“At the cemetery while the coffin was lowered, to think that she and Constantia had done this thing without asking his permission. What would father say when he found out? For he was bound to find out sooner or later. He always did. 'Buried. You two girls had me buried.' She could hear his stick thumping.”
Or when the organ-grinding and the spot of sunshine on their mother's picture start in both silent reminiscence as to whether life might have been different if she had lived.
“Might they have married? But there had been nobody for them to marry. There had been father's Anglo-Indian friends before he quarrelled with them. But after that she and Constantia never met a single man except clergymen. How did one meet men? Or even if they'd met them, how could one have got to know men well enough to be more than strangers? One read of people having adventures, being followed, and so on. But nobody had ever followed Constantia and her.”
“Miss Brill” is a sketch with a whimsical pathos. A little old maiden lady who dresses up every Sunday and goes to the Jardin Publiques in Paris and sits on a bench, getting her romance out of watching people and feeling that she is a part of the passing life, goes one Sunday as usual. The feature in the sketch is the little fur piece around her neck.
“Miss Brill put up her hand and touched her fur. Dear little thing! It was nice to feel it again. She had taken it out of its box that afternoon, shaken out the mothpowder, given it a good brush, and rubbed the life back into the dim little eyes.”
It is to her like a pet animal or even a child. At first she finds the park less interesting than usual, but finally, as she senses romance in a pair of park lovers who sit down on her bench, she hears the boy say, “that stupid old thing at the end there. Why does she come here at all—who wants her? Why doesn't she keep her silly old mug at home?” And the girl, giggling, replies, “It's her fu-fur which is so funny.... It's exactly like a fried whiting.” Suddenly the romance and the joy have all gone out of the old lady, and when she lays away her little fur piece in its box sadly and puts on the lid she thinks she hears something crying.
Ability to depict the hidden speck of beauty under an uncompromising exterior not only inspired some of Katherine Mansfield's finest touches, but is especially refreshing after acquaintance with many writers who seem bent solely upon discovering some inmost rottenness and turning upon it the X-rays. There are many old ladies in this book, and the loving skill with which she has reproduced for the reader the charm she was able to see in them is indicative not only of her art, but also of her essential wholesomeness.
“The Man Without a Temperament” is an objective study of an unpopular man. One knows him from the few outward glimpses given of him as well as if the author had made an intensive psychological study of him. That is, one knows him as one knows other people, not as he knows himself. The sketch is pregnant with irony and pathos. Without a temperament—unfeeling—is the world's verdict of him. In reality, he has more feeling than his critics. What he lacks is not feeling, but expression. He is like a person with a pocketful of “paper” who has to walk because he hasn't change to pay his carfare, or to go hungry because he can't pay for a meal. People who know him trust him, even if they do not fancy him or feel quite at ease with him; but with strangers he has no chance. A life study of such a character would make him interesting. A photograph shows him as one of the people who “never take good pictures.”
In “Bliss and Other Stories,” the author went into deeper water than in the other collection. She was less concerned with the little ironies and with the fine points of her characters, and more with great passions.
“Bliss,” the story, shows the same method as do many of her other stories, but reversed. It is as if her reel were being run before the reader backwards. Instead of hunting out the one flower in a patch of weeds, she painted a young married woman's Garden of Eden and then hunted down the snake. From the first note of Bertha Young's unexplainable bliss one knows that the snake motive is coming, but does not know how or where. The feeling of it runs through Bertha's psychical sense of secret understanding—the “something in common” between herself and Pearl Fulton, who, by a subtle uncanniness, is made to suggest a glorified “vamp.” The leading motive of the story is the psychic sympathy between the women, who are antitheses. Commonly such a sense of understanding would take the form of antipathy. That it is attraction—harking back in all likelihood to something in Bertha remote and unrecognised—constitutes the distinctiveness of the motive. The art is revealed in a clear-cut picture—nothing more. Katherine Mansfield knew so marvellously where to stop. She had a good eye, a deft hand, an understanding mind, a sense of humour, and she loved her fellow-beings.