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).