(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.”