Journal of Katherine Mansfield

The Cook's Story

The Cook's Story.

Her first husband was a pawnbroker. He learned his trade from her uncle, with whom she lived, and was more like her big brother than anything else from the age of thirteen. After he had married her they prospered. He made a perfect pet of her—they used to say. His sisters put it that he made a perfect fool of himself over her. When their children were fifteen and nine he urged his employers to take a man into their firm—a great friend of his—and persuaded them; really went security for this man. When she saw the man she went all over cold. She said, Mark me, you've not done right: no good will come of this. But he laughed it off. Time passed: the man proved a villain. When they came to take stock, they found all the stock was false: he'd sold everything. This preyed on her husband's mind, went on preying, kept him up at night, made a changed man of him, he went mad as you might say over figures, worrying. One evening, sitting in his chair, very late, he died of a clot of blood on the brain.

She was left. Her big boy was old enough to go out, but the little one was still not more than a baby: he was so nervous and delicate. The doctors had never let him go to school.

One day her brother-in-law came to see her and advised her to sell up her home and get some work. All that keeps you back, he said, is little Bert. Now, I'd advise you to place a certain sum with your solicitor for him and put him out—in the country. He said he'd take him. I did as he advised. But, funny! I never heard a word from the child after he'd gone. I used to ask why he didn't write, and they said, when he can write a decent letter you shall have it—not before. That went on for a twelvemonth, and I found afterwards he'd been writing all the time, grieving to be took away, and they'd never sent his letters. Then quite sudden his uncle wrote and said he must be taken away. He'd done the most awful things—things I couldn't find you a name for—he'd turned vicious—he was a little criminal! What his uncle said was I'd spoiled the child and he was going to make a man of him, and he'd beaten him and half starved him and when he was frightened at night and screamed, he turned him out into the New Forest and made him sleep under the branches. My big boy went down to see him. Mother, he says, you wouldn't know little Bert. He can't speak. He won't come near anybody. He starts off if you touch him; he's like a little beast. And, oh dear, the things he'd done! Well, you hear of people doing those things before they're put into orphanages. But when I heard that and thought it was the same little baby his father used to carry into Regent's Park bathed and dressed of a Sunday morning—well, I felt my religion was going from me.

I had a terrible time trying to get him into an orphanage. I begged for three months before they would take him. Then he was sent to Bisley. But after I'd been to see him there, in his funny clothes and all—I could see 'is misery. I was in a nice place at the time, cook to a butcher in a large way in Kensington, but that poor child's eyes—they used to follow me—and a sort of shivering that came over him when people went near.

Well, I had a friend that kept a boarding house in Kensington. I used to visit her, and a friend of hers, a big well-set-up fellow, quite the gentleman, an engineer who worked in a garage, came there very often. She used to joke and say he wanted to walk me out. I laughed it off till one day she was very serious. She said, You're a very silly woman. He earns good money; he'd give you a home and you could have your little boy. Well, he was to speak to me next day and I made up my mind to listen. Well, he did, and he couldn't have put it nicer. I can't give you a house to start with, he said, but you shall have three good rooms and the kid, and I'm earning good money and shall be more.

A week after, he come to me. I can't give you any money this week, he says, there's things to pay for from when I was single. But I daresay you've got a bit put by. And I was a fool, you know, I didn't think it funny. Oh yes, I said, I'll manage. Well, so it went on for three weeks. We'd arranged not to have little Bert for a month because, he said, he wanted me to himself, and he was so fond of him. A big fellow, he used to cling to me like a child and call me mother.

After three weeks was up I hadn't a penny. I'd been taking my jewels and best clothes to put away to pay for him until he was straight. But one night I said, Where's my money? He just up and gave me such a smack in the face I thought my head would burst. And that began it. Every time I asked him for money he beat me. As I said, I was very religious at the time, used to wear a crucifix under my clothes and couldn't go to bed without kneeling by the side and saying my prayers—no, not even the first week of my marriage. Well, I went to a clergyman and told him everything and he said, My child, he said, I am very sorry for you, but with God's help, he said, it's your duty to make him a better man. You say your first husband was so good. Well, perhaps God has kept this trial for you until now. I went home—and that very night he tore my crucifix off and hit me on the head when I knelt down. He said he wouldn't have me say my prayers; it made him wild. I had a little dog at the time I was very fond of, and he used to pick it up and shout, I'll teach it to say its prayers, and beat it before my eyes—until—well, such was the man he was.

Then one night he came in the worse for drink and fouled the bed. I couldn't stand it. I began to cry. He gave me a hit on the ear and I fell down, striking my head on the fender. When I came to, he was gone. I ran out into the street just as I was—I ran as fast as I could, not knowing where I was going—just dazed—my nerves were gone. And a lady found me and took me to her home and I was there three weeks. And after that I never went back. I never even told my people. I found work, and not till months after I went to see my sister. Good gracious! she says, we all thought you was murdered! And I never see him since….

Those were dreadful times. I was so ill, I could scarcely hardly work and of course I couldn't get my little boy out. He had to grow up in it. And so I had to start all over again. I had nothing of his, nothing of mine. I lost it all except my marriage lines. Somehow I remembered them just as I was running out that night and put them in my boddy—sort of an instinct as you might say.

J. digs the garden as though he were exhuming a hated body or making a hole for a loved one.

The ardent creature spent more than half her time in church praying to be delivered from temptation. But God grew impatient at last and caused the door to be shut against her. “For Heaven's sake,” said he, “give the temptation a chance!”

It's raining, but the air is soft, smoky, warm. Big drops patter on the languid leaves, the tobacco flowers lean over. Now there is a rustle in the ivy. Wingley has appeared from the garden next door; he bounds from the wall. And delicately, lifting his paws, pointing his ears, very afraid that big wave will overtake him, he wades over the lake of green grass.

“Mr. Despondency's daughter, Muchafraid, went through the water singing.”

She said: “I don't feel in the least afraid. I feel like a little rock that the rising tide is going to cover. You won't be able to see me … big waves … but they'll go down again. I shall be there—winking bright.”

Oh, what sentimental toshery!

June 10. I have discovered that I cannot burn the candle at one end and write a book with the other.

Life without work—I would commit suicide. Therefore work is more important than life.

June 21. Bateson and his love of the louse for its own sake. Pedigree lice. £100 a year from the Royal Institute: a large family: desperately poor: but he never notices. The lives he saved in the Balkan war with shaving and Thymol. Cases reduced from 7000 to 700. No reward, not even an O.B.E. He dissects them, finds their glands and so on, keeps them in tiny boxes; they feed on his arm. The louse and the bedbug.

Hydatids: the Australian who got them: handfuls of immature grapes. They attack the liver. In the human body they reproduce indefinitely. When they are passed and a sheep is attacked by them, they develop hooks and become long worms.

The Egyptian disease: a parasite which attacks the veins and arteries and causes fluxion—constant bleeding. It is another egg drunk in water. After it has been in man the only thing it can affect is a water-snail. It goes through an entirely new cycle of being until it can attack man again.

Dysentery: another parasite.

Hydrophobia: the virus from the dog is taken and a rabbit is infected. That rabbit is used to infect another rabbit: the 2nd a 3rd, and so on, until you get a rabbit who is practically pure virus. The spinal cords are then taken from these rabbits and dried by a vacuum. The result is pounded up fine into an emulsion: 1st rabbit, 2nd rabbit, 3rd rabbit, etc., and the patient is injected progressively till at last he receives a dose which, if he had not been prepared to resist it, would kill him outright. The disease develops very slowly; the treatment is very expensive. Symptoms are a profuse shiny bubbling saliva, and gasping and groaning as in gas-poisoning. No barking, no going on all fours.

In lockjaw the jaw does not lock.

Pasteur was a very dreamer of dreamers. Human beings are a side-line to science.

All this I talked over with Sorapure, June 21. His point of view about medicine seems to me just completely right. I'd willingly let him take off my head, look inside, and pop it on again, if he thought it might assist future generations. Quite the right man to have at one's dying bedside. He'd get me at any rate so interested in the process—gradual loss of sensitiveness, coldness in the joints, etc.—I'd lie there thinking: this is very valuable to know; I must make a note of this.

As he stood at the door talking: “Nothing is incurable; it's all a question of time. What seems so useless to-day may be just that link which will make all plain to a future generation….” I had a sense of the larger breath, of the mysterious lives within lives, and the Egyptian parasite beginning its new cycle of being in a water-snail affected me like a great work of art. No, that's not what I mean. It made me feel how perfect the world is, with its worms and hooks and ova, how incredibly perfect. There is the sky and the sea and the shape of a lily, and there is all this other as well. The balance how perfect! ( Salut, Tchehov!) I would not have the one without the other.

The clocks are striking ten. Here in my room the sky looks lilac; in the bath-room it is like the skin of a peach. Girls are laughing.

I have consumption. There is still a great deal of moisture ( and pain) in my bad lung. But I do not care. I do not want anything I could not have. Peace, solitude, time to write my books, beautiful external life to watch and ponder—no more. O, I'd like a child as well—a baby boy; mais je demande trop!

[Part of this note appears again in the following form.]

As he stood at the door he said quietly, “Nothing is incurable. What seems so useless to-day may be the link that will make all plain to-morrow.” We had been discussing hydatids, the Egyptian parasite that begins its cycle of existence being in a water-snail and the effects of hydrophobia. He smiled gently. There was nothing to be alarmed or shocked or surprised at. It was all a question of knowing these things as they should be known and not otherwise. But he said none of this and went off to his next case….

At breakfast time a mosquito and a wasp came to the edge of the honey dish to drink. The mosquito was a lovely little high stepping gazelle, but the wasp was a fierce roaring tiger. Drink, my darlings!

When the coffee is cold L.M. says: These things have to happen sometimes. And she looks mysterious and important, as if, as a matter of fact she had known all along that this was a cold coffee day.

What I felt was, he said, that I wasn't in the whole of myself at all. I'd got locked in, somehow, in some little … top room in my mind, and strangers had got in—people I'd never seen before were making free of the rest of it. There was a dreadful feeling of confusion, chiefly that, and … vague noises—like things being moved—changed about—in my head. I lit the candle and sat up and in the mirror I saw a dark, brooding, strangely lengthened face.

“The feeling roused by the cause is more important than the cause itself….” That is the kind of thing I like to say to myself as I get into the train. And then, as one settles into the corner—“For example”—or “Take—for instance …” It's a good game for one.

She fastens on a white veil and hardly knows herself. Is it becoming or is it not becoming? Ah, who is there to say. There is a lace butterfly on her left cheek and a spray of flowers on her right. Two dark bold eyes stare through the mesh—Surely not hers. Her lips tremble; faint, she sinks on her bed. And now she doesn't want to go. Must she? She is being driven out of the flat by those bold eyes. Out you go. Ah, how cruel! ( Second Violin.)

But her hand is large and cold with big knuckles and short square nails. It is not a little velvet hand that sighs, that yields—faints dead away and has to be revived again only to faint once more. ( S.V.)

What do I want? she thought. What do I really want more than anything else in the world? If I had a wishing ring or Ali Baba's lamp—no, it wasn't Ali Baba—it was—Oh, what did it matter! Just supposing some one came…. “I am here to grant your dearest wish.” And she saw, vaguely, a fluffy little creature with a silver paper star on a wand—a school fairy…. What should I say? It was cold in the kitchen, cold and dim. The tap dripped slowly, as tho' the water were half frozen…. ( S.V.)

Miss Todd and Miss Hopper were second violins. Miss Bray was a viola.

Midday strikes on various bells—some velvety soft, some languid, some regretful, and one impatient—a youthful bell ringing high and quick above the rest. He thought joyfully: That's the bell for me! …