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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I

Thursday — October 23, 1919 —

Thursday
October 23, 1919

To J. M. Murry

I wish you could see this glass of flowers on the dining room table—daisies and roses. Field daisies, but larger than English ones, and very wide, with the petals dipped in bright crimson and crimson roses from the wild garden at the side of the steps. I have just gathered the third rose and remarked that hundreds of buds will be blowing in a week or two. The sea is very pale to-day; small boats go sailing by. I was out in the garden all the morning: now I've come in to write. Don't you find it very difficult to work without a large table and four walls? I try everything, I work on a tray—on a chair—on a book—sit up high and arrange the ink and papers on Table Mountain, on the verandah … but no, at the last I have to come in. In our Sussex house we shall have a real table and a real chair and a real ‘abri.’

Except for my head to-day, I'm well again. I'm very glad to have had the experience: it makes me feel so secure. I should have had a doctor in London pour sûr, but here I did without one, treated myself and cured myself. This makes me feel so safe in case we should ever find ourselves on a desert island—just in case. If there are page 265 cannibals there our lives will be spared because of Wig the Healer, and if there aren't, they'll be spared pour la même raison. In view of the state of my head I am doing Galsworthy this week. I know what I think about him: I mean he has been in my mind for years and only wants dusting, bringing to the light and proving by this new book.

(Oh why, why
Did the Lord make the Fly?
And when we die
Shall we find them spry
In eternity?)

To be spry in eternity seems to me particularly awful: eternally spry! I don't want eternity at any rate, so it don't signify. Now it will be ideal for L. M.—time for everything, time to get to know everybody and to wonder about “this that and the other” to her heart's desire. She is, indeed, made for eternity—one of God's own, as you might say. But no—if the Lord will give me 30 years starting on May 1st, 1920, he can do what he likes with what's left of my bones and feathers after that.

I have 6 packets of cigarettes at 1 franc the packet, black soldiers' cigarettes, I should think, made to be distributed to dying Zouaves in hospital and—held over. But they are a great deal better than nothing.

Oh, is there any life of George Eliot so that I can write an article for November 22—less than a month to do it in—or if you could send me one or two of her novels—Romola, Adam Bede, whichever are best? I feel I'd love to do something, but if there are other people on the spot more competent and with more material, c'est entendu.