Читать книгу Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles) - Katherine Mansfield - Страница 41

BY 1903, when she was thirteen, Kathleen Beauchamp was developing emotionally with almost terrifying rapidity. Perhaps her friendship with Maata had begun her awakening. She began to be self-conscious, to perceive, and even to analyse the effect of her own emotions. As she looked back three years later at this consciousness, she recorded some of the moods and emotions, thinly veiling the record as a “novel” in which she called herself “Juliet.”

There had already been the birthday when she was given a doll’s pram, and “in a rage let it go hurling by itself down the grassy slope outside the conservatory.” And one of her friends remembered that:

“She was very excitable in those days and often in a furious rage. I remember one day she gave a squeel of rage and pinched her sister Vera for some small trifle.”

She, though finding these moments inexplicable at the time, afterward with searching sincerity before herself, concluded:”Strangely enough these fits are Father and Leslie over again.”

But this was her immediate record in Juliet:

“‘We’ve told Father all about it, Juliet,’ said Margaret. ‘And Father’s fearfully angry.’ Mary nodded. Juliet slipped the thing down the front of her sailor blouse. She had no definite idea of what she had been intending, but her head was full of strange, unreasonable impulses. She was feeling slightly sorry for her breach of self-control in that it incurred a long interview with her Father and with all probability some degrading issue — no jam for a week, or to bed at seven o’clock until she apologised. She walked slowly to the house, up the broad staone steps into the wide hall — and knocked at the Morning-room door.

“At two o’clock in the afternoon, Juliet had thrown a heavy book at her eldest sister Margaret — and a bottle of ink at her elder sister Mary. At six in the evening she was summoned to the Morning-room to explain these offences. After her too wholly successful acts of violence, she had retired to the sloping lawn at the extreme end of the garden, where she lay down comfortably and had some jam — Margaret and Mary, still smoking from the shock to their sensitive little systems, had rather rejoiced in the search for her, and especially in the knowledge that Mr. Blakewell was foaming up and down …”

Behind it, in part, was the childish longing — of which Katherine spoke often in later life — to be understood: to feel the warmth of immediate and instinctive protection, of the nest of safety which she invariably found with her Grandmother, less frequently with her mother. In childhood, save with the Grandmother, she was a prey to the feeling that she was a pariah. Part of the preciousness of the portrait of her Grandmother as a newly-married bride which she possessed was that it had been given to her by her mother “at a time when she loved me.” The phrase is eloquent.

“It was the freedom of those days” (she wrote in London in 1908)”the knowledge that — an she would — she could shake from her all the self-forged chains — banish all — and pillow her head in her Mother’s lap. All that unbelievably gone now.”

“An she would” — but she had the sensitive pride of the child who is marked as being “different”; and she wore (even then, at times) the mask which was to become her frequent protection before strangers in later years. She was not — and she knew she could not be — an exhibition child. She could not play the part which too often grown-ups unconsciously demand that their children shall play. But her longing to have her own role, and to give love and to receive it, was soon to find expression. It was only too ready to burst forth in a passion of adolescent love.