The Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield. Katherine Mansfield

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СКАЧАТЬ To my surprise, she came to my side and put her arm through mine.

      "Thank you," she said, gratefully. "I think it's awfully good of you to take me into your confidence like that. Awfully. And even if it were true...but no, it can't be true, otherwise you wouldn't have told me. I mean it can't be psychologically true of the same nature to be frank and dishonourable at the same time. Can it? But then...I don't know. I suppose it is possible. Don't you find that the Russian novelists have made an upheaval of all your conclusions?" We walked, bras dessus bras dessous, down the sunny path.

      "Let's sit down," said Violet. "There's a fountain quite near this bench. I often come here. You can hear it all the time." The faint noise of the water sounded like a half-forgotten tune, half sly, half laughing.

      "Isn't it wonderful!" breathed Violet. "Like weeping in the night."

      "Oh, Violet," said I, terrified at this turn. "Wonderful things don't weep in the night. They sleep like tops and know nothing more till again it is day."

      She put her arm over the back of the bench and crossed her legs.

      "Why do you persist in denying your emotions? Why are you ashamed of them?" she demanded.

      "I'm not. But I keep them tucked away, and only produce them very occasionally, like special little pots of jam, when the people whom I love come to tea."

      "There you are again! Emotions and jam! Now, I'm absolutely different. I live on mine. Sometimes I wish I didn't—but then again I would rather suffer through them—suffer intensely, I mean; go down into the depths with them, for the sake of that wonderful upward swing on to the pinnacles of happiness." She edged nearer to me.

      "I wish I could think where I get my nature from," she went on. "Father and mother are absolutely different. I mean—they're quite normal—quite commonplace." I shook my head and raised my eyebrows. "But it is no use fighting it. It has beaten me. Absolutely—once and for all." A pause, inadequately filled by the sly, laughing water. "Now," said Violet, impressively, "you know what I meant when I said I came here to forget."

      "But I assure you I don't, Violet. How can you expect me to be so subtle? I quite understand that you don't wish to tell me until you know me better. Quite!"

      She opened her eyes and her mouth.

      "I have told you! I mean—not straight out. Not in so many words. But then—how could I? But when I told you of my emotional nature, and that I had been in the depths and swept up to the pinnacles...surely, surely you realised that I was telling you, symbolically. What else can you have thought?"

      No young girl ever performs such gymnastic feats by herself. Yet in my experience I had always imagined that the depths followed the pinnacles. I ventured to suggest so.

      "They do," said Violet, gloomily. "You see them, if you look, before and after."

      "Like the people in Shelley's Skylark," said I.

      Violet looked vague, and I repented. But I did not know how to sympathise, and I had no idea of the relative sizes.

      "It was in the summer," said Violet. "I had been most frightfully depressed. I don't know what it was. For one thing I felt as though I could not make up my mind to anything. I felt so terribly useless—that I had no place in the scheme of things—and worst of all, nobody who understood me...It may have been what I was reading at the time...but I don't think...not entirely. Still one never knows. Does one? And then I met...Mr. Farr, at a dance—"

      "Oh, call him by his Christian name, Violet. You can't go on telling me about Mr. Farr and you...on the heights."

      "Why on earth not? Very well—I met—Arthur. I think I must have been mad that evening. For one thing there had been a bother about going. Mother didn't want me to, because she said there wouldn't be anybody to see me home. And I was frightfully keen. I must have had a presentiment, I think. Do you believe in presentiments?...I don't know, we can't be certain, can we? Anyhow, I went. And he was there." She turned a deep scarlet and bit her lip. Oh, I really began to like Violet Burton—to like her very much indeed.

      "Go on," I said.

      "We danced together seven times and we talked the whole time. The music was very slow,—we talked of everything. You know...about books and theatres and all that sort of thing at first, and then—about our souls."

      "...What?"

      "I said—our souls. He understood me absolutely. And after the seventh dance...No, I must tell you the first thing he ever said to me. He said, 'Do you believe in Pan?' Quite quietly. Just like that. And then he said, 'I knew you did.' Wasn't that extra-or-din-ary! After the seventh dance we sat out on the landing. And...shall I go on?"

      "Yes, go on."

      "He said, 'I think I must be mad. I want to kiss you,'—and—I let him."

      "Do go on."

      "I simply can't tell you what I felt like. Fancy! I'd never kissed out of the family before. I mean—of course—never a man. And then he said: 'I must tell you—I am engaged."'

      "Well?"

      "What else is there? Of course I simply rushed upstairs and tumbled everything over in the dressing-room and found my coat and went home. And next morning I made Mother let me come here. I thought," said Violet, "I thought I would have died of shame."

      "Is that all?" I cried. "You can't mean to say that's all?"

      "What else could there be? What on earth did you expect. How extraordinary you are—staring at me like that!"

      And in the long pause I heard again the little fountain, half sly, half laughing—at me, I thought, not at Violet.

      (1913)

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