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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I

Monday — October 6, 1919

Monday
October 6, 1919

I am sitting outside in the bastick chair; it is a mild, cloudy day. The morning was quite chilly—so was last night. Talk about the bounding horizon…. As I sit here I have to throw everything I write against it, and it seems to me the pink geranium beats me out of hand. It is a lesson in humility to write or think with that sea and sky there.

page 245

Where are you?

How are you?

When I know those things, and how you found everything I shall feel really settled, but while you are en voyage I'm restless. You understand that? Augusta, the maid, has disappeared. She must have seen that furniture arriving. 1

L. M. has broken:

(1)

The big fruit dish

(2)

Our plate

(3)

A saucer

all at one go from leaning on the sideboard. I shall buy crocks here but put them in your suit-case against the goldene Zeit. And the worst of it is I always feel she thinks it “so nice and homey” to occasionally smash a thing or two. You must keep me from getting overstern, overstrict and overtidy. It's an obsession. I realised it this morning. Even out here I had to rearrange the pick, the shovel, and the rake before I could do a thing—even though they were behind me. I hope I shan't say to our darling little boy “as long as your mudpies have form, darling, you can make them. But there must be no slopping over the mould.” He will like you best.

You know how, when we get hungry, we are at last even unable to play Demon for wanting the hash-hammer to sound. That is precisely my state of mind re a letter from you to say you are at home. Once I've got it, sat down to table with it, fed my soul on it, eaten every single scrap with all the appetite in the world, I fire ahead with other things….

1 The furniture was distinctly exiguous.