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.