Soul of a Bishop

H >> H. G. Wells >> Soul of a Bishop


He sat down contentedly in the low armchair beside her.

It wasn't a setting that one would rashly destroy....

And that evening at dinner this sense of his home as a complex of finely
adjusted things not to be rashly disturbed was still more in the mind of
the bishop. At dinner he had all his domesticities about him. It was the
family time, from eight until ten, at which latter hour he would usually
go back from the drawing-room to his study. He surveyed the table.
Eleanor was at home for a few days, looking a little thin and bright
but very keen and happy. She had taken a first in the first part of
the Moral Science Tripos, and she was working hard now for part two.
Clementina was to go back to Newnham with her next September. She
aspired to history. Miriam's bent was musical. She and Phoebe and Daphne
and Clementina were under the care of skilful Mademoiselle Lafarge,
most tactful of Protestant French-women, Protestant and yet not too
Protestant, one of those rare French Protestants in whom a touch of
Bergson and the Pasteur Monod

"scarce suspected, animates the whole."

And also they had lessons, so high are our modern standards of
education, from Mr. Blent, a brilliant young mathematician in orders,
who sat now next to Lady Ella. Mr. Whippham, the chaplain, was at the
bishop's right hand, ready for any chance of making arrangements to
clear off the small arrears of duty the little holiday in London had
accumulated. The bishop surveyed all these bright young people between
himself and the calm beauty of his wife. He spoke first to one and then
another upon the things that interested them. It rejoiced his heart to
be able to give them education and opportunity, it pleased him to see
them in clothes that he knew were none the less expensive because of
their complete simplicity. Miriam and Mr. Blent wrangled pleasantly
about Debussy, and old Dunk waited as though in orders of some rare and
special sort that qualified him for this service.

All these people, the bishop reflected, counted upon him that this would
go on....

Eleanor was answering some question of her mother's. They were so oddly
alike and so curiously different, and both in their several ways so
fine. Eleanor was dark like his own mother. Perhaps she did a little
lack Lady Ella's fine reserves; she could express more, she could feel
more acutely, she might easily be very unhappy or very happy....

All these people counted on him. It was indeed acutely true, as Likeman
had said, that any sudden breach with his position would be a breach of
faith--so far as they were concerned.

And just then his eye fell upon the epergne, a very old and beautiful
piece of silver, that graced the dinner-table. It had been given him,
together with an episcopal ring, by his curates and choristers at the
Church of the Holy Innocents, when he became bishop of Pinner. When they
gave it him, had any one of them dreamt that some day he might be moved
to strike an ungracious blow at the mother church that had reared them
all?

It was his custom to join the family in the drawing-room after dinner.
To-night he was a little delayed by Whippham, with some trivialities
about next month's confirmations in Pringle and Princhester. When he
came in he found Miriam playing, and playing very beautifully one of
those later sonatas of Beethoven, he could never remember whether it
was Of. 109 or Of. 111, but he knew that he liked it very much; it
was solemn and sombre with phases of indescribable sweetness--while
Clementina, Daphne and Mademoiselle Lafarge went on with their war
knitting and Phoebe and Mr. Blent bent their brows over chess. Eleanor
was reading the evening paper. Lady Ella sat on a high chair by the
coffee things, and he stood in the doorway surveying the peaceful scene
for a moment or so, before he went across the room and sat down on the
couch close to her.

"You look tired," she whispered softly.

"Worries."

"That Chasters case?"

"Things developing out of that. I must tell you later." It would be, he
felt, a good way of breaking the matter to her.

"Is the Chasters case coming on again, Daddy?" asked Eleanor.

He nodded.

"It's a pity," she said.

"What?

"That he can't be left alone."

"It's Sir Reginald Phipps. The Church would be much more tolerant if
it wasn't for the House of Laymen. But they--they feel they must do
something."

He seized the opportunity of the music ceasing to get away from the
subject. "Miriam dear," he asked, raising his voice; "is that 109 or
111? I can never tell."

"That is always 111, Daddy," said Miriam. "It's the other one is 109."
And then evidently feeling that she had been pert: "Would you like me to
play you 109, Daddy?"

"I should love it, my dear." And he leant back and prepared to listen in
such a thorough way that Eleanor would have no chance of discussing the
Chasters' heresies. But this was interrupted by the consummation of the
coffee, and Mr. Blent, breaking a long silence with "Mate in three, if
I'm not mistaken," leapt to his feet to be of service. Eleanor, with the
rough seriousness of youth, would not leave the Chasters case alone.

"But need you take action against Mr. Chasters?" she asked at once.

"It's a very complicated subject, my dear," he said.

"His arguments?"

"The practical considerations."

"But what are practical considerations in such a case?"

"That's a post-graduate subject, Norah," her father said with a smile
and a sigh.

"But," began Eleanor, gathering fresh forces.

"Daddy is tired," Lady Ella intervened, patting him on the head.

"Oh, terribly!--of that," he said, and so escaped Eleanor for the
evening.

But he knew that before very long he would have to tell his wife of
the changes that hung over their lives; it would be shabby to let the
avalanche fall without giving the longest possible warning; and before
they parted that night he took her hands in his and said: "There is much
I have to tell you, dear. Things change, the whole world changes. The
church must not live in a dream....

"No," she whispered. "I hope you will sleep to-night," and held up her
grave sweet face to be kissed.

(6)


But he did not sleep perfectly that night.

He did not sleep indeed very badly, but he lay for some time thinking,
thinking not onward but as if he pressed his mind against very strong
barriers that had closed again. His vision of God which had filled the
heavens, had become now gem-like, a minute, hard, clear-cut conviction
in his mind that he had to disentangle himself from the enormous
complications of symbolism and statement and organization and
misunderstanding in the church and achieve again a simple and living
worship of a simple and living God. Likeman had puzzled and silenced
him, only upon reflection to convince him that amidst such intricacies
of explanation the spirit cannot live. Creeds may be symbolical, but
symbols must not prevaricate. A church that can symbolize everything and
anything means nothing.

It followed from this that he ought to leave the church. But there came
the other side of this perplexing situation. His feelings as he lay in
his bed were exactly like those one has in a dream when one wishes to
run or leap or shout and one can achieve no movement, no sound. He could
not conceive how he could possibly leave the church.

His wife became as it were the representative of all that held him
helpless. She and he had never kept secret from one another any plan of
action, any motive, that affected the other. It was clear to him that
any movement towards the disavowal of doctrinal Christianity and the
renunciation of his see must be first discussed with her. He must tell
her before he told the world.

And he could not imagine his telling her except as an incredibly
shattering act.

So he left things from day to day, and went about his episcopal
routines. He preached and delivered addresses in such phrases as he knew
people expected, and wondered profoundly why it was that it should be
impossible for him to discuss theological points with Lady Ella. And one
afternoon he went for a walk with Eleanor along the banks of the Prin,
and found himself, in response to certain openings of hers, talking to
her in almost exactly the same terms as Likeman had used to him.

Then suddenly the problem of this theological eclaircissement was
complicated in an unexpected fashion.

He had just been taking his Every Second Thursday Talk with Diocesan
Men Helpers. He had been trying to be plain and simple upon the needless
narrowness of enthusiastic laymen. He was still in the Bishop Andrews
cap and purple cassock he affected on these occasions; the Men Helpers
loved purple; and he was disentangling himself from two or three
resolute bores--for our loyal laymen can be at times quite superlative
bores--when Miriam came to him.

"Mummy says, 'Come to the drawing-room if you can.' There is a Lady
Sunderbund who seems particularly to want to see you."

He hesitated for a moment, and then decided that this was a conversation
he ought to control.

He found Lady Sunderbund looking very tall and radiantly beautiful in
a sheathlike dress of bright crimson trimmed with snow-white fur and a
white fur toque. She held out a long white-gloved hand to him and
cried in a tone of comradeship and profound understanding: "I've come,
Bishop!"

"You've come to see me?" he said without any sincerity in his polite
pleasure.

"I've come to P'inchesta to stay!" she cried with a bright triumphant
rising note.

She evidently considered Lady Ella a mere conversational stop-gap, to
be dropped now that the real business could be commenced. She turned
her pretty profile to that lady, and obliged the bishop with a compact
summary of all that had preceded his arrival. "I have been telling
Lady Ella," she said, "I've taken a house, fu'nitua and all! Hea.
In P'inchesta! I've made up my mind to sit unda you--as they say
in Clapham. I've come 'ight down he' fo' good. I've taken a little
house--oh! a sweet little house that will be all over 'oses next month.
I'm living f'om 'oom to 'oom and having the othas done up. It's in that
little quiet st'eet behind you' ga'den wall. And he' I am!"

"Is it the old doctor's house?" asked Lady Ella.

"Was it an old docta?" cried Lady Sunderbund. "How delightful! And now I
shall be a patient!"

She concentrated upon the bishop.

"Oh, I've been thinking all the time of all the things you told me. Ova
and ova. It's all so wondyful and so--so like a G'ate Daw opening. New
light. As if it was all just beginning."

She clasped her hands.

The bishop felt that there were a great number of points to this
situation, and that it was extremely difficult to grasp them all
at once. But one that seemed of supreme importance to his whirling
intelligence was that Lady Ella should not know that he had gone to
relieve his soul by talking to Lady Sunderbund in London. It had never
occurred to him at the time that there was any shadow of disloyalty to
Lady Ella in his going to Lady Sunderbund, but now he realized that this
was a thing that would annoy Lady Ella extremely. The conversation had
in the first place to be kept away from that. And in the second place it
had to be kept away from the abrupt exploitation of the new theological
developments.

He felt that something of the general tension would be relieved if they
could all three be got to sit down.

"I've been talking for just upon two hours," he said to Lady Ella. "It's
good to see the water boiling for tea."

He put a chair for Lady Sunderbund to the right of Lady Ella, got her
into it by infusing an ecclesiastical insistence into his manner, and
then went and sat upon the music-stool on his wife's left, so as to
establish a screen of tea-things and cakes and so forth against her more
intimate enthusiasm. Meanwhile he began to see his way clearer and to
develop his line.

"Well, Lady Sunderbund," he said, "I can assure you that I think you
will be no small addition to the church life of Princhester. But I warn
you this is a hard-working and exacting diocese. We shall take your
money, all we can get of it, we shall take your time, we shall work you
hard."

"Wo'k me hard!" cried Lady Sunderbund with passion.

"We will, we will," said the bishop in a tone that ignored her
passionate note.

"I am sure Lady Sunderbund will be a great help to us," said Lady Ella.
"We want brightening. There's a dinginess...."

Lady Sunderbund beamed an acknowledgment. "I shall exact a 'eturn," she
said. "I don't mind wo'king, but I shall wo'k like the poo' students in
the Middle Ages did, to get my teaching. I've got my own soul to save as
well as help saving othas. Since oua last talk--"

She found the bishop handing her bread and butter. For a time the bishop
fought a delaying action with the tea-things, while he sought eagerly
and vainly in his mind for some good practical topic in which he could
entangle and suppress Lady Sunderbund's enthusiasms. From this she broke
away by turning suddenly to Lady Ella.

"Youa husband's views," she said, "we'e a 'eal 'evelation to me. It was
like not being blind--all at once."

Lady Ella was always pleased to hear her husband praised. Her colour
brightened a little. "They seem very ordinary views," she said modestly.

"You share them?" cried Lady Sunderbund.

"But of course," said Lady Ella.

"Wondyful!" cried Lady Sunderbund.

"Tell me, Lady Sunderbund," said the bishop, "are you going to alter the
outer appearance of the old doctor's house?" And found that at last he
had discovered the saving topic.

"Ha'dly at all," she said. "I shall just have it pointed white and do
the doa--I'm not su' how I shall do the doa. Whetha I shall do the doa
gold or a vehy, vehy 'itch blue."

For a time she and Lady Ella, to whom these ideas were novel, discussed
the animation of grey and sombre towns by house painting. In such matter
Lady Sunderbund had a Russian mind. "I can't bea' g'ey," she said. "Not
in my su'oundings, not in my k'eed, nowhe'e." She turned to the bishop.
"If I had my way I would paint you' cathed'al inside and out."

"They used to be painted," said the bishop. "I don't know if you have
seen Ely. There the old painting has been largely restored...."

From that to the end there was no real danger, and at last the bishop
found himself alone with his wife again.

"Remarkable person," he said tentatively. "I never met any one whose
faults were more visible. I met her at Wimbush House."

He glanced at his watch.

"What did she mean," asked Lady Ella abruptly, "by talking of your new
views? And about revelations?"

"She probably misunderstood something I said at the Garstein Fellows',"
he said. "She has rather a leaping mind."

He turned to the window, looked at his nails, and appeared to be
suddenly reminded of duties elsewhere....

It was chiefly manifest to him that the difficulties in explaining the
changes of his outlook to Lady Ella had now increased enormously.

(7)


A day or so after Lady Sunderbund's arrival in Princhester the bishop
had a letter from Likeman. The old man was manifestly in doubt about the
effect of their recent conversation.

"My dear Scrope," it began. "I find myself thinking continually about
our interview and the difficulties you laid bare so frankly to me.
We touched upon many things in that talk, and I find myself full of
afterthoughts, and not perfectly sure either quite of what I said or
of what I failed to say. I feel that in many ways I was not perhaps so
clear and convincing as the justice of my case should have made me, and
you are one of my own particular little company, you were one of the
best workers in that band of good workers, your life and your career
are very much my concern. I know you will forgive me if I still mingle
something of the paternal with my fraternal admonitions. I watched you
closely. I have still my old diaries of the St. Matthew's days, and I
have been looking at them to remind me of what you once were. It was my
custom to note my early impressions of all the men who worked with me,
because I have a firm belief in the soundness of first impressions and
the considerable risk one runs of having them obscured by the accidents
and habituations of constant intercourse. I found that quite early in
your days at St. Matthew's I wrote against your name 'enthusiastic, but
a saving delicacy.' After all our life-long friendship I would not write
anything truer. I would say of you to-day, 'This man might have been a
revivalist, if he were not a gentleman.' There is the enthusiast,
there is the revivalist, in you. It seems to me that the stresses and
questions of this great crisis in the world's history have brought it
nearer to the surface than I had ever expected it to come.

"I quite understand and I sympathize with your impatience with
the church at the present time; we present a spectacle of pompous
insignificance hard to bear with. We are doing very little, and we are
giving ourselves preposterous airs. There seems to be an opinion abroad
that in some quasi-automatic way the country is going to collapse after
the war into the arms of the church and the High Tories; a possibility
I don't accept for a moment. Why should it? These forcible-feeble
reactionaries are much more likely to explode a revolution that
will disestablish us. And I quite understand your theological
difficulties--quite. The creeds, if their entire symbolism is for a
moment forgotten, if they are taken as opaque statements of fact, are
inconsistent, incredible. So incredible that no one believes them;
not even the most devout. The utmost they do is to avert their
minds--reverentially. Credo quia impossibile. That is offensive to a
Western mind. I can quite understand the disposition to cry out at such
things, 'This is not the Church of God!'--to run out from it--

"You have some dream, I suspect, of a dramatic dissidence.

"Now, my dear Brother and erstwhile pupil, I ask you not to do this
thing. Wait, I implore you. Give me--and some others, a little time. I
have your promise for three months, but even after that, I ask you
to wait. Let the reform come from within the church. The church is
something more than either its creeds, its clergy, or its laymen. Look
at your cathedral rising out of and dominating Princhester. It stands
not simply for Athanasius; it stands but incidentally for Athanasius; it
stands for all religion. Within that fabric--let me be as frank here
as in our private conversation--doctrine has altered again and again.
To-day two distinct religions worship there side by side; one that fades
and one that grows brighter. There is the old quasi-materialistic belief
of the barbarians, the belief in such things, for example, as that
Christ the physical Son of God descended into hell and stayed there,
seeing the sights I suppose like any tourist and being treated with
diplomatic civilities for three terrestrial days; and on the other
hand there is the truly spiritual belief that you and I share, which
is absolutely intolerant of such grotesque ideas. My argument to you
is that the new faith, the clearer vision, gains ground; that the
only thing that can prevent or delay the church from being altogether
possessed by what you call and I admit is, the true God, is that such
men as yourself, as the light breaks upon you, should be hasty and leave
the church. You see my point of view, do you not? It is not one that
has been assumed for our discussion; it is one I came to long years ago,
that I was already feeling my way to in my St. Matthew's Lenton sermons.

"A word for your private ear. I am working. I cannot tell you fully
because I am not working alone. But there are movements afoot in which
I hope very shortly to be able to ask you to share. That much at least I
may say at this stage. Obscure but very powerful influences are at
work for the liberalizing of the church, for release from many
narrow limitations, for the establishment of a modus vivendi with the
nonconformist and dissentient bodies in Britain and America, and with
the churches of the East. But of that no more now.

"And in conclusion, my dear Scrope, let me insist again upon the eternal
persistence of the essential Religious Fact:"

(Greek Letters Here)

(Rev. i. 18. "Fear not. I am the First and Last thing, the Living
thing.")

And these promises which, even if we are not to take them as promises in
the exact sense in which, let us say, the payment of five sovereigns
is promised by a five-pound note, are yet assertions of practically
inevitable veracity:

(Greek Letters Here)

(Phil. i. 6. "He who began... will perfect." Eph. v. 14. "He will
illuminate.")


The old man had written his Greek tags in shakily resolute capitals. It
was his custom always to quote the Greek Testament in his letters,
never the English version. It is a practice not uncommon with the more
scholarly of our bishops. It is as if some eminent scientific man were
to insist upon writing H2O instead of "water," and "sodium chloride"
instead of "table salt" in his private correspondence. Or upon hanging
up a stuffed crocodile in his hall to give the place tone. The Bishop
of Princhester construed these brief dicta without serious exertion, he
found them very congenial texts, but there were insuperable difficulties
in the problem why Likeman should suppose they had the slightest weight
upon his side of their discussion. The more he thought the less they
seemed to be on Likeman's side, until at last they began to take on a
complexion entirely opposed to the old man's insidious arguments, until
indeed they began to bear the extraordinary interpretation of a special
message, unwittingly delivered.

(8)


The bishop was still thinking over this communication when he was
interrupted by Lady Ella. She came with a letter in her hand to ask him
whether she might send five-and-twenty pounds to a poor cousin of his,
a teacher in a girls' school, who had been incapacitated from work by
a dislocation of the cartilage of her knee. If she could go to that
unorthodox but successful practitioner, Mr. Barker, the bone-setter, she
was convinced she could be restored to efficiency. But she had no ready
money. The bishop agreed without hesitation. His only doubt was the
certainty of the cure, but upon that point Lady Ella was convinced;
there had been a great experience in the Walshingham family.

"It is pleasant to be able to do things like this," said Lady Ella,
standing over him when this matter was settled.

"Yes," the bishop agreed; "it is pleasant to be in a position to do
things like this...."




CHAPTER THE SEVENTH - THE SECOND VISION

(1)


A MONTH later found the bishop's original state of perplexity and
insomnia returned and intensified. He had done none of all the things
that had seemed so manifestly needing to be done after his vision in the
Athenaeum. All the relief and benefit of his experience in London had
vanished out of his life. He was afraid of Dr. Dale's drug; he knew
certainly that it would precipitate matters; and all his instincts
in the state of moral enfeeblement to which he had relapsed, were to
temporize.

Although he had said nothing further about his changed beliefs to Lady
Ella, yet he perceived clearly that a shadow had fallen between them.
She had a wife's extreme sensitiveness to fine shades of expression and
bearing, and manifestly she knew that something was different. Meanwhile
Lady Sunderbund had become a frequent worshipper in the cathedral, she
was a figure as conspicuous in sombre Princhester as a bird of paradise
would have been; common people stood outside her very very rich blue
door on the chance of seeing her; she never missed an opportunity of
hearing the bishop preach or speak, she wrote him several long
and thoughtful letters with which he did not bother Lady Ella, she
communicated persistently, and manifestly intended to become a very
active worker in diocesan affairs.

It was inevitable that she and the bishop should meet and talk
occasionally in the cathedral precincts, and it was inevitable that he
should contrast the flexibility of her rapid and very responsive mind
with a certain defensiveness, a stoniness, in the intellectual bearing
of Lady Ella.

If it had been Lady Sunderbund he had had to explain to, instead of Lady
Ella, he could have explained a dozen times a day.

And since his mind was rehearsing explanations it was not unnatural they
should overflow into this eagerly receptive channel, and that the less
he told Lady Ella the fuller became his spiritual confidences to Lady
Sunderbund.

She was clever in realizing that they were confidences and treating them
as such, more particularly when it chanced that she and Lady Ella and
the bishop found themselves in the same conversation.

She made great friends with Miriam, and initiated her by a whole
collection of pretty costume plates into the mysteries of the "Ussian
Ballet" and the works of Mousso'gski and "Imsky Ko'zakof."

The bishop liked a certain religiosity in the texture of Moussorgski's
music, but failed to see the "significance "--of many of the costumes.