Peter enjoyed one happy evening with his mother, and left for Oxford.
But Oxford had disappeared. Where was the beautiful city—offering illimitable knowledge, sure wisdom, lovely authority? Peter had come into touch with life. He had craved to find order and beauty in the pageant of London. Now, in the stones of Oxford, he saw only the frozen ideas of a vanished age—serene accomplishment whose finality exasperated him. He looked from his window across the shaven green of a perfect lawn to the chapel tower. The hour chiming in quarters from a dozen bells marked off yet another small distance between Oxford and the living day. His disillusion of the previous term was now openly confessed and examined.
Peter was not alone. Gamaliel drew to itself some excellent brain. It was celebrated for young men prematurely wise—young men who had learned everything at twenty-two, and never afterwards added to their store. Peter became a leading character in the intellectual set. They jested in good Greek, filling their heads with knowledge they affected to despise, taking in vain the theories of their masters, merrily playing with their grand-sires' bones of learning. They snorted with delight at the efforts of their chief clerical instructor to evade the Rabelaisian Obscenities of Aristophanes or a too curious inquiry into certain social habits of old Greece. They reduced Hegel to half-sheets of paper, suggested profanely various readings for Petronius, speculated without reverence on the darker habits of mankind from Aristotle to the Junior Prior. But in all this horseplay of minds young and keen was a strain of contemptuous fatigue. Gamaliel, out of its clever youngsters, bred civil servants, politicians, or university professors. Intellectual pedantry waited for those whom Gamaliel intellectually satisfied. Intellectual cynicism—the cynicism of a firm belief that nothing is important or new—waited for those who played the game of scholarship with humour enough to find it barren.
Peter, therefore, was not alone in his reaction against the formal discipline of the College, but he was alone in the obstinate ardour of his youth. He had just discovered that life was absorbing. Though he sat far into many nights in scholarly gymnastics with his friends, he came away to watch the grey light creeping into a world he keenly wanted to understand. He jested only with his brain, driven to the game by physical energy and friendly emulation. He was never really touched by the cynicism and horse laughter of his set. He often left these meetings in a sudden access of desolation.
Peter's directors began sadly to shake their heads. They knew the symptoms—knew he was already marked for failure. The Warden gravely reasoned with him.
"Mr. Paragon," he said, handing Peter his papers for the term, "these are second class."
Peter was mortified. His intellectual comrades mocked, but they also satisfied, their masters. Peter was of another fibre. He could do nothing without his entire heart. Various readings in Horace no longer fired him. The kick had gone out of his work. His brain was elsewhere.
He took the papers in silence. He could not understand his failure. Hitherto satisfying the examiners had been for Peter a matter of course.
"You have neglected your reading?" the Warden suggested, as Peter turned silently away.
"No, sir."