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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume II

October 1922

To William Gerhardi

I am very shaken to-day after a small minor revolution in the night. I put a vacuum flask full of boiling tea on the table by my bed last night and at about two o'clock in the morning there was a most Terrific explosion. It blew up everything. People ran from far and near. Gendarmes broke through the shutters with hatchets, firemen dropped through trap doors. Or very nearly. At any rate the noise was deafening and when I switched on the light there was my fiaschino outwardly calm still but tinkling internally in a terribly ominous way and a thin sad trickle oozed along the table.

I have nobody to tell this to to-day. So I hope your eyes roll. I hope you appreciate how fearful it might have been had it burst outwardly and not inwardly.

Bon jour, Mr. Gerhardi. I am so sorry we have not met in England. But after all I had to come abroad again and I shall spend the next three months in Paris instead of London. Perhaps we shall not meet until you are very old. Perhaps your favourite grandson will wheel you to my hotel then (I'm doomed to hotels) and instead of page 249 laughing, as we should now, a faint, light, airy chuckle will pass from bath chair to bath chair—

I don't awfully like the name of your new book,1 but I am sure the booksellers will. But then I don't very much like the idea of so-called somersaults in the first person. But I am certain the public will.

I wonder for how long you have put aside your novel About Love. Please tell me when you take it up again.

No, I didn't see the English Review. It's raining. I must rescue my dear little John Milton from the window sill.

Rescued…

People went on asking me about Mr. Gerhardi. His past, his present, his future, his favourite jam, did he prefer brown bread for a change sometimes. I answered everything.

I hope to have rather a better book out in the spring.

Goodbye. Are you quite well again? The weather is simply heavenly here.

1 The book was abandoned. (W. G.)