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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume II

August 9, 1921

To Richard Murry

We have just been doing the flowers—before we start work. Scene: the salle à manger—with windows wide open and pink curtains flapping. The table bare and heaped with petunias, snapdragons and nasturtiums. Glass vases and bowls full of water—a general sense of buds and wetness and that peculiar stickiness of fresh stalks. J. —white shirt with sleeves up to his shoulders, white duck trousers and rope shoes snipping with a large pair of wet scissors—me—blue cotton kimono and pink slippers, afilling of the vases… J. is terribly keen on petunias. I wish I could send you a whole great bastick full. They are wonderful flowers—almost pure light—and yet an exquisite starry shape. We have every colour from pale pink to almost blackish purple. And do you know the smell of page 127 snapdragons? My dear boy, I must here pause or you will walk away. But tell me—why do people paint forever bottles and onions? A white snapdragon, for instance, just for a change would be worth it, surely— Richard. I wish I could unobtrusively give you these things — leave flowers instead of foundlings on your studio doorstep, in fact. Perhaps one day I shall be able to…

I have been looking at a good deal of modern ‘work’ lately, and it almost seems to me that the blight upon it is a kind of fear. Writers, at any rate, are self-conscious to such a pitch now-a-days that their feeling for life seems to be absolutely stopped—arrested. It is sad. They know they oughtn't to say ‘driving fast, eh?’ and yet they don't know what they ought to say. If I am dead sincere I'd say I think it is because people have so little love in their hearts for each other. “Love casteth out Fear,” is one of those truths that one goes on proving and proving. And if you are without fear you are free; it's fear makes us slaves—But this sounds so prosy. You know it as well as I do. I hate to bore you.

J. had a birthday on Saturday. His presents were (I) a panama hat; (2) some coloured blotting paper; (3) a cake; (4) a ruler. We had a tea with candles complete and liqueur chocolates that were positively terrifying. The moment of agonizing suspense when you had the chocolate in your mouth and had to bite through to the mysterious liqueur. However, we survived.

The weather is superb, here. There has been a Battle of the Wasps. Three hosts with their citadels have been routed from my balcony blind. In the swamps, still white with cotton grass, there are hundreds of grasshoppers. J. saw an accident to one the other day. He jumped by mistake into a stream and was borne away. Body not recovered. When we thought about it—it was the first real accident to an insect that we remembered. Richard, I must start work.

I still have so much to tell you. I've only unpacked the page 128 little small things on top. All the big heavy ones are underneath.

L. M., who lives about 2 miles from here, is going to England this month and is going to bring back Wingley. Athy is married to an elderly lady in Hampstead, I believe, a widow. She lost her first husband—a lovely tabby—some taime ago.