The walls of the garden had fallen. Childhood was ended and with it all those absurd, aching fears lest I should never be a man and lest time might be a stationary, unescapable present, with no trap-doors giving access to the future. The experiment of life had begun in earnest, and the adventure.
That first October night of my residence at Oxford is forever memorable. Before leaving Pope Lane I had been led aside by my father. He had taken it for granted that I was now capable of a man’s follies and had warned me against them. Somehow his assumption that I had it in my choice to become a Don Juan warmed my heart; it impressed me as a tribute to my manhood—a tacit acknowledgment that I was a free agent. Free at last!
I did not understand one-tenth part of all that he hinted at. But his presumption that I did understand seemed to me a form of compliment. To ask for an explanation was a heroism of which I was not capable. So I left home clad in the armor of ignorance to do battle with the world.
Ruthita wanted to accompany me to the station. I would not let her. She was weepy in private; I knew that in public she would be worse. I had inherited my father’s dread of sentiment and his fear lest other people should construe it as weakness.
At Paddington I met the Bantam; we were entering the same college and traveled up together. We chose our places in a “smoker” by way of emphasizing to ourselves our emancipation. We tried to appear ordinary and at ease; beneath our mask of carelessness we felt delightfully bold and bad. In our carriage were three undergraduates, finished products of indifferent haughtiness. Though no more than a year our seniors, they loaded their pipes and puffed away without fear or furtiveness. They affected to be unaware of us. They were infinitely bored in manner and addressed the porters in a tone of lackadaisical, frigid tolerance. What masterfulness! And yet one term of Oxford would give us the right to be like that!—we, who so recently had been liable to be told that children must be seen and not heard. The assurance of these youthful men imperiled our courage.
As we neared Iffley, the domes and spires of the Mecca of dreamers swam up. The sky was pearl-colored without a cloud. Strewn throughout its great emptiness was the luminous dust of stars. All the tinsel ambitions which had lately stirred me were forgotten as the home of lost causes claimed me. I grew large within myself as, in watching its advance behind the river above the tree-tops, I merged my personality in this vision of architectural romance. Leaning against the horizon, stretching up and up, out of the murk of dusk and the blood-red decay of foliage, it symbolized for me all the yearning after perfection and the passionate desire for freedom that had always lain hidden in my heart. I wanted to be like that—the thing that gray pyramided stone seen at twilight can alone express—wise, unimpassioned, lovely, immutable.
We came to a standstill in the shabby station, which of all stations is probably the best beloved.
“Thank the Lord, we’re here at last.”
In a hansom, with a sporting cabby for our driver, we rattled through the ancient lamp-lit town where the ghosts of the dead summer rustled and reddened against the walls. Past the Castle we sped, through Carfax, down the High, past Oriel and Christ Church till we drew up with a jerk at Lazarus. Whatever we had suffered in the train in the way of lowered opinion of self was now made up to us; the servility of the College porter and scouts was eloquent of respect. We were undoubtedly persons of importance. If we wanted further proof of it, this awaited us in the pile of communications from Oxford tradesmen, notified beforehand of our coming, humbly soliciting our patronage.
The Bantam’s room and mine were next door to one another in Augustine’s Quad; fires were burning in the grates to bid us welcome. The scout, who acted as guide, seized the opportunity to sell us each a second-hand tin bath, a coal-scuttle, and a kettle at very much more than their first-hand prices. We felt no resentment. His deferential manner was worth the extra.
Just as we had commenced unpacking, the bell began to toll. We slipped on our gowns and followed the throng into a vaulted, dimly-lighted hall, where we dined at long tables off ancient silver, and had beer set before us. Surely we were men!
That night the Bantam and I sat far into the small, cold hours of the morning; there was no one to worry us to go to bed. When the Bantam had left, I lay awake in a state of bewildered ecstasy. I had become aware in the last ten hours of my unchartered personality. I realized that my life was my own to command, to make or mar. As the bells above the sleeping city rang out time’s progress, all the pageant of the lads of other ages, who had come up to Oxford star-eyed, as I had come, passed before me. When the withered leaves tapped against the walls, I could fancy that it was their footfall. They had come with a chance equal to mine; at the end of a few years they had departed. Some had succeeded and some had failed. Of all that great army which now stretched bivouacked throughout eternity, only the latest recruits were in sight. The scholar-monks, the soldier-saints, the ruffian-students of early centuries, the cavaliers, the philosophers, and the statesmen, together with the roisterers of the rank and file, were all equally and completely gone.
In the silence of my narrow room, with the flickering fire dying in the hearth, there brooded over me the shadowy darkness of the ages. What religion does for some men, for me the gray poetry of this poignant city accomplished. I had become aware that from henceforth the ultimate responsibility for my actions must rest forever with myself. I was strangely unafraid of this knowledge.
They were dim dawn-days that followed, when the air was filled with star-dust—neither with suns, nor moons, nor stars, only with the excitement of their promise. My world was at twilight, blurred and mysterious; only the huge design was clearly discernible—the cracks and imperfections were concealed from me, shrouded in dusk. I lived in a land of ideals, drawing my rules of conduct from the realism of the classics—a realism which even to the Greeks and Romans was only an aspiration, never a practice. Existence had for me all the piquant fascination which comes of half-knowledge—the charming allurement, leaving room for speculation, which the glimpse of a girl’s face has at nightfall. It was an age when all things seemed possible, because all were untested.
Gradually, out of the wilderness of strange faces, some became more familiar than others; little groups of friends-began to form. The instinctive principle on which my set came together was enthusiastic rebellion against convention and eager curiosity concerning existence. One by one, without appointing any place of meeting, we would drift into some man’s room. This usually occurred about eight in the evening, after dinner in hall. The lamp would be left unlighted; the couch would be drawn near the fire; then we would commence a conversation which was half jesting and half confessional.
Under the cloak of laughing cynicism we hid a desperate purpose. We wanted to know about life. We sought in each new face to discover if it could tell us. We had nothing to guide us but the carefully prepared disclosures which had been vouchsafed us in our homes. We had risen at a bound into a man’s estate, and still retained a boy’s knowledge. We realized that life was bigger, bolder, more adventurous, more disastrous than we had reckoned. Why was it that some men failed, while others had success? What external pressures caused the difference in achievement between Napoleon, for instance, and Charles Lamb? Who was responsible for our varying personalities? Where did our own responsibility begin, and where did it end?
The problems we argued predated the Decalogue, yet to us they were eternally original and personal. We attacked them with youthful insolence. The authority of no social institution was safe from our irreverence. We accepted nothing, neither religion, nor marriage; we had to go back to the beginning and re-mint truth for ourselves. Our real object in coming together was that we might pool our scraps of actual experience, and out of these materials fashion our conjectures.
There was one topic of inexhaustible interest. It permeated all our inquiry—woman. We knew so little about her; but we knew that she held the key opening the door to all romance. What gay cavaliers we could be in discussing her, and how sheepish in the presence of one concrete specimen of her sex—especially if she were beautiful, and not a relative!
All the adventures we had ever heard of seemed now within our grasp. Woman was the great unknown to us. We knew next to nothing of the penalties—only the romance.
Little by little the boldest among us, recognizing that talk led nowhere, began to put matters to the test. The same shy restraint that had made me afraid of Fiesole when she had tempted me to kiss her, made me an onlooker now. A saving common sense prompted me to await the proof of events. I acted on instinct, not on principle. The difference between myself and some of my friends was a difference of temperament. Perhaps it was a difference between daring and cowardice. There are times when our weaknesses appear to be virtues, preserving us from shipwreck. I was capable of tempestuous thoughts; while they remained thoughts I could clothe them with idealism and glamor. But I was incapable of impassioned acts; their atmosphere would be beyond my control—the atmosphere of inevitable vulgarity which results from contemporary reality. My observation of unrestraint taught me that unrestraint was ugly. In short, I had a pagan imagination at war with a puritan conscience.
In my day, there was no right or wrong in undergraduate Oxford—no moral or immoral. Every conventional principle of conduct which we had learnt, we flung into the crucible of new experience to be melted down and, out of the ordeal, minted afresh.
We divided ourselves into two classes: those who experimented and those who watched. There was only one sin in our calendar—not to be a gentleman. To be a gentleman, in our sense of the word, was to be a sportsman and to have good manners.
In our private methods of thought we were uninterfered with by those in authority. The University’s methods of disciplining our actions were, and still are, a survival of medi?valism. If an undergraduate was seen speaking to a lady, he had to be able to prove her pedigree or run the risk of being sent down. At nine o’clock Big Tom rang; ten minutes later every college-door was shut and a fine was imposed for knocking in or out. In the streets the proctors and their bulldogs commenced to go the rounds. Until twelve a man was safe in the streets, provided he appeared to be innocently employed and wore his cap and gown. Knocking into college after twelve was a grave offense.
If a man observed these rules or was crafty, he might investigate life to his heart’s content. Public opinion was extremely lenient. Conduct was a purely personal matter as long as it did not inconvenience anybody else. If a man had the all-atoning social grace, and was careful not to get caught in an incriminating act, though everybody knew about it from his own lips afterwards, he was not censured.
My cousin, Lord Halloway, had been a Lazarus man. Oxford still treasured the memory of his amorous exploits.
He had been a good deal of a dare-devil and was regarded as something of a hero; he inspired us with awe, for, despite his recklessness, he had played the game gaily and escaped detection. The impression that this kind of thing created was that indiscretions were only indiscreet when they were bungled. Punishment seemed the penalty for discovery—not for the sin itself. Naturally it was the foolish and less flagrant sinners who got caught. For instance, there was the Bantam.
The first term the Bantam watched and listened. There were occasions when he was a little shocked. When Christmas came round, having no home to go to, he kept on his rooms in college, and spent the vacation in residence. I returned to Pope Lane, and found that the womanliness of Ruthita and the Snow Lady had a sanitary effect. The wholesome sweetness of their affection, after the hot-house discussions of a group of boyish men, came like a breath of pure air. I fell back into the old trustfulness. I recognized that society had secret restraints and delicacies, a disclosure of the motives for which was not yet allowable; at the proper season life would explain itself.
When college re-assembled I noticed a change in the Bantam. He was soulful and sentimental—he took more pains with his dressing. He was continually slipping off by himself; when he returned he volunteered no information as to the purpose of his errand. When the eternal problem of woman was discussed, he smiled in a wise and melancholy manner. If he contributed a remark, it was not a guess, but had the air of authoritative finality. One night I tackled him. “What have you been up to, Bantam? You know too much.”
He twisted his pipe in his mouth pensively. “She’s the sweetest little girl in the world.”
He would not tell me her name. He had pledged her his word not to do that. There was a reason—she was working, and she belonged to too high a rank in society to work. She wished to remain obscure, until she could re-instate herself. She was a Cinderella who would one day emerge from poverty into splendor. The Bantam said his emotions were almost too sacred to talk about. Nevertheless, he meandered on with his mystery from midnight to three o’clock. She was a lady and terribly persecuted. He had come to her rescue just at the identical moment when a good influence was most needed. All through the Christmas Vac he had acted the big brother’s part, shielding her from temptation. She was lovely—there lay the pity of it.
I pointed out that there were ten thousand ways of flirting with girls, and that this was the most dangerous. His white knighthood was affronted by that word flirting. He became indignant and said I was no gentleman.
As time went on, acquaintance after acquaintance would drop in to see me, and would hint gravely at a deep and romantic passion which the Bantam had imparted to them alone. When I informed them that I also was in his confidence, they would repeat to me the same vague story of persecuted loveliness, but always with embellishments. By and by, the embellishments varied so irreconcilably that I began to suspect that they referred to more than one girl.
Most of us were in love with love in those days; we were all quite certain that an incandescent purifying passion lay ahead of us. It might knock at our door any hour—and then our particular problem would be solved. This hope was rarely mentioned. To one another we strove to give the impression of being cynical and careless. Yet always, beneath our pose of flippancy, we were seeking the face pre-destined to be for us the most beautiful in all the world. For myself, I was feverishly eager in its quest. I would scour the green-gray uplands of the Thames, telling myself that she might lie hidden in the cheerful quiet of some thatched farm. Every new landscape became the possible setting for my individual romance. I lived each day in expectancy of her coming. Sometimes at nightfall I would pause outside a lighted shop-window, arrested by a girl’s profile, and would pretend to myself that I had found her. That was how Rossetti found Miss Siddall; perhaps that was how it would happen to myself. One thing was certain: whenever and wherever I found her, whether in the guise of shop-girl, dairy-maid, or lady, for me the golden age would commence. I stalked through life on the airy stilts of an ?sthetic optimism.
Ah, but the Bantam, he was all for doing! If he could not find the love he wanted, he would seize the next best. Yet he would never admit that he was in love. He deceived himself into believing that he acted on the most altruistic motives. If others misunderstood him, it was because they were of grosser fiber. Other men, doing the things he did, laughingly acknowledged their rakishness; he, however, considered himself a self-appointed knight-errant to ladies in distress. He became involved in endless entanglements. It was by appealing to his higher nature with some pitiful story, that his transient attractions caught him.
I never knew a man so unfortunate in his genius for discovering lonely maidens in need of his protection. He always meant to be noble and virtuous, but his temperament was not sufficiently frigid to carry him safely through such ticklish adventures. He never learnt when to leave off; his fatal and theatric conception of chivalry continually led him on to situations more powerfully tempting. It would be easy to explain him by saying that he was a sentimental ass. But so were we all. The Bantam came to his ruin because he was lonely, because he had no social means of meeting women who were his equals, and because he was too kind-hearted; but mainly because he attributed to all women indiscriminately a virtue which unfortunately they do not all possess.
He sinned accidentally and therefore carelessly—not wisely, but too well. A man like Lord Halloway sinned of set purpose and laid his plans ahead; so far as society’s opinion of him was concerned he came off comparatively scatheless. The worst that was ever said of him was that he was a gay dog. Women even seemed to like him for it. I suppose he intrigued their fancy, and made them long to reform him. From this I learnt that the gaping sins of a gay dog are more easily forgiven than the peccadilloes of a sentimental donkey.
In the Easter Vacation of our first year at Oxford, the Bantam stayed at Putney. In the same house was an actress, very beautiful and more sorely used by the world than even the first girl. In the summer-time there was a widow at Torquay. In the beginning of our second year of residence there was a bar-maid at Henley. After that they followed in rapid succession. Wherever he went he found some woman starving for his sympathy. They were all ladies and phenomena of beauty, to judge from his accounts.
When he came to make confession to me, it was a little difficult to follow which particular lady he was talking about. He never mentioned them by name, and seemed to try to give the impression that they were one composite person.
One evening I got him with his back t............