Читать книгу Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles) - Katherine Mansfield - Страница 22

One afternoon the three children had been catching “cocha-bullies” and “tiddlers” in a stream. They followed it through the paddocks, down the ravine, to the Anikiwa beaches. Kass wandered away by herself, dragging the leather doll Hinemoa. She was finding little tiny shells. There was something very special to her in these — so perfect, so small and delicate, and yet in every detail like the big ones. Her love for little tiny things — exquisite, minute flowers and shells — poised on the very lintel of a faërie world, scarcely to be known except through these, and very deeply, very secretly her own — was poignant all her life.

She knelt by small pools along the beach, and gave herself up to this silvery world. Flowers no bigger than a pin prick on those trees waving beneath the water. Tiny silvery toadstools. Another world-within-a-world. She raised herself up and looked about, for a moment, longing for Uncle Cradock’s spectacles. But as she gazed down into that crystal country, she seemed to have become tiny, too — down beneath those flowery trees, beneath the silvery umbrella, to a world like the world within a drop of water.

After tea that evening she remembered Hinemoa. The leather doll was sitting in a tree by the ravine, half a mile away.

She began to cry. The grandmother called her sharply:

“Kass! You’re a silly little thing!”

“I know it’s still hanging from a tree in the rain,” she sobbed. Cousin Ethel tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t be consoled. She only cried and cried.

Finally the cousin heard the rain splash on the eaves. She called one of her brothers, a boy of about ten or twelve, and persuaded him to go down for the doll.

He came back from the half a mile in the wet, with a red face, dragging the leather doll by an arm. Though her cheeks were still stiff with the dried tears, Kass was sitting up by the fire.