Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I

Thursday, 5 p.m. — December 4, 1919

Thursday, 5 p.m.
December 4, 1919

It's sunset with a wide, wide pale yellow sky and a blue sea gilded over. I feel horribly weak after this fever attack, but calmer—just now—thank the Lord. My heart is so hateful. If you had such a heart. It bangs, throbs, beats out “Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching,” double quick time, with very fine double rolls for the kettle-drum. How it keeps it up I don't know. I always feel it's going to give out. I think every day I shall die of heart failure. I expect it's an inherited feeling from Mother. Oh lucky, lucky Mother, so surrounded, so held, so secure! Can't I hear her “Child, you mustn't be left here one instant,” and then she'd make miracles happen and by to-morrow she'd have me wrapped up and defied everybody.

But we are firmly held in the web of circumstance. We've got to risk it, to see it through. No, once I'm better I go to Mentone and I'll return here later in the spring when I'm stronger.

L. M. is out to tea with some people in Ospedaletti—gone off with a big bunch of roses for them. The wind sighs in the house and the fire goes chik-chik—very small. My fever makes everything 100 times more vivid, like a nightmare is vivid. But it will be over in a day or two, I expect. A bad business.

I am sure Mentone will do wonders for my old depression. I've great hopes of it. Forgive me, all you tell me about the house—I can't help feeling it's all part of a hideous vile joke that's being played on us for les autres to read about in days to come. I can't see it except like this.