‘We feel like children on a desert island.’ With one hand she held the rough, gaily-striped thing up to her chin; the other hand lay in mine. We talked of fame, how we both longed for it, how hard the struggle was, what we both meant to do. I found a piece of paper, and together we wrote a declaration vowing that in the space of one year we should both have become famous. And we signed the paper and sealed it; then, dedicating it to the gods, dropped it into the fire. For a moment a bright light, and then a handful of ashes. By and bye she fell asleep, and I gave her my share of the blanket, and arranged a sofa pillow in her low chair. The long night dragged coldly through, while I watched her, and thought, and longed, but could not sleep.
“To-day, at the other end of the world, I have suffered, and she, doubtless, has bought herself a new hat at the February sales. Sic transit gloria mundi.
“K. Mansfield.”
2
The books in her room at the Terrace lined the wall from the floor upwards for some four or five feet : sitting on the floor, she could reach any volume. The little room was arranged like a studio : her writing table by the window, her few treasures carefully placed — the Velasquez Venus, six small nude studies, bowls of flowers, her ‘cello “dreaming in the corner.” Like Grandmother Mansfield, she loved tidiness; her room was a projection of herself. Trespassers were intolerable.
One afternoon, being torn away from her sanctuary to meet people at tea, she startled them all by bursting out furiously :”I loathe this provincial place! Nobody in it understands me, and they haven’t any of my interests, and I detest it here!”
And on another occasion :”At five o’clock I go down to Wellington to watch Life.”
Much of her time was spent upstairs, writing. When she closed the door, she could shut out the whole world :
“Oh! this monotonous, terrible rain. The dull, steady, hopeless sound of it. I have drawn the curtains across the windows to shut out the weeping face of the world — the trees swaying softly in their grief and dropping silver tears upon the brown earth, the narrow, sodden, mean, draggled wooden houses, colourless save for the dull coarse red of the roof, and the long line of grey hills, impassable, spectral-like.
“So I have drawn the curtains across my windows, and the light is intensely fascinating. A perpetual twilight broods here. The atmosphere is heavy with morbid charm. Strange, as I sit here, quiet, alone, how each possession of mine — the calendar gleaming whitely on the wall, each picture, each book, my ‘cello case, the very furniture — seems to stir into life. The Velasquez Venus moves on her couch ever so slightly; across the face of Manon a strange smile flickers for an instant and is gone, my rocking chair is full of patient resignation, my ‘cello case is wrapt in profound thought. Beside me a little bowl of mig- nonette is piercingly sweet, and a cluster of scarlet geraniums is hot with colour.
“Sometimes through the measured sound of the rain comes the long, hopeless note of a fog horn far out at sea. And then all life seems but a crying out drearily, and a groping to and fro in a foolish, aimless darkness. Sometimes — it seems like miles away — I hear the sound of a door downstairs opening and shutting.
“And I listen and think and dream until my life seems not one life, but a thousand million lives, and my soul is weighed down with the burden of past existence, with the vague, uneasy consciousness of future strivings.
“And the grey thoughts fall upon my soul like the grey rain upon the world, but I cannot draw the curtain and shut them out.” *
3
“The Sketch always reminds me of the morning-room at 47,” Kathleen wrote, long afterward, to Marie. This big house, the scene of the tumultuous years of her New Zealand life, did not so readily become her “possession” as either the two homes in Tinakori Road, or “Chesney Wold” in Karori. Yet, had she continued to write, she undoubtedly would have set stories here. In 1920 she was turning back toward it, at last, though it had taken ten years to transcend the conflict of those days :
“Even if one does not acquire any ‘fresh meat’ — one’s vision of what one possesses is continually changing into something rich and strange, isn’t it? I feel mine is. 47, Fitzherbert Terrace p. e. is colouring beautifully with the years and I polish it and examine it, and only now is it ready to come out of the store room into the uncommon light of day.”
The family in 47 was rather quieter than it had been in the earlier homes. Bell Dyer had married, in England, and was living (as Wellington put it)”in a house full of servants.” The Grandmother had moved to Bolton Street to stay with friends. Vera was being courted by a young Canadian geologist who was engaged on a survey in New Zealand; and her departure was imminent.
Leslie Heron (“Chummie”) was going away to the Wailaki Boys’ High School. He was twelve, now — a fine, upstanding lad with charm and self-assurance. Kathleen had been too busied by the urgency of her own evolving life to show more affection toward him than toward the other members of her family. Probably she was barely conscious of her affection at the time. It was something realised much later, as she looked back; yet, even two years afterward, she summarised one aspect of her relation to “Chummie.” After all, he was her only brother, and a very nice one.
“I felt maternal toward him. As a baby he clung to me, and all the years after, I could, when I looked at him, feel those little hands around my neck. He had a little habit of bringing me flowers — a rose, some violets, a spray of apple blossom — Yes, he was always coming to me with his hands full of flowers.
“I see him as a little child, sitting on the table, while I scrubbed his grubby knees, and after his bath in my room in the morning, in his pink pyjamas, his hair curling all over his head, standing on one leg and flicking his towel, and crying : ‘It’s a lovely day, dearest.’ (And at night the game, ‘Payjamaarm.’)
“After playing cricket, stumbling up the stairs, hot, out of breath, and his shirt collar unbuttoned, his hair on end, damp, and mopping his face with an indescribable handkerchief. He was so absentminded, too … He read everything I gave him.
“I remember very well saying Good-bye to him. He was going away to school, and we kissed for a moment, and then I leaned out of the window. It had been raining. The air was very cool and clean. He waved to me from the gate, and I listened, hearing his glad little footsteps die down the street, fainter and fainter, so fast out of my life.”
Between Kathleen and her mother there was a certain similarity — a particular fastidiousness for one thing, which came to both from the Grandmother. Mrs. Beauchamp would refuse a cup of tea having a drop of milk spilled in the saucer :”That’s for servants!” she would say; and how high poised was her fine little head, with the high arched brows and the little frown between, as she said it, so airily.
Kathleen had something of her mother’s manner; she looked rather like her, too — had her colouring. And though she was more Beauchamp than Dyer, she had something of her mother’s nature. Mrs. Beauchamp, at one time, had wanted to write (her letters always were delightful); she was in sympathy with Kathleen’s longing to be a writer, even though she couldn’t comprehend the demands, the restrictions, which this desire imposed upon her daughter.
Kathleen once tried to express something of their relationship:
“… I often long to lean against Mother and know she understands things … that can’t be told … that would fade at a breath … delicate needs … a feeling of fineness
