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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume II

July 29, 1921

page 123

To the Hon. Dorothy Brett

I tremendously enjoyed that long letter. I had been out with M. down the road a little way and then across a stream and into the forest. There are small glades and lawns among the trees filled with flowers. I sat under a big fir and he went gathering. It was a dazzling bright day, big silvery clouds pressing hard on the mountain tops, not even the cotton grass moving. Lying on the moss I found minute strawberry plants and violets and baby fir cones, all looked faery—and M. moved near and far— calling out when he found anything special… Then he disappeared down into a valley and I got up and explored the little fir parlours and sat on the stumps and watched ants and wondered where that apricot stone had come from. These forests are marvellous: one feels as though one were on a desert island somehow. As to the butterflies and golden and green dragon-flies and big tawny bumble bees, they are a whole population. M. came back with a huge bunch of treasures and I walked home and found your letter in the hall. So I sat down on the bottom step of the stairs with the flowers in a wet hanky beside me and read it. Don't you think the stairs are a good place for reading letters? I do. One is somehow suspended—one is on neutral ground—not in one's own world, not in a strange one. They are an almost perfect meeting place—oh Heavens! how stairs do fascinate me when I think of it. Waiting for people— sitting on strange stairs hearing steps from above, watching the light playing by itself—hearing—far below a door, looking down into a kind of dim brightness, watching someone come up. But I could go on for ever.

Must put them in a story though! People come out of themselves—on stairs—they issue forth, unprotected. And then the window on a landing. Why is it so different to all other windows? I must stop this…

I am deeply interested in what you feel about Manet. For years he has meant more to me than any other of page 124 those French painters. He satisfies something deep in me. There is a kind of beautiful real maturity in his painting, as though he had come into his own, and it is a rich heritage. I saw a reproduction of a very lovely Renoir the other day, a young woman—profile—a three-quarter with the arm lazily outstretched, lovely throat, bosom, shoulder—such grace. But I think that in his later paintings he is so often muzzy. I can't appreciate the queer woolly outline, and I feel it was so often as like as not rheumatism rather than revelation. But I don't know. I'd like to have a feed of paintings one day—go from here to Madrid, say, and have a good look. I shall. Once one is out of England I always feel every thing and place is near. We are only four hours from Milan here. Well, even tho' we don't go—there it is. One could start on Saturday morning and be there for the opera that evening. It's the channel which is such a dividing line. It frightens me. It is so terrifically wide, really. And once one is across it one is on the island.

While I remember. Have you read The Three Mullar-Mulgars by de la Mare? If you haven't, do get it and read it to any infants you know. It's about three monkeys.

One seems to read a lot here. It's the kind of house in which you go into a room to comb your hair, find Gulliver's Travels on the shelf behind the door and are immediately lost to the world. The bedroom walls are of wood; there are thick white carpets on some of the floors—outside the windows wide balconies and thick striped cotton (blinds shut out the midday glare. A great many flowers everywhere—generally apricots ripening on the balcony ledge and looking rather gruesome like little decapitated chickens. If only I can make enough money so as never to leave here for good! One never gets old here. At 65 one is as spry as a two-year-old—and (I suppose it is the climate) all is so easy. The strain is gone. One hasn't that feeling of dragging a great endless rope out of a dark sea. Do you hate London? No, I do see it has its beauty and its charm, too. But all the same one feels so page 125 like the swollen sheep that looks up and is not fed. It is so hard—to put it ‘stuffily’—to live from one's centre of being in London.

Tell me what you are doing, if you are so inclined. Don't lose any more half stones! For Heaven's sake put the half back again. Look at the Sargol advertisements and be wise in time. God only loves the Fat; the thin people he sticks pins into for ever and ever.