Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles)
why I so longed to have somebody to show it to. I had gone all through it myself, from the kitchen to the dining-room, up into the bedrooms with the doll’s lamp on the table, heaps and heaps of times.
“‘When will she play with it?’ I asked grandmother. ‘By-and-by, darling.’
“It was spring. Our garden was full of big white lilies. I used to run out and sniff them and come in again with my nose all yellow.
"Can’t she go out?’
“At last, one very fine day, she was wrapped in the warm shawl and grandmother carried her into the cherry orchard, and walked up and down under the falling cherry flowers. Grandmother wore a grey dress with white pansies on it. The doctor’s carriage was waiting at the door, and the doctor’s little dog, Jackie, rushed at me and snapped at my bare legs. When we went back to the nursery and the shawl was taken away, little petals like feathers fell out of the folds. But Gwen did not look, even then. She lay in grandmother’s arms, her eyes just open to show a line of blue, her face very white, and the one tuft of goldy hair standing up on her head.
“All day, all night grandmother’s arms were full. I had no lap to climb into, no pillow to rest against. All belonged to Gwen. But Gwen did not notice this; she never put up her hand to play with the silver brooch that was a half-moon with five little owls sitting on it; she never pulled grandmother’s watch from her bodice and opened the back by herself to see grandfather’s hair; she never buried her head close to smell the lavender water, or took up grandmother’s spectacle case and wondered at its being really silver. She just lay still and let herself be rocked.
“Down in the kitchen one day old Mrs. MacKelvie came to the door and asked Bridget about the poor little mite, and Bridget said, ‘Kep’ alive on bullock’s blood hotted in a saucer over a candle.’ After that I felt frightened of Gwen, and I decided that even when she did play with the doll’s house I would not let her go upstairs into the bedroom — only downstairs, and then only when I saw she could look.
“Late one evening I sat by the fire on my little carpet hassock and grandmother rocked, singing the song she used to sing to me, but more gently. Suddenly she stopped and I looked up. Gwen opened her eyes and turned her little round head to the fire and looked and looked at, and then — turned her eyes up to the face bending over her. I saw her tiny body stretch out and her hands flew up, and ‘Ah! Ah! Ah!’ called the grandmother.
“Bridget dressed me next morning. When I went into the nursery I sniffed. A big vase of the white lilies was standing on the table. Grandmother sat in her chair to one side with Gwen in her lap, and a funny little man with his head in a black bag was standing behind a box of china eggs.
“‘Now!’ he said, and I saw my grandmother’s face change as she bent over little Gwen.
“‘Thank you,’ said the man, coming out of the bag. The picture was hung over the nursery fire. I thought it looked very nice. The doll’s house was in it — verandah and balcony and all. Gran held me up to kiss my little sister.”
Of course, the picture over the fireplace would have helped to keep the recollection real; though, as a matter of fact, it did become a bit confused, for the cherry trees belonged to Karori, several years later — not to Wellington; and old Mrs. MacKelvie belonged to Karori, too. But the birth of the little sister, that spring, was really true, and that first sense of threatened security was poignant enough — the child’s first realisation of aloneness — of standing outside looking in upon the one loved and secure who had taken her place — was keen and sharp enough, to be remembered always. The Grandmother was her security, and was still to be, as she looked back, twelve years later, from illness and loneliness in Bavaria:
“The only adorable thing I can imagine is for my grandmother to put me to bed and bring me a bowl of hot bread and milk, and standing with her hand folded, the left over the right, say in her adorable voice, ‘There, darling, isn’t that nice?’ To wake later and find her turning down the bedclothes to see if my feet were cold, and wrapping them in a little pink singlet, softer than cat’s fur…. Alas!”
While she was still too little to “have taken to pothooks,” and so hadn’t yet folded herself away into books (though she was not too young to have heard The Child’s Garden of Verses), what did this aloof, rather silent and dreamy child find to charm her into her own world?
Let her tell it herself as she remembered, in flying fragments, and as she wrote it — before ever she had left New Zealand — for a friend who kept it until this day. In her memory, no doubt, it was idealised, sentimentalised even, but beneath it is the real movement of a child’s mind, and the movement of the mind of a real child.
“The Child, standing on a chair by the window calls: ‘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; it would nearly make toast.’
“Her white furs have come out of the hat box—’ a little smelly, but such a comfy smell.’ She wears a 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.’ …
“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?’
“‘Why, of course, right through a coral forest, pink and white where the Sea King’s daughters play “Here we go gathering sea weed grapes,” and blow the loveliest tunes through little silver shells. And, if you do not stop to comb your curls or eat a little anemone jelly you would come right out on the other side. There you would find ladies sitting under big umbrellas, reading “Little Black Sambo” to children with brown cotton gloves and veils over their faces — and that would be England.’ …
“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 — 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 walk through a poplar grove at night 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, a sparrow — a little boy sparrow. Whistling on the top of that willow tree. Look at his fur blowing about…. He looks as though he was waving a hanky at me. I wish I could hold him inside my jacket here, and take him home — he’d be so warm.’
“She walks all the way back, ‘because it’s down.’ …
“So she finds the world a kind place. She is not haunted by the decay of Autumn, not chilled by the paralysis of Winter. To her 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.”
“The Child returned home from a visit to Aunt Emily’s.
“‘It was so nice. She has three kittens with trousers and a lady cat with a music and they all waggle themselves and sing a song.’
“‘And one kitten has a blue necktie and a face like Mummy.’
“Then Aunt Emily sent the whole party in a box half as big as the Child’s nursery….
“In the afternoon … she sat very still a big tattered book on her knees.
“‘What are you reading?’
“‘Oh, just things.’
“‘Here, show me the book.’ The pages were turned, slowly, and little pieces read here and there:
“‘Yes,