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[Pg 79] 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[Pg 80] 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[Pg 81] 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.

[Pg 82]

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 [Pg 83]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 er............