The Warden went to the door and turned the key. Why, he did not know. He simply did it instinctively. Then he finished reading the letter; and having read it through, read it again a second time. He was a free man, and he had obtained his freedom through a circumstance that was pitifully silly, a circumstance almost incredibly sordid and futile.
Her humiliation was his humiliation, for had he not chosen her to be his companion for life? Had he not at this time, when the full responsibility of manhood was placed on every man, had he not chosen as the mother of his children, a moral weakling?
He locked the letter up in his desk and paced the length of the room once or twice. Then he threw himself into a chair and, clasping his head in his hands, remained there motionless. Could he be the same man who had a few days ago, of his own free will, without any compulsion, without any kind of necessity, offered himself for life to a girl of whom he knew absolutely nothing, except that she had had a miserable upbringing and an heredity that he could not respect? Was it her slender beauty, her girlishness, that had made him so passionately pitiful?
From an ordinary man this action would have been folly, but from him it was an offence! A very great offence, now, in these times. On the desk lay some pages of notes—notes of a course of public lectures he was about to give, lectures on the responsibility of citizenship, in which he was going to make a strong appeal to his audience for a more conscious philosophy of life. He was going to urge the necessity for greater reverence for education. He was going to speak not only of the burden of Empire, but of the new burden, the burden of Democracy, a Democracy that is young, independent, and feeling its way. He was going to speak of the true meaning of a free Democracy, no chaotic meaningless freedom, but the sane and ordered freedom of educated men, Democracy open-eyed and training itself, like a strong man, to run a race for some far-off, some desired goal to which "all creation moves."
He was in these lectures going to pose not only as a practical man but as a preacher, one of those who "point the way"; and meanwhile he had bound himself to a girl who not only would be unable to grasp the meaning of any strenuous moral effort, but who would have to be herself guarded from every petty temptation that came in her way. He was (so he said to himself, as he groaned in his spirit) one of those many preachers who, in all ages, have talked of moral progress, and who have missed the road that they themselves have pointed out!
He was fiercely angry with himself because he had called the emotion that he had felt for Gwendolen in her mischance a "passionate pity." It was a very different emotion from that which wrung him when his old pupils, one by one, gave up their youth and hope in the service of their country. That indeed was a passionate pity, a pity full of remorseful gratitude, full of great pride in their high purpose and their noble self-sacrifice. On his mantelpiece, within arm's length of him, lay an open book. It was a book of poems, and there were verses that the Warden had read more than once.
"City of hope and golden dreaming."
A farewell to Oxford. It was the farewell of youth in its heyday to
"All the things we hoped to do."
And then followed the lines that pierced him now with poignant sadness as he thought of them—