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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I

Wednesday — June 12, 1918

Wednesday
June 12, 1918

No letter by this morning's post, so the day sets in very quiet. It's rather like waiting for a clock to strike. Is it going to strike? Is it not going to strike? No, it's well past the hour now…. Still, ‘thanks be to Fortune,’ I've the afternoon to look forward to—two chances a day: that beats France.

Re Jam. Mrs. Honey has got a nice little lot of gooseberries coming soon—they are called ‘golden drops’ and do make haändsome jam. She's keeping them for us. But do you like gooseberry jam; I do, awfully, if it's home made, and yet it's not (which really is a point in these days) too alluring. I am become, since I arrived here, a Gluttonous Fiend sur le sujet de marmelade d'oranges. It really does seem to me one of the superb discoveries, eaten early in the morning—and so prettie withal.

Yesterday afternoon, on the rocks, among the babies and family parties (too near me for my taste), each of us with our tea and trimmings and cigarettes, Anne and I sat. And She talked and I added:

“A—–!”

“Really!”

“How extraordinary!”

“Yes, I can imagine it.”

ringing the changes on this little chime, which somehow wonderfully was enough to bring all her thought rushing to me in a little urgent troop until I really (if you will please conceive of me as a kind of little warm dim temple) couldn't have held another.

page 200

But oh—they really were—some of them—no end “interesting.”

Why didn't I have a letter!

All the same I am a nice little thing this morning. If you were here I think you'd like my ways.

I fell fast in love with you last night at about 12.30. I was going to bed, dropping my velvet coat and velvet shoes on the bank before I took a header into what I was afraid was going to be a dark little pool, and suddenly I saw you in the ‘garden room’ making something, with a packing case, a hammer, a plane, nails….

“Hold this for me.” I held it, and you banged away.

“Half a minute. I'll just put a paper down to catch the sawdust.”

And later you put a little pot of glue in a saucepan of boiling water, where it bumped away while it melted.

This was so Ineffably Heavenly that I tied a love word to the leg of my very best and fastest pigeon and sent it off to you, to perch on the end of the grey bed and give the top of your head the gentlest possible peck so that you'd wake and get the message. Did you?

I must go out out out into the world.