Chapter XXX. Rhoda loses her. Writes to Pip. She has gone back to Mrs West’s. Please to go and see her. He writes, pleads. But she will not answer his letters. Then he is ill and there is silence. She goes for a walk and meets Maisie in the park. The sheep again. ‘I’ll not tell you –

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not I.’ Maisie is with Rhoda. She goes straight home. She and Rachael drink port. They sit on the sofa in Evershed’s room. He proposes. She accepts. They are married next afternoon. Chapter XXXI. Rhoda gains admittance. She sees the wedding ring. She is terribly hurt. She explains. Maata buries her head in the cushions. Did you ever hear of a broken heart. She promises to arrange a meeting. Does he know? Of course – he saw it in the paper. He had some sort of a breakdown. But better now. Says it is for the last time. Chapter XXXII. The meeting in the spring. The walk on the heath. I want to tell you something. I have never lived with Evershed as his wife – never. Their rapture at last. They arrange to go to America. She will get the money. She can. He leaves her and Max Castello speaks to him and tells him the truth and gives him the letters. Chapter XXXIII. She goes to Rhoda. It is all made plain. She is going to spend the night with Rhoda. And tomorrow the money can be had. She confides all her plans and hopes. She falls asleep at last like a lovely little child. Rhoda lies on the floor by the dying fire – the supreme sacrifice made. Chapter XXXIV. He did not know how he reached home. Yes he had had supper. He goes upstairs to his room and burns his papers and tidies up – then downstairs – first to the kitchen – sees them all and the brightness. Hal is in the drawingroom playing. Hallo old ghost. Going into the garden. There is a high white moon and the plane trees stand up in the blue air. He thinks they are very beautiful. His heart bursts with grief. He listens to Hal and by and bye he takes out the revolver and puts the spout in his mouth and shoots himself. Chapter XXXV. Rhoda sees Max and Maata and a lot of others after a concert. Maata speaks to her. There is only one thing. Are you happy. Life is not gay. Life is never gay. End of plan: August 2nd 1913. Characters. Maata Nelson Rhoda Bendall Mrs Bendall (her Mother)

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appendix a: plan of maata William Close Mrs Close Hal Close Maisie Close Philip, Pip Close Elena (Ellie) Thal Max Castello Rachael West Evershed The Greek boys Old Mrs Freeman (R.W.’s Mother) Mrs Banks (M’s landlady) Bessie Banks (daughter) Raspberry Nose Old Wintergreen May (Mrs Close’s servant)

Notes U Text: KMN, 1, pp. 248–55. 1. Our policy of not including crossed-out material from the notebooks (indicated by < >) has been ignored for this chapter plan, since it is conceivable that items may have been crossed out by KM once they had been written. Not including deleted material would leave this plan incomplete. 2. See p. 107, n. 2. 3. Halma was a board game invented in 1883 by an American surgeon at Harvard Medical School, similar in many ways to draughts or checkers. 4. The enormously popular three act farce by Brandon Thomas (1892).

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Appendix B: Unpublished Stories in King’s College London Archives

This group of previously unpublished stories became available only as the edition was about to go to press. The editors are indebted to Chris Mourant, who discovered them in the King’s College London Archives and so kindly made them available, to Dr Anna Snaith, and to King’s College London for permission to print them here. The typescripts are held in the archive of ADAM International Review, a journal founded in London by the Romanian Miron Grindea in 1941, and edited by him until his death in 1995. The typed manuscripts were given to Grindea by Ida Baker during the 1960s, together with the typescripts of several other KM stories which have all since been published. There were two issues of ADAM that printed extensive KM material: no. 300 (1965–6) and nos. 370–5 (1972–3). Whether the manuscripts acquired from Ida Baker were meant for either edition remains unclear. Further work on their provenance, why they were given to Grindea and why neither he nor anyone else ever published the four stories presented in this appendix is the subject of a paper in Volume 5 of Katherine Mansfield Studies, October 2013, by Chris Mourant.

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The Thoughtful Child and the Lilac Tree (1908) In this Spring weather a bird in the lilac tree on the lawn sings each day – a little brown bird – its song is about a fairy stream running through a dream forest. Nothing has ever enchanted the Thoughtful Child so much. She is transfigured this Spring and I look at her radiant little face with awe. The world is a bran tub of perpetual ‘dips’ and her astonishment at each fresh sweetness is so infectious that Mother and I feel it too, 529

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and even the white house, viewed from the garden, wears the most surprised expression – surely not entirely due to the glad absence of Winter curtains. Just now, for the Thoughtful Child, all life is centred in the blossoming lilac tree . . . her little child soul seems to have found its mate in the song of the brown bird. In the wood the Shadow children are full of energy after their winter sleep – all the trees having babies which must be looked after – flowers moving restlessly in the brown earth and begging them to please make the ground a little soft, and help them to pop through. The Thoughtful Child has told the Shadow Children about the lilac tree and they have paid it little visits in the evening but they are far too shy to venture on the lawn in sunshine and besides, they do not boast one sunbonnet between them. Hers do not fit them – much too big. Once upon a time she had a bonnet with a tape that pulled up at the top and the tape was broken so there was a little hole where a curl of her hair poked through. And she was trying the bonnet on a shadow child – a boy, too – so awkward – when he slipped his head right through the hole – and there he wears it to this day like a pink sprigged frock with the silly strings like trains wherever he walks. ‘But don’t be sad, Father dear, he thinks he feels perfectly beautiful.’ She is not wearing bonnets this Spring. Mother has bought her a wide straw hat trimmed with a little garland of green leaves and long strings. From early morning the lilac tosses its beautiful plumes and the scent – which is the very quintessence of Spring – floats like a pale mist across the lawn over the garden, and in through the muslin curtains . . . Mother is buttoning her into a ‘pinny’ – so stiff and. starched that she can barely peek at us over it, and seems to be walking about inside it and she suddenly claps her hands – ‘Oh, Father smell – ’ she and the pinny cannot stay in the house another weenty minute. The lawn is white with daisies – gold splashed with dandelions but where the lilac tree lives there is a little doormat of mauve bloom, and the song of the brown bird has turned us into an enchanted family. The house is a great castle – our commonest pebble path a bewildering maze – a labyrinth of gloomy shade – there is no fence – no hedge – no latched gate – but the garden stretches out glad hands to the whole Spring world. In the late afternoon the Thoughtful Child stands under the lilac tree her hands clasped – her little head thrown back – ‘blossoms falling on her curls. The wide hat at her feet is like a magic butterfly – and the brown bird keeps on singing. She is on tiptoe now – more than half fairy child herself . . . one green leaf from the tree floats right into her hands. She looks at it

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curiously. Has the brown bird sent her a present? Lo! it is a little green heart – the heart of the Spring. Notes U Text: TS King’s College London. Dedicated ‘To E.K.B.’ This and the following two stories were among those intended for the children’s book KM worked on but did not complete in Wellington in 1908. Her friend Edith Bendall (see p. 122, n. 1) was to illustrate the proposed volume. Another TS in the ADAM archive, ‘The Thoughtful Child. Her Literary Aspirations’, appears in this edition, pp. 119–22, the text taken from KMN, 1, pp. 204–6.

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The Thoughtful Child. In Autumn (1908) Now the feast of the Chrysanthemum is at hand. Red brown, purple, crimson, mauve and golden – the garden is flaming with these great lamps upon the bier of the dead Summer – their pungent yet mystic perfume floats like incense under the dome of the Autumn sky. All down the walks a fierce blossoming; the grey fence is alive with a glory of colour, and the bush near the front gate so weighted with white blossoms that, looking at it – we can already see the gaunt form of Winter, blowing on his fingers, stalking through our little fastnesses. The Thoughtful Child, standing on a chair by the window, looking at this riot of bloom called to us – ‘Father, Mother, the garden’s on fire.’ She is right. Over the white house a Virginia creeper has run like a thin sheet of flame and when she saw the sumac tree in the avenue – ‘I would like to warm my hands there, Father, it would nearly make toast.’ Her white furs have come out of the hat box – ‘a little smelly, Father dear, but such a comfy smell.’ She wears a ridiculously small red jacket over her white frocks and – ‘Look at my new woollen legs. Now I can walk twice as far as you because I’ve four.’ ‘Dear me,’ I sigh, complacently, thinking how soon I shall hear – ‘two lots of legs is rather heavy, Father dear.’ So up she goes on to my shoulder. ‘Come along, Honey, let us leave Mother and the white house and turn corners and look over tops – march together over the hills and far away – but you must hold tightly.’

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Now beyond the garden gate the road walks over a hill away from people and houses. ‘It’s running away from the shops,’ and we know, could we but walk far enough it would run right into the sea. ‘Does it go on then, Father dear?’ ‘Why, of course, right through a coral forest, pink and white where the Sea King’s daughters1 play “Here we go gathering sea weed grapes”, and blow the loveliest tunes through little silver shells. And, Thoughtful Child, if you did not stop to comb your curls with a golden comb or eat a little anemone jelly you would come right out the other side – a little damp, perhaps, but quite smiling. There you would find ladies sitting under big umbrellas reading “Little Black Sambo”2 to children with brown cotton gloves and veils over their faces – and that would be England . . . But we cannot go all that way now, dear. Mother would be quite anxious.’ Really a beautiful day . . . the blue sky is looking joyously at its clean face in the shining puddles. There is a dainty wind now hiding among the bushes, now ruffling the curls at the back of the Thoughtful Child’s neck – now turning the green grass into a little waving sea. We stop to pick a great spray of briar berries – ‘The ladies beads, Father’ – can she mean jewels? ‘Do you know, Thoughtful Child, that snuggled in each of these little red beds a rose family is hiding from the snow. And when the Spring comes, out they will pop – their pink skirts beautifully ironed and the sun will kiss their golden child faces.’ ‘I remember, Father, we saw one on a picnic and we put the smell in a book.’ ‘Oh yes, a little leaf in a Kate Greenaway book.’3 She agreed with me we could see a child in a daffodil frock take the blossoming bush by its pink branch handles – like a magic basket – and dance away with it over a green meadow. Now from the top of the hill there is a whole valley full of trees below us – pine trees – with their brown rug tucked round their big toes – a little bunch of oak trees – young things with an air of crisp daintiness about them which makes us shudder at the thought of the next wind storm. But the poplars are stiff and straight and naked already – like giant broom sticks for giant witches . . . ‘Oh, do not, I beg of you, Thoughtful Child, walk through a poplar grove in the night and in Autumn. Who knows but that you might see their huge, hag like forms rooting terribly at the trees – tearing them out of the dull earth – riding up over the face of the world and snatching at the stars with their claw like fingers.’ ‘Oh, look, Father dear, a sparrow – a little boy sparrow. Whistling on the top of that willow tree. Oh, isn’t he a darling Father dear, look at his fur blowin’ about.’

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I place her carefully on the top of a wooden fence – ‘hold on with both hands, dear’ – but she cannot recover from the sparrow. ‘Oh, Father, he looks as though he was waving a hanky at me. Such a baby thing! I wish I could hold him inside my jacket, here, and take him home – he’d be so warm.’ She looks at me – a little frown on her brow, such a divine, prophetic sweetness in her eyes, that the sun, who has been hiding behind a white cloud, rushes out, and kisses her. ‘Hold on tightly, Thoughtful Child, thank goodness your jacket is not unbuttoned. Before I can say “one o’clock” you and that sparrow would have blown up up on to that cloud and be riding round the blue sky “like on a merry-go-round”.’ She walked all the way back, ‘because it’s down’, and when we saw the ‘house’ right up to its neck in chrysanthemums and Mother by the gate – we ran. ‘Oh, Mother, I do want my dinner badly,’ said the Thoughtful Child – so she is very human after all. ‘Was it nice?’ asked Mother. ‘I love it every bit,’ she cried, dancing along the path in front of us. So you find the world a kind place, little daughter. You are not haunted by the decay of Autumn, you are not chilled by the paralysis of Winter. To you it is firelight, then the softest, gentlest sleep . . . And the white shroud is only a night gown – the bare earth – a bed for a little girl. My little Thoughtful Child – you are still looking out upon the world with the blue eyes of Spring, with the pink cheeks of Morning. Notes U Text: TS King’s College London. 1. KM draws on the Russian legend, ‘The Sea King’s Daughter’. 2. See p. 28, n. 1. 3. Kate Greenaway (1846–1901), the popular book illustrator and author, whose imaginary children were usually dressed in eighteenth-century fashions.

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Hand-in-Hand with the Thoughtful Child (1908) The Thoughtful Child returned home recently from a visit to Aunt Emily’s.

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‘It was so nice, Father. She has three kittens with trousers and a lady cat with a music and they all waggle themselves and sing a song.’ ‘Oh, not really, Thoughtful Child, that’s one of your make up stories, isn’t it, Honey?’ But she assured me she spoke the truth. ‘And one kitten has a blue necktie and a face quite like Mummy . . . and they live in a box with a window over it, and you turn them with a key.’ ‘What dears!’ I cried, and wrote to Aunt Emily for an explanation. But she sent me the whole family party in a box half as big as the Thoughtful Child’s nursery – and now we have spent nearly two hours breathlessly watching the lady cat with a music – the advanced Knickerbockered kittens – specially the little girl cat ‘with a face like Mummy’. They dance in a shameless vaudeville style, freely waving their legs and the lady cat with a really truly violin plays ‘tum-te-tumte-tum tina-tum-te’ in perfect time, over and over again, as long as the works will let her. Towards the end of the performance she gets very spasmodic, and, if you are not careful the kittens are left with their legs uncomfortably stuck high up in the air. ‘I think, Father,’ said the Thoughtful Child, when this delightful addition to the family had been put beddy bye, while lunch was being set, ‘this is far better than Jesus – ’ ‘Do you, dear.’ ‘Do you think Jesus had one, Father?’ ‘Maybe his Father made him something just as nice.’ ‘I do hope so, Father. I wonder if he thought the white kitten looked like his Mummy?’ ‘We don’t talk quite like that, dear. I’ve got a pepper-mint for a good girl.’ She climbed on to my knee, and ate it very slowly, frequently breathing in with great satisfaction. ‘Now it’s all Winter inside me, Daddy, – as cold as cold. Inside me I expect they’re putting on flannel petticoats and outside me they’ve given me a nainsook.’1 It sounded to me such a complicated statement that I did not enquire further into her tiring maids but made her run away and do ‘hands and faces’ before luncheon. In the afternoon we sat on the verandah she and I, she seated on the floor, her curls pinned up in a ‘bob’, her bare feet not much bigger than in the days when she walked up Mummy and the string of bright corals round her neck are not pinker than her cheeks. I, a father in a deck chair, watched her. She sat very still, a big tattered book on her knees.

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‘What are you reading, Daughter?’ ‘Oh, just things.’ ‘Here, show me the book.’ She came and stood beside my knee – I turned the pages, slowly, and read her a little piece here and there and explained the pictures. ‘Yes, that was a monkey with a hat on, feeding a baby with porridge in a spoon . . . I should think it would be frightened . . . Stolen the baby’s hat? I’m afraid you’re right. And that was an old man with a bird’s nest in his beard2 . . . No, she was quite right, Mummy would have been disgusted . . . But they certainly couldn’t help having plenty of crumbs . . . There was Jenny Wren at her wedding, with Cock Robin3 . . . Why a hanky over her face? Oh, it was a veil that ladies always wear then . . . How did she keep it on when she flew? I can’t think. She must have kept her head tucked under Cock Robin’s wing. And that was the old woman flying up to the moon in a basket4 . . . Our clothes basket, so it was . . . ’ ‘This is a very old book, Thoughtful Child. It belonged to your Mother when she was a little girl.’ ‘Oh, read me a great lot, Father.’ ‘Very well. But you must keep still and listen.’ She sat with her head pillowed against my shoulder, very still indeed, while I read her ‘Hush-a-bye-Baby’, and ‘See-saw, Marjory Daw’, and ‘Bye-Baby Bunting’, ‘I saw three ships a-sail-ing’,5 and many many others. What is the fascination and the charm in all these old, old rhymes? ‘Comb hair, comb, Daddy’s gone to plough If you want your hair combed Have it combed now.’6

I read that at least six times. ‘Oh, such a beautiful hymn, Father,’ and to me, too, it seemed fraught with most delicate suggestion. I saw the little child, standing on a chair by the window, looking out over the garden to the fields, and Daddy, ploughing even at that early hour, would see a light at the windows and say, ‘Oh, that’s my little daughter having her hair combed.’ Even the delicious adventures of Little Black Sambo and the irresponsible, intoxicating holiday glamour of Sam and Selina7 could not surpass these old verses . . . ‘Little girl, Little girl, where have you been Gathering roses to give to the Queen Little girl, Little girl, what gave she you She gave me a diamond as big as my shoe.’8

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‘But what does she do with the diamond, Father – and it has no smell . . . I would rather have the roses.’ ‘Of course you would, dear, but to you and all who belong to the Secret Society roses are diamonds.’ But here was another picture . . . the little girl curtseying low, half hidden behind the great bunch of roses, and the Queen, on her golden throne stretching out her hands for the flowers – her white hands – but she is used to thorns – and beside her, the diamond in a neat parcel tied with a ribbon . . . The Thoughtful Child fell asleep in my arms, and because she had one of my hands clasped firmly in hers she took me with her along the little white road, hedged with blossoming briar roses – past the green meadows where children played with white lambs and led them by a blue ribbon beside the buttercup fringed pools – past the wayside cottage where Mrs. Punch was pinning Toby’s9 clean neck frill on to the clothes line and Mr. Punch was reading ‘Ernie at the Seaside’ to the baby in long clothes – through the grey gates of Memory to the City of Long Ago. And the streets were grassgrown and rosy with daisies, and the houses, pink and white most magnificent affairs . . . I noticed in the poorer quarter the chimneys were solid red and white wooden blocks and several portentous looking residences of two stories had no suspicion of a staircase – but still they presented a bold face in the thin Spring sunshine . . . Everywhere we were greeted by children. ‘Oh, is that you, Thoughtful Child. You’re not here generally at this time of day.’ And by a pieman’s cart I noticed Simple Simon – ‘do give him a penny, Father.’ . . . There was a deafening noise of dogs barking, a shrill shrieking of laughter, a clatter of feet behind us . . . We looked round and beheld a procession – old men and young men – some in superb velvets and satins – some in tattered garments and behind them trooped Miss Muffet and Polly Flinders – who carried a little piece of velvet she had purchased from a beggar to mend her burnt clothes – and behind them Curly Locks – Jack and Jill – Little Bo-peep – The Old Woman who lived in a Shoe – marshalling her family along. They were all singing ‘Hark, Hark, the dogs do bark Beggars have come to town Some in rags and some in sags And some with velvet gown.’10

There was no defined time – it was more like a chant but the effect was intensely dramatic.

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‘But who are these,’ I asked. Some little children passed, in short frocks and white pinafores – such happy, happy children that I held my breath. ‘They are from the Child’s Garden11 round the corner,’ said the Thoughtful Child, ‘you know, Father?’ I nodded. ‘How very well you know your way about,’ I whispered to her. ‘What, Father dear?’ ‘Are you never lost, Daughter mine.’ She looked up at me – such a strange bright look – ‘Oh, no, Father dear, this is our town . . . ’ . . . Far away up in the air I saw the old woman in the basket. She was descending rapidly. In a moment or two – it seemed, she alighted and stood in the village street frowning and muttering. ‘Frightful lot of extra work these balloons are making,’ said she. ‘They send the currents all wrong.’ ‘The currents,’ said the Thoughtful Child – ‘is that where currants come from?’ Notes U Text: TS King’s College London. Dedicated ‘To F.A.D.’ 1. A soft muslin undergarment worn by children. 2. In a letter to her father, Harold Beauchamp, 9 July 1922, KM refers to the man ‘of whom it was said that “the birds of the air made a nest in his hair”’, from a poem she had read in the Melbourne publication, Cole’s Picture Book Annual (1883). (See CLKM, 5, p. 219, p. 220, n. 4.) Several of the following references may also be drawn from numbers of the children’s annual. 3. A rhyme from the eighteenth century, which ‘sang of Robin’s love for little Jenny Wren’. 4. The nursery rhyme beginning: ‘There was an old woman Tossed up in a basket Seventeen times as high as the moon.’ 5. All popular nursery rhymes, and the last a traditional Christmas carol. 6. Another nursery rhyme, to accompany hair-brushing. 7. Jean C. Archer, The Adventures of Samuel and Selina (1902), a collection of illustrated rhymes. 8. A variant, first published in the 1840s, of the better-known ‘Pussycat, where have you been?’. 9. The dog in the traditional puppet show of Mr Punch and his wife Judy.

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10. KM refers to several well-known nursery rhymes, before quoting the rhyme that goes back to the thirteenth century. 11. Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885).

•

A Little Episode (1909) (The one charm of the past is that it is past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen.) Lord Henry in ‘Dorian Gray’

Yvonne moved slowly up the long, brilliantly lighted Concert Hall. She bowed slightly to several acquaintances, faintly conscious of the men’s admiring glances and the women’s air of eager familiarity. Suddenly she felt a slight pull at her skirt, and, looking down, saw Mrs. Mason, a stout, moustached woman in an aggressively décolleté dress, smiling and holding out her hand. ‘Good evening, Mrs. Mason,’ said Yvonne, smiling also, and pressing the hand gently. ‘Good evening, Lady Mandeville . . . All alone? I hope that your husband’s not seedy?’ ‘He’s a little afraid that he’s catching a cold in the head,’ Yvonne replied, ‘so thought it better to stay by the fire and nurse himself.’ ‘O very wise, very wise indeed,’ said Mrs. Mason, ruffling the lace on her bosom until she had all the appearance of a pigeon, ‘sickness is so very prevalent just now.’ ‘Yes, wretchedly so,’ answered Yvonne. ‘My Ethel has had a frightful nosey cold and now it’s gone to her chest with a horrid loose cough. Of course she makes a great fuss but I know the secret of all these things – good strong mustard plasters.’ ‘Is that so,’ said Yvonne. She glanced at Mrs. Mason’s stout red arms and shivered slightly. ‘I hope you’re not catching anything,’ continued Mrs. Mason – ‘you’re looking a little puffy about the eyes, my dear.’ She turned to a small pale woman seated beside her, whose paleness was accentuated by a great cluster of scarlet geraniums and maidenhair fern which crept up her left shoulder . . . ‘May I introduce my friend Mrs. Wood – ’

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‘How do you do?’ said Yvonne, and moved to her seat. ‘What a distinguished looking woman,’ said Mrs. Wood, ‘such grace, Amelia – she looks like a Du Maurier1 picture, doesn’t she?’ ‘O yes, a dear little girl,’ said Mrs. Mason, fanning herself vigorously. ‘I knew her husband before they were married – a very good, practical fellow. Don’t you know about her?’ ‘No, nothing except that she is Lady Mandeville. Please tell me about her?’ ‘O she is a niece of Dr. and Mrs. Parratt – you know – those nice, quiet, thoughtful Church of England people in Bellevue Avenue – This girl was the daughter of Oswald Parratt – a younger brother and a complete failure. They tried him in everything – and at last he left all his family – went to Paris and took to Art.’ Mrs. Wood murmured a little exclamation – which might have been horror or pity or sympathy. ‘Then,’ said Mrs. Mason, pulling up her long gloves, and carefully smoothing out the creases, ‘he married some little obscure weed,’ her voice was full of withering contempt, ‘who died when this girl – Yvonne was born. They say the Father never recovered from that – and the child was brought up helter skelter in a dreadful way, until when she was seventeen her Father died. You remember Dr. and Mrs. Parratt were abroad at the time, so they rescued Yvonne – who hadn’t a penny – and brought her to Manchester.’ ‘Just like them,’ murmured Mrs. Wood, softly. ‘Yes. The child – at least she was half woman then – didn’t even know the Catechism – had no clothes and smoked cigarettes . . . It was a positive reformation. They changed her absolutely – and, as she was pretty, Geoffrey Mandeville fell in love with her and married her. Of course, as I told her, it was a mere fluke – the most wonderful good fortune. She, indeed, was perfectly dazed at the whole affair.’ ‘And has it been a success?’ ‘Turning out very well.’ ‘Have they any children?’ ‘No, not yet – but I should think they would, certainly – they can easily afford it, and Geoffrey is just that sort of man – good and earnest and very thorough . . . ’ Mrs. Wood glanced curiously at Yvonne – she leant back in her chair, her pale delicate face in repose wore a strangely listless expression – her fair, shining hair was arranged in fashionable puffs and curls. She wore a long black velvet kimono coat and looked the very embodiment of elegant languor. And the girl was thinking – ‘I am a damned fool to come here – I can’t think why I did, and it would have been so easy to get out of it. But it was too great

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a temptation . . . I wonder if he’ll be the same – I wonder if he’ll notice me – I shall certainly not dream of going to see him afterwards ...’ A man came on to the platform to open the piano – Yvonne stirred slightly in her seat – and opened and shut her hands convulsively. A moment later Jacques Saint Pierre was bowing before the audience. She did not look up until he had seated himself at the piano – then – – he had not changed – the same slim figure – the same profusion of black hair brushed straight back from his face – the pouting, eager mouth, the beautiful expressive Musician hands. A sudden wave of colour flooded her face – as he began to play. Recollections – exquisite bitter sweet memories began to flock past her – a motley – sad, fascinating troupe. She closed her eyes . . . Back again in her Father’s rooms – Jacques at the piano – Emil, half lying across the table – Jean by the fire – sketching them all . . . She, sitting huddled up by her Father – his arm round her, cheek to cheek, heart to heart. A thunderous, deafening burst of applause followed the Appassionata.2 The sharp, hard sound seemed to hurt her physically – seemed to fall upon her bruised, trembling soul – like brutal blows. Seized by an ungovernable impulse she rose and swiftly passed out of the hall. ‘Please direct me to the Artists’ Room,’ she said. The man looked at her enquiringly. ‘M. does not care to see – – – ’ ‘I am a personal friend of M. Saint Pierre. It is by appointment.’ The man bowed. They passed down a narrow stone passage – through swing doors – ‘second door to the right,’ said the attendant and left her there. Yvonne stood still a moment – she felt half suffocated – her heart seemed to be thudding – loudly and dully. Then she suddenly ran forward and knocked at the door. ‘Entrez,’ said a voice. She opened the door and stood, tremulous, tears trembling on her lashes, on the threshold. Jacques was standing before a little fire – smoking a cigarette. He looked up, inquiringly – and then, seeing her – ran forward and took her two hands – ‘Yvonne – Yvonne.’ ‘Jacques – Jacques.’ She was half laughing, half crying, inexpressibly, intoxicatingly beautiful . . . the little charming chrysalis of studio days had become

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this fascinating Society butterfly – and to her – this dear, affectionate boy had become ideal man – ideal musician –the symbol of all her happy life – her Paris days. ‘O,’ she said, impulsively – childishly. ‘I have been so miserable – ’ She felt she must tell him everything – confide in him – ask his advice – win his sympathy – She felt she must hear again that curious caressing tone of his voice . . . ‘O Jacques.’ He drew forward a chair. ‘Tenez,’ he said, ‘I must go and play again – Wait here – nobody will come near you – Here are some cigarettes and you must talk to me afterwards – ’ ‘O yes – yes,’ she cried. He left her, closing the door. Yvonne took a cigarette – lit it with a shadowy smile on her face – Very faintly she could hear the sound of the piano – If only they could see her now – all those fat, stolid Philistines – that idiot husband. When Jacques came back she looked like an adorable child caught mischief-making – the man caught his breath sharply – He was excited by the music – and his hands trembled perceptibly – He did not wish to hear a long, burdensome confession – he wanted to hold this woman and kiss her. Some tremendous passion seemed to be shaking him. ‘Well, tell me everything,’ he said, leaning against the mantelpiece and looking into the fire. Yvonne got up and stood beside him. She spoke very rapidly – in a low, even voice. ‘It’s only this Jacques. When I came from Paris here, O, I really thought I should have died – Jacques, I longed to die. I cried every night – but they had me in hand – they tortured me with everything. It went on for weeks – and until at last I made up my mind that whatever happened – I should leave them. But I hadn’t a penny – not even enough to pay postage stamps with – and no education – I couldn’t teach – or sew – or anything . . . ’ She put her hand on his sleeve – ‘They crushed all my ideals – all my hopes – they made me think of Paris – as Hell the fools – and Father the Arch Fiend. Bon Dieu – I was friendless – homeless – helpless – Then Lord Mandeville came – and engaged himself to me – yes, that’s the way to put it – and we’ve been married nine months.’ The man turned sharply – he was breathing hard. ‘Ah! it is true,’ said Yvonne – he thought he had never seen anyone so pale – ‘and – think – here I am. I thought – once I married, I would be freer –but I’m caged. This great heavy brute who whistles “Little Mary” out of tune the whole day long –and who doesn’t know a

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picture from a whisky advertisement. He’s my husband – Pity me,’ she cried. Like a child she looked at him and he suddenly caught her in his arms. She felt as though she had left the world altogether. He seemed to give her just that support she had been needing – Jacques bent down and whispered – ‘stay here until the Concert is over – and then I will walk home with you – Be a good girl and promise me.’ She assented – and he placed her back in the chair. She never moved again – never looked up – or stirred – until he stood before her in his long coat and soft hat. ‘Come along,’ he said. Out in the cold lighted streets they began talking again. He had drawn her arm through his and kept pressing her hand. Each time he did so a tremor ran through her – it was as though she held her life in her hand – and he crushed it – so. ‘Is there nowhere where we can talk?’ he said. Yvonne thought a moment – then she suddenly laughed. ‘Well, there’s my house – it’s a little gardener’s cottage not far from the gate – hidden by trees from the road and the house – There are just two rooms that I have furnished for myself – and Geoffrey has never been inside the door – we’ll go there.’ It was almost disappointing – Yvonne could feel unhappy no longer – she could no longer realise what had made her so wretched – Nothing on earth seemed to matter – except that she was alive and loving, and tremendously excited. ‘Jacques,’ she said – ‘you have all the air of the Great Life round you – you are making me feel again all the adorable irresponsibility of everything.’ He laughed shortly. It was making him half mad to walk thus – crushing her hand. They passed through the wide iron gates. Yvonne led the way – down an overgrown path – and into a little tree fringed space – There the house stood – a desolate place – she stooped down and groped for the key under the doormat. ‘Enter,’ she said, ‘and give me some matches.’ They walked into a small square room – Yvonne lit four candles on the mantelpiece. ‘How do you like it?’ she said, joyously. He looked round – here were all her Paris treasures – her Father’s pictures – little odd familiar pieces of drapery – a charcoal sketch of himself at the piano and then he turned and looked at Yvonne – Her fair shining hair glowed in the candle light – her mouth was scarlet – her eyes, curiously bright – She was still wrapped in her long cloak.

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Never before had Yvonne needed so much love in her life. Primitive woman she felt – with primitive impulses – primitive needs – all conventions – all scruples were thrown to the four winds. Jacques flung off his coat. Then he came forward – – She could not look at him – but stood – suddenly silent. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘let me help you off with this,’ and caught hold of her cloak. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured – suddenly and absurdly glad that her dress was beautiful. Then he caught hold of her – kissed her – roughly – repeatedly. ‘Let me go,’ she said, ‘let me go,’ yet lay passive in his arms. ‘Yvonne – Yvonne – look at me.’ She put her arms round his neck, and held up her face. ‘O, you are killing me,’ she moaned. Yvonne – dishevelled – flushed – entered the hall of her home – Lord Mandeville came out of the library. ‘Hallo, what’s up – what’s the matter,’ he said. ‘Have you had an accident – where’s the carriage.’ ‘I walked,’ said Yvonne ‘and the wind has blown me about.’ ‘You’ve cut your lip, or something,’ said Lord Mandeville, ‘there’s some blood on your chin.’ ‘It’s nothing,’ Yvonne answered. She slowly mounted the stairs – then looked back over her shoulder – ‘I’m going to bed.’ ‘O, alright, hurry up – I’m coming, too. Don’t you want anything to eat?’ ‘No, thank you.’ When she reached her room she turned on all the lights. There was a large bright fire burning in the grate – the curtains were drawn and the room felt hot – stifling. She ran to the glass – threw off her cloak and looked at herself, critically. ‘O, I have lived – I have lived,’ she cried – ‘And I shall see Jacques tomorrow of course – something beautiful and stupendous is going to happen – O I am alive again – at last!’ She threw off her clothes, hastily, brushed out her long hair, and then suddenly looked at the wide, empty bed. A feeling of intolerable disgust came over her. By Lord Mandeville’s pillow she saw a large bottle of Eucalyptus and two clean handkerchiefs. From below in the hall she heard the sound of bolts being drawn – then the electric light switched off – – She sprang into bed – and suddenly, instinctively with a little childish gesture – she put one arm over her face – as though to hide

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something hideous and dreadful – as her husband’s heavy ponderous footsteps sounded on the stairs . . . About the same time Jacques Saint Pierre sat in his rooms at the Hotel Manchester – writing a letter – ‘To-night – think of it – I saw Yvonne – she is quite a little Society lady – and I assure you – no longer one of us – But she bores me – she has the inevitable feminine passion for trying to relight fires that have long since been ashes – Take care, little one, that you do not – like wise. I hear her husband is very wealthy – and – what they call here – a “howling bore”. Adieu – chérie– I shall be with you in two days – if I manage to avoid the charming Yvonne – There is the penalty, you see, for being so fascinating. Jacques Saint Pierre.’ Notes U Text: TS King’s College London. The narrative conveys KM’s bitterness and disillusion following the musician Garnet Trowell’s abandoning her when pregnant, and her brief relationship with George Bowden, her husband of convenience. Alpers (Life, pp. 89–90), referring to a document which contains just a few draft lines of the story, reads it as direct evidence of KM’s own circumstances, concluding that the story seems ‘related to the marriage and the events that preceded it’ (p. 90). 1. George du Maurier (1834–96), cartoonist and satirical artist, and the author of Trilby (1894). 2. Beethoven’s piano sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 75 (1807).

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Index of First Lines

A day or two ago I was in a train. 29 A slow tranquil surrender of the Night Spirits [. . .] 67 A stretch of gorse clothing the hillside has caught fire. 66 All alone she was. All alone with her soul. 20 All that day the heat was terrible. 268 And for the first time in her short life, Phyllis wept. 113 Andreas Binzer woke slowly. He turned over on the narrow bed [. . .] 206 April 1st. Today the weather has been very dull and gray. 32 As Mitka turned into Wyndham Square he heard a beautiful clock strike ten. 398 At the corner of Oxford Circus Rosabel bought a bunch of violets [. . .] 133 Away beyond the line of the dark houses there is a sound [. . .] 78 Behind the house the hills rose in a great sweep of melancholy grandeur. 37 Bread soup was placed upon the table. 164 Certainly Sabina did not find life slow. 178 Cupid one day grew tired and fell asleep [. . .] 143 December, cold, dark and dreary. The wind was blowing all round his house [. . .] 63 Did we ever climb that tower, Vere, you and I? 98 ‘Do you think we might ask her to come with us’ [. . .] 234 Down the windy hill stalked Ole Underwood. 319 Each day they walked down Bond-street together [. . .] 86 Fifi was in bed. She had been there so long [. . .] 35 Frau Binzer and her mother sat at the dining-room table [. . .] 291 Frau Fischer was the fortunate possessor of a candle factory [. . .] 193 Getting ready was a terrible business. 184 ‘Good-evening,’ said the Herr Professor, squeezing my hand [. . .] 214 Guy Gaythorn knocked the ash from his cigar end into the fire [. . .] 109 545

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GWENNIE: Hallo, old dear! 221 He had lived there a very long time [. . .] 100 He met her again on the Pier at Eastbourne [. . .] 143 He told himself that he had managed that rather neatly [. . .] 140 He was a tall, stately pine-tree. So tall, so very tall [. . .] 10 He was but a child when he first saw Her. 13 I am afraid I must be very old-fashioned. 17 I can never forget the Thistle Hotel. 89 I look out through the window. A rhododendron bush sways [. . .] 140 I sat at the table writing letters. 288 I stand in the manuka scrub, the fairy blossom. 93 I think it must be the umbrellas which make us look ridiculous. 175 ‘I was never happy’, Huia said, leaning back wearily and closing his eyes. 61 In a very short time now the Thoughtful Child is going to take to pothooks. 119 In this Spring weather a bird in the lilac tree on the lawn sings [. . .] 529 It happened that on Juliette Delacour’s fourth birthday [. . .] 107 It is a sensation that can never be forgotten, to sit in solitude [. . .] 138 It is evening, and very cold. From my window the laurestinus bush [. . .] 83 It is raining. Big soft drops splash on the people’s hands and cheeks [. . .] 435 It was a big bare house surrounded with pine trees. 16 It was the old story of the woodcutter’s daughter [. . .] 198 It was visiting afternoon in a London hospital. 12 It was wonderful how quickly Rose Eagle forgot the first fourteen years of her life. 371 K.T. and her sister were walking down a road [. . .] 388 Life was a very vague scheme of things until Pearl Button went to school [. . .] 91 Lying thus on the sand, the foam almost washing over my hands [. . .] 110 Many, many miles from here, my little Saxons [. . .] 15 Marina stood at the scullery door and called ‘Pat, Pat’. 97 ‘Max, you silly devil, you’ll break your neck’ [. . .] 251 Millie stood leaning against the verandah until the men were out of sight. 326 MRS BUSK: I do hope I’m not late dear, but I’ve just had my hair washed 458

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Mrs Preston sat at the window waiting for Rachael to return from school. 365 1) Now a certain young man of the city fell sick. 146 Now the feast of the Chrysanthemum is at hand. 531 ‘Now, when, in the name of fortune, am I to see you?’ 102 Oh dear, how she wished that it wasn’t night-time. 422 ‘Oh, mother, it is still raining, and you say I can’t go out.’ 3 Old Tar must have begun building his house when he was about five years old. 341 On poetry afternoons grandmother let Mary and me [. . .] 168 On the stroke of nine o’clock Mr. and Mrs. De Voted [. . .] 261 On waking next morning Käthie slipped out of bed [. . .] 94 Once upon a time the Boy planted a seed in a little plot [. . .] 255 A. Once upon a time there was a nice, sweety, chubby little girl [. . .] 18 Pearl Button swung on the little gate in front of the House of Boxes. 285 Pearl had ridden far out of the town, along the road that crept like a white ribbon [. . .] 71 Rain came suddenly from a swollen sky [. . .] 304 Rewa felt that she had entered upon a new life, that she was purified, reborn. 127 Scene: A circular room with dull purple hangings. 116 She is like St Anne. Yes, the concierge is the image of St Anne [. . .] 439 She lay in bed, still, straight, her hands clasped above her head [. . .] 389 She sat on the broad window-sill, her hands clasped loosely in her lap. 99 She unpacked her box and then went into the sitting room. 76 She was just beginning to walk along a little white road [. . .] 158 Suddenly – dreadfully – I wake up. What has happened? 454 The girl came up on deck to find Dieppe like the mouth [. . .] 150 The landlady knocked at the door. 242 ‘The little town lies spread before the gaze of the eager traveller’ [. . .] 229 The servant girl, wearing a red, sleeveless blouse, brought in the samovar. 277 The servant who opened the door was twin sister [. . .] 322 The sound of rain woke Rhoda Bendall. 344 The sun streamed through the night nursery window [. . .] 24 The Thoughtful Child returned home recently [. . .] 533 The town clock was striking half-past twelve [. . .] 5 ‘There are two new guests arriving this afternoon’ [. . .] 189

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There is a very unctuous and irritating English proverb [. . .] 331 There is always something wonderfully touching [. . .] 392 There was not an inch of room for Lottie and Kezia in the buggy. [Aloe] 467 There were two orchards belonging to the old house. 451 They are a ridiculous company in this brown holland world [. . .] 122 They are such a subtle combination of the artificial and the natural [. . .] 84 They had lived together for a very long time – Father, Mother and she [. . .] 124 They were walking in a leisurely fashion up the stairs. 7 ‘Third storey – to the left, Madame,’ said the cashier, handing me a pink ticket. 336 This family began very modest with Mamma, extremely fat [. . .] 438 Through the Autumn afternoon – I sat before the fire in the Library [. . .] 82 Through the wild Winter afternoon Carlotta at the piano sang of love. 66 To the little girl he was a figure to be feared and avoided. 301 Vera Margaret, Charlotte Mary and K.M. were cleaning out the doll’s house. 64 Viewed from the drawing-room door, the members of the ‘Advanced’ [. . .] 266 We seem to have been up since early morning. 280 ‘Well, now, what have you written down?’ said Adrian [. . .] 311 Well. The Thoughtful Child and The Boy [. . .] 73 What! It can’t be six o’clock. Dear, dear, how time flies. 22 Whether he had forgotten what it felt like, or his head had really grown [. . .] 373 ‘Who is he?’ I said. ‘And why does he sit always alone’ [. . .] 172 Why can’t I change my hair ribbon on Wednesday afternoons. 433 ‘You got three-quarters of an hour,’ said the porter. 224 ‘You’re a sweet creature, aren’t you,’ said Nina [. . .] 462 Youth and Age walked hand in hand beneath the trees. 139 Yvonne moved slowly up the long, brilliantly lighted Concert Hall. 538

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Index of Stories

About Pat 29 Advanced Lady, The 234 Almost a Tragedy: The Cars on Lambton Quay 140 Aloe, The 467 At ‘Lehmann’s’ 178 At the Club 266 Attempt, An 97 Autumns: I 451 Autumns: II 454 Bains Turcs 336 Baron, The 174 Beautiful Miss Richardson, The 433 Being a Truthful Adventure 229 Birthday, A 206 Blaze, A 251 Brave Love 398 Child-Who-Was-Tired, The 158 Dark Hollow, The 462 Die Einsame (The Lonely One) 20 Education of Audrey, The 102 Enna Blake 3 Epilogue I: Pension Seguin 322 Epilogue II 331 Fairy Story, A 198 Festival of the Coronation, The 221 Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding 184 Frau Fischer 193 Germans at Meat 164 God, One Day on Mount Olympus, A 143 Great Examination, The 7 Green Goggles 277 Green Tree: A Fairy Story, The 255 Hand-in-Hand with the Thoughtful Child 533 549

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Happy Christmas Eve, A 5 ‘He met her again on the Pier at Eastbourne’ 143 His Sister’s Keeper 150 House, The 304 How Pearl Button was Kidnapped 285 Hydrangeas 389 ‘I am afraid I must be very old-fashioned’ 17 ‘ “I was never happy”, Huia said’ 61 In a Café 86 In Summer 113 In the Botanical Gardens 84 Indiscreet Journey, An 439 ‘It was a big bare house’ 16 Journey to Bruges, The 224 Juliet 37 Juliette Delacour 107 K.T. and her sister 388 L’Incendie 66 Les Deux Étrangères 35 Leves Amores 89 Little Episode, A 538 Little Girl, The 301 Little Governess, The 422 Luftbad, The 175 Maata 344 Man, the Monkey and the Mask, The 100 Marriage of Passion, A 261 Mary 168 Memories 63 Millie 326 Misunderstood 12 Modern Soul, The 214 My Potplants 32 New Dresses 291 Night Came Swiftly 71 Old Cockatoo Curl 311 Old Tar 340 Ole Underwood 319 ‘On waking next morning’ 94 One Day 24 Pine Tree, The Sparrows, and You and I, The 10 Prose 146 Rewa 127 Rose Eagle 371

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Rough Sketch 438 She 13 She and the Boy; or the Story of the Funny-Old-Thing 73 ‘She sat on the broad window-sill’ 99 ‘She unpacked her box’ 76 Silhouettes 83 Sister of the Baroness, The 189 Something Childish But Very Natural 373 Spring in a Dream 288 Spring Pictures 435 Stay-laces 458 Story of Pearl Button, The 91 Study: The Death of a Rose 138 Summer Idyll 67 Swing of the Pendulum, The 242 Tale of the Three, The 64 Tales of a Courtyard 280 ‘There is always something wonderfully touching’ 392 Thoughtful Child, The 124 Thoughtful Child and the Lilac Tree, The 529 Thoughtful Child. Her Literary Aspirations, The 119 Thoughtful Child. In Autumn, The 531 Tiredness of Rosabel, The 133 True Tale, A 16 Two Ideas with One Moral 18 Unexpected Must Happen, The 109 Vignette: By the Sea 110 Vignette: ‘I look out through the window’ 140 Vignette: Summer in Winter 66 Vignette: Sunset Tuesday 93 Vignette: They are a ridiculous company 122 Vignette: Through the Autumn Afternoon 82 Vignette: Westminster Cathedral 98 Vignettes 78 Woman at the Store, The 268 Yellow Chrysanthemum, The 116 Young Country 365 Your Birthday 22 ‘Youth and Age’ 139

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