Кэтрин Мэнсфилд – Selected Stories (страница 2)
Real Life
Mansfield’s output during and after the First World War was abundant, and fuelled in large part by two terrible tragedies: the first was the death on the battlefields of France of her beloved brother, Leslie, in 1915; the second was the news, in late 1917, that she had tuberculosis, a condition from which she never recovered. The war itself seemed to stifle her – ‘I have simply felt it closing in on me … and all to no purpose’ – and its effects caused her to reconsider the youthful exuberance of her earlier work. One of her last stories, ‘The Fly’, deals with grief in the wake of the First World War, and the ultimate futility of the struggle to survive.
In 1918, Mansfield’s story ‘Prelude’ was published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. (The Murrys had become friendly with the Woolfs, among other literary luminaries on the London scene, including D. H. Lawrence and his wife.) The story was a revised version of one she had begun writing in the wake of her brother’s death – a story she felt she owed it to him to write – and is about a New Zealand family and the intricacies and complications of their lives, loves and secrets. She later continued their story in ‘At the Bay’, as well as exploring similar settings and family dynamics in other stories including ‘The Garden Party’.
As in so much of Mansfield’s fiction, her characters’ inner emotional lives are richer and more intuitively described than their outer actions; there tends to be less ‘plot’ in her stories than there is longing, and agonising, and finding that reality rarely matches expectation. It was a natural theme to pursue for Mansfield, for whom the grass was repeatedly greener on the other side. The tedium of reality forever intruded on her fantasies – in the middle of the First World War she had even temporarily abandoned Murry and Baker to track down another lover, writer Francis Carco, who was serving on the treacherous Western Front in France.
‘I Am Simply Unworthy’
Mansfield never forgot that she was an outsider: in New Zealand she was pained by the exploitation of the indigenous Maori by wealthy white interlopers such as herself; in England she was ‘a little savage from New Zealand’; as a lover of both men and women she was at odds with the moral code of her era. It was perhaps because of this that she had elements of the fantasist about her, always imagining life to be more full of possibility than it really proved to be – a trait evident in her most memorable, most disillusioned, characters.
She was a true life-liver at a time when it wasn’t strictly acceptable to be one; a writer whose villains are cold and self-regarding but who consistently sought to suit herself. And she knew she was not perfect: writing to Ida Baker just ten months before dying of a haemorrhage related to her tuberculosis, she admitted, ‘I am simply unworthy of friendship … I take advantage of you, demand perfection of you, crush you. And the devil of it is that even though that is true as I write it I want to laugh.’
Mansfield published just three collections of stories in her lifetime, and although they made her popular she knew she was seriously unwell; she once confessed to a friend: ‘I shall not be “fashionable” long.’ She was planning her next collection of stories when she died in France in early 1923, but she left behind instructions to Murry to ‘tear up and burn as much as possible’ – an instruction he ignored, for better or worse. In truth she had been horrified at the idea of dying without publishing everything she’d hoped to (‘How unbearable it would be to die – leave “scraps”, “bits”’), and it is thanks to Murry that much of her writing ever came to light, even if his version of her was highly edited. But of all the posthumous tributes she received, perhaps none was more telling of her talent than that from Virginia Woolf, her friend, critic and publisher, who admitted: ‘I was jealous of her writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of.’
HOW PEARL BUTTON WAS KIDNAPPED
Pearl Button swung on the little gate in front of the House of Boxes. It was the early afternoon of a sunshiny day with little winds playing hide-and-seek in it. They blew Pearl Button’s pinafore frill into her mouth, and they blew the street dust all over the House of Boxes. Pearl watched it—like a cloud—like when mother peppered her fish and the top of the pepper-pot came off. She swung on the little gate, all alone, and she sang a small song. Two big women came walking down the street. One was dressed in red and the other was dressed in yellow and green. They had pink handkerchiefs over their heads, and both of them carried a big flax basket of ferns. They had no shoes and stockings on, and they came walking along, slowly, because they were so fat, and talking to each other and always smiling. Pearl stopped swinging, and when they saw her they stopped walking. They looked and looked at her and then they talked to each other, waving their arms and clapping their hands together. Pearl began to laugh.
The two women came up to her, keeping close to the hedge and looking in a frightened way towards the House of Boxes.
“Hallo, little girl!” said one.
Pearl said, “Hallo!”
“You all alone by yourself?”
Pearl nodded.
“Where’s your mother?”
“In the kitching, ironing-because-its-Tuesday.”
The women smiled at her and Pearl smiled back. “Oh,” she said, “haven’t you got very white teeth indeed! Do it again.”
The dark women laughed, and again they talked to each other with funny words and wavings of the hands. “What’s your name?” they asked her.
“Pearl Button.”
“You coming with us, Pearl Button? We got beautiful things to show you,” whispered one of the women. So Pearl got down from the gate and she slipped out into the road. And she walked between the two dark women down the windy road, taking little running steps to keep up, and wondering what they had in their House of Boxes.
They walked a long way. “You tired?” asked one of the women, bending down to Pearl. Pearl shook her head. They walked much further. “You not tired?” asked the other woman. And Pearl shook her head again, but tears shook from her eyes at the same time and her lips trembled. One of the women gave over her flax basket of ferns and caught Pearl Button up in her arms, and walked with Pearl Button’s head against her shoulder and her dusty little legs dangling. She was softer than a bed and she had a nice smell—a smell that made you bury your head and breathe and breathe it …
They set Pearl Button down in a log room full of other people the same colour as they were—and all these people came close to her and looked at her, nodding and laughing and throwing up their eyes. The woman who had carried Pearl took off her hair ribbon and shook her curls loose. There was a cry from the other women, and they crowded close and some of them ran a finger through Pearl’s yellow curls, very gently, and one of them, a young one, lifted all Pearl’s hair and kissed the back of her little white neck. Pearl felt shy but happy at the same time. There were some men on the floor, smoking, with rugs and feather mats round their shoulders. One of them made a funny face at her and he pulled a great big peach out of his pocket and set it on the floor, and flicked it with his finger as though it were a marble. It rolled right over to her. Pearl picked it up. “Please can I eat it?” she asked. At that they all laughed and clapped their hands, and the man with the funny face made another at her and pulled a pear out of his pocket and sent it bobbling over the floor. Pearl laughed. The women sat on the floor and Pearl sat down too. The floor was very dusty. She carefully pulled up her pinafore and dress and sat on her petticoat as she had been taught to sit in dusty places, and she ate the fruit, the juice running all down her front.
“Oh!” she said in a very frightened voice to one of the women, “I’ve spilt all the juice!”
“That doesn’t matter at all,” said the woman, patting her cheek. A man came into the room with a long whip in his hand. He shouted something. They all got up, shouting, laughing, wrapping themselves up in rugs and blankets and feather mats. Pearl was carried again, this time into a great cart, and she sat on the lap of one of her women with the driver beside her. It was a green cart with a red pony and a black pony. It went very fast out of the town. The driver stood up and waved the whip round his head. Pearl peered over the shoulder of her woman. Other carts were behind like a procession. She waved at them. Then the country came. First fields of short grass with sheep on them and little bushes of white flowers and pink briar rose baskets—then big trees on both sides of the road—and nothing to be seen except big trees. Pearl tried to look through them but it was quite dark. Birds were singing. She nestled closer in the big lap. The woman was warm as a cat, and she moved up and down when she breathed, just like purring. Pearl played with a green ornament round her neck, and the woman took the little hand and kissed each of her fingers and then turned it over and kissed the dimples. Pearl had never been happy like this before. On the top of a big hill they stopped. The driving man turned to Pearl and said, “Look, look!” and pointed with his whip.