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[Pg 139] 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[Pg 140] 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[Pg 141] he returned to the still, beautiful figure of his mother as to something rooted and safe. Sometimes, as he entertained some of his talking friends, he watched her sitting monumentally wise, passively confounding them.
"I won't stay alone in London," Peter suddenly announced.
His mother calmly considered him.
"I can easily arrange it for you," she suggested at last.
"I should go mad," said Peter briefly. He crossed to where his mother was sitting.
"Why, Peter," she said, "I hardly see anything of you."
"You are always there," said Peter, putting his arm around her shoulder. "You simply don't know what a comfort it is to have you. Somehow you keep things from going to the devil. I don't mean the housekeeping," continued Peter, answering his mother's puzzled look. "The fact is, mother, you're quite wonderful. You're the only person I know who hasn't any opinions. You just are."
Peter decided to go into the country, and return to London when his mother was ready to come back. The time for this had almost arrived, when he met Marbury in the lobby of the House of Commons.
Marbury broke away from his friends as Peter was hesitating whether to pass him.
"Hullo, Peter, what are you doing in this dusty[Pg 142] place? I thought you were loose in the theatre."
"Was," Peter briefly corrected.
"Then you got tired?"
"No, I squabbled with the editor."
"How are you getting on?" asked Marbury, quietly inspecting his friend.
"Very badly. How are you?"
"I'm standing in a month or so for the family seat," answered Marbury. "That's why I'm here. You must come and see the election. Politics from within."
"Damn politics."
"I'll tell you what it is, Peter. It's the Spring."
"I want to get away from all this infernal talking," said Peter.
"You've discovered that some of it's a bit thin?"
"I'll tell you what I've discovered," said Peter savagely, "I've discovered that almost any damn fool can be intellectual."
"Try the stupid fellows who are always right."
"Who are they?"
"Latest definition of a Tory. Come and talk to the farm-labourers."
"Not yet. I'm going to live in the air."
"What will you do? Books?"
"I hate books."
"Come now, Peter, not all books," protested Marbury. "Let me send you some. Books for the open."
"Can you find me a book that has nothing to[Pg 143] do with any modern thing—a book that goes with the earth and touches bottom."
"What's wrong with Shakespeare?" asked Marbury.
"I've packed Shakespeare."
"I'll send you some more."
"Be careful," Peter warned him; "I shall pitch anything that looks like a talking book into the fire."
"You mustn't do that, Peter. The books I am going to send you are valuable."
They were walking now in Whitehall.
"When do you begin to be elected?" asked Peter, suddenly expanding.
"Almost at once. I'll send for you when the time comes."
"What's the idea of that?"
"You must come round the constituency—fifty miles across in its narrowest part. I want someone to feed me with sandwiches and keep my spirits up. Besides it will do you good. You'll meet some people who have never written a book and haven't any opinions."
"Beasts of the field," said Peter.
"Not at all. They're all on the register; and they will vote for Marbury."
By the time they had reached Charing Cross Marbury had persuaded Peter to tell his address. He also agreed to join Marbury immediately he was summoned. The next day he went with his mother to Hamingburgh, and afterwards packed[Pg 144] for the country. He would wander aimlessly in Worcestershire from village to village till Marbury sent for him.
Already he was happier for the meeting. He felt an access of real affection for Marbury on being interrupted in his packing by the arrival of the books Marbury had promised. He pitched them unopened into his trunk, in confidence that Marbury had chosen well.