Chapter 14

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."

[Pg 89]

"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.

[Pg 90]

"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."

[Pg 91]

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 [Pg 92]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[Pg 93] 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[Pg 94] 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[Pg 95] 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.