Part 22
Notwithstanding the proverbial irregularity of the English mails and the infamous practice of Government in embezzling all private letters for the King's private reading, yours of the 17th eluded observation at the post office so as to reach me; and was as acceptable as, considering the wearisome frequency of your communications lately, could possibly be expected.
My last was a scrawl from Althorp--where we spent six weeks. That there are 60,000 volumes you know. I read them all, excepting a pamphlet in a _patois_ of the Sanscrit, written by a learned, but, I regret to add, profane Hindoo Sectarian, the blasphemous drift of which was to prove that Bramah's locks were not all patent.
We went to town to the fiddling[9] which it was the pill[10] of the day to cry down. I was much gratified by the show and altogether. I sate by the Duke of Wellington, who was good enough to go out to fetch me a pot of porter. When "See the Conquering Hero comes" was sung in _Judas Maccabeus_, all eyes were turned upon me. I rose and bowed--but did not think the place was suited for any more marked acknowledgment. The King sang the Coronation Anthem exceedingly well, and Princess Victoria whistled the "Dead March" in _Saul_ with, perhaps, rather less than her usual effect. But the _chef d'oeuvre_ was confessed by all to be Macaulay in "The Praise of God and of the Second Day." I rose a wiser, and, I think, a sadder man.
Bishop of Worcester spent two days here last week. He begged me with tears in his eyes to be Bishop instead of him. I took a night to consider of it and to examine into my fitness for such a charge--but in the morning gave answer with the elaborateness which the occasion demanded that I would see him ... first.
THE AUTHOR OF "ALICE" [Sidenote: _Lewis Carroll_]
DEAR SENIOR CENSOR,--In a desultory conversation on a point connected with the dinner at our high table, you incidentally remarked to me that lobster-sauce, "though a necessary adjunct to turbot, was not entirely wholesome."
It is entirely unwholesome. I never ask for it without reluctance; I never take a second spoonful without a feeling of apprehension on the subject of a possible nightmare. This naturally brings me to the subject of Mathematics, and of the accommodation provided by the University for carrying on the calculations necessary in that important branch of Science.
As Members of Convocation are called upon (whether personally, or, as is less exasperating, by letter) to consider the offer of the Clarendon Trustees, as well as every other subject of human or inhuman, interest, capable of consideration, it has occurred to me to suggest for your consideration how desirable roofed buildings are for carrying on mathematical calculations; in fact, the variable character of the weather in Oxford renders it highly inexpedient to attempt much occupation, of a sedentary nature, in the open air.
Again, it is often impossible for students to carry on accurate mathematical calculations in close contiguity to one another, owing to their mutual conversation; consequently these processes require different rooms in which irrepressible conversationalists, who are found to occur in every branch of Society, might be carefully and permanently fixed.
It may be sufficient, for the present, to enumerate the following requisites--others might be added as funds permit:
A. A very large room for calculating Greatest Common Measure. To this a small one might be attached for Least Common Multiple: this, however, might be dispensed with.
B. A piece of open ground for keeping Roots and practising their extraction: it would be advisable to keep Square Roots by themselves, as their corners are apt to damage others.
C. A room for reducing Fractions to their Lowest Terms. This should be provided with a cellar for keeping the Lowest Terms when found, which might also be available to the general body of Undergraduates, for the purpose of "keeping Terms."
D. A large room which might be darkened, and fitted up with a magic-lantern, for the purpose of exhibiting circulating Decimals in the act of circulation. This might also contain cupboards, fitted with glass doors, for keeping the various Scales of Notation.
E. A narrow strip of ground, railed off and carefully levelled for investigating the properties of Asymptotes, and testing practically whether Parallel Lines meet or not: for this purpose it should reach, to use the expressive language of Euclid, "ever so far."
This last process of "continually producing the lines," may require centuries or more; but such a period, though long in the life of an individual, is as nothing in the life of the University.
As Photography is now very much employed in recording human expression, and might possibly be adapted to Algebraical Expressions, a small photographic room would be desirable, both for general use and for representing the various phenomena of Gravity, Disturbance of Equilibrium, Resolution, etc., which affect the features during severe mathematical operations.
May I trust that you will give your immediate attention to this most important subject?
Believe me, Sincerely yours, MATHEMATICUS....
[Sidenote: _Miss E.G. Thomson_]
It was at the end of December, 1878, that a letter, written in a singularly legible and rather boyish-looking hand, came to me from Christ Church, Oxford, signed "C.L. Dodgson." The writer said that he had come across some fairy designs of mine, and he should like to see some more of my work. By the same post came a letter from my London publisher (who had supplied my address) telling me that the "Rev. C.L. Dodgson" was "Lewis Carroll."
"Alice in Wonderland" had long been one of my pet books, and, as one regards a favourite author as almost a personal friend, I felt less restraint than one usually feels in writing to a stranger, though I carefully concealed my knowledge of his identity, as he had not chosen to reveal it.
This was the beginning of a frequent and delightful correspondence, and, as I confessed to a great love for fairy lore of every description, he asked me if I would accept a child's fairytale book he had written, called "Alice in Wonderland." I replied that I knew it nearly all off by heart, but that I should greatly prize a copy given to me by himself. By return came "Alice," and "Through the Looking-glass," bound most luxuriously in white calf and gold. And this is the grateful and kindly note that came with them: "I am now sending you 'Alice,' and the 'Looking-glass' as well. There is an incompleteness about giving only one, and besides, the one you bought was probably in red, and would not match these. If you are at all in doubt as to what to do with the (now) superfluous copy, let me suggest your giving it to some poor sick child. I have been distributing copies to all the hospitals and convalescent homes I can hear of, where there are sick children capable of reading them, and though, of course, one takes some pleasure in the popularity of the books elsewhere, it is not nearly so pleasant a thought to me as that they may be a comfort and relief to children in hours of pain and weariness. Still, no recipient _can_ be more appropriate than one who seems to have been in fairyland herself, and to have seen, like the 'weary mariners' of old--
"Between the green brink and the running foam White limbs unrobèd to a crystal air, Sweet faces, rounded arms, and bosoms prest To little harps of gold."
"Do you ever come to London?" he asked in another letter; "if so, will you allow me to call upon you?"
Early in the summer I came up to study, and I sent him word that I was in town. One night, coming into my room after a long day spent at the British Museum, in the half-light I saw a card lying on the table: "Rev. C.L. Dodgson." Bitter, indeed, was my disappointment at having missed him, but, just as I was laying it sadly down, I spied a small T.O. in the corner. On the back I read that he couldn't get up to my rooms early or late enough to find me, so would I arrange to meet him at some museum or gallery the day but one following? I fixed the South Kensington Museum, by the "Schliemann" collection, at twelve o'clock.
A little before twelve I was at the rendezvous, and then the humour of the situation suddenly struck me, that I had not the ghost of an idea what _he_ was like, nor would _he_ have any better chance of discovering _me_! The room was fairly full of all sorts and conditions, as usual, and I glanced at each masculine figure in turn, only to reject it as a possibility of the one I sought. Just as the big clock had clanged out twelve, I heard the high, vivacious voices and laughter of children sounding down the corridor.
At that moment a gentleman entered, two little girls clinging to his hands, and, as I caught sight of the tall, slim figure, with the cleanshaven, delicate, refined face, I said to myself, "_That's_ Lewis Carroll." He stood for a moment, head erect, glancing swiftly over the room, then, bending down, whispered something to one of the children; she, after a moment's pause, pointed straight at me.
Dropping their hands, he came forward, and, with that winning smile of his that utterly banished the oppressive sense of the Oxford don, said simply, "I am Mr. Dodgson; I was to meet you, I think?" To which I as frankly smiled, and said, "How did you know me so soon?"
"My little friend found you. I told her I had come to meet a young lady who knew fairies, and she fixed on you at once. But _I_ knew you before she spoke."
_The Gentleman, January 29, 1898_.
AFTER MR. MASEFIELD [Sidenote: _Anon._]
From '41 to '51 I was an almost model son.
From '51 to '62 I wished to, but I didn't do.
From '62 to '67 I took the shortest cut to heaven.
From '67 to '79 I only drank one glass of wine.
From '79 to '84 I felt that I could do with more.
From '84 to '96 I found how hard it is to mix.
From '96 to Nineteen-odd Quod:
MISS STIPP OF PLOVER'S COURT [Sidenote: _H.B._]
In a neighbourhood of narrow streets and tunnelling alleys, where there are few lamps and the policemen go two and two, where all day long you see fierce-eyed women hooded with shawls coming out of greasy street-doors with jugs in their hands, and where all day long sullen men stand at the dark entry to court and alley with pipes in their mouths and their hands in their pockets, and where the little children "awfully reverse our Saviour's words, and are not of the Kingdom of Heaven, but of the Kingdom of Hell"--in this dark, dangerous riverside neighbourhood, with its foul odours and its filthy gutters, lives one of the most defenceless women who ever came into human existence.
I knock at a door in Plover's Court, and a half-dressed, half-starved, and wholly dirty child, with no boots to her feet, opens to me; and when this miserable heir of the ages, after she has stared at me like a famished animal, learns that I wish to see Miss Stipp, she bids me "go up." The narrow passage is hung with two lines of washing; and, pushing through the avenue formed by these dank garments, I catch sight in the stone-paved kitchen beyond of a big-headed, whitewashed-looking infant sprawling on the floor collecting soap-suds, and a woman in the midst of voluminous steam working her arms about in a dripping wash tub.
The stairs up which I make my difficult way are strung with washing as far as the first bend. The dampness of the atmosphere has converted the dust and grime on banisters, wall, and stairs into a muddy dew. The little doll's-house of a place reeks with the suffocating odour of gas, fried fish, onions, and steam. In one of the two rooms on the first floor, the door of which stands open, I see--and myself am seen, not to say scowled at, by a couple of pipe-smoking navvies, three or four ragged children, and a little rabbit of a flat-chested woman whose complexion and the colour of her garments bear a striking resemblance to moleskin, and whose thin hair is twisted up in front and held comfortably in its place by a single steel curling-pin which seems to occupy the whole breadth of her forehead.
My rap on the panel of the other door is soon answered by a shrill, cracked voice like the sputtering of a cheap phonograph, and opening the flimsy door I find myself in a tiny topsy-turvy chamber, with all its furniture dragged out of place, a pail of water in the centre of the floor, a piece of scrubbing-soap on the table, and an unwrung house-flannel soaking on the seat of a wooden chair. There is a nice, old-fashioned, round-fronted chest-of-drawers with brass handles in the room, but the most striking detail of its equipment is a stumpy and amazingly abrupt bedstead against the wall, which is just big enough for a big doll. The bedclothes of this eerie little cot are thrown back, and in the centre of the rumpled mattress, in the hollow made by my heroine's recumbent form, curled up in a sublime indifference to the puffing and blowing of its mistress on the hearth, lies a shabby, emaciated, and disgusting cat.
At first I suppose Miss Stipp--Miss Emma Jane Stipp--who is polishing the grate, to be _kneeling_ on the hearthstone; but when a bird-like claw is stretched out to me, and the shrill, cracked voice says, "I'm dirty, but hearty; sit down and enjoy yourself," I observe that the little dwarf is actually _standing_ on the hearthstone, although her big head does not come within several inches of the mantelpiece. Indeed, with her twisted feet crossed over one another, so that the left foot appears to be kicking and worrying the right foot, in order to take its place, and the right foot, which turns upward, appears to be trying to creep away from its enemy, as though it wanted to crawl up that enemy's leg to laugh at it from the mocking vantage of its own knee--the little old lady walks up and down on the hearthstone, her hand blacking and polishing the grate as she goes, just as you may see another lady walking up and down and taking the air on her doorstep.
* * * * *
The little dwarf is familiar to hundreds of Londoners. Always nursing the wall, and using a miniature crooked stick exactly like a question-mark, she hobbles through the streets like a half-human beetle, until she reaches some such place as the approach to a railway station, where she finds it profitable to stand as though in great pain, rolling sheep's eyes at the hurrying crowd. And many of those tenderhearted gentlemen and kind old ladies, and dear little overdressed children returning from a visit to Old Drury or the Tower of London, who have slipped a penny or a sixpenny-bit into the claw of the dwarf, must often have asked themselves at the time what manner of woman she is, and bothered themselves to imagine how on earth she lives. The old creature--for she is over seventy--is counted in statistics among the proud population of this Seat of Empire, and she is as much subject to the cosmic laws and as much a member of the human family as the tallest and most swaggering Lifeguards-man who ever had "Cook's Son!" shouted at him by irreverent urchin.
How she views the universe from her altitude of a yard, or a yard and three inches; what her attitude is to God and man, and how life goes with the old veteran after seventy odd years of its buffeting--these were some of the mysteries which I brought with me into her back room by the riverside for their unveiling by Miss Emma Stipp herself.
* * * * *
"I'm late this mornin', I am," she says, in her shrill fashion, standing right against the fire like a demon that no flame can consume, and vigorously rubbing at the grate with her black-lead brush. "The cause is _'im_," she continues, turning to point the brush at the cat sleeping on her bed, after she has rubbed the red tip of her long nose with a portion of her knuckles and a portion of the brush. "Oh, he's a villain, a dreadful villain he is," she cries, with exasperation, returning to her work; "he worries my life out, he do, the 'orrid varmint. Last night he didn't come home, he didn't. I set up for him, but he didn't come. 'Oh,' I says, 'if you're keepin' low company again,' I says, 'you can stop out all night,' I says, 'for I'll sit up for you no longer; so there, my ugly beauty.' And then in the middle of the night I wake up, I do, feeling that cold, and sneezin' and snuffin', and irritatin' I was from top to toe; and blest if Master Tom hadn't got upon the window-sill, bust open that there piece of brown paper I had pasted over the broken pane, I had, and let hisself in Yankee-doodle fashion, and left me to perish with the cold."
Her lined and wrinkled face, when she turns it to us, is not without the vestiges of attraction. The head, with its grey hair parted down the centre, is well-shaped; the forlorn-looking eyes are a pale-blue, like faded forget-me-nots; the thin, flexible nose, which is always moist, and the long, firm chin incline towards the formation known as the nut-cracker. But for her abbreviated trunk, and those few pathetic inches of twisted leg--chiefly feet--she might have passed for a matronly-looking and rather handsome old harridan, half Scotch and half Irish.
"What with the cat," she says, and then, letting her voice run up to a screech, she proceeds furiously, "and that devil of a woman downstairs! Oh! she's a wicked woman, she is, a _wicked_ woman, a _very_ wicked woman; she's got some of my things because I'm behind-hand in my rent, and she says she won't give them up; but she _shall_. I'll see that she do. Ah! I'll have the law on her--the nasty, swearing, beastly--Oh! she's a _wicked_ woman."
* * * * *
Think of the majesty of the English law which enables this pathetic yard of twisted womanhood to hold her own in a foul court against "a wicked woman" with arms like a bluejacket! But Miss Stipps is used to fighting her own battles. When children yell after her, "Old Goody Witch!" she swings about and takes her stick to them, pouring out such a flow of imprecation upon their young heads that they run away in a panic of alarm. Moreover, I have it on reliable authority that when Miss Stipps steps over the way with her jug for a pint of porter, she is in the habit, after reaching up her arm to receive the jug back from the barman, of telling the young man pretty sharply that she isn't buying froth, and that she'll trouble him to do a blow at the jug and to give another pull to his tap, which won't hurt him, it won't, as he ain't yet the proprietor of the place, and not likely to be, neither, if he treats poor ladies in sich a wulgar and Sheeny fashion.
I beg Miss Stipp to desist from her labour of dabbing the grate with streaky spots of black-lead, and implore her to take a seat and indulge herself for an easy hour in anecdotal reminiscences. Miss Stipp yields to my blandishments--that is to say, she backs against a little cobbler's stool, a stool which the Baby Bear in that immortal legend of "The Three Bears" would have found several sizes too small for it, and appears to slope half an inch to the rear. By the action of crossing her hands in her lap, and by the society smile on her face as she turns her dewy nose in my direction, I gather, though I should never have discovered it for myself, that Miss Stipp is seated.
We are now in for a thoroughly comfortable and intimate conversation. The cat is fast asleep. The spinster's mantelpiece, which is decorated with pictorial advertisements of such highly inappropriate commodities as baby's food and tobacco, wears an aspect which I am content to regard as social. And the cupboard beside the fireplace, although the bottom floor is used as a coal-cellar, suggests, with its crowded shelves of dishes, egg-cups, plates, biscuit-boxes, and paper bags, that we are in for a little friendly banquet, which, if not good enough for his Grace of Canterbury, might yet have inspired him of Assisi to ask a blessing.
* * * * *
"Well, you must know," says Miss Stipp, looking at the fire, and nodding her head as she speaks, "that I am one of ten, that I was born in Blackfriars--born in Blackfriars, I was--and that all the boys died, and that only me, who was born a cripple--born a cripple, I was--and my two sisters ever grew up to be a comfort to my poor mother. What father was, if ever he was anythin' at all, I _don't_ know; and if I ever did know I think it was somethin' connected in some roundabout fashion, it was, with drains. But he died early, and that was an end of _him_. My poor mother, she was a laundress--a beautiful laundress she was, a very beautiful laundress--and she used to do for a gentleman who was a dissentin' minister--a dissentin' minister he was--and most particular about his linen, and lived in the big square just by the church at the corner, number five; and I've knowed my poor mother fret herself almost to death, she would, if one of them little blisters ever come up on the gentleman's shirt-fronts. And I used to help my poor mother, I did, by carryin' the gentleman's linen to number five in the big square, and that was the fust job I ever did for my poor mother, and proud she was, and proud I was, too, that I could be sich a help to her.
"We was poorer than 'most anybody in Blackfriars, where we lived, and a terribly poor neighbourhood it were--terribly poor; and so one of my sisters got married, she did, and a wonderfully big family she had, but most of 'em died sharp, so _that_ was all right, excep' that the berryin' cost a tidy bit of money, it did. Then my other sister went out to service in Brixton. I useter go there one day a week--Toosday it was--to clean the silver and the soup tureens, and they give me a shillin', they did, I useter help sister in the kitchen--not a cook I wasn't, you must understand, but I useter help with the vegetables and the dishin'-up, and they give me a shillin'. It was a very nice house; a nice house, and no mistake about it. The lady had married a gardener--a gentleman's gardener, he was; and there was a carpet all over the dining-room floor--a nice carpet, a Brussels carpet, an ol' Brussels carpet; and she kep' a parrot--oh, a nasty, spiteful parrot, it was--I useter hate it, I did, the nasty, squawlin' beast; and it was more to her than any baby; and I useter clean the silver and the soup tureens, and do the vegetables and dish-up, Toosdays it was; and they give me a shillin'.
"All by meself I useter go, there and back, and one night"--she lifts her claws and gurgles at the memory, with a slow smile creepin' gradually through all the wrinkles on her face--"Oh, didn't I give my poor mother a fright, and no mistake about it! It was one of them nasty, stinkin' cold, freezin' nights; the streets like ice, they was, and the 'bus horses couldn't get along nohow, for all they was roughed; and it was past eleven o'clock, it was--yes, past eleven o'clock, it was--before ever I got home; and there was my poor mother standing at the door of the alms-house where we was livin' in Blackfriars--my poor mother and me--and cryin' and wringin' her hands and makin' a to-do, she was, thinking as how she had lost me altogether.
* * * * *