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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I

Saturday—no Friday — March 16, 1918

Saturday—no Friday
March 16, 1918.

Charles [Lamb's letters] came and a perfectly heavenly letter which simply bore him on rosy wings to my bedside—also the papers that bound him. I am going to make him a very thick coat with a velvet collar and ten buttons a side for the journey. For I cannot resist such a companion across France.

Your letter has made my coming real again. It keeps flashing in and out, now light, now dark, like a revolving lighthouse (not your letter—my coming). Sometimes I do see—but sometimes there's nought but wavy dark.

L. M. is gone. A great mistral is roaring. It's a brutal day, and my room is only just done, 4 p.m., and I spent the night hunting and hallooing after a flea. I saw it once—a pox on it!—sitting on the edge of my navel and looking into that organ through a telescope of its front page 156 legs as though it were an explorer on the crater of an extinct volcano. But when I hopped, it hopped and beat me. Now it is still roaring in this room somewhere. It was a very wild savage specimen of a monster—the size of a large China tea-leaf—and tore mouthfuls out of me while I slept. I shall hang out a little sign to-night: “No butter, no margarine, no meat.” But I'm not hopeful.

The Sunday Evening Telegram, which was Lamb's undervest as it were, gave me a Great Shock. In this little time, and even with The Paris Daily Mail occasionally, I had almost forgotten that appalling abyss of vulgarity which does exist. I had to ring for a fork and have it took away. Did you read Lamb on Rousseau?

So you have got Thomas Wyatt. Well—I suppose that is quite natural. The poem I meant begins

They flee from me who sometimes did me seek
With naked foot stalking within my chamber….

and what especially caught me was the second verse which I can't now read calmly. It's marvellous, I think. 1 I could say why, but I must take this to the post before the wind blows too loud and too cold.

1 The first two verses of this beautiful poem are:

They flee from me that sometime did me seek,
With naked foot stalking within my chamber:
Once have I seen them gentle, tame and meek,
That now are wild, and do not once remember
That sometime they have put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking in continual change.

Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once especial—
In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown did from her shoulders fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
And therewithal so sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, ‘Dear Heart, how like you this?