The Soul of a Bishop

Surely so one might call a halt to all these harsh conflicts. So one might lay hands afresh upon these stubborn minds, one might win them round to look at Christ the Master and Servant…

That, he thought, would be a good phrase: “Christ the Master and Servant.”…

“Members of one Body,” that should be his text… At last it was finished. The big congregation, which had kept so still, sighed and stirred. The task of reconciliation was as good as done. “And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost…”

Outside the day had become suddenly bright, the threatening storm had drifted away, and great shafts of coloured light from the pictured windows were smiting like arrows amidst his hearers…

This idea of a great sermon upon capital and labour did so powerfully grip the bishop’s imagination that he came near to losing the 8.27 train also.

He discovered it when it was already in the station. He had to walk down the platform very quickly. He did not run, but his gaiters, he felt, twinkled more than a bishop’s should.

(8)

Directly he met his wife he realized that he had to hear something important and unpleasant.

She stood waiting for him in the inner hall, looking very grave and still. The light fell upon her pale face and her dark hair and her long white silken dress, making her seem more delicate and unworldly than usual and making the bishop feel grimy and sordid.

“I must have a wash,” he said, though before he had thought of nothing but food. “I have had nothing to eat since tea-time – and that was mostly talk.”

Lady Ella considered. “There are cold things… You shall have a tray in the study. Not in the dining-room. Eleanor is there. I want to tell you something. But go upstairs first and wash your poor tired face.”

“Nothing serious, I hope?” he asked, struck by an unusual quality in her voice.

“I will tell you,” she evaded, and after a moment of mutual scrutiny he went past her upstairs.

Since they had come to Princhester Lady Ella had changed very markedly. She seemed to her husband to have gained in dignity; she was stiller and more restrained; a certain faint arrogance, a touch of the “ruling class” manner had dwindled almost to the vanishing point. There had been a time when she had inclined to an authoritative hauteur, when she had seemed likely to develop into one of those aggressive and interfering old ladies who play so overwhelming a part in British public affairs. She had been known to initiate adverse judgments, to exercise the snub, to cut and humiliate. Princhester had done much to purge her of such tendencies. Princhester had made her think abundantly, and had put a new and subtler quality into her beauty. It had taken away the least little disposition to rustle as she moved, and it had softened her voice.

Now, when presently she stood in the study, she showed a new circumspection in her treatment of her husband. She surveyed the tray before him.

“You ought not to drink that Burgundy,” she said. “I can see you are dog-tired. It was uncorked yesterday, and anyhow it is not very digestible. This cold meat is bad enough. You ought to have one of those quarter bottles of champagne you got for my last convalescence. There’s more than a dozen left over.”

The bishop felt that this was a pretty return of his own kindly thoughts “after many days,” and soon Dunk, his valet-butler, was pouring out the precious and refreshing glassful…

“And now, dear?” said the bishop, feeling already much better.

Lady Ella had come round to the marble fireplace. The mantel-piece was a handsome work by a Princhester artist in the Gill style – with contemplative ascetics as supporters.

“I am worried about Eleanor,” said Lady Ella.

“She is in the dining-room now,” she said, “having some dinner. She came in about a quarter past eight, half way through dinner.”

“Where had she been?” asked the bishop.

“Her dress was torn – in two places. Her wrist had been twisted and a little sprained.”

“My dear!”

“Her face – Grubby! And she had been crying.”

“But, my dear, what had happened to her? You don’t mean – ?”

Husband and wife stared at one another aghast. Neither of them said the horrid word that flamed between them.

“Merciful heaven!” said the bishop, and assumed an attitude of despair.

“I didn’t know she knew any of them. But it seems it is the second Walshingham girl – Phoebe. It’s impossible to trace a girl’s thoughts and friends. She persuaded her to go.”

“But did she understand?”

“That’s the serious thing,” said Lady Ella.

She seemed to consider whether he could bear the blow.

“She understands all sorts of things. She argues… I am quite unable to argue with her.”

“About this vote business?”

“About all sorts of things. Things I didn’t imagine she had heard of. I knew she had been reading books. But I never imagined that she could have understood…”

The bishop laid down his knife and fork.

“One may read in books, one may even talk of things, without fully understanding,” he said.

Lady Ella tried to entertain this comforting thought. “It isn’t like that,” she said at last. “She talks like a grown-up person. This – this escapade is just an accident. But things have gone further than that. She seems to think – that she is not being educated properly here, that she ought to go to a College. As if we were keeping things from her…”

The bishop reconsidered his plate.

“But what things?” he said.

“She says we get all round her,” said Lady Ella, and left the implications of that phrase to unfold.

(9)

For a time the bishop said very little.

Lady Ella had found it necessary to make her first announcement standing behind him upon the hearthrug, but now she sat upon the arm of the great armchair as close to him as possible, and spoke in a more familiar tone.

The thing, she said, had come to her as a complete surprise. Everything had seemed so safe. Eleanor had been thoughtful, it was true, but it had never occurred to her mother that she had really been thinking – about such things as she had been thinking about. She had ranged in the library, and displayed a disposition to read the weekly papers and the monthly reviews. But never a sign of discontent.

“But I don’t understand,” said the bishop. “Why is she discontented? What is there that she wants different?”

“Exactly,” said Lady Ella.

“She has got this idea that life here is secluded in some way,” she expanded. “She used words like ‘secluded’ and ‘artificial’ and – what was it? – ‘cloistered.’ And she said – ”

Lady Ella paused with an effect of exact retrospection.

“‘Out there,’ she said, ‘things are alive. Real things are happening.’ It is almost as if she did not fully believe – ”

Lady Ella paused again.

The bishop sat with his arm over the back of his chair, and his face downcast.

“The ferment of youth,” he said at last. “The ferment of youth. Who has given her these ideas?”

Lady Ella did not know. She could have thought a school like St. Aubyns would have been safe, but nowadays nothing was safe. It was clear the girls who went there talked as girls a generation ago did not talk. Their people at home encouraged them to talk and profess opinions about everything. It seemed that Phoebe Walshingham and Lady Kitty Kingdom were the leaders in these premature mental excursions. Phoebe aired religious doubts.

“But little Phoebe!” said the bishop.

“Kitty,” said Lady Ella, “has written a novel.”

“Already!”

“With elopements in it – and all sorts of things. She’s had it typed. You’d think Mary Crosshampton would know better than to let her daughter go flourishing the family imagination about in that way.”

“Eleanor told you?”

“By way of showing that they think of – things in general.”

The bishop reflected. “She wants to go to College.”

“They want to go in a set.”

“I wonder if college can be much worse than school… She’s eighteen – ? But I will talk to her…”

(10)

All our children are changelings. They are perpetually fresh strangers. Every day they vanish and a new person masquerades as yesterday’s child until some unexpected development betrays the cheat.

The bishop had still to learn this perennial newness of the young. He learnt it in half an hour at the end of a fatiguing day.

He went into the dining-room. He went in as carelessly as possible and smoking a cigarette. He had an honourable dread of being portentous in his family; almost ostentatiously he laid the bishop aside. Eleanor had finished her meal, and was sitting in the arm-chair by the fire with one hand holding her sprained wrist.

“Well,” he said, and strolled to the hearthrug. He had had an odd idea that he would find her still dirty, torn, and tearful, as her mother had described her, a little girl in a scrape. But she had changed into her best white evening frock and put up her hair, and became in the firelight more of a lady, a very young lady but still a lady, than she had ever been to him before. She was dark like her mother, but not of the same willowy type; she had more of her father’s sturdy build, and she had developed her shoulders at hockey and tennis. The firelight brought out the gracious reposeful lines of a body that ripened in adolescence. And though there was a vibration of resolution in her voice she spoke like one who is under her own control.

“Mother has told you that I have disgraced myself,” she began.

“No,” said the bishop, weighing it. “No. But you seem to have been indiscreet, little Norah.”

“I got excited,” she said. “They began turning out the other women – roughly. I was indignant.”

“You didn’t go to interrupt?” he asked.

She considered. “No,” she said. “But I went.”

He liked her disposition to get it right. “On that side,” he assisted.

“It isn’t the same thing as really meaning, Daddy,” she said.

“And then things happened?”

“Yes,” she said to the fire.

A pause followed. If they had been in a law-court, her barrister would have said, “That is my case, my lord.” The bishop prepared to open the next stage in the proceedings.

“I think, Norah, you shouldn’t have been there at all,” he said.

“Mother says that.”

“A man in my position is apt to be judged by his family. You commit more than yourself when you commit an indiscretion. Apart from that, it wasn’t the place for a girl to be at. You are not a child now. We give you freedom – more freedom than most girls get – because we think you will use it wisely. You knew – enough to know that there was likely to be trouble.”

The girl looked into the fire and spoke very carefully. “I don’t think that I oughtn’t to know the things that are going on.”

The bishop studied her face for an instant. It struck him that they had reached something very fundamental as between parent and child. His modernity showed itself in the temperance of his reply.

“Don’t you think, my dear, that on the whole your mother and I, who have lived longer and know more, are more likely to know when it is best that you should begin to know – this or that?”

The girl knitted her brows and seemed to be reading her answer out of the depths of the coals. She was on the verge of speaking, altered her mind and tried a different beginning.

“I think that every one must do their thinking – his thinking – for – oneself,” she said awkwardly.

“You mean you can’t trust – ?”

“It isn’t trusting. But one knows best for oneself when one is hungry.”

“And you find yourself hungry?”

“I want to find out for myself what all this trouble about votes and things means.”

“And we starve you – intellectually?”

“You know I don’t think that. But you are busy…”

“Aren’t you being perhaps a little impatient, Eleanor? After all – you are barely eighteen… We have given you all sorts of liberties.”

Her silence admitted it. “But still,” she said after a long pause, “there are other girls, younger than I am, in these things. They talk about – oh, all sorts of things. Freely…”

“You’ve been awfully good to me,” she said irrelevantly. “And of course this meeting was all pure accident.”

Father and daughter remained silent for awhile, seeking a better grip.

“What exactly do you want, Eleanor?” he asked.

She looked up at him. “Generally?” she asked.

“Your mother has the impression that you are discontented.”

“Discontented is a horrid word.”

“Well – unsatisfied.”

She remained still for a time. She felt the moment had come to make her demand.

“I would like to go to Newnham or Somerville – and work. I feel – so horribly ignorant. Of all sorts of things. If I were a son I should go – ”

“Ye – es,” said the bishop and reflected.

He had gone rather far in the direction of the Woman Suffrage people; he had advocated equality of standard in all sorts of matters, and the memory of these utterances hampered him.

“You could read here,” he tried.

“If I were a son, you wouldn’t say that.”

His reply was vague. “But in this home,” he said, “we have a certain atmosphere.”

He left her to imply her differences in sensibility and response from the hardier male.

Her hesitation marked the full gravity of her reply. “It’s just that,” she said. “One feels – ” She considered it further. “As if we were living in a kind of magic world – not really real. Out there – ” she glanced over her shoulder at the drawn blind that hid the night. “One meets with different sorts of minds and different – atmospheres. All this is very beautiful. I’ve had the most wonderful home. But there’s a sort of feeling as though it couldn’t really go on, as though all these strikes and doubts and questionings – ”

She stopped short at questionings, for the thing was said.

The bishop took her meaning gallantly and honestly.

“The church of Christ, little Norah, is built upon a rock.”

She made no answer. She moved her head very slightly so that he could not see her face, and remained sitting rather stiffly and awkwardly with her eyes upon the fire.

Her silence was the third and greatest blow the bishop received that day…

It seemed very long indeed before either of them spoke. At last he said: “We must talk about these things again, Norah, when we are less tired and have more time… You have been reading books… When Caxton set up his printing-press he thrust a new power between church and disciple and father and child… And I am tired. We must talk it over a little later.”

The girl stood up. She took her father’s hands. “Dear, dear Daddy,” she said, “I am so sorry to be a bother. I am so sorry I went to that meeting… You look tired out.”

“We must talk – properly,” said the bishop, patting one hand, then discovering from her wincing face that it was the sprained one. “Your poor wrist,” he said.

“It’s so hard to talk, but I want to talk to you, Daddy. It isn’t that I have hidden things…”

She kissed him, and the bishop had the odd fancy that she kissed him as though she was sorry for him…

It occurred to him that really there could be no time like the present for discussing these “questionings” of hers, and then his fatigue and shyness had the better of him again.

(11)

The papers got hold of Eleanor’s share in the suffragette disturbance. The White Blackbird said things about her.

It did not attack her. It did worse. It admired her …impudently.

It spoke of her once as “Norah,” and once as “the Scrope Flapper.”

Its headline proclaimed: “Plucky Flappers Hold Up L. G.”

CHAPTER THE THIRD – INSOMNIA

(1)

THE night after his conversation with Eleanor was the first night of the bishop’s insomnia. It was the definite beginning of a new phase in his life.

Doctors explain to us that the immediate cause of insomnia is always some poisoned or depleted state of the body, and no doubt the fatigues and hasty meals of the day had left the bishop in a state of unprecedented chemical disorder, with his nerves irritated by strange compounds and unsoothed by familiar lubricants. But chemical disorders follow mental disturbances, and the core and essence of his trouble was an intellectual distress. For the first time in his life he was really in doubt, about himself, about his way of living, about all his persuasions. It was a general doubt. It was not a specific suspicion upon this point or that. It was a feeling of detachment and unreality at once extraordinarily vague and extraordinarily oppressive. It was as if he discovered himself flimsy and transparent in a world of minatory solidity and opacity. It was as if he found himself made not of flesh and blood but of tissue paper.

But this intellectual insecurity extended into his physical sensations. It affected his feeling in his skin, as if it were not absolutely his own skin.

And as he lay there, a weak phantom mentally and bodily, an endless succession and recurrence of anxieties for which he could find no reassurance besieged him.

Chief of this was his distress for Eleanor.

She was the central figure in this new sense of illusion in familiar and trusted things. It was not only that the world of his existence which had seemed to be the whole universe had become diaphanous and betrayed vast and uncontrollable realities beyond it, but his daughter had as it were suddenly opened a door in this glassy sphere of insecurity that had been his abiding refuge, a door upon the stormy rebel outer world, and she stood there, young, ignorant, confident, adventurous, ready to step out.

“Could it be possible that she did not believe?”

He saw her very vividly as he had seen her in the dining-room, slender and upright, half child, half woman, so fragile and so fearless. And the door she opened thus carelessly gave upon a stormy background like one of the stormy backgrounds that were popular behind portrait Dianas in eighteenth century paintings. Did she believe that all he had taught her, all the life he led was – what was her phrase? – a kind of magic world, not really real?

He groaned and turned over and repeated the words: “A kind of magic world – not really real!”

The wind blew through the door she opened, and scattered everything in the room. And still she held the door open.

He was astonished at himself. He started up in swift indignation. Had he not taught the child? Had he not brought her up in an atmosphere of faith? What right had she to turn upon him in this matter? It was – indeed it was – a sort of insolence, a lack of reverence…

It was strange he had not perceived this at the time.

But indeed at the first mention of “questionings” he ought to have thundered. He saw that quite clearly now. He ought to have cried out and said, “On your knees, my Norah, and ask pardon of God!”

Because after all faith is an emotional thing…

He began to think very rapidly and copiously of things he ought to have said to Eleanor. And now the eloquence of reverie was upon him. In a little time he was also addressing the tea-party at Morrice Deans’. Upon them too he ought to have thundered. And he knew now also all that he should have said to the recalcitrant employer. Thunder also. Thunder is surely the privilege of the higher clergy – under Jove.

But why hadn’t he thundered?

He gesticulated in the darkness, thrust out a clutching hand.

There are situations that must be gripped – gripped firmly. And without delay. In the middle ages there had been grip enough in a purple glove.

(2)

From these belated seizures of the day’s lost opportunities the bishop passed to such a pessimistic estimate of the church as had never entered his mind before.

It was as if he had fallen suddenly out of a spiritual balloon into a world of bleak realism. He found himself asking unprecedented and devastating questions, questions that implied the most fundamental shiftings of opinion. Why was the church such a failure? Why had it no grip upon either masters or men amidst this vigorous life of modern industrialism, and why had it no grip upon the questioning young? It was a tolerated thing, he felt, just as sometimes he had felt that the Crown was a tolerated thing. He too was a tolerated thing; a curious survival…

This was not as things should be. He struggled to recover a proper attitude. But he remained enormously dissatisfied…

The church was no Levite to pass by on the other side away from the struggles and wrongs of the social conflict. It had no right when the children asked for the bread of life to offer them Gothic stone…

He began to make interminable weak plans for fulfilling his duty to his diocese and his daughter.

What could he do to revivify his clergy? He wished he had more personal magnetism, he wished he had a darker and a larger presence. He wished he had not been saddled with Whippham’s rather futile son as his chaplain. He wished he had a dean instead of being his own dean. With an unsympathetic rector. He wished he had it in him to make some resounding appeal. He might of course preach a series of thumping addresses and sermons, rather on the lines of “Fors Clavigera,” to masters and men, in the Cathedral. Only it was so difficult to get either masters or men into the Cathedral.

Well, if the people will not come to the bishop the bishop must go out to the people. Should he go outside the Cathedral – to the place where the trains met?

Interweaving with such thoughts the problem of Eleanor rose again into his consciousness.

Weren’t there books she ought to read? Weren’t there books she ought to be made to read? And books – and friends – that ought to be imperatively forbidden? Imperatively!

But how to define the forbidden?

He began to compose an address on Modern Literature (so-called).

It became acrimonious.

Before dawn the birds began to sing.

His mind had seemed to be a little tranquillized, there had been a distinct feeling of subsidence sleepwards, when first one and then another little creature roused itself and the bishop to greet the gathering daylight.

It became a little clamour, a misty sea of sound in which individuality appeared and disappeared. For a time a distant cuckoo was very perceptible, like a landmark looming up over a fog, like the cuckoo in the Pastoral Symphony.

The bishop tried not to heed these sounds, but they were by their very nature insistent sounds. He lay disregarding them acutely.

Presently he pulled the coverlet over his ears.

A little later he sat up in bed.

Again in a slight detail he marked his strange and novel detachment from the world of his upbringing. His hallucination of disillusionment had spread from himself and his church and his faith to the whole animate creation. He knew that these were the voices of “our feathered songsters,” that this was “a joyous chorus” greeting the day. He knew that a wakeful bishop ought to bless these happy creatures, and join with them by reciting Ken’s morning hymn. He made an effort that was more than half habit, to repeat and he repeated with a scowling face and the voice of a schoolmaster:

“Awake my soul, and with the sun Thy daily stage of duty run…”

He got no further. He stopped short, sat still, thinking what utterly detestable things singing birds were. A. blackbird had gripped his attention. Never had he heard such vain repetitions. He struggled against the dark mood of criticism. “He prayeth best who loveth best – ”

No, he did not love the birds. It was useless to pretend. Whatever one may say about other birds a cuckoo is a low detestable cad of a bird.

Then the bishop began to be particularly tormented by a bird that made a short, insistent, wheezing sound at regular intervals of perhaps twenty seconds. If a bird could have whooping-cough, that, he thought, was the sort of whoop it would have. But even if it had whooping-cough he could not pity it. He hung in its intervals waiting for the return of the wheeze.

And then that blackbird reasserted itself. It had a rich boastful note; it seemed proud of its noisy reiteration of simple self-assertion. For some obscure reason the phrase “oleographic sounds” drifted into the bishop’s thoughts. This bird produced the peculiar and irrational impression that it had recently made a considerable sum of money by shrewd industrialism. It was, he thought grimly, a genuine Princhester blackbird.

This wickedly uncharitable reference to his diocese ran all unchallenged through the bishop’s mind. And others no less wicked followed it.