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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume II

December 5, 1921

To the Hon. Dorothy Brett

These last few days have been rather bad ones—tired ones. I haven't been able to do anything but read. It's on these occasions that one begins to wish for queer things like gramophones. It wouldn't matter if one could just walk away. But that's out of the question at present. But no more of it.

Wasn't that Van Gogh shown at the Goupil ten years ago? Yellow flowers, brimming with sun, in a pot? I wonder if it is the same. That picture seemed to reveal something that I hadn't realised before I saw it. It lived with me afterwards. It still does. That and another of a sea-captain in a flat cap. They taught me something about writing, which was queer, a kind of freedom—or rather, a shaking free. When one has been working for a long stretch one begins to narrow one's vision a bit, to fine things down too much. And it's only when something else breaks through, a picture or something seen out of doors, that one realises it. It is—literally—years since I have been to a picture show. I can smell them as I write.

I am writing to you before breakfast. It's just sunrise and the sky is a hedge-sparrow-egg blue, the fir trees are quivering with light. This is simply a marvellous climate for sun. We have far more sun than in the South of France, and while it shines it is warmer. On the other hand—out of it—one might be in the Arctic Zone, and it freezes so hard at night that we dare not let the chauffage page 161 down, even. It is queer to be in the sun and to look down on the clouds. We are above them here. But yesterday for instance it was like the old original flood. Just Montana bobbed above the huge lakes of pale water. There wasn't a thing to be seen but cloud below.

Oh dear! I am sure by now you are gasping at the dullness of this letter. To tell you the truth—I am horribly unsettled for the moment. It will pass. But while it is here I seem to have no mind except for what is worrying me. I am making another effort to throw off my chains— i.e., to be well. And I am waiting for the answer to a letter. I'm half here—half away—it's a bad business. But you see I have made up my mind to try the Russian doctor's treatment. I have played my card. Will he answer? Will anything come of it? One dares not speak of these things. It is so boring, for it is all speculation, and yet one cannot stop thinking … thinking … imagining what it would be like to run again or take a little jump.