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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume II

August 1921

It's Sunday—my day for writing letters. But I don't write them. You are one of the very very few people whom I want to write to. I think of you and I straightway long to ‘clasp hands across a vast’ … and more. I want to talk and to listen—(that first) and to have a good long look at you. When I'm fond of people their appearance is very valuable to me too. Do you feel like that? But re people. It's queer how unimportant they seem to become as one goes on. One feels as tho' one has seen them enough—got what one wants from them and so—to work. I don't mean that in a cold-blooded way. Perhaps the truth is one has less and less time away from work. It gets more engrossing every day here, and we live like a pair of small time-tables. The hours away from it we read Shakespeare aloud, discuss what has been written. J. goes flower finding—then the specimens have to be sorted, pressed, examined. While he's out I play the piano or go for a small snail crawl myself. And before one can say knife it's time to go to bed. We get up at 7.30—both of us—and breakfast on a balcony all windows with a ring of snow mountains to look at across the valley.

Come here, one day. It's a very good place. I am determined to make enough money to build a small shack here and make it my winter perch for as long as I need perches. The point about this place is it is not spoilt. There never can be a railway here. There is nothing to do except look at the mountains, climb them and explore the forests and paddle in the streams. Motor cars can't do page 129 these things so the rich and great will never come. The very flowers seem to me to know this—there is a brightness upon them—and they are careless—even the wild strawberry doesn't bother to hide—And there's a delicate creature (the Bell Flower, J.'s favourite) that grows everywhere—as fine as a harebell and a very clear almost glassy blue. It would not dare to grow in more civilised places. Oh, Richard—I do love the earth! When I go off by myself here—one slips through the tree trunks and one is out of sight at once—hidden from every eye. That's my joy. I sit on a stump or on the fir needles and my only trouble is that I can't make some small grass hoppery sound now and then—one wants to praise someone or give thanks to someone.

Down below our windows in that rocky clearing before the trees begin there is a flock of goats feeding as I write. The sound of their bells is very pleasant. I look at them and wish I could put one in an envelope (a goat, I mean) for you to draw. Small fine, flattish head, delicate legs, lean springing haunches. I'd like also to post you our maid-servant Ernestine to paint. She looks like a sunflower. She's in the kitchen now, shelling peas, and she wears a sunday bodice, yellow with black velvet stripes and rather big sleeves. (She always dresses in the peasant costume). As I write it seems to me I've told you all this before. Have I? Forgive me if I have.