In after years it became a habit with my father to say grimly that Uncle Obad’s Christmas dinner was the most expensive he had ever eaten—it had cost him two thousand pounds. This was the only reference to the unfortunate past that he permitted himself. On calm reflection I think he was a little sorry for the caustic frankness of some of his remarks; he was willing to forget them. Besides, as it happened, one of my uncle’s least forgivable offenses—the mentioning of our names to the newspaper men—resulted in an extraordinary stroke of luck.
A week after our visit to Chelsea, my father received a letter. It was from a firm of lawyers and stated that a friend, who had read of our loss, was anxious to provide the money for my education; the only condition made was that he should be allowed to remain anonymous.
At first my father flatly refused to put himself under such an obligation to an unknown person. “One would think that we were paupers,” he said; “such an offer may be kindly meant, but it’s insulting.”
He was so sensitive on the subject that we none of us dared to argue the matter. We considered the affair as closed, and began to consider what walk of business I should enter. Then we discovered that my father had gone off on the quiet and interviewed the lawyers; as a consequence, a second and more pressing letter arrived, stating that the anonymous benefactor would be gravely disappointed if we did not accept. He was childless and had often wished to do something for me. My father’s misfortune was his opportunity.
Our curiosity was piqued. Who of our friends or acquaintance was childless? We ran over the names of all possible benefactors—a task not difficult, for we had few friends.
The name of my mother’s father, Sir Charles Evrard, was suggested. He fitted the description exactly; the long estrangement which had resulted from my father’s elopement supplied the motive for his desire to suppress his personality.
Out of this guess Ruthita wove for me a romantic future, opening to my astonished imagination a career more congenial than any I had dreamt in my boldest moments. Up to this time, save for whispered hints from my grandmother Cardover, no mention had been made of my mother’s family. My father’s plebeian pride had never recovered from the shock and humiliation of his early years. At first out of jealous purpose, latterly from force of habit and the delicacy which men feel after re-marriage, he had allowed me to grow up in almost entire ignorance of my maternal traditions.
Now that the subject had to be discussed he became obstinately silent to the point of sullenness. The Snow Lady came to the rescue. “Leave him to me,” she said; “I know how to manage him, my dear.”
She laid it tactfully before him that he had no right to let his personal likes or dislikes prevent me from climbing back into my mother’s rank in society. I was my grandfather’s nearest kin and, if our surmise proved correct, this might be Sir Charles’s first step towards a reconciliation—a step which might end in his making his will in my favor.
Grandmother Cardover was communicated with and instructed to report on the lie of the country. She replied that folks said that old Sir Charles was wonderfully softened. She also informed us that Lord Halloway, the next of kin to myself, had been up to some more of his devilry and was in disgrace with his uncle. This time it was to do with a Ransby bathing-machine man’s daughter. Lord Halloway was my second-cousin, the Earl of Lovegrove’s son and heir. His Christian name was Denville; I came to know him less formally in later days as Denny Halloway.
I was packed off to my grandmother, ostensibly for a week’s holiday at Ransby—in reality to put our hazard to the test.
Ransby to-day is a little sleepy seaside town. The trade has gone away from it. Every summer thousands of holiday-makers from London invade it with foreign, feverish gaiety; when they are gone it relapses into its contented old-world quiet. In my boyhood, however, it was a place of provincial bustle and importance. The sailing vessels from the Baltic crowded its harbor, lying shoulder to shoulder against its quays, unloading their cargoes of tallow and timber and hemp. Now all that remains is the herring fishery and the manufacture of nets.
Grandmother Cardover’s house stood near the harbor; from the street we could see the bare masts of the shipping lying at rest. In the front on the ground-floor was the shop, piled high with the necessaries of sea-going travel. There were coils of rope in the doorway, and anchors and sacks of ship’s biscuits; a little further in tarpaulin and oil-skin jackets hung from the ceiling, interspersed with smoked hams; and, at the back, stood rows of cheeses and upturned barrels on which ear-ringed sailor-men would sit and chat.
Behind the counter was a door, with windows draped with red curtains. It led into what was called the keeping-room, a cozy parlor in which we took our meals, while through the window in the door we could watch the customers enter. The keeping-room had its own peculiar smell, comfortable and homelike. I scarcely know how to describe it; it was a mixture of ozone, coffee, and baking bread. Out of the keeping-room lay the kitchen, with its floor of red bricks and its burnished pots and pans hung in rows along the walls. It was my grandmother’s boast that the floor was so speckless that you could eat a meal off it. Across the courtyard at the back lay the bakehouse, with its great hollow ovens and troughs in which men with naked feet trod out the dough.
Grandmother had never been out of Ransby save to visit us at Pope Lane, and this rarely. Even then, after a fortnight she was glad to get back. She said that Ransby was better than London; you weren’t crowded and knew everyone you met. The streets of London were filled with stranger-windows and stranger-faces, whereas in Ransby every house was familiar and had its story.
She carried, strung from a belt about her waist, all the keys of her bins and cupboards. You knew when she was coming by the way they jangled. She was a widow, and perfectly happy. On Sundays she attended the Methodist Chapel in the High Street, with its grave black pulpit and high-backed pews. On week-days she marshaled her sea-captains, handsome bearded men, and entertained them at her table. In spite of younger rivals, who tried to win their patronage from her by cuts in prices, she held their custom by her honest personality. I believe many of them made her offers of marriage, for she was still comely to look at; she refused them as lovers and kept them as friends. She usually dressed in black, with a gold locket containing the hair of her husband, many years dead, hung about her neck. Her hair was arranged in two rows of corkscrew curls, which reached down to her shoulders from under a prim white cap. She had a trick of making them waggle when she wished to be emphatic. She was a good deal of a gossip, was by instinct an antiquary, and had a lively sense of wit which was kept in check by a genuine piety—in short, she was a thoroughly wholesome, capable, loving woman. The type to which she belonged is now quickly vanishing—that of the more than middle-aged person who knows how to grow old usefully and graciously: a woman of the lower-middle class not chagrined by her station, who acknowledged cheerfully that she had her superiors and, demanding respect from others, gave respect ungrudgingly where it was due. She was a shop-keeper proud of her shop-keeping.
That week at Ransby was a kind of tiptoe glory. My Grannie took me very seriously; she had under her roof a boy who would surely be a baronet, perhaps a lord, and maybe an earl. What had only been an expectation with us was for her a certainty. The floodgate of her reminiscence was opened wide; she swept me far out into the romantic past with her accounts of my mother’s ancestry. The Evrards were no upstart nobility; they had their roots in history. She could tell me how they returned from exile with King Charles, or how they sailed out with Raleigh to destroy the Armada. But I liked to hear best about my mother, how she rode into Ransby under her scarlet plumes, on her great gray horse, with her flower face; and how my father caught sight of her and loved her.
I began to understand my father in a new way, entirely sympathetic. He was a man who had tasted the best of life at the first. There was something epic about his sorrow.
These conversations usually took place in the keeping-room at night. The shutters of the shop had been put up. The gas was unlighted. The flames of the fire, dancing in the grate, split the darkness into shadows which groped across the walls. Everything was hushed and cozy. My Grannie, seated opposite to me, on the other side of the fireplace, would bend forward in her chair as she talked; when she came to exciting passages her little gray curls would bob, or to passages of sentiment she would remove her shiny spectacles to wipe her eyes. If she stopped at a loss for the next topic, all I had to say was, “And how did Sir Charles Evrard look, Grannie, when he came to you that first morning after they had run away?”
“He looked, as he has always looked, my dear, an aristocrat.”
“But how did he treat you? Wasn’t he angry?”
“Angry with a woman! Certainly not. He treated me like a courtly gentleman—with respect. He dismounts and comes into my shop as leisurely as though he had only stepped in to exchange the greetings of the day. He raises his hat to me as he enters. ‘A fine day, Mrs. Cardover,’ he says.
“‘A fine day, Sir Charles, but inclined to blow up squally,’ says I.
“Then he turns his face away and inquires, ‘If it’s not troubling you, can I see your son this morning?’
“‘He went to London early,’ says I.
“He puts his hand to his throat quickly, as if he were choking. Then he asks huskily, still not looking at me, ‘Did he go alone?’
“‘That, Sir Charles, is more than I can say.’
“‘Quite right. Quite right.’ And he speaks so quickly that he startles me.
“Then he turns round, trying to smile, and shows me a face all old and pale. ‘A very fine day for someone; but it’s true what you say, it’ll blow up squally later.’
“And with that he leaves me, raising his hat, and rides away.”
“And you knew all the time?” I ask.
“We both knew all the time,” she replies.
During the daytime we went through the flat wind-swept country on excursions to Woadley Hall. Our hope was that we might meet Sir Charles, and that he would recognize me. Unfortunately, on the afternoon of my arrival he had a hunting accident, and kept the house during all the period of my stay. My nearest approach to seeing him was one evening, when the winter dusk had gathered early; I hid in the shrubbery outside the library and saw his shadow fall across the blind. He seemed to stand near the window listening. We were not more than two yards separated. I wonder, did some instinct, subtler than the five senses, let him know of the starved yearning that was calling to him out there in the dark? How those long watches in Woadley Park stirred up memories, and made my mother live again!
When the week had expired, I returned to Pope Lane. The offer was re-debated and at last accepted. I went back to the Red House and there learnt the fickleness of popularity. My uncle’s downfall had caused me to become a far less exalted person. My influence was gone; a period of persecution threatened. The Bantam alone stood by me; even in his eyes I was a Samson shorn of his glory. The renewed, half-shy interest taken in me by the Creature was a doubtful asset. Our friendship was a coalition of two weaknesses, and resulted in nothing profitable in the way of social strength. He did his best to make things up to me. He was almost womanly in his kindness. Now that Lady Zion was gone he felt a great emptiness in life; he borrowed me that, in some measure, I might fill her place. He told Sneard that he wished to coach me that I might sit for a scholarship at Oxford. Permission was granted, so we both got off prep.
Evening after evening I would spend at his cottage, the lamp lighted and the books spread out on the table. He decided that I was not much good at natural science, and declared that I must specialize in history. He was a genius in his way, and had amazing stores of information. When he overcame his hesitating shyness, he showed himself a scholar of erudite knowledge and intrepid imagination. He had a passion for antiquity that amounted to idolatry, and a faculty which was almost uncanny for making the dead world live again. While he spoke I would forget his shabbiness, his chalk-stained hands, uncouth gestures, and revolting untidiness. He was a magician who unlocked the doors of the storied past; he owned the right-of-way through all men’s minds, from Homer to Herbert Spencer. When he spoke of soldiers, his air was bullying and defiant. But it was when he spoke of women that he spoke with his heart. Then, all unaware of what he was doing, he pulled aside the curtains and let me gaze in upon the empty rooms of his life. It was he who pointed out to me that, with rare exceptions, it is not the virtuous but only the beautiful women that the world remembers.
It was odd to think what images of loveliness went to and fro behind that soiled mask of outward personality, in the hidden temples of his brain. The Creature was a man you had to love or dislike, to know altogether or not to know at all. In that last year and a half at the Red House, when he tapped me on the shoulder and led me away by the revelation of his curious secret charm, I got both to know and to love him.
And yet there was always fear in my friendship. He was queer like his sister before him. Her death seemed to have unbalanced his reason; it was a weakness that grew upon him. He seemed to have lost his power of distinguishing between the present and the imaginary or the past. Often in the cottage he would forget that his sister was not still alive and, rising from the table, would look beyond me as if he saw her, or would go out into the passage and call to her. Nothing in the cottage had been changed since her departure. Her belongings lay untouched, just where she had left them, as though her return was hourly expected.
He fell into the way of imitating her gestures, and humming snatches of her crazy songs. He would tumble over the precipice into the abyss of insanity without warning, in the middle of being rational; and would clamber back just as suddenly, apparently without knowledge of where he had gone. Of one of her songs he was extremely fond. I had often heard Lady Zion sing it as she rode between the hedges, and had been made aware of her approach long before I caught sight of her:—
“All the chimneys in our town
Wake from death when the cold comes down;
Through the summer against the sky
Tall, and silent, and stark they lie—
But every chimney in our town
Starts to breathe when the cold comes down.”
Some safe-guarding astuteness prevented him from showing his weakness at the Red House; and I was too fond of him to tell. To the rest of the boys he was only the grubby, somewhat eccentric little “stinks” master. Nevertheless, sane or insane, it was through the Creature’s efforts that, after a year of coaching, I won a history scholarship at Lazarus for eighty pounds.
Still, eighty pounds would not carry me to Oxford. It became a worrying problem to my family exactly what my grandfather, if he were my benefactor, had meant by “undertaking the expenses of my education.” His generosity might be co-terminous with my school-days. A month after the winning of the scholarship the lawyers wrote, setting our minds at rest and congratulating me on my success in the name of their client. This letter was gratifying in more than a monetary sense—it was a sign that the anonymous friend was keeping a close watch on my doings.
Since the interview at Chelsea there had been no intercourse between my father and Uncle Obad. I had once contrived to see my uncle by stealth, but the first question he had asked me was, did I come with my father’s knowledge. When I could not give him that assurance, he had sorrowfully refused to have anything to do with me. At the time I shrank from mentioning the matter to my father; so for a year and a half my uncle and his doings had dropped completely out of my life.
But my treatment of him weighed on my conscience. My last term at school had ended. It was August, and in October I expected to go up to Oxford. With my scholarship and the money the lawyers sent me I should soon be a self-supporting person. Already I thought myself a man. I felt that on the whole my father’s quarrel with my uncle was reasonable, but I could not see why I should be made to share it. So one day as I got up from breakfast, I mentioned casually that I was going to run over to Charity Grove.
It was just such another golden morning as the one of ten years earlier, when I had driven for the first time across London behind Dollie. What a big important person the Spuffler had seemed to me then! How wonderful that he, a grown-up, should take so much trouble to be friendly to a little chap! Then my mind wandered back over all his repeated kindness—all that he had stood for in the past as a harbor of refuge from the stormy misunderstandings of childhood. He and the Creature, both failures and generally despised, were two of the best men that I had ever met. Whatever his faults, he still was splendid.
I came to the Christian Boarding House, and passed up the driveway shut in with heavy evergreens. Caroline, tousled of hair, all loose ends, girt about her middle with a sackcloth apron, was on her knees bricking the steps. She did not recognize me. The Mistress was out shopping, she said, but the Master was in the paddock. “Ah, yes,” I thought, “feeding the fowls.”
I passed through the decayed old rooms, with their heavy shabby furniture, so evidently picked up cheap at auctions; then I passed out through the French windows into the cool garden, where sunshine dappled the lawn, struggling with difficulty through the crowded branches. At the gate into the paddock I halted. There he was with a can of water in his hand, fussing, in and out his coops and hutches, so extremely busy, as though the future of the world depended on his efforts. I suppose he was still evolving that strain of perpetually laying hens, The Spreckles, which was to bring him fame and fortune.
I called to him, “Uncle Obad.”
When he had recovered from his emotion, I soon found that the old fellow had long ago emerged from all personal sense of disgrace with his usual corklike irrepressibility. He chatted with me cheerily, calling me, “Old chap,” just as though nothing painful had happened to separate us. On being ousted from Chelsea, he had immediately dropped back, with something like a sigh of relief, into his former world of momentous trifles—philanthropy and fowls. “We lived at a terrible pace, old chap. It was wearing us out. We couldn’t have stood it.”
He spoke as if the abdication of his brief period of affluence had been voluntary. I scented here one of his spuffling explanations to his neighbors for his precipitate return to the boarding-house.
On inquiry I found that all his philanthropic societies had forgiven and taken him back. After sulking a while and flirting with various paid secretaries, they had agreed for economy’s sake to let bygones be bygones. They had been unable to find any other person who would serve them as loyally without salary, and who at the same time was able to offer up such beautiful extempore prayers. The list of their contributors had afforded Rapson his happiest hunting-ground. Procuring my uncle’s services for nothing was their only way of getting anything back.
“And what about Rapson?” I asked. “Do you still believe in him?”
He shook his head dolefully. “I begin to lose faith, Dante; I begin to doubt.”
“But have you heard from him since he went away?”
“Never a word.”
He hesitated and then he said, “There’s Kitty, you know. He didn’t do the straight thing by her. No, I’m afraid Rapson wasn’t a good man.”
At mention of Kitty I pricked up my ears; I had often wondered about her. “What had Kitty to do with him?” I asked. “Were they engaged?”
“No, unfortunately.”
“In love?”
“Perhaps.”
“Married?”
“I wish they had been. After he’d left her, she was awfully cut up. I did what I could for her. You remember that hundred pounds?”
“My father—at Chelsea—the Christmas present?”
“Yes. I couldn’t keep it. I gave it to her.”
“You always have to be giving something,” I said.
We were sitting on an upturned barrow in the paddock when this conversation took place. I thought how characteristic of Uncle Obad that was—to be helping others at a time when he himself was most in need of help. But his kindness knew no seasons. Then I began, as a very young man will, to think of Kitty, and, because of her frailty, to picture her through a haze of romance.
“Where’s Kitty now?” I asked.
“She’s in a photographer’s at Oxford. She serves behind a counter. But, come, you’ve not told me yet what you think of my fowls.”
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 mediævalism. 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 æsthetic 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 to the wall. “Bantam, who is this Oxford girl—the first one you got to know about?”
Then he admitted that she was a shop-girl. I knew what that meant: some of the Oxford tradesmen engaged girls for the prettiness of their faces, that they might attract custom by flirting with the undergrads. Little by little I narrowed him down in his general statements till I had guessed the shop in which she worked.
“Is she a good girl?” I asked.
Instead of taking offense, he answered, “Dante, the thought of her goodness often makes me ashamed of myself.”
It was evident, though he would not admit it, that this affair at least was serious.
“Then why does she stay there?”
“She can’t help herself.”
“Why can’t she help herself?”
“She’s an orphan and has a living to earn. She’s afraid to get out of a situation.”
“But what good are you doing her?”
“Helping her to keep up her courage by letting her know that one man respects her.”
“Don’t you think she may get to expect more than that?”
“Certainly not. Why should she?”
“Just because girls do,” I said. “Do you write her letters?”
“Sometimes.”
“What do you write about?”
He wouldn’t tell me that. Next day I went down to the shop to investigate matters. Since the Bantam wouldn’t listen to sense, I intended to hint to the girl the danger of what she was doing. Of course she could never marry him; but I was morally certain that that was what she was aiming at.
The shop was a stationer’s. I had chosen an hour in the afternoon when it was likely to be empty, everyone being engaged in some form of athletics. I entered and saw a daintily gowned woman with her back turned towards me. She was all in white. Her waist was of the smallest. She had a mass of honey-colored hair. She swung about at sound of my footstep.
“Why, Kitty, of all people in the world! I didn’t expect to find you here.”
“As good as old times,” she said. “I’ve often seen you pass the window, but I thought you wouldn’t want to know me.”
“And why not?”
“Because of what happened.”
“Rapson?”
She flushed and hung her head. I wondered if she meant what I thought she meant.
I hated to see her sad; she looked so young and pretty. I began to ask her what she was doing.
“Doing! Minding shop, remembering, growing old, and earning my living. It’s just horrid to be here, Dante. I have to watch you ’Varsity men having a good time—and once I belonged to your set. And they come in and stare at me, and pay me silly compliments—and I have to smile and pretend I like it. That’s what I’m paid for. They don’t know how I hate them. When they have their sweethearts and sisters up, they walk past me as though they never knew me.”
“But are they all like that?”
She smiled, and I knew she loved him. When she spoke her voice trembled. “There’s one of them is different.”
“Kitty, he’s the one I came to talk about.”
With instinctive foreknowledge of the purpose of my errand, her face became tragic. “His father’s in India,” I explained. “From what I hear of him he’s very proud. If the Bantam made a marriage that could in any way be regarded as imprudent, he’d cut him off. He’d be ruined. You know how it would be; the world would turn its back on him.”
“What do we care about the world?” she said. “The world’s a coward.”
It was wonderful how coldly practical I could become in dealing with another man’s heart affairs—I, who spent my time dreaming of the most extraordinarily unconventional marriages.
“The world may be a coward, Kitty, but you have to live in it. Besides, are you sure that the Bantam really cares for you? Have you told him everything?”
She stared into my eyes across the counter with frightened fascination. I knew that I was acting like a brute and I despised myself. I had hardly meant to ask her the last question—it had slipped out. While we gazed at one another there drifted through my memory all the scenes of that day at Richmond—the gaiety of it, and the hunger with which she had clutched me to her as we punted back in the dark. I understood what this little bit of love must mean to her after her experience of disillusion.
“No, I have not told him. I daren’t. I’m afraid to lose him. Oh, Dante, don’t tell him; it’s my one last chance to be good.”
“But you’ve got to tell him, Kitty. If his love’s worth anything, he’ll forgive you. He’d be sure to find out after marriage.”
“I don’t care about marriage,” she whispered desperately.
“Even then, you ought to tell him.”
A customer came into the shop. We tumbled from our height of emotion. It was another example of how reality makes all things prosaic. She had to compose herself, and go and serve him. He had come to admire her and showed a tendency to dawdle. His purchase was the excuse for his presence. I had an opportunity to watch her—how charmingly fresh she looked and how girlish. And yet she was three years older than myself—that seemed incredible. At last the customer went.
“Kitty, I feel I’ve been a horrid beast to you—it’s so often like that when one speaks the truth. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I want to see you happy. I’ll not interfere. You must do what you feel to be right about it.” And with that I left her.
The Bantam was rowing in the college crew that summer. What with training, going to bed early, and keeping up with his work, I saw little of him. The night before the races he came into my room. He looked brilliantly healthy—lean and tanned.
“Are you alone?”
“You can see I am. What’s the trouble?”
He sank into a chair and grinned at me. “It’s all up. I’ve been an awful ass.”
“How?”
“I wrote two letters; one to the widow at Torquay and the other to the actress. They were nice friendly letters, but far too personal. I put ’em in the wrong envelopes.”
“And they’ve sent them back with bitter complaints against your infidelity. Poor old Bantam!”
“They haven’t. They’re keeping them as proof. They’ve both struck out the same line of action and talk about a breach of promise suit. They’re both coming to see me to-morrow, and they’re sure to meet. There’ll be a gay old row, and I shall get kicked out of Lazarus.”
I whistled.
“You may well whistle,” he said, ridiculously puckering his mouth; “it’s a serious affair. Here have I been trying to be decent to two women, and they’re going to try to make me out a kind of letter-writing Bluebeard. I know quite well I’ve written silly things to them that could be construed in a horribly damaging manner. I only meant to be cheery, you know, but I see now that there’ve been times when I’ve crossed the boundary of mere friendship. They can both make a case against me I suspect and so can all the other girls. Once the thing leaks into the papers, they’ll all swoop down like a lot of vultures to see what they can get.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I can run away to-night without leaving any address. That would leave the crew in the lurch; we’d get bumped every night on the river—so I can’t do that. I can stop and face it out—let my pater in for all kinds of expense in the way of damages, and get sent down. Or I can marry one of ’em, and so shut all the others’ mouths. It isn’t money they’re wanting—it’s me as a husband. Isn’t it a gay old world?”
He pushed his hands deep into his trouser-pockets and thrust out his legs. He didn’t seem adequately desperate—in fact he gave the impression of being glad this thing had happened. I was puzzling over what I ought to say to him, when it occurred to me that I hadn’t offered any expression of sympathy; I told him I was awfully sorry.
“Needn’t be. You see, there’s only one girl I greatly care about, and she’s just all the world. She had a mishap some years back with a cad—she only told me a month ago, and because of it she refused to marry me. She’s got it into her head that I’m too good for her. Well, now I can prove to her that it’s the other way about.”
The Bantam ruffled his hair. He spoke with genuine feeling; this was quite different from any of his former confessions. He moistened his lips nervously, and turned away his eyes from me. “There are some girls,” he said, “who never need to be forgiven. Whatever they’ve done and whatever they’re doing, doesn’t matter. They seem always too pure for us men.”
I leant forward and took his hand. I felt proud of him. “I’ll stand by you, old chap. How can I help?”
“By being awfully decent to these two women to-morrow. Take ’em out on the river and keep ’em quiet. Drug ’em with flattery. They’re both of them immensely good-looking. P’raps if you treat ’em well, they’ll be ashamed to make a row. Then, when Eights’ Week is over and the crew doesn’t want me any longer, I’ll slip up to London, and establish a residence, and get married.”
As he was going out of the room I called him back. “What’s the name of the girl you’re going to marry?”
“Kitty,” he whispered below his breath, as though it were a word too sacred to mention.
The widow from Torquay arrived next morning; so did the actress from Putney. I let each one suppose that the other was my near relative, and never left them for a moment together, lest they should discover their error. I gave them separately to understand that their troubles would be satisfactorily settled. I made much of the rigors of training, which compelled the Bantam to absent himself. They didn’t meet him until after they had seen him racing, by which time he had become a kind of hero to them. I saw them safely off at the station by different trains—so the crash was averted. When Eights’ Week was ended the Bantam vanished, without explanation to the college. A month later I attended his wedding.
Kitty had asked permission to invite one guest—she wouldn’t tell us his name. When we three had assembled in the little Church of Old St. Mary’s, Stoke Newington, who should come fussing up the aisle but my uncle, the Spuffler. He wore a frayed frock-coat; the end of his handkerchief was hanging out of his tail-pocket, as usual.
All through the service he gave himself such important airs that the clergyman took it for granted that the bride was his daughter.
We jumped into a couple of hansoms and drove down to Verrey’s to lunch. The Bantam said he knew he couldn’t afford it, but he was determined to have one good meal before he busted. We had a private room set apart for us. The Spuffler tasted the best champagne he had drunk since his fiasco. It made him reflective. He kept on telling us that life was a switchback—an affair of ups and downs. The Bantam cut him short by proposing a toast to all the ladies he hadn’t married. And I sat and stared at Kitty, with her cornflower eyes and sky-blue dress, and wondered where my eyes had been that I hadn’t married her myself.
We went to the Parks and took a boat on the Serpentine. It was there that the Bantam let his bomb burst: he was sailing on the Celtic, via New York, for Canada. He felt sure his father would disown him for having spoilt his Oxford opportunities, so he was going to start life afresh in a land where no one would remember.
In the autumn, when I returned to Lazarus, I had an opportunity to judge how the world treats breakers of convention. No one had a good word to say for the Bantam. Everybody was eager to disclaim him as his friend—he had married a shop-girl. Yet Halloway, who sinned cavalierly without twinge of conscience or attempt at reparation, was spoken of, even by persons who had never known him, with a kind of tolerant, admiring affection. So much for what this taught me of social morality. Playing safe, and not ethical right or wrong, was the standard of conventional righteousness.
Star-dust days were drawing to an end. The grim, inevitable facts of life were looming larger and nearer. Romance was slowly giving way before reality. It was the last year at Oxford for most of the men in my set. Conversations began to take a practical turn, as to how a living might be earned. For myself, I listened with a languid interest. These discussions did not concern my future. I expected that my grandfather would continue my allowance. I should not be forced to sell myself by doing uncongenial, remunerative kinds of work. I should have time to mature. I wanted to make a study of the Renaissance. About twenty years hence I should publish a book; then I should be famous. Meanwhile I should collect my facts, and probably enter Parliament as member for Ransby.
It was wonderful how bravely confident we were. We gazed into the future without fear or tremor. We all knew that we were sure of success. Already we were picking out the winners—the naturally great men, who would arrive at the top of the tree with the first effort. It was a belief among us that genius was nothing more than concentrated will-power. Then something happened which startled me into a novel display of energy.
Ever since leaving the Red House, the Creature had written me once a week, usually on a Sunday, with clockwork regularity. One Monday I went to the porter’s lodge for my mail and missed his letter. The following morning, glancing down the paper, my eye was attracted by a headline which read, TRAGIC DEATH OF A SCHOOLMASTER. The news-item announced the death of Mr. Murdoch, science master of the Red House. It appeared that the boys had gone down to the laboratory to attend the experimental chemistry class. On opening the door they had been driven back by a powerful smell of gas, but not before they had caught a glimpse of Mr. Murdoch fallen in a heap upon the floor. When the room was entered it was quite evident that the death was not accidental. Every burner in the room was full on, and the ventilators were stopped with rags.
Some days later I received a legal letter informing me that the Creature had left a will in my favor. His total estate amounted to three hundred pounds. I was requested to call at the lawyer’s office. I got leave of absence from my college and went to London. There I learnt that at the time that the will had been made, a little over five years ago, the value of the estate had been a thousand pounds. Of this I had already received over seven hundred, remitted to me by his lawyers from time to time according to his instructions. He had originally saved the money in order that he might provide for his sister in the event of his dying first. On her death, he had executed the present will, making me his heir.
So Sir Charles Evrard was not the author of my prosperity! The disappointment of the discovery robbed me for an instant of all sense of gratitude. I felt almost angry with the Creature for having been the innocent cause of all this building of air-castles. This was the second time that fortune had led me on to expect, only to trick me when the future seemed secure. The uncertainty of everything unnerved me. Life seemed to pucker its brows and stare down at me with a frown. All the money that had been spent on my education had taught me nothing immediately useful—and now I had a living to earn.
Luckily, just about this time, it was suggested to me that, after I had taken my Finals, I should enter for some of the history fellowships in the autumn. It was expected that I would gain an easy First; if I did that, I had a fair chance of winning a fellowship at my own college.
Now that my fool’s paradise had melted into nothingness, I felt the spur of necessity, and commenced to work strenuously. Gradually a higher motive than the mere hope of reward began to actuate my energy. I wanted to be what the Creature had hoped for me. Now that he was gone, he became very near to me. He was always haunting my memory. He had robbed himself that he might give me my chance. I felt humbled that I should have spent his money with so free a hand, while he had been living in comparative poverty. I could picture just how he looked that morning when the boys burst into the laboratory. His hands were stained with chalk. His uncombed hair fell back from his wrinkled forehead. He was wearing the same old clothes—the tweed jacket and gray flannel trousers—that I knew so well. Probably he looked both tired and dirty, and a little disreputable.
I reproached myself for the shortness of my letters to him. I saw now, in the light of after events, how I might have been a strength to him. He had given me everything; I had given him nothing. His fineness of feeling had led him to prevent my gratitude. Never by the slightest hint had he left me room to guess that I was beholden to him. And now he was beyond reach of thanks.
I recalled how I had teased him as a youngster, and had courted popularity at his expense. When I was most angry against myself, I would drift back into the class-room where the boys were baiting him, and would hear him making his peace-offering, “Penthil, Cardover? Penthil, Buzzard? Want a penthil?” And then, in spite of indignation, I had to laugh.
When Finals came on I won my First and in the autumn gained a history fellowship at Lazarus. It was worth two hundred pounds a year. It allowed me ample time to travel and was tenable for seven years, on the condition that I did not marry.