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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I

Wednesday — November 26, 1919

Wednesday
November 26, 1919

What's the day like? I am thinking of you. I have got our house on the brain as well as the heart. I feel such a frenzy of impatience, but that must not be. We must be wise children and hard to please, for this time it really is more important than ever before. This time we decide to live in the land with our flocks and our herds, our man-servant and our maidservant and our two sacred cats.

All the same, I keep seeing chimneys in the landscape of my mind, so to say—chimneys that are going to be ours. Think of the first time we visit together, sitting on a step with our hats on our knees smoking a cigarette (man with a vehicle waiting for us somewhere round a corner) looking over the garden, feeling the house behind us, saying: We must have peonies under these windows. And then we get into the station cab and the man drives away and we hold each other's hands and think how familiar this road will become….

It's a wild, glittering day. I can't go to those people for lunch. The wind is like a great bird tumbling over the sea with bright flashing wings. I am upstairs in my bedroom sitting in the sun. The windows are open. It is very pleasant. One could make a charming room of this.

At three o'clock I woke up into the middle of a terrific thunderstorm. The thunder seemed to set one's bones vibrating. One heard the sea, not breaking regularly, but struggling and only now and again with a great harsh sigh the waves spent themselves. It is strange to be alone in such a storm. I kept feeling I must write this, I must write this; but it must be a man who feels it, rather an page 303 elderly man away from home, and something must happen to him—something, you know, which could not happen to such a man—and then the morning must follow, still, clear, ‘poised,’ like it is after such a storm, and he….

It's afternoon. I've just had another caller. A woman who lives here in Ospedaletti with her Italian maid, her English maid, her mother, and I should think a few Spanish menservants. She asked me to tea on Monday. Her villa has a flat roof. She was swathed in fur, violet perfume, and I thought she was M. The spit of M. M.'s eyes, teeth, extravagance. Chicken, 18 lire, butter, 20 lire!! Did you ever! ‘You must go to Algiers next year. Algiers is perfect.’ She is, I should think, very rich and what they call ‘fast’—plays golf, bridge, our car. No ‘swank.’ She has a house in the South of England. I had no time in this race (so familiar!) to ask where, but it was that which interested me. But I must have cards. Here are 5 people I ought to leave cards on. What an absurd predicament. Oh, how nice our name is! My husband bulks very large in these conversations. What a dark, romantic, brilliant creature he is, and as he need never see the people he is quite safe.

My God! the wind. It's blowing great huge guns.

I send J.'s letter just to give you an idea of her. She is a nice woman, streets above these callers. This woman has left rather a faded taste of white suède gloves in my mouth after all. She is unhappy, dissatisfied like M. was. I don't know: one's work sets one finally apart from the idle world, doesn't it?