Chapter 13

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[Pg 79] 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[Pg 80] 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[Pg 81] 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.

[Pg 82]

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 [Pg 83]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[Pg 84] 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.

[Pg 85]

"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[Pg 86] 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.

[Pg 87]

"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.