Katherine Mansfield Page 9

  The wedding day was fixed for 2 March at Paddington Registry Office (Vera was to be married in September in the pro-cathedral in Wellington). The plan was that Katherine should move into Bowden's flat after a brief honeymoon in a London hotel. She told no one at Beauchamp Lodge. Cousin Henry had written to her parents dutifully, but the mail took six weeks. The Trowells were not informed, of course, although the Saleebys knew at least of the engagement, for which they had given a celebratory dinner.

  Ida was invited to be Katherine's witness, although she and Bowden had not met previously. Katherine wore a black suit and hat which, in Ida's version, represented her sombre feelings, although Bowden considered it simply a smart and suitable get-up. According to her own and Bowden's recollections, Ida was upset, but Katherine appeared quite normal. She and Bowden went off to a musical show, and then dined in a restaurant. All went reasonably well, until they reached their hotel. In the bedroom, with its pink-shaded lights and satin furniture, she changed abruptly and made it obvious that she was not prepared to consummate the marriage. It seems unlikely that the note from Ida saying ‘Bear up’, inserted in her small suitcase, was responsible for this change of heart. As far as Bowden was concerned, her behaviour remained incomprehensible for the rest of his acquaintance with her, although in the immediate aftermath of the fiasco of the wedding he thought her frigidity towards him might be a sign of lesbianism.

  Katherine herself offered no explanation and simply departed in the night. She went back to Beauchamp Lodge, but this was strictly for single women; so when she came down to breakfast and announced she was married – a tableau she could not resist – she knew she would have to leave. Even her closest ‘friends’ had no idea what she had been planning, and she departed in a cloud of mystery and a certain amount of bad feeling for her duplicity.

  Ida helped her to find a room. It was not a nice one, above a nearby hairdresser's shop. Bowden called and was turned away. Katherine sat and wept. What had she intended? And what was she to do now? Never at a loss for long, she took a train north a few days later, arrived in Glasgow, where the Moody-Manners was in full spate, and joined Garnet in his lodgings.

  Katherine was still in love, or half in love, with Garnet. A poem from this period suggests that they spent a day or two on their own, perhaps outside Glasgow, in moorland country that was still bleak and wintry. ‘Sleeping Together’ certainly evokes the mixture of emotions – young love and tenderness, a sense of adventure simply in being together, exhaustion and foreboding – that must have enveloped them:

  Sleeping together… how tired you were!…

  How warm our room… how the firelight spread

  On walls and ceiling and great white bed!

  We spoke in whispers as children do,

  And now it was I – and then it was you

  Slept a moment, to wake – ‘My dear,

  I'm not at all sleepy,’ one of us said…

  Was it a thousand years ago?

  I woke in your arms – you were sound asleep –

  And heard the pattering sound of sheep.

  Softly I slipped to the floor and crept

  To the curtained window, then, while you slept,

  I watched the sheep pass by in the snow.

  O flock of thoughts with their shepherd Fear

  Shivering, desolate, out in the cold,

  That entered into my heart to fold!

  A thousand years… was it yesterday

  When we, two children of far away,

  Clinging close in the darkness, lay

  Sleeping together?… How tired you were!…15

  Conventional as the tone is, real feeling and a real moment are created: Garnet, worn out with weeks of slogging in the orchestra, travel, tension and conflicting emotions; Katherine, knowing she had got herself into a hopeless position, however much she played different parts with different people.

  Yet in Glasgow and then Liverpool, to which they travelled next, she could fancy herself for a while a professional woman among other professionals, sharing Garnet's theatrical digs and actually being paid to go on stage herself, for she was allowed to join the chorus of the Moody-Manners company. So it became partly an amusing adventure too; and parents and propriety were both being defied successfully, since neither the Beauchamps, nor the Trowells, and least of all Bowden, so much as knew where she was or what she was up to.

  Still the main problem remained unsolved. We do not know whether she told Garnet of either her pregnancy or her wedding. An announcement of the marriage appeared in the Morning Post on 17 March, presumably placed there by the unfortunate Bowden. Then in April Katherine appeared in London again. The affair with Garnet was hopeless; they were both too young to sort things out. ‘You're your mother's boy,’ she made the heroine of her fragmentary novel accuse her lover,16 but what could a boy of nineteen in his circumstances have done?

  Ida and Katherine went flat-hunting and found a small place in Maida Vale, ‘unpainted wood, bamboo furniture – the sort that tumbles over – and cotton curtains’.17 Katherine now told Ida about her pregnancy, and seemed unhappy and frightened; she kept writing to Garnet, and did not like living alone. She also began to take veronal, sometimes dosing herself heavily in order to sleep. Meanwhile, Mrs Beauchamp, weak heart or no, was steaming full speed round the world, alone, to investigate her delinquent daughter's behaviour.

  In late April, Katherine took a trip to Brussels, also alone, ‘on the spur of the moment’,18 using the name ‘Mrs K. Bendall’ and writing notes which were possibly intended to be sent to ‘Garnie’.* They spoke of her overpowering desire to be out of the country: ‘I loathe England,’ a sentiment that would have raised a wry smile in her parents. She was self-conscious enough to comment on the interest taken in her trip by one of her Beauchamp Lodge friends, and self-possessed enough to observe approvingly of her own appearance, ‘I wear a green silk scarf & a dark-brown hat with a burst of dull pink velvet’.19 She ordered a brandy and soda for herself before sleeping on the boat, washed her hair in the ladies' cabin in the morning and enjoyed noticing that her fellow passengers thought she was French.

  What did she hope for in Brussels? Perhaps she intended to make arrangements to give birth to her baby there, though she also mentions New York, where she and Garnet had talked of going. She may have been considering seeking an abortion, or even had thoughts of suicide, remembering the Trowells' friend Rudolf, who had shot himself there. Another note, written in London and signed ‘Katie Mansfield '09’, apparently addressed to Ida, suggests that Katherine was worrying about her lesbian impulses also. She specifically excluded Ida from them, mentioned how strong they were in New Zealand, and related them to Rudolf's similarly aberrant behaviour, which caused him ‘ruin and mental decay’ and was the reason for his death. Katherine talked of the fear of becoming ‘insane or paralytic’ and finished, ‘I think my mind is morally unhinged and that is the reason – I know it is a degradation so unspeakable that – one perceives the dignity in pistols’.20 The note was apparently found by Bowden, with a paper round it inscribed ‘Never to be read on your honour as my friend, while I am still alive. K. Mansfield’. Something about it does not ring quite true, and makes one wonder whether it was one of her histrionic gestures, or even a plant, intended to impress and mislead her husband.

  Whatever she had gone to Brussels for, she was back within a few days, and settled down to wait rather nervously for her mother's arrival at the end of May. She met the boat-train in a newly bought large black straw hat; Mrs Beauchamp looked disdainfully at her, carried her off to her hotel in Manchester Street, and consigned the hat to the chambermaid. She then went to consult with the hapless Bowden.

  He had now decided that the trouble was due to Katherine's lesbianism, and since Mrs Beauchamp had come with this possibility in mind, she was happy to let him believe it. For good measure, she went to see Ida's father, Colonel Baker, about the ‘unwise’ friendship between the two young women. As summarily as the straw ha
t – for Mrs Beauchamp had no time to waste – the bewildered Ida, who had no idea what anyone was talking about, was dispatched on a cruise to the Canaries with her sister May: the two families, not normally lavish with their daughters, splashed out most generously on fares, cruises and hotels. Privately, Mrs Beauchamp must have realized that perverted love was not the real problem at all, or at least not the main one now facing her.

  Both Ida and Katherine's younger sister Jeanne suggested later that Mrs Beauchamp did not realize Katherine was pregnant at this time. It is not possible to believe this. The only reason Katherine had for her hasty marriage was her pregnancy. She must have conceived the baby in December, probably at Carlton Hill; she was still a plump girl, but even so her experienced mother cannot have failed to notice that her daughter was five months' pregnant. And what other reason would there have been for rushing her off to Bavaria? Another Channel crossing, another train across Europe, and the two women were installed in the Hotel Kreuzer, in Bad Wörrishofen in the hills west of Munich, within one week of Mrs Beauchamp's arrival in London. Who recommended Wörishofen, and what her mother hoped Katherine would do there, nobody knows; to judge from her subsequent behaviour, she may well have hoped she had seen the last of her embarrassing child. Equally, she may have taken counsel with the English Beauchamps, and been told how Charlotte got away with her inconvenient baby by staying out of England. Mrs Beauchamp was back in London in time to sail on the Tongariro on 10 June, leaving Katherine alone in Germany.

  In New Zealand Vera was preparing for her wedding to a rising young Canadian geologist, and the Beauchamps were furious to discover that evil tongues were warning him against marrying into a family with Katherine's bad blood. Fortunately, he took no notice, and when he and Vera were married in the autumn, every ship in Wellington Harbour flew its flags in celebration, so powerful and prominent the Beauchamps had become. But on her arrival in Wellington, Mrs Beauchamp sent for her lawyers and rewrote her will – the ultimate bourgeois gesture – cutting Katherine out completely. The gesture was never revoked.

  6

  Bavaria 1909: ‘Kathe Beauchamp-Bowden, Schriftstellerin’

  Katherine was not at all crushed by her mother's disposal of her. She may even have welcomed the idea of a trip to Germany, enthusiastic as she always was for new places and experiences, and pleased to practise the language she had studied with the much-admired Walter Rippmann at Queen's; the Trowell boys had studied in Germany too, and Cousin Elizabeth had by now extracted several bestsellers from her German husband's Pomeranian estates.

  In the Hotel Kreuzer, Katherine signed herself in unabashedly as Käthe Beauchamp-Bowden, Schriftstellerin (i.e., woman writer). She had published nothing in her ten months in London, but the entry reads like a bold prediction that now at last she is about to find her direction as a writer; and, indeed, she began at once to discover raw material for stories, simply by looking round. Much as Isherwood did a generation later in Berlin, she cast a coolly satirical eye at the crassness, affectations and chauvinism of the German bourgeoisie. Bad Wörishofen, like so many German spas, owed its success to the health theories of one man, in this case a local priest, Sebastian Kneipp; in the 1890s he thought up a particular form of treatment, hydrotherapy, or the Wasserkur, which involved baths in the local water, hosing, walking barefoot and a vegetarian diet. Pfarrer Kneipp's ideas became immensely popular, spreading to other parts of Germany, and the village in the pine forests throve, the local peasant farmers suddenly finding themselves surrounded by hotels, casinos and bathing establishments. From Mrs Beauchamp's point of view, it must have seemed a suitable place to leave her daughter, since it was a health resort, with plenty of doctors, as well as being remote from anyone who knew anything about Katherine or her family.

  Because she destroyed her own records of this period, and because there is almost no other testimony available, her experiences in Bavaria remain partly conjectural. Ida was made to destroy her letters, and Katherine burnt her notebooks. It was, nevertheless, an absolutely crucial time for her; without an understanding of what happened to her in 1909, the rest of her life simply does not make sense.

  At first, everything was straightforward enough. Local records show that she moved out of the Kreuzer almost as soon as her mother left, on 12 June. She settled, instead, in the Pension Müller, which became the ‘German Pension’ of her first book, with its little garden boasting a lilac bush, summer-house and an arbour where guests might take coffee in their dressing-gowns, its dinner-gong summoning them to enormous meals – not everyone was a vegetarian – and mealtime conversations in which the company exchanged details of the bodily functions, its changing guests all curious about one another's symptoms, histories and social status. Katherine watched and gave nothing away, placing everyone else admirably, refusing to be placed herself, keeping her secrets.

  Her room had a chestnut tree immediately outside, its green boughs against the window, a horsehair sofa too stiff to be comfortable, and a red pillow she would put on the floor if she wanted to lie there; and in this room, at some point in late June or early July, she suffered a miscarriage, possibly as a result of lifting her trunk from the top of the wardrobe. Garnet's baby, dreamed of and lamented for the rest of her life, was lost. It was too small to be registered as a still birth, and we do not know whether it was the ‘son’ she had always imagined.

  It must have caused a stir at the Pension Müller; no husband in evidence, and now no baby either. Clearly, Katherine had conflicting feelings about the loss; she was satirical about the German matrons' enthusiasm for babies in the stories she was beginning to write, and she shared the distaste for the process of childbirth expressed by many educated British women at this time. ‘I consider childbearing the most ignominious of all professions,’ remarks the narrator in ‘Frau Fischer’. All the same, she wrote to Ida, asking her to send out an English child for her to look after. Ida, for whom no service seemed impossible, duly found a boy of eight who had been ill with pleurisy, from a London family only too grateful to get him out of the filthy town air. His name was Charlie Walter; he was sent out to Bavaria, with a label round his neck, to this totally unknown young lady. Katherine kept him for his summer holidays, telling him to call her ‘Sally’: another secret name, as though she could not bear to be the same person for too long.

  She did not explain the circumstances of the miscarriage to Ida then or later, but she did behave with remarkable resilience, moving herself out of the Pension Müller to rooms in the flat of a woman who ran a lending library above the post office, Fräulein Rosa Nitsch. Here she recovered her health and presumably improved Charlie's too; and she began to make new friends among the summer visitors, notably a group of Polish intellectuals, and among them in particular a good-looking and smooth-tongued young man of twenty-eight with ambitions to be a writer – or at any rate a translator – himself. His name was Floryan Sobieniowski; he came, or he said he came, from an impoverished landowning family in Terezski, a part of Poland then annexed by Russia. He had studied at the University of Cracow and acquired a good command of German, and a little English.

  Floryan and Käthe Beauchamp-Bowden got on well. They were both quick, clever and attractive, both interested in literary careers; both had good voices and a passion for singing, both were travellers and adventurers, and she, at any rate, was licking some emotional wounds. He appears to have had nothing but his wits to live on and he may have observed that she had at least a small, regular supply of money, dispatched, no doubt, by Mr Kay. By the autumn, Charlie Walter had been sent back to London with another label, Katherine had moved again, this time into lodgings with the Brechenmacher family (he was a postman whose family name she borrowed for a story), and she was studying the Polish language busily with the help of a fat dictionary in a green leather binding. Floryan was now allowed to call her by her old name, Kathleen. He had interested her in Polish and Russian literature and was suggesting that they should set off eastwards together. They might go to
Munich, that great centre of cultural and Bohemian life; they could go on to Russia, or perhaps turn west again to Paris, earning their livings by translating and writing. It was just the sort of proposition Katherine found attractive; and Floryan, who never had much difficulty in talking himself into people's good graces, knew how to paint a glorious picture of their future life and achievements together. In due course, she would get a divorce, and they would be married.

  In a work of fiction, the part played by Floryan in Katherine's life would appear so extraordinary and melodramatic that one might shrug it off as improbable. In a biography, the problem is one of documentation; it is not possible to prove every detail of the story I propose to trace, but it does fit all the facts we know, and has an inner logic which makes sense of everything else that happened subsequently in the lives of both Katherine and Floryan.

  The story is complicated, and divided into two parts – cultural and medical – which have to be followed carefully and separately, but which run in parallel through the whole course of her life. For when Floryan fell in love with her, as he undoubtedly did, and when she responded to him, as she certainly did also, when they sat smoking and talking about Polish and Russian, English and American literature, about translating and publishing and fame, laying plans for a brilliant pair of careers, when all this was being set in motion, Floryan, without evil intentions at that point, surely – for were they not both adventurers and equals in the same field? – like some demon dropped into the plot of her life, was offering her poisoned gifts.

  The first of these gifts seems innocent enough. Floryan, a Russian speaker and professional translator, must be the likely candidate for introducing Katherine to the work of Chekhov, who had died only a few years earlier, in 1904, in Germany, and was still relatively unknown in western Europe; only two small volumes of his stories had been translated into English, attracting very little attention, and none of his plays. Katherine herself begins to mention Chekhov only years later: 1914 is the first journal entry, and the letters contain nothing until 1918, when Murry had begun to tell her that her stories resembled Chekhov's.