Without Knowing Mr Walkley

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 carefully 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