Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I

Monday — May 27, 1918

Monday
May 27, 1918

You see, I was in the S. of F. from December till April. What was it like on the whole? Just Hell. As you know it nearly killed me. Then I came back to rest with you. All my longing, all my desires, all my dreams and hopes had been just to be with you, and—to come back to my home. Bien! I came. Heard how ill I was, scarcely seem to have seen you, except through a mist of anxiety, felt that all your idea was for me to get away into the country again. Well, I understood that. Although, please try to realise the appalling blow it was to me to uproot again—and so soon, with hardly a word spoken. Please do try to realise that. Plus the knowledge that I was more ill than I'd thought, and that all my precious ‘privacy,’ my love of ‘self-contained’ life, doing all for myself in my own way … was to be taken away from me, was ‘bad’ for me, enfin.

However, it was only for a month or six weeks that I was to be alone. Then you came down for your holiday and page 181 we went back together. I arrived, and found I was to be here (without a word explaining why this change had been) at least 4 months, until the late autumn. No word of your coming, no word of anything else. It was a sort of ultimate comble. It knocked me back onto my own lonely self. I was in despair, as you know, and I saw Life quite differently. I felt that I could endure no more, and I fell into the dark hollow which waits for me always—the old one—and I wrote from there….

Now about the Elephant. 1 Get it if you can, and we will make it a Singing Elephant with all our hearts.

As I wired you this morning, I am not going to leave this hotel after all. I cannot explain to another landlady that my lungs are weak. Also the fag of wondering what I shall order to eat would mean I'd order nothing. Here, it comes, and one eats it, and it's over. And they know me here, now, and are more than kind to me. The old un,' Mrs. Honey, is ‘pure Heron.’ Bless her! I can always hear her and my gran'ma talking as they put the linen away. So here I shall remain…. You must try to come here, as we did once arrange, even for a week, and we'll have a sail-boat and go “whiffing for pollocks.” I am working hard and Pagello says I have made remarkable progress.

1 The name given to a singularly tall grey house in Hampstead, which we took in July 1918.