P. Lovecraft. Image courtesy of the August Derleth Trust.

 

Mansfield with Monsters presents readers with a rare glimpse into the work of this much-loved author. We may never know why Mansfield and her publishers excised so many of the monstrous elements of her work, or why the official version of her life story so carefully conceals her occult adventures. We may never know the real Katherine Mansfield, but the authors hope that this volume may shed some light on the world as Mansfield saw it.

It is a chilling vision, one which Mansfield was compelled to write about, yet one she ultimately chose to conceal from her readers. Perhaps this is the final enigma Mansfield presents: the dark contradiction at the heart of a great writer who declared, “at the end Truth is the only thing worth having; it is more thrilling than love, more joyful, and more passionate.”

Matt & Debbie Cowens

22 January 2012

The Woman at the Store

All that day the heat was terrible. The wind blew close to the ground; it rooted among the tussock grass, slithered along the road, so that the white pumice dust swirled in our faces, settled and sifted over us and was like a dry-skin itching for growth on our bodies. The horses stumbled along, coughing and chuffing. The pack horse was sick—with a big, open sore rubbed under the belly. Now and again she stopped short, threw back her head, looked at us as though she were going to cry, and whinnied.

Hundreds of larks shrilled; their dark shapes scrawling across the slate-grey sky like letters etched on a tombstone, and the sound of the larks reminded me of pencils scraping a slate surface. There was nothing to be seen but wave after wave of tussock grass, patched with purple orchids and manuka bushes covered with thick spider webs.

Jo rode ahead. He wore a blue galatea shirt, corduroy trousers, and riding boots. A white handkerchief, spotted with red so that it looked as though his nose had been bleeding on it, was knotted round his throat. Wisps of white hair straggled from under his wideawake—his moustache and eyebrows were the colour of old bones—he slouched in the saddle, grunting. Not once that day had he sung.

It was the first day we had been without his bawdy songs for a month, and now there seemed something uncanny in his silence. Jim rode beside me, white as a clown; his black eyes glittered, and he kept shooting out his tongue and moistening his lips. He was dressed in a Jaeger vest, and a pair of blue duck trousers, fastened round the waist with a plaited leather belt. We had hardly spoken since dawn. At noon we had lunched off fly biscuits and apricots by the side of a swampy creek.

“My stomach feels like the crop of a hen,” said Jo. “Now then, Jim, you’re the bright boy of the party—where’s this ’ere store you kep’ on talking about. ‘Oh, yes,’ you says, ‘I know a fine store, with a paddock for the horses and a creek runnin’ through, owned by a friend of mine who’ll give yer a bottle of whisky before ’e shakes hands with yer.’ ”

Jim laughed. “Don’t forget there’s a woman too, Jo, with blue eyes and yellow hair, who’ll promise you something else before she shakes hands with you. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

“The heat’s making you balmy,” said Jo. But he dug his knees into the horse. We shambled on. I half fell asleep, and had a sort of uneasy dream that the horses were not moving forward at all—then that I was on a rocking-horse, and my old mother was scolding me for raising such a fearful dust from the drawing-room carpet.

I sniveled and woke to find Jim leaning over me, maliciously smiling.

“That was a case of all but,” said he. “I just caught you.”

I raised my head. “Thank the Lord we’re finally arriving somewhere.”

We were on the brow of the hill, and below us there was a whare roofed with corrugated iron. It stood in a garden, rather far back from the road and half in shadow—a big paddock opposite, and a creek and a clump of skeletal willow-trees. A thin line of blue smoke stood up straight from the chimney of the whare; and as I looked a gaunt woman came out, followed by a child and a sheep dog—the woman carrying what appeared to me a black stick.