Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles)
Maata was not typical, either of the Maoris or the blending of Maori and English blood; partly, perhaps, because her social position was unique. Maata was said to be a Maori princess in her own right, as well as heiress to Maori holding, and very wealthy. She had lived in the city, and had been educated as an English girl; yet there was little of the English in Maata’s assured presence; and none of the English in her hot, glowing eyes.
They were wide-set, amazing in their dark fiery beauty. She knew how to use them, too. Something in the way her lips curved upward when she smiled was very telling. She appeared rather Spanish with her warm skin, and nose a trifle spatulate, yet fine; and the rich, bright colours she wore. A glowing, passionate stream coursed through her veins; her skin looked warm; it was hot to the touch from the secret fire that flashed so beautifully in her eyes. The Maoris would have said she possessed mana— “personal magnetism.”
To all the girls there was something romantic about Maata — something in herself, even apart from the title of “Princess.” And Kathleen loved her. Maata imparted to her a warmth as no one else could at that time. She caught some of the fire and felt it fly through her own blood. She felt ardent toward Maata — she felt she adored her— “she worshipped her.”
Yet because Kathleen had been conventionally brought up, the girls were forced to keep their meetings clandestine.
Years after — in the autumn of 1913 — Katherine Mansfield drafted a novel with Maata, for its central character. In Paris that winter she wrote the first chapters of Maata, catching something of the flame and the passion — something of the Maata of those days when they both were in their teens; but her writing was interrupted unexpectedly, and she never was able to complete the “novel.”
Maata, herself, despite her fiery beauty and her expensive education in “town” — or perhaps because of these things — lived a brief and varied and unhappy life. Her conjugal history was not unlike that of Armena down in the country of Marlborough Sounds.
CHAPTER VII
FIRST LOVE
“All love is sweet;
Given or returned. Common as light is love,
And its familiar voice wearies not ever.
They who inspire it most are fortunate
… but they who feel it most
Are happier still.” — P. B. S.
Kathleen M. Beauchamp 27/6/03. (Album.)
1
BY 1903, when she was thirteen, Kathleen Beauchamp was developing emotionally with almost terrifying rapidity. Perhaps her friendship with Maata had begun her awakening. She began to be self-conscious, to perceive, and even to analyse the effect of her own emotions. As she looked back three years later at this consciousness, she recorded some of the moods and emotions, thinly veiling the record as a “novel” in which she called herself “Juliet.”
There had already been the birthday when she was given a doll’s pram, and “in a rage let it go hurling by itself down the grassy slope outside the conservatory.” And one of her friends remembered that:
“She was very excitable in those days and often in a furious rage. I remember one day she gave a squeel of rage and pinched her sister Vera for some small trifle.”
She, though finding these moments inexplicable at the time, afterward with searching sincerity before herself, concluded:”Strangely enough these fits are Father and Leslie over again.”
But this was her immediate record in Juliet:
“‘We’ve told Father all about it, Juliet,’ said Margaret. ‘And Father’s fearfully angry.’ Mary nodded. Juliet slipped the thing down the front of her sailor blouse. She had no definite idea of what she had been intending, but her head was full of strange, unreasonable impulses. She was feeling slightly sorry for her breach of self-control in that it incurred a long interview with her Father and with all probability some degrading issue — no jam for a week, or to bed at seven o’clock until she apologised. She walked slowly to the house, up the broad staone 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 too wholly successful acts of violence, she had retired to the sloping lawn at the extreme end of the garden, where she lay down comfortably and had some jam — Margaret and Mary, still smoking from the shock to their sensitive little systems, had rather rejoiced in the search for her, and especially in the knowledge that Mr. Blakewell was foaming up and down …”
Behind it, in part, was the childish longing — of which Katherine spoke often in later life — to be understood: to feel the warmth of immediate and instinctive protection, of the nest of safety which she invariably found with her Grandmother, less frequently with her mother. In childhood, save with the Grandmother, she was a prey to the feeling that she was a pariah. Part of the preciousness of the portrait of her Grandmother as a newly-married bride which she possessed was that it had been given to her by her mother “at a time when she loved me.” The phrase is eloquent.
“It was the freedom of those days” (she wrote in London in 1908)”the knowledge that — an she would — she could shake from her all the self-forged chains — banish all — and pillow her head in her Mother’s lap. All that unbelievably gone now.”
“An she would” — but she had the sensitive pride of the child who is marked as being “different”; and she wore (even then, at times) the mask which was to become her frequent protection before strangers in later years. She was not — and she knew she could not be — an exhibition child. She could not play the part which too often grown-ups unconsciously demand that their children shall play. But her longing to have her own role, and to give love and to receive it, was soon to find expression. It was only too ready to burst forth in a passion of adolescent love.
2
As nothing can stale the wonder of love as it suddenly flowers at fourteen, so there is nothing to prepare for it. It is a miracle. All else has had its warning, its intimations, some faint echo in the consciousness from experience at an age before perception; or some “memory” before consciousness began. But adolescent love comes from the unknown. Who can say it is less “real” than “real love” (when it comes); that it is less keen?
“I am alone in the house…. Footsteps pass and repass — that is a marvellous sound — and the low voices — talking on — dying away. It takes me back years — to the agony of waiting for one’s love.”
When Katherine first heard Arnold Trowell play the ‘cello, he was already a “wunderkind.” Gerardy had heard him; he must be sent to Frankfort (the Master said) to study at the Hoch Conservatorium under Hugo Becker. Not only was he to be the youngest pupil receiving instruction from that celebrated teacher (Arnold was fifteen), but the first to become a pupil without having gone through a preparatory course at the Conservatorium. He was Wellington’s acknowledged genius; the city itself was raising the funds to send him abroad to study.
Katherine met him at her own house at a “musical” (as Juliet calls it in her “novel”). What must have been the effect on one who had all the unawakened responses to art in a country which had had no art to offer? It is doubtful whether she had ever heard a ‘cello (she herself says that she had not). There was no music; there were no plays or pictures or new books in Wellington in those days.
Fortunately, we possess in the first chapter of Juliet, Kathleen’s own account