"You've dropped on this fellow like a sand-bag. We're here to encourage this sort of drama."
Peter put his nose into the air.
"What is the name of this paper? I thought you called it the Free Lance."
"You can say what you like about plays in general."
Peter then and there resigned. But he was too good a pen to lose. His editor borrowed a gallery ticket from a London daily paper, and sent Peter to attend debates in the House of Commons as an impartial critic of Parliamentary deportment and intelligence. Three weeks shattered all Peter's fixed ideas of English public life. He forgot to detest the futility of the party game—as he had at the Oxford Union so persistently contrived to do—in sincere enjoyment of a perpetually interesting comedy. Moreover, the figures he most admired were the figures he should by rote have denounced. He delighted in the perfect address of a statesman he had formerly reprobated as an old-fashioned Liberal; and, listening to the speeches of the old-fashioned Liberal's principal Tory opponent, he felt he was in contact with a living and adventurous mind. Peter recognised that this man—hitherto simply regarded as an enemy of the people—was, like himself, an explorer. He was feeling his way to the truth.
XX
Peter stood one evening in early March—it was his second spring in London—upon the terrace at Westminster. The friendly member who had brought him there had for a moment disappeared. Perhaps it was the first stirring of the year, or the air blowing up from the sea after the fumes of the stuffiest room in London, but Peter felt a glad release as he watched the tide sweeping in from the bridge. He had just heard the speech of a socialist minister reflecting just that intellectual rigidity from which he was beginning to recoil. The day was warm, with faint ashes of a sunset dispersed over a sky of intense blue. Peter watched a boat steaming out into a world so wide that it dwarfed the towers under which he had that afternoon been sitting. Dead phrases lingered in his brain, prompting into memory a multitude of doctrines and ideas—the stuff on which he had fed since he set out to explore revolutionary London. He shot them impatiently at the open sky. They rattled against the impenetrable blue like peas flung at a window. Peter impulsively breathed deeply of the flowing air. It rushed into the corners of his brain.