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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume II

November 1920

To Richard Murry

It's 7.15 a.m. and I've just had breakfast in a room lit with great gorse yellow patches of sunlight. Across one patch there's a feathery pattern that dances—that's from the mimosa tree outside. The two long windows are wide open—they are the kind that open in half—with wings, you know—so much more generous than the English kind. A wasp is paddling his pettitoes in the honey-glass and the sky is a sort of pale lapus lazuli. Big glancing silver ducks of light dive in and out of the sea.

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This kind of weather has gone on for over a week without one single pause. I take a sun bath every morning—costume de bain: a black paper fan—and it has an awfully queer effect on one. I mean all this radiance has. You know those rare moments when it's warm enough to lie on your back and bask—it's a kind of prolongation of that. One tries to behave like a sober sensible creature and to say ‘thank you’ to the umbrella mender but all the time one is hiding broad beams. So I slink away out of sight of everybody, down the steps from the terrace and stand underneath a tree called a datura and there privately, I gloat. This tree, Sir, is a sight for you. It has small close, grey-green leaves; the buds in their first stage are soft green pods. They open and the flower, lightly folded, springs out and gradually it opens into a long bell-like trumpet about 8 inches long—gold coloured with touches of pale red. But the drawing in the buds and the petals! The gaiety of the edges—the freedom with which Papa Cosmos has let himself go on them! I have looked at this tree so long that it is transplanted to some part of my brain—for a further transplanting into a story one day.

You must come here one day, and live here for a bit. I don't see how you couldn't be happy. I appreciate your feeling that you would not care to work on a large canvas in England. I feel just the same about writing. I'm always afraid my feelings won't last long enough for me to have expressed all that I wanted to. There's something in the atmosphere which may blow cold. And there's always a sense of rush—a strain. If the Muse does deign to visit me I'm conscious all the time that she's got her eye on the clock, she's catching the funicular to Olympus at 5.30 or the special to Parnassus at 5.15. Whereas here, one begins to tell the time by the skies again.

As for little K. M., she's a-going it as usual. The more I do the more I want to do, it will always be the same. The further one climbs the more tops of mountains one sees. But it's a matter for rejoicing—as long as one can page 80 keep the coffin from the door. I don't care a pin about the old wolf. I must get up and take the earwigs out of the roses. Why should they choose roses? But they do and I go against Nature in casting them forth.