Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (287 page)

A CHINAMAN

Yet, despite his love for the photographer’s art, he hated the idea of having his own picture taken for the benefit of a curious world.
The shyness that made him nervous in the presence of strangers made the idea that any one who cared to stare into a shop window could examine and criticise his portrait extremely repulsive to him.

I remember that this shyness of his was the only occasion of anything approaching a quarrel between us.

I had an idle trick of drawing caricatures when I was a child, and one day when he was writing some letters I began to make a picture of him on the back of an envelope.
I quite forget what the drawing was like—probably it was an abominable libel—but suddenly he turned round and saw what I was doing.
He got up from his seat and turned very red, frightening me very much.
Then he took my poor little drawing, and tearing it into small pieces threw it into the fire without a word.
Afterwards he came suddenly to me, and saying nothing, caught me up in his arms and kissed me passionately.
I was only some ten or eleven years of age at the time, but now the incident comes back to me very clearly, and I can see it as if it happened but yesterday—the sudden snatching of my picture, the hurried striding across the room, and then the tender light in his face as he caught me up to him and kissed me.

I used to see a good deal of him at Oxford, and I was constantly in Christ Church.
He would invite me to stay with him and find me rooms just outside the college gates, where I was put into charge of an elderly dame, whose name, if I do not forget, was Mrs.
Buxall.
I would spend long happy days with my uncle, and at nine o’clock I was taken over to the little house in St.
Aldates and delivered into the hands of the landlady, who put me to bed.

In the morning I was awakened by the deep reverberations of “Great Tom” calling Oxford to wake and begin the new day.
Those times were very pleasant, and the remembrance of them lingers with me still.
Lewis Carroll at the time of which I am speaking had two tiny turret rooms, one on each side of his staircase in Christ Church.
He always used to tell me that when I grew up and became married he would give me the two little rooms, so that if I ever disagreed with my husband we could each of us retire to a turret till we had made up our quarrel!

And those rooms of his!
I do not think there was ever such a fairy-land for children.
I am sure they must have contained one of the finest collections of musical-boxes to be found anywhere in the world.
There were big black ebony boxes with glass tops through which you could see all the works.
There was a big box with a handle, which it was quite hard exercise for a little girl to turn, and there must have been twenty or thirty little ones which could only play one tune.
Sometimes one of the musical-boxes would not play properly, and then I always got tremendously excited.
Uncle used to go to a drawer in the table and produce a box of little screw-drivers and punches, and while I sat on his knee he would unscrew the lid and take out the wheels to see what was the matter.
He must have been a clever mechanist, for the result was always the same-after a longer or shorter period the music began again.
Sometimes when the musical-boxes had played all their tunes he used to put them in the box backwards, and was as pleased as I at the comic effect of the music “standing on its head,” as he phrased it.

There was another and very wonderful toy which he sometimes produced for me, and this was known as “The Bat.”
The ceilings of the rooms in which he lived at the time were very high indeed, and admirably suited for the purposes of “The Bat.”
It was an ingeniously constructed toy of gauze and wire, which actually flew about the room like a bat.
It was worked by a piece of twisted elastic, and it could fly for about half a minute.

I was always a little afraid of this toy because it was too lifelike, but there was a fearful joy in it.
When the music-boxes began to pall he would get up from his chair and look at me with a knowing smile.
I always knew what was coming even before he began to speak, and I used to dance up and down in tremendous anticipation.

“Isa, my darling,” he would say, “once upon a time there was some one called Bob the Bat!
and he lived in the top left-hand drawer of the writing-table.
What could he do when uncle wound him up?”

And then I would squeak out breathlessly, “He could really Fly!”

Bob the Bat had many adventures.
There was no way of controlling the direction of its flight, and one morning, a hot summer’s morning when the window was wide open, Bob flew out into the garden and alighted in a bowl of salad which a scout was taking to some one’s rooms.
The poor fellow was so startled by the sudden flapping apparition that he dropped the bowl, and it was broken into a thousand pieces.

There!
I have written “a thousand pieces,” and a thoughtless exaggeration of that sort was a thing that Lewis Carroll hated.
“A thousand pieces?”
he would have said; “you know, Isa, that if the bowl had been broken into a thousand pieces they would each have been so tiny that you could have hardly seen them.”
And if the broken pieces had been get-at-able, he would have made me count them as a means of impressing on my mind the folly of needless exaggeration.

I remember how annoyed he was once when, after a morning’s sea bathing at Eastbourne, I exclaimed, “Oh, this salt water, it always makes my hair as stiff as a poker.”

He impressed it on me quite irritably that no little girl’s hair could ever possibly get as stiff as a poker.
“If you had said, ‘as stiff as wires,’ it would have been more like it, but even that would have been an exaggeration.”
And then, seeing that I was a little frightened, he drew for me a picture of “The little girl called Isa whose hair turned into pokers because she was always exaggerating things.”

That, and all the other pictures that he drew for me are, I’m sorry to say, the sole property of the little fishes in the Irish Channel, where a clumsy porter dropped them as we hurried into the boat at Holyhead.

“I nearly died of laughing,” was another expression that he particularly disliked; in fact any form of exaggeration generally called from him a reproof, though he was sometimes content to make fun.
For instance, my sisters and I had sent him “millions of kisses” in a letter.
Below you will find the letter that he wrote in return, written in violet ink that he always used (dreadfully ugly, I used to think it).

“CH.
Ch.
Oxford,
“
Ap.
14, 1890
.

“My own Darling,

It’s all very well for you and Nellie and Emsie to write in millions of hugs and kisses, but please consider the
time
it would occupy your poor old very busy Uncle!
Try hugging and kissing Emsie for a minute by the watch, and I don’t think you’ll manage it more than 20 times a minute.
‘Millions’ must mean 2 millions at least.

20)2,000,000 hugs and kisses
60)100,000 minutes
12)1,666 hours
6)138 days (at twelve hours a day)
23 weeks.

“I couldn’t go on hugging and kissing more than 12 hours a day: and I wouldn’t like to spend
Sundays
that way.
So you see it would take
23 weeks
of hard work.
Really, my dear child, I
cannot spare the time
.

“Why haven’t I written since my last letter?
Why, how
could
I, you silly silly child?
How could I have written
since the last time
I
did
write?
Now, you just try it with kissing.
Go and kiss Nellie, from me, several times, and take care to manage it so as to have kissed her
since the last time
you
did
kiss her.
Now go back to your place, and I’ll question you.

“‘Have you kissed her several times?’

“‘Yes, darling Uncle.’

“‘What o’clock was it when you gave her the
last
kiss?’

“‘5 minutes past 10, Uncle.’

“‘Very well, now, have you kissed her
since
?’

“‘Well—I—ahem!
ahem!
ahem!
(excuse me, Uncle, I’ve got a bad cough).
I—think—that—I—that is, you, know, I——’

“‘Yes, I see!
“Isa” begins with “I,” and it seems to me as if she was going to
end
with “I,”
this
time!’

“Anyhow, my not writing hasn’t been because I was
ill
, but because I was a horrid lazy old thing, who kept putting it off from day to day, till at last I said to myself, ‘WHO ROAR!
There’s no time to write now, because they
sail
on the 1st of April.’
  In fact, I shouldn’t have been a bit surprised if this letter had been from
Fulham
, instead of Louisville.
Well, I suppose you
will
be there by about the middle of May.
But mind you don’t write to me from there!
Please,
please
, no more horrid letters from you!
I
do
hate them so!
And as for
kissing
them when I get them, why, I’d just as soon kiss—kiss—kiss
you
, you tiresome thing!
So there now!

“Thank you very much for those 2 photographs—I liked them—hum—
pretty
well.
I can’t honestly say I thought them the very best I had ever seen.

“Please give my kindest regards to your mother, and ½ of a kiss to Nellie, and
1
⁄200 a kiss to Emsie, and
1
⁄2,000,000 a kiss to yourself.
So, with fondest love, I am, my darling, your loving Uncle,

“C.
L.
Dodgson.”

And now, in the postscript, comes one of the rare instances in which Lewis Carroll showed his deep religious feeling.
It runs—

“
P.S.
—I’ve thought about that little prayer you asked me to write for Nellie and Emsie.
But I would like, first, to have the words of the one I wrote for
you
, and the words of what they
now
say, if they say any.
And then I will pray to our Heavenly Father to help me to write a prayer that will be really fit for them to use.”

Again, I had ended one of my letters with “all join me in lufs and kisses.”
It was a letter written when I was away from home and alone, and I had put the usual ending thoughtlessly and in haste, for there was no one that I knew in all that town who could have joined me in my messages to him.
He answered me as follows:—

“7 Lushington Road, Eastbourne,
“
Aug.
30, 90
.

“Oh, you naughty, naughty, bad wicked little girl!
You forgot to put a stamp on your letter, and your poor old uncle had to pay TWOPENCE!
His
last
Twopence!
Think of that.
I shall punish you severely for this when once I get you here.
So
tremble
!
Do you hear?
Be good enough to tremble!

“I’ve only time for one question to-day.
Who in the world are the ‘all’ that join you in ‘Lufs and kisses.’
Weren’t you fancying you were at home, and sending messages (as people constantly do) from Nellie and Emsie without their having given any?
It isn’t a good plan that sending messages people haven’t given.
I don’t mean it’s in the least
untruthful
, because everybody knows how commonly they are sent without having been given; but it lessens the pleasure of receiving the messages.
My sisters write to me ‘with best love from all.’
I know it isn’t true; so I don’t value it much.
The other day, the husband of one of my ‘child-friends’ (who always writes ‘your loving’) wrote to me and ended with ‘Ethel joins me in kindest regards.’
In my answer I said (of course in fun)—‘I am not going to send Ethel kindest regards, so I won’t send her any message
at all
.’
Then she wrote to say she didn’t even know he was writing!
‘Of course I would have sent best love,’ and she added that she had given her husband a piece of her mind!
Poor husband!

“Your always loving uncle,
“C.
L.
D.”

These letters are written in Lewis Carroll’s ordinary handwriting, not a particularly legible one.
When, however, he was writing for the press no characters could have been more clearly and distinctly formed than his.
Throughout his life he always made it his care to give as little trouble as possible to other people.
“Why should the printers have to work overtime because my letters are ill-formed and my words run into each other?”
he once said, when a friend remonstrated with him because he took such pains with the writing of his “copy.”
As a specimen of his careful penmanship the diary that he wrote for me, which is reproduced in this book in facsimile, is an admirable example.

They were happy days, those days in Oxford, spent with the most fascinating companion that a child could have.
In our walks about the old town, in our visits to cathedral or chapel or hall, in our visits to his friends he was an ideal companion, but I think I was almost happiest when we came back to his rooms and had tea alone; when the fire-glow (it was always winter when I stayed in Oxford) threw fantastic shadows about the quaint room, and the thoughts of the prosiest of people must have wandered a little into fancy-land.
The shifting firelight seemed to almost ætherealise that kindly face, and as the wonderful stories fell from his lips, and his eyes lighted on me with the sweetest smile that ever a man wore, I was conscious of a love and reverence for Charles Dodgson that became nearly an adoration.

It was almost pain when the lights were turned up and we came back to everyday life and tea.

He was very particular about his tea, which he always made himself, and in order that it should draw properly he would walk about the room swinging the tea-pot from side to side for exactly ten minutes.
The idea of the grave professor promenading his book-lined study and carefully waving a tea-pot to and fro may seem ridiculous, but all the minutiæ of life received an extreme attention at his hands, and after the first surprise one came quickly to realise the convenience that his carefulness ensured.