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 kindadvances 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 asneither 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 ofsmall 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 answeredMiranda, 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.
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 andrapid. 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 windowsopened 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'sinstinct, 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 eveningof 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 hisroom. 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 awall'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.
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 todissuade 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.
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 totremble 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 hewas 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.
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 longgazing 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.
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 tocategories. 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 inouter 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 thedroop 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 tornfrom 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.
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 thanyou. 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."
"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 thanyou. 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 hismouth 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.
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 hadnothing 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 pavementor 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 intothe 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 merelybewildered 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 anobligatoto 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 lookedas 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 paintedthe 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.