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.