"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.