The time had now come for Peter to be removed to Oxford. Amid all the novelty, the unimagined comfort and dignity, the beginning of new and exciting friendships, the first encounter with men of learning and position, Peter kept always a region of himself apart, whither he retired to dream of Miranda. He wrote her long and impassioned letters, pouring forth a flood of impetuous imagery wherein her kinship with all intense and lovely things persisted in a thousand shapes. But gradually, under many influences, a change prepared.
First, there was his contact with the intellectual life of Gamaliel. His inquisitive idealism gradually came down from heaven, summoned to definite earth by the ordered wisdom of Oxford. He had lately striven to catch, in a net of words, inexpressible beauty and elusive thought. But his desire to push expression to the limit of the comprehensible; his gift of nervous, pictorial speech; the crowding truths, half seen, that filled his brain were now opposed and estimated according to sure knowledge and the standards which measure a successful examinee. Truth, for ever about to show her face, at whose unsubstantial robe Peter had sometimes caught, now appeared formal, severe, gowned, and reading a schedule. All the knowledge of the world, it seemed, had been reduced to categories. Style was something that dead authors had once achieved. It could be ranged in periods and schools, some of which might with advantage be imitated. Peter found that concerning all things there were points of view. An acquaintance with these points of view and an ability rapidly to number them was almost the only kind of excellence his masters were able to reward.
The result of Peter's contact with the tidy, well-appointed wisdom of Gamaliel was disastrous. His imagination, starting adventurously into the unknown, was systematically checked. This or that question he was asking of the Sphinx was already answered. He fell from heaven upon a passage of Hegel or a theory of Westermarck.
Peter quickened his disillusion by the energy and zeal of his reading. He threw himself hungrily upon his books, and gloried in the ease with which wisdom could be won and stored for reference. His ardour for conquest, by map and ruler, of the kingdoms of knowledge lasted well through his first term. Only obscurely was he conscious of clipped wings.
Hard physical exercise also played a part in bringing Peter to the ground. He was put into training for the river, and was soon filled with a keen interest in his splendid thews. Stretched at length in the evening, warm with triumphant mastery of some theorem concerning the Absolute First Cause, Peter saw himself as typically a live intellectual animal. Less and less did he live in outer space. He began athletically to tread the earth.
Then, too, Peter made many friends—friends who in some ways were older than he. He thought of Miranda as an elfin girl, but his friends talked of women in a way Peter had never heard. For Peter sex had been one of the things which he seemed always to have known. It had not insistently troubled him. He now encountered it in the conversation of his friends as something stealthily comic, perturbing and curiously attractive. He did not actively join in these conversations, but they affected him.
The week slid away, and term was virtually at an end. Peter sat alone in his room with Miranda's last letter. In his ears the rhythm of oars and the hum of cold wet air yet remained, drowning the small noises of the fire. Miranda's letter was bitterly reproachful—glowing at the top heat of a lovers' quarrel. Miranda felt Peter's absence more than he could do. She now had nothing but Peter, and already she was a woman. Unconsciously she resented Peter's imaginative ecstasies. She wanted him to hold and to see. When he answered her from the clouds she was desolate. Moreover, Peter wrote much of his work and play; and Miranda, afraid and jealous of the life he was leading in Oxford, was tinder for the least spark of difference.
The letter Peter held in his hand was all wounded passion. He could see her tears and the droop of her mouth trembling with anger. He had neglected a request she had made. He had written instead a description of the boat he had helped to victory. Something in Miranda's letter—something he had not felt before—caught suddenly at a need in him as yet unknown. He realised all at once that he wanted her to be physically there. He read again her burning phrases and felt the call to him of her thwarted hunger—felt it clearly beneath her superficial estrangement and reproach. He flung himself desperately back into his chair and remained for a moment still. Then he sprang up and wandered restlessly in the dim room, at last pausing by the mantelpiece and turning the lamp upon her photograph. It had caught the full, enigmatic curve of her mouth, breaking into her familiar sad smile. Peter was abruptly invaded with a secret wish, his blood singing in his ears, his heart throbbing painfully, a longing to make his peace possessing him. He felt curiously weak—almost as if he might fall. The room was twisting under his eyes. He flexed his muscles and closed his eyes in pain. Then, in deep relief, he, in fancy, bent forward and kissed her.
He decided to plead with her face to face, and he let pass the intervening day in a luxury of anticipation. He dwelled, as he had not before, on her physical grace. He would sweep away all her sorrow in passionate words uttered upon her lips.
He reached his uncle's house by an earlier train than was expected. His mother was not at home, and he went to his room unchallenged. Out on the balcony the wind roared to him through the bare trees. It was warm for a December evening, and very dark. He looked towards Miranda's house—a darker spot on the dark; for there was no light in the windows. It thrilled him to see how dark it was; and as he went through the garden towards her, with the wind about him like a cloak, drawn close and impeding him, he was glad of the freedom and secrecy it seemed to promise. He could call aloud in that dark wind, and his words were snatched away. His lips and face were trembling, but it did not matter, for the darkness covered them.
At last he stood by the house. The door was half-open. His fancy leaped at Miranda waiting for him. He had only to enter, and he pressed in her comfortable arms.
He pushed open the door, and a hollow echo ran into many rooms and died away upstairs. He was sensible now, in shelter from the wind, of a stillness he had never known. It shot into him a quick terror. As he stood and listened, he could hear water dripping into a cistern somewhere in the roof. The door was blown violently shut, and the report echoed as in a cavern. The house was empty.
Peter lighted a match, and held it above his head. He saw that the linoleum had been torn from the floor; that the kitchen was empty of furniture; that the dust and rubbish of removal lay in the four corners. The match burnt his fingers and went out. Every sensation died in Peter. He stood in the darkness, hearing small noises of water, the light patter of soot dislodged from the chimney, the creak and rustle of a house deserted.
When his eyes were used to the dark, he moved towards a glimmer from the hall-door. He could not yet believe what he saw. He expected the silence of his dream to break. Mechanically he went through the house, standing at last under the eaves of Miranda's attic-room. His eyes, straining to the far corner, traced the white outline of the sloping ceiling. He stood where Miranda had so often slept, a wall's breadth from himself.
The water dripped pitilessly in the roof, and Peter, poor model of an English boy, lay in grief, utterly abandoned, his clenched hands beating the naked floor.
There was a veiled expression in Peter's eyes that evening when he met his mother. Passion was exhausted. He divined already that Miranda was irrecoverable, that pursuit was useless. He now clearly understood how and why she had suffered. His late agony in her room she had many times endured, looking in his letters for a passion not yet illumined, eager to find that he needed her, but finding always that she lived in a palace of cloud. He saw now that Miranda's love had never been the dreaming ecstasy from which he himself had just awakened. He remembered and understood what he had merely accepted as characteristic of her turbulent spirit—sudden fits of petulance, occasions when without apparent reason she had flung savagely away from him. There were other things which thrilled him now, as when her arms tightened about his neck, and she answered his light caress with urgent kisses.
Peter's mother gave him a note in Miranda's hand:
"Peter,—We are going to Canada, and I am not going to write to you. I think, Peter, you are only a boy, and one day you will find out whether you really loved me. I am older than you. I shall not come back to you, because you are going to be rich, and your friends cannot be my friends. If you had answered my last letter, perhaps I could not have done this. But it is better."
When Peter had finished reading he saw that his mother was watching him. He was learning to notice things. His mother, too, he had never really regarded except in relation to himself. Yet she had seen unfold the tale of his passion. She, too, had been affected. He passed her the letter, and waited as she read.
You know, mother, what this means? he asked, shyly moved to confide in her.
Yes, Peter, I think I do, she answered, glad of his trust.
Peter bent eagerly towards her. "Can you tell me where they have gone?"
Mrs. Paragon gently denied him:
No one knows. They left very quickly. Mr. Smith owed some money.
It pained her so sordidly to touch Peter's tragedy.
He ran away? concluded Peter, squarely facing it.
Mrs. Paragon bent her head. Peter tried to say something. He wanted to tell his mother how suddenly precious to him was her knowledge and understanding. But he broke off and his mouth trembled. In a moment she had taken him as a child.
At last she spoke to him again, wisely and bravely:
Try to put all this away, she pleaded. "You are too young. I want you to be happy with your friends."
She paused shyly, a little daunted by the thought in her mind. Then she quietly continued:
I don't want you to think yet of women.
She continued to urge him:
Life is so full of things. You think now only of this disappointment, but, Peter dear, I want you to be strong and famous.
Her words, years afterwards to be remembered, passed over Peter's head. He hardly knew what she said. He was conscious only of her tenderness—his first comfort. It was the consecration of their discovered intimacy.
Uncle Henry was away from home—not expected for several days. Peter was grateful for this. He could not have met the rosy man with the heartiness he required. Peter spent the evening talking to his mother of Oxford and his new friends. She quietly insisted that he should.
But, when Peter was alone once more in his room, his grief came back the deadlier for being held away. He sat for half an hour in the dark. Then he left the room and knocked at his mother's door.
Is that you, Peter?
I want to talk to you.
The door was not locked and she called him in. He had a plan to discuss, but it could have waited. He merely obeyed a blind instinct to get away from his misery. His mother leaned from the bed on her elbow, and Peter sat beside her. She raised her arm to his shoulder with a gesture slow and large. Peter insensibly found comfort in her beauty. He had never before realised his mother was beautiful. Was it the open calm of her forehead or her deep eyes?
Can't you sleep, dear? she asked.
I want to ask you something.
Well?
Mrs. Paragon tranquilly waited.
I want to go away, said Peter. "I can't bear to be so near to everything."
Mrs. Paragon was immediately practical.
Where do you want to go? she asked.
I could spend the vacation in London, suggested Peter.
What will your uncle say?
Tell him everything.
Mrs. Paragon smiled at herself explaining Peter's tragedy to Uncle Henry.
You want to go at once?
Please.
Peter's mother looked wistfully, with doubt in her heart. Her hand tightened on his arm.
I wonder, she almost whispered. "Can I trust you to go?"
She looked at him with her calm eyes.
Peter, she said at last, "you still belong to me. You must come back to me as my own. Do you understand?"
Peter saw yet deeper into his mother's heart—the mother he had so long neglected to know. Her question hung in the air, but he could not trust his voice. His eyes answered her in an honourable promise. Then suddenly he bent his head to her bosom. Her arms accepted him.
Scarcely half an hour later Peter was fast sleeping in his room. Already the torrent of his life was breaking a fresh channel. He had dedicated himself anew.
Peter reached London in the late afternoon. Already he was looking forward.
His impetuous desire to get away from Hamingburgh was blind obedience to an instinct of his youth to have done with things finished. He was most incredibly young. His late agony for Miranda left him only the more sensitive to small things that tended to be more freshly written upon his mind. It might crudely be said that his first impulse was to forget Miranda. He had in a few hours burnt out the passion of several years; and he already was seeking unawares fresh fuel to light again his fire upon a hearth which suddenly was cold.
The intensity of his need to feel again the blow which his checked aspiration towards Miranda had so suddenly kindled was leading him blindly out and away from her. Paradoxically he was starting away from Miranda upon a pilgrimage to find her—a pilgrimage which could only come full circle when again the passion she had raised could be felt and recognised. The penalty of his early visitation by the Promethean spark was about to be exacted. Henceforth life must be a restless and a perpetual adventure. London now was his immediate quest, a quest which seemingly had nothing now to do with Miranda, though ultimately it confessed her.
A mild excitement struggled into his mind as the train plunged him deeper and deeper into the city. London, the centre of the world, was spread before him.
He took rooms in Cursitor Street at the top of a tall building. His sitting-room opened upon Chancery Lane. There was a sober gateway into a quadrangle which suggested Oxford.
That evening Peter, muffled in a heavy coat, rode for hours upon the omnibuses. His first excursion, in the early evening, presented the workers of London pouring home. The perpetual roar and motion of this multitude soothed Peter, and gradually crushed in him all sense of personal loss. He began to feel how small was his drop of sorrow. At a crossing of many streets he saw a man knocked down by a horse. The hum and drift of London hardly paused. The man was quickly lifted into a cab and hurried away. Many passengers in the waiting omnibuses on the pavement were unaware that anything had happened. The incident profoundly affected Peter. In this great torrent of lives it seemed that the mischance of one was of no importance.
Late at night he stood in the bitter cold outside one of the theatres. The doors were suddenly flung open, and the street was broken up with jostling cabs and a babel of shouting and whistling. Delicately dressed women waited on the pavement or were whirled away in magnificent, shining cars. Peter caught some of their conversation: fragments of new plans for meeting, small anxieties as to whether some trivial pleasure would be quite perfect, comments on the play they had seen—wisps of talk reflecting beautiful, proud lives.
In a few moments the street was silent again. The wretched loafers who had swarmed about the doors, thrusting forward their services, vanished as swiftly as they had appeared.
For the next few days Peter tramped London from end to end. He realised its bitter contrasts and brutal energy. He lived only with his Oxford books and with this growing vision of modern life superficially inspected. He began to think. He did not look for any of the men he knew, but brooded and watched alone.
From his window in the morning he saw the workers pass—girl-clerks and respectable young men, afterwards the solicitors; and, passing through the gates in front of him, men with shining hats, keen-faced and seeming full of prosperous respectability. A man with one arm sold papers from a stand at the corner. Several times, as the day passed, a pale and urgent youth would fly down the street on a bicycle, dropping a parcel of papers beside the man with one arm. Peter traced these bicycles one day to a giant building where the papers were printed.
Peter read in the middle part of the morning. For lunch he went East into the City or West into the Strand. In the East he lunched beside men of commerce—men who ate squarely and comfortably from the joint or grill. West he lunched with clerks and people from the shops, with actors and journalists, publishers and secretaries.
In the afternoon Peter sometimes walked into the region of parks and great houses. He saw the shops and the women. Bond Street particularly fascinated him. Somehow it seemed just the right place for the insolent and idle people who at night flashed beside him in silk and fur. One afternoon he went at random from far West to far East, touching extremes, and once he went by boat to Greenwich, curiously passing the busy and wonderful docks. He knew also the limitless drab regions to the north and west—cracks between London and the better suburbs.
Gradually the monster took outline and lived in his brain. He watched the lesser people passing from their work and followed them to villas in Hammersmith or Streatham. The shiny hats be tracked to Kensington; the furred women in Bond Street to some near terrace or square.
All that Peter saw, or filled in for himself, though it took shape in his mind, did not yet drive him into an attitude. He was interested. The sleeping wretches on the Embankment; men who stopped him for pence, women who stole about the streets by night, were all part of this vivid and varied life he was learning to know. It was not yet called to account. It was just observed.
But the train was laid for an intellectual explosion. London waited to be branded as a city of slaves, with beggary in the streets and surfeit in men's houses.
He went one evening to a theatre. A popular musical comedy was running into a second edition. Peter had never before visited a theatre since as a boy he had seen the plays of Shakespeare presented by a travelling company at home.
He watched the people from an upper part of the house. The women attracted him most. They were more easily placed than the men. He could better imagine their lives. Their faces and clothes and manners were more eloquent of position and character. Peter was amazed at the diversity of the stalls—substantial dames, platitudes in flesh and blood, whom he instinctively matched with the men who lunched solidly to the east of Fleet Street; women, beside them, who breathed ineffable distinction; vivacious young girls bright with pleasure and health; women, beside them, boldly putting a final touch to an elaborate complexion. Other parts of the house were more of a kind. The balcony beneath him presented a solid front of formal linen and dresses in the mean of fashion. Topping all, in the gallery, was a dark array of people, notably drab in the electric blaze.
Except from the conversation of his Oxford friends Peter was quite unprepared for the entertainment that followed. At first it merely bewildered him. The perfunctory sex pantomime between the principal players; recurring afflictions of the chorus into curious movements; the mechanical embracing and caressing; the perpetual erotic innuendo—this was all so unintelligible and strange, so entirely outside all that Peter felt and knew about life, that his imagination hesitated to receive it. Gradually, however, there stole into his brain a mild disgust.
Finally there was a ballet. Its principal feature was a stocking dance. Eight young women appeared in underclothing, and eight of their total sixteen legs were clad in eight black stockings—the odd stockings being evenly divided. The first part of the ballet consisted in eight black stockings being drawn upon the eight legs which were bare. The second part of the ballet consisted in removing eight original black stockings from the legs adjacent. The ballet was performed to music intended to seduct, and the girls crooned an obligato to the words, "Wouldn't you like to assist us?"
Peter flushed into astonishment and anger. He felt as if a strange hand had suddenly drawn the curtain from the most secret corner of his being. He felt as though he had been publicly stripped. He drew himself tightly back into his seat.
The curtain dropped, and the lights went up for an interval. People in the stalls talked and smiled. No flutter of misgiving troubled the marble breasts of the great ladies. Men looked as before into the eyes of their women. Nothing, it seemed, had happened.
Peter was amazed—his brain on fire with vague phrases of contempt. His fingers shook in a passion of wrath as he gathered up his hat and coat.
Missing his way, he went into the bar. It was crowded with white-fronted men, their hats set rakishly back, discussing with freedom and energy the quality of the entertainment. Nothing of what Peter had seen or felt seemed to have touched them. Suddenly Peter was greeted:
Hullo, Paragon!
The Hon. Freddie Dundoon was a Gamaliel man—one for whom Peter and the college generally had much contempt, an amiable fool, of good blood, but, as sometimes happens, of no manners or intelligence.
Peter muttered a greeting and passed on. But he was not so easily to get away. Dundoon caught him by the arm.
You're not going? he protested.
Yes, I am, said Peter, turning away his head. He did not like people who breathed into his face.
Stuff. Come and have a brandy and soda.
No, thanks.
What's the hurry?
Peter stood in bitter patience, too exasperated to speak.
Won't you really have a drink? Dundoon persisted.
No, thanks, Peter wearily repeated.
Come home and see the mater. She's your sort. Books and all that.
Many thanks, said Peter more politely. "I'm afraid I can't."
Sorry you won't stop. I'd take you to Miss Beryl. Third stocking from the right.
Curse you. Let me get out of this.
Peter wrenched his arm rudely away. He blundered into a pendulous fat man in the door, and turned to apologise. Dundoon was still looking after him, his jaw fallen in a vacant surprise.
Peter thankfully breathed the cold pure air of the street. He walked at random. He tried to collect himself, to discover why he had felt so bitterly ashamed, so furiously angry. His young flesh was in arms. He had seen a travesty of something he felt was, in its reality, great and clean. His senses rebelled against the mockery to which they had been invited. Sex was coming to the full in Peter. It waited in his blood and brain. He was conscious in himself of a sleeping power, and conscious that evening of an attempt to degrade it. He shrank instinctively.
Men at Gamaliel had called him a Puritan. He chafed at the term, feeling in himself no hostility or distrust of life. It was the sly, mechanical travesty of these things, peeping out of their talk, which offended him. To-night he had seen this travesty offered to a great audience of men and women. Brooding on a secret which had painted the butterfly and tuned the note of an English bird, he had seen it to-night, for the first time, as a punctual gluttony. Impatiently he probed into the roots of his anger. It was not sex which thus had frightened him, but its prostitution in the retinue of formal silliness.
The audience he found incredible. Either the entertainment meant nothing at all or it was hideously profane. But the witnesses, whose diversity of class, sex, age, and habit he had so enviously noted before the curtain rose, seemed to see nothing at all. Mentally he made an exception of the man from Gamaliel. He at any rate seemed to have a scale of intelligible values—a scale whereby the third stocking from the right could be accurately placed.
Peter had walked for about an hour. He had wandered in a circle and found himself again outside the theatre he had left. The people were streaming on to the pavement, unaffectedly happy after an evening of formal fun—men and women who had been held in the grip of life, or who stood, as Peter stood, upon the threshold, yet who apparently did not object to witness a parody of their great adventure in a ballet of black stockings. He watched the street noisily emptying as the audience scattered. Soon he stood lonely and still, tired of the puzzle, his anger exhausted.
A hand was slipped gently under his arm. He looked into a pretty childish face, and realised that the woman was addressing him.
You are waiting? she suggested.
Peter stared at her for a moment—not realising. She met him with a professional smile, her eyes filmy with a challenge, demurely evading him. He understood, and shrank rudely away from her, with a quick return of his anger. He saw in her face an effort to steel herself against his impulsive recoil. He felt the repercussion of her shame.
But it passed. Her mouth hardened. She took her hand from his arm, and mocking him with a light apology, slipped quietly away.
Peter moved impetuously forward. He felt a warm friendliness for the woman in whom he had read a secret agony. For the first time that evening he had come into touch with a fellow. She, too, felt something of what was troubling him. His gesture of sympathy was not perceived. He watched her dwindling down the street, and started to follow her. She was allied with him against a world which had conspired to degrade them.
Then he saw she was no longer alone. She stood talking with a man upon the pavement. Her companion hailed a cab, and they drove away together, passing Peter where he had paused, transfixed with a pain at his heart.
Was it jealousy? Peter flung out his hands at the stars; tears of impotent rage came into his eyes. The pain he endured was impersonal jealousy for a creature desecrated. He was jealous not for the woman whose soul for a moment he had touched, but for life itself profaned.
All that night, with his window wide to the cold air, Peter pondered the life of London. Early next day, his head confused with grasping at ideas whereby intellectually to express his disgust, he went into the streets.
He walked into a broad Western thoroughfare famous for cheap books. Embedded among the more substantial warehouses was an open stall which Peter had frequently noticed. The books in this shop were always new, always cheap, very strangely assorted, and mostly by people of whom Peter had never heard. There were plays, pamphlets, studies in economy and hygiene, in mysticism and the suffrage, trade-unionism and lyric poetry, Wagner and sanitation. Peter looked curiously at an inscription in gold lettering above the door: "The Bomb Shop."
The keeper of the stall came forward as Peter lingered. He was tall, with disordered hair, neatly dressed in tweeds. He looked at Peter in a friendly way—obviously accessible.
You are reading the inscription? he said politely.
What does it mean? Peter asked.
Have you looked at any of the books?
They seemed to be mixed.
They are in one way all alike.
How is that?
Explosive.
The keeper of the stall looked curiously at Peter, and began to like his ingenuous face.
Come into the shop, he said, and led the way into its recesses.
This is not an ordinary shop, he explained, as Peter began to read some titles. "I am a specialist."
What is your subject? Peter formally inquired.
Revolution. Every book in this establishment is a revolutionary book. All my books are written by authors who know that the world is wrong, and that they can put it right.
Who know that the world is wrong? Peter echoed.
That's the idea.
I know that the world is wrong, said Peter wearily. "I want to know the reason."
It's a question of temperament, said the bookman. "Some like to think it is a matter of diet or hygiene. Here is the physiological, medical, and health section. Some think it is a question of beauty and ugliness. The art section is to your right. Or perhaps you are an economist?"
Peter, who had not yet compassed irony, looked curiously at his new friend.
Seriously? he said at last, and paused irresolutely.
You want me to be serious?
I've been in London for five days. Last night I was at a theatre. Then a woman spoke to me in the street. I don't understand it.
What don't you understand?
I don't understand anything.
The bookman began to be interested.
Have you any money? he briefly inquired.
Peter pulled out a bundle of notes. "Are these any good?" he asked.
The bookman looked at the notes, and at Peter with added interest.
This is remarkable, he decided. "You seem to be in good health, and you carry paper money about with you as if it were rejected manuscript. Yet you want to know what's wrong with the world. Have you read anything?"
I have read Aristotle's Ethics, Grote's History of Greece, and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. I'm a Gamaliel man, said Peter.
The bookman's eyes were dancing.
Can you spend five pounds at this shop?
Yes, said Peter dubiously.
Very well. I'll make you up a parcel. You shall know what is wrong with the world. You will find that most of the violent toxins from which we suffer are matched with anti-toxins equally violent. This man, for instance, said the bookman, reaching down a volume, "explains that liberty is the cause of all our misfortunes."
He began to put together a heap of books on the counter.
Nevertheless, he continued, adding a volume to the heap, "a too rigid system of State control is equally to blame. Here, on the other hand, is a book which tells us that London is unhappy because the sex energy of its inhabitants is suppressed and discouraged. Here, again, is a book—Physical Nirvana—which condemns sex energy as the root of all human misery. You tell me that last night a woman spoke to you in the street. Here is a writer who explains that she is a consequence of long hours and low wages. But she is equally well explained by her own self-indulgence and love of pleasure."
He broke off, the books having by this time grown to a pile.
There is a lot to read, said Peter.
It seems a lot, the bookman reassured him. "But these modern people are easy thinkers."
Peter looked suspiciously at the bookman. "You don't take these books very seriously yourself."
But I've read them, said the bookman. "You'd better read them too. It's wise to begin by knowing what people are writing and thinking. It saves time. Read these books, and burn them—most of them, at any rate."
Peter left the shop wondering why he had wasted five pounds. He drifted towards Trafalgar Square and met a demonstration of trade-unionists with flying banners and a brass band that played a feeble song for the people. He followed them into the square, and joined a crowd which collected about the foot of the Monument.
The speeches raised a sleeping echo in Peter's brain, a forgotten ecstasy of devotion to his father's cause. The speaker harshly and crudely denounced the luxury of the rich as founded upon the indigence of the poor, dwelling on just those brutal contrasts of London which had already touched Peter. The speaker's bitter eloquence moved him, but the narrow vulgarity of his attack was disconcerting. Peter was sure that life was not explained by the simple villainy of a few rich people.
He walked away from the crowd towards Westminster, trying to realise as an ordered whole his distracting vision of London. The dignity of Whitehall was mocked in his memory by eight black stockings, by the provoking eyes of the man at the bookshop, by the fleeting shame of a strange woman who had spoken to him in the street.
Peter thought again of his father and of the books they had read. His father had rightly rebelled. All was not well. On the other hand, Peter got no help from his father's books. They had prepared in him a revolutionary temper; but they were clearly not pertinent to anything Peter had seen. They dealt with battles that were won already—problems that had passed. Priests and Kings, Liberty and Toleration, Fraternity and Equality—all these things were historical.
Early that evening, with his window open to the noises of London, he began to struggle through the wilderness of modern revolutionary literature. Book after book he flung violently away. His quick mind rejected the slovenly thought of the lesser quacks.
At last he came upon a book of plays and prefaces by an author whose name was vaguely familiar—a name which had penetrated to Oxford. Peter began to read.
Here at last was—or seemed to be—the real thing. Soon his wits were leaping in pursuit of the most active brain in Europe—a brain, too, which dealt directly with the thronging puzzles of to-day. Peter exulted in the clean logic of this writer—the first writer he had met who wrote of the modern world.
Peter's excitement became almost painful as he found passages directly bearing upon things he had himself observed, giving them coherence, stripping away pretence. Peter, vaguely aware that life was imperfect, his mind new-stored with pictures that distressed and puzzled him, now came into touch with a keen destructive intelligence which brought society tumbling about his ears in searching analysis, impudent and rapid wit, in a rush of buoyant analogy and vivid sense—an intelligence, moreover, with a great gift of literary expression, at the same time eloquent and familiar. It seemed as if the writer were himself present in the room, talking personally to the reader.
Peter hunted from the pile of books all of this author he could find, and sat far into the night, breaking from mood to mood. Many times he audibly laughed as he caught a new glimpse of the human comedy. In turn he was angry, triumphant, and deeply pitiful. Above all, he was aware in himself of a pleasure entirely new—a pleasure in life intellectually viewed. He felt he would never again be the same after his contact with the delicate machinery of this modern mind. Once or twice he shut the book he was reading and lay back in his chair. His brain was now alive. It went forward independently, darting upon a hundred problems, ideas, and questions, things he had felt and seen.
He even began to criticise and to differ from the author whose book had shocked his brain into life. Peter had only needed the spur; and now he answered, passing in review the whole pageant of things respectable and accepted. His young intellect frisked and gambolled in the Parliament and the Churches; stripping Gamaliel; exploding categories; brandishing its fist in the noses of all reverend names, institutions, and systems; triumphantly yelling as the firm and ancient world cracked and tumbled.
Tired at last, he shut the last of many volumes and went to bed, not without a look of contempt towards the corner whither his Oxford studies had previously been hurled. His brain shouted with laughter in despite of his learned University. Derisively he shut his eyes, too weary to be quite sure whether he precisely knew what he was deriding.
He woke late in the morning, the winter sun shining brilliantly into his room. Revolutionary literature lay to right and left—the small grey volumes which had precipitated his intellectual catastrophe quietly conspicuous in a small heap by themselves. Peter walked to the window and looked into the street. It was altogether the same, with men of law in shining hats passing under the archway opposite into their quiet demesne. London stood solidly as before. Peter looked a little dubiously at the grey books. They, too, apparently were real.
Peter was at home for a day before returning to Oxford. Hamingburgh seemed to have grown very small and quiet. He felt in coming back a loss of energy. In London he had seemed at the heart of a hundred questions. He had watched the London crowds with intimacy. They were very real. He lost this reality in the quiet streets of Hamingburgh. Life ceased to ask urgently for an explanation.
He noted on his way from the station that people were moving into Miranda's empty house. But it hardly seemed to matter.
Peter enjoyed one happy evening with his mother, and left for Oxford.
But Oxford had disappeared. Where was the beautiful city—offering illimitable knowledge, sure wisdom, lovely authority? Peter had come into touch with life. He had craved to find order and beauty in the pageant of London. Now, in the stones of Oxford, he saw only the frozen ideas of a vanished age—serene accomplishment whose finality exasperated him. He looked from his window across the shaven green of a perfect lawn to the chapel tower. The hour chiming in quarters from a dozen bells marked off yet another small distance between Oxford and the living day. His disillusion of the previous term was now openly confessed and examined.
Peter was not alone. Gamaliel drew to itself some excellent brain. It was celebrated for young men prematurely wise—young men who had learned everything at twenty-two, and never afterwards added to their store. Peter became a leading character in the intellectual set. They jested in good Greek, filling their heads with knowledge they affected to despise, taking in vain the theories of their masters, merrily playing with their grand-sires' bones of learning. They snorted with delight at the efforts of their chief clerical instructor to evade the Rabelaisian Obscenities of Aristophanes or a too curious inquiry into certain social habits of old Greece. They reduced Hegel to half-sheets of paper, suggested profanely various readings for Petronius, speculated without reverence on the darker habits of mankind from Aristotle to the Junior Prior. But in all this horseplay of minds young and keen was a strain of contemptuous fatigue. Gamaliel, out of its clever youngsters, bred civil servants, politicians, or university professors. Intellectual pedantry waited for those whom Gamaliel intellectually satisfied. Intellectual cynicism—the cynicism of a firm belief that nothing is important or new—waited for those who played the game of scholarship with humour enough to find it barren.
Peter, therefore, was not alone in his reaction against the formal discipline of the College, but he was alone in the obstinate ardour of his youth. He had just discovered that life was absorbing. Though he sat far into many nights in scholarly gymnastics with his friends, he came away to watch the grey light creeping into a world he keenly wanted to understand. He jested only with his brain, driven to the game by physical energy and friendly emulation. He was never really touched by the cynicism and horse laughter of his set. He often left these meetings in a sudden access of desolation.
Peter's directors began sadly to shake their heads. They knew the symptoms—knew he was already marked for failure. The Warden gravely reasoned with him.
Mr. Paragon, he said, handing Peter his papers for the term, "these are second class."
Peter was mortified. His intellectual comrades mocked, but they also satisfied, their masters. Peter was of another fibre. He could do nothing without his entire heart. Various readings in Horace no longer fired him. The kick had gone out of his work. His brain was elsewhere.
He took the papers in silence. He could not understand his failure. Hitherto satisfying the examiners had been for Peter a matter of course.
You have neglected your reading? the Warden suggested, as Peter turned silently away.
No, sir.
Won't you take us a little more seriously?
I cannot be interested, Peter shot out impulsively.
Is this wise? the Warden gravely inquired. "We expect you to do well."
I will try, sir.
Peter was sad, but not sullen.
You owe it to the College, said the Warden, drily incisive. Then he added: "Why must you go so quickly, Mr. Paragon? You are not yet ready for things outside."
Peter was suddenly grateful. He was, at any rate, understood.
I will try with my whole soul, he ardently exclaimed.
Meanwhile, the Warden concluded with a smile, "notes on gobbets need not be written in the manner of La Rochefoucauld. There isn't time."
Peter, passing into the quadrangle, met Dundoon. He was in riding breeches. He lived in riding breeches, till they became for Peter a symbol of well-born inanity. Moreover, he was freely indulging his principal pleasure—namely, he was vigorously cracking a riding-whip, making the walls ring with snap after snap.
Hullo, he said as Peter passed within careful distance.
Idiot, muttered Peter between his teeth.
Freshly roasted by the Wuggins—What?
Dundoon, you're a damned nuisance. Put it away.
It's most important, Peter Pagger. It's most devilish important. M.F.H.—What?
Dundoon cracked his whip rather more successfully than usual. The snap tingled in Peter's brain. In a fit of temper he sprang at Dundoon, and wrenched the whip from his hand.
Dundoon looked at Peter's gleaming eyes as though he had seen the devil.
What's this? In the name of Hell what is it? he said at last.
I'm sorry, said Peter with withering humility. "Here is your whip."
He handed it back to Dundoon, who took it cautiously. Peter moved away. But Dundoon arrested him.
Peter Pagger, he said thoughtfully, "do I understand that you've been rude to me?"
As you please.
Because you'll be ragged, that's all. You'll be jolly well ragged.
The party of Dundoon was strolling up, and was invited to hear the news.
Here, you fellows. Peter Pagger has been very rude to me. What shall we do to him? Peter Pagger has been roasted by the Wuggins for his naughty life in London. Third stocking from the right—What?
Peter strode off boiling with anger.
Dundoon belonged to a set which derived principally from a famous English school. It was a set traditionally opposed to the intellectuals; indeed these two principal sets fed fat an ancient grudge. College humour mainly consisted at this time in the invention of scandalous histories by members of one set concerning members of the other. Needless to say the Paggers far excelled the Dundoons in the pith of their libels, so that the Dundoons had often to assert their supremacy in other ways. Upon one cold winter night, for example, the Paggers, one and all, retiring to rest had missed a necessary vessel. Thick snow covered the garden quadrangle, of which the Dundoons had built an immense mound upon the lawn. After three days a thaw set vigorously in, and the Junior Prior, looking from his window in the dawn, was shocked by an unutterable stack of College china mocking the doubtful virginity of the snow. The enterprises of the Dundoons were not subtle.
The Junior Prior was not at this time happy. Quite recently he had himself been one of the Dundoons. He was a young professor of mathematics; and, because he was also an astronomer, they called him Peepy. He was brilliant on paper, but an admitted failure in dealing with the men. His discipline was openly flouted.
Peter, who naturally did not know that the Junior Prior was an error of judgment, confessed by the authorities, regarded him, unfairly to Gamaliel, as typical of the place. He derided in him a wholly ineffectual and pedantic person whose dignity at Gamaliel reduced life to absurdity. Peter was barely civil to the Junior Prior. It was characteristic of the Junior Prior that he tactlessly favoured the Dundoons. They used his pet name, and paraded with him linked in familiar conversation. Naturally, when his discipline fell upon men outside the set he favoured, it was bitterly resented. It was remembered, a fact unknown to the Fellows, that in the term before Peter came to Gamaliel the Junior Prior had been pushed downstairs by a robust man from the Colonies who, though he happened to be reading theology, was old enough to be the father of the Junior Prior, and had, it was believed, actually killed people somewhere in Mexico.
The incident between Peter and Dundoon naturally splashed rather rudely into these College politics. Clearly it needed very little to raise a scandal. One of the Dundoons talked with Peter in the boat that afternoon, telling him that vengeance was intended, but Peter was wearily contemptuous.
In the evening he sat peacefully at his window. To-day they had paddled far, passing through the locks to lower reaches of the river. Peter was tired and contemplative, his brain still rocking with the boat and filled with desolate echoes of shouting over lonely water.
Big Tom was belling his hundred-and-one. The lawn was deserted and very quiet. Peter could recover distantly the rhythm of the town band. He remembered the night of his first introduction to the dons of Gamaliel—the infinite promise that once had sounded in the Oxford bells.
A riotous party broke into the far corner. Peter was not long in doubt as to who they were. Dundoon was cracking his whip.
Peter sat still as they came irregularly towards him.
Peter Pagger, said Dundoon, not quite certain of his syllables, "we have come to rag you. Have you any objections?"
He stood below on the grass. He had been drinking and was very serious.
None at all, said Peter indifferently. He looked down, as it were, on a group of animals.
He hasn't any objections, said Dundoon confidentially to his supporters.
Listen to me, he continued, addressing the open window. "This is most important. You've been very rude to me. What are you going to do about it?"
I'm sitting here, said Peter.
He heard them blundering up the wooden staircase. He might have sported a strong oak, locking them out until his friends had come together. But it hardly seemed worth while.
He leaned upright by the open window, his hands in his pockets, as the Dundoons playfully rearranged the furniture. The etiquette on an occasion like this was simple. He must not make himself ridiculous by taking too seriously the frolic of men not entirely sober. Neither must he allow himself to be insulted. Peter looked carelessly on, very calm but alert to decide when the joke had gone as far as the decorum of Gamaliel allowed.
One of the Dundoons was arranging Peter's coal neatly upon the mantelpiece. Another was turning his pictures to the wall. His tablecloth and hearthrug were transposed. His wardrobe was assorted into heaps upon the floor and labelled for a sale by auction.
Suddenly Peter saw that Dundoon was about to empty a water-jug into the bed. Peter passed swiftly towards him.
I don't think we'll do that, he said. "It would be nasty."
You've been very rude to me, said Dundoon, dangerously tilting the jug.
Peter grasped him firmly by the arm and took the jug away. He put it back into the corner.
Dundoon looked at Peter for a moment in drunken meditation. Then he put his hand on Peter's shoulder.
Peter Pagger, he said, "this is most important. Sorry to say—absolutely necessary to cleanse and purify unwholesome bed." And he walked to the corner.
Peter followed him.
Dundoon, he said sharply.
Dundoon turned and found Peter at his elbow. Peter shook his fist under the nose of Dundoon.
Pick up that water-jug and I'll punch your damned head.
Here, you fellows, shouted Dundoon. "Come and hear what Peter Pagger is saying. He's been very rude to me."
The Dundoons crowded into the little bedroom, and someone called: "Take away his trousers!"
Peter stood back. There was an uproar and a movement towards him.
Mind yourselves, he shouted. "I'm going to fight."
There was a knock at the bedroom door, and silence fell suddenly.
Come in, called Peter, not without relief.
The Junior Prior stood in the doorway. He had heard an uproar in Peter's rooms, and he did not immediately see the company.
Mr. Paragon, he said with the dignity of a sergeant, "what's all this noise?"
He had got as far as this when Dundoon suddenly put a fond arm around his neck.
It's all right, Peepy, he said. "Peter Pagger's been very rude to me."
The Junior Prior changed colour, and Peter enjoyed his confusion. The Junior Prior's attempt at discipline collapsed. He had come to assert his authority over a mere member of the college, but he had fallen among friends.
Don't you think this has gone far enough? He almost pleaded with Dundoon.
Peter Pagger's been very rude to me.
Yes. But I think you ought to come away.
But, Peepy, this is most important.
One of the Dundoons, more alive to the position than the rest, hastily pushed his leader from the room. Already the other men had discreetly vanished.
What are you doing? Dundoon protested.
Come out of it, you fool, whispered the man of tact. "Don't you see you're making it awkward for Peepy?"
Awkward for Peepy? said Dundoon very audibly. "Why is it awkward for Peepy?"
The Junior Prior went scarlet under Peter's dancing eyes.
Your room seems to have suffered, he dimly smiled. "I must look to Dundoon," and he dived hastily into the passage. Peter heard a sharp scuffle. He saw, in his mind's eye, the embarrassed man of authority forcing his tactless crony from sight and hearing. He flung up his hands in glee.
The story did not lose in Peter's telling. Peter improved his description as the days went by. "Awkward for Peepy," passed into the language.
The Paggers, one and all, decided that it would be extremely awkward for Peepy if, after collapsing before Dundoon, he should ever again actively interfere with themselves.
The term drew to an end. Peter's boat went head of the river in five bumps. There was a large dinner in the College hall, and a small dinner of Peter's friends upon the following day. This last dinner had important consequences. The toasts were many, and Peter was not a seasoned man. He put vine leaves in his hair, and scarcely conscious of his limbs, danced lightly into Gamaliel quadrangle. It was a dinner at Peter's expense, exclusively of Paggers; and at one o'clock in the morning they began to do each what his brain imagined.
Peter secured a beautiful enamel bath which belonged to Dundoon, and for an hour he could not be interrupted. To sit in the bath of Dundoon, and to clatter hideously from flight to flight of the stone steps of the College hall was a perfect experience. It never palled. Meanwhile Peter's friends had discovered an open window of the buttery, and announcements were made to Peter from time to time. Peter sat gravely in his bath and smiled.
Rows of chickens for the evening meal, said a man from the deeps of the larder. The chickens were handed out and spread decently upon the lawn.
Reports were made of a wonderful breakfast waiting to be cooked.
How well they provide for us, said Peter, gazing upon rows of fish, joints of beef and mutton, hams and sides of bacon. Then Peter stood up in his bath and prophesied:
Gentlemen, he said. "All kinds of food grow upon trees of the field. I should not be at all surprised—" He broke off, sunk in contemplation of a spreading elm.
Then he again carried his bath to the head of the steps, and his friends were busy for the next half hour. At the end of that time the trees were heavy with strange fruit.
Peter was then invited to join in a choral dance; but he would not leave his bath.
He felt a sudden need for violent rhythm, and began heavily to beat the bath of Dundoon.
Windows were flung up, and protesting shouts were heard from sleepy men in garments hastily caught up. The Junior Prior, who had as long as possible refrained, saw he must intervene. He flung on a few necessary clothes and issued from his turret.
Peter lay directly in his path. He paused irresolutely at the foot of the steps.
Mr. Paragon.
The Junior Prior asserted his authority with misgiving.
Sir?
Go to your rooms.
Peter descended the steps unsteadily. Then he stopped, looking wistfully towards his bath. It was too much. He began to climb back again.
Mr. Paragon, repeated the Junior Prior.
Sir?
Need you do that again?
This, objected Peter with the faintest parody of Dundoon, "is most important."
The Junior Prior was seen to flush in the lamplight.
Mr. Paragon, come down!
Peter sighed and again started to descend. He missed a step and fell rudely towards the Junior Prior, who stepped back to receive him. But the Junior Prior caught his slippered heel in a low iron railing that skirted the lawn, and fell with his legs in the air. Peter, caught by the parapet, gazed thoughtfully at the legs of the Junior Prior.
The Junior Prior was loosely clad. He had put his legs hastily into a pair of trousers, kept in place by the last abdominal button. Disordered by his sudden fall, the ends of the trousers projected beyond his feet.
Everything happened in a moment. Peter saw his enemy delivered up. His bland good-fellowship of the evening surrendered to Berserker rage. He stooped, and in a flash caught hold of the loose ends of the trousers. Unconscious of his enormous strength, he pulled sharp and wild. The button gave with a snap, and Peter, staggered for a moment by the recoil, was next seen rushing up the lawn, a strange banner streaming about his head.
Peter's friends were awed into silence. The ceremony which so largely figured in conversation at Gamaliel had at last been performed, and it had been performed on the Junior Prior.
Peter, in mad rush, came upon a meditative figure. The Warden, working late into the night, was at last disturbed. He had arrived in time to see Peter staggering back from a recumbent figure in the middle distance. He watched Peter in his furious career down the lawn, and saw Peter's miserable victim glimmer hastily away into the far turret. The Warden was not ignorant of College politics. He already suspected that this was no ordinary achievement.
Well, Mr. Paragon, he said as Peter forged into view. "Are these your property?"
He caught at the trousers, and Peter, struck comparatively sober, decided to temporise.
They are not my property, sir. They are, f-f-th' moment, borrowed.
Peter felt very politic and clever.
Who is the owner of this property? asked the Warden.
I'm sorry, sir, but I cannot tell.
Peter was beginning to feel how impossible it was to face the fact that he had removed the trousers of the Junior Prior. He could not tell the Warden. It seemed indelicate. He wanted to cover the shame of his victim.
You know, of course, to whom this property belongs? the Warden persisted.
Yes, sir.
But you refuse to say.
Peter was struck miserably silent. He did not like to deny the Warden, but he could not utter the outrage he had committed.
Very well, said the Warden. "I will impound the property. Doubtless it will be claimed."
He quietly took possession of the trousers and turned to go.
Mr. Paragon.
Yes, sir?
I rely on you to see that the College is in bed within the next ten minutes. I shall send for you in the morning. Good night.
Good night, sir.
Peter soberly reported the interview to his friends, and they decided to sleep.
Already the zest was beginning to go out of life. A comfortless grey light was beginning to peer dimly at the hanging burden of the trees.
Peter sat wakefully at his window. His revolt against the discipline of Gamaliel came merely to this—that he had removed the trousers of the Junior Prior. He had been noisy and foolish, and it had seemed the best joke in the world that his friends should give the laborious College servants at least an hour's extra work to do in the morning. A large side of bacon hanging grotesquely in the pale light intolerably mocked him from the noble elm beside his window. He felt very old and tired. In the morning he was summoned to the Warden's house. The Warden met him seriously, as though, Peter thought, he instinctively knew how to make him ashamed.
Well, Mr. Paragon, the property has been identified.
I'm sorry, sir.
I, too, am sorry, Mr. Paragon. You are sent down for the remaining days of the term, and I shall seriously have to consider whether I can allow you to come back after the vacation. I suppose you realise that the discipline of the College must be observed?
Yes, sir.
The Junior Prior, the Warden continued with perfect gravity, "has been offered an important post in a Japanese university. Perhaps he will accept it. He desires to study the refraction of light in tropical atmospheres. It may therefore be possible for you to join us again next term. Otherwise I am afraid we shall have to strike you from the books. I think you understand the position, Mr. Paragon?"
Yes, sir.
Peter cut short his friends when they asked for an account of his roasting.
The Wuggins, he said emphatically, "is a big man. I'm going down by the seven-forty to Hamingburgh."
Peter wanted to get away without fuss, but the Paggers would not hear of it. It was decided there must be a procession to the railway station. All the folly had gone out of Peter, but he was now helplessly a hero.
The procession started from the College gates. Fifty hansom-cabs, decorated with purple crape, formed up under the Warden's windows. The town band was hired to play a solemn march. Peter, compelled to bear the principal part in a joke which he no longer appreciated, was borne to the leading cab pale with mortification. The slow journey to the station seemed interminable. All Oxford was grinning from the creeping pavement. At last the station was reached. Peter leaped from duress, heartily cursed his friends, and, safe at last in the train, began to wonder how his uncle would receive him.
The Warden of Gamaliel had watched Peter's funeral procession from behind the curtains of his window. He smiled as he saw Peter borne forth, clearly reflecting in his expressive young face an ineffectual dislike of his notoriety. The Warden turned from the window as the strains of a solemn march weakened along the street. He smiled again that day at odd times, but sometimes he pressed his lips together and shook his head.
Peter Paragon is a good boy, he told the Fellows at dinner, "but I don't in the least know what we are going to do with him."
Peter spent the vacation at home solidly reading and digesting without enthusiasm the Oxford books. He soon heard from his friends that the Junior Prior had vanished, and that he himself would be invited to return. He spent his days regularly between classical literature for a task and modern literature for pleasure.
Mrs. Paragon gravely listened to Peter's story of his indiscipline. She did not, of course, find it in any way ridiculous. She brooded upon it as evidence of Peter's abounding life, and she instinctively trembled. Peter's energy was beginning to be dangerous.
Peter's uncle flung up his great head and laughed. He made Peter, to Peter's rage, recur to the story again and again, asking for unspeakable details. His red face shone and twinkled. He roared with delight.
In the middle of the vacation the author who first had stirred Peter to intellectual enthusiasm came to Hamingburgh, and talked Socialism to a local branch of the Superior Socialists. Peter was wrought to so high an admiration of the art with which the great man handled his audience, by the clarity, vigour, and wit of his speaking, that he dared at the end to ask publicly some very pertinent and searching questions. The speaker could not answer him immediately; but afterwards promised to write to Peter if Peter would remind him.
Peter thus became one of the fortunate correspondents of an author whose private letters were better than his published works. Before he returned to Oxford he already had a small pile, thumbed with continuous reading.
Peter acquitted himself reasonably to the satisfaction of his masters when he returned to Gamaliel. He wrote without vigour or interest, but his grim industry saved him from absolute failure. All through the term he stuck hard at the necessary books, and trained hard for the summer eights. His spare energy now went into socialist oratory, blue books, and public speaking. He made sudden appearances at the Oxford union, cutting into the debates with ferocious contempt for the politics there discussed. To Peter the world was very wrong, and it seemed easy to put it right. He denounced the imbecility of the party game—played in the midst of so much urgently calling to be done. He drowned his audiences in terrible figures and unanswerable economy. He extirpated landlords and destroyed wagery. He abolished the oldest profession in the world as accidental to a society badly run. Peter became famous as an orator. It was confidently said that next term he would be given a place on the Committee of the union. One evening he was taken by the Proctors, prophesying from a cart in the Broad. He was fined, ostensibly for appearing ungowned in the streets at an unlawful hour.
Peter's access of political fervour was aggravated this term by an unfortunate accident. He sprained a tendon of his leg, and had to drop out of the boat a few days before the races. The effect of this physical relaxation was to increase his energy for discontent. For several blissful days he lay upon his back in a punt upon the Char, happy to be lazy, to breathe the heavy scent of hawthorn, to be rocked by noises of water and of voices over the water. Then he began to dream; and blue books marched in the avenues of his brain, mocking the elaborate idleness of the afternoon. The week itself of the races forced once again upon his imagination the contrasts he had seen in London. The merry pageant of the river, brilliant with summer dresses; the pleasant evening parties at the Old Mitre where his mother and uncle were staying; everywhere an expensive and careless life accepted as normal—these things were bright against a dark background of neglect and oppression. Peter was now a very serious young man.
His brooding at this time was only lightened during the summer week by the presence in Oxford of his mother and uncle. There was much to arrange and to observe. Peter had been afraid of his uncle. How would his uncle behave among the Oxford people? Peter was not really happy until he had dined very near Dundoon and his party. The father of Dundoon was a nobleman with 10,000 acres of urban land. Yet, Peter cynically reflected, you could scarcely distinguish him from Uncle Henry. He, too, had a large red face, ate with more heartiness than delicacy, and talked in an accent entirely his own. Peter breathed more freely. Instinctively he began a peroration as to aristocracy true and false, with interpolated calculations as to the possible unearned increment upon 10,000 acres conveniently near London.
Uncle Henry, of course, had to be shown exactly where the Junior Prior had fallen; and Peter had to stand by, embarrassed and fuming, while Uncle Henry rehearsed the scene in pantomime.
Peter was proud and glad to see how rapidly his friends came to praise and admire his mother. They instinctively felt her strength and peace. They began at once to confide in her, though her answers were rarely of more than one syllable. Of all Peter's friends Lord Marbury liked her best.
Marbury was at this time Peter's nearest friend at Gamaliel. Peter had met Marbury only this last term. He had one day sat next to a stranger at dinner. Finding the stranger to be a man of excellent intelligence Peter had begun vigorously to denounce the aristocracy of England. The stranger had mildly protested that English lords were rather more various in character than Peter supposed, and that perhaps they had a use in politics and society. Peter contested this, overwhelming his new friend with facts, figures, arguments, and devices for buying out all the vested interests of the nobility at a reasonable figure. Two days after, at a college ceremony which required the men to answer to their names, Peter heard with distaste that a new title was being called. He looked contemptuously round, and to his dismay saw his new friend rise in answer. Marbury smiled pleasantly at Peter and chaffed him in the best of humour.
The friendship rapidly grew. Marbury was all that a man of lively interest and fancy can be who has mixed from a boy with polite citizens of the world. He knew all that Peter had yet to learn; but Peter's world of ideas attracted him as a country unexplored. Peter less consciously drew towards Marbury as one who seemed, in all but purely intellectual things, unaccountably wise. He really felt the curb of Marbury's knowledge of things as they are, whereas Marbury delighted in Peter's enthusiasm for things as they should be.
Marbury's charm for Peter rested, too, upon his ability to talk in a perfectly natural and unaffected way of intimate and simple things. Marbury at once declared his pleasure in Peter's mother. His own people had not come to Oxford for the races, and he devoted himself almost entirely to Mrs. Paragon.
It's pleasant just to carry her mackintosh, he said to Peter one evening after they had come from the hotel.
I'm glad you like her.
Like her? protested Marbury. "Don't be inadequate. She is simply wonderful."
Peter asked himself how Marbury had discovered this.
What have you been talking about all the evening? he inquired.
I haven't the least idea. Mostly nonsense.
Then how do you know she is wonderful?
Peter, said Marbury, "sometimes you annoy me. It's true that I haven't the least idea what your mother thinks about the English aristocracy or George Meredith. I simply know that your mother is wonderful."
Peter leant eagerly forward:
I understand how you feel.
Good, jerked Marbury. "I'm glad you are not quite insensible."
He looked reflectively at Peter, and continued:
I am almost hopeful about you now that I've met your mother. I cannot help feeling there must be some sanity in you somewhere. But where did you get all your nonsense?
My father was shot down in the street, said Peter briefly.
I'm sorry, said Marbury after a pause. "I did not know."
The summer races were run to an end, and only three weeks of term remained. Peter, physically unemployed, accumulated stores of energy. He became insufferably violent in conversation, and Marbury, after telling him to put his head in ice, said he would have no more to do with him till he no longer addressed his friends as if they were a public meeting.
That Peter did not that term fly into flat rebellion was due to a lack of opportunity. For a similar reason he continued to get through another year between Oxford and Hamingburgh. His weeks at home with his mother were like deep pools of a stream between troubled reaches. At Oxford Marbury, with his imperturbable sanity and good humour, kept him a little in check. They were inseparable. Peter would not again go on the river. He bought a horse and rode with Marbury through the winter and spring in the country about Oxford, or sailed with him in the desolate river beyond Port Meadow. Meantime he gored at his books like an angry bull, was the favourite hot gospeller of the Oxford Socialists, and was elected Secretary of the union as an independent candidate—a fact recorded with misguided enthusiasm in the Labour press. Peter's first summer term was the model of the two which followed; and his second summer term might harmlessly have passed like the first had not Marbury been called away. Marbury was his uncle's heir, and his uncle was not expected to live through the year. Henceforth Marbury would have to spend most of his time upon his uncle's estate. Thus, in the singing month of May, and in his second year, Peter was left unbridled.
Marbury had been away for three weeks when Peter was arrested one morning by a placard outside the Oxford theatre. A play was announced by a young dramatist who followed the lead of Peter's acknowledged master. Peter knew the play well, knew it was finer in quality than the majority of plays performed in London or elsewhere. There had been preliminary difficulties with the Censor as to the licensing of this play, but in the end it had been passed for public performance—not until the intellectual press had exhaustively discussed the absurdities implied in the Censor's hesitation. Peter knew by heart all the arguments for and against the Censorship of plays. Musical comedy and French farce ruled at the Oxford theatre—productions which Peter had publicly denounced as intentionally offered for the encouragement of an ancient profession. He was, therefore, agreeably pleased to read the announcement of a play morally edifying and intellectually brilliant.
But two days later a mild sensation fluttered the gossips of North Oxford and splashed into the conversation of the Common rooms. The Vicegerent of the University, who had an absolute veto upon performances at the Oxford theatre, suddenly decided that the play must not be presented.
Peter heard the news at dinner. For the remaining weeks of the term he was a raging prophet. Too excited to eat, he left the table and walked under the trees, smouldering with plans for exposing this foolish and complacent tyranny.
First he would exhaust clearly and forcibly upon paper its thousand absurdities. Peter wrote far into the night, caught in a frenzy of inspired logic. Having argued his position point by point, having rooted it firm in reason, morality, and justice, he flung loose the rein of his indignation. He ended by the first light of day, and read over his composition in a glow of accomplishment. Surely this conspiracy must collapse in a shout of laughter.
He took his MS. to a friend who at that time was editing the principal undergraduate magazine. Half an hour later he returned to his room gleaming with fresh anger. His friend had refused to publish his MS., saying it was too rude, and that he did not want to draw the evil eye of authority. Peter called him coward, and shook his fist under the editorial nose.
In the evening he arranged with a local publisher to print a thousand copies in pamphlet form. Later he attended a seminar class under the Vicegerent, and at the end of the hour waited to speak with him.
Well, Mr. Paragon?
Peter was outwardly calm, but for sixty interminable minutes he had boiled with impatient anger.
Sir, I wish to resign from the seminar.
The Vicegerent detected a tremor of suppressed excitement. He looked keenly at Peter.
What are your reasons? he asked.
I need more time for private reading.
For example?
I am interested in the modern theatre.
Peter had intended merely to resign. He had not intended to offer reasons. But he could not resist this. The words shot rudely and clumsily out of him.
The Vicegerent saw a light in Peter's eye. He was a man of humour, and he smiled.
H'm. This, I take it, is a sort of challenge? he said.
It is a protest, Peter suggested.
The Vicegerent twinkled, and Peter helplessly chafed. The Vicegerent put a gentle hand upon his arm.
Well, Mr. Paragon, I'm sorry your protest has taken this particular form. I shall be sorry to lose you. However, your protest seems to be quite in order. So I suppose you are at liberty to make it.
And to publish my reasons? Peter flared.
I have published mine, smiled the Vicegerent.
He took up a copy of the Oxford magazine, underlined a brief passage in blue pencil, and handed it to Peter. Peter read:
The Vicegerent has decided that Gingerbread Fair is not a suitable play for performance at the Oxford Theatre. He does not think the moral of the play is one that can suitably be offered to an audience of young people. It will be remembered that this play was licensed by the Lord Chamberlain only after serious consideration of its ethical purport.
Peter choked.
These are not reasons, he flamed.
Mr. Paragon, said the Vicegerent, "this is not for discussion."
Peter dropped the magazine upon the table between them and went from the room without a word.
The Paggers joyfully roared when Peter's pamphlet issued from the press. Peter had improved it in proof with an Appendix, wherein, helped by his learned friends, he presented an anthology of indecorous passages collected from classical texts recommended for study by the Examiners. Peter explained to the world that the young people whose minds must not be contaminated by Gingerbread Fair would in default of its performance spend the evening with masterpieces by Aristophanes, Petronius, and Ovid of the "ethical purport" indicated in the cited examples.
Peter posted a copy of his pamphlet to every resident Master of Arts in Oxford, and awaited the result. He expected at least to rank with Shelley in conspicuous and reputable martyrdom. But nothing happened. The Warden met him with the usual friendly smile. The Vicegerent nodded to him affably in the Corn Market. They did not seem to have suffered any rude or shattering experience. The walls of learning stood yet, solemn and grey.
Words, it seemed, were wasted. Reason was of no account. Peter was resolved somehow to be noticed. He would break down this cynical indifference of authority to truth and humour.
Upon the morning when Gingerbread Fair should first have been performed in Oxford, Peter saw its place upon the placards taken by a play from London. The picture of a young woman in lace knickerbockers was evidence that the play would abound in precisely that sort of indecency which, as Peter had proved in his pamphlet, must necessarily flourish in a Censor-ridden theatre. That this kind of play should, by authority, be encouraged at the expense of the new, clean drama of the militant men whom Peter loved, pricked him to the point of delirium. He then and there resolved that the day should end in riot.
The Paggers were ready. They cared not a straw for Peter's principles; but, when he suggested that the play at the Oxford theatre should be arrested, they rented four stage-boxes and waited for the word. Peter, at urgent speed, had leaflets printed, in which were briefly set forth the grounds on which the men of Oxford protested against a change of bill which substituted the woman in knickerbockers for Gingerbread Fair. The play dragged on. Peter waited for the bedroom, and with grim patience watched the gradual undressing of the principal lady. He intended to make a speech.
The interruption came sooner than Peter intended. He was about to scatter his leaflets and leap to the stage when an outrageous innuendo from one of the actors inspired a small demonstration from some Paggers in the pit.
Isn't it shocking? said a voice in an awed, but audible, undertone.
Order! order! shouted some people of the town.
There were counter-cries of "Shame!" and in a moment the theatre was in an uproar. Peter scattered his leaflets with a magnificent gesture and jumped on to the stage. The Paggers tumbled out of their boxes, arrested the stage manager in the act of lowering the curtain, and began to carry off the stage properties as lawful spoil.
Peter had counted on being able to make a speech—to explain his position with dignity. He did not know how quickly an uproar can be raised. Also he had reckoned without the Paggers. They wanted fun.
When it was over Peter remembered best the frightened eyes of the woman on the stage. For no reason at all madness had burst into the theatre. She heard a great noise, and saw Peter with a gleaming face leap towards her. She screamed, and continued screaming, but her voice was lost.
Meantime her husband and manager, inferring that his wife had been insulted, came rushing from the wings.
Peter vainly trying to make himself heard, suddenly felt a violent push in the back. He turned and saw a furious man, apparently speaking, but his words were drowned. This man all at once hit Peter in the face.
Peter forgot all about the Censor, and shot out hard with his left. The man went down. Peter noticed that more than one person was rolling on the floor.
Seeing another member of the player's company before him with a lifted fist he hit him hard on the jaw. This man fell away, and Peter prepared to hit another. Then he noticed that the next man to be hit was a policeman; also that the Paggers were climbing hastily back into their boxes loaded with booty. He started after them, but, as he was stepping over a prostrate carcase, the carcase gripped him by the leg. He fell to the stage with a crash, knocking his head violently on the boards.
When Peter came to himself he was in the open air. The police were disputing for his body with the Senior Proctor. He sat up and felt his head. By this time the Senior Proctor had established his rights of jurisdiction, and the police, leaving Peter to the University, departed.
When Peter was able to stand, he confessed his name and accepted a summons to appear before the Vicegerent in his court of justice. He then went back to Gamaliel.
The Paggers were assembled in his room when he returned, telling stories of the evening and dividing the spoil. There was eager competition for some of the articles, more especially for personal property of the principal lady. All such garments as she had already discarded had been thoughtfully secured. They lay in a fascinating heap upon Peter's rug. It had just been decided, when Peter arrived, that they should be knocked down to the highest bidder, and that the proceeds should be handed over to the college chaplain for charitable uses.
At sight of Peter these proceedings were interrupted. It was admitted that Peter had first claim.
Peter, they said, "has suffered."
I have an idea, said a man from the colonies. "I know what Peter would like to do."
Peter was racked with headache, and sick with a sense of futility.
Shut up, you fools, he growled at them.
Peter is ungrateful after all we have done for him; but we know what Peter would like to do with these pretty things. He would like to wrap them up in a parcel, and send them to St. James' Palace. Won't the Lord Chamberlain be surprised? We will enclose a schedule—List of Garments Discarded by Principal Lady under the Aegis of the Lord Chamberlain at the Oxford Theatre on the Fourteenth Instant.
There cannot be a schedule, said another wag. "How are we to name these pretty things?"
Our definitions will be arbitrary. Here, for instance, is a charming trifle, fragrant as flowers in April. Mark it down as 'A Transparency—Precise Function Unknown.'
Camisole, suggested a voice.
Will the expert kindly come forward?
It seemed hours before Peter, after much perfunctory ribaldry, was left alone with his remorse. The little heap of white garments accused him from the table of rowdiness and vulgarity. They filled his room with the scent of violets, and he remembered now the eyes of the woman he had so rudely frightened.
In the immediate future he saw the red tape of being formally sent down—a grave reprimand from the authorities, twinkling amusement from the Warden. They would treat him like a child. Had he not behaved like a child? All his fine passion had turned to ridicule. Peter, solitary in his room, found comfort in one thought alone. The world was waiting for him in London, where he would be received as a man, and be understood—where passion and a keen mind could be turned to high ends and worthily expended. He accused authority of his excesses, and dedicated himself afresh to resist and discredit his rulers. He was now a responsible revolutionary, with a hard world in front of him to be accused and beaten down. He thought again of his father—now a bright legend of intellectual revolt.
Next day Peter listened quietly to all that was said to him, receiving as of course an intimation that he was finally expelled from the College. This time the funeral was spared. Peter's friends were too busy packing for the vacation. His last farewell was spoken on the platform of Oxford station. Marbury, returning for a night to college, hailed him as he jumped from the cab.
Hullo, Peter, he said at once. "You're a famous man!"
Don't rot.
Have you seen the local paper?
Why?
There are some rather good headlines, answered Marbury, unfolding the sheet.
RAID UPON THE OXFORD THEATRE
SUDDEN UPROAR
DESTRUCTION OF STAGE PROPERTIES
PRINCIPAL LADY PROSTRATED WITH SHOCK
He finished reading, and handed the paper to Peter.
What on earth have you been doing? he asked, as Peter seized and devoured it.
Peter ran his eye over the lines. Reported in the common form of a local scribe it read like a drunken brawl.
Were you tight? asked Marbury briefly.
No, I was not tight, Peter snapped. "Look here, Marbury," he continued, "this wasn't a picnic. It was damn serious."
Serious?
It was a protest.
This is interesting, said Marbury. "What was it about?"
It was a protest, Peter declared with high dignity, "against the censorship of stage plays."
Marbury looked at Peter for a moment. Then went into peals of laughter. Peter looked at him intending to kill.
Don't be angry, Peter. I don't often laugh. But this is funny.
I don't agree with you.
Peter, dear boy, come away from your golden throne.
Marbury smoothed his face. "I suppose this means you're going down for good."
Thank Heaven for that!
Look me up in London. I'm going down myself next term.
Sick of it? asked Peter.
Not at all. But my uncle is far from well, and I'm next man on the estate. I have just been seeing the lawyers.
We're going different ways, Marbury.
Stuff.
I'm in the other camp, Peter insisted.
Very well, said Marbury cheerfully; "when you're tired of the other camp remember you've a friend outside. Good-bye, and good-luck."
Peter could not resist Marbury's good temper. He was beginning to feel in the wrong.
Marbury, he said, "why am I always rude?"
Marbury smiled into Peter's lighted face:
You were born younger than most of us. Meantime, your train is moving.
Peter scrambled into a passing carriage, and Marbury threw his luggage in at the window.
Peter waved him a friendly farewell, and retired to reflect upon his inveterate want of grace.
Marbury looked after the train in smiling meditation. He expected to see Peter within the year. He rather enjoyed the prospect of Peter loose among the intellectuals of London. He knew what these people were like.
Uncle Henry was at first inclined to be angry when Peter appeared for the second time a banished man. Peter wisely forebore trying to explain the motive of his riot.
The fact is, Uncle, I have had enough of Oxford, he said.
Oxford seems to have had enough of you, his uncle grumbled. "I told you to get education."
There isn't any education at Oxford. It's in London now.
What will you do in London?
I could read for the bar, Peter suggested.
Alone in London, eh? I don't think so. You want a nursemaid.
Let the mater come and keep house.
Uncle Henry reflected. "Peter," he said, "keep out of the police court. I draw the line at that."
I shall be all right in London. Oxford annoyed me, Uncle.
Very well. I leave it to your mother.
Peter's mother agreed to come to London and manage a small flat.
I shall just love to have you, mother, Peter said to her when the plans were laid.
I wonder? she said, searching his face.
You're not worried about this Oxford mess?
I'm thinking, Peter. You're so terribly impatient.
Peter himself hunted out the flat and furnished it.
Let him handle a bit of money, his uncle suggested.
Incidentally Peter learned something about the housing of people in London; something, too, of agents and speculators in housing. Finally he perched in Golder's Green in a small flat over a group of shops. The agent assured him it was a district loved by literary and artistic people.
His mother quickly followed him to London with plate and linen. A maid was engaged, and Peter settled down to happiness and comfort.
His first sensations were triumphant. He kicked his heels. The grey walls of Oxford fell away. He tramped the streets of London, and flung out the chest of a free man. Moreover, he had the zest of his new employment. He broke his young brains against the subtleties of the law.
Within a few weeks he began tentatively to know the intellectual firebrands of the time. He had sent his pamphlet concerning Gingerbread Fair to the distinguished author whose epistolary acquaintance he had made in Hamingburgh. The great man, who independently had heard the full story of Peter's assault upon the Lord Chamberlain's stage at Oxford, was tickled, and sent him an introduction to a famous collectivist pair whose salon included everybody in London who had a theory and believed in it.
Peter met Georgian poets, independent critics and reviewers, mystics of every degree, diagrammatic and futurist painters, musicians who wrote in pentametric scales, social reformers, suspected dramatists—everybody who had proved anything, or destroyed anything, or knew how the world should be run; experts upon constitutional government in the Far East, upon beautiful conduct in garden cities, upon the incidence of taxation, upon housing and sanitation, upon sweated labour, upon sex and marriage, upon vaccination and physical culture, upon food-bases, oriental religion and Hindu poetry.
Peter did not meet all these people at once. There was a period of six months during which he gradually intruded among these jarring intelligencies. During this time he was continually seeing things from a new angle and weighing fresh opinions, continually pricked to explore untrodden ways of speculation. The chase of exotic views was for a time fun enough to keep him from measuring their value.
Peter for nearly eighteen months mingled with this fussy and bitter under-world of thinkers and talkers. He listened seriously to all it had to say, at first with respect and curiosity. But gradually he grew suspicious—even hostile. As he knew these people better, and talked with them more intimately, he discovered that their energy was much of it superficial. When, in his lust for truth, he pushed into their defences, he found that many of their views were fashionable hearsay. They echoed one another. Only a few had deeply read or widely observed for themselves. Each clique had its registered commonplaces. Each was a nest of authority. Peter suffered a series of small shocks, hardly felt individually, but insensibly breaking down his faith. Often as he pushed into the mind of this person or that, thrilling to meet and clash with a pliable intelligence, he found himself vainly beating against the logical blank wall of a formula.
Among Peter's new acquaintances was the editor of a collectivist weekly Review. This man discovered Peter's literary gift and turned him loose upon the theatres. For several months Peter wrote weekly articles, with liberty to say what he pleased. Peter said what he pleased with ferocity. His articles were a weekly battery, trained upon the amusements of modern London. All went well till Peter began to quarrel with the intellectual drama of his editor. One week Peter grew bitter concerning a new stage hero of the time—the man of ideas who talks everybody down. Peter said flatly that he was tired of this fidgety puppet. It was time he was put away. The editor sent for him.
Here, Paragon, this won't do at all.
What's wrong?
You've dropped on this fellow like a sand-bag. We're here to encourage this sort of drama.
Peter put his nose into the air.
What is the name of this paper? I thought you called it the Free Lance.
You can say what you like about plays in general.
Peter then and there resigned. But he was too good a pen to lose. His editor borrowed a gallery ticket from a London daily paper, and sent Peter to attend debates in the House of Commons as an impartial critic of Parliamentary deportment and intelligence. Three weeks shattered all Peter's fixed ideas of English public life. He forgot to detest the futility of the party game—as he had at the Oxford union so persistently contrived to do—in sincere enjoyment of a perpetually interesting comedy. Moreover, the figures he most admired were the figures he should by rote have denounced. He delighted in the perfect address of a statesman he had formerly reprobated as an old-fashioned Liberal; and, listening to the speeches of the old-fashioned Liberal's principal Tory opponent, he felt he was in contact with a living and adventurous mind. Peter recognised that this man—hitherto simply regarded as an enemy of the people—was, like himself, an explorer. He was feeling his way to the truth.
Peter stood one evening in early March—it was his second spring in London—upon the terrace at Westminster. The friendly member who had brought him there had for a moment disappeared. Perhaps it was the first stirring of the year, or the air blowing up from the sea after the fumes of the stuffiest room in London, but Peter felt a glad release as he watched the tide sweeping in from the bridge. He had just heard the speech of a socialist minister reflecting just that intellectual rigidity from which he was beginning to recoil. The day was warm, with faint ashes of a sunset dispersed over a sky of intense blue. Peter watched a boat steaming out into a world so wide that it dwarfed the towers under which he had that afternoon been sitting. Dead phrases lingered in his brain, prompting into memory a multitude of doctrines and ideas—the stuff on which he had fed since he set out to explore revolutionary London. He shot them impatiently at the open sky. They rattled against the impenetrable blue like peas flung at a window. Peter impulsively breathed deeply of the flowing air. It rushed into the corners of his brain.
He left the House, and walked towards Charing Cross. He fitfully turned over in his mind passages of the speech he had heard that afternoon, but repeatedly the windy heavens rebuked him. He began to feel as if, with adventures all about him, he had for days been prying into a heap of rubbish.
He pulled up on the pavement beside a great horse straining to start a heavy dray. Sparks flew from his iron hoofs, which, in a desperate clatter, marked the rhythm of his effort. The muscles of his flank were contracted. His whole form was alive with energy. The dray started and moved away.
Elfinly there intruded upon Peter, watching the struggle of this beautiful creature, a memory of the ministerial orator. The one seemed grotesquely to outface the other. The straining thews of the horse were in tune with the sky. The breath in his nostrils was that same air from the sea which had met Peter upon the terrace. Nature was knit in a friendly vitality, mysteriously opposed to all the categories. The categories were somehow mystically shattered beneath the iron of the horse's beating hoofs; were shredded by the wind which noisily fluttered Peter's coat.
That same evening he attended a fashionable lecture, wherein it was explained that marriage was an affair of State. The theme touched in Peter a strain of feeling that had slept from the moment he had lost Miranda. When the lecturer had shown how the erotic forces now loose in the world, and acting blindly, could be successfully run in leash by a committee of experts, Peter left the meeting and sat in a restaurant waiting for dinner. The place was gay with tongues. The tongues were German and French, or English that clearly was not natural; for this was a dining place of men who paid the bill for women they had not met before. The company was very select; and Peter, devouring an expensive meal, admired with the shyness that beauty still raised in him, the clothes, faces, and obvious charms of the lovely feeders. Sometimes his heart beat a little faster as the insolent, slow eyes of one of these women curiously surveyed him. There was a beautiful creature who especially fascinated him. He felt he would like just to look at her, and enjoy the play of her face. He could not do as he wished, because now and then she glanced at him, and he would not have met her eyes for the world. Once, however, there was a clashing of their looks, and Peter felt that his cheeks were burning.
Tumultuously rebuking his pulse, Peter caught an ironic vision of himself leading a long file of these brilliant women to the lecturer from whom he had just escaped, with a request that he should deal with them according to his theory of erotic forces.
May was drawing to an end when Peter's mother decided she must spend a few weeks with her brother in Hamingburgh. Peter realised, as she told him of this, how quietly necessary she had been to him during these last months. Always he returned to the still, beautiful figure of his mother as to something rooted and safe. Sometimes, as he entertained some of his talking friends, he watched her sitting monumentally wise, passively confounding them.
I won't stay alone in London, Peter suddenly announced.
His mother calmly considered him.
I can easily arrange it for you, she suggested at last.
I should go mad, said Peter briefly. He crossed to where his mother was sitting.
Why, Peter, she said, "I hardly see anything of you."
You are always there, said Peter, putting his arm around her shoulder. "You simply don't know what a comfort it is to have you. Somehow you keep things from going to the devil. I don't mean the housekeeping," continued Peter, answering his mother's puzzled look. "The fact is, mother, you're quite wonderful. You're the only person I know who hasn't any opinions. You just are."
Peter decided to go into the country, and return to London when his mother was ready to come back. The time for this had almost arrived, when he met Marbury in the lobby of the House of Commons.
Marbury broke away from his friends as Peter was hesitating whether to pass him.
Hullo, Peter, what are you doing in this dusty place? I thought you were loose in the theatre.
Was, Peter briefly corrected.
Then you got tired?
No, I squabbled with the editor.
How are you getting on? asked Marbury, quietly inspecting his friend.
Very badly. How are you?
I'm standing in a month or so for the family seat, answered Marbury. "That's why I'm here. You must come and see the election. Politics from within."
Damn politics.
I'll tell you what it is, Peter. It's the Spring.
I want to get away from all this infernal talking, said Peter.
You've discovered that some of it's a bit thin?
I'll tell you what I've discovered, said Peter savagely, "I've discovered that almost any damn fool can be intellectual."
Try the stupid fellows who are always right.
Who are they?
Latest definition of a Tory. Come and talk to the farm-labourers.
Not yet. I'm going to live in the air.
What will you do? Books?
I hate books.
Come now, Peter, not all books, protested Marbury. "Let me send you some. Books for the open."
Can you find me a book that has nothing to do with any modern thing—a book that goes with the earth and touches bottom.
What's wrong with Shakespeare? asked Marbury.
I've packed Shakespeare.
I'll send you some more.
Be careful, Peter warned him; "I shall pitch anything that looks like a talking book into the fire."
You mustn't do that, Peter. The books I am going to send you are valuable.
They were walking now in Whitehall.
When do you begin to be elected? asked Peter, suddenly expanding.
Almost at once. I'll send for you when the time comes.
What's the idea of that?
You must come round the constituency—fifty miles across in its narrowest part. I want someone to feed me with sandwiches and keep my spirits up. Besides it will do you good. You'll meet some people who have never written a book and haven't any opinions.
Beasts of the field, said Peter.
Not at all. They're all on the register; and they will vote for Marbury.
By the time they had reached Charing Cross Marbury had persuaded Peter to tell his address. He also agreed to join Marbury immediately he was summoned. The next day he went with his mother to Hamingburgh, and afterwards packed for the country. He would wander aimlessly in Worcestershire from village to village till Marbury sent for him.
Already he was happier for the meeting. He felt an access of real affection for Marbury on being interrupted in his packing by the arrival of the books Marbury had promised. He pitched them unopened into his trunk, in confidence that Marbury had chosen well.