Incidentally Peter learned something about the housing of people in London; something, too, of agents and speculators in housing. Finally he perched in Golder's Green in a small flat over a group of shops. The agent assured him it was a district loved by literary and artistic people.
His mother quickly followed him to London with plate and linen. A maid was engaged, and Peter settled down to happiness and comfort.
His first sensations were triumphant. He kicked his heels. The grey walls of Oxford fell away. He tramped the streets of London, and flung out the chest of a free man. Moreover, he had the zest of his new employment. He broke his young brains against the subtleties of the law.
Within a few weeks he began tentatively to know the intellectual firebrands of the time. He had sent his pamphlet concerning Gingerbread Fair to the distinguished author whose epistolary acquaintance he had made in Hamingburgh. The great man, who independently had heard the full story of Peter's assault upon the Lord Chamberlain's stage at Oxford, was tickled, and sent him an introduction to a famous collectivist pair whose salon included everybody in London who had a theory and believed in it.
Peter met Georgian poets, independent critics and reviewers, mystics of every degree, diagrammatic and futurist painters, musicians who wrote in pentametric scales, social reformers, suspected dramatists—everybody who had proved anything, or destroyed anything, or knew how the world should be run; experts upon constitutional government in the Far East, upon beautiful conduct in garden cities, upon the incidence of taxation, upon housing and sanitation, upon sweated labour, upon sex and marriage, upon vaccination and physical culture, upon food-bases, oriental religion and Hindu poetry.
Peter did not meet all these people at once. There was a period of six months during which he gradually intruded among these jarring intelligencies. During this time he was continually seeing things from a new angle and weighing fresh opinions, continually pricked to explore untrodden ways of speculation. The chase of exotic views was for a time fun enough to keep him from measuring their value.
Peter for nearly eighteen months mingled with this fussy and bitter under-world of thinkers and talkers. He listened seriously to all it had to say, at first with respect and curiosity. But gradually he grew suspicious—even hostile. As he knew these people better, and talked with them more intimately, he discovered that their energy was much of it superficial. When, in his lust for truth, he pushed into their defences, he found that many of their views were fashionable hearsay. They echoed one another. Only a few had deeply read or widely observed for themselves. Each clique had its registered commonplaces. Each was a nest of authority. Peter suffered a series of small shocks, hardly felt individually, but insensibly breaking down his faith. Often as he pushed into the mind of this person or that, thrilling to meet and clash with a pliable intelligence, he found himself vainly beating against the logical blank wall of a formula.
Among Peter's new acquaintances was the editor of a collectivist weekly Review. This man discovered Peter's literary gift and turned him loose upon the theatres. For several months Peter wrote weekly articles, with liberty to say what he pleased. Peter said what he pleased with ferocity. His articles were a weekly battery, trained upon the amusements of modern London. All went well till Peter began to quarrel with the intellectual drama of his editor. One week Peter grew bitter concerning a new stage hero of the time—the man of ideas who talks everybody down. Peter said flatly that he was tired of this fidgety puppet. It was time he was put away. The editor sent for him.
"Here, Paragon, this won't do at all."
"What's wrong?"