face, and a faded bonnet; she spoke but little, did her work quickly and unobtrusively, and adored Katherine. What Katherine felt towards her is in the story which she imagined for her.
That summer the Beauchamp family came to London; and Katherine and her brother,”Chummie,” who stayed behind in London after the family had left, became closer friends than before. But in the early autumn she fell ill again, this time with pleurisy, and went to Geneva, where one of her Polish friends — the father of the wunderkind — was now settled. To this moment, or the memory of this moment, belong the Tales from a Courtyard printed in Rhythm; and there is a humorous description of the boarding-house at which she stayed in “Pension Séguin.” The change of note in such a piece from that of the outwardly similar sketches of In a German Pension is marked. Katherine was now laughing at herself. The conclusion to the sketch called Violet, which is set in Geneva, is characteristic. Violet is naïve, but so is Katherine in being astonished at her naïve: human beings are all rather absurd and rather lovable. Plainly, she was growing out of the satirical conventions, and eager to turn from the somewhat narrow path which The New Age had prescribed for her. But this path had at least led to the publication of her first book. In the autumn of 1911 the German Pension sketches were collected and published in a volume by Stephen Swift, who paid her £15 in advance of royalties.
From the Morning Post, in particular, it received some discriminating praise; and it had some measure of success. At the moment when her publisher went bankrupt it was in its third edition. Since the editions were of 500 copies, that means that at least a thousand copies had been sold.
That autumn Katherine received through her publishers, Stephen Swift, a letter from John Middleton Murry. It asked her to send a story to Rhythm, a small quarterly literary magazine of some few months’ standing published at Oxford. She replied by sending a rather bitter “fairy story.” Murry returned it, saying that he had not found it easy to understand, and asking for another. She sent The Woman at the Store. He was deeply impressed by this grim and convincing story of a woman’s life in the back-blocks of New Zealand, and wrote to her expressing his admiration. And, shortly afterwards, at the end of December, he was invited by the late W. L. George and his wife to meet Katherine Mansfield at dinner at 84 Hamilton Terrace. He accepted eagerly.
Katherine arrived a little late, in a taxi. She wore a simple dove-grey evening dress with a single red flower, and a gauze scarf of the same dove-grey. She was at first very quiet and reserved. Murry even felt that his congratulations on The Woman at the Store — which he said, very truly, was “by far the best story that had been sent in to Rhythm” — had been profuse and clumsy. And in other ways he felt rather crude. He had never tasted plumsoup, which — as a German gourmet’s dish — was served in honour of Katherine’s recently published book. He had not read Artzibashev’s Sanine, nor even heard of the author’s name; and the book was a topic of discussion. None the less, after a little while, the ice melted, and Katherine and he were absorbed in talk — so absorbed that by the time they went to look for a taxi for her, he was in imminent danger of having to walk to Waterloo. At parting, she asked him to come to tea at her flat. It is characteristic that it never occurred to him to ask her to take tea with him.
It was not until he was in full tilt after his train that it struck him that he did not know where she lived, and that no day had been appointed. Nor did he realise that he was suffering from love at first sight. Instead, he waited impatiently and in vain for a note of more explicit invitation. It did not come.
It was some weeks afterwards he received a letter from Geneva, in which Katherine explained that she had suddenly had to return there; but that she would be in London again very soon, and would give him honey and brown bread for tea, if he came. He went, from Oxford. It was a rainy day. He was naïvely surprised to find her in a room with rush matting on the floor, but with hardly any furniture. Conspicuously, there was no table. There was a roll-top desk with a chair, a simple divan, and a small rocking-chair, in which he was invited to sit. The tea was served in bowls upon the floor.
For a little while he felt awkward, perched uncertainly above her, while she squatted on the floor and poured the tea. But again the ice melted magically; and he found himself telling her, not merely of his ambitions with regard to the little magazine, but of his immediate problem. It was that he felt that Oxford had become unendurable, that he could not face the prospect of returning there merely to sit for a School in which he had long since lost all interest. Yet what could he do? He was maintained at Oxford solely by scholarships and exhibitions; and both his school and college had been very generous towards him. It was his duty, he knew, to work at least moderately well and get the First that was expected of him. But a year before he had conceived the idea of going to Paris for his vacations; and under the influence of Paris all capacity for working for examinations had seeped away from him. Oxford, his Oxford friends, his Oxford work, had become suddenly unreal. He had made up his mind to leave. Yet, if he did leave, there was nothing for him to do. He could not quarter himself at home with a father whose natural ambition he had disappointed completely. He must launch out and make some sort of living. And, so far as he knew, there was no sort of living to be made.
Katherine was gravely sympathetic; and together they stared for a long while at the manifest impossibility. Then they laughed. Life was like that.”But,” she said,”don’t stay at Oxford, whatever you do. It’s wrong.” And somehow that seemed to lift a weight from his shoulders — to be, in some inexplicable way, a solution of the problem which it left precisely the same as it was before. Yet not precisely the same. For the decision now was taken. It was no longer a question of whether, but of how.
He had a brilliant friend, he said, three years older than himself, who had disappointed everybody at Oxford. He was making a living of some sort by reporting cricket-matches for The Field. Perhaps he might help. And he was very anxious to meet Katherine, whose sketches in The New Age he had read and admired from the beginning. How would it be if the three of them had dinner together next week, and talked it all over? They could dine at the Dieppe for 1s. 3d.
Katherine agreed.”But,” she said,”you shall call for me at tea-time, and we’ll go and have tea somewhere first. I may have thought of something. Then we’ll meet Goodyear.” And that seemed to him a curiously perfect idea. So they parted. She came into the dark hall to see him out. Her peach-coloured silk shawl, like a big embroidered handkerchief, glowed while they said good-bye. When he had reached the bottom of the long stairs he crossed the road and looked up to mark her rooms in memory. It was hard to distinguish them. The floors, the windows were all the same. He calculated by the staircase — four flights and then to the left. There, or thereabouts. Was that a peach-coloured shawl he could see dimly at the window? He took the risk, and waved, and ran.
Immediately he set to work with a new energy. He explained his situation to his old classical tutor, H. F. Fox, who had stood by him so often in the past, and now stood by him once again. Fox made no secret of his disapproval.”I don’t think I ought to help you,” he said. Then, severely and fiercely,”But well go and see Spender to-morrow.”And on the next day it was so. Two humaner men — two men more liberal in the ideal sense of that new hackneyed word — were not, than these two friends. And, when they joined forces against him, it was hard indeed for Murry to stand his ground. “After all,” said Spender,”a First is worth having.”“And why not take a year in Germany?” said Fox.”There are new research fellowships : the College will give you one gladly, I know.”“Besides,” said Spender,”it’s only a matter of three months more work.”
“But I ceased to work a year ago. I don’t work. I simply read Plato over and over. I don’t work even on him. I can’t see him from the school’s point of view any more. I don’t know why, but I can’t.”
And if he had been aware of what had happened to him, he would have said :”And I’ve fallen hopelessly, finally in love.”But he was not aware of anything save that it
