Without Knowing Mr Walkley

by Edith Olivier

  The life lived by Women University Students was a great surprise to me, as my ideas of a women’s college were derived from Tennyson’s ‘Princess’. Here was no ‘Rosebud garden of girls’. Instead I found a lot of young women who seemed to look upon their Oxford years as merely the prelude to a troublesome examination, which would in its turn be the prelude to the life of a schoolmistress.

  At St. Hugh’s I made acquaintance with what I called the Femme Servante, a genus produced where two or three are gathered together, and those two or three are girls. The Femme Servante is what her name suggests. When she takes a fancy to another girl (and it is her characteristic to do this very often), her happiness lies in becoming the slave of her friend. St. Hugh’s was a poor college with an inadequate staff of servants, and the students had to do a good deal of domestic work for themselves. It was, therefore, a great convenience to find amateurs who were willing to keep fires in, fill hot-water bottles, make toast, boil kettles, run errands, brush clothes, wash gloves, or darn vests. I soon possessed several of these invaluable little creatures, and as I generally saw them doing these very dull things, the impulse was, not primarily to feel gratitude, but to connect them in the mind with all those things which one most disliked doing for oneself.

  In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf remarks on the austerity of life in a women’s college compared with those inhabited by men. This was certainly exemplified at St. Hugh’s in my day. No one had two rooms, not even the Vice-Principal, and there were even one or two double rooms shared by two students. But the general rule was that everyone had a ‘Bed-Sitter’, the bed disguised as a sofa in the day, and often sat upon in the evening by half a dozen of the guests at one of the rather tepid ‘ Cocoas’ which took for us the place of the wines of our ‘fast’ brothers. Food in college was plain and boring—mostly very large cods, and legs of mutton, washed down by water. As the term went on, however, and faces grew pale and nerves jumpy, there appeared all down the table, bottles of Burgundy, each labelled with its owner’s name. These were meant to stimulate the waning vitality of these strenuous students, for they were one and all extremely strenuous. Their years at Oxford meant little beyond lectures, essays, and the Radcliffe Library. There were for us none of those terrific morning conversations which echo across the quads in the men’s colleges, completely preventing reading except in vacation, but which really constitute most of the fun of being at once young and intelligent. At St. Hugh’s, everyone worked conscientiously behind closed doors, and the passages were as silent as the catacombs except in those few minutes when the whole college was speeding to eat in Hall or to pray in Chapel. At half-past ten at night, there was generally another outburst. Punctuates the moment, a bell was heard in the passages, and then here and there a door broke open, and there reeled out the besotted guests who had been solidly drinking cocoa inside, since the clock had struck ten half an hour before. For the discipline was supreme, and those parties were timed to the half-minute. No one expected to live her own life, or to keep her own hours. Women’s colleges had then an untarnished schoolgirl complexion.

  The authorities constantly reminded us that we were not members of the university, but its guests. No university tutor need accept us as pupils. Those who taught us did so from their belief in the Higher Education of Women, and if our manners did not reach the standard they expected from us, they might at any moment refuse to teach us at all. It was like walking the tightrope, for we had to keep a balance between two yawning gulfs. Some tutors boycotted the women’s colleges because of the students’ lack of charm. One critical don succeeded in stopping hockey for several terms after he once met the teams coming home, and saw the hot and swollen faces of some of his pupils. On the other hand, there were those who disapproved of us for fear that the ‘sweet girl graduates’ might endanger the morals of the university. I was once reported to Miss Moberly as having worn an amber necklace at a lecture, and amber is notoriously magnetic. Fortunately I possessed no such talisman, so I escaped being sent down.

  Our lectures were heavily chaperoned. We sat on the dais in the college halls, well out of reach of the common herd of scribbling young men; and anyone wishing to attend a lecture to which no other women students were going, had to be accompanied by an accredited chaperon. I only remember one dramatic interruption to a lecture, and that was when the hall of Lincoln College was suddenly invaded by a mob which rushed in to beat the bounds. The boundary of two parishes apparently runs across that spot.

  Marcia Rice and I sometimes heard Evensong in the Chapel of Magdalen or New College, after which we walked in the college gardens. We had often done this before one of us happened to read St. Hugh’s House Rules, and there we saw that this ribald practice was forbidden unless we took a chaperon with us. I know not if such rules still exist.

  From the point of view of scholarship, we were, I think, luckier than the women undergraduates of today. There were in my time very few women tutors, and those advanced and leading university dons who believed in women’s higher education, felt it to be their responsibility to take a real part in it. My own tutor was A. L. Smith, Master of Balliol, a great scholar, an alarming wit, and a most individual personality. There was in his donnishness that peculiar quality which only grows in the fusty atmosphere of an ancient college. One thinks of it as one hears the names of Duns Scotus, Erasmus, or Lewis Carroll; and university life must be thinned and watered down unless it brings one up against such characters as these—odd, idiosyncratic, and wilfully learned. There are not many of them today, and none of them are women. This kind is born of a combination of old books, old port, and old Common Rooms, and it smells of all three.

  Yet out of these old things there comes forth something perennially fresh and racy. To come upon it is like finding a new book bound up in old covers.

  I was at Oxford for four terms in all, but they were not consecutive. In those days I had very bad bronchial-asthma, and I could not live in Oxford in winter. When I was there, I had a rigid regime laid down by the doctor, early to bed and late to rise, and a great deal of lying down during the day. Even so, I went down without taking schools, though Mr. Smith cheered me by telling me that I was taking something away from Oxford which was more valuable than the results of an examination. This was true, and it was he who gave it to me. It might be summed up in one of his interruptions to the first essay I read him.

  ‘What is your authority?’ he said sharply, after one of my statements.

  ‘Stubbs,’ I stuttered.

  ‘I know. I know. Of course. But what was his authority?’

  Those five words showed me what Mr. Smith possessed, and what he thought worth handing on to his pupils—the resolve to seek truth only at first-hand. This was for me the real lesson of Oxford.

  At Oxford too I knew some remarkable people. First among these was Miss Moberly herself. As I have said, she was a distant relation of my mother’s, but my parents had seen little of her since she went to Oxford, and I should never have known her but for St. Hugh’s. In her sitting-room there, two family portraits were hung—those of her mother, and of her Moberly grandmother. Miss Moberly’s mother, painted by Sir David Wilkie, as a vision of femininity—swan neck, sloping shoulders, oval face, sidelong glance, vast feathered hat with veils, and a little hand fastening a glove. The grandmother had a square dark Slavonic face, and looked from the wall into the room with rather a forbidding expression.

  Beneath the portraits of her two very opposite-looking ancestresses, Miss Moberly sat, reading, writing, or playing the piano, and looking up to greet a visitor with a sudden very brilliant smile. She had a fascinating, mellow voice, with an amusing crack in it. Her colour and the contour of her face resembled those of the stern grandmother, but the welcoming smile must have come from the lovely mother. Miss Moberly had been born with a prejudiced and extremely biased nature, but she had told herself that the head of a college should possess wisdom and impartiality, so she made herself develop those qualities. But the o
ld Adam would sometimes peep irresistibly out. As a young woman, she had not been particularly interested in the higher education of women as a cause to be fought for; but she had quite naturally studied Hebrew and Greek, because she couldn’t see how anyone could care about the Bible, without wishing to read it in the original languages.

  Miss Moberly had then the independent attitude towards learning which is possessed by the natural scholar who has chosen for himself the intellectual pastures in which he will browse; yet she was well aware of the meaning of scholastic discipline. Her father had been Head Master of Winchester, and his years there must have made a considerable impress on his character. He bequeathed to all his family a touch of the schoolmaster. Miss Moberly had it, and she seemed at once to be a decisive head, and a docile subordinate. She ruled her own college, but she was all the time rather frightened of Miss Wordsworth, of a body which sounded to me like the ‘ Heptagonal Council’, and of the kind and pernickety dons who had accepted us as pupils. She constantly warned us of the pitfalls surrounding our paths, as we trod delicately on the stepping-stones she laid down to guide us among the fads and prejudices of these fastidious autocrats.

  Miss Moberly alone made St. Hugh’s worth while. She was a very exciting head of a college. Music had been her first love, and at St. Hugh’s she liked nothing better than to collect a string band or a chorus from among the students, and to work away at some rather difficult music. She was a very good conductor, and also never minded the drudgery of teaching. Unforgettable too are her Sunday evening lectures on the ‘ Book of the Revelation’. She had high spiritual insight, and she also was saturated with Hebrew symbolism, and knew a good deal of medieval history. All of this was blended in those lectures.

  At St. Hugh’s I gained Miss Moberly as a friend to the end of her life, and she allowed me to write the introduction to the final edition of ‘An Adventure’, the little book in which she related her amazing experience at the Trianon. It was this ‘adventure’ which made her known to a far wider circle than would otherwise have heard of her; and, oddly enough, for years she objected to the subject’s being mentioned in her presence. The clairvoyante and the schoolmaster in her did not agree, and she disliked ‘spiritualistic’ experiences. The book for years had a sort of pseudo-anonymity, and was talked of as the ‘Ghost Story of those two Governesses’— which—for anyone who knew her—did not suggest Miss Moberly at all. When she at last consented to admit that she had been the writer, she was unexpectedly pleased with the renewed appreciation which the book received now it was learnt that its writer was so responsible a person.

  When I was at Oxford, Lewis Carroll was still living in the rooms in Tom Quad which he had occupied when my father was at Christ Church. He sometimes invited me to dinner. His position in Oxford was such that in his case alone, our rigid rule of chaperonage was waived. If our authorities were sticklers for chaperons, he was equally a stickler for none.

  ‘I only like a tête-à-tête dinner,’ he said. ‘And if you don’t come alone, you shan’t come at all.’

  Miss Moberly gave in, saying with her gay smile: ‘Once more, we must make a virtue of necessity.’

  Mr. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll’s real name) had instituted a fixed technique for his dinner parties. Dinner was at seven, and at half-past six, he always appeared at St. Hugh’s to walk with me to Christ Church. The walk took exactly half an hour, and at the end of the evening, my host timed our return to St. Hugh’s to synchronize with the ringing of the ten-thirty bell in the passages. He left me at the door precisely at that moment, to show his sincere respect for college rules so long as he approved of what they laid down. He used to say that those walks were the best part of his dinner parties. The food was always the same. Only two courses—first, some very well-cooked mutton chops, and then, meringues. A glass or two of port followed, and, an hour after dinner, we had tea. Mr. Dodgson never spoke of Alice in Wonderland; but there were three other things in his life of which he seemed really proud. He spoke of them every time we had dinner together. They were his kettle, his logic, and his photographs.

  At eight-forty-five in the evening, he always set about boiling the water for our tea, and Lewis Carroll was very like other old people, in that the same thing always reminded him of the same story. He now told the story of his invention. It appeared that he had noticed that most people either burnt their hands on kettles, or used kettle-holders, which were always dirty, and often lost. He had got a blacksmith to attach to his own kettle a long handle like that on a saucepan, and with this he always lifted his kettle off the fire, and filled the teapot. He boasted about this in a most ingenuous manner. Then he was always in the middle of an argument with the university Professor of Logic, and each time I dined in his rooms, he had ready a newly invented problem of his own, which I was asked to solve ‘by common sense’. My wild guesses were nearly always lucky enough to agree with Mr. Dodgson’s own solutions, and to disagree with those of the Professor; so we were both very happy, and congratulated each other a lot. But best of all were his photographs, taken by him in the days before dry plates were invented. The wet plate gives great quality to the prints. Mr. Dodgson’s were deep, soft, and beautiful. They were mostly portraits in ‘carte-de-visite’ size, and very unpretentious, but I have seen no photographs which produce so delicately the modelling of the face. They were quite unlike any photographs of to-day, both in this fine portraiture, and in the unaffected realism of their setting. His sitters sat on their chairs and sofas, and round their own tables, conversing in their tall hats and crinolines, and seemingly quite unaware that they were posing for their ‘likenesses’. Mr. Dodgson was prouder of his sitters than of his art. He had many portraits of King Edward VII as an undergraduate, lots of ‘Alice’ and the rest of Dean Liddell’s family; and there were pages of Rossettis and Terrys, which I always remember.

  Mr. Dodgson was very fond of little girls, and especially of child actresses, or children who loved plays. At a matinee in Brighton, he once sat in the stalls beside a little girl of about four, and their mutual enjoyment made them quickly friends. After the theatre, he tracked her to her home, and then found out who lived in the house. Though, as I have said, he never appeared very proud of having written Alice in Wonderland, he quite appreciated the value of being the author of that book, when he wanted to make a fresh ‘child friend’. He now wrote to the mother of this little girl, saying who he was, and inviting the child to tea. He received a curt and crushing reply. The lady wrote:

  ‘The young lady whom you speak of as my “little girl” is not so very childish after all, and she is not my daughter, but my niece. If she were my own child, I should certainly ask you your intentions before allowing her to accept your invitation, and I must do the same now.’

  Mr. Dodgson replied that his intentions were honourable, ‘though one does not usually have specific “intentions” with regard to a child of four or five.’

  By some mistake, the letter had reached the wrong lady, and one who, oddly enough, had been at the same matinee with a niece of nineteen. The episode hurt Mr. Dodgson’s feelings very much, and he told me that he thought the name of Lewis Carroll might have been allowed to guarantee the safety of a young girl of any age whatever.

  And the real little friend of the theatre never knew what a distinguished conquest she had made that afternoon. If any lady who was a child in Brighton in the ’sixties or ’seventies, may happen to read this book, let her search her memory for a swift and intimate friendship which began and ended one afternoon in the theatre there. She captivated Lewis Carroll.

  BOOK II

  AWAY FROM WILTON

  PREAMBLE

  SALISBURY CLOSE AND FITZ HOUSE

  Mary Kingsley found a tribe in West Africa who believed that, when a man has to leave one home for another, his frightened soul escapes from his body and runs away into the wilds. Once there, he will never find it again. But now every man in the tribe has learnt how to lift the fluttering homesick thing very care
fully out of his breast before he begins to pack his other treasures. He puts it into a safe box which he gives into the keeping of the priest till he is settled in his new home. Then he goes to collect his lost soul and to bring it back with him.

  I had not read this when we left Wilton, and when we were first living in The Close, I felt very unhappy and forlorn. I wandered about, looking for something, I knew not what; but it was something which I could not find. As the months went on, the cathedral gave me some sort of a substitute for the soul I had lost; and at the time I did not guess what was happening to me. I had then a sort of life, but it never seemed quite like my own; and the nine years which we spent away from Wilton would have left a complete blank in my memory but for the diary which I continued to keep. When at last we came back to The Daye House, I found my lost soul in the park. It had been there all the time; and now it walked back into me of its own accord, and I was myself again.

  We left Wilton because my father was too old to go on with his parish work, so for the last seven years of his life, he lived in that house on the north side of The Close which is earmarked for the senior prebendary, and he took his part in the cathedral services.

  The people in The Close were then (and doubtless still are) greatly influenced by their houses. No one living in these can ever be quite commonplace. Very few of our neighbours went to bed without first looking through their windows out into the moonlight or the starlight, to find against the sky the outline of the cathedral, standing apart upon its great sweep of lawn—a silent beatitude. Month by month they watched the stars in their courses journeying in their gigantic wheels over the spire. On summer evenings, the groups which stood gossiping in The Close over the little events of the day, were never altogether oblivious of the beauty of the glowing twilight as it slowly blurred the noble lines and the intricate carvings of the great building.