Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The Life of Katherine Mansfield

Chapter II: Wellington: 11 Tinakori Road

page 62

Chapter II: Wellington: 11 Tinakori Road

“Coming continually on the spirit with a fine suddenness.” —Keats.

1

The True Original Pa Man coined a phrase which became part of the Beauchamp heritage:

“The umbrageous hills kissed the waters of the South Pacific.” This was “very Pa,” Katherine Mansfield thought, and she laughed at it as one laughs at things because one likes them. She herself had a “special” feeling for certain places that she knew in New Zealand: Day's Bay, and “the ferny paths” through the manukas and tree ferns; Anikiwa on Marlborough Sounds; Karori. As she looked back, they became “a kind of possession.” She belonged to that Island. Her navel string had been fastened to it, and from it she was nourished.

The grandmother had so often told her of the storm on the day of her birth, that she more than half believed she remembered it, herself:

“She had come forth squealing out of a reluctant mother in the teeth of a ‘Southerly Buster.’ The Grandmother, shaking her before the window, had seen the sea rise in green mountains and sweep the esplanade. The little house was like a shell to its loud booming. Down in the gully the wild trees page 63 lashed together and big gulls wheeling and crying skimmed past the misty window.”

She was born at eight o'clock on Sunday morning, October 14th, 1888. It was early spring in Wellington, and azaleas were out in the Botanical Gardens.

She might have been born of the wind and the sea on that wild morning.“The voice of her lawless mother the sea” called to her all of her life; she was “the sea child” of her early poem.

“Into the world you sent her, mother,
Fashioned her body of coral and foam
Combed a wave in her hair's warm smother
And drove her away from home.”

She never was happy far from it, not happy for long with it. When Cornwall, Ospedaletti, the South of France, reminded her of New Zealand, she was at home while the illusion lasted. But wind always frightened her. It brought back the night terrors of childhood and made it impossible for her ever to live long alone.

From the time she was fifteen and first seriously trying to “write,” her notebooks were filled with such beginnings as:

“The storm on the day of her birth. Now to plan it—She is born in New Zealand on the day of the storm.”

The storm at her birth seemed to have some mysterious significance for her which was part of her being and must be expressed.

In The Birthday, as it was first published with a New Zealand setting, she developed that storm into page 64 part of her story; but when she rewrote it for The German Pension, she transferred the setting to Germany. It was not what she meant: it was not “that Island.” It merely reflected her ironic state. In The Aloe she tried once more to describe it; but when she revised the tale as Prelude, she omitted the description. She felt, it seemed, that the storm at her birth had a meaning which lay beyond words. It belonged, in its elusiveness, with The Voices of the Air.

2

In later years, Katherine Mansfield was laughingly disappointed over her early appearance. When her sister “Marie” sent her a photograph of herself as a baby, it was a “dreadful shock” :

“I had always imagined it—a sweet little laughing thing, rather French, with wistful eyes under a fringe, firmly gripping a spade, showing even then a longing to dig for treasure with her own hands. But this little solemn monster with a wisp of hair, looked as though she were just about to fall over backwards head overheels! On her feet she wears, as far as I can make out, a pair of ordinary workman's boots which the photographer, from astonishment or malice, has photographed so close up that each tootsie is the size of her head. The only feature about her is her ears which are neatly buttonholed on to the sides of her head and not just safty-pinned on as most babies' are. Even the spade she clasps with the greatest reluctance.”

But it was hardly a fair picture, for she had jaundice at three months old, and was sent to Anikiwa, in the Sounds, where her cousins remember her as “a page 65 yellow, ill-looking baby” who took an inexplicable fancy to a certain stone in the garden, and refused to be quiet unless they sat on the uncomfortable seat and nursed her.

Knowing (as did The Thoughtful Child) that “the right sort of people must expect children to sit on them,” she fortunately had a lap undisputedly her own for her first two years. She had been her grandmother's child from the moment the old woman so unceremoniously shook her before the streaming window on the night she was born in the “Southerly Buster.” Her father was ordered “home” to England for a cure soon after her birth. Since he could never think of going far without his wife, Kathleen Mansfield was left in her grand-mother's care. She was always to be more Mansfield than she was Kathleen. Margaret Mansfield Dyer was spiritual godmother to her, as well as grandmother.

Most children pass in the accepted manner through the hands of the angel who (in the Garden Behind the Moon where they shine the stars) wipes each child's mind clean with a sponge when he reaches the age of three. But there was one corner in the mind of Kathleen Beauchamp which never was erased. It was the memory of a morning two days before her second birthday:

“Things happened so simply then, without preparation and without any shock. They let me go into my mother's room. (I remember standing on tiptoe and using both hands to turn the big white china door-handle) and there lay my mother in bed with her arms along the sheet, and there sat my grandmother before the fire with a baby in a flannel page 66 across her knees. My mother paid no attention to me at all. Perhaps she was asleep, for my grandmother nodded and said in a voice scarcely above a whisper, ‘Come and see your little sister.’ I tiptoed to her voice across the room, and she parted the flannel, and I saw a little round head with a tuft of goldy hair on it and a big face with eyes shut—white as snow. ‘Is it alive?’ I asked. ‘Of course,’ said grandmother. ‘Look at her holding my finger.’ And—yes, a hand, scarcely bigger than my doll's, in a frilled sleeve, was wound round her finger. ‘Do you like her?’ said my grandmother. ‘Yes. Is she going to play with the doll's house?’ ‘By-and-by,’ said the grandmother, and I felt very pleased. Mrs. Heywood had just given us the doll's house. It was a beautiful one with a verandah and a balcony and a door that opened and shut and two chimneys. I wanted badly to show it to someone else.
“‘Her name is Gwen,’ said the grandmother. ‘Kiss her.’
“I bent down and kissed the little goldy tuft. But she took no notice. She lay quite still with her eyes shut.
“‘Now go and kiss mother,’ said the grandmother.
“But mother did not want to kiss me. Very languid, leaning against the pillows, she was eating some sago. The sun shone through the windows and winked on the brass knobs of the big bed.
“After that grandmother came into the nursery with Gwen and sat in front of the nursery fire in the rocking chair with her. Meg and Tadpole were away staying with Aunt Harriet, and they had gone before the new doll's house arrived, so that was why I so longed to have somebody to show it to. I had gone all through it myself, from the kitchen to the dining-room, up into the bedrooms with the doll's lamp on the table, heaps and heaps of times.
“‘When will she play with it?’ I asked grandmother.
page break
Black and white photograph of Katherine Mansfield's grandmother, Margaret Dyer holding infant Gwendoline Beauchamp in front of the Doll's House

Grandmother Dyer,
Baby Gwen & The Doll's House

page break page 67
“‘By-and-by, darling.’
“It was spring. Our garden was full of big white lilies. I used to run out and sniff them and come in again with my nose all yellow.
“‘Can't she go out?’
“At last, one very fine day, she was wrapped in the warm shawl and grandmother carried her into the cherry orchard, and walked up and down under the falling cherry flowers. Grandmother wore a grey dress with white pansies on it. The doctor's carriage was waiting at the door, and the doctor's little dog, Jackie, rushed at me and snapped at my bare legs. When we went back to the nursery and the shawl was taken away, little petals like feathers fell out of the folds. But Gwen did not look, even then. She lay in grandmother's arms, her eyes just open to show a line of blue, her face very white, and the one tuft of goldy hair standing up on her head.
“All day, all night grandmother's arms were full. I had no lap to climb into, no pillow to rest against. All belonged to Gwen. But Gwen did not notice this; she never put up her hand to play with the silver brooch that was a half-moon with five little owls sitting on it; she never pulled grandmother's watch from her bodice and opened the back by herself to see grandfather's hair; she never buried her head close to smell the lavender water, or took up grandmother's spectacle case and wondered at its being really silver. She just lay still and let herself be rocked.
“Down in the kitchen one day old Mrs. MacKelvie came to the door and asked Bridget about the poor little mite, and Bridget said, ‘Kep’ alive on bullock's blood hotted in a saucer over a candle.’ After that I felt frightened of Gwen, and I decided that even when she did play with the doll's house I would not let her go upstairs into the bedroom—only downstairs, and then only when I saw she could look.
“Late one evening I sat by the fire on my little page 68 carpet hassock and grandmother rocked, singing the song she used to sing to me, but more gently. Suddenly she stopped and I looked up. Gwen opened her eyes and turned her little round head to the fire and looked and looked at, and then—turned her eyes up to the face bending over her. I saw her tiny body stretch out and her hands flew up, and ‘Ah! Ah! Ah!’ called the grandmother.
“Bridget dressed me next morning. When I went into the nursery I sniffed. A big vase of the white lilies was standing on the table. Grandmother sat in her chair to one side with Gwen in her lap, and a funny little man with his head in a black bag was standing behind a box of china eggs.
“‘Now!’ he said, and I saw my grandmother's face change as she bent over little Gwen.
“‘Thank you,’ said the man, coming out of the bag. The picture was hung over the nursery fire. I thought it looked very nice. The doll's house was in it—verandah and balcony and all. Gran held me up to kiss my little sister.”

Of course, the picture over the fireplace would have helped to keep the recollection real; though, as a matter of fact, it did become a bit confused, for the cherry trees belonged to Karori, several years later—not to Wellington; and old Mrs. MacKelvie belonged to Karori, too. But the birth of the little sister, that spring, was really true, and that first sense of threatened security was poignant enough—the child's first realisation of aloneness—of standing outside looking in upon the one loved and secure who had taken her place—was keen and sharp enough, to be remembered always. The Grandmother was her security, and was still to be, as she looked back, twelve years later, from illness and loneliness in Bavaria:

page 69
“The only adorable thing I can imagine is for my grandmother to put me to bed and bring me a bowl of hot bread and milk, and standing with her hand folded, the left over the right, say in her adorable voice, ‘There, darling, isn't that nice?’ To wake later and find her turning down the bedclothes to see if my feet were cold, and wrapping them in a little pink singlet, softer than cat's fur…. Alas!”

While she was still too little to “have taken to pothooks,” and so hadn't yet folded herself away into books (though she was not too young to have heard The Child's Garden of Verses), what did this aloof, rather silent and dreamy child find to charm her into her own world?

Let her tell it herself as she remembered, in flying fragments, and as she wrote it—before ever she had left New Zealand—for a friend who kept it until this day. In her memory, no doubt, it was idealised, sentimentalised even, but beneath it is the real movement of a child's mind, and the movement of the mind of a real child.

“The Child, standing on a chair by the window calls: ‘Father, Mother, the garden's on fire.’ She is right. Over the white house a Virginia creeper has run like a thin sheet of flame and when she saw the sumac tree in the avenue: ‘I would like to warm my hands there; it would nearly make toast.
“Her white furs have come out of the hat box—‘ a little smelly, but such a comfy smell.’ She wears a small red jacket over her white frocks and—‘ Look at my new woollen legs. Now I can walk twice as far as you because I've four.’ …
“Beyond the garden gate the road walks over a hill away from people and houses.
“‘It's running away from the shops,’ and we know, page 70 could we but walk far enough, it would run right into the sea. ‘Does it go on then?’
“‘Why, of course, right through a coral forest, pink and white where the Sea King's daughters play “Here we go gathering sea weed grapes,” and blow the loveliest tunes through little silver shells. And, if you do not stop to comb your curls or eat a little anemone jelly you would come right out on the other side. There you would find ladies sitting under big umbrellas, reading “Little Black Sambo” to children with brown cotton gloves and veils over their faces—and that would be England.’ …
“Now from the top of the hill there is a whole valley full of trees; below us—pine trees—with their brown rug tucked round their big toes—a little bunch of oak trees—with an air of crisp daintiness about them which makes us shudder at the thought of the next wind storm. But the poplars are stiff and straight and naked already—like giant broom sticks for giant witches. ‘Oh, do not walk through a poplar grove at night in Autumn. Who knows but that you might see their huge, hag-like forms rooting terribly at the trees—tearing them out of the dull earth—riding up over the face of the world and snatching at the stars with their claw-like fingers.’
“‘Oh, look, a sparrow—a little boy sparrow. Whistling on the top of that willow tree. Look at his fur blowing about…. He looks as though he was waving a hanky at me. I wish I could hold him inside my jacket here, and take him home—he'd be so warm.’
“She walks all the way back, ‘because it's down.’ …
“So she finds the world a kind place. She is not haunted by the decay of Autumn, not chilled by the paralysis of Winter. To her it is firelight, then the softest, gentlest sleep—and the white shroud is only a night gown; the bare earth—a bed for a little girl.”
“The Child returned home from a visit to Aunt Emily's.
page 71
“‘It was so nice. She has three kittens with trousers and a lady cat with a music and they all waggle themselves and sing a song.’
“‘And one kitten has a blue necktie and a face like Mummy.’
“Then Aunt Emily sent the whole party in a box half as big as the Child's nursery….
“In the afternoon … she sat very still a big tattered book on her knees.
“‘What are you reading?’
“‘Oh, just things.
“‘Here, show me the book.’ The pages were turned, slowly, and little pieces read here and there:
“‘Yes, that was a monkey with a hat on, feeding a baby with porridge in a spoon…. I should think it would be frightened. Stolen the baby's hat? I'm afraid you're right. And that was an old man with a bird's nest in his beard…. No, Mummy would have been disgusted…. But they certainly couldn't help having plenty of crumbs…. There was Jenny Wren at her wedding, with Cock Robin…. Why a hanky over her face? Oh, it was a veil that ladies always wear then…. How did she keep it on when she flew? She must have kept her head tucked under Cock Robin's wing…. And that was the old woman flying up to the moon in a basket…. Yes, our clothes basket.’
“This was a very old book. It belonged to her mother when she was a little girl.
“What is the fascination and charm of all these old old rhymes?

” ‘Comb hair, comb,
Daddy's gone to plough
If you want your hair combed
Have it combed now.'

“‘Oh, such a beautiful hymn.’ … the little child, standing on a chair by the window, looking out over the garden to the fields, and Daddy, ploughing even page 72 at that early hour, would see a light at the windows and say, ‘Oh, that's my little daughter having her hair combed.’
“Even the delicious adventures of Little Black Sambo and the irresponsible, intoxicated holiday glamour of Sam and Selina could not surpass these old verses:

” ‘Little girl, little girl, where have you been?
Gathering roses to give to the Queen.
Little girl, little girl, what gave she you?
She gave me a diamond as big as my shoe.'

“‘But what does she do with the diamond—and it has no smell…. I would rather have the roses.’
“But here was another picture … the little girl courtseying low, half hidden behind the great bunch of roses, and the Queen, on her golden throne stretching out her hands for the flowers—her white hands—but she is used to thorns—and beside her, the diamond in a neat parcel tied with a ribbon….
“The Child fell asleep … and took her way along the little white road hedged with blossoming briar roses—past the green meadows where children played with white lambs and led them by a blue ribbon beside the buttercup fringed pools—past the wayside cottage where Mrs. Punch was pinning Toby's clean neck frill on to the clothes line and Mr. Punch was reading ‘Ernie at the Seaside’ to the baby in long clothes.
“Far away up in the air an old woman in a basket. She was descending rapidly. ‘Frightful lot of extra work these balloons are making,’ said she frowning and muttering. ‘They send the currents all wrong.’
“‘The currents,’ said the Child. ‘Is that where currants come from?’
“‘Oh,’ the old woman muttered, ‘there are currents and currants, which of course tells you I have a sister in the currant business—“Hot Cross buns the old woman runs.” …
page 73
“From a minute house came the sound of a great many babies laughing and crooning. Inside, a row of the prettiest babies imaginable. And at the end of the room the teacher, a demure little person with great horn spectacles and a birch rod in her hand.
“‘I just wanted to say How do you do,’ said the Child, ‘and ask if the babies might sing the school song.’
“‘They're all too young,’ said the Schoolmistress, ‘but perhaps you would sing it for them?’
“The Child put her hands together, shook her back hair, and sang in a clear high voice:

” ‘Little Nellie Nipkin, brisk and clean and neat
Keeps a little baby school in the village street
Teaches little pupils all that she can find
And keeps a little birch that teaches them to mind.'

“‘Thank you,’ said Miss Nipkin, ‘but the birch is only a matter of form.’
“From the street came the sound of music … and there was the lady cat playing the violin, and the three little kittens with trousers. The Child clapped her hands.
“‘Hallo, hallo,’ she said. ‘I knew I would find you here.’ The lady cat nodded brightly.
“‘What sweet little knickers your children have.’
“‘They are quite blithesome,’ said the lady cat, and as we walk down the street into the market place we hear her violin, now faint, now clear….”

3

Even when Kathleen was still of importance as “the baby” of the family—even then she often turned to her own duality for companionship—as Katherine turned, later, to Kezia. Her company in those days was with “the shadow children, thin page 74 and small”; or the cabbage tree with its hair out of curl:

“Never mind, cabbage tree, when I am taller
And if you grow, please, a little bit smaller,
I shall be able by that time, may be,
To make you the loveliest curls, cabbage tree.”

Later her sense of solidariness drew her very much deeper into a fantastic world. And then (as now, when she was small) her aloneness was closely connected with a certain fear: fear of wind, fear of night. From that earliest childhood she was haunted by fearful dreams that made her sleep poorly. In fact she preferred to go without sleep, at times—and trembled for the comfort of a candle in the hands of her mother or grandmother, when she was a child.

There were occasions when:

“The wind keeps going creepy-creep
And waiting to be fed.”

and

“Like an awful dog we had
Who used to creep around …”

The fear of the wind, when she was small, was joined in her mind with fear of the doctor's little dog,“Jackie,” who snapped at her bare legs when she was two. It was connected with her earliest memory, and it was a fearful one which lasted all her life. The horrors were perhaps the worst when they strayed from the companionable world of fantasy and betrayed her by precipitating her back, terrified, into the world of grown-ups for protection.

One of these strayed companions from her fanciful page 75 world watched her grimly as she said her solitary good-bye to the darkening house in Tinakori Road. This was later when she was five. But it was a characteristic episode of her early days:

“Her old bogey, the dark, had overtaken her, and now there was no lighted room to make a despairing dash for. Useless to call ‘Grandma.’ … If she flew down the stairs and out of the house she might escape from It in time. It was round like the sun, It had a face. It smiled, but It had no eyes. It was yellow. When she was put to bed with two drops of aconite in a medicine glass It breathed very loudly and firmly and It had been known on certain particularly fearful occasions to turn round and round. It hung in the air. That was all she knew and even that much had been very difficult to explain to the grandmother. Nearer came the terror and more plain to feel the ‘silly’ smile. She snatched her hands from the window pane, opened her mouth to call Lottie, and fancied she did call loudly, though she made no sound—It was at the bottom of the stairs, waiting in the little dark passage, guarding the back door—but Lottie was at the back door, too! ‘Oh, there you are,’ she said cheerfully.”

Even “the same old nightmare” that often came from the grown-up world: “… the butcher with a knife and rope who grew nearer and nearer, smiling that dreadful smile, while she could not move, could only stand still crying out, ‘Grandma, Grandma’ …” could not have been as terrifying to The Little Girl as those disembodied Ones that escaped to pursue her in the dark, and sped through her dreams at night.

The Grandmother was the link between the page 76 children and the grown-ups. After the birth of Gwen, her fourth child, the mother seems to have lived in the condition of aloofness in which she appears in Prelude, The Aloe, and At the Bay. The first six years of her married life had drained her energy; she was surrounded by her family. Her husband, with his continual need of her support, took what time and life she had to spare. The children flitted about her in the little box-like house. She would go out among the flowers, for which she had a passion: arum lilies and pincushions around the little square mat of lawn in the front garden; and to the wild gully, at the back—filled with green and tree ferns; beyond that, the world appeared unreal.

But the Grandmother was still in close touch with domestic life. There is work to be done in the New Zealand homes, where maids are few and inadequate. A succession of Alices,“Alice-the-hired-girl,” came and went, but the Grandmother, like all really good cooks, loved cooking, and by the time Kathleen was big enough to peel passion fruit for the little purple seeds to put in fruit salad, Vera was old enough to be a real help in the house.

Vera Margaret was everybody's favourite, and well she might be. She was one of those fortunate and contented children born to be “a comfort to her parents.” She had her mother's rather effusive manner without her mother's natural hauteur. They all had this manner, except the small Kathleen. The atmosphere was more that of an English than a Colonial home. The children were well-behaved—taught to say “Gran, Dear”;“Mother, Dear”; page 77 Father, Dear”; and they all addressed one another indiscriminately as “darling.” If, at times, Vera seemed to the younger children to belong rather to the world of grown-ups, it was doubtless because—being the oldest, and having her father's sense of responsibility—she felt accountable to the grown-ups for the younger ones.“To see Vera was to love her,” the Anikiwa cousins said:“to see Kathleen was to remember her.” Vera at eight was a tall, straight-backed girl (though she was threatened with curvature of the spine for a while); she had the high colour in her cheeks and lips that the Wellington wind whips into the faces of so many children. Her hair—brown like the mother's—was in long, neat plaits. All the girls looked like the mother; but Kathleen had her mother's colourless skin; the others had a touch of the father's ruddy colouring.

Charlotte Mary (“Chaddie” familiarly,“Marie” more respectfully) was a year and a half older than Kathleen, and apparently followed the course of the other two. She wore her hair in ringlets, at six, and walked with her feet turned out. She was a charming and affectionate child, easy and soft of speech.

All three of the little girls were dressed alike. They wore jumper dresses on week-days, and freshly starched pinafores on Sundays. If company came for tea, the Grandmother slipped a fresh pinafore over the play frock. They had small black sandals with short socks, and bare knees that needed frequent scrubbing.

Kathleen's wavy dark hair was about her shoulders page 78 like Edna's in Something Childish, when she was very small. She was rather lumpish, and often called to the others:“Wait for me! I can't hurry. I'm too fat—-” One of the little Walter Nathans, of whom there were five, used to shout over the fence at her from No. 13:“Fatty! Fatty! Fatty!” To which she scorned to make reply.

Yet even when she was small, she cast a small black shadow of her father's temper. It was, she afterward thought, a little demon which possessed her—a “black monkey” :

“My Babbles has a nasty knack
Of keeping monkeys on her back….
“She comes and stands beside my chair
With almost an offended air
And says: ‘Oh, Father, why can't I?’
And stamps her foot and starts to cry—
“She throws about her nicest toys
And makes a truly dreadful noise
Till Mother rises from her place
With quite a Sunday churchy face….
“Never a kiss or one goodnight
Never a glimpse of candle light
Oh, how the monkey simply flies!” …

In many other respects she was her father's daughter. They were alike in the wrong ways, and different in the right ones. But there was a twinkle between them and the bond of the “jolly voice” in which children “expect to be talked to” and in which he so often did talk to her. Kass shared her father's humour as fairly as she shared his temper. The real bond between the Pa Man and the child was the True Original Pa Man, who had given page 79 them both their patrimony of wit. The children were brought up on his auctioneer's jingles as other children are raised on their father's old college songs. The small Beauchamps were veritably rocked to sleep on:“Ohau can I cross the river Ohau?” and

“On the banks of the Wamangaroa
They discovered the bones of a moa,
The largest I ween that e'er was seen
On the banks of the Wamangaroa.
Its back measured two feet by the tape, Sir,
And it was a most elegant shape, Sir—
And he dug his own grave by the bright rippling wave
On the banks of the Wamangaroa.”

When he was feeling “jolly” and had exhausted his father's repertory, the Pa Man occasionally tried extempore of his own:

“Orua away gently in a small boat
For you must beware of the Horowhenua afloat.”

Or he rolled off the pleasant greeting phrases that he and his father learned from the Maoris: Kanui taku aroka atu kia oke (Great is my love to you) … Kia whiti tonu te ra kirunga kiaoke (May the sunshine of happiness ever rest upon you).

These celebrations were usually over the dinnertable when the children were allowed to dine with the grown-ups.

Even when they were far too small to understand, the “jolly” voice rolled about them:

“‘Bread?’ Plain or coloured, Miss? Half a yard cut on the cross, I take it, with as little selvedge as possible.”
page 80

The whimsical spirit of The True Original Pa Man presided over some feasts:

“‘My father would say,’ said Burnell (as he carved), ‘this must have been one of those birds whose mother played to it in infancy upon the German flute. And the sweet strains of the dulcet instrument acted with such effect upon the infant mind …’.”

When, in after years, anything was “very Pa,” it meant (in Katherine Mansfield's private language), something with a style of its own, something which could withstand the current mode—something having individuality, vigour, flamboyancy.

There were the flashes when the father stopped for a twinkle with the children at home, and would draw for them strange and exciting dragons—“dragons with seven bellies”; and there were the brief and intoxicating visits to the strange place where he lived during the day:

“My father's office. I smell it…. I see the cage of the clumsy wooden goods lift and the tarred ropes hanging.”

On his desk was a little brass pig, with a bristly mat of hair for wiping pens. It always stood on a pile of torn letters. When she had to stretch on tiptoe to look over the edge of the desk, it had been the first thing she reached for: the darling little gold pig! With her delight in small quaint things, it seemed to her too, too lovely! What was its significance, of what was it a symbol?

When she went “home” to England for the last time it went with her. It stood on a pile of torn page 81 letters on her own desk all the rest of her life; and when she first knew she was to die, she said (among a very few other things):“Don't let anything happen to my brass pig. I'd like Vera to have it.” In her will, afterward, she bequeathed it back to her father. This was strangely significant because very few possessions—in the material sense—were precious to her. She had few treasures during her lifetime, and these few she was likely to give away, impulsively, to any who seemed to be “her people.” But this was a kind of talisman, a “sign” between the two of them—which meant, perhaps, that the bond could never be forgotten.

It had the same meaning between them—the same meaning for her, at least—as the little bunch of flowers that he left, years later, at the Casetta:

“And here on the table are five daisies and an orchid that Father picked for me and tied with a bit of grass and handed me. If I had much to forgive him, I would forgive him much for this little bunch of flowers. What have they to do with it all?”

The bond was there. And Kathleen believed that her father, who had his fortune to make, his own career to follow, and lived in a world beyond, was essentially, in his hidden self, of her kind. In her imagination, he was a child battling with giants; and she felt and suffered for him. She knew that behind the armour of the rising business man was the wincing and sensitive boy; and she was instant in sympathy with him. When on a visit to the Riviera, during which he came to see her at the Casetta, his money-wallet was stolen, she quivered in an agony page 82 of sympathy for his loss, as for a naked child in a winter storm:

“I really literally nearly fainted when this swept over me and I ‘saw’ him with a very high colour putting on a smile. I do hope to God people don't suffer quite as I think they do: it's not to be borne if they do.”

But the battle with giants was his life, as she knew it. He was the business man who left the children to the women of the family. There they were, and that was an end of it.

page break page break
Anikiwa

Anikiwa