each selecting a pool, we collected seaweed, pearly shells, coloured stones, sea anemones and star fish. I vaguely remember Christmas at the Bay. I gave Kass a thimble in a green plush case, and felt at the time that she would have much preferred a book. To Jeanne I gave a pink and white dolls’ teapot, which she still talks about. ‘Chummie’ had a toy dancing bear, and that is all I remember except a present that I received of a large mauve box of chocolate almonds with a pair of gilt tongs on top. It was my first real box of sweets — from a friend of my father — and Kass and I were both quite overcome by such magnificence.”
The quietness of Day’s Bay became, for Katherine Mansfield, a standard of stillness. It was only of the heightened sense of absolute stillness produced by isolation and illness and “a sky like lead” that she could say it was “much quieter than Day’s Bay.” That meant a superhuman, or even an inhuman stillness — the quietness that descends upon one who has drifted out of life itself. The quietness of Day’s Bay represented a perfection of human stillness, friendly and benign. It was of Day’s Bay and her summers there that she was thinking when, in a mood of happiness in a Paris spring, — when, as she walked,”the air just lifts enough to blow on your cheeks. Ah, how delicious that is!” — she tried to make a present of her happiness to a friend.
“There is a wharf not far from here where the sand barges unload. Do you know the smell of wet sand? Does it make you think of going down to the beach in the evening light after a rainy day and gathering the damp driftwood (it will dry on the top of the stove) and picking up for a moment the long branches of seaweed that the waves have tossed and listening to gulls who stand reflected in the gleaming sand, and just fly a little way off as you come and then — settle again?”
4
At Karori, her own country had lain “beyond the Blue Mountains.” When she returned to Tinakori Road, it lay beyond the Green Gate. She was always — all her life long — to have this escape — this country of her mind. For years it was the Heron, that perfect house beneath the flowery trees where I she would create her own world, live in the company of those radiant beings,”her people.” Nearer the end of her life when her disease had made her even more of an exile, it became “the silent world”; then “no one knew where she was” :
“… I have felt very often lately as though the silence had some meaning beyond these signs, these intimations. Isn’t it possible that if one yielded there is a whole world into which one is received? It is so near and yet I am conscious that I hold back from giving myself up to it. What is this something mysterious that waits — that beckons?”
The Green Gate was far on this side of those borders; yet it was beyond the known land. Behind it were flowers, and enchantment. It was guarded (both she and Marion liked to believe) by a fiery dragon. Many times the two girls passed it as they flew up Hill Street to the Golder Hill house, where Kathleen was allowed to visit Marion Ruddick. Many times they crept to the Green Gate, longing yet fearing to open it; always something drew them back in time.
In the Golder Hill garden they sat in the acacia tree eating little fluted cakes of Canadian maple sugar brought by Marion from Canada. From their high leafy perch, they could look into the Convent square; they could even see the ripple across the grass, across the beds of freezias. Was it the wind shaking them, or were they heavy with bees? Kathleen was never in that garden more than once or twice; yet from the acacia tree she was at home in that square. They could see the Harbour from their high seat. On some rare days the water turned the colour of New Zealand jade — jade that the Maoris mined in the South Island. In 1915 her brother gave her a tiki made of it, which she wore round her neck till she died.
Marion told stories of her own country:”sliding down snow-covered hills on sleds and driving in red sleighs with jingling bells through forests of living Christmas trees”; and she remembered, afterward, that:”Every tree in the Golder Hill garden contained a wood nymph and every flower a fairy. The big rata tree with its shaggy red blossoms we called ‘the fire tree’ and its flowers were burning tongues of flame.” They tried poetry, as they sat in the tree looking out over the Convent garden and the Harbour. Marion remembers their struggle with an Ode to a Snowdrop. They kept that kingdom to themselves.
There were other “moments, glimpses, even, before which all else pales.” Up through the wild bush at the back of Day’s Bay were the “ferny paths” winding lazily through tree fern: umbrella fern with dark green leaves spreading out from the centre like a star fish; lace fern, aromatic in the hot sunshine; the real climbing fern, Mange-Mange, twisting over bushes and trees with its stem so uniform that the Maoris wove baskets from it, and used it as rope to fasten the thatch to their roofs. There was King Fern with little boat-shaped seeds; and Crown Fern with a perfect little crown in each section of stem.
Over the second range beyond the Bay was a beech grove — nothing but beeches over the whole hill top. The leaves were like lace — like dark brown lace. Light coming through them made another world, like the light beneath water. The girls walking in this wood were tempted to step very high (as they stepped to escape crabs in the rock pools at the Bay). To walk through this odd light was like walking through the clearest of rain water; the slim tree-trunks glistened whitely, like stems beneath water, too; small roots twining lacily over the bare ground were like roots washed bare at the bottom of the sea. Did they merely imagine that the bell bird sounded different here? That it was like a bell heard across lonely water?
In spring, the fern-like dark beech leaves with flaming Iceland poppies, and boronia — little tight bunches heaped in the huge baskets with daphne — were sold down on the corners of Lambton Quay.
People stood talking, gesturing with unwrapped flowers.
As she pinned boronia on her coat, Kathleen thought that nothing could bring the woods down into the city as that beech fern — as those minute bronze bells of boronia, splotched with their own sunlight and with a fragrance like none other on earth. On early mornings, when the flowers had just come heavy with scent from the Hutt Valley, she stood pressed against the windows of flower shops and “gazed into them as small boys are supposed to gaze into pastry-cooks.”
Nothing could so bring back New Zealand spring — (azalea bushes in the Botanical Garden, beds of cinerarias at Tinakori Road, or flower baskets on Lambton Quay) — as the heavy scent of boronia:
“I’d like to send you seeds from the far corners of the earth and have a boronia plant below the studio window. Do you know the scent of boronia? My grandmother and I were very fond of going to a place called McNab’s Tea Gardens, and there we used to follow our noses and track down the boronia bushes. Oh, how I must have tired the darling out! It doesn’t bear thinking about.”
In their own garden at No. 75 there were “glimpses,” too:
“‘I remember ruffling the violet leaves…. Do you remember that some of the pears we found used to have little teeth marks in them?’
“‘Who bit them?’
“‘It was always a mystery’.”
As, years later, at Hampstead, she had “moments” of that same faëriness intruding over the borders from another world:
“There is nobody in the house, and yet whose is this faint whispering? On the stairs there are tiny spots of gold — tiny foot-prints.”
The Green Gate hid the enchanted garden — for how long? Yet (as Marion remembers) the day came when they must know:
“Cautiously we pulled the latch and pushed it slowly open. There was our garden, a riot of colour, but there also was the dragon in the
