Our devotion to the services of the Church at St. Lucy’s was but part of a great religious movement throughout the University. In those days, the Sunday evening sermons for undergraduates which are now preached at St. Peter’s-in-the-East were still preached at St. Mary’s, and when a really popular orator such as the then Bishop of Plymouth was to occupy the pulpit, you did well to be in time for the opening prayers if you wanted to make sure of a seat. I remember an atheist meeting, which was being held opposite the moving platform in St. Giles’, where the old Martyrs’ Memorial used to stand, being almost broken up by a set of Magdalen undergraduates who were returning from the Bullingdon dinner. When the Archbishop of British Guiana was given his honorary degree (I was in the theatre myself), there was no larking among the undergraduates in the gallery, except that one young man threw down a black and only partially clothed “Golliwog” in his direction—an action which the Oxford Magazine criticized afterward as being in doubtful taste. Altogether, our young friends at Oxford might do worse than go back to the religious standard of the early thirties.
No one man can be more reasonably credited with having brought about this state of things than Canon Dives of Christ Church. It is not easy, of course, from the Catholic point of view to sympathize with his difficulties or to rest satisfied with his affirmations. But in those days he was a tower of strength to many weak hearts. I remember attending a meeting of the Oxford University Churches Reunion in the J.C.R. at Worcester, to which he read his famous “Explanation of the Existence of Good.” I felt it to be so remarkable a feat that I kept the notes of it, of which I give an abstract. Evil, he said, was an undeniable fact in our experience. The phenomenon of pain, which some short-sighted philosophers had attempted to deny, was sufficiently attested for us by the “fugitive reaction” which it set up in Man and even, apparently, in the lower animals. “If I am kicked on the shin,” he explained with his dry humour, “my instinct is to put my shin elsewhere.” A very little reflection would show us that the parallel phenomenon known as “Moral” evil had an equally real existence. “If I see a man kicking a baby on the shin, my instinct is to remonstrate with him.” He then drew a lurid picture of all the moral evil that went on in the world: even in those days, it was a damning indictment! “Now, gentlemen,” he continued, in that curious little shriek that was so characteristic of his pulpit delivery, “no Evil without Good! Evil cannot exist without implying the existence of its correlative! If you, gentlemen,” (beaming at us through his spectacles) “are to be at liberty to do wrong, you must ipso facto leave me my liberty to do right. You will tell me that, on this showing, Good has only a parasitic, and almost a negative existence. Be it so; it exists. And now, how are we to account for its existence?” He went on to show, in a really eloquent passage, that Evil can only realize itself fully if and in so far as it finds itself in a continual struggle against Good; that Good is, consequently, necessary to the constitution of the world, which demands Evil as a condition of its fulfilment. “Some day, perhaps,” he added, “wiser heads and clearer vision than yours or mine will be able to include Evil and Good under a Higher Synthesis which shall co-ordinate and subsume them both. Meanwhile, we struggle on in the half-light of our uncertainty, only confident that the Power (for so, I think we may call it) which has instilled into our natures such an irresistible craving for what is evil, will somehow, somewhere, bring that evil to fulfilment.” The roof of the J.C.R. echoed again as we testified by our grateful plaudits our gratitude to Canon Dives for his courageous utterance.
But it must not be imagined that our whole time at Oxford was spent in these serious occupations! We had our relaxations, too, and wherever innocent fun was going, you may be sure that the undergraduates of St. Lucy’s had their part. No less than five of us, I remember, were included in the caste of “Oh, blast it all” when it was performed by the O.U.D.S. in the Lent term of 1936. I came on myself in the Mixed Bathing scene, and again at the end of the Fourth Act, where the male and female choruses come out of the Noah’s Ark in pairs, in fancy dress. We had the opportunity of seeing most of the successful revues at the Theatre, some of them when they had only been running three years or so on the London stage. Occasionally (for the Proctors were very strict about the management of the theatre) we had to vary the entertainment with the old classical stage of Pinero and Brandon Thomas.
It was in the Eights Week of my last year (1938) that the St. Lucy’s boat went up into the First Division, beating Merton II. It was true that Merton I had now been head of the river five years in succession, and some thought that they sacrificed the prospects of their second boat to those of their first, but it was, nevertheless, a memorable triumph. There was bad blood between the rowing and the football sets at the time, because the football semi-final had been reported in the St. Lucy’s Chronicle in a way that we all thought odious. But it was not a time for narrow, sectarian grudges; and we all turned out in our football skirts and our blue-and-gold-edged “perspirers” to watch the race from the towing path. The habit of putting on “change” to watch the races was merely a survival, ever since the towing path had been turned into a moving platform, but it was a ritual rigorously observed. How we shouted, as the nose of the St. Lucy’s boat gradually gained upon our Herculean antagonists, and bumped them just opposite the Lady Margaret barge! There were great doings in the College that night, and we broke three of the library windows.
But meanwhile the shadow of Schools was drawing nearer, and there was little time left for such frivolities. I knew that I was sound on my texts, and my tutress warned me to take it easy toward the end. I went away for three days before the examination—to Ascot, where I made some good selections. The examination itself filled me with despair: the weather was thunderous and the heat of the room excessive. I even went so far as to write on one of my papers: “TO THE EXAMINER.—I could have done this question much better if the woman in front of me were not using such a noisy typewriter.” My “viva” was a short and purely informal one; they asked me the whereabouts of Tonkin, which I located, in the embarrassment of the moment, in Lancashire. But when the lists came out in September I found my own name among the first class, and made history once more as the first woman who had ever made good in Byzantine architecture.
CHAPTER IV
TRAVELS ON THE CONTINENT
Only in travel do we find rest. For our world is a moving platform, and he who would mark time must run—certainly he must run.—Dr. Dives: Abraham the Pedestrian.
The choice of a profession, which naturally began to exercise me when I had gone down, was not at that time at all an easy one. The effect of Indian Home Rule had been, not only to disappoint many who had aspired to the Indian Civic Service, but to send home from India a whole host of Europeans who had lost their positions there and were now in search of employment. The field was consequently narrowed. Canon Dives was very urgent with me to take Holy Orders. “It is just your sort we want,” he was kind enough to say: “people who have stripped Life of its mysteries and looked Truth in the face.” I objected that I felt disqualified on theological grounds: my geographical training had taught me that what is nowhere is nothing, and the idea of a Supreme Being who was ubiquitous affronted my intelligence. Could I, then, honestly take the pay of a Church which taught the existence of a God, when I myself believed in nothing of the sort? He was quite unshaken in his opinion. “After all,” he said, “relativity is in the air, and we are coming to realize, I think, that all truth is relative to the person who believes it. To preach to a congregation of orthodox people and bid them live up to their lights is not necessarily the work of one who is herself an orthodox believer. Besides, you would not get much pay at first. And, as time went on, you might well find that your own ideas would come to frame themselves in a more traditional setting.” I thus very nearly became a deaconess (it was not, of course, till nearly twenty years later that women could attain any higher rank in the ministry). But family opposition (“My dear,” said Miss Linthorpe, “you’d run off with the examining chaplain”) combined with my absence of any definite religious convictions to prevent it. There was some talk of my going into my father’s business, but its prospects were still far from reassuring, and my mother urged, with some common sense, that it would be a mistake to have all our eggs in one basket. And then the authorities at St. Lucy’s solved the difficulty by obtaining for me, as the result of my geographical successes, a travelling scholarship which, on condition of my residing abroad, would make it unnecessary for me to think further about my career for the next two years.
I travelled by train. The aeroplane had not then come to its own, even for long journeys. A series of accidents in the five previous years, not traceable to any one cause, but simply one of those runs of bad luck which mere observation cannot but detect in the nature of things, had made the public nervous and the insurance premiums prohibitive. On the other side, the American Trust which had just taken over the main arteries of Continental Travel—one hardly hears it spoken of now, or only in the same breath with the Darien Canal and the South Sea Company, but to us the Belgium to Bosphorus Trunk Railway was the latest achievement of the human genius—had undoubtedly revolutionized the train journey. The continuous cinema performances, even if you did not patronize them yourself, at least drew off from you the importunate infants that are the bane of the railway carriages (Juliet Savage profanely said that when she went by train she always prayed “Deliver me, O Lord, from the hands of strange children”). Wireless installations and a tape machine made it possible to keep in touch with the news of the world at large. The libraries paid their way, although they were said to reckon on a loss of about £5 by thefts every journey! I believe billiard-players complained of the motion, even the very slight motion which the patent springs had not managed to eliminate, but for myself I always found Badminton made a better game when you had the swing of the train under you to complicate the problem of keeping your feet. With all these amenities, we did not trouble about speed (these trains de luxe only averaged about thirty miles an hour), and the pleasant days passed all too quickly on them. Well, it was another item added to the great list of human follies! And yet it is good discipline for the soul to have seen many such and to have outlived them.
With such leisurely progress I visited, during the latter part of ’38 and almost the whole of ’39, the principal centres of that mid-European republic which we now call Magiria, but which still went, at the time of my visit, by the name of Mittel-Europa. I went from Geneva to Munich, from Munich to Innsbruck, from Innsbruck to Vienna, from Vienna to Bayreuth and Prague, from Prague to Buda-Pest, from Buda-Pest back to Dresden and Leipzig, from Leipzig to Mainz, and so back again to Basle, without crossing a frontier, having my luggage examined, or being asked to produce a passport—I got tired of counting how often I must have submitted to such nuisances if I had done the same journey ten years earlier. I was not a mere sight-seer; I had a purpose in view. Although a travelling scholarship did not entail any conditions as to how you should occupy your time, there was still a feeling that you ought to produce, when it lapsed, a thesis of some sort to justify your intellectual existence. For myself, I determined to write a monograph, which I subsequently published and which gained me honorary admission to the Royal Geographical Society, on the constitution and the general conditions of life which I had observed in the then quite new country of Mittel-Europa. I hope my readers will not accuse me of unnecessary vanity if I print here some few paragraphs from it, which are not, after all, without their interest: it is instructive to read, at this distant date, the estimate which an impartial observer could then form of the prospects of that unique state, which had not then passed, as it has since passed triumphantly, the test of more than fifty years’ untroubled permanence.