“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.