Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles)
what face he would be wearing.
They flocked over, when they saw him in the garden, all ready to ride in the barrow or on his back. The three little Beauchamp girls would drift in, dressed alike in galatea blouses, white or striped; and blue smocked jumper dresses. They were very careful of those dresses; they always wore them for a whole week, and yet they looked neat and fresh. Lena Monaghan’s mother used to point out how clean the little Beauchamp girls were. Lena’s dress lasted only two days. But Lena didn’t know — her own mother didn’t know — the “terrible times” that Kass had over hers; and the conspiracies with the grandmother over clean pinafores and lost hair-bows. But all was forgotten at Uncle Fred’s. If Vera, grown up and lady-like, hurried on, and Chaddie, gay and elfish, danced ahead, while Kass lagged behind crying,”Wait for me!” Uncle Fred had some surprising transformation. She forgot to say,”I can’t go fast like the others; I’m too fat”; for he could go fast or slow to suit the child. And he made the most astonishing changes in his hair! Sometimes he had a little beard, sometimes a moustache, sometimes little sidewhiskers. Then when they had got used to the two of those, he would appear with only one. He was like the little beds in his garden: some were beautifully tended; others were bristling with weeds. Great times the children had in the paddocks with him. Wherever he was there was a party. The house and the garden rang with fun. He loved to get up little theatricals for the children, and he seemed to have boundless delight and energy for everything. He would dress up for the parts, and his long thin legs seemed to be everywhere.
When a ball was held at the Parochial Hall, they dressed in some of these costumes. Kass was “Mrs. Tom Thumb,” with the grandmother’s cap and an antimacassar apron over her neat long black dress. Marie was “Mr. Tom Thumb.” She was allowed to wear the uncle’s chain and tie, and he made a tremendous white walrus pioneer’s moustache and glued it on for her.
Rose Ridler helped on these occasions. Rose was an orphan who had been taken by Mrs. Waters for a maid when she was eighteen; and she had become not only a daughter, but a manager and staff and companion, all in one. She was a small dark person, with a quick dry wit. She and Mr. Waters always had a joke between them. In fact, they had a joke that ran like a serial with new chapters added from day to day. And Rose never forgot any of it. She adored him as the children adored him, and she followed him about at home as children collected after him when he went down the street. Every Karori child went to Rose with a cut finger, as they went to Mr. Waters for sympathy and fun.
Rose helped in the garden, too; but in the house she not merely helped, she managed it all. Mrs. Waters could cook well; she said she “could make soup with her eyes shut,” and good soup it was, too. But Rose Ridler’s gingerbread was Karori history. The children were allowed to scrape the dish and lick the spoon; and they invariably wondered why — when it all was the same dough — the top tasted smooth and shiny and sweetish and like top; and the underneath tasted like underneath — bity and saltish and rough.
On Sundays, Rose Ridler taught Sunday School at the Parochial Hall, at half past two in the afternoon. The little girls went in their Sunday pinafores. The Grandmother took them to church in the morning, and they sat in a stiffly starched row listening to Mr. Waters as he led the Karori Church Choir. If they went in the evening with their father, they had always to carry a lantern. There were only foot-paths and no street lights in Karori. At home they used big lamps of the same sort as the little lamp in the doll’s house.
When the aunt lay in the darkened room, with her air of resignation — while Rose Ridler managed the house, and Mr. Waters charmed the children — had she a real premonition of tragedy, after all? Yet when it came, she met it valiantly. It seemed almost as though she had performed her suffering beforehand, while she had time for it.
In November, 1918, Vera came, on the Niagara, on a visit to Wellington. By some trick of fate, that ship brought the first of the post-war influenza to New Zealand. When word came that Vera was ill, Mr. Beauchamp and Mr. Waters got permission to go to her. A few days afterward both men were stricken with the disease. A week later Mr. Waters was dead.
3
What was remarkable about Pat Sheehan that he should for ever afterward stalk through the pages that told of Karori? To the grown-ups — nothing. Patrick Sheehan was the handy man whom Mr. Beauchamp had found to drive him to town with the phæton and the grey mare; to care for the pony,”General,” which he thought “too dangerous for the children to ride”; to work in the paddocks and orchards of “Chesney Wold.” He was just an Irish immigrant to New Zealand — another of the floating ones.
To the children, his distinction was in his Irishness: his power through fun and fantasy to enter their world.
His Irishness appeared in his stories; and the small girl, who long before had been companioned by “the shadow children thin and small,” found familiar country here:
“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 gumtree, picked some leaves from the topmost branches, and then crept down again. ‘You see,’ Pat would say … ‘it’s from blue gums that you got eucalyptus, and the old man suffered from cold, living in such dampness’.”
When she was very small she was like another Katya in Tchehov’s A Tedious Story, which — when she found it in later life — became part of herself:
“Her eyes invariably expressed the same thing: ‘Everything that goes on in this world, — everything is beautiful and clever’.”
Like another Katya, too, she was gradually to discover that thieves had been at the “bag full of rainbow hopes” which she thought to have hidden safely.
But Pat belonged to the time of rainbows, and all that he did was remarkable, and curious, and full of delight:
“He used to hoist me up on 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 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 … the way in which the Dukes of Ireland balanced salt upon their knives.”
Pat had the power to enter not only the children’s world, but the world of Kezia, which was another country entirely:
“I played a game which had no end and no 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.”
Already this little girl had begun to know loneliness. She was surrounded by three sisters and a small brother; by a father, mother, grandmother, aunt. She lived in a busy, healthy household, among happy people. Yet it was not enough. She was of the lonely ones who must discover (at a heavy price) that so few — so far between — are “her people.” She was of the unique ones who must create their own world:
“I thought of the time when I was quite a child” (she wrote in her first year at College),”and lived in the great old rambling house that has long since been removed and its place taken by other houses more useful but far less dear. The old house had an extraordinary fascination for me. I always thought of it as a species of ogre who controlled all our garden and our meadows and our woods.
“‘May I go and play in the hayfield to-day?’ I used to say, and gaze up timidly at its stern, unblinking face, and it never failed to give me an answer. The great thing about it that puzzled me was that it never closed its eyes….
“Down at the bottom of our garden ran a little stream, and here I spent many happy hours. With my shoes and socks off, and my frock tucked high all around me, I used to wade, and attempt to catch certain very tiny fish that swam and played in its depths — or rather, its shallow places. If I did catch one, I always put it into