perhaps) and keeping the “literary club” and its activities secret. The School was composed of jokes collected from grown-up papers and “original” stories. Kathleen’s was a story about a dog:”The door opened and in-flu-Enza.” The first issue (for club members only) was copied in Kathleen’s irregular, rather distinctive hand, on large double sheets of foolscap. Several of the girls kept their copies for nearly thirty years because of one contributor who they believed would “do something” in the future; but as she never was heard of again, the copies of The School were gradually destroyed. There may be one in existence, somewhere, but it seems doubtful.
Mrs. Henry Smith thought Kathleen was “a thundercloud” among the other girls of the family. Vera was pretty and affectionate. Several times she showed affection for Mrs. Smith; but there never was a sign of it from Kathleen. Jeanne looked like Alice-in-Wonderland — quaint and dainty. The Beauchamps were affectionate among themselves:”an affectionate family.” But Kathleen seemed to her “a very unpolished diamond, while the others were too polished.” She was “plain,” “a surly sort of a girl”— “imaginative to the point of untruth.” Even the other girls used to say of her stories:”Oh, wait till to-morrow and it will be different!”
Kathleen didn’t conceal her dislike when Mrs. Henry Smith returned her compositions with severe criticism. Like Miss Butts, she told her they were poorly written, poorly spelled, and careless. Then she added a few points of her own: they were “too prolific” — she wrote so much that she spoiled her writing— “though it had something original about it.” Kathleen had been given two subjects for compositions.”One,” said Mrs. Henry Smith, ‘was good. The other wasn’t because it was about school life, and no girl should write about school girls: she put herself in too much.”
Long afterward, the Head Mistress explained:”The family was very conventional; Kass was the outlaw. No one here saw that the unconventionality and rebellion had something behind it. Nobody, I think, understood that or her. They just tried to make her conform: reprimanded her for errors in spelling, carelessness, and poor writing. But that was ‘the method’ in those days.”
Yet it was not all suppression. When Kathleen arranged and directed “Mrs. Jarley’s Wax Works,” a school benefit for the Polynesian Missions, some of her newly awakening life was allowed wings. She was influenced by her reading, of course: but she added her own inventions. Excitement was added to the performance by a visitor from England (the Rev. Charles Prodgers) who didn’t conceal his amusement and delight in Kathleen Beauchamp’s unique exhibition. He was perhaps the first to realise something of the promise in her individuality. Before he returned to England, he wrote in her album:
“With every good wish for ‘Mrs. Jarley’s’ future success.”
3
Mr. Robert Parker taught Kathleen pianoforte for two years. Vera was the better musician, the better student of music; but even thirty years later he remembered Kass— “Well … very well. I can see her sitting there at the piano … her very attitude. It is remarkable how she noticed details at her age. The pale picture of Rubinstein (there it is) did hang above the mantelpiece, though there was no inscription; and the picture of Solitude was over the piano. She has the room down exactly in that — what shall I call it? — that very sentimental little piece about me in The Wind Blows.”
But Mr. Parker was renowned for sentiment. He leaned over a little as he talked, rubbing together those pale, slim, well-groomed hands. His slightly stooped shoulders seemed bent rather from hovering above his guests — so courteously, so solicitously — than from any stoop of age. His beautiful long hair was brushed smoothly back. It gleaned with its own light. His features, aquiline; his mouth, full and a trifle loose; but it was his eyes — the meaning glance in them. In the “quiet cave” of his studio, a music lesson with Mr. Parker could be a sedative, it could be a cocktail. Unimportant the composition:
“ ‘Nellie Bly
Caught a fly
Put it in her tea!”
“This exquisite morceau was in my pianoforte Tutor, words and all. Who could have composed it?”
He had the rare power of transmitting his own delight in music; and music was his life — taught at Miss Swainson’s School. He was on the staff until he was nearly eighty years old; even then he was as courtly as ever; and even after that his own students still felt that his look had some special meaning, some significance for them, alone.
Miss Mary Swainson herself took music lessons from him for years; and she sang to his accompaniment at St. Paul’s. The girls even told how the sexton had overlooked them when they were rehearsing one evening and locked them in the Cathedral.
If her singing class dragged, the girls wished Mr. Parker would look in, for then all lessons stopped; and they could have a little chat while the Mistress swept forward with her best outside-of-school smile. Kass glanced sideways at Diddy, when she saw the door open; but Diddy looked back at her, smiling pleasantly and raising her brows in a question:”What do you mean?” Mary looked discreetly down her nose.
4
There was one other at the Terrace School who claimed Kathleen’s special notice. Martha-Grace,”Princess Maata” among her own people, was a half-caste Maori girl a form or two above Kass at school.
The Maoris, from the first, had been accepted in New Zealand on an equal social basis with the English, and were absorbed into the white population. They became a kindly, a courteous and an amiable people, with a leaning toward beauty, a flair for fantasy, a greater receptivity. They took on most of the physical characteristics of the English — a fair skin, blue eyes, often — but their eyes were limpid; they had a softer, warmer look — a look of kindliness and sympathy and humour. It was by this that the Maori blood might be detected as well as by deep kindness, gentleness and sweetness of nature and instinctive courtesy.
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
