generous of you, Daddy dear,” and I placed the entire plate of cut bread and butter on his chest. As a kind of sacrifice to the darling. I felt he deserved it and he does so love those thin shaves of bread and butter.’
“‘Can’t you see the plate,’ cried Laurie, ‘gently rising and falling on his pyjama jacket?’
“‘They began to laugh, but it really was most thrilling. Champagne did make all the difference — didn’t it? Just the feeling it was there gave such a different…. Oh, absolutely!”
It was not of this, but of another sketch from the same period of memory — Her First Ball — that she said:
“I have been writing about a dance this afternoon, and remembering how one polished the floor was so thrilling that everything was forgotten.”
Then there was the dance itself — the big bare, flower-filled room, cleared; an impromptu orchestra playing by the lamplight which threw such shadows over the wide sleeves and top-knots of the girls; and the boys whom they had known all their lives — now half grown, stiff in “Sunday suits,” coming to ask for the waltzes and lancers; Siegfried Eichelbaum, Cheviot Bell,”Chummie,” and the Nathans who used to live next door.
George Nathan asked Kass for a dance on one of these evenings.
She answered abruptly:”I know you hate me! Why do you ask me to dance?”
He was surprised, but not nonplussed, being one of those stout, hearty lads who laugh easily.
“But I don’t hate you!” he said.
And he didn’t. He was thinking he couldn’t say she was attractive. He liked the slinky type, and she was plump, and had a quick way of speaking at you so you never knew what she was going to say.”She frightens people away,” he decided, as he crossed the room for another of Godber’s meringues.
5
How differently each of her friends saw Kathleen Beauchamp. It was so all of her life. Few of her friends “knew” her: she had an outward chameleon quality by which she could match herself to the individual and the situation, until her acquaintances were baffled — unable to agree “who she was.” A certain sure intuition made her protect herself from most of them. Few knew anything of her life beyond their own immediate part in it. She completed, rounded off, her experiences quickly; she passed rapidly from one circle to another; she seldom mentioned her earlier life to the new group, and since she really was a different person in the various stages of her swift development she left her acquaintances with widely divergent impressions. To herself she was like one in a train who, even as he waves to those left behind on the platform, is seeing the new destination which they would never know. She often said to Ida:”I’ve finished with all that; now let’s forget it!”
During most of her life she made her friends among those who had an artistic aim corresponding to her own. When she returned to Wellington most of her first acquaintances were musicians.
Matty, Mr. Beauchamp’s secretary, was a member of their trio — one who could be called upon to accompany Kathleen’s practices. Kathleen could telephone to her, when she felt in the mood, as she did on the evening when she said:
“There’s a fine fire in Harold’s study. He and the girls are away. Do come, dear. We can talk there. I hate society! There’s so much hypocrisy in it!”
Matty smiled over this with her own peculiar satisfaction. She looked upon Kathleen Beauchamp as she might have looked upon the star of a troupe of players descended upon Wellington fresh from London.
She had seen Kathleen for the first time after her return, on a Saturday morning in October, at eleven o’clock, entering the D.I.C. tea-room, a social centre of Wellington. Hesitating a moment, glancing across the crowded little tables, Kathleen met her own eyes in a gilt-framed mirror. With a slight pause as she passed it, she pushed the eye-veil back over the little round hat with the Mercury wings — her “Wooza” pinned to the back hair above the stiff linen collar. She was fully conscious of the glance passing between Matty and the girl with her. Matty’s pointed little nose fairly leaned toward her cheek in eager agitation. As she passed, Kathleen took out a cigarette, and said coolly:”How are you, dear?”
During the following months she allowed herself to be cultivated. In these matters she never was obtuse.
“What do you think of relatives who call one ‘posey and affected’?” she asked Matty once, speaking of a letter received by the family. Secretly immensely intrigued, Matty merely answered:”It isn’t very tactful.” Matty had concluded that Kathleen could be “posey without its really seeming to be affectation.” She who never thought of herself as a picture to be appropriately framed was enthralled by what, to her, was remarkable and individual in the dress and appearance of Kathleen Beauchamp. After a concert which they attended together, someone asked her:”Who was that fine-looking girl you were with?”Matty preened herself over this. She secretly thought that Kass had “a fine proud bearing, magnificent dark eyes, beautifully waved hair, and distinction,” and she took the compliment to herself.
At one concert Kathleen sat in the balcony, dressed in a simple black frock and toying with a red rose; but at an afternoon tea she was wearing a plain dress of heavy, stiff stuff and a stiff dark hat, while everyone else was fluffy. She told Matty later that Marie had made them, and added:”It’s counterpane stuff!”
That was another thing which held Matty charmed and astonished: she never knew what Kass would say. Though she always appeared serious, though Matty never saw more than a slight change of expression — though she spoke in a monotone, she was always making dry comments on things and people, which seemed to Matty daring and dangerous and delightful, as when, in the middle of a concert, just after a tenor solo, she leaned over to her and whispered:”Wasn’t he an elongated clothes horse?”
CHAPTER XII
THE GROWING OF WINGS
“The head can offer no account.” — Keats.
1
“I WISH that I was as far advanced in my work as you are in yours — but I am far from it,” Kass had written to “E.K.B.” — Edith (“Edie”) Kathleen Bendall — early in 1907.
About this time the following entry appeared in her Note Book:
“There is — I think Mr. Trowell. Definitely I have decided not to be a musician — It’s not my forte — I can plainly see — The fact remains at that — I must be an authoress. Cæsar (A.T.) is losing hold of me. Edie (E.K.B.) is waiting for me — I shall slip into her arms. They are safest. Do you love me?”
Everyone remembers the laughter greeting her announcement:”I’m going to be a writer!” Her Aunt and Rose remember it, and her cousins, and her friends. It was more than half due to her challenging gesture; less than half because she didn’t look the part, and because she had been “just Kass” to them for so long.
Independent though she was, Kathleen was always seeking for someone in immediate sympathy — someone to create for, someone to speak to in creating. Her need was peculiar, and intimately her own. The
