Katherine Mansfield Page 8

  Ida was introduced to all the Trowells and the two young women took Dolly out for teas and shopping trips, to concerts and the British Museum; Dolly thought Ida nice but wet. On other occasions Arnold and Garnet made up a foursome with Ida and Katherine. She was no longer in love with Arnold, but when he put an arm round Ida in the train one evening, she scolded him sharply: ‘She doesn't like that sort of thing.’4

  It was easier to control friends if they were kept apart from one another, and this on the whole Katherine did. Looking back forty years later when Antony Alpers spoke to them, her Beauchamp Lodge girl-friends felt she had established intimacy with each of them separately, confiding different secrets and giving different versions of her experience. Some were hurt or baffled when they found that there were other facets; others dismissed her angrily as someone who had lied for fun.

  Katherine was a liar all her life – there is no getting around this – and her lies went quite beyond conventional social lying. Whereas Murry ‘forgot’ things or distorted subtly, she was a bold and elaborate inventor of false versions. A charitable view of the origin of this habit could be that it was a bid for attention, a response to feeling obscured and overlooked in a large family with an inattentive mother; this may then have developed into a pleasure in dramatizing for its own sake, making herself into the heroine of a story. If the truth was dull, it could be artistically embroidered; and if she was the heroine of her own life story, lies became not lies but fiction, a perfectly respectable thing.

  That autumn she told two friends at Beauchamp Lodge that she had been taken ashore from the Papanui at Montevideo and drugged, and now feared she might be pregnant. Ida heard nothing of this, and, in any case, there was no pregnancy; but it was the sort of danger young girls used to be solemnly warned against, and it is easy to see how a shipboard romance (and a late period) might have been worked up into something half terrifying and half enjoyably dramatic. Had she been in real trouble, there was a whole posse of relations to turn to: Aunt Belle, her Payne cousins, who were doctors' daughters, and her Beauchamp cousins, one of whom was also a doctor. It would not have been the first time the family had dealt with such a problem; Charlotte Beauchamp had borne an illegitimate child at the age of fifteen, discreetly disposed of in Switzerland.5 But Katherine did not know about that, and she had not crossed the world to throw herself into the family's arms.

  One weekend was sacrificed to a visit to Aunt Belle in Surrey. Katherine duly cooed over the baby, lead-paned windows and old oak chests, and enjoyed a ramble in Ashdown Forest while her sporting aunt played golf, but the visit was not repeated. More exciting invitations came from the family of Margaret Wishart, a new Beauchamp Lodge friend, who invited Katherine to go to Paris with them in October. They toured all the traditional sights, but she was most pleased by the Latin Quarter and fantasized about living in two small rooms, high up, with a wood fire, coffee and cigarettes, closed shutters, the lamp on the table ‘like the sun on a green world’. She was magnetized by Paris throughout her life, and the account of this trip is the first of her letters in which the characteristic Mansfield appears, intoxicated by the pleasures of travel. This is the embarkation at Newhaven:

  I have a confused impression of rain and dancing lights and sailors in great coats & boots like Flying Dutchman mariners. We go aft to the Ladies Cabin where a little French woman is in attendance, her white face peering curiously at us over billows and billows of apron. Such wide blue velvet couches, such hard bolsters for tired heads. We slip off boots and skirts & coats, wash, and wrapped round in my big coat & a rug tucked round my toes I settled down for the night. It was amusing, you know, all round these same huddled figures, in the same little brown rugs, like patients in a hospital ward. And the little French woman sits in the middle knitting a stocking. Beside her on a red table a lamp throws a fantastic wavering light. All through the hours, half sleeping, half waking I would open my eyes and see this little bowed figure & the wavering light seemed to play fantastic tricks with her & the stocking in my fancy grew – gigantic – enormous.6

  Her writing is alive, her observation acute, and her imagination has a touch of nightmare intensity: Katherine's characteristic talent is already formed, and showing its affinity with Dickens.

  Other glimpses of Katherine that autumn show her going along alone to a suffragette meeting in Baker Street, intending to write it up for a New Zealand paper. The mixture of solemnity and shabbiness was too much for her, and she was not turned into a supporter of the Cause:

  Immediately I entered the hall two women who looked like very badly upholstered chairs pounced upon me, and begged me to become a voluntary worker. There were over two hundred present – all strange looking, in deadly earnest – all looking, especially the older ones, particularly ‘run to seed’. And they got up and talked and argued until they were hoarse, and thumped on the floor and applauded – The room grew hot and in the air some spirit of agitation or revolt, stirred & grew. It was over at 10.30. I ran into the street – cool air and starlight – I had not eaten any dinner, so bought a 2d sandwitch at a fearful looking café, jumped into a hansom, & drove home here, eating my sandwitch all the way – it was a tremendous two pen'north – almost too big to hold with both hands – & decided I could not be a suffragette – the world was too full of laughter.7

  A deplorable response, perhaps, but at least an honest one; Katherine was, in general, on the side of the suffragettes, but had not the temperament for the dreary, necessary political work of meetings, discussions and fund-raising.

  Other incarnations of Katherine appeared at dinner-parties given by Caleb Saleeby, the scientific journalist (and contributor to the New Age), and his wife, Monica, daughter of Alice Meynell. Saleeby was a keen amateur musician – it was probably through the Trowells that Katherine met him – and he liked nothing better than entertaining pianists and singers alongside his literary and newspaper friends in his house in Hamilton Terrace, St John's Wood; he and his wife took to Katherine and invited her often. Sometimes she appeared in demure dresses with a manner to match; sometimes she transformed herself dramatically by appearing in Maori costume (modified to suit British tastes) with a string of amber beads.

  She knew how to make an impression, and she craved fame without knowing how best to approach it. One evening she went to a concert given by a Venezuelan pianist she had already heard in Wellington in 1907, Teresa Carreño, ‘the Valkyrie of the piano’, who was giving a programme of Liszt and Beethoven at the Bechstein Hall. Katherine praised her performance as ‘the last word in tonal beauty and intensity’, but was more interested by her subsequent visit to Carreño, who evidently remembered her with affection and invited her for an afternoon visit which was spent

  talking in the half-dark – in a fascinating room full of flowers and photographs – fine pictures of her famous friends, and Russian cigarettes – and books and music and cushioned couches… we talked… of Music in Relation to Life – of the splendid artist calling – of all her journeys – a great deal besides. Truly she is one woman in a thousand.8

  Carreño might well impress Katherine. She was in her fifties, had had four husbands, begun her public career in New York at the age of eight, composed a considerable amount of music for piano and strings while she toured the world, managed an opera company, conducted and even sung in various operas. The remarkable thing is that Katherine should have impressed her enough to be given so much of the Valkyrie's time; perhaps she was simply charmed by Katherine, or perhaps she mistook her enthusiasm for real musicianship.

  The truth was that Katherine realized her own cello-playing could not pass muster in the professional musical world. She was, after all, surrounded by young women at Beauchamp Lodge who were wholly given up to becoming professionals, not to mention the Trowell family. In the course of the autumn she sold her instrument, and began to think of an entirely different plan. It began by reading aloud sketches and poetry she had written to selected friends, and practising in front of a m
irror; and when this went well, she resolved ‘to revolutionize and revive the art of elocution’9 by writing and performing her works in public:

  Nothing offends me so much as the conventional reciter – stiff – affected – awkward – but there is another side to it - the side of art. A darkened stage - great – high backed oak chair – flowers – shaded lights – a low table filled with curious books – and to wear a simple, beautifully coloured dress – You see what I mean. Then to study tone effects in the voice - never rely on gesture - though gesture is another art and should be linked irrevocably with it – and express in the voice and face and atmosphere all that you say… Well, I should like to do this – and this is in my power because I know I possess the power of holding people… I could then write just what I felt would suit me – and could popularize my work – and also I feel there's a big opening for something sensational and new in this direction.10

  This striking project – with its obvious affinities with Dickens's public performances – did not get very far. For a while Katherine earned some pocket-money by appearing at drawing-room parties given by hostesses who liked to offer a little entertainment to their guests, and whom she would oblige with a song or a recitation. Later she performed similarly at a few small concerts, but whether she could have held a large audience with a full programme of her own was never put to the test.* Interestingly, her contemporary Ruth Draper, who also began with private-party pieces written by herself, did succeed in making a lifelong and dazzling career in this way.*

  We should have very little information about this period of Katherine's life were it not for a batch of letters she wrote during the autumn and winter of 1908, and which were carefully and secretly preserved by their recipient, Garnet Trowell. For Garnet, the sweet and shadowy second fiddle, nobody's favourite, less good looking and less gifted than Arnold, the gentle, shy and nervous Garnet had become the recipient of Katherine's passionate attentions.

  Her love-affair with him resembles most of the affairs in her life in that she seems to have initiated, dominated and ended it. Whatever Garnet himself wrote, or thought, or said about it is unknown. His letters have not survived and he never explained his part to any member of his family; years later he promised Dolly that he would tell her the whole story, but he died without doing so. In 1908 Garnet was a tall, dreamy and bookish boy of nineteen; he had gone through the same musical education as his twin, living the student life in Frankfurt and Brussels from a very early age, but always lacking Arnold's total dedication and virtuosity. The best he could manage now was a job with the orchestra of a travelling opera company, the Moody-Manners. It was a thoroughly professional and thoroughly popular company; opera was not then regarded as an élite art form in Britain. The star singers, Fanny Moody and Charles Manners, toured all over the British Isles with an Italian conductor, chorus, principals and players ready to perform Verdi, Wagner, Puccini and Wallace (the now forgotten but once hugely popular Irish composer) evening after evening, in one provincial theatre after another. It was a demanding life, involving hours of uncomfortable train travel and all the uncertainties of theatrical lodging houses, but it was also exciting and enjoyable for both audiences and performers: Beatrice Campbell, a friend of Katherine's later, who came from a highly respectable Dublin family, said she was tempted to join the Moody-Manners with her sister when they were young, for the sheer fun of the experience.

  For Garnet, it was a reasonable job – his family could not afford to keep him – and all through the autumn he was away touring in Birmingham, Halifax, Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Hull, playing under the artistic pseudonym of ‘Carrington Garnet’ (his full name was Garnet Carrington Trowell). Katherine's love for him seems to have begun within a month of her arrival in England, and almost from the start of her passionately worded correspondence she addressed him as ‘my wonderful, splendid husband’11 and fantasized about their future life together. In October he sent her a ring for her birthday, and the Trowells accepted that they were engaged. Dolly had a clear memory of a morning in Garnet's room in Carlton Hill – the room had crimson wallpaper, with a band of green all round the middle on which he had pinned reproductions of great paintings – when Garnet and ‘Kass’ came in to tell her they were engaged.

  In December, when he was home for a short break from the tour, Katherine seems to have moved out of Beauchamp Lodge and into Carlton Hill. They were in love, and driven to all the time-honoured devices for being alone: late evening walks to Primrose Hill, where they could sit and kiss in the cold, staying up by the fire after the parents had been tactfully persuaded to go to bed. Arnold teased the couple amicably, Dolly was thrilled, and for a while all was well. Mr and Mrs Trowell had to go away for a few days. Garnet and Katherine became lovers. Then he had to return north to the Moody-Manners.

  What seems to have happened next is that Katherine and the Trowell parents fell out. They were short of money, short enough to be forced to give notice to their servant. Katherine was equally unable to manage on her allowance. She could never resist buying flowers, clothes and books, or accepting presents from Ida; she had grown up in a family that was rich and growing richer all the time, and could not accommodate to scrimping poverty. She became disdainful of the Trowells' poverty, and they in turn suspicious of her ‘fine ways’.12 Mrs Trowell asked her to pay for her washing at Carlton Hill and she refused, probably because she couldn't. There was an explosion. Katherine foolishly blurted out the true nature of her relationship with the absent Garnet. At this the parents became ‘violent, hysterical, half mad’, and banished her from the house.

  Nothing was explained to Dolly who found herself suddenly and inexplicably cut off from her big ‘sister’ Katherine's name was quite simply never mentioned again. Dolly hid her photograph in the wardrobe. Later, she remembered, she felt obliged to cut her on the steps of Queen's Hall. The nearest Garnet came to any comment was to tell Dolly he could not go to his father for advice on personal matters.13 He was younger than Katherine, still a minor, with no home but that of his parents, and no regular source of income. Garnet was in no position to make chivalrous or defiant gestures.

  Katherine returned to Beauchamp Lodge, taking a cheaper room on the ground floor. Her situation, as far as her other friends and family knew, was unchanged, and she continued to go out to parties, dinners and shows. She had met at the Saleebys’ a singing teacher and ex-choral scholar of King's College, Cambridge, a bachelor in his early thirties called George Bowden, who asked her out and showed signs of finding her fascinating. More invitations, little notes and flowers followed. They shared an interest in elocution – some of Bowden's pupils were clergymen wishing to improve their pulpit performances – and Bowden thought Katherine accomplished enough to do some of her sketches at his concerts:

  Both in the little work she did with me and in the public recital of some of her own sketches given at one or two of my concerts, the use of her voice was quite unselfconscious. Its charm lay in its clear embodiment of her subject lit up by the delicate prism of her mind. The effect was a unity which maintained her integrity intact.14

  His responses at the time were probably less carefully phrased; she took to visiting him regularly at the flat he shared with a man friend, and when Bowden had to go into hospital to have his tonsils out, she offered to collect him in a taxi. He felt they shared a modern outlook and a sense of humour; presently he proposed to her, and was accepted. Marriage was to liberate Katherine from the tyranny of her family, it seemed, although she told him she was already over twenty-one. Apparently, money was not discussed.

  Bowden's account of his courtship of Katherine, written many years later, is so determinedly gentlemanly, fair and cautious that it is impossible to see what his emotions really were at the time, or why a man of his age, just building a career which depended on being free to accept a great variety of engagements, many of a semi-social nature, a man comfortably installed in a small bachelor flat with a manservant, should have got hims
elf abruptly married to a young woman he hardly knew after a few teas at Rumpelmayer's and a few evenings together chatting about music, life and the emancipation of women. From this distance, it looks like a case of rabbit and ferret. Katherine had decided to be married, and had lighted on this kindly, possibly rather weak, easily deceived man, clearly not a passionate lover, but equally in thrall to her. Having told him she was twenty-two, she introduced him briefly over tea to Henry Beauchamp (the cousin who had been her guardian) and his sister Elizabeth von Arnim, who happened to be in London but who had no reason to take any interest in the fate of this little cousin from New Zealand. Katherine insisted that they should not contact her parents, in case they should try to delay the marriage. She also wrote Bowden a note, warning him not to expect ‘too much’ of her.

  Why was she in such a hurry to be married to a man she clearly neither loved nor respected? Bowden did not know it, but she was pregnant with Garnet's baby. Whether Garnet knew or not is uncertain; there are no letters extant for this period.