STORIES FOR MY NEW BOOK

N. Z.Honesty:The Doctor, Arnold Cullen and his wife Lydia, and Archie the friend.
L.Second Violin:Alexander and his friend in the train. Spring ... wet lilac ... spouting rain.
N. Z.Six Years After:A wife and husband on board a steamer. They see some one who reminds them. The cold buttons.
L.Lives Like Logs of Driftwood:This wants to be a long, very well written story. The men are important, especially the lesser man. It wants a great deal of working ... newspaper office.
N. Z.A Weak Heart:Roddie on his bike in the evening, with his hands in his pockets, doing marvels by that dark tree at the corner of May Street.
L.Widowed:Geraldine and Jimmie, a house overlooking Sloane Street and Square. Wearing those buds at her breast. “Married or not married” ... From autumn to spring.
N. Z.Our Maude:Husban͜d ͜and͟ wi͜fe p͟la͜y du͟ets:͜ A͟nd ͜a o͟ne a͟ two ͟a three a one a two three one! His white waistcoats. Wifeling and Mahub! What a girl you are!
N. Z.At Karori:The little lamp. I seen it. And then they were silent.
N. Z.Aunt Anne:Her life with the Tannhaüser overture.

Of these stories only the one called At Karori and subsequently entitled The Doll’s House was finished, three days later, on October 30. Of some of the remaining stories there are considerable fragments, of three of them I have so far discovered no trace at all. All the fragments I have found which indubitably belong to any of these stories I have included in this volume. I have also included other fragments which seemed to possess a separate existence, but I have reserved most of the shorter pieces for publication with her Journal.

Between October 1921, when the original plan of this volume was sketched, and the end of January 1922, she finished other stories which she had not foreseen. These were A Cup of Tea, Honeymoon, Taking the Veil, and the long, unfinished, yet somehow complete piece, A Married Man’s Story. In January she also began The Doves’ Nest, a story which was particularly important to her, and with the writing of which—at least at the beginning—she was satisfied. She wrote in her Journal on New Year’s Day, 1922:

Wrote The Doves’ Nest this afternoon. I was in no mood to write; it seemed impossible. Yet, when I had finished three pages, they ‘were all right!’ This is a proof (never to be too often proved) that when one has thought out a story nothing remains but the labour.

She worked on and off at The Doves’ Nest during the following summer also. Unfortunately I can find no trace of her own manuscript. There is a fair, clean copy, typewritten by herself, of the portion printed in this book, but nothing more.

In February 1922 began three months of an exacting medical treatment in Paris, during which work became more and more a physical impossibility. Nevertheless, at the beginning of this time, on February 20th, she wrote The Fly. On her return to Switzerland in June she tried to resume work on The Doves’ Nest and she wrote the scenario of a play; but again physical weakness made work in the mountains impossible. To ease the strain on her heart she descended into the valley in June. At Sierre she wrote more of The Doves’ Nest, much more, alas, than remains; she also began the unfinished piece called Father and the Girls and finished the short story called The Canary. These were the last of the stories written by her which can be exactly dated. There is reason, however, to believe that the passage of the story called Six Years After which ends with the words: “Can one do nothing for the dead? And for a long time the answer had been—Nothing!” was actually the last piece written by her. It seems to belong to the autumn of 1922, when she had, for a time, practically abandoned writing.

It was not, however, because of her physical weakness that she stopped writing in the late summer of 1922. The power of her spirit to triumph over the frailty of her body had been proved over and over again. She stopped writing deliberately, not under compulsion. She felt that her whole attitude to life needed to be renewed, and she determined that she would write no more until it had been renewed.

Perhaps an idea of the way her mind—or rather her whole being—was moving, may be gleaned from some extracts from her journal. At first, her dissatisfaction with her work took shape in a feeling that she was not exerting the whole of her powers or expressing the whole of her knowledge in her writings. As early as July 1921, when she was still engaged on the last of the stories for “The Garden Party,” she wrote: