Читать книгу Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles) - Katherine Mansfield - Страница 82

What was the importance of those six weeks in the wild King Country? It drew her back (that was perhaps paramount) to New Zealand in a way closer than she had ever known. There had been Anikiwa and Picton on the Sounds, when she was a child. There had been Karori, too — the Pa Man’s New Zealand — the Island of the ‘90’s. But at Lake Taupo she found something which rooted her even more deeply and permanently in the wild and beautiful primitive country and its people.

She was older now; she could know its more poignant significance. She never forgot those things; she spoke of them often; all her life she kept the small black Note Book with the jottings of that trip — meaning, in her own way, and in her own time, to make it live again later, as she did, indeed, in the two early stories.

This was its enduring meaning; but the immediate effect was to make her even more restless in Wellington, even more at odds with her immediate surroundings; they had neither the lure of the wild, nor the attraction of the cultivated. January ist she greeted:

“The year be darned — My Year 1908

And a happy New Year to you and the sky, the great star, the light….

Well — I have the brain and also the inventive faculty.

What else is needed?”

February and March were bitter and painful months. Wellington seemed more insufferable by contrast to the wild, free Midlands. Again she lived a dual existence — living, as it were by force of will, in London, gathering all her forces in desperation against the physical barriers that held her from it.

“I always seem to learn at the risk of my life” (she said later)— “but I do learn.” She knew, without doubt, that only by behaving so outrageously that her father would be glad to be rid of her, could she free herself. Yet the price of such behaviour was terrible to her. She was no “widely experienced woman of thirty.” She was a girl of eighteen, reared in an isolated mid-Victorian community for fourteen years; sheltered in Miss Clara Fenessa Wood’s circumspect London boarding-house for three more; taught “life” suddenly and violently by unassimilated, ill-assorted reading.

Her entries for the next three months were only curt “evidence” :

“Feb. 10th.

“I shall end — of course — by killing myself.”

“March 18th.

“I purchase my freedom with my life — It were better that I were dead — really — I am unlike others because I have experienced all there is to experience. But there is no one to help me — Of course Oscar — Dorian Gray has brought the S.S. to pass.”

“May 1st.

“I am now much worse than ever. Madness must lie this way. Pull yourself up.”

There lay one secret of her rapid and extraordinary growth: that remarkable rallying power — that source of strength which (after vainly looking everywhere) she found within herself.

Always it had been true — and always it would be — there was “no one to help” her. Like that other Katya, to whom she felt herself so similar,”her soul had never known, and never would know shelter all her life, all her life.”

Now she was searching deeply for the answer — and for the strength to measure it — as always she forced herself to seek the answer and the means: