Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles)
They exchanged glances, some of them, and laughed:”Aren’t they putting on a lot of style with those big instruments!”
It had been made somewhat difficult for the girls on their return from London, not because their father was a self-made man — in this young country everyone was self-made — but he had made himself more rapidly than most, and when, after the girls’ return,”he took that big house in Fitzherbert Terrace,” some Wellington circles resented it. Nor was it customary, at that time, for girls to be sent “home” to England to be educated. The immediate consequence of this estrangement was that they were thrown back, more than ever, upon their own family life, and upon their immediate friends.
Their musical evenings — an outstanding institution in a community dependent entirely upon its own resources for diversion — often ended with a dance. Thrilling event! Years later Kathleen could capture even the anticipation of “a family dance” :
“The excitement began first thing that morning by their father suddenly deciding that, after all, they could have champagne. What! Impossible! Mother was joking!
“A fierce discussion had raged ever on this subject since the invitations were sent out, Father pooh-poohing — and refusing to listen, and Mother, as usual siding with him when she was with him: (‘Of course, darling: I quite agree’) and siding with them when she was with them: (‘Most unreasonable. I more than see the point.’) So that by the time they had definitely given up hope of champagne, and had focussed all their attention on the hock cup instead. And now, for no reason whatever, with nobody saying a word to him — so like Father! — he had given in.
“‘It was just after Zaidee had brought in our morning tea. He was lying on his back, you know, staring at the ceiling, and suddenly he said:”I don’t want the children to think I am a wet blanket about this dance affair. If it’s going to make all that difference to them, if it’s a question of the thing going with a swing or not going with a swing I’m inclined to let them have champagne. I’ll call in and order it on my way to the Bank.”’
“‘My dear! What did you say?’
“‘What could I say? I was overcome. I said:”That’s very generous of you, Daddy dear,” and I placed the entire plate of cut bread and butter on his chest. As a kind of sacrifice to the darling. I felt he deserved it and he does so love those thin shaves of bread and butter.’
“‘Can’t you see the plate,’ cried Laurie, ‘gently rising and falling on his pyjama jacket?’
“‘They began to laugh, but it really was most thrilling. Champagne did make all the difference — didn’t it? Just the feeling it was there gave such a different…. Oh, absolutely!”
It was not of this, but of another sketch from the same period of memory — Her First Ball — that she said:
“I have been writing about a dance this afternoon, and remembering how one polished the floor was so thrilling that everything was forgotten.”
Then there was the dance itself — the big bare, flower-filled room, cleared; an impromptu orchestra playing by the lamplight which threw such shadows over the wide sleeves and top-knots of the girls; and the boys whom they had known all their lives — now half grown, stiff in “Sunday suits,” coming to ask for the waltzes and lancers; Siegfried Eichelbaum, Cheviot Bell,”Chummie,” and the Nathans who used to live next door.
George Nathan asked Kass for a dance on one of these evenings.
She answered abruptly:”I know you hate me! Why do you ask me to dance?”
He was surprised, but not nonplussed, being one of those stout, hearty lads who laugh easily.
“But I don’t hate you!” he said.
And he didn’t. He was thinking he couldn’t say she was attractive. He liked the slinky type, and she was plump, and had a quick way of speaking at you so you never knew what she was going to say.”She frightens people away,” he decided, as he crossed the room for another of Godber’s meringues.
5
How differently each of her friends saw Kathleen Beauchamp. It was so all of her life. Few of her friends “knew” her: she had an outward chameleon quality by which she could match herself to the individual and the situation, until her acquaintances were baffled — unable to agree “who she was.” A certain sure intuition made her protect herself from most of them. Few knew anything of her life beyond their own immediate part in it. She completed, rounded off, her experiences quickly; she passed rapidly from one circle to another; she seldom mentioned her earlier life to the new group, and since she really was a different person in the various stages of her swift development she left her acquaintances with widely divergent impressions. To herself she was like one in a train who, even as he waves to those left behind on the platform, is seeing the new destination which they would never know. She often said to Ida:”I’ve finished with all that; now let’s forget it!”
During most of her life she made her friends among those who had an artistic aim corresponding to her own. When she returned to Wellington most of her first acquaintances were musicians.
Matty, Mr. Beauchamp’s secretary, was a member of their trio — one who could be called upon to accompany Kathleen’s practices. Kathleen could telephone to her, when she felt in the mood, as she did on the evening when she said:
“There’s a fine fire in Harold’s study. He and the girls are away. Do come, dear. We can talk there. I hate society! There’s so much hypocrisy in it!”
Matty smiled over this with her own peculiar satisfaction. She looked upon Kathleen Beauchamp as she might have looked upon the star of a troupe of players descended upon Wellington fresh from London.
She had seen Kathleen for the first time after her return, on a Saturday morning in October, at eleven o’clock, entering the D.I.C. tea-room, a social centre of Wellington. Hesitating a moment, glancing across the crowded little tables, Kathleen met her own eyes in a gilt-framed mirror. With a slight pause as she passed it, she pushed the eye-veil back over the little round hat with the Mercury wings — her “Wooza” pinned to the back hair above the stiff linen collar. She was fully conscious of the glance passing between Matty and the girl with her. Matty’s pointed little nose fairly leaned toward her cheek in eager agitation. As she passed, Kathleen took out a cigarette, and said coolly:”How are you, dear?”
During the following months she allowed herself to be cultivated. In these matters she never was obtuse.
“What do you think of relatives who call one ‘posey and affected’?” she asked Matty once, speaking of a letter received by the family. Secretly immensely intrigued, Matty merely answered:”It isn’t very tactful.” Matty had concluded that Kathleen could be “posey without its really seeming to be affectation.” She who never thought of herself as a picture to be appropriately framed was enthralled by what, to her, was remarkable and individual in the dress and appearance of Kathleen Beauchamp. After a concert which they attended together, someone asked her:”Who was that fine-looking girl you were with?”Matty preened herself over this. She secretly thought that Kass had “a fine proud bearing, magnificent dark eyes, beautifully waved hair, and distinction,” and she took the compliment to herself.
At one concert Kathleen sat in the balcony, dressed in a simple black frock and toying with a red rose; but at an afternoon tea she was wearing a plain dress of heavy, stiff stuff and a stiff dark hat, while everyone else was fluffy. She told Matty later that Marie had made them, and added:”It’s counterpane stuff!”
That was another thing which held Matty charmed and astonished: she never knew what Kass would say. Though she always appeared serious, though Matty never saw more than a slight change of expression — though she spoke in a monotone, she was always making dry comments on things and people, which seemed to Matty daring and dangerous and delightful, as when, in the middle of a concert, just after a tenor solo, she leaned over to her and whispered:”Wasn’t he an elongated clothes horse?”