never was happy far from it, not happy for long with it. When Cornwall, Ospedaletti, the South of France, reminded her of New Zealand, she was at home while the illusion lasted. But wind always frightened her. It brought back the night terrors of childhood and made it impossible for her ever to live long alone.
From the time she was fifteen and first seriously trying to “write,” her notebooks were filled with such beginnings as:
“The storm on the day of her birth. Now to plan it — She is born in New Zealand on the day of the storm.”
The storm at her birth seemed to have some mysterious significance for her which was part of her being and must be expressed.
In The Birthday, as it was first published with a New Zealand setting, she developed that storm into part of her story; but when she rewrote it for The German Pension, she transferred the setting to Germany. It was not what she meant: it was not “that Island.” It merely reflected her ironic state. In The Aloe she tried once more to describe it; but when she revised the tale as Prelude, she omitted the description. She felt, it seemed, that the storm at her birth had a meaning which lay beyond words. It belonged, in its elusiveness, with The Voices of the Air.
2
In later years, Katherine Mansfield was laughingly disappointed over her early appearance. When her sister “Marie” sent her a photograph of herself as a baby, it was a “dreadful shock” :
“I had always imagined it — a sweet little laughing thing, rather French, with wistful eyes under a fringe, firmly gripping a spade, showing even then a longing to dig for treasure with her own hands. But this little solemn monster with a wisp of hair, looked as though she were just about to fall over backwards head overheels! On her feet she wears, as far as I can make out, a pair of ordinary workman’s boots which the photographer, from astonishment or malice, has photographed so close up that each tootsie is the size of her head. The only feature about her is her ears which are neatly buttonholed on to the sides of her head and not just safty-pinned on as most babies’ are. Even the spade she clasps with the greatest reluctance.”
But it was hardly a fair picture, for she had jaundice at three months old, and was sent to Anikiwa, in the Sounds, where her cousins remember her as “a yellow, ill-looking baby” who took an inexplicable fancy to a certain stone in the garden, and refused to be quiet unless they sat on the uncomfortable seat and nursed her.
Knowing (as did The Thoughtful Child) that “the right sort of people must expect children to sit on them,” she fortunately had a lap undisputedly her own for her first two years. She had been her grandmother’s child from the moment the old woman so unceremoniously shook her before the streaming window on the night she was born in the “Southerly Buster.” Her father was ordered “home” to England for a cure soon after her birth. Since he could never think of going far without his wife, Kathleen Mansfield was left in her grand-mother’s care. She was always to be more Mansfield than she was Kathleen. Margaret Mansfield Dyer was spiritual godmother to her, as well as grandmother.
Most children pass in the accepted manner through the hands of the angel who (in the Garden Behind the Moon where they shine the stars) wipes each child’s mind clean with a sponge when he reaches the age of three. But there was one corner in the mind of Kathleen Beauchamp which never was erased. It was the memory of a morning two days before her second birthday:
“Things happened so simply then, without preparation and without any shock. They let me go into my mother’s room. (I remember standing on tiptoe and using both hands to turn the big white china door-handle) and there lay my mother in bed with her arms along the sheet, and there sat my grandmother before the fire with a baby in a flannel across her knees. My mother paid no attention to me at all. Perhaps she was asleep, for my grandmother nodded and said in a voice scarcely above a whisper, ‘Come and see your little sister.’ I tiptoed to her voice across the room, and she parted the flannel, and I saw a little round head with a tuft of goldy hair on it and a big face with eyes shut — white as snow. ‘Is it alive?’ I asked. ‘Of course,’ said grandmother. ‘Look at her holding my finger.’ And — yes, a hand, scarcely bigger than my doll’s, in a frilled sleeve, was wound round her finger. ‘Do you like her?’ said my grandmother. ‘Yes. Is she going to play with the doll’s house?’ ‘By-and-by,’ said the grandmother, and I felt very pleased. Mrs. Heywood had just given us the doll’s house. It was a beautiful one with a verandah and a balcony and a door that opened and shut and two chimneys. I wanted badly to show it to someone else.
“‘Her name is Gwen,’ said the grandmother. ‘Kiss her.’
“I bent down and kissed the little goldy tuft. But she took no notice. She lay quite still with her eyes shut.
“‘Now go and kiss mother,’ said the grandmother.
“But mother did not want to kiss me. Very languid, leaning against the pillows, she was eating some sago. The sun shone through the windows and winked on the brass knobs of the big bed.
“After that grandmother came into the nursery with Gwen and sat in front of the nursery fire in the rocking chair with her. Meg and Tadpole were away staying with Aunt Harriet, and they had gone before the new doll’s house arrived, so that was 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
