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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I

Thursday afternoon — May 23, 1918

page 175
Thursday afternoon
May 23, 1918

It's a windy fluid day. I can't walk in it, but I have started working—another member of the “Je ne parle pas” family, I fondly dream—It's a devastating idea. However, I am only, so to say at the Heads, at Pencarron Light House, with it, yet—not even in Cook's Straits, and they look par-tic-u-larly rough and choppy….

It's such strange weather, not warm, with big sighing puffs of wind, and the sea a steady glitter. At four o'clock I got up and looked out of window. It was not dark. Oh, so wonderful. I had forgotten such things.

The old'un has just brought the morning post—letters from C. and M. and W. D. I expect yours will come this afternoon. I didn't expect it this morning. God! I feel so hard-hearted. I don't care a button for C.'s letter and yet—it was so charming. In fact, I only want to drop all those people and disappear from their lives—utterly disappear….

I must get up. I am afraid there are no flowers in this letter. I haven't any. I'm shorn of them to-day. When I ‘see’ again, I'll show you, too. I feel extraordinarily better and stronger with no pain at all. But I can't write you the letters I should like to, because my ‘vagrant self’ is uppermost, and you don't really know her or want to know her.

I wonder what is going to happen—if the war will end in our lives. But even if it does end, human beings will still be as vile as ever. I think there is something in the idea that children are born in sin, judging from the hateful little wretches who ‘play’ under my window—somehow horrible little toads, just as evil as slum children. I believe if they were left to themselves the strong ones would kill the weak'uns—torture them and jump on them until they were flat! Well, that's excusable in grown-up people, but in children …!

Oh, people are ugly. I have such a contempt for them. How hideous they are, and what a mess they have made of page 176 everything! It can never be cleared up, and I haven't the least desire to take even a feather duster to it. Let it be, and let it kill them—which it won't do. But oh (without conceit) where are one's playfellows? Who's going to call out and say: I want you. Come and see what I've made? No, one must have an iron shutter over one's heart.

Now I will get up.