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Karori was exactly the place that Katherine Mansfield would have chosen for Kezia to live in as a little girl. Wellington had its magic of sea, and the docks where ships blossomed from the dark water like lilies from a stagnant pond. But Karori had something quite other vibrating in its keen air—an electric current, stimulating, exhilarating, charged with exuberance. How completely, as she breathed it, she became a child of that country. An instinct more powerful than reason woke in her a thousand inherited impulses and desires. It was the instinct impelling the pioneers before her to “search behind the mountain ranges”; and which had rooted them, at last, in that Island. Growing in her, it was fanned by that air, fed by the sound of the sea, and by sight of those sharply-folded hills. It was to live on in her, and grow continually more living, all her life. No matter what country was stamped upon her passport, it was by virtue of Karori that she was to remain “the little Colonial.”

But Katherine Mansfield's Karori was a Karori that had suffered a sea-change, and been transmuted into something rich and strange. It was to become page 17 for her, and for certain of her readers, the symbol of a quality of experience—of that experience of the external world which came to her when she was “crystal-clear.” The seed of this pearl of price was a certain quality of physical atmosphere:

“I love this place more and more” (she wrote of the Isola Bella at Mentone).“One is conscious of it as I used to be conscious of New Zealand. I mean if I went for a walk there and lay down under a pine tree and looked up at the wispy clouds through the branches I came home plus the pine tree.”

But it was far more than a physical effect.“Un paysage, c'est un état d'âme,” said Amiel. And the crystal clarity of Katherine Mansfield's memory of Karori was not due to the light of the sun. Karori shone for her in another light.

“Why should one love? No reason; it's just a mystery. But it is like a light. I can only see things truly in its rays.”

What had come to pass in those later days was her emergence out of the valley of the shadow of Experience into the light of Innocence regained, and just as William Blake turned to the child world to find terms to express his wisdom, so Katherine Mansfield turned back to Karori.

Therefore it would be to deny the very inmost law of high human experience to believe that if only her memory of Karori had remained with her undimmed from childhood, she might have been spared much suffering, or escaped that constraint of destiny which compelled her to meet unhappiness in the pursuit of strange gods whose ways were not page 18 her ways, and to be caught in the toils of experience which “wasn't All experience.” The experience that “isn't All experience” is precisely what Experience is. And it was in virtue of that suffering, that pursuit of strange gods, that “waste,” that she became crystalline. She was marked out to tread “the road of excess that leads to the palace of wisdom.” It was not merely after, but because, she had felt the full impact of life—not merely after, but because she had reached the conclusion:“I adore Life, but my experience of the world is that it's pretty terrible” —that she came fully into her possession of Karori. That possession was the reward of a spiritual victory.

Her flowering was the flowering of the aloe—“that flower safety” —which, rooted in its own soil, pushing through its nettles, measures its height in the upper air, at last—and flowering, dies. But the first stirring, the first breaking of that ground which was to nourish the plant, began generations before the conception of Prelude or The Doll's House—began even before the Pa Men had left their England to pioneer in their New Zealand.