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The soul of a bishop

by H. G. Wells · English · Gutenberg #1269 · 466,868 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The soul of a bishop

Author: H. G. Wells


        
Release date: February 19, 2006 [eBook #1269]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1269

Credits: Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOUL OF A BISHOP ***

THE SOUL OF A BISHOP

By H. G. Wells




CONTENTS

     CHAPTER THE FIRST   -  THE DREAM
     CHAPTER THE SECOND  -  THE WEAR AND TEAR OF EPISCOPACY
     CHAPTER THE THIRD   -  INSOMNIA
     CHAPTER THE FOURTH  -  THE SYMPATHY OF LADY SUNDERBUND
     CHAPTER THE FIFTH   -  THE FIRST VISION
     CHAPTER THE SIXTH   -  EXEGETICAL
     CHAPTER THE SEVENTH -  THE SECOND VISION
     CHAPTER THE EIGHTH  -  THE NEW WORLD
     CHAPTER THE NINTH   -  THE THIRD VISION


“Man's true Environment is God”

J. H. OLDHAM in “The Christian Gospel” (Tract of the N. M. R. and H.)




THE SOUL OF A BISHOP




CHAPTER THE FIRST - THE DREAM

(1)


IT was a scene of bitter disputation. A hawk-nosed young man with a
pointing finger was prominent. His face worked violently, his lips moved
very rapidly, but what he said was inaudible.

Behind him the little rufous man with the big eyes twitched at his robe
and offered suggestions.

And behind these two clustered a great multitude of heated, excited,
swarthy faces....

The emperor sat on his golden throne in the midst of the gathering,
commanding silence by gestures, speaking inaudibly to them in a tongue
the majority did not use, and then prevailing. They ceased their
interruptions, and the old man, Arius, took up the debate. For a time
all those impassioned faces were intent upon him; they listened as
though they sought occasion, and suddenly as if by a preconcerted
arrangement they were all thrusting their fingers into their ears and
knitting their brows in assumed horror; some were crying aloud and
making as if to fly. Some indeed tucked up their garments and fled. They
spread out into a pattern. They were like the little monks who run from
St. Jerome's lion in the picture by Carpaccio. Then one zealot rushed
forward and smote the old man heavily upon the mouth....

The hall seemed to grow vaster and vaster, the disputing, infuriated
figures multiplied to an innumerable assembly, they drove about like
snowflakes in a gale, they whirled in argumentative couples, they spun
in eddies of contradiction, they made extraordinary patterns, and then
amidst the cloudy darkness of the unfathomable dome above them there
appeared and increased a radiant triangle in which shone an eye. The eye
and the triangle filled the heavens, sent out flickering rays, glowed
to a blinding incandescence, seemed to be speaking words of thunder
that were nevertheless inaudible. It was as if that thunder filled the
heavens, it was as if it were nothing but the beating artery in the
sleeper's ear. The attention strained to hear and comprehend, and on the
very verge of comprehension snapped like a fiddle-string.

“Nicoea!”

The word remained like a little ash after a flare.

The sleeper had awakened and lay very still, oppressed by a sense of
intellectual effort that had survived the dream in which it had arisen.
Was it so that things had happened? The slumber-shadowed mind, moving
obscurely, could not determine whether it was so or not. Had they indeed
behaved in this manner when the great mystery was established? Who
said they stopped their ears with their fingers and fled, shouting with
horror? Shouting? Was it Eusebius or Athanasius? Or Sozomen.... Some
letter or apology by Athanasius?... And surely it was impossible that
the Trinity could have appeared visibly as a triangle and an eye. Above
such an assembly.

That was mere dreaming, of course. Was it dreaming after Raphael? After
Raphael? The drowsy mind wandered into a side issue. Was the picture
that had suggested this dream the one in the Vatican where all the
Fathers of the Church are shown disputing together? But there surely God
and the Son themselves were painted with a symbol--some symbol--also?
But was that disputation about the Trinity at all? Wasn't it rather
about a chalice and a dove? Of course it was a chalice and a dove! Then
where did one see the triangle and the eye? And men disputing? Some such
picture there was....

What a lot of disputing there had been! What endless disputing! Which
had gone on. Until last night. When this very disagreeable young man
with the hawk nose and the pointing finger had tackled one when one was
sorely fagged, and disputed; disputed. Rebuked and disputed. “Answer me
this,” he had said.... And still one's poor brains disputed and would
not rest.... About the Trinity....

The brain upon the pillow was now wearily awake. It was at once
hopelessly awake and active and hopelessly unprogressive. It was like
some floating stick that had got caught in an eddy in a river, going
round and round and round. And round. Eternally--eternally--eternally
begotten.

“But what possible meaning do you attach then to such a phrase as
eternally begotten?”

The brain upon the pillow stared hopelessly at this question, without an
answer, without an escape. The three repetitions spun round and round,
became a swiftly revolving triangle, like some electric sign that
had got beyond control, in the midst of which stared an unwinking and
resentful eye.

(2)


Every one knows that expedient of the sleepless, the counting of sheep.

You lie quite still, you breathe regularly, you imagine sheep jumping
over a gate, one after another, you count them quietly and slowly until
you count yourself off through a fading string of phantom numbers to
number Nod....

But sheep, alas! suggest an episcopal crook.

And presently a black sheep had got into the succession and was
struggling violently with the crook about its leg, a hawk-nosed black
sheep full of reproof, with disordered hair and a pointing finger. A
young man with a most disagreeable voice.

At which the other sheep took heart and, deserting the numbered
succession, came and sat about the fire in a big drawing-room and argued
also. In particular there was Lady Sunderbund, a pretty fragile tall
woman in the corner, richly jewelled, who sat with her pretty eyes
watching and her lips compressed. What had she thought of it? She had
said very little.

It is an unusual thing for a mixed gathering of this sort to argue about
the Trinity. Simply because a tired bishop had fallen into their party.
It was not fair to him to pretend that the atmosphere was a liberal and
inquiring one, when the young man who had sat still and dormant by the
table was in reality a keen and bitter Irish Roman Catholic. Then the
question, a question-begging question, was put quite suddenly, without
preparation or prelude, by surprise. “Why, Bishop, was the Spermaticos
Logos identified with the Second and not the Third Person of the
Trinity?”

It was indiscreet, it was silly, to turn upon the speaker and affect an
air of disengagement and modernity and to say: “Ah, that indeed is the
unfortunate aspect of the whole affair.”

Whereupon the fierce young man had exploded with: “To that, is it, that
you Anglicans have come?”

The whole gathering had given itself up to the disputation, Lady
Sunderbund, an actress, a dancer--though she, it is true, did not say
very much--a novelist, a mechanical expert of some sort, a railway peer,
geniuses, hairy and Celtic, people of no clearly definable position,
but all quite unequal to the task of maintaining that air of reverent
vagueness, that tenderness of touch, which is by all Anglican standards
imperative in so deep, so mysterious, and, nowadays, in mixed society at
least, so infrequent a discussion.

It was like animals breaking down a fence about some sacred spot. Within
a couple of minutes the affair had become highly improper. They had
raised their voices, they had spoken with the utmost familiarity of
almost unspeakable things. There had been even attempts at epigram.
Athanasian epigrams. Bent the novelist had doubted if originally there
had been a Third Person in the Trinity at all. He suggested a reaction
from a too-Manichaean dualism at some date after the time of St. John's
Gospel. He maintained obstinately that that Gospel was dualistic.

The unpleasant quality of the talk was far more manifest in the
retrospect than it had been at the time. It had seemed then bold
and strange, but not impossible; now in the cold darkness it seemed
sacrilegious. And the bishop's share, which was indeed only the weak
yielding of a tired man to an atmosphere he had misjudged, became a
disgraceful display of levity and bad faith. They had baited him.
Some one had said that nowadays every one was an Arian, knowingly or
unknowingly. They had not concealed their conviction that the bishop did
not really believe in the Creeds he uttered.

And that unfortunate first admission stuck terribly in his throat.

Oh! Why had he made it?

(3)


Sleep had gone.

The awakened sleeper groaned, sat up in the darkness, and felt gropingly
in this unaccustomed bed and bedroom first for the edge of the bed and
then for the electric light that was possibly on the little bedside
table.

The searching hand touched something. A water-bottle. The hand resumed
its exploration. Here was something metallic and smooth, a stem. Either
above or below there must be a switch....

The switch was found, grasped, and turned.

The darkness fled.

In a mirror the sleeper saw the reflection of his face and a corner
of the bed in which he lay. The lamp had a tilted shade that threw
a slanting bar of shadow across the field of reflection, lighting a
right-angled triangle very brightly and leaving the rest obscure. The
bed was a very great one, a bed for the Anakim. It had a canopy with
yellow silk curtains, surmounted by a gilded crown of carved wood.
Between the curtains was a man's face, clean-shaven, pale, with
disordered brown hair and weary, pale-blue eyes. He was clad in purple
pyjamas, and the hand that now ran its fingers through the brown hair
was long and lean and shapely.

Beside the bed was a convenient little table bearing the light, a
water-bottle and glass, a bunch of keys, a congested pocket-book, a
gold-banded fountain pen, and a gold watch that indicated a quarter past
three. On the lower edge of the picture in the mirror appeared the back
of a gilt chair, over which a garment of peculiar construction had been
carelessly thrown. It was in the form of that sleeveless cassock of
purple, opening at the side, whose lower flap is called a bishop's
apron; the corner of the frogged coat showed behind the chair-back, and
the sash lay crumpled on the floor. Black doeskin breeches, still warmly
lined with their pants, lay where they had been thrust off at the corner
of the bed, partly covering black hose and silver-buckled shoes.

For a moment the tired gaze of the man in the bed rested upon these
evidences of his episcopal dignity. Then he turned from them to the
watch at the bedside.

He groaned helplessly.

(4)


These country doctors were no good. There wasn't a physician in the
diocese. He must go to London.

He looked into the weary eyes of his reflection and said, as one makes a
reassuring promise, “London.”

He was being worried. He was being intolerably worried, and he was ill
and unable to sustain his positions. This doubt, this sudden discovery
of controversial unsoundness, was only one aspect of his general
neurasthenia. It had been creeping into his mind since the “Light Unden
the Altar” controversy. Now suddenly it had leapt upon him from his own
unwary lips.

The immediate trouble arose from his loyalty. He had followed the King's
example; he had become a total abstainer and, in addition, on his own
account he had ceased to smoke. And his digestion, which Princhester
had first made sensitive, was deranged. He was suffering chemically,
suffering one of those nameless sequences of maladjustments that still
defy our ordinary medical science. It was afflicting him with a general
malaise, it was affecting his energy, his temper, all the balance and
comfort of his nerves. All day he was weary; all night he was wakeful.
He was estranged from his body. He was distressed by a sense of
detachment from the things about him, by a curious intimation of
unreality in everything he experienced. And with that went this levity
of conscience, a heaviness of soul and a levity of conscience, that
could make him talk as though the Creeds did not matter--as though
nothing mattered....

If only he could smoke!

He was persuaded that a couple of Egyptian cigarettes, or three at the
outside, a day, would do wonders in restoring his nervous calm. That,
and just a weak whisky and soda at lunch and dinner. Suppose now--!

His conscience, his sense of honour, deserted him. Latterly he had had
several of these conscience-blanks; it was only when they were over that
he realized that they had occurred.

One might smoke up the chimney, he reflected. But he had no cigarettes!
Perhaps if he were to slip downstairs....

Why had he given up smoking?

He groaned aloud. He and his reflection eyed one another in mutual
despair.

There came before his memory the image of a boy's face, a swarthy little
boy, grinning, grinning with a horrible knowingness and pointing
his finger--an accusing finger. It had been the most exasperating,
humiliating, and shameful incident in the bishop's career. It was
the afternoon for his fortnightly address to the Shop-girls' Church
Association, and he had been seized with a panic fear, entirely
irrational and unjustifiable, that he would not be able to deliver the
address. The fear had arisen after lunch, had gripped his mind, and then
as now had come the thought, “If only I could smoke!” And he had smoked.
It seemed better to break a vow than fail the Association. He had fallen
to the temptation with a completeness that now filled him with shame and
horror. He had stalked Dunk, his valet-butler, out of the dining-room,
had affected to need a book from the book-case beyond the sideboard,
had gone insincerely to the sideboard humming “From Greenland's icy
mountains,” and then, glancing over his shoulder, had stolen one of
his own cigarettes, one of the fatter sort. With this and his bedroom
matches he had gone off to the bottom of the garden among the laurels,
looked everywhere except above the wall to be sure that he was alone,
and at last lit up, only as he raised his eyes in gratitude for the
first blissful inhalation to discover that dreadful little boy peeping
at him from the crotch in the yew-tree in the next garden. As though God
had sent him to be a witness!

Their eyes had met. The bishop recalled with an agonized distinctness
every moment, every error, of that shameful encounter. He had been too
surprised to conceal the state of affairs from the pitiless scrutiny of
those youthful eyes. He had instantly made as if to put the cigarette
behind his back, and then as frankly dropped it....

His soul would not be more naked at the resurrection. The little boy
had stared, realized the state of affairs slowly but surely, pointed his
finger....

Never had two human beings understood each other more completely.

A dirty little boy! Capable no doubt of a thousand kindred
scoundrelisms.

It seemed ages before the conscience-stricken bishop could tear himself
from the spot and walk back, with such a pretence of dignity as he could
muster, to the house.

And instead of the discourse he had prepared for the Shop-girls' Church
Association, he had preached on temptation and falling, and how he knew
they had all fallen, and how he understood and could sympathize with the
bitterness of a secret shame, a moving but unsuitable discourse that
had already been subjected to misconstruction and severe reproof in the
local press of Princhester.

But the haunting thing in the bishop's memory was the face and gesture
of the little boy. That grubby little finger stabbed him to the heart.

“Oh, God!” he groaned. “The meanness of it! How did I bring myself--?”

He turned out the light convulsively, and rolled over in the bed, making
a sort of cocoon of himself. He bored his head into the pillow and
groaned, and then struggled impatiently to throw the bed-clothes off
himself. Then he sat up and talked aloud.

“I must go to Brighton-Pomfrey,” he said. “And get a medical
dispensation. If I do not smoke--”

He paused for a long time.

Then his voice sounded again in the darkness, speaking quietly, speaking
with a note almost of satisfaction.

“I shall go mad. I must smoke or I shall go mad.”

For a long time he sat up in the great bed with his arms about his
knees.

(5)


Fearful things came to him; things at once dreadfully blasphemous and
entirely weak-minded.

The triangle and the eye became almost visible upon the black background
of night. They were very angry. They were spinning round and round
faster and faster. Because he was a bishop and because really he did not
believe fully and completely in the Trinity. At one and the same time
he did not believe in the Trinity and was terrified by the anger of the
Trinity at his unbelief.... He was afraid. He was aghast.... And oh! he
was weary....

He rubbed his eyes.

“If I could have a cup of tea!” he said.

Then he perceived with surprise that he had not thought of praying. What
should he say? To what could he pray?

He tried not to think of that whizzing Triangle, that seemed now to be
nailed like a Catherine wheel to the very centre of his forehead,
and yet at the same time to be at the apex of the universe. Against
that--for protection against that--he was praying. It was by a great
effort that at last he pronounced the words:

“Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord ....”

Presently he had turned up his light, and was prowling about the room.
The clear inky dinginess that comes before the raw dawn of a spring
morning, found his white face at the window, looking out upon the great
terrace and the park.




CHAPTER THE SECOND - THE WEAR AND TEAR OF EPISCOPACY

(1)


IT was only in the last few years that the bishop had experienced
these nervous and mental crises. He was a belated doubter. Whatever
questionings had marked his intellectual adolescence had either been
very slight or had been too adequately answered to leave any serious
scars upon his convictions.

And even now he felt that he was afflicted physically rather than
mentally, that some protective padding of nerve-sheath or brain-case had
worn thin and weak, and left him a prey to strange disturbances, rather
than that any new process of thought was eating into his mind. These
doubts in his mind were still not really doubts; they were rather alien
and, for the first time, uncontrolled movements of his intelligence.
He had had a sheltered upbringing; he was the well-connected son of
a comfortable rectory, the only son and sole survivor of a family
of three; he had been carefully instructed and he had been a willing
learner; it had been easy and natural to take many things for granted.
It had been very easy and pleasant for him to take the world as he found
it and God as he found Him. Indeed for all his years up to manhood
he had been able to take life exactly as in his infancy he took his
carefully warmed and prepared bottle--unquestioningly and beneficially.

And indeed that has been the way with most bishops since bishops began.

It is a busy continuous process that turns boys into bishops, and it
will stand few jars or discords. The student of ecclesiastical biography
will find that an early vocation has in every age been almost universal
among them; few are there among these lives that do not display the
incipient bishop from the tenderest years. Bishop How of Wakefield
composed hymns before he was eleven, and Archbishop Benson when scarcely
older possessed a little oratory in which he conducted services and--a
pleasant touch of the more secular boy--which he protected from a too
inquisitive sister by means of a booby trap. It is rare that those
marked for episcopal dignities go so far into the outer world
as Archbishop Lang of York, who began as a barrister. This early
predestination has always been the common episcopal experience.
Archbishop Benson's early attempts at religious services remind one both
of St. Thomas a Becket, the “boy bishop,” and those early ceremonies of
St. Athanasius which were observed and inquired upon by the good bishop
Alexander. (For though still a tender infant, St. Athanasius with
perfect correctness and validity was baptizing a number of his innocent
playmates, and the bishop who “had paused to contemplate the sports of
the child remained to confirm the zeal of the missionary.”) And as with
the bishop of the past, so with the bishop of the future; the Rev. H. J.
Campbell, in his story of his soul's pilgrimage, has given us a pleasant
picture of himself as a child stealing out into the woods to build
himself a little altar.

Such minds as these, settled as it were from the outset, are either
incapable of real scepticism or become sceptical only after catastrophic
changes. They understand the sceptical mind with difficulty, and their
beliefs are regarded by the sceptical mind with incredulity. They have
determined their forms of belief before their years of discretion, and
once those forms are determined they are not very easily changed. Within
the shell it has adopted the intelligence may be active and lively
enough, may indeed be extraordinarily active and lively, but only within
the shell.

There is an entire difference in the mental quality of those who are
converts to a faith and those who are brought up in it. The former know
it from outside as well as from within. They know not only that it is,
but also that it is not. The latter have a confidence in their creed
that is one with their apprehension of sky or air or gravitation. It
is a primary mental structure, and they not only do not doubt but they
doubt the good faith of those who do. They think that the Atheist and
Agnostic really believe but are impelled by a mysterious obstinacy to
deny. So it had been with the Bishop of Princhester; not of cunning
or design but in simple good faith he had accepted all the inherited
assurances of his native rectory, and held by Church, Crown, Empire,
decorum, respectability, solvency--and compulsory Greek at the Little
Go--as his father had done before him. If in his undergraduate days he
had said a thing or two in the modern vein, affected the socialism
of William Morris and learnt some Swinburne by heart, it was out of a
conscious wildness. He did not wish to be a prig. He had taken a far
more genuine interest in the artistry of ritual.

Through all the time of his incumbency of the church of the Holy
Innocents, St. John's Wood, and of his career as the bishop suffragan
of Pinner, he had never faltered from his profound confidence in those
standards of his home. He had been kind, popular, and endlessly active.
His undergraduate socialism had expanded simply and sincerely into a
theory of administrative philanthropy. He knew the Webbs. He was
as successful with working-class audiences as with fashionable
congregations. His home life with Lady Ella (she was the daughter of
the fifth Earl of Birkenholme) and his five little girls was simple,
beautiful, and happy as few homes are in these days of confusion. Until
he became Bishop of Princhester--he followed Hood, the first bishop,
as the reign of his Majesty King Edward the Peacemaker drew to its
close--no anticipation of his coming distress fell across his path.

(2)


He came to Princhester an innocent and trustful man. The home life
at the old rectory of Otteringham was still his standard of truth and
reality. London had not disillusioned him. It was a strange waste of
people, it made him feel like a missionary in infidel parts, but it was
a kindly waste. It was neither antagonistic nor malicious. He had always
felt there that if he searched his Londoner to the bottom, he would
find the completest recognition of the old rectory and all its data and
implications.

But Princhester was different.

Princhester made one think that recently there had been a second and
much more serious Fall.

Princhester was industrial and unashamed. It was a countryside savagely
invaded by forges and mine shafts and gaunt black things. It was scarred
and impeded and discoloured. Even before that invasion, when the heather
was not in flower it must have been a black country. Its people were
dour uncandid individuals, who slanted their heads and knitted their
brows to look at you. Occasionally one saw woods brown and blistered by
the gases from chemical works. Here and there remained old rectories,
closely reminiscent of the dear old home at Otteringham, jostled and
elbowed and overshadowed by horrible iron cylinders belching smoke and
flame. The fine old abbey church of Princhester, which was the cathedral
of the new diocese, looked when first he saw it like a lady Abbess who
had taken to drink and slept in a coal truck. She minced apologetically
upon the market-place; the parvenu Town Hall patronized and protected
her as if she were a poor relation....

The old aristocracy of the countryside was unpicturesquely decayed. The
branch of the Walshinghams, Lady Ella's cousins, who lived near Pringle,
was poor, proud and ignoble. And extremely unpopular. The rich people
of the country were self-made and inclined to nonconformity, the
working-people were not strictly speaking a “poor,” they were highly
paid, badly housed, and deeply resentful. They went in vast droves to
football matches, and did not care a rap if it rained. The prevailing
wind was sarcastic. To come here from London was to come from
atmospheric blue-greys to ashen-greys, from smoke and soft smut to grime
and black grimness.

The bishop had been charmed by the historical associations of
Princhester when first the see was put before his mind. His realization
of his diocese was a profound shock.

Only one hint had he had of what was coming. He had met during
his season of congratulations Lord Gatling dining unusually at the
Athenaeum. Lord Gatling and he did not talk frequently, but on this
occasion the great racing peer came over to him. “You will feel like a
cherub in a stokehole,” Lord Gatling had said....

“They used to heave lumps of slag at old Hood's gaiters,” said Lord
Gatling.

“In London a bishop's a lord and a lark and nobody minds him,” said Lord
Gatling, “but Princhester is different. It isn't used to bishops....
Well,--I hope you'll get to like 'em.”

(3)


Trouble began with a fearful row about the position of the bishop's
palace. Hood had always evaded this question, and a number of
strong-willed self-made men of wealth and influence, full of local
patriotism and that competitive spirit which has made England what it
is, already intensely irritated by Hood's prevarications, were resolved
to pin his successor to an immediate decision. Of this the new bishop
was unaware. Mindful of a bishop's constant need to travel, he was
disposed to seek a home within easy reach of Pringle Junction, from
which nearly every point in the diocese could be simply and easily
reached. This fell in with Lady Ella's liking for the rare rural
quiet of the Kibe valley and the neighbourhood of her cousins the
Walshinghams. Unhappily it did not fall in with the inflexible
resolution of each and every one of the six leading towns of the see to
put up, own, obtrude, boast, and swagger about the biggest and showiest
thing in episcopal palaces in all industrial England, and the new
bishop had already taken a short lease and gone some way towards the
acquisition of Ganford House, two miles from Pringle, before he realized
the strength and fury of these local ambitions.

At first the magnates and influences seemed to be fighting only among
themselves, and he was so ill-advised as to broach the Ganford House
project as a compromise that would glorify no one unfairly, and leave
the erection of an episcopal palace for some future date when he perhaps
would have the good fortune to have passed to “where beyond these
voices there is peace,” forgetting altogether among other oversights
the importance of architects and builders in local affairs. His
proposal seemed for a time to concentrate the rich passions of the whole
countryside upon himself and his wife.

Because they did not leave Lady Ella alone. The Walshinghams were
already unpopular in their county on account of a poverty and shyness
that made them seem “stuck up” to successful captains of industry
only too ready with the hand of friendship, the iron grip indeed
of friendship, consciously hospitable and eager for admission and
endorsements. And Princhester in particular was under the sway of that
enterprising weekly, The White Blackbird, which was illustrated by,
which indeed monopolized the gifts of, that brilliant young caricaturist
“The Snicker.”

It had seemed natural for Lady Ella to acquiesce in the proposals of the
leading Princhester photographer. She had always helped where she could
in her husband's public work, and she had been popular upon her own
merits in Wealdstone. The portrait was abominable enough in itself; it
dwelt on her chin, doubled her age, and denied her gentleness, but it
was a mere starting-point for the subtle extravagance of The Snicker's
poisonous gift.... The thing came upon the bishop suddenly from the
book-stall at Pringle Junction.

He kept it carefully from Lady Ella.... It was only later that he found
that a copy of The White Blackbird had been sent to her, and that she
was keeping the horror from him. It was in her vein that she should
reproach herself for being a vulnerable side to him.

Even when the bishop capitulated in favour of Princhester, that decision
only opened a fresh trouble for him. Princhester wanted the palace to be
a palace; it wanted to combine all the best points of Lambeth and
Fulham with the marble splendours of a good modern bank. The bishop's
architectural tastes, on the other hand, were rationalistic. He was all
for building a useful palace in undertones, with a green slate roof
and long horizontal lines. What he wanted more than anything else was
a quite remote wing with a lot of bright little bedrooms and a
sitting-room and so on, complete in itself, examination hall and
everything, with a long intricate connecting passage and several doors,
to prevent the ordination candidates straying all over the place and
getting into the talk and the tea. But the diocese wanted a proud
archway--and turrets, and did not care a rap if the ordination
candidates slept about on the carpets in the bishop's bedroom.
Ordination candidates were quite outside the sphere of its imagination.

And he disappointed Princhester with his equipage. Princhester had
a feeling that it deserved more for coming over to the church from
nonconformity as it was doing. It wanted a bishop in a mitre and a gilt
coach. It wanted a pastoral crook. It wanted something to go with its
mace and its mayor. And (obsessed by The Snicker) it wanted less of Lady
Ella. The cruelty and unreason of these attacks upon his wife distressed
the bishop beyond measure, and baffled him hopelessly. He could not see
any means of checking them nor of defending or justifying her against
them.

The palace was awaiting its tenant, but the controversies and
bitternesses were still swinging and swaying and developing when King
George was being crowned. Close upon that event came a wave of social
discontent, the great railway strike, a curious sense of social and
political instability, and the first beginnings of the bishop's ill
health.

(4)


There came a day of exceptional fatigue and significance.

The industrial trouble was a very real distress to the bishop. He had
a firm belief that it is a function of the church to act as mediator
between employer and employed. It was a common saying of his that the
aim of socialism--the right sort of socialism--was to Christianize
employment. Regardless of suspicion on either hand, regardless of
very distinct hints that he should “mind his own business,” he exerted
himself in a search for methods of reconciliation. He sought out every
one who seemed likely to be influential on either side, and did his
utmost to discover the conditions of a settlement. As far as possible
and with the help of a not very efficient chaplain he tried to combine
such interviews with his more normal visiting.

At times, and this was particularly the case on this day, he seemed to
be discovering nothing but the incurable perversity and militancy of
human nature. It was a day under an east wind, when a steely-blue sky
full of colourless light filled a stiff-necked world with whitish high
lights and inky shadows. These bright harsh days of barometric high
pressure in England rouse and thwart every expectation of the happiness
of spring. And as the bishop drove through the afternoon in a hired
fly along a rutted road of slag between fields that were bitterly wired
against the Sunday trespasser, he fell into a despondent meditation upon
the political and social outlook.

His thoughts were of a sort not uncommon in those days. The world was
strangely restless. Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had
been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some
compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people's ideas,
and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow. Not that Queen
Victoria had really been a paper-weight or any weight at all, but
it happened that she died as an epoch closed, an epoch of tremendous
stabilities. Her son, already elderly, had followed as the selvedge
follows the piece, he had passed and left the new age stripped bare.
In nearly every department of economic and social life now there was
upheaval, and it was an upheaval very different in character from the
radicalism and liberalism of the Victorian days. There were not only
doubt and denial, but now there were also impatience and unreason.
People argued less and acted quicker. There was a pride in rebellion for
its own sake, an indiscipline and disposition to sporadic violence that
made it extremely hard to negotiate any reconciliations or compromises.
Behind every extremist it seemed stood a further extremist prepared to
go one better....

The bishop had spent most of the morning with one of the big employers,
a tall dark man, lean and nervous, and obviously tired and worried
by the struggle. He did not conceal his opinion that the church was
meddling with matters quite outside its sphere. Never had it been
conveyed to the bishop before how remote a rich and established
Englishman could consider the church from reality.

“You've got no hold on them,” he said. “It isn't your sphere.”

And again: “They'll listen to you--if you speak well. But they don't
believe you know anything about it, and they don't trust your good
intentions. They won't mind a bit what you say unless you drop something
they can use against us.”

The bishop tried a few phrases. He thought there might be something in
co-operation, in profit-sharing, in some more permanent relationship
between the business and the employee.

“There isn't,” said the employer compactly. “It's just the malice of
being inferior against the man in control. It's just the spirit of
insubordination and boredom with duty. This trouble's as old as the
Devil.”

“But that is exactly the business of the church,” said the bishop
brightly, “to reconcile men to their duty.”

“By chanting the Athanasian creed at 'em, I suppose,” said the big
employer, betraying the sneer he had been hiding hitherto.

“This thing is a fight,” said the big employer, carrying on before the
bishop could reply. “Religion had better get out of the streets until
this thing is over. The men won't listen to reason. They don't mean
to. They're bit by Syndicalism. They're setting out, I tell you, to be
unreasonable and impossible. It isn't an argument; it's a fight. They
don't want to make friends with the employer. They want to make an end
to the employer. Whatever we give them they'll take and press us for
more. Directly we make terms with the leaders the men go behind
it.... It's a raid on the whole system. They don't mean to work the
system--anyhow. I'm the capitalist, and the capitalist has to go. I'm to
be bundled out of my works, and some--some “--he seemed to be rejecting
unsuitable words--“confounded politician put in. Much good it would do
them. But before that happens I'm going to fight. You would.”

The bishop walked to the window and stood staring at the brilliant
spring bulbs in the big employer's garden, and at a long vista of
newly-mown lawn under great shapely trees just budding into green.

“I can't admit,” he said, “that these troubles lie outside the sphere of
the church.”

The employer came and stood beside him. He felt he was being a little
hard on the bishop, but he could not see any way of making things
easier.

“One doesn't want Sacred Things,” he tried, “in a scrap like this.

“We've got to mend things or end things,” continued the big employer.
“Nothing goes on for ever. Things can't last as they are going on
now....”

Then he went on abruptly to something that for a time he had been
keeping back.

“Of course just at present the church may do a confounded lot of harm.
Some of you clerical gentlemen are rather too fond of talking socialism
and even preaching socialism. Don't think I want to be overcritical.
I admit there's no end of things to be said for a proper sort of
socialism, Ruskin, and all that. We're all Socialists nowadays.
Ideals--excellent. But--it gets misunderstood. It gives the men a sense
of moral support. It makes them fancy that they are It. Encourages them
to forget duties and set up preposterous claims. Class war and all that
sort of thing. You gentlemen of the clergy don't quite realize that
socialism may begin with Ruskin and end with Karl Marx. And that from
the Class War to the Commune is just one step.”

(5)


From this conversation the bishop had made his way to the vicarage of
Mogham Banks. The vicar of Mogham Banks was a sacerdotal socialist of
the most advanced type, with the reputation of being closely in touch
with the labour extremists. He was a man addicted to banners, prohibited
ornaments, special services at unusual hours, and processions in the
streets. His taste in chasubles was loud, he gardened in a cassock
and, it was said, he slept in his biretta; he certainly slept in a hair
shirt, and he littered his church with flowers, candles, side altars,
confessional boxes, requests for prayers for the departed, and the like.
There had already been two Kensitite demonstrations at his services, and
altogether he was a source of considerable anxiety to the bishop. The
bishop did his best not to know too exactly what was going on at Mogham
Banks. Sooner or later he felt he would be forced to do something--and
the longer he could put that off the better. But the Rev. Morrice Deans
had promised to get together three or four prominent labour leaders for
tea and a frank talk, and the opportunity was one not to be missed.
So the bishop, after a hasty and not too digestible lunch in the
refreshment room at Pringle, was now in a fly that smelt of straw
and suggested infectious hospital patients, on his way through the
industry-scarred countryside to this second conversation.

The countryside had never seemed so scarred to him as it did that day.

It was probably the bright hard spring sunshine that emphasized
the contrast between that dear England of hedges and homes and the
south-west wind in which his imagination lived, and the crude presences
of a mechanical age. Never before had the cuttings and heapings, the
smashing down of trees, the obtrusion of corrugated iron and tar, the
belchings of smoke and the haste, seemed so harsh and disregardful
of all the bishop's world. Across the fields a line of gaunt iron
standards, abominably designed, carried an electric cable to some
unknown end. The curve of the hill made them seem a little out of the
straight, as if they hurried and bent forward furtively.

“Where are they going?” asked the bishop, leaning forward to look out of
the window of the fly, and then: “Where is it all going?”

And presently the road was under repair, and was being done at a great
pace with a huge steam-roller, mechanically smashed granite, and kettles
of stinking stuff, asphalt or something of that sort, that looked
and smelt like Milton's hell. Beyond, a gaunt hoarding advertised
extensively the Princhester Music Hall, a mean beastly place that
corrupted boys and girls; and also it clamoured of tyres and potted
meats....

The afternoon's conference gave him no reassuring answer to his
question, “Where is it all going?”

The afternoon's conference did no more than intensify the new and
strange sense of alienation from the world that the morning's talk had
evoked.

The three labour extremists that Morrice Deans had assembled obviously
liked the bishop and found him picturesque, and were not above a certain
snobbish gratification at the purple-trimmed company they were in, but
it was clear that they regarded his intervention in the great dispute
as if it were a feeble waving from the bank across the waters of a great
river.

“There's an incurable misunderstanding between the modern employer and
the modern employed,” the chief labour spokesman said, speaking in a
broad accent that completely hid from him and the bishop and every one
the fact that he was by far the best-read man of the party. “Disraeli
called them the Two Nations, but that was long ago. Now it's a case
of two species. Machinery has made them into different species. The
employer lives away from his work-people, marries a wife foreign, out of
a county family or suchlike, trains his children from their very birth
in a different manner. Why, the growth curve is different for the two
species. They haven't even a common speech between them. One looks east
and the other looks west. How can you expect them to agree? Of course
they won't agree. We've got to fight it out. They say we're their
slaves for ever. Have you ever read Lady Bell's 'At the Works'? A
well-intentioned woman, but she gives the whole thing away. We say,
No! It's our sort and not your sort. We'll do without you. We'll get a
little more education and then we'll do without you. We're pressing for
all we can get, and when we've got that we'll take breath and press
for more. We're the Morlocks. Coming up. It isn't our fault that we've
differentiated.”

“But you haven't understood the drift of Christianity,” said the bishop.
“It's just to assert that men are One community and not two.”

“There's not much of that in the Creeds,” said a second labour leader
who was a rationalist. “There's not much of that in the services of the
church.”

The vicar spoke before his bishop, and indeed he had plenty of time
to speak before his bishop. “Because you will not set yourselves to
understand the symbolism of her ritual,” he said.

“If the church chooses to speak in riddles,” said the rationalist.

“Symbols,” said Morrice Deans, “need not be riddles,” and for a time the
talk eddied about this minor issue and the chief labour spokesman and
the bishop looked at one another. The vicar instanced and explained
certain apparently insignificant observances, his antagonist was
contemptuously polite to these explanations. “That's all very pratty,”
 he said....

The bishop wished that fine points of ceremonial might have been left
out of the discussion.

Something much bigger than that was laying hold of his intelligence, the
realization of a world extravagantly out of hand. The sky, the wind,
the telegraph poles, had been jabbing in the harsh lesson of these men's
voices, that the church, as people say, “wasn't in it.” And that at
the same time the church held the one remedy for all this ugliness and
contention in its teaching of the universal fatherhood of God and the
universal brotherhood of men. Only for some reason he hadn't the phrases
and he hadn't the voice to assert this over their wrangling and their
stiff resolution. He wanted to think the whole business out thoroughly,
for the moment he had nothing to say, and there was the labour leader
opposite waiting smilingly to hear what he had to say so soon as the
bout between the vicar and the rationalist was over.

(6)


That morning in the long galleries of the bishop's imagination a fresh
painting had been added. It was a big wall painting rather in the manner
of Puvis de Chavannes. And the central figure had been the bishop of
Princhester himself. He had been standing upon the steps of the
great door of the cathedral that looks upon the marketplace where the
tram-lines meet, and he had been dressed very magnificently and rather
after the older use. He had been wearing a tunicle and dalmatic under a
chasuble, a pectoral cross, purple gloves, sandals and buskins, a mitre
and his presentation ring. In his hand he had borne his pastoral staff.
And the clustering pillars and arches of the great doorway were painted
with a loving flat particularity that omitted nothing but the sooty
tinge of the later discolourations.

On his right hand had stood a group of employers very richly dressed
in the fashion of the fifteenth century, and on the left a rather more
numerous group of less decorative artisans. With them their wives and
children had been shown, all greatly impressed by the canonicals. Every
one had been extremely respectful.

He had been reconciling the people and blessing them and calling them
his “sheep” and his “little children.”

But all this was so different.

Neither party resembled sheep or little children in the least degree. .

The labour leader became impatient with the ritualistic controversy; he
set his tea-cup aside out of danger and leant across the corner of the
table to the bishop and spoke in a sawing undertone. “You see,” he said,
“the church does not talk our language. I doubt if it understands our
language. I doubt if we understand clearly where we are ourselves. These
things have to be fought out and hammered out. It's a big dusty dirty
noisy job. It may be a bloody job before it's through. You can't
suddenly call a halt in the middle of the scrap and have a sort of
millennium just because you want it....

“Of course if the church had a plan,” he said, “if it had a proposal to
make, if it had anything more than a few pious palliatives to suggest,
that might be different. But has it?”

The bishop had a bankrupt feeling. On the spur of the moment he could
say no more than: “It offers its mediation.”

(7)


Full as he was with the preoccupation of these things and so a little
slow and inattentive in his movements, the bishop had his usual luck
at Pringle Junction and just missed the 7.27 for Princhester. He might
perhaps have got it by running through the subway and pushing past
people, but bishops must not run through subways and push past people.
His mind swore at the mischance, even if his lips refrained.

He was hungry and, tired; he would not get to the palace now until long
after nine; dinner would be over and Lady Ella would naturally suppose
he had dined early with the Rev. Morrice Deans. Very probably there
would be nothing ready for him at all.

He tried to think he was exercising self-control, but indeed all his
sub-conscious self was busy in a manner that would not have disgraced
Tertullian with the eternal welfare of those city fathers whose
obstinacy had fixed the palace at Princhester. He walked up and down the
platform, gripping his hands very tightly behind him, and maintaining
a serene upcast countenance by a steadfast effort. It seemed a small
matter to him that the placards of the local evening papers should
proclaim “Lloyd George's Reconciliation Meeting at Wombash Broken up
by Suffragettes.” For a year now he had observed a strict rule against
buying the products of the local press, and he saw no reason for varying
this protective regulation.

His mind was full of angry helplessness.

Was he to blame, was the church to blame, for its powerlessness in these
social disputes? Could an abler man with a readier eloquence have done
more?

He envied the cleverness of Cardinal Manning. Manning would have got
right into the front of this affair. He would have accumulated credit
for his church and himself....

But would he have done much?...

The bishop wandered along the platform to its end, and stood
contemplating the convergent ways that gather together beyond the
station and plunge into the hillside and the wilderness of sidings and
trucks, signal-boxes, huts, coal-pits, electric standards, goods sheds,
turntables, and engine-houses, that ends in a bluish bricked-up cliff
against the hill. A train rushed with a roar and clatter into the
throat of the great tunnel and was immediately silenced; its rear lights
twinkled and vanished, and then out of that huge black throat came wisps
of white steam and curled slowly upward like lazy snakes until they
caught the slanting sunshine. For the first time the day betrayed
a softness and touched this scene of black energy to gold. All late
afternoons are beautiful, whatever the day has been--if only there is a
gleam of sun. And now a kind of mechanical greatness took the place of
mere black disorder in the bishop's perception of his see. It was harsh,
it was vast and strong, it was no lamb he had to rule but a dragon.
Would it ever be given to him to overcome his dragon, to lead it home,
and bless it?

He stood at the very end of the platform, with his gaitered legs wide
apart and his hands folded behind him, staring beyond all visible
things.

Should he do something very bold and striking? Should he invite both men
and masters to the cathedral, and preach tremendous sermons to them upon
these living issues?

Short sermons, of course.

But stating the church's attitude with a new and convincing vigour.

He had a vision of the great aisle strangely full and alive and astir.
The organ notes still echoed in the fretted vaulting, as the preacher
made his way from the chancel to the pulpit. The congregation was tense
with expectation, and for some reason his mind dwelt for a long time
upon the figure of the preacher ascending the steps of the pulpit.
Outside the day was dark and stormy, so that the stained-glass windows
looked absolutely dead. For a little while the preacher prayed. Then in
the attentive silence the tenor of the preacher would begin, a thin jet
of sound, a ray of light in the darkness, speaking to all these men as
they had never been spoken to before....

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.

Once during his summer holidays in Florence he and Lady Ella had
subscribed to an association for the protection of song-birds. He
recalled this now with a mild wonder. It seemed to him that perhaps
after all it was as well to let fruit-growers and Italians deal with
singing-birds in their own way. Perhaps after all they had a wisdom....

He passed his hands over his face. The world after all is not made
entirely for singing-birds; there is such a thing as proportion.
Singing-birds may become a luxury, an indulgence, an excess.

Did the birds eat the fruit in Paradise?

Perhaps there they worked for some collective musical effect, had some
sort of conductor in the place of this--hullabaloo....

He decided to walk about the room for a time and then remake his bed....

The sunrise found the bishop with his head and shoulders out of the
window trying to see that blackbird. He just wanted to look at it. He
was persuaded it was a quite exceptional blackbird.

Again came that oppressive sense of the futility of the contemporary
church, but this time it came in the most grotesque form. For hanging
half out of the casement he was suddenly reminded of St. Francis of
Assisi, and how at his rebuke the wheeling swallow stilled their cries.

But it was all so different then.

(3)


It was only after he had passed four similar nights, with intervening
days of lassitude and afternoon siestas, that the bishop realized that
he was in the grip of insomnia.

He did not go at once to a doctor, but he told his trouble to every one
he met and received much tentative advice. He had meant to have his
talk with Eleanor on the morning next after their conversation in the
dining-room, but his bodily and spiritual anaemia prevented him.

The fifth night was the beginning of the Whitsuntide Ember week, and
he wore a red cassock and had a distracting and rather interesting day
welcoming his ordination candidates. They had a good effect upon him; we
spiritualize ourselves when we seek to spiritualize others, and he went
to bed in a happier frame of mind than he had done since the day of the
shock. He woke in the night, but he woke much more himself than he had
been since the trouble began. He repeated that verse of Ken's:

“When in the night I sleepless lie, My soul with heavenly thoughts
supply; Let no ill dreams disturb my rest, No powers of darkness me
molest.”


Almost immediately after these there floated into his mind, as if it
were a message, the dear familiar words:

“He giveth his Beloved sleep.”


These words irradiated and soothed him quite miraculously, the clouds of
doubt seemed to dissolve and vanish and leave him safe and calm under a
clear sky; he knew those words were a promise, and very speedily he fell
asleep and slept until he was called.

But the next day was a troubled one. Whippham had muddled his timetable
and crowded his afternoon; the strike of the transport workers had
begun, and the ugly noises they made at the tramway depot, where they
were booing some one, penetrated into the palace. He had to snatch a
meal between services, and the sense of hurry invaded his afternoon
lectures to the candidates. He hated hurry in Ember week. His ideal was
one of quiet serenity, of grave things said slowly, of still, kneeling
figures, of a sort of dark cool spiritual germination. But what sort of
dark cool spiritual germination is possible with an ass like Whippham
about?

In the fresh courage of the morning the bishop had arranged for that
talk with Eleanor he had already deferred too long, and this had proved
less satisfactory than he had intended it to be.

The bishop's experience with the ordination candidates was following
the usual course. Before they came there was something bordering upon
distaste for the coming invasion; then always there was an effect of
surprise at the youth and faith of the neophytes and a real response of
the spirit to the occasion. Throughout the first twenty-four hours
they were all simply neophytes, without individuality to break up their
uniformity of self-devotion. Then afterwards they began to develop
little personal traits, and scarcely ever were these pleasing traits.
Always one or two of them would begin haunting the bishop, giving way
to an appetite for special words, special recognitions. He knew the
expression of that craving on their faces. He knew the way-laying
movements in room and passage that presently began.

This time in particular there was a freckled underbred young man who
handed in what was evidently a carefully prepared memorandum upon what
he called “my positions.” Apparently he had a muddle of doubts about
the early fathers and the dates of the earlier authentic copies of the
gospels, things of no conceivable significance.

The bishop glanced through this bale of papers--it had of course no
index and no synopsis, and some of the pages were not numbered--handed
it over to Whippham, and when he proved, as usual, a broken reed, the
bishop had the brilliant idea of referring the young man to Canon Bliss
(of Pringle), “who has a special knowledge quite beyond my own in this
field.”

But he knew from the young man's eye even as he said this that it was
not going to put him off for more than a day or so.

The immediate result of glancing over these papers was, however, to
enhance in the bishop's mind a growing disposition to minimize the
importance of all dated and explicit evidences and arguments for
orthodox beliefs, and to resort to vague symbolic and liberal
interpretations, and it was in this state that he came to his talk with
Eleanor.

He did not give her much time to develop her objections. He met her
half way and stated them for her, and overwhelmed her with sympathy
and understanding. She had been “too literal.” “Too literal” was his
keynote. He was a little astonished at the liberality of his own views.
He had been getting along now for some years without looking into his
own opinions too closely and he was by no means prepared to discover
how far he had come to meet his daughter's scepticisms. But he did meet
them. He met them so thoroughly that he almost conveyed that hers was a
needlessly conservative and oldfashioned attitude.

Occasionally he felt he was being a little evasive, but she did not
seem to notice it. As she took his drift, her relief and happiness were
manifest. And he had never noticed before how clear and pretty her eyes
were; they were the most honest eyes he had ever seen. She looked at him
very steadily as he explained, and lit up at his points. She brightened
wonderfully as she realized that after all they were not apart, they had
not differed; simply they had misunderstood....

And before he knew where he was, and in a mere parenthetical declaration
of liberality, he surprised himself by conceding her demand for Newnham
even before she had repeated it. It helped his case wonderfully.

“Call in every exterior witness you can. The church will welcome
them.... No, I want you to go, my dear....”

But his mind was stirred again to its depths by this discussion. And
in particular he was surprised and a little puzzled by this Newnham
concession and the necessity of making his new attitude clear to Lady
Ella....

It was with a sense of fatality that he found himself awake again that
night, like some one lying drowned and still and yet perfectly conscious
at the bottom of deep cold water.

He repeated, “He giveth his Beloved sleep,” but all the conviction had
gone out of the words.

(4)


Neither the bishop's insomnia nor his incertitudes about himself and his
faith developed in a simple and orderly manner. There were periods of
sustained suffering and periods of recovery; it was not for a year or
so that he regarded these troubles as more than acute incidental
interruptions of his general tranquillity or realized that he was
passing into a new phase of life and into a new quality of thought.
He told every one of the insomnia and no one of his doubts; these he
betrayed only by an increasing tendency towards vagueness, symbolism,
poetry and toleration. Eleanor seemed satisfied with his exposition; she
did not press for further enlightenment. She continued all her outward
conformities except that after a time she ceased to communicate; and in
September she went away to Newnham. Her doubts had not visibly affected
Clementina or her other sisters, and the bishop made no further attempts
to explore the spiritual life of his family below the surface of its
formal acquiescence.

As a matter of fact his own spiritual wrestlings were almost exclusively
nocturnal. During his spells of insomnia he led a curiously double
existence. In the daytime he was largely the self he had always been,
able, assured, ecclesiastical, except that he was a little jaded and
irritable or sleepy instead of being quick and bright; he believed in
God and the church and the Royal Family and himself securely; in
the wakeful night time he experienced a different and novel self, a
bare-minded self, bleakly fearless at its best, shamelessly weak at its
worst, critical, sceptical, joyless, anxious. The anxiety was quite the
worst element of all. Something sat by his pillow asking grey questions:
“What are you doing? Where are you going? Is it really well with the
children? Is it really well with the church? Is it really well with the
country? Are you indeed doing anything at all? Are you anything more
than an actor wearing a costume in an archaic play? The people turn
their backs on you.”

He would twist over on his pillow. He would whisper hymns and prayers
that had the quality of charms.

“He giveth his Beloved sleep”; that answered many times, and many times
it failed.

The labour troubles of 1912 eased off as the year wore on, and the
bitterness of the local press over the palace abated very considerably.
Indeed there was something like a watery gleam of popularity when he
brought down his consistent friend, the dear old Princess Christiana of
Hoch and Unter, black bonnet, deafness, and all, to open a new wing of
the children's hospital. The Princhester conservative paper took the
occasion to inform the diocese that he was a fluent German scholar and
consequently a persona grata with the royal aunts, and that the Princess
Christiana was merely just one of a number of royalties now practically
at the beck and call of Princhester. It was not true, but it was very
effective locally, and seemed to justify a little the hauteur of which
Lady Ella was so unjustly suspected. Yet it involved a possibility of
disappointments in the future.

He went to Brighton-Pomfrey too upon the score of his general health,
and Brighton-Pomfrey revised his general regimen, discouraged indiscreet
fasting, and suggested a complete abstinence from red wine except white
port, if indeed that can be called a red wine, and a moderate use of
Egyptian cigarettes.

But 1913 was a strenuous year. The labour troubles revived, the
suffragette movement increased greatly in violence and aggressiveness,
and there sprang up no less than three ecclesiastical scandals in
the diocese. First, the Kensitites set themselves firmly to make
presentations and prosecutions against Morrice Deans, who was reserving
the sacrament, wearing, they said, “Babylonish garments,” going beyond
all reason in the matter of infant confession, and generally brightening
up Mogham Banks; next, a popular preacher in Wombash, published a book
under the exasperating title, “The Light Under the Altar,” in which
he showed himself as something between an Arian and a Pantheist, and
treated the dogma of the Trinity with as little respect as one would
show to an intrusive cat; while thirdly, an obscure but overworked
missioner of a tin mission church in the new working-class district at
Pringle, being discovered in some sort of polygamous relationship, had
seen fit to publish in pamphlet form a scandalous admission and defence,
a pamphlet entitled “Marriage True and False,” taking the public
needlessly into his completest confidence and quoting the affairs of
Abraham and Hosea, reviving many points that are better forgotten about
Luther, and appealing also to such uncanonical authorities as
Milton, Plato, and John Humphrey Noyes. This abnormal concurrence of
indiscipline was extremely unlucky for the bishop. It plunged him into
strenuous controversy upon three fronts, so to speak, and involved
a great number of personal encounters far too vivid for his mental
serenity.

The Pringle polygamist was the most moving as Morrice Deans was the most
exacting and troublesome and the Wombash Pantheist the most insidiously
destructive figure in these three toilsome disputes. The Pringle man's
soul had apparently missed the normal distribution of fig-leaves; he
was an illiterate, open-eyed, hard-voiced, freckled, rational-minded
creature, with large expository hands, who had come by a side way into
the church because he was an indefatigable worker, and he insisted upon
telling the bishop with an irrepressible candour and completeness just
exactly what was the matter with his intimate life. The bishop very
earnestly did not want these details, and did his utmost to avoid the
controversial questions that the honest man pressed respectfully but
obstinately upon him.

“Even St. Paul, my lord, admitted that it is better to marry than burn,”
 said the Pringle misdemeanant, “and here was I, my lord, married and
still burning!” and, “I think you would find, my lord, considering
all Charlotte's peculiarities, that the situation was really much more
trying than the absolute celibacy St. Paul had in view.”...

The bishop listened to these arguments as little as possible, and did
not answer them at all. But afterwards the offender came and wept and
said he was ruined and heartbroken and unfairly treated because
he wasn't a gentleman, and that was distressing. It was so exactly
true--and so inevitable. He had been deprived, rather on account of
his voice and apologetics than of his offence, and public opinion was
solidly with the sentence. He made a gallant effort to found what
he called a Labour Church in Pringle, and after some financial
misunderstandings departed with his unambiguous menage to join the
advanced movement on the Clyde.

The Morrice Deans enquiry however demanded an amount of erudition that
greatly fatigued the bishop. He had a very fair general knowledge of
vestments, but he had never really cared for anything but the poetry of
ornaments, and he had to work strenuously to master the legal side
of the question. Whippham, his chaplain, was worse than useless as a
helper. The bishop wanted to end the matter as quickly, quietly, and
favourably to Morrice Deans as possible; he thought Morrice Deans a
thoroughly good man in his parish, and he believed that the substitution
of a low churchman would mean a very complete collapse of church
influence in Mogham Banks, where people were now thoroughly accustomed
to a highly ornate service. But Morrice Deans was intractable and his
pursuers indefatigable, and on several occasions the bishop sat far into
the night devising compromises and equivocations that should make the
Kensitites think that Morrice Deans wasn't wearing vestments when he
was, and that should make Morrice Deans think he was wearing vestments
when he wasn't. And it was Whippham who first suggested green tea as
a substitute for coffee, which gave the bishop indigestion, as his
stimulant for these nocturnal bouts.

Now green tea is the most lucid of poisons.

And while all this extra activity about Morrice Deans, these vigils and
crammings and writings down, were using all and more energy than the
bishop could well spare, he was also doing his quiet utmost to keep “The
Light under the Altar” ease from coming to a head.

This man he hated.

And he dreaded him as well as hated him. Chasters, the author of “The
Light under the Altar,” was a man who not only reasoned closely
but indelicately. There was a demonstrating, jeering, air about his
preaching and writing, and everything he said and did was saturated by
the spirit of challenge. He did not so much imitate as exaggerate the
style of Matthew Arnold. And whatever was done publicly against him
would have to be done very publicly because his book had got him a
London reputation.

From the bishop's point of view Chasters was one of nature's ignoblemen.
He seemed to have subscribed to the Thirty-Nine Articles and passed all
the tests and taken all the pledges that stand on the way to ordination,
chiefly for the pleasure of attacking them more successfully from the
rear; he had been given the living of Wombash by a cousin, and filled it
very largely because it was not only more piquant but more remunerative
and respectable to be a rationalist lecturer in a surplice. And in a
hard kind of ultra-Protestant way his social and parochial work was not
badly done. But his sermons were terrible. “He takes a text,” said one
informant, “and he goes on firstly, secondly, thirdly, fourthly, like
somebody tearing the petals from a flower. 'Finally,' he says, and
throws the bare stalk into the dustbin.”

The bishop avoided “The Light under the Altar” for nearly a year. It
was only when a second book was announced with the winning title of “The
Core of Truth in Christianity” that he perceived he must take action.
He sat up late one night with a marked copy, a very indignantly marked
copy, of the former work that an elderly colonel, a Wombash parishioner,
an orthodox Layman of the most virulent type, had sent him. He perceived
that he had to deal with a dialectician of exceptional ability, who had
concentrated a quite considerable weight of scholarship upon the task of
explaining away every scrap of spiritual significance in the Eucharist.
From Chasters the bishop was driven by reference to the works of Legge
and Frazer, and for the first time he began to measure the dimensions
and power of the modern criticism of church doctrine and observance.
Green tea should have lit his way to refutation; instead it lit up the
whole inquiry with a light of melancholy confirmation. Neither by night
nor by day could the bishop find a proper method of opening a counter
attack upon Chasters, who was indisputably an intellectually abler man
and a very ruthless beast indeed to assail, and meanwhile the demand
that action should be taken increased.

The literature of church history and the controversies arising out of
doctrinal development became the employment of the bishop's leisure and
a commanding preoccupation. He would have liked to discuss with some one
else the network of perplexities in which he was entangling himself, and
more particularly with Canon Bliss, but his own positions were becoming
so insecure that he feared to betray them by argument. He had grown up
with a kind of intellectual modesty. Some things he had never yet talked
about; it made his mind blench to think of talking about them. And his
great aching gaps of wakefulness began now, thanks to the green tea, to
be interspersed with theological dreams and visions of an extravagant
vividness. He would see Frazer's sacrificial kings butchered
picturesquely and terribly amidst strange and grotesque rituals; he
would survey long and elaborate processions and ceremonials in which
the most remarkable symbols were borne high in the sight of all men; he
would cower before a gigantic and threatening Heaven. These
green-tea dreams and visions were not so much phases of sleep as an
intensification and vivid furnishing forth of insomnia. It added
greatly to his disturbance that--exceeding the instructions of
Brighton-Pomfrey--he had now experimented ignorantly and planlessly
with one or two narcotics and sleeping mixtures that friends and
acquaintances had mentioned in his hearing. For the first time in his
life he became secretive from his wife. He knew he ought not to take
these things, he knew they were physically and morally evil, but
a tormenting craving drove him to them. Subtly and insensibly his
character was being undermined by the growing nervous trouble.

He astonished himself by the cunning and the hypocritical dignity he
could display in procuring these drugs. He arranged to have a tea-making
set in his bedroom, and secretly substituted green tea, for which he
developed a powerful craving, in the place of the delicate China tea
Lady Ella procured him.

(5)


These doctrinal and physical anxieties and distresses were at their
worst in the spring and early summer of 1914. That was a time of great
mental and moral disturbance. There was premonition in the air of those
days. It was like the uneasiness sensitive people experience before a
thunderstorm. The moral atmosphere was sullen and close. The whole
world seemed irritable and mischievous. The suffragettes became
extraordinarily malignant; the democratic movement went rotten with
sabotage and with a cant of being “rebels”; the reactionary Tories and a
crew of noisy old peeresses set themselves to create incurable confusion
again in the healing wounds of Ireland, and feuds and frantic folly
broke out at every point of the social and political edifice. And then
a bomb burst at Sarajevo that silenced all this tumult. The unstable
polity of Europe heeled over like a ship that founders.

Through the swiftest, tensest week in history Europe capsized into war.

(6)


The first effect of the war upon the mind of the bishop, as upon
most imaginative minds, was to steady and exalt it. Trivialities and
exasperations seemed swept out of existence. Men lifted up their eyes
from disputes that had seemed incurable and wrangling that promised to
be interminable, and discovered a plain and tragic issue that involved
every one in a common call for devotion. For a great number of men and
women who had been born and bred in security, the August and September
of 1914 were the supremely heroic period of their lives. Myriads
of souls were born again to ideas of service and sacrifice in those
tremendous days.

Black and evil thing as the war was, it was at any rate a great thing;
it did this much for countless minds that for the first time they
realized the epic quality of history and their own relationship to the
destinies of the race. The flimsy roof under which we had been living
our lives of comedy fell and shattered the floor under our feet; we saw
the stars above and the abyss below. We perceived that life was insecure
and adventurous, part of one vast adventure in space and time....

Presently the smoke and dust of battle hid the great distances again,
but they could not altogether destroy the memories of this revelation.

For the first two months the bishop's attention was so detached from
his immediate surroundings and employments, so absorbed by great events,
that his history if it were told in detail would differ scarcely at all
from the histories of most comparatively unemployed minds during those
first dramatic days, the days when the Germans made their great rush
upon Paris and it seemed that France was down, France and the whole
fabric of liberal civilization. He emerged from these stunning
apprehensions after the Battle of the Marne, to find himself busy upon a
score of dispersed and disconnected war jobs, and trying to get all the
new appearances and forces and urgencies of the war into relations with
himself. One thing became very vivid indeed, that he wasn't being used
in any real and effective way in the war. There was a mighty going
to and fro upon Red Cross work and various war committees, a vast
preparation for wounded men and for the succour of dislocated
families; a preparation, that proved to be needless, for catastrophic
unemployment. The war problem and the puzzle of German psychology ousted
for a time all other intellectual interests; like every one else the
bishop swam deep in Nietzsche, Bernhardi, Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
and the like; he preached several sermons upon German materialism
and the astonishing decay of the German character. He also read every
newspaper he could lay his hands on--like any secular man. He signed
an address to the Russian Orthodox church, beginning “Brethren,” and
he revised his impressions of the Filioque controversy. The idea of a
reunion of the two great state churches of Russia and England had always
attracted him. But hitherto it had been a thing quite out of scale,
visionary, utopian. Now in this strange time of altered perspectives it
seemed the most practicable of suggestions. The mayor and corporation
and a detachment of the special reserve in uniform came to a great
intercession service, and in the palace there were two conferences of
local influential people, people of the most various types, people
who had never met tolerantly before, expressing now opinions of
unprecedented breadth and liberality.

All this sort of thing was fresh and exciting at first, and then it
began to fall into a routine and became habitual, and as it became
habitual he found that old sense of detachment and futility was creeping
back again. One day he realized that indeed the whole flood and tumult
of the war would be going on almost exactly as it was going on now if
there had been neither cathedral nor bishop in Princhester. It came to
him that if archbishops were rolled into patriarchs and patriarchs into
archbishops, it would matter scarcely more in the world process that was
afoot than if two men shook hands while their house was afire. At times
all of us have inappropriate thoughts. The unfortunate thought that
struck the bishop as a bullet might strike a man in an exposed trench,
as he was hurrying through the cloisters to a special service and
address upon that doubly glorious day in our English history, the day of
St. Crispin, was of Diogenes rolling his tub.

It was a poisonous thought.

It arose perhaps out of an article in a weekly paper at which he had
glanced after lunch, an article written by one of those sceptical
spirits who find all too abundant expression in our periodical
literature. The writer boldly charged the “Christian churches” with
absolute ineffectiveness. This war, he declared, was above all other
wars a war of ideas, of material organization against rational freedom,
of violence against law; it was a war more copiously discussed than any
war had ever been before, the air was thick with apologetics. And what
was the voice of the church amidst these elemental issues? Bishops and
divines who were patriots one heard discordantly enough, but where were
the bishops and divines who spoke for the Prince of Peace? Where was the
blessing of the church, where was the veto of the church? When it
came to that one discovered only a broad preoccupied back busied in
supplementing the Army Medical Corps with Red Cross activities, good
work in its way--except that the canonicals seemed superfluous. Who
indeed looked to the church for any voice at all? And so to Diogenes.

The bishop's mind went hunting for an answer to that indictment. And
came back and came back to the image of Diogenes.

It was with that image dangling like a barbed arrow from his mind that
the bishop went into the pulpit to preach upon St. Crispin's day, and
looked down upon a thin and scattered congregation in which the elderly,
the childless, and the unoccupied predominated.

That night insomnia resumed its sway.

Of course the church ought to be controlling this great storm, the
greatest storm of war that had ever stirred mankind. It ought to be
standing fearlessly between the combatants like a figure in a wall
painting, with the cross of Christ uplifted and the restored memory of
Christendom softening the eyes of the armed nations. “Put down those
weapons and listen to me,” so the church should speak in irresistible
tones, in a voice of silver trumpets.

Instead it kept a long way from the fighting, tucked up its vestments,
and was rolling its local tubs quite briskly.

(7)


And then came the aggravation of all these distresses by an abrupt
abandonment of smoking and alcohol. Alcoholic relaxation, a necessary
mitigation of the unreality of peacetime politics, becomes a grave
danger in war, and it was with an understandable desire to forward the
interests of his realm that the King decided to set his statesmen an
example--which unhappily was not very widely followed--by abstaining
from alcohol during the continuance of the struggle. It did however
swing over the Bishop of Princhester to an immediate and complete
abandonment of both drink and tobacco. At that time he was finding
comfort for his nerves in Manila cheroots, and a particularly big and
heavy type of Egyptian cigarette with a considerable amount of opium,
and his disorganized system seized upon this sudden change as a
grievance, and set all his jangling being crying aloud for one
cigarette--just one cigarette.

The cheroots, it seemed, he could better spare, but a cigarette became
his symbol for his lost steadiness and ease.

It brought him low.

The reader has already been told the lamentable incident of the stolen
cigarette and the small boy, and how the bishop, tormented by that
shameful memory, cried aloud in the night.

The bishop rolled his tub, and is there any tub-rolling in the world
more busy and exacting than a bishop's? He rolled in it spite of
ill-health and insomnia, and all the while he was tormented by the
enormous background of the world war, by his ineffective realization
of vast national needs, by his passionate desire, for himself and his
church, not to be ineffective.

The distressful alternation between nights of lucid doubt and days of
dull acquiescence was resumed with an intensification of its contrasts.
The brief phase of hope that followed the turn of the fighting upon the
Maine, the hope that after all the war would end swiftly, dramatically,
and justly, and everything be as it had been before--but pleasanter,
gave place to a phase that bordered upon despair. The fall of Antwerp
and the doubts and uncertainties of the Flanders situation weighed
terribly upon the bishop. He was haunted for a time by nightmares of
Zeppelins presently raining fire upon London. These visions became
Apocalyptic. The Zeppelins came to England with the new year, and with
the close of the year came the struggle for Ypres that was so near
to being a collapse of the allied defensive. The events of the early
spring, the bloody failure of British generalship at Neuve Chapelle,
the naval disaster in the Dardanelles, the sinking of the Falaba,
the Russian defeat in the Masurian Lakes, all deepened the bishop's
impression of the immensity of the nation's difficulties and of his
own unhelpfulness. He was ashamed that the church should hold back its
curates from enlistment while the French priests were wearing their
uniforms in the trenches; the expedition of the Bishop of London to
hold open-air services at the front seemed merely to accentuate the
tub-rolling. It was rolling the tub just where it was most in the way.

What was wrong? What was wanting?

The Westminster Gazette, The Spectator, and several other of the most
trusted organs of public opinion were intermittently discussing the same
question. Their discussions implied at once the extreme need that
was felt for religion by all sorts of representative people, and the
universal conviction that the church was in some way muddling and
masking her revelation. “What is wrong with the Churches?” was,
for example, the general heading of The Westminster Gazette's
correspondence.

One day the bishop skimmed a brief incisive utterance by Sir Harry
Johnston that pierced to the marrow of his own shrinking convictions.
Sir Harry is one of those people who seem to write as well as speak in
a quick tenor. “Instead of propounding plainly and without the acereted
mythology of Asia Minor, Greece and Rome, the pure Gospel of Christ....
they present it overloaded with unbelievable myths (such as, among
a thousand others, that Massacre of the Innocents which never took
place).... bore their listeners by a Tibetan repetition of creeds that
have ceased to be credible.... Mutually contradictory propositions....
Prayers and litanies composed in Byzantine and mediaeval times....
the want of actuality, the curious silliness which has, ever since the
destruction of Jerusalem, hung about the exposition of Christianity....
But if the Bishops continue to fuss about the trappings of religion....
the maintenance of codes compiled by people who lived sixteen hundred
or two thousand five hundred years ago.... the increasingly educated
and practical-minded working classes will not come to church, weekday or
Sunday.”

The bishop held the paper in his hand, and with a mind that he felt to
be terribly open, asked himself how true that sharp indictment might be,
and, granting its general truth, what was the duty of the church, that
is to say of the bishops, for as Cyprian says, ecelesia est in episcopo.
We say the creeds; how far may we unsay them?

So far he had taken no open action against Chasters. Suppose now he
were to side with Chasters and let the whole diocese, the church of
Princhester, drift as far as it chose under his inaction towards an
extreme modernism, risking a conflict with, and if necessary fighting,
the archbishop.... It was but for a moment that his mind swung to this
possibility and then recoiled. The Laymen, that band of bigots, would
fight. He could not contemplate litigation and wrangling about the
teaching of the church. Besides, what were the “trappings of religion”
 and what the essentials? What after all was “the pure gospel of Christ”
 of which this writer wrote so glibly? He put the paper down and took a
New Testament from his desk and opened it haphazard. He felt a curious
wish that he could read it for the first time. It was over-familiar.
Everything latterly in his theology and beliefs had become
over-familiar. It had all become mechanical and dead and unmeaning to
his tired mind....

Whippham came with a reminder of more tub-rolling, and the bishop's
speculations were broken off.




CHAPTER THE FOURTH - THE SYMPATHY OF LADY SUNDERBUND

(1)


THAT night when he cried aloud at the memory of his furtive cigarette,
the bishop was staying with a rich man named Garstein Fellows. These
Garstein Fellows people were steel people with a financial side to them;
young Garstein Fellows had his fingers in various chemical businesses,
and the real life of the firm was in various minor partners called
Hartstein and Blumenhart and so forth, who had acquired a considerable
amount of ungentlemanly science and energy in Germany and German
Switzerland. But the Fellows element was good old Princhester stuff.
There had been a Fellows firm in Princhester in 1819. They were not
people the bishop liked and it was not a house the bishop liked staying
at, but it had become part of his policy to visit and keep in touch with
as many of the local plutocracy as he could, to give and take with them,
in order to make the presence of the church a reality to them. It had
been not least among the negligences and evasions of the sainted but
indolent Hood that he had invariably refused overnight hospitality
whenever it was possible for him to get back to his home. The morning
was his working time. His books and hymns had profited at the cost of
missing many a generous after-dinner subscription, and at the expense
of social unity. From the outset Scrope had set himself to alter this.
A certain lack of enthusiasm on Lady Ella's part had merely provoked
him to greater effort on his own. His ideal of what was needed with the
people was something rather jolly and familiar, something like a very
good and successful French or Irish priest, something that came
easily and readily into their homes and laid a friendly hand on their
shoulders. The less he liked these rich people naturally the more
familiar his resolution to be successfully intimate made him. He put
down the names and brief characteristics of their sons and daughters in
a little note-book and consulted it before every visit so as to get
his most casual enquiries right. And he invited himself to the Garstein
Fellows house on this occasion by telegram.


“A special mission and some business in Wombash may I have a scrap of
supper and a bed?”


Now Mrs. Garstein Fellows was a thoroughly London woman; she was one of
the banking Grunenbaums, the fair tall sort, and she had a very decided
tendency to smartness. She had a little party in the house, a sort of
long week-end party, that made her hesitate for a minute or so before
she framed a reply to the bishop's request.


It was the intention of Mrs. Garstein Fellows to succeed very
conspicuously in the British world, and the British world she felt was
a complicated one; it is really not one world but several, and if you
would surely succeed you must keep your peace with all the systems and
be a source of satisfaction to all of them. So at least Mrs. Garstein
Fellows saw it, and her method was to classify her acquaintances
according to their systems, to keep them in their proper bundles, and
to give every one the treatment he or she was accustomed to receive. And
since all things British are now changing and passing away, it may not
be uninteresting to record the classification Mrs. Garstein Fellows
adopted. First she set apart as most precious and desirable, and
requiring the most careful treatment, the “court dowdies “--for so it
was that the dignity and quiet good taste that radiated from Buckingham
Palace impressed her restless, shallow mind--the sort of people who
prefer pair horse carriages to automobiles, have quiet friendships in
the highest quarters, quietly do not know any one else, busy themselves
with charities, dress richly rather than impressively, and have either
little water-colour accomplishments or none at all, and no other
relations with “art.” At the skirts of this crowning British world Mrs.
Garstein Fellows tugged industriously and expensively. She did not keep
a carriage and pair and an old family coachman because that, she felt,
would be considered pushing and presumptuous; she had the sense to stick
to her common unpretending 80 h.p. Daimler; but she wore a special sort
of blackish hat-bonnet for such occasions as brought her near the centre
of honour, which she got from a little good shop known only to very few
outside the inner ring, which hat-bonnet she was always careful to
sit on for a few minutes before wearing. And it was to this first and
highest and best section of her social scheme that she considered that
bishops properly belonged. But some bishops, and in particular such
a comparatively bright bishop as the Bishop of Princhester, she also
thought of as being just as comfortably accommodated in her second
system, the “serious liberal lot,” which was more fatiguing and less
boring, which talked of books and things, visited the Bells, went to all
first-nights when Granville Barker was the producer, and knew and valued
people in the grey and earnest plains between the Cecils and the Sidney
Webbs. And thirdly there were the smart intellectual lot, again not very
well marked off, and on the whole practicable to bishops, of whom fewer
particulars are needed because theirs is a perennial species, and then
finally there was that fourth world which was paradoxically at once very
brilliant and a little shady, which had its Night Club side, and seemed
to set no limit to its eccentricities. It seemed at times to be aiming
to shock and yet it had its standards, but here it was that the dancers
and actresses and forgiven divorcees came in--and the bishops as a rule,
a rule hitherto always respected, didn't. This was the ultimate world of
Mrs. Garstein Fellows; she had no use for merely sporting people and
the merely correct smart and the duller county families, sets that led
nowhere, and it was from her fourth system of the Glittering Doubtfuls
that this party which made her hesitate over the bishop's telegram, was
derived.

She ran over their names as she sat considering her reply.

What was there for a bishop to object to? There was that admirable
American widow, Lady Sunderbund. She was enormously rich, she was
enthusiastic. She was really on probation for higher levels; it was her
decolletage delayed her. If only she kept off theosophy and the Keltic
renascence and her disposition to profess wild intellectual passions,
there would be no harm in her. Provided she didn't come down to dinner
in anything too fantastically scanty--but a word in season was possible.
No! there was no harm in Lady Sunderbund. Then there were Ridgeway Kelso
and this dark excitable Catholic friend of his, Paidraig O'Gorman. Mrs.
Garstein Fellows saw no harm in them. Then one had to consider Lord
Gatling and Lizzie Barusetter. But nothing showed, nothing was likely to
show even if there was anything. And besides, wasn't there a Church and
Stage Guild?

Except for those people there seemed little reason for alarm. Mrs.
Garstein Fellows did not know that Professor Hoppart, who so amusingly
combined a professorship of political economy with the writing of
music-hall lyrics, was a keen amateur theologian, nor that Bent, the
sentimental novelist, had a similar passion. She did not know that her
own eldest son, a dark, romantic-looking youngster from Eton, had also
come to the theological stage of development. She did however weigh
the possibilities of too liberal opinions on what are called social
questions on the part of Miss Sharsper, the novelist, and decided that
if that lady was watched nothing so terrible could be said even in an
undertone; and as for the Mariposa, the dancer, she had nothing but
Spanish and bad French, she looked all right, and it wasn't very likely
she would go out of her way to startle an Anglican bishop. Simply she
needn't dance. Besides which even if a man does get a glimpse of a
little something--it isn't as if it was a woman.

But of course if the party mustn't annoy the bishop, the bishop must
do his duty by the party. There must be the usual purple and the silver
buckles.

She wired back:


“A little party but it won't put you out send your man with your
change.”

(2)


In making that promise Mrs. Garstein Fellows reckoned without the
morbid sensibility of the bishop's disorganized nervous system and the
unsuspected theological stirrings beneath the apparent worldliness of
Hoppart and Bent.

The trouble began in the drawing-room after dinner. Out of deference to
the bishop's abstinence the men did not remain to smoke, but came in to
find the Mariposa and Lady Sunderbund smoking cigarettes, which these
ladies continued to do a little defiantly. They had hoped to finish them
before the bishop came up. The night was chilly, and a cheerful wood
fire cracking and banging on the fireplace emphasized the ordinary
heating. Mrs. Garstein Fellows, who had not expected so prompt an
appearance of the men, had arranged her chairs in a semicircle for a
little womanly gossip, and before she could intervene she found her
party, with the exception of Lord Gatling, who had drifted just a little
too noticeably with Miss Barnsetter into a window, sitting round with
a conscious air, that was perhaps just a trifle too apparent, of being
“good.”

And Mr. Bent plunged boldly into general conversation.

“Are you reading anything now, Mrs. Garstein Fellows?” he asked. “I'm an
interested party.”

She was standing at the side of the fireplace. She bit her lip and
looked at the cornice and meditated with a girlish expression. “Yes,”
 she said. “I am reading again. I didn't think I should but I am.”

“For a time,” said Hoppart, “I read nothing but the papers. I bought
from a dozen to twenty a day.”

“That is wearing off,” said the bishop.

“The first thing I began to read again,” said Mrs. Garstein Fellows,
“--I'm not saying it for your sake, Bishop--was the Bible.”

“I went to the Bible,” said Bent as if he was surprised.

“I've heard that before,” said Ridgeway Kelso, in that slightly
explosive manner of his. “All sorts of people who don't usually read the
Bible--”

“But Mr. Kelso!” protested their hostess with raised eyebrows.

“I was thinking of Bent. But anyhow there's been a great wave of
seriousness, a sudden turning to religion and religious things. I don't
know if it comes your way, Bishop....”

“I've had no rows of penitents yet.”

“We may be coming,” said Hoppart.

He turned sideways to face the bishop. “I think we should be coming
if--if it wasn't for old entangled difficulties. I don't know if you
will mind my saying it to you, but....”

The bishop returned his frank glance. “I'd like to know above all
things,” he said. “If Mrs. Garstein Fellow will permit us. It's my
business to know.”

“We all want to know,” said Lady Sunderbund, speaking from the low chair
on the other side of the fireplace. There was a vibration in her voice
and a sudden gleam of enthusiasm in her face. “Why shouldn't people talk
se'iously sometimes?”

“Well, take my own case,” said Hoppart. “In the last few weeks, I've
been reading not only in the Bible but in the Fathers. I've read most of
Athanasius, most of Eusebius, and--I'll confess it--Gibbon. I find all
my old wonder come back. Why are we pinned to--to the amount of creed we
are pinned to? Why for instance must you insist on the Trinity?”

“Yes,” said the Eton boy explosively, and flushed darkly to find he had
spoken.

“Here is a time when men ask for God,” said Hoppart. “And you give them
three!” cried Bent rather cheaply. “I confess I find the way encumbered
by these Alexandrian elaborations,” Hoppart completed.

“Need it be?” whispered Lady Sunderbund very softly.

“Well,” said the bishop, and leant back in his armchair and knitted his
brow at the fire. “I do not think,” he said, “that men coming to God
think very much of the nature of God. Nevertheless,” he spoke slowly
and patted the arm of his chair, “nevertheless the church insists that
certain vitally important truths have to be conveyed, certain mortal
errors are best guarded against, by these symbols.”

“You admit they are symbols.”

“So the church has always called them.”

Hoppart showed by a little movement and grimace that he thought the
bishop quibbled.

“In every sense of the word,” the bishop hastened to explain, “the
creeds are symbolical. It is clear they seek to express ineffable things
by at least an extended use of familiar words. I suppose we are all
agreed nowadays that when we speak of the Father and of the Son we mean
something only in a very remote and exalted way parallel with--with
biological fatherhood and sonship.”

Lady Sunderbund nodded eagerly. “Yes,” she said, “oh, yes,” and held up
an expectant face for more.

“Our utmost words, our most elaborately phrased creeds, can at the best
be no better than the shadow of something unseen thrown upon the screen
of experience.”

He raised his rather weary eyes to Hoppart as if he would know what else
needed explanation. He was gratified by Lady Sunderbund's approval, but
he affected not to see or hear it. But it was Bent who spoke.

He spoke in the most casual way. He made the thing seem the most
incidental of observations.

“What puzzles me,” he said, “is why the early Christians identified the
Spermaticos Logos of the Stoics with the second and not with the third
person of the Trinity.”

To which the bishop, rising artlessly to the bait, replied, “Ah! that
indeed is the unfortunate aspect of the whole affair.”

And then the Irish Catholic came down on him....

(3)


How the bishop awakened in the night after this dispute has been
told already in the opening section of this story. To that night of
discomfort we now return after this comprehensive digression. He
awoke from nightmares of eyes and triangles to bottomless remorse and
perplexity. For the first time he fully measured the vast distances
he had travelled from the beliefs and attitudes of his early training,
since his coming to Princhester. Travelled--or rather slipped and fallen
down the long slopes of doubt.

That clear inky dimness that comes before dawn found his white face at
the window looking out upon the great terrace and the park.

(4)


After a bout of mental distress and sleeplessness the bishop would
sometimes wake in the morning not so much exhausted as in a state of
thin mental and bodily activity. This was more particularly so if the
night had produced anything in the nature of a purpose. So it was
on this occasion. The day was clear before him; at least it could be
cleared by sending three telegrams; his man could go back to Princhester
and so leave him perfectly free to go to Brighton-Pomfrey in London and
secure that friendly dispensation to smoke again which seemed the only
alternative to a serious mental breakdown. He would take his bag, stay
the night in London, smoke, sleep well, and return the next morning.
Dunk, his valet-butler, found him already bathed and ready for a cup of
tea and a Bradshaw at half-past seven. He went on dressing although the
good train for London did not start until 10.45.

Mrs. Garstein Fellows was by nature and principle a late riser; the
breakfast-room showed small promise yet of the repast, though the table
was set and bright with silver and fresh flowers, and a wood fire popped
and spurted to greet and encourage the March sunshine. But standing in
the doorway that led to the promise and daffodils and crocuses of Mrs.
Garstein Fellows' garden stood Lady Sunderbund, almost with an effect
of waiting, and she greeted the bishop very cheerfully, doubted the
immediate appearance of any one else, and led him in the most natural
manner into the new but already very pleasant shrubbery.

In some indefinable special way the bishop had been aware of Lady
Sunderbund's presence since first he had met her, but it was only now
that he could observe her with any particularity. She was tall like his
own Lady Ella but not calm and quiet; she was electric, her eyes, her
smiles, her complexion had as it were an established brightness that
exceeded the common lustre of things. This morning she was dressed in
grey that was nevertheless not grey but had an effect of colour, and
there was a thread of black along the lines of her body and a gleam of
gold. She carried her head back with less dignity than pride; there was
a little frozen movement in her dark hair as if it flamed up out of her
head. There were silver ornaments in her hair. She spoke with a pretty
little weakness of the r's that had probably been acquired abroad. And
she lost no time in telling him, she was eager to tell him, that she had
been waylaying him. “I did so want to talk to you some maw,” she said.
“I was shy last night and they we' all so noisy and eaga'. I p'ayed that
you might come down early.

“It's an oppo'tunity I've longed for,” she said.

She did her very pretty best to convey what it was had been troubling
her. 'iligion bad been worrying her for years. Life was--oh--just
ornaments and games and so wea'isome, so wea'isome, unless it was
'iligious. And she couldn't get it 'iligious.

The bishop nodded his head gravely.

“You unde'stand?” she pressed.

“I understand too well--the attempt to get hold--and keep hold.”

“I knew you would!” she cried.

She went on with an impulsive rapidity. O'thodoxy had always 'ipelled
her,--always. She had felt herself confronted by the most insurmountable
difficulties, and yet whenever she had gone away from Christianity--she
had gone away from Christianity, to the Theosophists and the Christian
Scientists--she had felt she was only “st'aying fu'tha.” And then
suddenly when he was speaking last night, she had felt he knew. It was
so wonderful to hear the “k'eed was only a symbol.”

“Symbol is the proper name for it,” said the bishop. “It wasn't for
centuries it was called the Creed.”

Yes, and so what it really meant was something quite different from what
it did mean.

The bishop felt that this sentence also was only a symbol, and nodded
encouragingly--but gravely, warily.

And there she was, and the point was there were thousands and thousands
and thousands of educated people like her who were dying to get through
these old-fashioned symbols to the true faith that lay behind them. That
they knew lay behind them. She didn't know if he had read “The Light
under the Altar”?

“He's vicar of Wombash--in my diocese,” said the bishop with restraint.

“It's wonde'ful stuff,” said Lady Sunderbund. “It's spi'tually cold,
but it's intellectually wonde'ful. But we want that with spi'tuality. We
want it so badly. If some one--”

She became daring. She bit her under lip and flashed her spirit at him.

“If you--” she said and paused.

“Could think aloud,” said the bishop.

“Yes,” she said, nodding rapidly, and became breathless to hear.

It would certainly be an astonishing end to the Chasters difficulty if
the bishop went over to the heretic, the bishop reflected.

“My dear lady, I won't disguise,” he began; “in fact I don't see how
I could, that for some years I have been growing more and more
discontented with some of our most fundamental formulae. But it's been
very largely a shapeless discontent--hitherto. I don't think I've said a
word to a single soul. No, not a word. You are the first person to
whom I've ever made the admission that even my feelings are at times
unorthodox.”

She lit up marvellously at his words. “Go on,” she whispered.

But she did not need to tell him to go on. Now that he had once broached
the casket of his reserves he was only too glad of a listener. He talked
as if they were intimate and loving friends, and so it seemed to both
of them they were. It was a wonderful release from a long and painful
solitude.

To certain types it is never quite clear what has happened to them until
they tell it. So that now the bishop, punctuated very prettily by
Lady Sunderbund, began to measure for the first time the extent of his
departure from the old innate convictions of Otteringham Rectory. He
said that it was strange to find doubt coming so late in life, but
perhaps it was only in recent years that his faith had been put to any
really severe tests. It had been sheltered and unchallenged.

“This fearful wa',” Lady Sunderbund interjected.

But Princhester had been a critical and trying change, and “The Light
under the Altar” case had ploughed him deeply. It was curious that
his doubts always seemed to have a double strand; there was a moral
objection based on the church's practical futility and an intellectual
strand subordinated to this which traced that futility largely to its
unconvincing formulae.

“And yet you know,” said the bishop, “I find I can't go with Chasters.
He beats at the church; he treats her as though she were wrong. I feel
like a son, growing up, who finds his mother isn't quite so clear-spoken
nor quite so energetic as she seemed to be once. She's right, I feel
sure. I've never doubted her fundamental goodness.”

“Yes,” said Lady Sunderbund, very eagerly, “yes.”

“And yet there's this futility.... You know, my dear lady, I don't
know what to do. One feels on the one hand, that here is a cloud of
witnesses, great men, sainted men, subtle men, figures permanently
historical, before whom one can do nothing but bow down in the utmost
humility, here is a great instrument and organization--what would the
world be without the witness of the church?--and on the other hand here
are our masses out of hand and hostile, our industrial leaders equally
hostile; there is a failure to grip, and that failure to grip is so
clearly traceable to the fact that our ideas are not modern ideas, that
when we come to profess our faith we find nothing in our mouths but
antiquated Alexandrian subtleties and phrases and ideas that may have
been quite alive, quite significant, quite adequate in Asia Minor or
Egypt, among men essentially orientals, fifteen hundred years ago, but
which now--”

He expressed just what they came to now by a gesture.

She echoed his gesture.

“Probably I'm not alone among my brethren,” he went on, and then: “But
what is one to do?”

With her hands she acted her sense of his difficulty.

“One may be precipitate,” he said. “There's a kind of loyalty and
discipline that requires one to keep the ranks until one's course of
action is perfectly clear. One owes so much to so many. One has to
consider how one may affect--oh! people one has never seen.”

He was lugging things now into speech that so far had been scarcely
above the threshold of his conscious thought. He went on to discuss the
entire position of the disbelieving cleric. He discovered a fine point.

“If there was something else, an alternative, another religion, another
Church, to which one could go, the whole case would be different. But to
go from the church to nothingness isn't to go from falsehood to truth.
It's to go from truth, rather badly expressed, rather conservatively
hidden by its protections, truth in an antiquated costume, to the
blackest lie--in the world.”

She took that point very brightly.

“One must hold fast to 'iligion,” she said, and looked earnestly at him
and gripped fiercely, pink thumbs out, with her beautiful hands held up.

That was it, exactly. He too was gripping. But while on the outside the
Midianites of denial were prowling for these clinging souls, within
the camp they were assailed by a meticulous orthodoxy that was only too
eager to cast them forth. The bishop dwelt for a time upon the curious
fierceness orthodoxy would sometimes display. Nowadays atheism can be
civil, can be generous; it is orthodoxy that trails a scurrilous fringe.

“Who was that young man with a strong Irish accent--who contradicted me
so suddenly?” he asked.

“The dark young man?”

“The noisy young man.”

“That was Mist' Pat'ick O'Go'man. He is a Kelt and all that. Spells
Pat'ick with eva so many letters. You know. They say he spends ouas and
ouas lea'ning E'se. He wo'ies about it. They all t'y to lea'n E'se, and
it wo'ies them and makes them hate England moa and moa.”

“He is orthodox. He--is what I call orthodox to the ridiculous extent.”

“'idiculous.”

A deep-toned gong proclaimed breakfast over a square mile or so of
territory, and Lady Sunderbund turned about mechanically towards the
house. But they continued their discussion.

She started indeed a new topic. “Shall we eva, do 'ou think, have a new
'iligion--t'ua and betta?”

That was a revolutionary idea to him.

He was still fending it off from him when a gap in the shrubs brought
them within sight of the house and of Mrs. Garstein Fellows on the
portico waving a handkerchief and crying “Break-fast.”

“I wish we could talk for houas,” said Lady Sunderbund.

“I've been glad of this talk,” said the bishop. “Very glad.”

She lifted her soft abundant skirts and trotted briskly across the still
dewy lawn towards the house door. The bishop followed gravely and slowly
with his hands behind his back and an unusually peaceful expression upon
his face. He was thinking how rare and precious a thing it is to find
intelligent friendship in women. More particularly when they were
dazzlingly charming and pretty. It was strange, but this was really his
first woman friend. If, as he hoped, she became his friend.

Lady Sunderbund entered the breakfast room in a gusty abundance like
Botticelli's Primavera, and kissed Mrs. Garstein Fellows good-morning.
She exhaled a glowing happiness. “He is wondyful,” she panted. “He is
most wondyful.”

“Mr. Hidgeway Kelso?”

“No, the dee' bishop! I love him. Are those the little sausages I like?
May I take th'ee? I've been up houas.”

The dee' bishop appeared in the sunlit doorway.

(5)


The bishop felt more contentment in the London train than he had felt
for many weeks. He had taken two decisive and relieving steps. One was
that he had stated his case to another human being, and that a very
charming and sympathetic human being, he was no longer a prey to a
current of secret and concealed thoughts running counter to all the
appearances of his outward life; and the other was that he was now
within an hour or so of Brighton-Pomfrey and a cigarette. He would lunch
on the train, get to London about two, take a taxi at once to the wise
old doctor, catch him over his coffee in a charitable and understanding
mood, and perhaps be smoking a cigarette publicly and honourably and
altogether satisfyingly before three.

So far as Brighton-Pomfrey's door this program was fulfilled without
a hitch. The day was fine and he had his taxi opened, and noted with a
patriotic satisfaction as he rattled through the streets, the glare of
the recruiting posters on every vacant piece of wall and the increasing
number of men in khaki in the streets. But at the door he had a
disappointment. Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was away at the front--of all
places; he had gone for some weeks; would the bishop like to see Dr.
Dale?

The bishop hesitated. He had never set eyes on this Dr. Dale.

Indeed, he had never heard of Dr. Dale.

Seeing his old friend Brighton-Pomfrey and being gently and tactfully
told to do exactly what he was longing to do was one thing; facing some
strange doctor and going slowly and elaborately through the whole
story of his illness, his vow and his breakdown, and perhaps having his
reaction time tested and all sorts of stripping and soundings done, was
quite another. He was within an ace of turning away.

If he had turned away his whole subsequent life would have been
different. It was the very slightest thing in the world tipped the
beam. It was the thought that, after all, whatever inconvenience and
unpleasantness there might be in this interview, there was at the end of
it a very reasonable prospect of a restored and legitimate cigarette.




CHAPTER THE FIFTH - THE FIRST VISION

(1)


Dr. DALE exceeded the bishop's worst apprehensions. He was a lean, lank,
dark young man with long black hair and irregular, rather prolonged
features; his chin was right over to the left; he looked constantly at
the bishop's face with a distinctly sceptical grey eye; he could not
have looked harder if he had been a photographer or a portrait painter.
And his voice was harsh, and the bishop was particularly sensitive to
voices.

He began by understanding far too much of the bishop's illness, and he
insisted on various familiarities with the bishop's heart and tongue and
eye and knee that ruffled the bishop's soul.

“Brighton-Pomfrey talked of neurasthenia?” he asked. “That was his
diagnosis,” said the bishop. “Neurasthenia,” said the young man as
though he despised the word.

The bishop went on buttoning up his coat.

“You don't of course want to break your vows about drinking and
smoking,” said the young man with the very faintest suggestion of
derision in his voice.

“Not if it can possibly be avoided,” the bishop asserted. “Without a
loss, that is, of practical efficiency,” he added. “For I have much to
do.”

“I think that it is possible to keep your vow,” said the young man,
and the bishop could have sworn at him. “I think we can manage that all
right.”

(2)


The bishop sat at the table resting his arm upon it and awaiting the
next development of this unsatisfactory interview. He was on the verge
of asking as unpleasantly as possible when Brighton-Pomfrey would
return.

The young man stood upon Brighton-Pomfrey's hearth-rug and was evidently
contemplating dissertations.

“Of course,” he said, as though he discussed a problem with himself,
“you must have some sort of comfort. You must get out of this state, one
way or another.”

The bishop nodded assent. He had faint hopes of this young man's ideas
of comfort.

Dr. Dale reflected. Then he went off away from the question of comfort
altogether. “You see, the trouble in such a case as this is peculiarly
difficult to trace to its sources because it comes just upon the
border-line of bodily and mental things. You may take a drug or alter
your regimen and it disturbs your thoughts, you may take an idea and
it disturbs your health. It is easy enough to say, as some do, that all
ideas have a physical substratum; it is almost as easy to say with the
Christian Scientist that all bodily states are amenable to our ideas.
The truth doesn't, I think, follow the border between those opposite
opinions very exactly on either side. I can't, for instance, tell you to
go home and pray against these uncertainties and despairs, because it
is just these uncertainties and despairs that rob you of the power of
efficient prayer.”

He did not seem to expect anything from the bishop.

“I don't see that because a case brings one suddenly right up against
the frontier of metaphysics, why a doctor should necessarily pull
up short at that, why one shouldn't go on into either metaphysics or
psychology if such an extension is necessary for the understanding of
the case. At any rate if you'll permit it in this consultation....”

“Go on,” said the bishop, holding on to that promise of comfort. “The
best thing is to thrash out the case in your own way. And then come to
what is practical.”

“What is really the matter here--the matter with you that is--is a
disorganization of your tests of reality. It's one of a group of states
hitherto confused. Neurasthenia, that comprehensive phrase--well, it is
one of the neurasthenias. Here, I confess, I begin to talk of work I am
doing, work still to be published, finished first and then published....
But I go off from the idea that every living being lives in a state
not differing essentially from a state of hallucination concerning the
things about it. Truth, essential truth, is hidden. Always. Of course
there must be a measure of truth in our working illusions, a working
measure of truth, or the creature would smash itself up and end itself,
but beyond that discretion of the fire and the pitfall lies a wide
margin of error about which we may be deceived for years. So long as it
doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. I don't know if I make myself clear.”

“I follow you,” said the bishop a little wearily, “I follow you.
Phenomena and noumena and so on and so on. Kant and so forth.
Pragmatism. Yes.”

With a sigh.

“And all that,” completed Dr. Dale in a voice that suggested mockery.
“But you see we grow into a way of life, we settle down among habits and
conventions, we say 'This is all right' and 'That is always so.' We
get more and more settled into our life as a whole and more and more
confident. Unless something happens to shake us out of our sphere of
illusion. That may be some violent contradictory fact, some accident,
or it may be some subtle change in one's health and nerves that makes
us feel doubtful. Or a change of habits. Or, as I believe, some subtle
quickening of the critical faculty. Then suddenly comes the feeling as
though we were lost in a strange world, as though we had never really
seen the world before.”

He paused.

The bishop was reluctantly interested. “That does describe something--of
the mental side,” he admitted. “I never believe in concealing my own
thoughts from an intelligent patient,” said Dr. Dale, with a quiet
offensiveness. “That sort of thing belongs to the dark ages of the
'pothecary's art. I will tell you exactly my guesses and suppositions
about you. At the base of it all is a slight and subtle kidney trouble,
due I suggest to your going to Princhester and drinking the local
water--”

“But it's excellent water. They boast of it.”

“By all the established tests. As a matter of fact many of our best
drinking waters have all sorts of unspecified qualities. Burton water,
for example, is radioactive by Beetham's standards up to the ninth
degree. But that is by the way. My theory about your case is that this
produced a change in your blood, that quickened your sensibilities and
your critical faculties just at a time when a good many bothers--I don't
of course know what they were, but I can, so to speak, see the marks all
over you--came into your life.”

The bishop nodded.

“You were uprooted. You moved from house to house, and failed to get
that curled up safe feeling one has in a real home in any of them.”

“If you saw the fireplaces and the general decoration of the new
palace!” admitted the bishop. “I had practically no control.”

“That confirms me,” said Dr. Dale. “Insomnia followed, and increased the
feeling of physical strangeness by increasing the bodily disturbance. I
suspect an intellectual disturbance.”

He paused.

“There was,” said the bishop.

“You were no longer at home anywhere. You were no longer at home in your
diocese, in your palace, in your body, in your convictions. And then
came the war. Quite apart from everything else the mind of the whole
world is suffering profoundly from the shock of this war--much more
than is generally admitted. One thing you did that you probably did not
observe yourself doing, you drank rather more at your meals, you smoked
a lot more. That was your natural and proper response to the shock.”

“Ah!” said the bishop, and brightened up.

“It was remarked by Tolstoy, I think, that few intellectual men would
really tolerate the world as it is if it were not for smoking and
drinking. Even novelists have their moments of lucidity. Certainly these
things soothe the restlessness in men's minds, deaden their sceptical
sensibilities. And just at the time when you were getting most
dislodged--you gave them up.”

“And the sooner I go back to them the better,” said the bishop brightly.
“I quite see that.”

“I wouldn't say that,” said Dr. Dale....

(3)


“That,” said Dr. Dale, “is just where my treatment of this case differs
from the treatment of “--he spoke the name reluctantly as if he disliked
the mere sound of it--“Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey.”

“Hitherto, of course,” said the bishop, “I've been in his hands.”

“He,” said Dr. Dale, “would certainly set about trying to restore your
old sphere of illusion, your old familiar sensations and ideas and
confidences. He would in fact turn you back. He would restore all your
habits. He would order you a rest. He would send you off to some holiday
resort, fresh in fact but familiar in character, the High lands, North
Italy, or Switzerland for example. He would forbid you newspapers and
order you to botanize and prescribe tranquillizing reading; Trollope's
novels, the Life of Gladstone, the works of Mr. A. C. Benson, memoirs
and so on. You'd go somewhere where there was a good Anglican chaplain,
and you'd take some of the services yourself. And we'd wash out the
effects of the Princhester water with Contrexeville, and afterwards
put you on Salutaris or Perrier. I don't know whether I shouldn't have
inclined to some such treatment before the war began. Only--”

He paused.

“You think--?”

Dr. Dale's face betrayed a sudden sombre passion. “It won't do now,” he
said in a voice of quiet intensity. “It won't do now.”

He remained darkly silent for so long that at last the bishop spoke.
“Then what,” he asked, “do you suggest?

“Suppose we don't try to go back,” said Dr. Dale. “Suppose we go on and
go through.”

“Where?”

“To reality.

“I know it's doubtful, I know it's dangerous,” he went on, “but I am
convinced that now we can no longer keep men's minds and souls in these
feathered nests, these spheres of illusion. Behind these veils there is
either God or the Darkness.... Why should we not go on?”

The bishop was profoundly perplexed. He heard himself speaking. “It
would be unworthy of my cloth,” he was saying.

Dr. Dale completed the sentence: “to go back.”

“Let me explain a little more,” he said, “what I mean by 'going on.' I
think that this loosening of the ties of association that bind a man to
his everyday life and his everyday self is in nine cases out of ten a
loosening of the ties that bind him to everyday sanity. One common form
of this detachment is the form you have in those cases of people who
are found wandering unaware of their names, unaware of their places
of residence, lost altogether from themselves. They have not only lost
their sense of identity with themselves, but all the circumstances of
their lives have faded out of their minds like an idle story in a book
that has been read and put aside. I have looked into hundreds of such
cases. I don't think that loss of identity is a necessary thing; it's
just another side of the general weakening of the grip upon reality, a
kind of anaemia of the brain so that interest fades and fails. There
is no reason why you should forget a story because you do not believe
it--if your brain is strong enough to hold it. But if your brain is
tired and weak, then so soon as you lose faith in your records, your
mind is glad to let them go. When you see these lost identity people
that is always your first impression, a tired brain that has let go.”

The bishop felt extremely like letting go.

“But how does this apply to my case?”

“I come to that,” said Dr. Dale, holding up a long large hand. “What
if we treat this case of yours in a new way? What if we give you not
narcotics but stimulants and tonics? What if we so touch the blood that
we increase your sense of physical detachment while at the same time
feeding up your senses to a new and more vivid apprehension of things
about you?” He looked at his patient's hesitation and added: “You'd lose
all that craving feeling, that you fancy at present is just the need
of a smoke. The world might grow a trifle--transparent, but you'd keep
real. Instead of drugging oneself back to the old contentment--”

“You'd drug me on to the new,” said the bishop.

“But just one word more!” said Dr. Dale. “Hear why I would do this! It
was easy and successful to rest and drug people back to their old states
of mind when the world wasn't changing, wasn't spinning round in the
wildest tornado of change that it has ever been in. But now--Where can
I send you for a rest? Where can I send you to get you out of sight and
hearing of the Catastrophe? Of course old Brighton-Pomfrey would go on
sending people away for rest and a nice little soothing change if the
Day of Judgment was coming in the sky and the earth was opening and the
sea was giving up its dead. He'd send 'em to the seaside. Such things as
that wouldn't shake his faith in the Channel crossing. My idea is that
it's not only right for you to go through with this, but that it's the
only thing to do. If you go right on and right through with these doubts
and intimations--”

He paused.

“You may die like a madman,” he said, “but you won't die like a tame
rabbit.”

(4)


The bishop sat reflecting. What fascinated and attracted him was the
ending of all the cravings and uneasinesses and restlessness that had
distressed his life for over four years; what deterred him was the
personality of this gaunt young man with his long grey face, his excited
manner, his shock of black hair. He wanted that tonic--with grave
misgivings. “If you think this tonic is the wiser course,” he began.
“I'd give it you if you were my father,” said Dr. Dale. “I've got
everything for it,” he added.

“You mean you can make it up--without a prescription.”

“I can't give you a prescription. The essence of it--It's a distillate I
have been trying. It isn't in the Pharmacopeia.”

Again the bishop had a twinge of misgiving.

But in the end he succumbed. He didn't want to take the stuff, but also
he did not want to go without his promised comfort.

Presently Dale had given him a little phial--and was holding up to the
window a small medicine glass into which he was pouring very carefully
twenty drops of the precious fluid. “Take it only,” he said, “when you
feel you must.”

“It is the most golden of liquids,” said the bishop, peering at it.

“When you want more I will make you more. Later of course, it will be
possible to write a prescription. Now add the water--so.

“It becomes opalescent. How beautifully the light plays in it!

“Take it.”

The bishop dismissed his last discretion and drank.

“Well?” said Dr. Dale.

“I am still here,” said the bishop, smiling, and feeling a joyous
tingling throughout his body. “It stirs me.”

(5)


The bishop stood on the pavement outside Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey's house.
The massive door had closed behind him.

It had been an act of courage, of rashness if you will, to take this
draught. He was acutely introspective, ready for anything, for the most
disagreeable or the most bizarre sensations. He was asking himself, Were
his feet steady? Was his head swimming?

His doubts glowed into assurance.

Suddenly he perceived that he was sure of God.

Not perhaps of the God of Nicaea, but what did these poor little
quibblings and definitions of the theologians matter? He had been
worrying about these definitions and quibblings for four long restless
years. Now they were just failures to express--what surely every one
knew--and no one would ever express exactly. Because here was God, and
the kingdom of God was manifestly at hand. The visible world hung before
him as a mist might hang before the rising sun. He stood proudly and
masterfully facing a universe that had heretofore bullied him into doubt
and apologetics, a universe that had hitherto been opaque and was now
betrayed translucent.

That was the first effect of the new tonic, complete reassurance,
complete courage. He turned to walk towards Mount Street and Berkeley
Square as a sultan might turn to walk among his slaves.

But the tonic was only beginning.

Before he had gone a dozen steps he was aware that he seemed more solid
and larger than the people about him. They had all a curious miniature
effect, as though he was looking at them through the wrong end of an
opera glass. The houses on either side of the street and the traffic
shared this quality in an equal measure. It was as if he was looking at
the world through apertures in a miniature cinematograph peep-show. This
surprised him and a little dashed his first glow of satisfaction.

He passed a man in khaki who, he fancied, looked at him with an odd
expression. He observed the next passers-by narrowly and suspiciously, a
couple of smartish young men, a lady with a poodle, a grocer's boy with
a basket, but none seemed to observe anything remarkable about him. Then
he caught the eye of a taxi-driver and became doubtful again.

He had a feeling that this tonic was still coming in like a tide. It
seemed to be filling him and distending him, in spite of the fact that
he was already full. After four years of flaccidity it was pleasant to
be distended again, but already he felt more filled than he had ever
been before. At present nothing was showing, but all his body seemed
braced and uplifted. He must be careful not to become inflated in his
bearing.

And yet it was difficult not to betray a little inflation. He was so
filled with assurance that things were right with him and that God was
there with him. After all it was not mere fancy; he was looking through
the peepholes of his eyes at the world of illusion and appearance. The
world that was so intent upon its immediate business, so regardless of
eternal things, that had so dominated him but a little while ago, was
after all a thing more mortal than himself.

Another man in khaki passed him.

For the first time he saw the war as something measurable, as something
with a beginning and an end, as something less than the immortal spirit
in man. He had been too much oppressed by it. He perceived all these
people in the street were too much oppressed by it. He wanted to tell
them as much, tell them that all was well with them, bid them be of good
cheer. He wanted to bless them. He found his arm floating up towards
gestures of benediction. Self-control became increasingly difficult.

All the way down Berkeley Square the bishop was in full-bodied struggle
with himself. He was trying to control himself, trying to keep within
bounds. He felt that he was stepping too high, that his feet were not
properly reaching the ground, that he was walking upon cushions of air.

The feeling of largeness increased, and the feeling of transparency in
things about him. He avoided collision with passers-by--excessively. And
he felt his attention was being drawn more and more to something that
was going on beyond the veil of visible things. He was in Piccadilly
now, but at the same time Piccadilly was very small and he was walking
in the presence of God.

He had a feeling that God was there though he could not see him. And at
the same time he was in this transitory world, with people going to and
fro, men with umbrellas tucked dangerously under their arms, men in a
hurry, policemen, young women rattling Red Cross collecting boxes, smart
people, loafers. They distracted one from God.

He set out to cross the road just opposite Prince's, and jumping
needlessly to give way to an omnibus had the narrowest escape from a
taxicab.

He paused on the pavement edge to recover himself. The shock of his near
escape had, as people say, pulled him together.

What was he to do? Manifestly this opalescent draught was overpowering
him. He ought never to have taken it. He ought to have listened to the
voice of his misgivings. It was clear that he was not in a fit state to
walk about the streets. He was--what had been Dr. Dale's term?--losing
his sense of reality. What was he to do? He was alarmed but not
dismayed. His thoughts were as full-bodied as the rest of his being,
they came throbbing and bumping into his mind. What was he to do?

Brighton-Pomfrey ought never to have left his practice in the hands of
this wild-eyed experimenter.

Strange that after a lifetime of discretion and men's respect one should
be standing on the Piccadilly pavement--intoxicated!

It came into his head that he was not so very far from the Athenaeum,
and surely there if anywhere a bishop may recover his sense of
being--ordinary.

And behind everything, behind the tall buildings and the swarming people
there was still the sense of a wide illuminated space, of a light of
wonder and a Presence. But he must not give way to that again! He had
already given way altogether too much. He repeated to himself in a
whisper, “I am in Piccadilly.”

If he kept tight hold upon himself he felt he might get to the Athenaeum
before--before anything more happened.

He murmured directions to himself. “Keep along the pavement. Turn to
the right at the Circus. Now down the hill. Easily down the hill. Don't
float! Junior Army and Navy Stores. And the bookseller.”

And presently he had a doubt of his name and began to repeat it.

“Edward Princhester. Edward Scrope, Lord Bishop of Princhester.”

And all the while voices within him were asserting, “You are in the
kingdom of Heaven. You are in the presence of God. Place and time are a
texture of illusion and dreamland. Even now, you are with God.”

(6)


The porter of the Athenaeum saw him come in, looking well--flushed
indeed--but queer in expression; his blue eyes were wide open and
unusually vague and blue.

He wandered across towards the dining-room, hesitated, went to look at
the news, seemed in doubt whether he would not go into the smoking-room,
and then went very slowly upstairs, past the golden angel up to the
great drawing-room.

In the drawing-room he found only Sir James Mounce, the man who knew
the novels of Sir Walter Scott by heart and had the minutest and most
unsparing knowledge of every detail in the life of that supreme giant of
English literature. He had even, it was said, acquired a Scotch burr in
the enthusiasm of his hero-worship. It was usually sufficient only to
turn an ear towards him for him to talk for an hour or so. He was now
studying Bradshaw.

The bishop snatched at him desperately. He felt that if he went away
there would be no hold left upon the ordinary things of life.

“Sir James,” he said, “I was wondering the other day when was the exact
date of the earliest public ascription of Waverley to Scott.”

“Eh!” said Sir James, “but I'd like to talk that over with ye. Indeed
I would. It would be depending very largely on what ye called 'public.'
But--”

He explained something about an engagement in Birmingham that night, a
train to catch. Reluctantly but relentlessly he abandoned the proffered
ear. But he promised that the next time they met in the club he would go
into the matter “exhausteevely.”

The door closed upon him. The bishop was alone. He was flooded with
the light of the world that is beyond this world. The things about him
became very small and indistinct.

He would take himself into a quiet corner in the library of this doll's
house, and sit his little body down in one of the miniature armchairs.
Then if he was going to faint or if the trancelike feeling was to become
altogether a trance--well, a bishop asleep in an armchair in the library
of the Athenaeum is nothing to startle any one.

He thought of that convenient hidden room, the North Library, in which
is the bust of Croker. There often one can be quite alone.... It was
empty, and he went across to the window that looks out upon Pall Mall
and sat down in the little uncomfortable easy chair by the desk with its
back to the Benvenuto Cellini.

And as he sat down, something snapped--like the snapping of a lute
string--in his brain.

(7)


With a sigh of deep relief the bishop realized that this world had
vanished.

He was in a golden light.

He perceived it as a place, but it was a place without buildings or
trees or any very definite features. There was a cloudy suggestion of
distant hills, and beneath his feet were little gem-like flowers, and
a feeling of divinity and infinite friendliness pervaded his being. His
impressions grew more definite. His feet seemed to be bare. He was no
longer a bishop nor clad as a bishop. That had gone with the rest of the
world. He was seated on a slab of starry rock.

This he knew quite clearly was the place of God.

He was unable to disentangle thoughts from words. He seemed to be
speaking in his mind.

“I have been very foolish and confused and perplexed. I have been like a
creature caught among thorns.”

“You served the purpose of God among those thorns.” It seemed to him at
first that the answer also was among his thoughts.

“I seemed so silly and so little. My wits were clay.”

“Clay full of desires.”

“Such desires!”

“Blind desires. That will presently come to the light.”

“Shall we come to the light?”

“But here it is, and you see it!”

(8)


It became clearer in the mind of the bishop that a figure sat beside
him, a figure of great strength and beauty, with a smiling face and
kindly eyes. A strange thought and a strange courage came to the bishop.

“Tell me,” he whispered, “are you God?”

“I am the Angel of God.”

The bishop thought over that for some moments.

“I want,” he said, “to know about God.

“I want,” he said, with a deepening passion of the soul, “to know about
God. Slowly through four long years I have been awakening to the need
of God. Body and soul I am sick for the want of God and the knowledge of
God. I did not know what was the matter with me, why my life had become
so disordered and confused that my very appetites and habits are all
astray. But I am perishing for God as a waterless man upon a raft
perishes for drink, and there is nothing but madness if I touch the seas
about me. Not only in my thoughts but in my under thoughts and in my
nerves and bones and arteries I have need of God. You see I grew up in
the delusion that I knew God, I did not know that I was unprovisioned
and unprovided against the tests and strains and hardships of life. I
thought that I was secure and safe. I was told that we men--who were
apes not a quarter of a million years ago, who still have hair upon
our arms and ape's teeth in our jaws--had come to the full and perfect
knowledge of God. It was all put into a creed. Not a word of it was to
be altered, not a sentence was to be doubted any more. They made me a
teacher of this creed. They seemed to explain it to me. And when I came
to look into it, when my need came and I turned to my creed, it was old
and shrivelled up, it was the patched-up speculations of vanished Greeks
and Egyptians, it was a mummy of ancient disputes, old and dry, that
fell to dust as I unwrapped it. And I was dressed up in the dress of old
dead times and put before an altar of forgotten sacrifices, and I went
through ceremonies as old as the first seedtime; and suddenly I knew
clearly that God was not there, God was not in my Creed, not in my
cathedral, not in my ceremonies, nowhere in my life. And at the same
time I knew, I knew as I had never known before, that certainly there
was God.”

He paused. “Tell me,” said the friend at his side; “tell me.”

“It was as if a child running beside its mother, looked up and saw that
he had never seen her face before, that she was not his mother, and that
the words he had seemed to understand were--now that he listened--words
in an unknown tongue.

“You see, I am but a common sort of man, dear God; I have neither lived
nor thought in any way greatly, I have gone from one day to the next day
without looking very much farther than the end of the day, I have gone
on as life has befallen; if no great trouble had come into my life, so
I should have lived to the end of my days. But life which began for me
easily and safely has become constantly more difficult and strange.
I could have held my services and given my benedictions, I could have
believed I believed in what I thought I believed.... But now I am lost
and astray--crying out for God....”

(9)


“Let us talk a little about your troubles,” said the Angel. “Let us talk
about God and this creed that worries you and this church of yours.”

“I feel as though I had been struggling to this talk through all the
years--since my doubts began.”

“The story your Creed is trying to tell is much the same story that
all religions try to tell. In your heart there is God, beyond the stars
there is God. Is it the same God?”

“I don't know,” said the bishop.

“Does any one know?”

“I thought I knew.”

“Your creed is full of Levantine phrases and images, full of the patched
contradictions of the human intelligence utterly puzzled. It is about
those two Gods, the God beyond the stars and the God in your heart. It
says that they are the same God, but different. It says that they have
existed together for all time, and that one is the Son of the other. It
has added a third Person--but we won't go into that.”

The bishop was reminded suddenly of the dispute at Mrs. Garstein
Fellows'. “We won't go into that,” he agreed. “No!”

“Other religions have told the story in a different way. The Cathars and
Gnostics did. They said that the God in your heart is a rebel against
the God beyond the stars, that the Christ in your heart is like
Prometheus--or Hiawatha--or any other of the sacrificial gods, a rebel.
He arises out of man. He rebels against that high God of the stars and
crystals and poisons and monsters and of the dead emptiness of space....
The Manicheans and the Persians made out our God to be fighting
eternally against that Being of silence and darkness beyond the stars.
The Buddhists made the Lord Buddha the leader of men out of the futility
and confusion of material existence to the great peace beyond. But it is
all one story really, the story of the two essential Beings, always the
same story and the same perplexity cropping up under different names,
the story of one being who stirs us, calls to us, and leads us, and
of another who is above and outside and in and beneath all things,
inaccessible and incomprehensible. All these religions are trying to
tell something they do not clearly know--of a relationship between these
two, that eludes them, that eludes the human mind, as water escapes from
the hand. It is unity and opposition they have to declare at the same
time; it is agreement and propitiation, it is infinity and effort.”

“And the truth?” said the bishop in an eager whisper. “You can tell me
the truth.”

The Angel's answer was a gross familiarity. He thrust his hand through
the bishop's hair and ruffled it affectionately, and rested for a moment
holding the bishop's cranium in his great palm.

“But can this hold it?” he said....

“Not with this little box of brains,” said the Angel. “You could as soon
make a meal of the stars and pack them into your belly. You haven't the
things to do it with inside this.”

He gave the bishop's head a little shake and relinquished it.

He began to argue as an elder brother might.

“Isn't it enough for you to know something of the God that comes down to
the human scale, who has been born on your planet and arisen out of Man,
who is Man and God, your leader? He's more than enough to fill your mind
and use up every faculty of your being. He is courage, he is adventure,
he is the King, he fights for you and with you against death....”

“And he is not infinite? He is not the Creator?” asked the bishop.

“So far as you are concerned, no,” said the Angel.

“So far as I am concerned?”

“What have you to do with creation?”

And at that question it seemed that a great hand swept carelessly across
the blackness of the farther sky, and smeared it with stars and suns and
shining nebulas as a brush might smear dry paint across a canvas.

The bishop stared in front of him. Then slowly he bowed his head, and
covered his face with his hands.

“And I have been in orders,” he murmured; “I have been teaching people
the only orthodox and perfect truth about these things for seven and
twenty years.”

And suddenly he was back in his gaiters and his apron and his shovel
hat, a little black figure exceedingly small in a very great space....

(10)


It was a very great space indeed because it was all space, and the roof
was the ebony of limitless space from which the stars swung flaming,
held by invisible ties, and the soil beneath his feet was a dust of
atoms and the little beginnings of life. And long before the bishop
bared his face again, he knew that he was to see his God.

He looked up slowly, fearing to be dazzled.

But he was not dazzled. He knew that he saw only the likeness and
bodying forth of a being inconceivable, of One who is greater than the
earth and stars and yet no greater than a man. He saw a being for ever
young, for ever beginning, for ever triumphant. The quality and texture
of this being was a warm and living light like the effulgence at
sunrise; He was hope and courage like a sunlit morning in spring. He
was adventure for ever, and His courage and adventure flowed into and
submerged and possessed the being of the man who beheld him. And this
presence of God stood over the bishop, and seemed to speak to him in a
wordless speech.

He bade him surrender himself. He bade him come out upon the Adventure
of Life, the great Adventure of the earth that will make the atoms our
bond-slaves and subdue the stars, that will build up the white fires of
ecstasy to submerge pain for ever, that will overcome death. In Him
the spirit of creation had become incarnate, had joined itself to men,
summoning men to Him, having need of them, having need of them, having
need of their service, even as great kings and generals and leaders need
and use men. For a moment, for an endless age, the bishop bowed himself
in the being and glory of God, felt the glow of the divine courage and
confidence in his marrow, felt himself one with God.

For a timeless interval....

Never had the bishop had so intense a sense of reality. It seemed that
never before had he known anything real. He knew certainly that God was
his King and master, and that his unworthy service could be acceptable
to God. His mind embraced that idea with an absolute conviction that was
also absolute happiness.

(11)


The thoughts and sensations of the bishop seemed to have lifted for
a time clean away from the condition of time, and then through a vast
orbit to be returning to that limitation.

He was aware presently that things were changing, that the light was
losing its diviner rays, that in some indescribable manner the glory and
the assurance diminished.

The onset of the new phase was by imperceptible degrees. From a glowing,
serene, and static realization of God, everything relapsed towards
change and activity. He was in time again and things were happening, it
was as if the quicksands of time poured by him, and it was as if God
was passing away from him. He fell swiftly down from the heaven
of self-forgetfulness to a grotesque, pathetic and earthly
self-consciousness.

He became acutely aware of his episcopal livery. And that God was
passing away from him.

It was as if God was passing, and as if the bishop was unable to rise up
and follow him.

Then it was as if God had passed, and as if the bishop was in headlong
pursuit of him and in a great terror lest he should be left behind. And
he was surely being left behind.

He discovered that in some unaccountable way his gaiters were loose;
most of their buttons seemed to have flown off, and his episcopal
sash had slipped down about his feet. He was sorely impeded. He kept
snatching at these things as he ran, in clumsy attempts to get them off.

At last he had to stop altogether and kneel down and fumble with the
last obstinate button.

“Oh God!” he cried, “God my captain! Wait for me! Be patient with me!”

And as he did so God turned back and reached out his hand. It was indeed
as if he stood and smiled. He stood and smiled as a kind man might do;
he dazzled and blinded his worshipper, and yet it was manifest that he
had a hand a man might clasp.

Unspeakable love and joy irradiated the whole being of the bishop as he
seized God's hand and clasped it desperately with both his own. It was
as if his nerves and arteries and all his substance were inundated with
golden light....

It was again as if he merged with God and became God....




CHAPTER THE SIXTH - EXEGETICAL

(1)


WITHOUT any sense of transition the bishop found himself seated in the
little North Library of the Athenaeum club and staring at the bust of
John Wilson Croker. He was sitting motionless and musing deeply. He was
questioning with a cool and steady mind whether he had seen a vision
or whether he had had a dream. If it had been a dream it had been an
extraordinarily vivid and convincing dream. He still seemed to be in the
presence of God, and it perplexed him not at all that he should also
be in the presence of Croker. The feeling of mental rottenness and
insecurity that had weakened his thought through the period of his
illness, had gone. He was secure again within himself.

It did not seem to matter fundamentally whether it was an experience of
things without or of things within him that had happened to him. It was
clear to him that much that he had seen was at most expressive, that
some was altogether symbolical. For example, there was that sudden
absurd realization of his sash and gaiters, and his perception of them
as encumbrances in his pursuit of God. But the setting and essential of
the whole thing remained in his mind neither expressive nor symbolical,
but as real and immediately perceived, and that was the presence and
kingship of God. God was still with him and about him and over him and
sustaining him. He was back again in his world and his ordinary life,
in his clothing and his body and his club, but God had been made and
remained altogether plain and manifest.

Whether an actual vision had made his conviction, or whether the
conviction of his own subconscious mind had made the dream, seemed but
a small matter beside the conviction that this was indeed the God he had
desired and the God who must rule his life.

“The stuff? The stuff had little to do with it. It just cleared my
head.... I have seen. I have seen really. I know.”

(2)


For a long time as it seemed the bishop remained wrapped in clouds of
luminous meditation. Dream or vision it did not matter; the essential
thing was that he had made up his mind about God, he had found God.
Moreover, he perceived that his theological perplexities had gone. God
was higher and simpler and nearer than any theological God, than the
God of the Three Creeds. Those creeds lay about in his mind now like
garments flung aside, no trace nor suspicion of divinity sustained them
any longer. And now--Now he would go out into the world.

The little Library of the Athenaeum has no visible door. He went to the
book-masked entrance in the corner, and felt among the bookshelves
for the hidden latch. Then he paused, held by a curious thought. What
exactly was the intention of that symbolical struggle with his sash and
gaiters, and why had they impeded his pursuit of God?

To what particularly significant action was he going out?

The Three Creeds were like garments flung aside. But he was still
wearing the uniform of a priest in the service of those three creeds.

After a long interval he walked into the big reading-room. He ordered
some tea and dry toast and butter, and sat down very thoughtfully in a
corner. He was still sitting and thinking at half-past eight.

It may seem strange to the reader that this bishop who had been doubting
and criticizing the church and his system of beliefs for four long
years had never before faced the possibility of a severance from his
ecclesiastical dignity. But he had grown up in the church, his life had
been so entirely clerical and Anglican, that the widest separation he
had hitherto been able to imagine from this past had left him still a
bishop, heretical perhaps, innovating in the broadening of beliefs and
the liberalizing of practice, defensive even as Chasters was defensive,
but still with the palace and his dignities, differing in opinion rather
than in any tangible reality from his previous self. For a bishop,
disbelief in the Church is a far profounder scepticism than mere
disbelief in God. God is unseen, and in daily things unfelt; but
the Church is with the predestined bishop always. His concept of the
extremest possible departure from orthodoxy had been something that
Chasters had phrased as “a restatement of Christ.” It was a new idea, an
idea that had come with an immense effect of severance and novelty, that
God could be other than the God of the Creed, could present himself
to the imagination as a figure totally unlike the white, gentle, and
compromising Redeemer of an Anglican's thought. That the bishop should
treat the whole teaching of the church and the church itself as wrong,
was an idea so new that it fell upon him now like a thunderbolt out of a
cloudless sky. But here, clear in his mind now, was a feeling, amounting
to conviction, that it was the purpose and gesture of the true God that
he should come right out of the church and all his professions.

And in the first glow of his vision he felt this gesture imperative. He
must step right out.... Whither? how? And when?

To begin with it seemed to him that an immediate renunciation was
demanded. But it was a momentous step. He wanted to think. And to go
on thinking. Rather than to act precipitately. Although the imperative
seemed absolute, some delaying and arresting instinct insisted that he
must “think” If he went back to Princhester, the everyday duties of
his position would confront him at once with an effect of a definite
challenge. He decided to take one of the Reform club bedrooms for two or
three days, and wire to Princhester that he was “unavoidably delayed in
town,” without further explanations. Then perhaps this inhibitory force
would give way.

It did not, however, give way. His mind sat down for two days in a blank
amazement at the course before him, and at the end of that time this
reasonless and formless institution was as strong as ever. During that
time, except for some incidental exchanges at his clubs, he talked to no
one. At first he did not want to talk to any one. He remained mentally
and practically active, with a still intensely vivid sense that God,
the true God, stood watching him and waiting for him to follow. And to
follow meant slipping right out of all the world he had ever known.
To thrust his foot right over the edge of a cliff would scarcely have
demanded more from the bishop's store of resolution. He stood on the
very verge. The chief secretion of his mind was a shadowy experiment or
so in explanation of why he did not follow.

(3)


Insensibly the extreme vividness of his sense of God's nearness
decreased. But he still retained a persuasion of the reality of an
immediate listener waiting, and of the need of satisfying him.

On the third day he found his mind still further changed. He no longer
felt that God was in Pall Mall or St. James's Park, whither he
resorted to walk and muse. He felt now that God was somewhere about the
horizon....

He felt too no longer that he thought straight into the mind of God. He
thought now of what he would presently say to God. He turned over and
rehearsed phrases. With that came a desire to try them first on some
other hearer. And from that to the attentive head of Lady Sunderbund,
prettily bent towards him, was no great leap. She would understand,
if any one could understand, the great change that had happened in his
mind.

He found her address in the telephone book. She could be quite alone
to him if he wouldn't mind “just me.” It was, he said, exactly what he
desired.

But when he got to her great airy flat overlooking Hyde Park, with its
Omega Workshop furniture and its arresting decoration, he was not so
sure whether this encounter was so exactly the thing he had desired as
he had supposed.

The world had become opaque and real again as he walked up St. James's
Street and past the Ritz. He had a feeling that he was taking an
afternoon off from God. The adventurous modernity of the room in which
he waited intensified that. One whole white wall was devoted to a small
picture by Wyndham Lewis. It was like a picture of an earthquake in a
city of aniline pink and grey and keen green cardboard, and he wished it
had never existed.

He turned his back upon it and stared out of the window over the trees
and greenery. The balcony was decorated with white and pink geraniums in
pots painted black and gold, and the railings of the balcony were black
and gold with crimson shape like squares wildly out of drawing.

Lady Sunderbund kept him waiting perhaps five minutes. Then she came
sailing in to him.

She was dressed in a way and moved across the room in a way that was
more reminiscent of Botticelli's Spring than ever--only with a kind
of superadded stiffish polonaise of lace--and he did not want to be
reminded of Botticelli's Spring or wonder why she had taken to stiff
lace polonaises. He did not enquire whether he had met Lady Sunderbund
to better advantage at Mrs. Garstein Fellows' or whether his memory had
overrated her or whether anything had happened to his standard of taste,
but his feeling now was decidedly one of disappointment, and all the
talk and self-examination he had promised himself seemed to wither and
hide away within him. For a time he talked of her view, and then
admired her room and its arrangement, which he thought really were quite
unbecomingly flippant and undignified for a room. Then came the black
tea-things on their orange tray, and he searched in his mind for small
talk to sustain their interview.

But he had already betrayed his disposition to “go on with our talk”
 in his telephone enquiry, and Lady Sunderbund, perceiving his shyness,
began to make openings for him, at first just little hinting openings,
and then larger and larger ones, until at last one got him.

“I'm so glad,” she said, “to see you again. I'm so glad to go on with
our talk. I've thought about it and thought about it.”

She beamed at him happily.

“I've thought ova ev'y wo'd you said,” she went on, when she had
finished conveying her pretty bliss to him. “I've been so helped by
thinking the k'eeds are symbols. And all you said. And I've felt time
after time, you couldn't stay whe' you we'. That what you we' saying to
me, would have to be said 'ight out.”

That brought him in. He could not very well evade that opening without
incivility. After all he had asked to see her, and it was a foolish
thing to let little decorative accidentals put him off his friendly
purpose. A woman may have flower-pots painted gold with black checkers
and still be deeply understanding. He determined to tell her what was in
his mind. But he found something barred him from telling that he had
had an actual vision of God. It was as if that had been a private and
confidential meeting. It wasn't, he felt, for him either to boast a
privilege or tell others of things that God had not chosen to show them.

“Since I saw you,” he said, “I have thought a great deal--of the subject
of our conversation.”

“I have been t'ying to think,” she said in a confirmatory tone, as if
she had co-operated.

“My faith in God grows,” he said.

She glowed. Her lips fell apart. She flamed attention.

“But it grows less like the faith of the church, less and less. I was
born and trained in Anglicanism, and it is with a sort of astonishment I
find myself passing now out of every sort of Catholicism--seeing it from
the outside....”

“Just as one might see Buddhism,” she supplied.

“And yet feeling nearer, infinitely nearer to God,” he said.

“Yes,” she panted; “yes.”

“I thought if one went out, one went out just to doubt and darkness.”

“And you don't?”

“No.”

“You have gone at one step to a new 'iligion!”

He stared for a moment at the phrase.

“To religion,” he said.

“It is so wondyful,” she said, with her hands straight down upon the
couch upon which she was sitting, and leaning forward at him, so as to
seem almost as much out of drawing as a modern picture.

“It seems,” he reflected; “--as if it were a natural thing.”

She came back to earth very slowly. She turned to the tea-things with
hushed and solemn movements as though she administered a ceremony of
peculiar significance. The bishop too rose slowly out of the profundity
of his confession. “No sugar please,” he said, arresting the lump in mid
air.

It was only when they were embarked upon cups of tea and had a little
refreshed themselves, that she carried the talk further.

“Does it mean that you must leave the church?” she asked.

“It seemed so at first,” he said. “But now I do not know. I do not know
what I ought to do.”

She awaited his next thought.

“It is as if one had lived in a room all one's life and thought it the
world--and then suddenly walked out through a door and discovered the
sea and the mountains and stars. So it was with me and the Anglican
Church. It seems so extraordinary now--and it would have seemed the
most natural thing a year ago--to think that I ever believed that the
Anglican Compromise was the final truth of religion, that nothing more
until the end of the world could ever be known that Cosmo Gordon Lang
did not know, that there could be no conception of God and his quality
that Randall Davidson did not possess.”

He paused.

“I did,” he said.

“I did,” she responded with round blue eyes of wonder.

“At the utmost the Church of England is a tabernacle on a road.”

“A 'oad that goes whe'?” she rhetorized.

“Exactly,” said the bishop, and put down his cup.

“You see, my dear Lady Sunderbund,” he resumed, “I am exactly in the
same position of that man at the door.”

She quoted aptly and softly: “The wo'ld was all befo' them whe' to
choose.”

He was struck by the aptness of the words.

“I feel I have to come right out into the bare truth. What exactly then
do I become? Do I lose my priestly function because I discover how great
God is? But what am I to do?”

He opened a new layer of his thoughts to her.

“There is a saying,” he remarked, “once a priest, always a priest. I
cannot imagine myself as other than what I am.”

“But o'thodox no maw,” she said.

“Orthodox--self-satisfied, no longer. A priest who seeks, an exploring
priest.”

“In a Chu'ch of P'og'ess and B'othe'hood,” she carried him on.

“At any rate, in a progressive and learning church.”

She flashed and glowed assent.

“I have been haunted,” he said, “by those words spoken at Athens. 'Whom
therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.' That comes
to me with an effect of--guidance is an old-fashioned word--shall I
say suggestion? To stand by the altar bearing strange names and ancient
symbols, speaking plainly to all mankind of the one true God--!”

(4)


He did not get much beyond this point at the time, though he remained
talking with Lady Sunderbund for nearly an hour longer. The rest was
merely a beating out of what had already been said. But insensibly she
renewed her original charm, and as he became accustomed to her he forgot
a certain artificiality in her manner and the extreme modernity of her
costume and furniture. She was a wonderful listener; nobody else could
have helped him to expression in quite the same way, and when he left
her he felt that now he was capable of stating his case in a coherent
and acceptable form to almost any intelligent hearer. He had a point of
view now that was no longer embarrassed by the immediate golden
presence of God; he was no longer dazzled nor ecstatic; his problem had
diminished to the scale of any other great human problem, to the scale
of political problems and problems of integrity and moral principle,
problems about which there is no such urgency as there is about a house
on fire, for example.

And now the desire for expression was running strong. He wanted to
state his situation; if he did not state he would have to act; and as he
walked back to the club dinner he turned over possible interlocutors
in his thoughts. Lord Rampound sat with him at dinner, and he came near
broaching the subject with him. But Lord Rampound that evening had
that morbid running of bluish legal anecdotes which is so common an
affliction with lawyers, and theology sinks and dies in that turbid
stream.

But as he lay in bed that night he thought of his old friend and helper
Bishop Likeman, and it was borne in upon him that he should consult him.
And this he did next day.

Since the days when the bishop had been only plain Mr. Scrope, the
youngest and most helpful of Likeman's historical band of curates, their
friendship had continued. Likeman had been a second father to him; in
particular his tact and helpfulness had shone during those days of doubt
and anxiety when dear old Queen Victoria, God's representative on earth,
had obstinately refused, at the eleventh hour, to make him a bishop. She
had those pigheaded fits, and she was touchy about the bishops. She had
liked Scrope on account of the excellence of his German pronunciation,
but she had been irritated by newspaper paragraphs--nobody could ever
find out who wrote them and nobody could ever find out who showed them
to the old lady--anticipating his elevation. She had gone very red
in the face and stiffened in the Guelphic manner whenever Scrope was
mentioned, and so a rich harvest of spiritual life had remained untilled
for some months. Likeman had brought her round.

It seemed arguable that Scrope owed some explanation to Likeman before
he came to any open breach with the Establishment.

He found Likeman perceptibly older and more shrivelled on account of the
war, but still as sweet and lucid and subtle as ever. His voice sounded
more than ever like a kind old woman's.

He sat buried in his cushions--for “nowadays I must save every scrap
of vitality”--and for a time contented himself with drawing out his
visitor's story.

Of course, one does not talk to Likeman of visions or intuitions. “I am
disturbed, I find myself getting out of touch;” that was the bishop's
tone.

Occasionally Likeman nodded slowly, as a physician might do at the
recital of familiar symptoms. “Yes,” he said, “I have been through most
of this.... A little different in the inessentials.... How clear you
are!”

“You leave our stupid old Trinities--as I left them long ago,” said old
Likeman, with his lean hand feeling and clawing at the arm of his chair.

“But--!”

The old man raised his hand and dropped it. “You go away from it
all--straight as a line. I did. You take the wings of the morning and
fly to the uttermost parts of the earth. And there you find--”

He held up a lean finger, and inclined it to tick off each point.

“Fate--which is God the Father, the Power of the Heart, which is God
the Son, and that Light which comes in upon us from the inaccessible
Godhead, which is God the Holy Spirit.”

“But I know of no God the Holy Spirit, and Fate is not God at all. I
saw in my vision one sole God, uncrucified, militant--conquering and to
conquer.”

Old Likeman stared. “You saw!”

The Bishop of Princhester had not meant to go so far. But he stuck to
his words. “As if I saw with my eyes. A God of light and courage.”

“You have had visions, Scrope?”

“I seemed to see.”

“No, you have just been dreaming dreams.”

“But why should one not see?”

“See! The things of the spirit. These symbols as realities! These
metaphors as men walking!”

“You talk like an agnostic.”

“We are all agnostics. Our creeds are expressions of ourselves and our
attitude and relationship to the unknown. The triune God is just the
form of our need and disposition. I have always assumed that you took
that for granted. Who has ever really seen or heard or felt God? God
is neither of the senses nor of the mind; he is of the soul. You are
realistic, you are materialistic....”

His voice expostulated.

The Bishop of Princhester reflected. The vision of God was far off
among his memories now, and difficult to recall. But he said at last: “I
believe there is a God and that he is as real a person as you or I. And
he is not the theological God we set out before the world.”

“Personification,” said Likeman. “In the eighteenth century they used to
draw beautiful female figures as Science and Mathematics. Young men have
loved Science--and Freedom--as Pygmalion loved Galatea. Have it so
if you will. Have a visible person for your Deity. But let me keep up
my--spirituality.”

“Your spirituality seems as thin as a mist. Do you really
believe--anything?”

“Everything!” said Likeman emphatically, sitting up with a transitory
vigour. “Everything we two have ever professed together. I believe that
the creeds of my church do express all that can possibly be expressed in
the relationship of--That”--he made a comprehensive gesture with a twist
of his hand upon its wrist--“to the human soul. I believe that they
express it as well as the human mind can express it. Where they seem
to be contradictory or absurd, it is merely that the mystery is
paradoxical. I believe that the story of the Fall and of the Redemption
is a complete symbol, that to add to it or to subtract from it or to
alter it is to diminish its truth; if it seems incredible at this point
or that, then simply I admit my own mental defect. And I believe in our
Church, Scrope, as the embodied truth of religion, the divine instrument
in human affairs. I believe in the security of its tradition, in
the complete and entire soundness of its teaching, in its essential
authority and divinity.”

He paused, and put his head a little on one side and smiled sweetly.
“And now can you say I do not believe?”

“But the historical Christ, the man Jesus?”

“A life may be a metaphor. Why not? Yes, I believe it all. All.”

The Bishop of Princhester was staggered by this complete acceptance. “I
see you believe all you profess,” he said, and remained for a moment or
so rallying his forces.

“Your vision--if it was a vision--I put it to you, was just some single
aspect of divinity,” said Likeman. “We make a mistake in supposing that
Heresy has no truth in it. Most heresies are only a disproportionate
apprehension of some essential truth. Most heretics are men who have
suddenly caught a glimpse through the veil of some particular verity....
They are dazzled by that aspect. All the rest has vanished.... They are
obsessed. You are obsessed clearly by this discovery of the militancy of
God. God the Son--as Hero. And you want to go out to the simple worship
of that one aspect. You want to go out to a Dissenter's tent in the
wilderness, instead of staying in the Great Temple of the Ages.”

Was that true?

For some moments it sounded true.

The Bishop of Princhester sat frowning and looking at that. Very far
away was the vision now of that golden Captain who bade him come. Then
at a thought the bishop smiled.

“The Great Temple of the Ages,” he repeated. “But do you remember the
trouble we had when the little old Queen was so pigheaded?”

“Oh! I remember, I remember,” said Likeman, smiling with unshaken
confidence. “Why not?”

“For sixty years all we bishops in what you call the Great Temple of
the Ages, were appointed and bullied and kept in our places by that
pink irascible bit of dignity. I remember how at the time I didn't dare
betray my boiling indignation even to you--I scarcely dared admit it to
myself....”

He paused.

“It doesn't matter at all,” and old Likeman waved it aside.

“Not at all,” he confirmed, waving again.

“I spoke of the whole church of Christ on earth,” he went on.
“These things, these Victorias and Edwards and so on, are temporary
accidents--just as the severance of an Anglican from a Roman communion
and a Greek orthodox communion are temporary accidents. You will remark
that wise men in all ages have been able to surmount the difficulty of
these things. Why? Because they knew that in spite of all these splits
and irregularities and defacements--like the cracks and crannies and
lichens on a cathedral wall--the building held good, that it was shelter
and security. There is no other shelter and security. And so I come to
your problem. Suppose it is true that you have this incidental vision
of the militant aspect of God, and he isn't, as you see him now that
is,--he isn't like the Trinity, he isn't like the Creed, he doesn't seem
to be related to the Church, then comes the question, are you going out
for that? And whither do you go if you do go out? The Church remains. We
alter doctrines not by changing the words but by shifting the accent. We
can under-accentuate below the threshold of consciousness.”

“But can we?”

“We do. Where's Hell now? Eighty years ago it warmed the whole Church.
It was--as some atheist or other put it the other day--the central
heating of the soul. But never mind that point now. Consider the
essential question, the question of breaking with the church. Ask
yourself, whither would you go? To become an oddity! A Dissenter. A
Negative. Self emasculated. The spirit that denies. You would just go
out. You would just cease to serve Religion. That would be all. You
wouldn't do anything. The Church would go on; everything else would go
on. Only you would be lost in the outer wilderness.

“But then--”

Old Likeman leant forward and pointed a bony finger. “Stay in the Church
and modify it. Bring this new light of yours to the altar.”

There was a little pause.

“No man,” the bishop thought aloud, “putteth new wine into old bottles.”

Old Likeman began to speak and had a fit of coughing. “Some of these
texts--whuff, whuff--like a conjuror's hat--whuff--make 'em--fit
anything.”

A man-servant appeared and handed a silver box of lozenges into which
the old bishop dipped with a trembling hand.

“Tricks of that sort,” he said, “won't do, Scrope--among professionals.

“And besides,” he was inspired; “true religion is old wine--as old as
the soul.

“You are a bishop in the Church of Christ on Earth,” he summed it up.
“And you want to become a detached and wandering Ancient Mariner from
your shipwreck of faith with something to explain--that nobody wants to
hear. You are going out I suppose you have means?”

The old man awaited the answer to his abrupt enquiry with a handful of
lozenges.

“No,” said the Bishop of Princhester, “practically--I haven't.”

“My dear boy!” it was as if they were once more rector and curate.
“My dear brother! do you know what the value of an ex-bishop is in the
ordinary labour market?”

“I have never thought of that.”

“Evidently. You have a wife and children?”

“Five daughters.”

“And your wife married you--I remember, she married you soon after you
got that living in St. John's Wood. I suppose she took it for granted
that you were fixed in an ecclesiastical career. That was implicit in
the transaction.”

“I haven't looked very much at that side of the matter yet,” said the
Bishop of Princhester.

“It shouldn't be a decisive factor,” said Bishop Likeman, “not decisive.
But it will weigh. It should weigh....”

The old man opened out 

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