I DON'T know what we were about to let Miss Wick miss the Boats,' said
Mr. Mafferton one day, over his after-noon-tea in Lady Torquilin's flat.
I looked at Lady Torquilin, and said I thought Mr. Mafferton must be
mistaken; I had never missed a boat in my life, and, besides, we hadn't
been going anywhere by boat lately. The reason we had put off our trip
to Richmond five times was invariably because of the weather. Peter
Corke happened to be there that afternoon, too, though she didn't make
much of a visit. Miss Corke never did stay very long when Mr. Mafferton
was there--he was a person she couldn't bear. She never called him
anything but 'That.' She declared you could see hundreds of him any
afternoon in Piccadilly, all with the same hat and collar and expression
and carnation in their button-holes. She failed to see why I should
waste any portion of my valuable time in observing Mr. Mafferton, when
I had still to see 'Dolly's Chop House,' and Guy the King-maker's tablet
in Warwick Lane, and the Boy in Panyer Alley, and was so far unimproved
by anything whatever relating to Oliver Goldsmith or Samuel Johnson.
She could not understand that a profoundly uninteresting person might
interest you precisely on that account. But, 'Oh you aborigine!' she
began about the Boats, and I presently understood another of those
English descriptive terms by which you mean something that you do not
say.
The discussion ended, very happily for me, in an arrangement suggested
jointly by Miss Corke and Mr. Mafferton. Lady Torquilin and I should go
to Oxford to see 'the Eights.' Mr. Mafferton had a nephew at Pembroke,
and no doubt the young cub would be delighted to look after us. Miss
Corke's younger brother was at Exeter, and she would write to the
dear boy at once that he must be nice to us. Peter was very sorry she
couldn't come herself--nothing would have given her greater pleasure,
she said, than to show me all I didn't know in the Bodleian.
I suppose we have rather a large, exaggerated idea of Oxford in America,
thinking about it, as it were, externally. As a name it is so constantly
before us, and the terms of respect in which the English despatches
speak of it are so marked, that its importance in our eyes has become
extremely great. We think it a city, of course--no place could grow to
such fame without being a city--and with us the importance of a city
naturally invests itself in large blocks of fine buildings chiefly
devoted to business, in a widely-extended and highly-perfected telephone
system, and in avenues of Queen Anne residences with the latest modern
conveniences. And Lady Torquilin, on the way, certainly talked a great
deal about 'the High'--which she explained to be Oxford's principal
thoroughfare--and the purchases she had at one time or another made
on it, comparing Oxford with London prices. So that I had quite an
extensive State Street or Wabash Avenue idea of 'the High.' Both our
young gentlemen friends were fractional parts of the Eights, and were
therefore unable to meet us. It had been arranged that we should lunch
with one at two, and take tea with the other at five, but Lady Torquilin
declared herself in urgent need of something sustaining as soon as we
arrived, and 'Shall we go to the Clarendon to get it?' said she, 'or to
Boffin's?'
'What is Boffin's?' I inquired. It is not safe, in English localisms, to
assume that you know anything.
'Boffin's is a pastry-cook's,' Lady Torquilin informed me, and I
immediately elected for Boffin's. It was something idyllic, in these
commonplace days, when Dickens has been so long dead, that Boffin should
be a pastry-cook, and that a pastry-cook should be Boffin. Perhaps
it struck me especially, because in America he would have been a
'confectioner,' with some aesthetic change in the spelling of the
original Boffin that I am convinced could not be half so good for
business. And we walked up a long, narrow, quiet street, bent like an
elbow, lined with low-roofed little shops devoted chiefly, as I
remember them, to the sale of tennis-racquets, old prints, sausages, and
gentlemen's neckties, full of quaint gables, and here and there lapsing
into a row of elderly stone houses that had all gone to sleep together
by the pavement, leaving their worldly business to the care of the
brass-plates on their doors. Such a curious old street we went up
to Boffin's, so peaceful, nothing in it but inoffensive boys
pushing handcarts, and amiable gentlemen advanced in years with
spectacles--certainly more of these than I ever saw together in any
other place--never drowsing far from the shadow of some serious grey
pile, ivy-bearded and intent, like a venerable scholar--oh, a very
curious old street!
'Shall we get,' said I to Lady Torquilin, 'any glimpse of the High
before we reach Boffin's?' Dear Lady Torquilin looked at me sternly,
as if to discover some latent insincerity. 'None of your impertinence,
miss,' said she; 'this is the High!'
I was more charmed and delighted than I can express, and as Lady
Torquilin fortunately remembered several things we urgently needed, and
could buy to much better advantage in Oxford than in 'Town,' I had the
great pleasure of finding out what it was like to shop in the High,
and the other queer little streets which are permitted to run--no, to
creep--about the feet of the great wise old colleges that take such
kindly notice of them. It was very nice, to my mind, that huddling
together of pastry-cooks and gargoyles, of chapels and old china shops,
of battered mediæval saints and those little modern errand-boys
with their handcarts--of old times and new, preponderatingly old and
respectfully new. Much more democratic, too, than a seat of learning
would be in America, where almost every college of reputation is
isolated in the sea of 'grounds,' and the only sound that falls upon
the academic ear is the clatter of the lawn-mower or the hissing of the
garden-hose. Nor shall I soon forget the emotions with which I made
a perfectly inoffensive purchase in a small establishment of wide
reputation for petty wares, called, apparently from time immemorial,
'The Civet Cat'--not reproachfully, nor in a spirit of derision, but
bearing the name with dignity in painted letters.
People who know their way about Oxford will understand how we found ours
to Pembroke from the High. I find that I have forgotten. We stood at so
many corners to look, and Lady Torquilin bade me hurry on so often, that
the streets and the colleges, and the towers and the gardens, are all
lost to me in a crowded memory that diverges with the vagueness of
enchantment from Carfax and Boffin's. But at last we walked out of the
relative bustle of the highways and byways into the quietest place
I ever saw or felt, except a graveyard in the Strand--a green square
hedged in with buildings of great dignity and solidity, and very serious
mind. I felt, as we walked around it to ask a respectable-looking man
waiting about on the other side where Mr. Sanders Horton's rooms were,
as if I were in church.
'Yes'm! This way'm, if you please,' said the respectable-looking man. 'Mr.'Orton's rooms is on the first floor h'up, 'm'; and as Mr. Horton himself had come out on the landing to receive us, and was presently very prettily shaking hands with us, we had no further difficulty. Our host had not considered himself equal to lunching two strange ladies unassisted, however, and as he looked a barely possible nineteen, this was not remarkable, Lady Torquilin thought afterwards. He immediately introduced his friend, Lord Symonds, who seemed, if anything, less mature, but whose manners were quite as nice. Then we all sat down in Mr. Sanders Horton's pretty little room, and watched the final evolution of luncheon on the table, and talked about the view. 'You have a lovely lawn,' said I to Mr. Horton, who responded that it wasn't a bad quad; and when I asked if the respectable-looking man downstairs was the caretaker of the college: 'Oh, nothing so swagger!' said Lord Symonds; 'probably a scout!' And the presence of a quad and a scout did more than all the guide-books I read up afterwards to give me a realising sense of being in an English university centre. We looked at Mr. Horton's pictures, too, and examined, complimentarily, all his decorative effects of wood-carving and old china, doing our duty, as is required of ladies visiting the menage of a young gentleman, with enthusiasm. I was a little disappointed, personally, in not finding the initials of Byron or somebody cut on Mr. Horton's window-sill, and distinctly shocked to hear that this part of Pembroke College had been built within the memory of living man, as Mr. Horton was reluctantly obliged to admit. He apologised for its extreme modernness on the ground of its comparative comfort, but seemed to feel it, in a subdued way, severely, as was eminently proper. Among the various photographs of boat-races upon the wall was one in which Mr. Horton pointed out 'the Torpids,' which I could not help considering and remarking upon as a curious name for a boating-crew. 'Why are they called that?' I asked; 'they seem to be going pretty fast.'
'Oh, rather!' responded Mr. Horton. 'Upon my word, I don't know. It does
seem hard lines, doesn't it? Symonds, where did these fellows get their
name?' But Lord Symonds didn't know exactly either--they'd always
had it, he fancied; and Lady Torquilin explained that 'this young
lady'--meaning me--could never be satisfied with hearing that a thing
was so because it was so--she must always know the why and wherefore of
everything, even when there was neither why nor wherefore; at which we
all laughed and sat down to luncheon. But I privately made up my mind
to ask an explanation of the Torpids from the first Oxford graduate
with honours that I met, and I did. He didn't know either. He was not a
boating-man, however; he had taken his honours in Classics.