Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles)
are some sentences in an unfinished story, belonging to this time, which express her sense of total disillusion. The story is called The New Zealander, and it begins in the form of a letter, written from New Zealand to a friend in London:
“I wonder where you are and what doing. London, England seems to me almost another planet. I cannot believe that only a few months ago we talked in your cool room and outside saw the leaves spring in the chestnut-tree on the corner. There life seems dead for me — buried. Surely after my terrible sorrow, London seems 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 … with the travail gone. I could not have stayed there any longer. I felt rather like a frightened child lost in a funeral procession — yes, as bad as that — and came home.”
Thus in imagination; but in fact there was no home for her to go to. Home for her was not a place but a feeling — of security, and protection and understanding: of “belonging.” Her grandmother was dead; and she was ill.”I am physically sick,” she wrote in her journal,”with no home, no place in which I can hang up my hat — to say Here I belong — for there is no such place in the wide world for me.” She had become the frightened child, vainly dreaming of a lap to rest in.”I can’t rest,” she cried,”that is the agonizing part.”
Meanwhile the news of her marriage and her separation — Katherine had cabled the former — had reached her mother and father. Naturally, they were filled with misgiving and alarm. Her mother’s sense of responsibility for her irresponsible daughter was acute; and she hastened to England. Of what occurred between them at their meeting there is no record save of her mother’s greeting. Katherine had on a cheap shiny black hat.”Why child! what are you wearing. You look like an old woman in that. As if you were going to a funeral!” But this was emphatically not a time when her mother loved her; and no doubt the familiar little frown between her mother’s brows deepened. Long afterwards Katherine said that her mother could be cold as steel. Katherine expected nothing less; but she had dreams of something more.
She was told to return to her husband; and she refused. She had good reason for refusing; she was with child, and not by her husband. And she was not ashamed, not contrite. Her rebellion had taken life, and she would defend it.
There was nothing for it, then, but Katherine must go abroad and hide. The tender sympathy of the old Professor in Katherine’s favourite A Tedious Story was not to be expected. The one thing needful in this case was that the breath of scandal should not be wafted overseas. So Katherine was despatched to Germany, first to a convent in the mountains, and then settled in the Bavarian village of Woerishofen. There she lodged with the postmistress, who was kind to her, and ate at a pension. But soon she became seriously ill. She had been walking exultantly, barefoot, in the wild woods, and she was badly chilled. She lay shivering in bed, and wrote:
“I think it is the pain that makes me shiver and feel dizzy. To be alone all day, in a house whose every sound seems foreign to you, and to feel a terrible confusion in your body which affects you mentally, suddenly pictures for you detestable incidents, revolting personalities, which you only shake off to find recurring as the pain grows worse again….
“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 hands folded, the left thumb over the right, say in her adorable voice: ‘There, darling, isn’t that nice?’ Oh, what a miracle of happiness that would be. To wake later to find her turning down the bedclothes to see if my feet were cold, and wrapping them up in a little pink singlet, softer than cat’s fur…. Alas!”
The physical pain she suffered at this time was intense, and she had a hard struggle to resist a too frequent recourse to veronal. But the pain was intermittent, and there were days when she was almost happy, thinking eagerly of her baby boy. But Katherine’s child was fated to remain always a dream-child. It was born prematurely, and born dead: and her own life was in jeopardy. To the physical pain was added the greater mental agony of her loss. She had believed that a child was coming to put an end to her loneliness. The disappointment of her hope was unbearable. When she began to recover physical strength she implored Ida to find her a little child to take care of.
A tiny boy from a slum who needed a long holiday was found and brought to her. His name was Walter. He suffered, like so many slum-children, from the effects of malnutrition since birth. He had spindly legs and a distended stomach; he had no appetite at all for simple wholesome food, and pined for the rubbish to which he was accustomed. Yet he was gentle, sensitive, quick and loving — a strange little creature from a dark other world, who blinked bewildered in this. He went to Katherine’s heart, as she struggled to make him strong; and the memory of that little boy was one day to emerge to stir the slow heart of the world. He was to be transmuted into Ma Parker’s Lennie.
“‘Gran, gi’ us a penny! ‘he coaxed.
“‘Be off with you; Gran ain’t got no pennies.’
“‘Yes, you ‘ave.’
“‘No, I ain’t.’
“‘Yes, you ‘ave. Gi’ us one!’
“‘Already she was feeling for the old, squashed, black leather purse.
“‘Well, what’ll you give your gran?’
“He gave a shy little laugh and pressed closer. She felt his eyelid quivering against her cheek. ‘I ain’t got nothing,’ he murmured….”
The spring came and Katherine was stronger. She began to reach out her tendrils to life again. One vivid little picture, of a dozen words, shines out from this time in her writing. Twelve years later she was looking down on the quietness of the Rhone Valley from Montana.
“And yet I love this quiet clouded day. A bell sounds from afar; the birds sing after one another as if they called across the tree-tops. I love this settled stillness, and this feeling that, at any moment, down may come the rain. Where the sky is not grey, it is silvery white, streaked with white clouds.”
At the very moment of that perception, in harmony with it, came the memory of the Bavarian village.
“Strange! I suddenly found myself outside the library in Woerishofen: spring — lilac — rain — books in black bindings.”
There was a library in Woerishofen. It was in fact a modest little spa with a discreet unfashionable fame for the water-cure of the good Pfarrer Kneipp. Katherine, like many others, came to believe in his instinctive health-wisdom, his curative sagacity; and she admired him for his brusque and sterling honesty and above all for the spirit with which the country parson regarded his gift of healing as a talent to be employed in the service not of himself, but of his Master. She gladly submitted to his ice-cold hosings, of which even the memory made one’s teeth chatter, and gained strength thereby.
Since it was cheap and unfashionable, beautiful and homely, Woerishofen attracted impecunious continental littérateurs. Among them was a Polish literary critic, charming, distinguished and completely untrustworthy. He might have served as the original of one of Dostoevsky’s Poles. He had a magnificent singing voice, and a wonderful repertory of Polish and Russian songs. He had, also, a passion for Stanislas Wyspianski, which he strove to communicate to her; and with his help and a German text she began to translate one of Wyspianski’s plays. There was also a long, lugubrious German Pole who seems, in memory, to have sat at a café table all day long, plunged in a comic melancholy, humming over and again one single verse of a then popular song:
“Du bist verrückt, mein kind, —
Du muss nach Berlin;
Wo die verrückten sind —
Da gehörst du hin!”
There was yet another Pole, Yelski by name, who made a deeper impression. He was an odd little man, with a big head, and a passionate affection for his little boy, who was a musical wunderkind. Both the boy and the father were long cherished in Katherine’s memory.
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