Chapter 19

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.

[Pg 134]

"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[Pg 135] 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[Pg 136] 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?"

[Pg 137]

"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.