seemed to her so much more awakened, more sophisticated than most of the girls at Queen’s.”Mimi” was one of the three girls (the others being Ida Baker, and Gwen Rouse, a girl from Lancashire — with whom Kathleen felt she “could be herself”). She remembers Kathleen as “definitely most enthusiastic in temperament, even to the extent of stammering very slightly from sheer excitement when much roused; and, of course,” she adds,”the’cello was the great thing. She was to play in London and appear as a’cellist. She gave me a solo performance on the landing outside the ‘Giraffe Hole.’ … I thought it extremely good, but should have done the same, no doubt, if it had been extremely bad.”
Except for practising music, there was not much for the girls to do together except sit and talk; yet when the mothers heard that some of them sat in the dark shadowy niches of the Hall, holding hands, they were indignant.”Of course,” writes “Mimi,” “K. M. and I had long discussions over Tolstoi, Maeterlinck, Ibsen in the lower corridor. We came an hour early for them, and were suspected of immorality. Miss Croudace was stupefied when, asking what we talked about, I told her.”
Girls under eighteen were not allowed out of College bounds. When they went to the Gardens near Regent’s Park occasionally, for tennis (which was their one game), they marched in a “crocodile,” led by Miss Hatch.
Kathleen’s real escape from this confined and decorous life was through her music; and the escape was not merely spiritual, but physical.”Guardy” (short for Guardian) — De Monk Beauchamp, their second cousin, whom the father had deputed to keep an eye on the girls in London — was the Secretary of the London Academy of Music; and Kathleen persuaded him to recommend that she should be allowed to take extra lessons there. Manifestly her lessons at the London Academy were to be the counterpart of Arnold Trowell’s study at the Brussels Conservatoire. And Kathleen, and Ida, who went with her — she for violin, Kathleen for’cello — referred to it as “The Conservatory.”
Even Charles Palliser — her father’s old New Zealand friend, now a London bank manager, whose daughter Eileen was at Queen’s with the Beauchamp girls — took them to concerts at Queen’s Hall. He was lovingly remembered by Kathleen ever after :
“… a tall man with a pointed grey beard, Irish eyes and a voice like the sky at evening. His name is Charles Palliser, and he was a love of my salad days.”
One imagines that Kathleen decided the direction of these expeditions. Music was everything to her, then. It was not music for its own sake, exactly, but music as the atmosphere of romantic love, the path to the garden of the Hesperides. Music linked her with Arnold Trowell; and the bond with Arnold Trowell was the bond with genius, freedom, rapture, Bohemia. Music was for her then a girl’s anticipation of the secret of life, or of that final wisdom to which Tchehov gave perfect utterance, when he felt, in listening to music, that “all things are forgiven, and it would be strange not to forgive.”
The seed of this realisation was in Kathleen’s absorption in music, which was indeed so complete at this time, that afterward she almost persuaded herself that there had been a choice to be made between music and letters, and that she had chosen letters. It was not so. But music was to her, then, a symbol of Art in its vaguely felt significance : it was an earnest of that attitude of all-comprehending significance of which Art at its highest is the sacrament, and of which her own art was finally to be the expression.
She was impatient to excel, to be at the inmost heart of music. Under the Queen’s College’cello master, Professor Hahn, she felt that her progress was too slow. So she became a familiar figure, in her big dark coat and soft black hat, carrying the cumbersome canvas-covered’cello, hurrying down Princess Street in the fog to the Academy, followed by the tall striding Ida and a violin case; or flying back in the evening when the high bowls of yellow light seemed to her so gay and blissful. Often they went early to concerts at Queen’s Hall and waited for the topmost gallery seats — Kathleen, rapt, absorbed in the programme; Ida, watching her lean over the gallery rails, with her “live hands taking and giving the music” :
“Her quick, life-giving hands — so light and sure in their movements — passing over things, hardly touch- ing or moving, but leaving them alive (Ida described it). Later, coming into her room early in the morning — just a glance all around the room, like a greeting, then moving lightly around — a sure quick almost loving touch to the flowers — the mantelpiece, her writing table — sometimes just a fraction of an inch closer or further away — and the room lived and breathed — ever so quietly — and smiled as if it was quite sure you understood — might even have a little joke with you.”
At certain hours during the day — the music room at Queen’s being unoccupied — Kathleen was able to slip down unnoticed in spite of the bulky ‘cello, and Ida looked for her there and sat while she practised. Just as in “Katie’s voice, there was a certain deep sad note which made Ida catch her breath” (and Kathleen “used” it, too, sometimes) — so in her playing there was a note, a strain, a whole phrase, an entire movement, which to Ida was a glimpse of another plane of being — not merely the fulfilment she sought in “the perfect thing,” but a transporting — a vision. She felt, hearing it, that certain phrases were the sheer inspiration of one “living on a higher plane,” one who momentarily succeeded in illuminating, disclosing her own exalted state. And in bright flashes, like the rocketing of stars, Ida felt she knew this state of being.
What Ida gave to Katherine was a deep love, a complete devotion, constant and enduring; and for Katherine, also, the bond was life-long. If at times she seemed to fling herself violently free, she always acknowledged the bond. If to Ida those brief years together at Queen’s seemed a time of rapture and enchantment, there were moments when Katherine herself more than half believed it. Ten years afterward she lent herself to an effort to recapture the past:
“… I kept seeing the Squares with their butterfly leaves just ready to fly. We (Ida and I) met near the old haunts — Queen Anne Street — and walked in one of the little lanes and short cuts that we know so well — side by side, talking. ‘Let me tie your veil,’ and I stop; and she ties it and we walk on again …”
Spring leaves and autumn leaves in a London Square: the tender green and the tender gold. These in their evanescence and their beauty reminded Kathleen of her college days and her college friendship. In one of the moments when she “saw Ida as a character in a book” — while she was writing Maata — she pictured her again as the tall schoolgirl, clumsy and rapt, breaking from the decorous procession through the London Squares to catch in her clapped hands a falling, fluttering leaf— “a happy month” :
“They did not fall like leaves — they fell like feathers — fluttering and floating from the trees that lined the road…. Who was it used to say that every leaf you caught meant a happy month? Rhody (Ida) of course. She saw Rhody, the tall school girl, break from the ‘crocodile’ when they walked in the park, and run after the leaves with big, far too big gestures, as though she expected the whole tree to fall into her arms. Rhody used to keep the leaves in her Bible, and take them out and hold them up to the light and gaze at them in Scripture lessons. And she always said she knew each one apart. Well — if she said so — she did. Just like her.”
That picture of Ida more than any other remained with Katherine as a mark of the past. It was symbolic: of her rapt devotion, of the contrast between her awkwardness and the delicate, elusive thing she tried to grasp; of the happiness she seemed, at times, to miss, by some immediate ignorance of the truth:
“He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who catches a joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.”
