The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I

Thursday morning: A little before ten — December 9, 1915

Thursday morning: A little before ten
December 9, 1915

I expect you are in London. I have just washed and dressed and put on my white broderie anglaise jacket (I really do look rather a pretty girl) and now I'm sitting in the sun by the open window smoking the first cigarette. The air is like silk to-day and there is a sheen upon the world like the sheen on a bird's wing. It's very quiet except for the gardener and his spade and warm as fine wool. Yesterday I walked to Sanary—which is the next bay to this, on the road that follows past the palm avenue. Really it was very hot. You walked along with your eyes and nose screwed up and breathed Hail Maries that you wouldn't freckle or be accosted by a black soldier. But I wish you could have been there and seen that bay. There is a long beach there too and on the other side of the road fields of jonquils in flower. Two women one in grey and one in yellow with black straw hats were picking them. As I passed they stood up and held the big nodding bunches before their eyes to see who was passing. There is a tiny villa there, too—with a glass verandah and a small garden. It could not have more than two rooms. It looks right over the bay to the open sea. Behind it rears up an old rock covered with that pink heath and rosemary. A board on the gate said ‘à louer.’ I confess to hanging over the fence for a long time and dreaming…. Coming home in the evening with driftwood to burn—the lamp on the round table—the jar of wild flowers on the mantelpiece… Sitting on the verandah in canvas chairs after supper and smoking and listening to the idle sea. But don't be frightened, you were not there. It was my Brother who sat on the verandah step stroking a kitten that curled on his knee.

I think the Oxford Book of English Verse is very poor. I read it for hours this morning in bed—I turned over pages and pages and pages. But except for Shakespeare and Marvell and just a handful of others it seems to me to be a mass of falsity. Musically speaking, hardly anyone seems to even understand what the middle of the note is—what that sound is like. It's not perhaps that they are even ‘sharp’ or ‘flat’—it's something much more subtle—they are not playing on the very note itself. But when, in despair I took up the French Book I nearly sautéd from the fenêtre with rage. It's like an endless gallery of French salon furniture sicklied o'er with bed canopies, candelabra and porcelain cupids all bow and bottom. Of course there are exceptions. Victor Hugo, by the way, reminded me very much of our white bull taking a railway ticket—to Parnassus. And I wasn't a bit ‘surprised.’