“I’ve been listening to what you said about me, mumma,” he confessed while Frau Kellermann brushed him down. “It was not true about the watch. I was only looking at it, and the little girl never stays in the bedroom. She told me herself she always goes down to the kitchen, and—”
“Da, that’s enough!” said Frau Kellermann.
We marched en masse along the station road. It was a very warm afternoon, and continuous parties of “cure guests”, who were giving their digestions a quiet airing in pension gardens, called after us, asked if we were going for a walk, and cried “Herr Gott — happy journey” with immense ill-concealed relish when we mentioned Schlingen.
“But that is eight kilometres,” shouted one old man with a white beard, who leaned against a fence, fanning himself with a yellow handkerchief.
“Seven and a half,” answered Herr Erchardt shortly.
“Eight,” bellowed the sage.
“Seven and a half!”
“Eight.”
“The man is mad,” said Herr Erchardt.
“Well, please let him be mad in peace,” said I, putting my hands over my ears.
“Such ignorance must not be allowed to go uncontradicted,” said he, and turning his back on us, too exhausted to cry out any longer, he held up seven and a half fingers.
“Eight!” thundered the greybeard, with pristine freshness.
We felt very sobered, and did not recover until we reached a white signpost which entreated us to leave the road and walk through the field path — without trampling down more of the grass than was necessary. Being interpreted, it meant “single file”, which was distressing for Elsa and Fritz. Karl, like a happy child, gambolled ahead, and cut down as many flowers as possible with the stick of his mother’s parasol — followed the three others — then myself — and the lovers in the rear. And above the conversation of the advance party I had the privilege of hearing these delicious whispers.
Fritz: “Do you love me?” Elsa: “Nu — yes.” Fritz passionately: “But how much?” To which Elsa never replied — except with “How much do you love me?”
Fritz escaped that truly Christian trap by saying, “I asked you first.”
It grew so confusing that I slipped in front of Frau Kellermann — and walked in the peaceful knowledge that she was blossoming and I was under no obligation to inform even my nearest and dearest as to the precise capacity of my affections. “What right have they to ask each other such questions the day after letters of blessing have been received?” I reflected. “What right have they even to question each other? Love which becomes engaged and married is a purely affirmative affair — they are usurping the privileges of their betters and wisers!”
The edges of the field frilled over into an immense pine forest — very pleasant and cool it looked. Another signpost begged us to keep to the broad path for Schlingen and deposit waste paper and fruit peelings in wire receptacles attached to the benches for the purpose. We sat down on the first bench, and Karl with great curiosity explored the wire receptacle.
“I love woods,” said the Advanced Lady, smiling pitifully into the air. “In a wood my hair already seems to stir and remember something of its savage origin.”
“But speaking literally,” said Frau Kellermann, after an appreciative pause, “there is really nothing better than the air of pine trees for the scalp.”
“Oh, Frau Kellermann, please don’t break the spell,” said Elsa.
The Advanced Lady looked at her very sympathetically. “Have you, too, found the magic heart of Nature?” she said.
That was Herr Langen’s cue. “Nature has no heart,” said he, very bitterly and readily, as people do who are over-philosophised and underfed. “She creates that she may destroy. She eats that she may spew up and she spews up that she may eat. That is why we, who are forced to eke out an existence at her trampling feet, consider the world mad, and realise the deadly vulgarity of production.”
“Young man,” interrupted Herr Erchardt, “you have never lived and you have never suffered!”
“Oh, excuse me — how can you know?”
“I know because you have told me, and there’s an end of it. Come back to this bench in ten years’ time and repeat those words to me,” said Frau Kellermann, with an eye upon Fritz, who was engaged in counting Elsa’s fingers with passionate fervour — “and bring with you your young wife, Herr Langen, and watch, perhaps, your little child playing with—” She turned towards Karl, who had rooted an old illustrated paper out of the receptacle and was spelling over an advertisement for the enlargement of Beautiful Breasts.
The sentence remained unfinished. We decided to move on. As we plunged more deeply into the wood our spirits rose — reaching a point where they burst into song — on the part of the three men — “O Welt, wie bist du wunderbar!” — the lower part of which was piercingly sustained by Herr Langen, who attempted quite unsuccessfully to infuse satire into it in accordance with his — “world outlook”. They strode ahead and left us to trail after them — hot and happy.
“Now is the opportunity,” said Frau Kellermann. “Dear Frau Professor, do tell us a little about your book.”
“Ach, how did you know I was writing one?” she cried playfully.
“Elsa, here, had it from Lisa. And never before have I personally known a woman who was writing a book. How do you manage to find enough to write down?”
“That is never the trouble,” said the Advanced Lady — she took Elsa’s arm and leaned on it gently. “The trouble is to know where to stop. My brain has been a hive for years, and about three months ago the pent-up waters burst over my soul, and since then I am writing all day until late into the night, still ever finding fresh inspirations and thoughts which beat impatient wings about my heart.”
“Is it a novel?” asked Elsa shyly.
“Of course it is a novel,” said I.
“How can you be so positive?” said Frau Kellermann, eyeing me severely.
“Because nothing but a novel could produce an effect like that.”
“Ach, don’t quarrel,” said the Advanced Lady sweetly. “Yes, it is a novel — upon the Modern Woman. For this seems to me the woman’s hour. It is mysterious and almost prophetic, it is the symbol of the true advanced woman: not one of those violent creatures who deny their sex and smother their frail wings under … under—”
“The English tailor-made?” from Frau Kellermann.
“I was not going to put it like that. Rather, under the lying garb of false masculinity!”
“Such a subtle distinction!” I murmured.
“Whom then,” asked Fräulein Elsa, looking adoringly at the Advanced Lady — “whom then do you consider the true woman?”
“She is the incarnation of comprehending Love!”
“But my dear Frau Professor,” protested Frau Kellermann, “you must remember that one has so few opportunities for exhibiting Love within the family circle nowadays. One’s husband is at business all day, and naturally desires to sleep when he returns home — one’s children are out of the lap and in at the university before one can lavish anything at all upon them!”
“But Love is not a question of lavishing,” said the Advanced Lady. “It is the lamp carried in the bosom touching with serene rays all the heights and depths of—”
“Darkest Africa,” I murmured flippantly.
She did not hear.
“The mistake we have made in the past — as a sex,” said she, “is in not realising that our gifts of giving are for the whole world — we are the glad sacrifice of ourselves!”
“Oh!” cried Elsa rapturously, and almost bursting into gifts as she breathed — “how I know that! You know ever since Fritz and I have been engaged, I share the desire to give to everybody, to share everything!”
“How extremely dangerous,” said I.
“It is only the beauty of danger, or the danger of beauty,” said the Advanced Lady — “and there you have the ideal of my book — that woman is nothing
but a gift.”
I smiled at her very sweetly. “Do you know,” I said, “I, too, would like to write a book on the advisability of caring for daughters, and taking them for airings and keeping them out of kitchens!”
I think the masculine element must have felt these angry vibrations: they ceased from singing, and together we climbed out of the wood, to see Schlingen below us, tucked in a circle of hills, the white houses shining in the sunlight, “for all the world like eggs in a bird’s nest”, as Herr Erchardt declared. We descended upon Schlingen and demanded sour milk with fresh cream and bread at the Inn of the Golden Stag, a most friendly place, with tables in a rose-garden where hens and chickens ran riot — even flopping upon the disused tables and pecking at the red checks on the cloths. We broke the bread into the bowls, added the cream, and stirred it round with flat wooden spoons, the landlord and his wife standing by.
“Splendid weather!” said Herr Erchardt, waving his spoon at the landlord, who shrugged his shoulders.
“What! you don’t call it splendid!”
“As you please,” said the landlord, obviously scorning us.
“Such a beautiful walk,” said Fräulein Elsa, making a free gift of her most charming smile to the landlady.
“I never walk,” said the landlady; “when I go to Mindelbau my man drives me — I’ve more important things to do with my legs than walk them through the dust!”
“I like these people,” confessed Herr Langen to me. “I like them very, very much. I think I shall take a room here for the whole summer.”
“Why?”
“Oh, because they live close to the earth, and therefore despise it.”
He pushed away his bowl of sour milk and lit a cigarette. We ate, solidly and seriously, until these seven and a half kilometres to Mindelbau stretched before us like an eternity. Even Karl’s activity became so full fed that he lay on the ground and removed his leather waistbelt. Elsa suddenly leaned over to Fritz and whispered, who on hearing her to the end and asking her if she loved him, got up and made a little speech.
“We — we wish to celebrate our betrothal by — by — asking you all to drive back with us in the landlord’s cart — if — if it will hold us!”
“Oh, what a beautiful, noble idea!” said Frau Kellermann, heaving a sigh of relief that audibly burst two hooks.
“It is my little gift,” said Elsa to the Advanced Lady, who by virtue of three portions almost wept tears of gratitude.
Squeezed into the peasant cart and driven by the landlord, who showed his contempt for mother earth by spitting savagely every now and again, we jolted home again, and the nearer we came to Mindelbau the more we loved it and one another.
“We must have many excursions like this,” said Herr Erchardt to me, “for one surely gets to know a person in the simple surroundings of the open air — one shares the same joys — one feels friendship. What is it your Shakespeare says? One moment, I have it. ‘The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried — grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel!’”
“But,” said I, feeling very friendly towards him, “the bother about my soul is that it refuses to grapple anybody at all — and I am sure that the dead weight of a friend whose adoption it had tried would kill it immediately. Never yet has it shown the slightest sign of a hoop!”
He bumped against my knees and excused himself and the cart.
“My dear little lady, you must not take the quotation literally. Naturally, one is not physically conscious of the hoops; but hoops there are in the soul of him or her who loves his fellowmen.… Take this afternoon, for instance. How did we start out? As strangers you might almost say, and yet — all of us — how have we come home?”
“In a cart,” said the “only remaining joy”, who sat upon his mother’s lap and felt sick.
We skirted the field that we had passed through, going round by the cemetery. Herr Langen leaned over the edge of the seat and greeted the graves. He was sitting next to the Advanced Lady — inside the shelter of her shoulder. I heard her murmur: “You look like a little boy with your hair blowing about in the wind.” Langen, slightly less bitter, watched the last graves disappear. And I heard her murmur: “Why are you so sad? I, too, am very sad sometimes — but — you look young enough for me to dare to say this — I — too — know of much joy!”
“What do you know?” said he.
I leaned over and touched the Advanced Lady’s hand. “Hasn’t it been a nice afternoon?” I said questioningly. “But you know, that theory of yours about women and Love — it’s as old as the hills — oh, older!”
From the road a sudden shout of triumph. Yes, there he was again — white beard, silk handkerchief and undaunted enthusiasm.
“What did I say? Eight kilometres — it is!”
“Seven and a half!” shrieked Herr Erchardt.
“Why, then, do you return in carts? Eight kilometres it must be.”
Herr Erchardt made a cup of his hands and stood up in the jolting cart while Frau Kellermann clung to his knees. “Seven and a half!”
“Ignorance must not go uncontradicted!” I said to the Advanced Lady.
About Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield, short-story writer and poet, was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888 in Wellington. At 19, she left for the UK and became a significant Modernist writer, mixing with fellow writers such as Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot and DH Lawrence. She wrote five collections of short stories, the final one being published posthumously by her husband, the writer and critic John Middleton Murry, along with a volume of her poems and another of her critical writings. Subsequently there have been collections of her letters and journals. She died of tuberculosis at the age of 34 at Fontainebleau. Although New Zealand settings do feature in her works, she looked to European movements in writing and the arts for inspiration, and also wrote stories with a European setting.
Virginia Woolf famously admitted that Mansfield was the only writer she was jealous of, and it is believed that conversations with Mansfield prompted Woolf to write Mrs Dalloway. Many writers in the 1930s, such as Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley, consciously adopted Mansfield’s pioneering styles, and, along with DH Lawrence, used her character (she was called ‘a dangerous woman’) in their fiction. This parallel influence of her life as well as her literary voice has continued in such works as CK Stead’s novel Mansfield. The clarity and vividness of her pared-back writing lend it a timeless quality that continues to weave its magic with new readers.
Roger Robinson writes that it took 50 years for ‘New Zealand imaginative writing to begin to engage with this complex presence in the country’s cultural history’ (The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature). Since then, Murry’s tireless efforts to establish Mansfield’s reputation have been built upon by others, with much scholarly attention, and leading to the five-volume Letters, edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, and Anthony Alpers’ seminal biography. In 1959 the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Awards were established, and in 1970 the Mansfield Memorial Fellowship was created.
About Vincent O’Sullivan
Vincent O’Sullivan is an editor, poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, essayist, academic and critic and has served as literary editor to the New Zealand Listener. Among other residencies and fellowships, O’Sullivan has held the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship in Menton, France, and has won numerous literary prizes throughout his distinguished career, including several Montana Book Awards. In 2000, he was made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. He is a graduate of the University of Auckland and Oxford University, and has lectured at Victoria University of Wellington and the University of Waikato. In 1997, he became Director of Victoria University’s Stout Research Centre, and is now Emeritus Professor of English. In 2004 he was awarded the Creative New Zealand Michael King Writer’s Fellowship, and in 2006 he received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.
Known for his powerful
intellect, and the broad range of his writing, O’Sullivan has also earned international acclaim as the joint editor, with Margaret Scott, of the five-volume Letters of Katherine Mansfield.
Copyright
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