Transcriber's Note:
A Table of Contents has been added.

PETER PARAGON

PETER PARAGON

A Tale of Youth

BY
JOHN PALMER

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
1915

Copyright, 1915
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

TO
MILDRED

PETER PARAGON

CONTENTS

I

Peter might justly have complained that his birth was too calmly received. For Peter's mother accepted him without demur. Women who nurse themselves more thoroughly than they nurse their babies will incredulously hear that Mrs. Paragon made little difference in her life on Peter's account until within four hours of his coming. Nevertheless Peter was a healthy baby, shapeless and mottled.

Mrs. Paragon was tall and fair, with regular features and eyes set well apart. They looked at you candidly, and you were aware of their friendly interest. They perfectly expressed the simplicity and peace of her character. She was mild and immovable; with a strength that was felt by all who dealt with her, though she rarely asserted it. She had the slow, deep life of a mother.

Mr. Paragon was at all points contrasted. He was short, and already at this time he was stout. He had had no teaching; but he was not an ignorant man. He was naturally of an active mind; and he had read extensively the literature that suited his habit of reflection.

Mr. Paragon was the son of a small tradesman, and had by the death of his parents been thrown upon the London streets. After ten years he had emerged as a managing clerk.

Had Mr. Paragon been well treated he might have reached his fortieth year sunny and charitable, with a cheerful faith in people and institutions. But living a celibate life, insufficiently fed, shabbily clothed, and never doubting his mental superiority to prosperous employers, he had naturally adopted extremely bitter views of the world.

Surmounting a shelf of Mr. Paragon's favourite books was a plaster bust of Bradlaugh. The shelf itself included Tom Paine's Rights of Man, Godwin's Political Justice, and the works of Voltaire in forty English volumes. Mr. Paragon talked the language of Godwin's philosophic day. Priests, kings, aristocracies, and governments were his familiar bogies. He went every Sunday to a Labour church where extracts from Shelley and Samuel Butler were read by the calendar; and he was a successful orator of a powerful group of rebels among the railwaymen.

Mr. Paragon was more Falstaff than Cassius to the eye. There was something a little ludicrous in Mr. Paragon, with legs well apart, hands deep in his trousers, demonstrating that religion was a device of government for the deception of simple men, and that property was theft.

Mrs. Paragon loved her husband, and ignored his opinions. He on his side found rest after the bitterness of his early years in the shelter of her wisdom. His anarchism became more and more an intellectual indulgence. Gradually the edge was taken from his temper. He began to enjoy his grievances now that they no longer pinched him. His charity, in a way that charity has, extended with his circumference. He was earning £4 a week, and he had in his wife a housekeeper who could make £4 cover the work of £6. Mrs. Paragon did not, like many of her friends, overtask an incompetent drudge at £10 a year. She saved her money, and halved her labour. Ends met; and things were decently in order. Mr. Paragon was happy; insured against reasonable disaster; with sufficient energy and spirit left at the end of a day's work to take himself seriously as a citizen and a man.

There were times when Mr. Paragon took himself very seriously indeed. On the evening of the day when Mr. Samuel, curate of the parish, called to urge Mrs. Paragon to have Peter christened, Mr. Paragon talked so incisively that only his wife could have guessed how little he intended.

"No priests," he said. "That's final."

He looked in fierce dispute at Mrs. Paragon; but meeting her calm eyes, looked hastily away at Peter, who was sleeping by the fire in a clothes basket.

Mrs. Paragon was dishing up the evening meal; and Mr. Paragon saw that a reasonably large pie-dish had appeared from the oven, from which arose a browned pyramid of sliced potatoes. The kitchen was immediately filled with a savour only to be associated with Mr. Paragon's favourite supper.

Mrs. Paragon ignored the eagerness with which he drew to the table. Shepherd's pie is a simple thing, but not as Mrs. Paragon made it. Mr. Paragon, as he spooned generously into the steaming dish, had forgotten Mr. Samuel till Mrs. Paragon reminded him.

"Mr. Samuel," she said, "is only doing his duty."

Mr. Paragon washed down a large mouthful of pie with small beer. Another mouthful was cooling upon the end of his fork.

"Who made it his duty?" he asked.

Mrs. Paragon never answered these rhetorical questions; and Mr. Paragon added, after a mouthful:

"There are honest jobs."

"Yes, dear; but Mr. Samuel believes in christening."

"Perhaps he does. Mr. Samuel believes that the animals went in two by two."

There was a long pause. Then Mrs. Paragon left the table to serve a large suet pudding studded with raisins.

She dealt with it in silence. Mr. Paragon, as always on these occasions when they were pulling different ways, felt as if he were trying to make waves in a pool by blowing upon the surface. He could never more than superficially ruffle the spirit of his wife. He was obscurely aware that she had inexhaustible reserves.

The meal concluded without further conversation; but, when Mr. Paragon had eaten more than was good for him, he began to feel that impulsive necessity to be generous which invariably overtook him sooner or later in his differences with Mrs. Paragon. He looked at her amiably:

"I see it like this," he said. "Mr. Samuel thinks he's right. But he's not going to stuff it into my boy. I'm an independent man, and I think for myself."

"Yes, dear," said Mrs. Paragon. "I don't know whether Mr. Samuel is right or wrong. I want to do the best for Peter."

Mr. Paragon looked sharply at his wife. She was sitting comfortably beside the clothes basket, resting for the first time since seven o'clock in the morning. There was not the remotest suggestion that she was resisting him. Nevertheless Mr. Paragon was aware of a passive antagonism. He was sure she wanted Peter to be christened; he was also sure that none of his very reasonable views affected her in the least degree.

He was right. Mrs. Paragon liked to hear her husband talk. But logic did not count in her secure world. She knew only what she wanted and felt. Calm and unutterable sense was all her genius; and Mr. Paragon felt, rather than knew, that his books and opinions were feathers in the scale.

"If Peter isn't christened," Mrs. Paragon softly pursued, "he'll be getting ideas into his head. I want him to start like other boys. Let him find out for himself whether Mr. Samuel's right or wrong. If you keep Peter away from Church he'll think there's something wrong with it."

"Something wrong with it!" exploded Mr. Paragon. "I'll tell you what's wrong with it."

Mr. Paragon proceeded to do so at some length. Mrs. Paragon was quite content to see Mr. Paragon spending his force. Mr. Paragon talked for a long time, ending in firm defiance.

"I don't see a son of mine putting pennies into the plate for the clergyman's Easter Holiday Fund," he noisily concluded. "When my son is old enough to read Genesis, he'll be old enough to read the Origin of Species and the works of Voltaire."

Thereafter he sat for the rest of the evening by the kitchen fire reading his favourite volume of the forty—the adventures of Candide and of Pangloss.

But for a few moments the reading was interrupted, for Peter suddenly woke and yelled for food. As Mrs. Paragon sat with the child, Mr. Paragon had never felt more conscious of her serenity, of her immovable strength, of her eternity. He watched her over the pages of his book.

When he again looked into the adventures of Candide they had lost something of their zest. He wondered between the lines whether the patriarch of Ferney would have written with quite so definite an assurance and clarity if once he had looked into the eyes of Mrs. Paragon.

A few days later Peter was christened at the local church.

II

Miranda was thirteen years old, and she lived in the next house. She was Peter's best friend. They had soon discovered that their ideas as to a good game were similar, and for many years they had played inseparably. Already Mrs. Paragon and Mrs. Smith had decided to open a way through the wall that divided the two gardens.

To-day this breach in the wall had been filled in by Miranda with packing-cases and an old chair. Miranda stood beside her defences of the breach with sword and shield on the summit of a wall less than nine inches across.

At the wall's foot was Peter. He was his favourite hero—Shakespeare's fifth Henry.

"How yet resolves the governor of the town?

This is the latest parle we will admit."

The moment had come for Miranda to descend from the wall and deliver the keys of the city. But Miranda this morning refused the usual programme. Peter, hearing that the text of Shakespeare would not on this occasion be followed, resolved that none of the horrors of war should be spared.

He came to the attack with a battering-ram.

"Saint George! Saint George!" he shouted, and the ram rushed forward.

"France! France!" Miranda screamed, and unexpectedly emptied a pail of cold water upon Peter's head.

Peter left the ram and swiftly retreated.

Both parties were by this time lost to respect of consequences. Into Peter's mind there suddenly intruded Shakespeare's vision of himself.

"... And at his heels,

Leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire

Crouch for employment."

Fire! Obviously this was the retort.

Nothing in the world burns so fiercely as a well-dried bundle of straw. Within half a minute of the match there was literally a roar of flame, ascending into the crevices of Miranda's breach. She rushed into the smoke, swayed, and leaped blindly into her father's marrow-bed.

Her father's marrows had been tenderly nursed to the threshold of perfection. It was a portion of his routine to come into the garden after breakfast to inspect, feel, weigh in his hands, and liberally to discourse upon marrows. But nothing at that moment could sober Miranda. She did not care.

Peter was for the moment awed into inaction by a fire which burned more rapidly than he had intended; but he climbed at last upon the wall, saw Miranda prone among the marrows, and, surging with conquest, leaped furiously upon her.

Peter was more complicated than Miranda. Miranda did not yet know that she had ruined her father's marrows. She was mercifully made to feel and to know one thing at a time; and at this moment she felt that the only thing in the world that mattered was to kill Peter.

But Peter realised in mid-air that he, too, would soon be standing amid extended ruins of the marrow-bed. His moment of indecision was fatal. Spreading his legs, to avoid a particularly fine vegetable, he fell headlong. Miranda was swiftly upon him, and they rolled among the shoots and blossoms. Peter forgot his scruples. He drew the dagger at his belt, and stabbed.

Triumph was stillborn. He felt himself suddenly lifted from the marrow-bed, and was next aware of some vigorous blows indelicately placed.

Mrs. Smith had returned from marketing, and looked for her daughter. The fire was not difficult to perceive; it was roaring to heaven. Nor was Miranda easily overlooked, for she was in her death-agony.

Miranda calmly stood by, waiting until Mrs. Smith was free to deal with her. Miranda was always sensible. Her turn would come.

Mrs. Smith suddenly dropped Peter into the marrows, and turned the garden hose upon Peter's fire. Peter, scrambling to his feet, watched her with dry, contemptuous eyes. The fire was furiously crackling, shooting up spark and flame. It was beautiful and splendid. Peter found himself wondering in his humiliation how Mrs. Smith could so callously extinguish it.

"I never saw such children," said Mrs. Smith. "I don't know what your father will say, Miranda."

Mrs. Smith was a hard-working wife. She had no time for thought or imagination. She dealt with Miranda, and children generally, by rote. "Mischief" was something that children loved, for which they were punished. It was recognised as the sort of thing serious people avoided.

"I don't know what your father will say, Miranda." The phrase was automatic with Mrs. Smith. Miranda knew that her father would say less than her mother.

"It was my fire," said Peter, smouldering wickedly; "and they are my marrows."

"I wasn't talking to you," said Mrs. Smith; "you'd better go away."

At this point Mrs. Paragon appeared above the wall.

"Peter," she said, "you might have burned the house down."

How different, Peter thought, was his mother from Mrs. Smith. His mother understood. Obviously it was wrong to burn the house down. He saw the point. His mother hadn't any theories about mischief.

Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Paragon exchanged some sentiments on the waywardness of children, and the fire being quenched, Miranda was kept indoors for the rest of the day. Peter wistfully wandered between meals about the scene of his morning's adventure. He was burning with a sense of wrong. He admitted his fault. He had imperilled the house, and he had helped to destroy his neighbour's marrows. But he felt that Mrs. Smith's view of things was perverse, and that his humiliation had been out of all proportion to his offence. At the thought of Miranda's imprisonment he savagely flushed.

Peter ended the day in a softer mood. In the evening he had seen Mr. Smith inspecting the ruins of his marrow bed. He knew exactly what Mr. Smith was feeling. He remembered how he himself had felt when Mrs. Smith had made him destroy a platform he had built in the chestnut tree at the foot of the garden.

Peter dashed through the gap in the wall. Mr. Smith, a kind little man with the temperament of an angel, looked him sorrowfully in the face. Peter's contrition was manifest and perfectly understood.

"Bit of a mess, eh!" said Mr. Smith with an affectation that it did not matter.

"I'm sorry," said Peter. "It's a shame. I'm awfully sorry."

"That's all right," said Mr. Smith. Then he added cheerfully: "Your father will put it right."

Mr. Smith, as a gardener, was the pupil of Mr. Paragon. But though he had complete confidence in his instructor, his belief that anyone would ever be able to make anything of the mangled vegetation between them was obviously pretended for Peter's sake; and Peter knew this as well as he.

Peter brushed away the necessary tears, and was about to obey an impulse to grip Mr. Smith's hand in sympathy, when Mrs. Smith called her husband sharply to supper.

Peter watched him disappear into the house with a sudden conviction that life was difficult. Already he heard the voice, thin and penetrating, of Mrs. Smith, raised in a discourse upon mischief.

Peter went in to his mother to tell her that he had apologised to Mr. Smith. He knew it would please her, and he also knew that his father, when he came home, would treat him with justice and understanding.

III

Mr. Paragon was intended for a gardener. Had he been put upon the land at an early age he would neither have read books nor misread men: missing these opportunities for cynicism. He might have given his name to a chrysanthemum; and in ripe age have been full of meditated wisdom.

That Mr. Paragon at this time should sensibly have softened from the bitterness of his youth, was as much due to his large garden as to the influence of his wife and the effect of his prosperity. In his oldest and toughest clothes, working as English labourers worked before they had lost the secret, Mr. Paragon in no way resembled himself as member of the Labour church and a popular orator. The land absorbed him. He handled his spade in an indescribable, professional manner. You recognised the connoisseur who gathers in his palms the rarest china. You trust the man who by mere handling of an object can convey to you a sense of its value. In the same way you trusted Mr. Paragon with a spade. When Mr. Paragon took a cutting it always struck. When he selected seeds they always were fruitful. When he built a bank or rounded the curve of a plot the result was always pleasing; and it came of itself, without reflection or difficulty. His gift was from nature. He had read no literature of gardening, and he had had no instruction. It was his charming privilege that a garden naturally blossomed under his hands.

Mrs. Paragon encouraged in every possible way her husband's love of the soil. Instinctively she divined that here he was best, and that here he was nearest herself. She was rarely without some of his flowers upon her table or pinned in her dress; and when on free days Mr. Paragon spent absorbed and laborious hours in the garden, Mrs. Paragon brought him cheese and beer, or tea and muffins, waiting at his elbow, interested and critical, while he discussed his plans, and asked her for advice which he never regarded. Had Mrs. Paragon neglected to feed him on these occasions he would not have noticed it, for he lost all count of time, and did not remember he was hungry till darkness came.

The most striking event of the year for Mr. Paragon and his house was the disposal of the season's rubbish. For twelve months it accumulated in a large hole, rotting in the rain and sun. Mr. Paragon dug it carefully into the soil at the end of the year, using it as a foundation for beds and banks. Usually the whole family assisted at the carting of the rubbish, with a box on wheels.

Peter was master of the convoy for carting the rubbish, and this was a military enterprise. Miranda harassed his operations to the best of her ability. There were ambuscades, surprises, excursions and alarms.

Mr. Smith looked upon these operations with delight. He liked to see Mr. Paragon at work in the garden. He was proud of his successful neighbour, and took real pleasure in his competence. Moreover, he delighted in Peter's lively and interesting pretences. He would himself have led the attack upon Peter's convoy had he been free of Mrs. Smith's critical and contemptuous survey from the back-parlour window. Once he had actively taken part, and Mrs. Smith discovered him on all fours among the gooseberries, whence he had intended to create a diversion in Peter's rear. The rational frigidity with which she had come from the house to inquire what he imagined himself to be doing effectually prevented a repetition.

This afternoon there was a sharp encounter. This was a great moment in Peter's life owing to a brief, almost instantaneous, passage. Miranda met Peter's onslaught in her manly fashion, and soon they were locked in a desperate embrace. Suddenly Peter saw Miranda, as it seemed to him afterwards, for the first time. Her head was flung back, her cheeks crimsonly defiant, eyes shining, and hair scattered. For Peter it was a vision. He saw with uneasy terror that Miranda was beautiful. He had a quailing instinct to release her. It passed; but Miranda met the look that came into his eyes and understood.

Who can say how softly and insensibly the change had been prepared? The books they had read; the strange couples that walked in the evening, curiously linked; the half-thoughts and surmises; queer little impulses of cruelty or tenderness that had passed between them—all were suddenly gathered up.

Peter realised the difference in his life that this moment had made for him in the late evening when Mr. Paragon was showing him a transit of Jupiter's third moon. Astronomy was a passion with Mr. Paragon. Astronomy overthrew Genesis and confounded religion. He had picked up cheap a six-inch reflecting telescope, and very frequently on fine evenings he probed the heavens for uninspected nebulæ, resolved double stars, mapped the surface of the moon, followed the fascinating mutation of the variables. Peter was very soon attracted and absorbed into his father's pastime. It had a breathless appeal for him. Awed and excited, he would project his mind into the measureless dark spaces. It was an adventure. Sometimes they would rise after midnight, and these were the times Peter loved best. The extreme quiet of the hour; loneliness upon earth giving a keener edge to the loneliness of heaven; the silence of the sleeping street lending almost a terror to the imagined silence of space; the secret flavour which crept into the enterprise from the mere fact of waking while the world was asleep—all this gave to the situation, for Peter, an agreeable poignancy. Already he had discovered the appeal of Shelley, and he would repeat, pleasantly shuddering, passages of his favourite story:

"I have made my bed

In charnels and on coffins, where black death

Keeps record of the trophies won from thee,

Hoping to still these obstinate questionings

Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost,

Thy messenger, to render up the tale

Of what we are."

The contrast was striking at these times between Peter and his father. For Mr. Paragon every double star resolved was a nail in the coffin of the Established Church; every wonder of the skies, inspected and verified, was a confirmation that society was built on stubble. But for Peter these excursions were food for fancy, the stuff of his dreams. He soared into space, not as Mr. Paragon intended, to discover the fraud of priests and kings, but to voyage with Shelley's Mab through the beautiful stars.

To-night the adventure had lost its edge. Nothing could be more exciting than a transit of Jupiter's third moon. The gradual approach of the tiny moon to the edge of the planet; its momentary extinction; the slow passage of the little shadow on the cloud-bright surface—the loveliness of this miniature play was sharpened for Peter by knowledge of its immensity. Mr. Paragon gave up the telescope to Peter, and waited for breathless exclamation. But Peter was silent.

"Well," said Mr. Paragon, "can't you see it?"

"Yes," answered Peter indifferently.

"Perhaps the focus isn't quite right," suggested Mr. Paragon. He looked anxiously at Peter. Peter's indifference was unusual.

"It's all right, father, I can see it well. It's a black spot, and it's moving across."

"Wonderful!" said Mr. Paragon. "Think of it, Peter. Jupiter to-night is 60,000,000 miles away. It would easily hold 1300 of us, and it's got five moons. Looks as if it were made for lighting people to bed, don't it?"

"Yes, father," said Peter without interest.

Peter's fancy had suddenly flown to a passage in Romeo and Juliet, hitherto passed as absurd—something about cutting up Romeo into little stars. Peter smelled the wet earth and remembered Miranda. His imagination to-night refused the cold voyage into space. His father's figures, after which his mind had so often adventurously strained, were senseless.

His attention fell suddenly asleep at the telescope.

He realised that his father was asking him whether the transit was finished. He started into watchfulness and replied, still indifferently, that it was.

Mr. Paragon was mortified. He showed Peter the wonders of the universe with a sort of proprietary satisfaction. He was proud of the size of Jupiter. He was personally exalted that the distance between the earth and the moon should be 240,000 miles. He had the pride of a conscientious cicerone; of the native who does the honours of his town. Peter to-night was disappointing.

"Well," said Mr. Paragon desperately, "what do you think of it?"

"It was very clear," Peter dutifully answered.

"There's not many lads your age," grumbled Mr. Paragon, "that have seen a transit of Jupiter's third moon."

"I know," said Peter, trying to feel excited and grateful. He had been looking forward to this evening for weeks. Why was he unable to enjoy it?

He repeated the question to himself as, half an hour later, he lay peacefully in bed. Then he found himself trying to remember the exact phrase about Romeo and the little stars.

IV

Peter went daily to school in a dirty quarter of the town at least two miles from home. The house of the Paragons was upon the borders of the western or fashionable suburb of Hamingburgh. The school barely escaped the great manufacturing district to the east and south. It was a branch school of the great local foundation of King Edward VI. In the phrase of the local roughs, through whose courts and alleys he passed, Peter was a "grammar-cat."

He was supposed to go to school by the main road, where he was more or less under the protection of the police. For between the roughs and the grammar-cats was perpetual war; and to take the shorter route through the courts and alleys was an act of provocation. But Peter hankered after the forbidden road. His father, showing him the way to school, had stopped at a certain corner:

"This," he said, "is the shortest way; but you had better go round by the main road."

"Why?" Peter had asked.

"It's a nasty neighbourhood," said Mr. Paragon.

From that moment the shortest route became for Peter a North-West Passage. He would stand at the fatal corner, looking up the street with its numberless small entries. Then, on a memorable day, he plunged.

First he had a soaring sense of his audacity. He felt he had left the laws behind. To win through now must entirely depend on his personal resource. At the doors of an immense factory men, women, and boys stood in line, waiting for the signal to blow them into work. Peter felt with a sinking at the stomach that he was an object of curiosity. He indeed looked strangely out of place in his neat suit of a small tar, with a sailor's knot foppishly fastened at the breast. The curious eyes of the waiting group followed him up the street. He was painfully aware, as he passed, that jocular remarks in sleepy midland slang were freely exchanged upon his apparition. Higher up the street a little rough stopped for a moment and stared, then started into an alley screaming.

The street was suddenly alive. Peter, flinging self-respect to the winds, started to run. A stone caught him smartly on the heel, and he thought he was lost. But another cry was almost immediately sounded. The helmet of a policeman came glinting up the street.

The roughs vanished as quickly as they had appeared.

Peter did not again venture into this district alone. At least a dozen of his school friends lived in the western suburb. He formed them into a company, which daily took the forbidden way to school. Such was the origin of a feud whose deeds and passages would fill a chronicle. Peter's company was long remembered.

He soon made some striking discoveries. You cannot fight with a persistent enemy, even though his methods are not your methods, without touching his good points. It soon became evident that he and the roughs were less bitterly opposed than either of them was to the police. It was also clear that the men and women of the factory were "sports." They encouraged the boys quite impartially, and saw fair play.

Peter particularly remembered one morning of snow and dirt outside the big factory, when he slipped and fell, squirming with bitter pain of a snowball hard as ice in his ear. A stalwart woman with naked arms grimed with lead, picked him up and pressed him in a comfortable and friendly way against her bosom. She was in that dark hour an angel of strength and solace. The incident always lived in Peter's memory along with the faint smell in his nostrils of the factory grime.

On the morning after the transit of Jupiter's third moon Peter was late. His company had not waited. Peter had to pass his enemies alone.

He still wondered at the change which had come over him yesterday. Nothing that morning seemed of the least importance save a curious necessity to be still and inquire of himself what had happened.

He thought only of Miranda, wondering why he saw her now at a distance.

A company of roughs lay between Peter and his friends. He was cut off; but it did not seem to matter. Everything that morning was unreal. He walked quite indifferently towards them. They seemed so remote that, had they vanished into air, he would not have been surprised.

Peter pushed loftily past a handsome young rough.

"Now then," said the fellow.

"Let me pass," said Peter, curiously pedantic beside the other.

"Not so fast."

"Let go of my arm," said Peter.

"Not much," said the enemy.

Peter flew into a rage.

"Funk," he said, without point or reason.

"Say it again."

"Funk."

"Who's a funk?"

"You are."

"Are you calling me a funk?"

"Yes."

"Say it again."

"Funk."

There was a deadlock. Peter must try something else.

"See this face?" he inquired with deadly offensiveness, thrusting forward his countenance for exhibition.

"Take it away," said the other.

"Hit it," said Peter.

"I shall if you don't take it away."

"Just you hit it."

Peter's enemy did hit it. Immediately a ring was formed. Peter fell back into his mood of indifference to the world. This fight was a nuisance, but it had to go on.

They fought three vigorous rounds. From every court and alley spectators poured. Windows were flung up.

Then a policeman was seen, and in ten seconds the street was empty again. Peter jogged off to the main road. The roughs scattered into holes.

Peter, late for school, came up for inspection with a swollen lip and an eye which became more remarkable as time went on. But pain this morning meant as little to Peter as reproof. He was unable to take things seriously. He felt curiously above them.

Home at midday he avoided his family. He felt a necessity to be alone, to dream and to exult over something that had neither shape nor name. He went into a secret passage.

This secret passage was intimately bound up with his life of adventure. The gardens of Peter's road met at the bottom the gardens of a parallel highway. The two rows were parted by a line of trees and a wall. On the farther side of the wall a thick hedge, planted a few feet from the foot of the wall, had been trained to meet it overhead. After many years it formed a natural green tunnel between the gardens. This tunnel, cleared of dead shoots and leaves, was large enough for Peter and Miranda to crawl from end to end of the wall's foot, and gave them access, after pioneering, to the trees which rose regularly from the midst of the hedge.

Peter to-day climbed into the secret passage, not for adventure but to be alone. The old life seemed very remote. Could he really have believed that the tree against which he leaned was a fortress that had cost him ten thousand men?

A humble bee bustled into the shade and fell, overloaded with pollen. Peter watched it closely. Already he found himself seeing little things—their beauty and a vague impulse in himself to express it.

Peter's indifference to the impertinent call of the things of yesterday was quite wonderful.

"Hullo!" said Mr. Paragon at dinner, "you've been fighting."

"Yes, father," said Peter.

"Goodness gracious!" Mrs. Paragon exclaimed. "Look at Peter's face!"

"Yes, mother," said Peter.

"Tell us about it, my boy," twinkled Mr. Paragon.

"There's nothing to tell, father."

"Was he a big boy?" Mr. Paragon asked.

"Middling."

"Did you beat him?"

"No, father."

"Did he beat you?"

"No, father."

Mr. Paragon looked at Peter with misgiving.

"Mary," said Mr. Paragon in the late evening, "Peter's growing up."

They were sitting together in the garden, Mr. Paragon smoking a pipe after supper. It was warm and quiet, with occasional light noises from the wood and the near houses. It was Mr. Paragon's moment of peace—a time for minor meditations, softened by the stars and the flowers, equally his by right of conquest.

Mrs. Paragon sighed. She divined a coming rift between herself and Peter.

"He is very young," she protested.

"He was always older than his years," said Mr. Paragon; and, after a silence, he added: "Don't lose touch with the boy, Mary. We have got to help him over these discoveries. Life's too fine to be picked up anyhow."

"It's not easy to keep with the young. There's so much to understand."

Mrs. Paragon said this a little sadly, and Mr. Paragon felt bound to comfort her.

"Peter's a good boy," he said.

Meantime Peter in his attic was not asleep. It was his habit, shut in his room for the night, to climb through the skylight, and sit upon a flat and cozy space of the roof by the warm chimney. There he was frequently joined by Miranda from the attic of the next house.

But Peter sat this evening at the window. The garden was quick with faint play of the wind; and Peter's ears were sensitive to small noises of the trees.

There was a faint tapping upon the wall. Peter was instantly alert, and as instantly amazed at the effect upon himself of this familiar signal. He had heard it a hundred times. It was thus that he and Miranda communicated with one another when they went up to their nook by the chimney.

He looked into the dark room. The signal was repeated, but he sat by the window like alabaster, his heart beating in his ears.

The knocking ceased, and for a long while Peter sat still as a stone. Then he sprang at the cord of the skylight window, opened it and crept out. Miranda was perched between the chimneys. It was quite dark. Peter could only see that she was staring away from him.

"Miranda!" His voice trembled and broke, but she did not move.

He knew now he had not been dreaming. Miranda, too, was changed. He felt it in the poise of her averted face and in her silence.

He waited to say he knew not what, and stayed there, a queer figure sitting astride the slates. Miranda's arm lay along the skylight. He touched her.

She caught her breath, and Peter knew she was crying.

"Miranda," he called, "why are you crying?"

She turned in the dark and a tear splashed on his hand.

"I'm not crying!" she flashed. "I thought you were never coming," she added inconsequently.

It was Peter's first encounter with a woman. He was for a moment checked.

"Miranda!" he said; and again his voice trembled and broke on the name. Miranda, in a single day as old as a thousand years, vibrated to the word half-uttered. She dropped her head into her hands, and wept aloud.

Peter held her tight, speaking now at random.

"I always meant to come," he quavered. "You know I always meant to come. Miranda, don't cry so. I was afraid when first I heard you knocking."

"You'll always love me, Peter."

"For ever and ever."

Every little sound was exaggerated. There was a low mutter of voices in the garden below. Peter saw the glow of his father's pipe. So near it seemed, he fancied he could smell the tobacco.

Mr. and Mrs. Paragon, talking of Peter, sat later than usual. Before going to bed, they went into the attic, and stood together for a while. Peter had fallen happily asleep. Miranda was comforted, and he was lifted above all the heroes. The shadow of adolescence lay upon him. His mother saw it, and, as she kissed him, it seemed as if she were bidding him farewell upon a great adventure.

V

Peter in common daylight carefully examined his face in the looking-glass. His left eye was a painter's palette. He ruefully remembered that the fight had yet to be finished. He was bound to offer his adversary an opportunity of completing the good work, and he distinctly quailed. Peter was this morning upon solid earth. The crisis was past. He knew now that he had quickly to be a man, to get knowledge and wealth and power.

Boys at Peter's branch of the foundation of King Edward VI could no higher ascend into knowledge than the binomial theorem. Peter, not yet fifteen, was already head of the school—the favourite pupil of his masters, easily leading in learning and cricket. Already it was a question whether he should or should not proceed to the High School where Greek and the Calculus were to be had.

Peter's career was already a problem. Mr. Paragon inclined to believe that the best thing for a boy of fifteen was to turn into business, leaving Greek to the parsons. Mrs. Paragon had different views. Peter was yet unaware of this discussion, nor had he wondered what would happen when the time came for leaving his first school.

Peter's company raised a chorus when they beheld him. They explained to Peter what his face was like. They were proud of it. A terrible and bloody fellow was their captain.

When Peter met his adversary each noted with pleasure that the other was honourably marked.

The handsome rough thrust out a large red hand.

"Take it or leave it," he said.

Peter took it. The bells were calling in a final burst, and he passed rapidly on with his company. It was peace with honour.

Peter was in a resolute grapple with the binomial theorem when a call came for him to go into the headmaster's room. Peter, delicately feeling his battered face, followed the school-porter with misgiving.

"Paragon," said the headmaster, "I don't like your face. It isn't respectable."

Peter writhed softly, aware that he was ironically contemplated.

"This fighting in the streets," continued the headmaster, "is becoming a public nuisance. I should be sorry to believe that any of our boys provoked it. I hope it was self-defence."

"Mostly, sir," said Peter.

"I rely upon you, Paragon, to avoid making the school a nuisance to the parish."

"I realise my responsibility, sir."

Peter was quite serious, and the headmaster did not smile.

"Now, Paragon," he said, "I want to talk to you about something else. I have just written to your father. Do you know what you would like to do when you leave school?"

"No, sir," said Peter.

Peter had, in fancy, invented posts for himself that would tax to the fullest extent his complicated genius. He had lived a hundred lives. Nevertheless, bluntly asked whether he had thought about his future, he as bluntly answered "No," and knew in a moment that the answer was dreadfully true. His cloud cuckooland of battle and success, magnificent with pictures of himself in all the great attitudes of history, vanished at a simple question. He was rapidly growing old.

The headmaster continued, pitilessly sensible.

"I want you to go on with your education," he said. "You have done very well with us here. I have written to your father urging him to send you to the High School where it will be possible for you to qualify for the University. I want you, before you see your father, to make up your mind what you want to do."

Peter left the headmaster's room with a sense of loss. The glamour had gone out of life. His future, vast and uncertain, had in a moment narrowed to a practical issue. Should he go on to another school, or into some office of the town? These were dreary alternatives. Already he was fifteen years old, and he had somehow to be the most famous man in the world within the next five years.

Peter's father went that day to visit his brother-in-law.

Henry Prout, Peter's uncle and godfather, had at this time retired from the retailing of hardware. He was wealthy, an alderman of the town, and a bachelor. He took a father's interest in his nephew. There was a tacit, very indefinite assumption that in all which nearly concerned his sister's son Henry had a right to be consulted.

When Peter heard his father had gone round to his uncle's house he knew his career was that evening to be decided.

Henry Prout was a copy in gross of his sister. Mrs. Paragon was queenly and fair. Henry was large and florid. Mrs. Paragon was amiable and full of peace. Henry was genial and lazy. Mrs. Paragon equably accepted life from a naturally perfect balance of character, Henry from a naturally perfect confidence in the inclinations of his rosy and abundant flesh.

Uncle Henry had one large regret. He had had no education, and he greatly envied the people who had. His admiration for the results of education was really a part of his indolence. He admired the readiness and ease with which educated people disposed of problems which cost him painful efforts of the brain. Education was for Uncle Henry a royal way to the settlement of every difficult thing. If you had education, life was an arm-chair. If you had it not, life was a necessity to think things laboriously out for yourself.

Uncle Henry had made up his mind that Peter should have the best education money could buy. Peter, he determined, should learn Greek.

"Well, George," he said in his comfortable thick voice, "what's it going to be?"

He was not yet alluding to Peter's career, but to some bottles on the little table between them.

"Half and half," said George.

"Help yourself," said Henry, adding, as Mr. Paragon portioned out his whisky, "How's sister?"

"Up to the mark every time."

"She's all right. There's not a more healthy woman in England than sister."

Henry paused a little in reflection upon the virtues of Mrs. Paragon. He then continued.

"How's the boy?"

"I'll tell you what," said Mr. Paragon, "he's growing up."

"Fifteen next December."

"Old for his age," said Mr. Paragon, nodding between the lines.

Uncle Henry thoughtfully compressed his lips.

"Well," he said, "I suppose the boy will have to find out what he's made of."

"He's very thick next door," suggested Mr. Paragon with a meaning eye.

"I've noticed her, George. She'll soon be finding out a thing or two for herself."

"There's a handsome woman there," said Mr. Paragon.

"Well enough."

They paused again in contemplation of possibilities in Miranda.

"I've had a letter," said Mr. Paragon at last. The headmaster's sheet was handed over, and carefully deciphered.

"Writes a shocking hand," said Uncle Henry. "That's education. Peter's hand," he added contentedly, "is worse. I can't make head or tail of what Peter writes."

Henry mixed himself another whisky. "They seem to think a great lot of him," he said thoughtfully. "That about the Scholarships, for instance. They say he'll get the £30. Then he goes to the High School and gets £50, and £80 at the University. Think of that, George."

"I don't hold with it," Mr. Paragon broke out.

"Education," Henry began.

"Education yourself," interrupted Mr. Paragon. "What's the good of all that second-hand stuff?"

"It helps."

"Yes. It helps to make a nob of my son. It's little he'll learn at the University except to take off his hat to people no better than himself."

"Can't you trust him?"

"Peter's all right," Mr. Paragon jealously admitted.

"There's no harm in a bit of Greek. You talk as if it was going to turn him straight off into a bishop."

Uncle Henry paused, and, desiring to make a point, took the hearthrug.

"I can't understand you," he continued, with legs well apart. "If Peter is going to have my money, he's got to learn how to spend it. Look at myself. I have had sense to make a bit of money, but I've got no more idea of spending it than a baby. I want Peter to learn."

"That's all right," said Mr. Paragon. "But what's going to happen to Peter when he gets into the hands of a lot of doctors?"

"Peter must take his chance."

"It's well for you to talk. You're as blue as they're made, and a churchwarden of the parish."

Uncle Henry solemnly put down his glass. "George," he said, "it does not matter to a mortal fool what I am, nor what you are. Peter's got to find things out for himself. He'll get past you and me; and, whether he comes out your side or mine, he'll have more in his head."

Uncle Henry ended with an air of having closed the discussion, and, after some friendly meditation, whose results were flung out in the fashion of men too used to each other's habit of thought to need elaborate intercourse, Mr. Paragon rose and went thoughtfully home.

By the time he reached the Kidderminster Road he had definitely settled the question of Peter's career. Peter should get knowledge. He should possess the inner fortress of learning. He should be the perfect knight of the oppressed people, armed at all points. Thus did Mr. Paragon reconcile his Radical prejudices with his fatherly ambition.

Arrived home, he showed the headmaster's letter to Mrs. Paragon.

She read it with the pride of a mother who knows the worth of her boy, but nevertheless likes it to be acknowledged.

Mr. Paragon watched her as she read.

"Yes," he said, answering her thoughts, "Peter's all right."

Mrs. Paragon handed back the letter.

"I suppose," suggested Mr. Paragon, airily magnificent, "he had better go on with his education?"

"Of course," said Mrs. Paragon.

Mr. Paragon knew at once that if he had persisted in taking Peter from school he would have had to persuade his wife that it was right to do so. He also knew that this would have been very difficult.

Fortunately, however, he had decided otherwise. He could flatter himself now that he had settled this grave question himself. It was true, in a sense, that he had. Mr. Paragon had not for nothing lived with his wife for nearly seventeen years.

VI

Peter was not happy at the High School. It is disconcerting, when you have been First Boy and a Captain, to be put among inferior creatures to learn Greek. Peter had risen with his former friends from the lowest to the highest; they had grown together in sport and learning. Now he found himself in a middle form, an interloper among cliques already established. Moreover, the boys at the High School, where education for such as could not obtain a foundation scholarship was more expensive than at the lower branches, were of a superior quality, with nicer manners and a more delicate way of speaking. He was a stranger.

At sixteen Peter was almost a man. His father had always met him upon an intellectual equality. They had talked upon the gravest matters. Peter had voraciously read a thousand books which he did not altogether understand. It needed only physical adolescence to show him how far he had outstripped the friends of his age.

The lot of a precocious boy is not a happy one, and Peter paid the penalty. He made not a single friend during his two years at the new school. He lived gravely after his own devices, quiet, observant, superficially accessible to the kind advances of his masters and classfellows, but profoundly unaffected.

Nevertheless these years were the most important of Peter's life, wherein he learned all that his father was able to teach him. Peter, years after he had outlived much of his early wisdom, yet looked back upon this time as peculiarly sacred to his father. From him he learned to accept naturally the perplexing instincts that now were arisen within him. Peter escaped the usual unhappy period of surmise and shamefast perplexity.

More particularly these were the glorious years of Peter and Miranda. Peter found in Miranda the perfect maid, and Miranda, eager for knowledge and greedy of adoration, reaching after the life of a woman with the mind and body of a girl, found in Peter the pivot of the world. In these years were laid the foundations of an incredible intimacy. Daily they grew in a perpetual discovery of themselves. Peter opened to Miranda the store of his knowledge. There was perfect confidence. At an age when the secrets of life are the subject of uneasy curiosity at best, and at worst of thoughtless defamation, Peter and Miranda talked of them as they talked of their bees (Peter's latest craze); of the stars; of the poets they loved (Miranda was not yet altogether a woman: she loved the poets); of the life they would lead in the friendly world.

Miranda was the more thrown upon Peter as neither of her parents was able to direct her. Her mother was entirely unimaginative. Her fierce affection for Miranda showed itself in a continual insistence that she should "behave"; read and eat only what was good for her; and be as well, if not better, dressed than the children of her neighbours. For her father Miranda had some affection, but she could not respect him. She saw him continually overridden by her mother, and already she overtopped him in stature by a head.

The months went quickly by, and soon it was the eve of Peter's journey to Oxford as the candidate for an open scholarship. Peter was nervously excited. Every little detail, in his heightened sensibility, seemed important. It was late summer, a warm night, the room filling rapidly with shadows. Miranda sat by the window, her face to the fallen sun.

The men were talking politics. Their lifted voices grated upon Peter's thoughts. It was a time of strikes and rioting. Mr. Paragon, as an orator, was urgently requested in the streets of Hamingburgh. He was full of his theme, and extremely angry with Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith was an entirely amiable little man, but he delighted in the phrases of battle. He talked politics in a soldier's terms. He was perpetually storming the enemy's position or turning his rear. The English political situation was in Mr. Smith's view never far removed from war and revolution. He delighted in images of violence. The mildest of small men, whose nerves were shattered by an unexpected noise, he was always ready to talk of the prime duty of governments to stamp out rebellion in blood. Mr. Smith could not pull a cracker at Christmas without shutting his eyes and getting as far as possible from the explosion; but, politically, he was a Prussian.

"Shoot them down!"

Mr. Smith was repeating a formula by now almost mechanical.

To Peter it was desperately familiar. The men's voices every now and then were overborne by Mrs. Smith in one of her perpetual recommendations to Miranda.

"Take your elbows off the sill, Miranda."

"Yes, mother."

Miranda answered with the mechanical obedience of a child who makes allowances.

She turned at the same time into the room, full of the contrast between the beauty of the garden and the two absurd figures in dispute upon the hearthrug. She looked over to Peter in the shadow.

His eyes were full of her, burning with delight.

Miranda, meeting his look, felt suddenly too glad for endurance. She burst from her seat.

Her mother's voice, thin and penetrating, was plainly heard above the ground-bass of political argument.

"Where are you going, Miranda?"

"Into the garden, mother," patiently answered Miranda, and with never a look at Peter she went.

The men talked on. Peter quietly followed Miranda into the garden, unnoticed except by his mother.

Mrs. Paragon had read the lines of her son's face. She sighed as he slipped away, knowing that at that moment the world held for Peter but one thing really precious. She smiled, not bitterly, but with indulgence, upon the talking fathers.

Peter and Miranda sat for many minutes without a word. The evening was perfect, the shining of stars in a violet sky mocked on earth with the shining of great clusters of evening primrose. How full the night seemed! The stars were very secret, but the secret waited to be told.

"I shall not be able to bear it," said Miranda suddenly.

"Four days," said Peter.

"But after that."

"Eight weeks at a time."

But Miranda's heart sank at the eternity of eight weeks.

Protesting with her, Peter at last said:

"I'm always with you, Miranda."

She turned and found he was looking where Mirza glittered with its companion star. He had written her a poem in which he had likened Mirza to himself, eternally passing through heaven with his tiny friend.

Miranda felt to-night how empty was this fancy.

"You are going away," she said, "and you have never——" She stopped, frightened and ashamed. She wished to run from the place, and she was glad of the dark.

The feeling passed, and she lifted her head, looking at Peter. Her eyes were full of challenge and of fear, of confession, of reserve—the courage of a maid—proud to be as yet untouched, but happy in surrender.

"All that I have—and how beautiful it is!—is yours," was what Peter read.

The tears rushed into her eyes. They both were crying as Peter kissed her. It was the first kiss of lovers two years old, the first delicate breach of their chastity.

Miranda lifted her head upon Peter's arm.

"I want to be with you always," she said. "I cannot bear you to go away."

Footsteps intruded. Uncle Henry had come, God-speeding his nephew. Peter had been missed, and Uncle Henry was coming to find him. Peter felt as if the world were advancing to rob him of something too precious to be lawfully his. He wanted to save Miranda from this intrusion.

"Good-bye, darling!" he whispered.

She understood.

"Hold me near to you, Peter," she said. They kissed a second time, lingering on the peril of discovery. She ran lightly away as Uncle Henry parted the bushes and thrust his great head towards the seat.

"Hullo, Peter, my boy, is that you?"

"Yes, Uncle."

"I thought I would look round to wish you luck."

"Thank you, Uncle."

"Somebody did not want to see me," said Uncle Henry, crossly following Miranda with his eyes.

Peter flashed an indignant look upon his uncle. He could not tell him why Miranda had gone away; how she was too precious to suffer the contact of dull earth.

They walked into the house. For Peter the rest of the evening passed in a dream. He made his plans for an early breakfast, received the last advice as to his trains and the disposition of his money, and went as soon as possible to his bedroom under the eaves.

VII

Miranda was at the window as Peter drove off next morning in a hansom-cab. The sun was shining, the earth green after rain. Peter was starting on his first unaccompanied journey in his first hansom-cab, and he was unable to feel as miserable as he should. Miranda gave him a smile that struggled to be free of sadness at losing him for four days, and of envy at his adventure. Peter knew how she felt, and he was angry with himself for being happy.

The miles flew quickly by. Peter soon began to wonder in pleasant excitement what Oxford was like.

At Oxford station he was immediately sensible of the advantages of a town where a great many people live only to anticipate the wishes of young gentlemen. In Hamingburgh only people with great presence of mind can succeed in being attended to by the men who in that independent city put themselves, as cabmen, porters, and shop assistants, into positions of superiority to the public. Peter was amazed at the deference with which his arrival upon the platform was met. The whole town seemed only anxious that he should reach his lodgings as quickly and as comfortably as possible.

Peter's impressions thereafter were fierce and rapid. His four days were a wonderful round of visits. He perused the colleges, the gardens, and the river. He called upon old schoolfellows for whom the life of Oxford was already commonplace; who had long since forgotten that they were living in one of the loveliest of mediæval towns; who blindly perambulated the cloisters, weighing the issues of a Test Match. He visited professors by invitation, and listened for the first time in his life to after-dinner conversation incredibly polite. After his papers were written for the day, he could make a quiet meal and issue adventurously into the streets, eagerly looking into the career at whose threshold he had arrived.

Peter was in a city of illusion. He constructed the life, whose outward activities he so curiously followed, from the stones of Oxford, and saw, as it seemed to him, an existence surrendered to lovely influences of culture and the awful discipline of knowledge. With reverence he encountered in the quadrangle of the college whose hospitality he was seeking, a majestic figure, silver-haired, of dreaming aspect, passing gravely to his pulpit of learning. This was that famous Warden, renowned in Europe as the author of many books wherein the mightiest found themselves corrected.

Later in the day he enviously saw the inhabitants of this happy world, who in the morning had followed the Warden in to his lecture to get wisdom, issue from their rooms (whose windows opened within rustle of the trees and prospect of a venerable lawn) dressed for the field or river. It particularly impressed Peter that in this attire they should take their way unconcerned through the streets of the town. No one would have dared, in Hamingburgh, to be thus conspicuous. How debonair and free was life in this heavenly city!

At evening Peter walked in the streets and quadrangles, getting precious glimpses of an interior studiously lit, with groups, as he fancied them, of sober scholars in grave debate upon their studies of the morning; or, perhaps, in pleasant reminiscence of their games of the afternoon. Sometimes Peter would hear a burst of laughter or see through the panes of a college window a group of men deep in poker or bridge. Peter then remembered wild tales of the license of young bloods, and was not displeased. It added a zest to his meditations.

Peter's last evening focussed his impressions. It was the agreeable habit of the dons of Gamaliel College to invite their candidates to dinner when the trial was over. Peter accepted the invitation with dismay. It was the first time he had ever proposed to take an evening meal by way of dinner; he was afraid.

Nevertheless, the reality was quite pleasant. His first impression of the dons of Gamaliel was of their kindly interest in himself. He seemed to be specially selected for attention. The Warden in his welcome looked perusingly at him. Peter's instinct, quick to feel an atmosphere, warned him, as they talked, that he was being tactfully drawn. He noticed also the smiles that occasionally passed when he plunged into some vigorous opinion about the books he hated or loved. Insensibly he grew more cautious, and, as the dinner advanced, he was amazed to hear himself, as though he were listening to someone else, saying things in a new way. Peter was beginning to acquire the Oxford manner. His old life was receding. He caught vaguely at a memory of Miranda, but she lived in another world. Here he sat a king of the earth. A beautifully spoken, white-haired servant at his elbow filled his glass with golden wine, and as he accepted regally of delicate meats from dishes respectfully offered, he heard himself, in tones already grown strangely in tune with those of his companions, contributing discreet opinions.

Peter, too, was drinking. He discovered how easy it was to talk at ease, to sparkle, to throw out, in grand disorder, the thronging visions of his brain. Far from shrinking in diffidence from the necessity to assert himself and to be prominent, he began now actively to intervene.

Peter never remembered how first they came to talk of bees. But he did not for years forget the dramatic circumstances of this conversation. He never lost the horror with which he realised immediately after the event that he had contradicted the Reverend Warden, and that the whole table was waiting for him to make his contention good.

"Well, Mr. Paragon, how do you explain all this?"

The room had suddenly become silent. All the little conversations had gone out. For the first time Peter felt that an audience was hanging upon him. He flushed, set his teeth, and talked. He talked with enthusiasm, tempered instinctively with the Oxford manner. His enthusiasm delighted the dons of Gamaliel, to whom it was very strange, and his experience interested them. Peter loved his bees and handled them well. When he had ended his account, all kinds of questions were asked. More than ever he felt elated and sure of himself. He emptied yet another glass of the golden wine.

"I'm becoming quite brilliant," he thought.

Then he saw that the Warden was speaking into an ear of the white-haired servant, glancing with ever so slight a gesture at Peter's empty glass. This time the servant in passing round the table omitted Peter.

Peter was quick to understand. He arrested himself in the act of saying something foolish. Clearly the wine had gone into his head. He wondered whether he would be able to stand up when the time came. He sank suddenly into himself, answering when he was appealed to directly, but otherwise content to watch the table. He thought with remorse of Miranda, almost forgotten amid the excitement of these last days. He saw again the garden as it looked on the evening of his farewell. He wanted to be away from these strange people, from the raftered hall, the table soft-lit, beautiful with silver and glass. The voices went far-off. Only when his neighbour touched him on the shoulder did he notice that his companions were moving.

The Warden bade him a cordial good-bye. He smiled at Peter in a way that made his heart leap with a conviction that he had been successful.

"I wonder," Peter said to himself as he walked back to his rooms—"I wonder if I am really drunk?" He had never felt before quite as he did to-night. Now that he was in the open, he wanted to leap and to sing.

The municipal band was playing as he turned into the street. Round it were gathered in promenade an idle crowd of young shopkeepers, coupled, or desirous of being coupled, with girls of the town.

Peter noticed a handsome young woman at the edge of the crowd, hanging upon the arm of a young man. She was closely observing him as he came up. It seemed to Peter that she mischievously challenged him. Her companion was staring vacantly at the bandsmen. Peter paused irresolutely, flushed a burning red, and passed hastily away.

He was astonished and humiliated at his physical commotion. The music sounded hatefully the three-four rhythm of surrender. He was yet able to hear it as he stood under the window of his room. He saw again the enigmatic eyes of the girl, the faint welcome of her smile, so slight as to be no more than a shadow, the coquettish recoil of her shoulders as he paused.

He turned into his lodgings, and ten o'clock began to strike on the Oxford bells. He waited for several minutes till the last had sounded. Oxford, for Peter, was to the end a city of bells. He never lost the impression of his first night as he lay, too excited for sleep, his thoughts interrupted with the hours as they sounded, high and low, till the last straggler had ended. It always profoundly affected him, this converse at night between turret and turret of the sleeping stones. It came at last to emphasize his impression of Oxford as a place whose actual and permanent life was in the walls and trees, whose men were shadows.

To-night the bells invited Peter to look into the greater life he expected to lead in this place. The scattered glimpses of a beautiful world at whose threshold he stood were now united in a hope that soon he would permanently share it within call of the hours as melodiously in this grey city they passed.

The fumes of the evening were blown away; the band in the street was no longer heard. Peter, awake in bed, heard yet another striking of the hour. He was looking back to his last evening with Miranda. How did she come into this new life? He thought of her sleeping, parted by a wall's breadth from his empty room at home, and was invaded with a desire to be near her greater than his envy of anything that sounded in the striking bells.

"Miranda." He repeated the syllables to himself as the bells were striking, and fell asleep upon her name.

VIII

Peter, home after his first important absence, found that his former life had shrunk. He had seen things on a generous scale. Only for four days had he been away, but it was an epoch.

He went immediately to find Miranda, trembling with impatience. But he was struck shy when they met. Peter had imagined this meeting as a perfect renewal of their last moments together. He had seen himself thrilling into a passionate welcome, taking up his life with Miranda where it had abruptly ceased with the arrival of Uncle Henry four days ago. But at sight of her the current of his eagerness was checked. It was that curious moment of lovers who have lived through so many meetings in imagination that the actual moment cannot be fulfilled.

"You're back," she said awkwardly, hardly able to look at him.

"I've just this moment come." Peter thought it was the staring daylight that put this constraint upon them. Then he saw in his fancy the welcome he had expected—very different from this—and, as though he were acting something many times rehearsed, he kissed Miranda with an intended joy.

Miranda's constraint was now broken.

"I have missed you dreadfully," she whispered.

She held him tight, urged by the piteous memory of four empty days; and Peter, rising at her passion, strained her truthfully towards him. The disillusion of meeting fell away from them both.

Soon he was talking to her of Oxford, and the great life he had shared. He did not realise that a strain of arrogant enthusiasm came into his tale—a suggestion that in these last four days he had flapped the wings of his ambition in high air and dazzling sunshine. Miranda was chilled, feeling she had been in the cold, divining that Peter had a little grown away from her in the things he recounted with such unnecessary joy. At last she interrupted him.

"You haven't missed me, Peter."

"But I have," answered Peter, passing in a breath to tell of his encounter with the dons of Gamaliel. Miranda put her hand into his, but Peter, graphically intent upon his tale, insensibly removed it for a necessary gesture.

"I don't want to hear," said Miranda suddenly.

She slipped from where they sat, and, killing him with her eyes, walked abruptly away.

Peter was struck into dismay. Remorse for his selfish intentness upon glories Miranda had not shared shot him through. But he stayed where she had left him, sullenly resentful. She need not have been so violent. How ugly was her voice when she told him she did not want to hear. Peter noticed in her swinging dress a patched rent, and her dusty shoes down at the heel. Spitefully he called into his mind, for contrast and to support him in his resentment, the quiet and ordered beauty of the life he had just seen. He retired with dignity to the house, and made miserable efforts to forget that Miranda was estranged.

Mrs. Paragon wanted to hear all that Peter had seen and done. Peter told again his tale without enthusiasm. Then his father also must hear. Peter talked of Oxford, wondering, as he talked, where Miranda had gone, and whether she would forgive him even if he admitted he was to blame. His experiences now had lost all their charm. He had taken a vain pleasure in glorifying them to Miranda, but the glory now was spoiled.

Mr. Paragon was delighted to hear Peter describing his first serious introduction to polite company without seeming violently pleased. Clearly Oxford was not going to corrupt him. Peter spoke almost with distaste of his fine friends.

"Well, my boy," said Mr. Paragon, "you don't seem to think much of this high living."

"It's all right, father," answered Peter, absently dwelling on Miranda.

"What did you talk about? Mostly trash, I suppose?"

"Yes, father." Peter was now at Miranda's feet, asking her to forgive him.

A little later Mr. Smith came in, and the time passed heavily away. Mr. Smith was trying to dissuade Mr. Paragon from taking part in an angry demonstration of railway men who had struck work in the previous week. Already there had been rioting. To-night Mr. Paragon was to address a meeting in the open air, and his talk was loud and bitter. Peter heard all this rhetoric with faint disgust. He was at that time in all things his father's disciple. But to-night his brain was dancing between a proud girl, with eyes that hurt, swinging away from him in her patched frock and dusty shoes, and a long, low-lit table elegant with silver and glass. He could not listen to these foolish men; and when Mr. Smith had reached the summit of his theme in a call to "shoot them down," and when his father was clearly making ready utterly to destroy his enemy, Peter went impatiently from the room.

Mrs. Paragon made ready her husband for the meeting without regarding Mr. Smith's gloomy fears of disorder and riot. It had always been Mr. Paragon's amusement to speak in public, and she had decided that politics could have no serious results. For a few minutes she watched him diminish up the long street, and then returned to the kitchen where Mr. Smith, balancing on his toes, talked still of the dark necessities of blood and iron.

Two hours later Peter's father was brought home dead, with a bullet in his brain.

IX

Peter sat stonily where Miranda left him earlier in the day. It was now quite dark, the evening primrose shining in tall clusters, very pale, within reach of his hand. Since a cab had jingled into hearing, stopped beside the house, and jingled away, hardly a sound had broken into his thoughts. Each rustle of the trees or lightest noise of the garden raised in him a riot of excitement; for he felt that Miranda would come, and he lived moment by moment intensely waiting. He was sure she would not be able to sleep without making her peace.

Several times he moaned softly, and asked for her aloud. Once he was filled with bitterest anger, and started to go back into the house. He hated her. His brilliant future should not be linked with this rude and shabby girl. Then, in sharp remorse, he asked to be forgiven. Tears of self-pity had followed tears of anger and tears of utter pain, and had dried on his cheeks as he rigidly kept one posture on the narrow bench. He felt to-night that he had the power to experience and to utter all the sorrow of the world, and mixed with his pain there were sensations of the keenest luxury.

At last a footstep sounded. He began to tremble unendurably; but in the next instant he knew it was not Miranda. He had not recovered from his disappointment when his mother stood beside him.

He looked at her vaguely, not yet recalled from his raging thoughts. She called his name, and there was something in her voice that startled him. The moon which was now coming over the house poured its light upon her face. Swiftly Peter was aware of some terrible thing struggling for expression. His mother's eyes were clouded as though she was dazed from the effect of some hard and sudden blow. Her lips were drawn tight as though she suffered. She stood for a moment, and once or twice just failed to speak.

"Peter," she said at last, "I have to tell you something."

Peter stared at her, quickly beginning to fear.

"Don't be frightened, dear boy." Peter saw the first tears gather and fall.

"Mother, you are hurt."

Her tears now fell rapidly as she stooped and strained Peter towards her. She could not bear to see his face as she told him.

"Something terrible has happened. There has been a fight in the streets and father——"

Her arms tightened about him. Peter knew his father was dead.

"We are alone, Peter," she said at last.

Then she rose, and there were no more tears. Erect in the moonlight, she seemed the statue of a mourning woman.

"He is lying in our room, Peter. Won't you come?"

Peter instinctively shuddered away. Then, feeling as though a weight had just been laid on him, he asked:

"Can I help you, mother? Is there anything to do?"

"Uncle Henry is here. Come when you can."

Peter watched her move away towards the house. Self died outright in him as, filled with worship, he saw her, grave and beautiful, going to the dead man.

Soon he wondered why, now that trouble had really come, he could not so easily be moved. The tears, which so readily had started from his eyes as he had brooded on his quarrel with Miranda, would not flow now for his father. His imagination could not at once accept reality. He sat as his mother had left him, sensible of a gradual ache that stole into his brain. Time passed; and, at last, as the ache became intolerable, he heard himself desperately repeating to himself the syllables:

"Never, Never."

He would never again see his father. Then his brain at last awoke in a vision of his father, an hour ago or so, confronting Mr. Smith. Peter's emotion first sprang alive in a sharp remorse. He had that evening found his father insufferable.

Peter could no longer sit. He walked rapidly up and down the garden, giving rein to self-torment. He had always thought of his father, and now remembered him most vividly, as one who had read with him the books which first had opened his mind. His father shone now upon Peter crowned with all the hard, bright literature of revolt.

A harsh cry suddenly broke up the silence of the garden. A newsboy ran shrieking a special edition, with headlines of riot and someone killed.

The cry struck Peter motionless. He had realised so far that his father was dead. Now he remembered the riot. The newsboy had shouted of a charge of soldiers.

Why had Peter not accepted his father's gospel? Why had he not stood that evening by his father's side? The enemies of whom his father had so often talked to Peter were real, and had struck him down. All the idle rhetoric that had slept unregarded in Peter's brain now rang like a challenge of trumpets. He saw his father as one who had tried to teach him a brave gospel of freedom, who had resisted tyranny, and died for his faith.

Peter cursed the oppressor with clenched hands. In the tumble of his thoughts there intruded pictures, quite unconnected, of the life he had known at his first school—encounters with the friendly roughs, their common hatred of the police, the comfortable, oily embrace of the woman who had picked him from the snow. He felt now that he was one of these struggling people, that he ought that night to have stood with his father. In contrast with the warm years in which he had gloried in the life of his humbler school his later comparative solitude coldly emphasized his kinship with the dispossessed.

Scarcely twenty-four, hours ago Peter had feasted with the luxurious enemies of the poor. He had come from them, vainglorious and eager to claim their fellowship. For this he had been terribly punished. Peter felt the hand of God in all this. It seemed like destiny's reward for disloyalty to all his father had taught.

He went into the house, and soon was looking at the dead man. His mother moved about the room, obeying her instinct to put all into keeping with the cold severity of that still figure. Peter looked and went rapidly away. He felt no tie of blood or affection. He was looking at death—at something immensely distant.

Nevertheless, as he went from the oppressive house, this chill vision of death consecrated in his fancy the figure, legendary now, of a martyred prophet of revolt. By comparison he hardly felt his personal loss of a father.

As he passed into the garden, he saw into the brilliantly lighted room next door. Mr. Smith sprawled with his head on the table, sobbing like a child. Peter, in a flash, remembered him as he had stood not two hours ago beside his father, shrilly repeating an hortation to shoot them down. In that moment Peter had his first glimpse of the irony of life. He felt impulsively that he ought to comfort that foolish bowed figure whose babble had been so rudely answered.

Then, as Mr. Smith was seen to wipe his watery eyes with a spotted handkerchief, Peter grew impatient under that sting of absurdity which in life pricks the holiest sorrow. He turned sharply away, and in the path he saw Miranda.

She put out her arm with a blind gesture to check the momentum of his recoil from the lighted window. He caught at her hand, but his fingers closed upon the rough serge of her sleeve. His passion leaped instantly to a climax. It was one of those rare moments when feeling must find pictured expression; when every barrier is down between emotion and its gesture. Miranda stood before him, the reproach of his disloyalty, a perfect figure of the life he must embrace. His hand upon her dress shot instantly into his brain a memory of that mean moment when he had nursed his wrongs upon her homeliness. A fierce contrition flung him without pose or premeditation on his knees beside her. As she leaned in wonder towards him, he caught the fringe of her frayed skirt in his hands, and, in a moment of supreme dedication, kissed it in a passion of worship.

X

The interim between the death of Peter's father and Peter's ascent into Oxford was filled with small events which impertinently buzzed about him. Even his father's funeral left no deep impression. It was formal and necessary. Peter was haunted, as the ceremony dragged on, with a reproachful sense that he was not, as he should, responding to its solemnity. Passion, of love or grief or adoration, came to Peter by inspiration. He could not punctually answer. He marvelled how easily at the graveside the tears of his friends and neighbours were able to flow. He himself had buried his father upon the night of his father's death, and had started life anew. The funeral was for him no more than the ghost of a dead event.

Next came the removal of Mrs. Paragon into the well-appointed house of Uncle Henry. Henry had arranged that henceforth his sister should live with him; that Peter should look to him as a guardian, and think of himself as his uncle's inheritor. All these new arrangements passed high over Peter's head. They were a background of rumour and confusion to days of exquisite sensibility and peace. Only one thing really mattered. Uncle Henry's house was in the fashionable road that ran parallel to that in which Peter was born, so that Peter could reach Miranda by way of the garden, which met hers at the wall's end.

Adolescence carried him high and far, winging his fancy, giving to the world forms and colours he had never yet perceived. His passion, unaware of its physical texture, had almost disembodied him. Miranda focussed the rays of his soul, and drew his energy to a point. He was pure air and fire. Standing on the high balcony of his new room, he felt that, were he to leap down, he must float like gossamer. Or, as he lay in the grass beside Miranda, staring almost into the eye of the sun, he acknowledged a kinship with the passing birds, imagined that he heard the sap of the green world ebb and flow; or, pressing his cheeks to the cool earth, he would seem to feel it spinning enormously through space.

They talked hardly at all, and then it was of some small intrusion into their happy silence—the chatter of a bird in distress or the ragged flying of a painted moth. Only seldom did Peter turn to assure himself that Miranda was still beside him. He was absorbed with his own vast content and gratitude for the warm and lovely world, his precious agony of aspiration towards the inexpressible, his sense of immense, unmeasured power. Miranda was his precious symbol. Uttered in her, for his intimate contemplation, he spelled the message with which the air was burdened, which shivered on the vibrating leaves, and burned in the summer heat. When, after long gazing into blue distances of air, he turned to find Miranda, it seemed that the blue had broken and yielded its secret.

From the balcony of his room at night he saw things so lovely that he stood for long moments still, as though he listened. The trees, massed solemnly together, waited sentiently to be stirred. The stars drew him into the deep. Voices broke from the street. Light shining from far windows, and the smoke of chimneys fantastically grouped, filled him with a sense of pulsing, intimate life; a world of energy whose stillness was the measure of its power, the slumber of a bee's wing.

One of the far lighted windows belonged to Miranda. He was content to know she was there, and recalled, clear in his mind's eye, the lines and gestures of her face. The beauty he saw there had seemed almost to break his heart. It wavered upon him alternate with the stars and the dark trees of the garden. Loveliness and a perpetual riddle delicately lurked in the corners of her mouth. Sometimes, when they were together, he would lay his finger very softly on Miranda's lips.

He rarely kissed her. The flutter of his pulse died under an ecstasy bodiless as his passion for the painted sky. He did not yet love the girl who sometimes with a curious ferocity flung her arms about him and crushed his face against her shabby dress. Rather he loved the beauty of the world and his inspired ability, through her, to embrace it.

XI

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.

XII

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.

XIII

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.

XIV

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.

XV

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.

XVI

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."

XVII

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.

XVIII

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.

XIX

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.

XX

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.