in it. Yet she was Lil to everybody. The name was not meant, or felt to be, a familiarity. Everybody said” Good evening, Lil” when they entered; hardly anybody said anything more to her during the evening. It was a convention of the place to ignore her — out of a kind of deference, as though she were there incognito. Yet if by chance she was absent, the first question asked of Ma, the landlady, was always:” Where’s Lil?”And a great part of the evening’s conversation would be spent in wondering what might have happened to her. Was she ill?
It is hard to say what happened on this particular night. And perhaps nothing particular did happen save to Katherine and Murry — and Lil. Suddenly they were conscious that she was looking at herself intently in the big mirror. Probably she had looked at herself many times before, and probably they had seen her do it often. But to-night it was different. She was looking at herself as at a stranger, in whose face she was trying to discover something. And the stranger’s face in the mirror was terribly white and old; and the eyes in the face were fathomless dark caverns, reaching back, back. It seemed as though Lil could not take her own eyes away from those eyes in the mirror. They had laid some spell upon her. And well they might.
Murry did not know that Katherine was watching Lil; neither did Katherine know that Murry was watching her. When they spoke of it afterwards, they discovered that each had wanted the other not to see. Each had felt that the other should be spared that sight. When Murry had risen to go — long before the usual time — Katherine had followed eagerly, thankful that Murry had escaped the vision.
Neither had escaped it. All their lives long this remained the most vivid of their experiences together. Yet it is doubtful whether either of them spoke of it again, after that night. Even on that night they said very little about it, though it occupied all their thoughts, as they sat on the floor together by the fire. Lil’s face in the mirror brought them finally together. Against that vision — and all its inexpressible meaning — they knew they must hold together, for ever. It had been part of the understanding between them, since they had acknowledged that they did love one another, that it might not be permanent. That night as they clasped each other close, and sat silent before the fire, they knew and acknowledged that they were bound together for ever. That night, for the first time, they slept in each other’s arms.
The rest of Katherine Mansfield’s life — a bare eleven years — is written by her own hand in her Journal and her Letters. In the nature of things that record is not complete. Many of her letters have been published only in part, and some not published at all. And probably it will be many years yet before these can be published. But the publication, when it comes, will add little that is essential to the picture of herself that is contained in the Journal and the Letters. What she was, what she became, is told in them with far greater truth than any biographer could hope to achieve.
LETTERS AND JOURNAL
THE LETTERS OF KATHERINE MANSFIELD VOL. 1
Paris: 31 rue de Tournon — February 1914 —
Monday — Rose Tree Cottage — The Lee, Great Missenden — March 1, 1915 —
Wednesday, late afternoon — March 11
Paris: 13 Quai aux Fleurs — March 19, 1915 —
Sunday, early afternoon — March 21, 1915
Monday night — March 22, 1915 —
Thursday morning — March 25, 1915
Saturday afternoon — March 27, 1915
Saturday afternoon: Café Biard — March 27, 1915
