The Soul of a Bishop

“Well, old Dad!” she said as she drew near. “You’ve got back a colour.”

“I’ve got back everything. It’s time I returned to Princhester.”

“Not in this weather. Not for a day or so.” She flung herself at his feet. “Consider your overworked little daughter. Oh, how good this is!”

“No,” said the bishop in a grave tone that made her look up into his face. “I must go hack.”

He met her clear gaze. “What do you think of all this business, Eleanor?” he asked abruptly. “Do you think I had a sort of fit in the cathedral?”

He winced as he asked the question.

“Daddy,” she said, after a little pause; “the things you said and did that afternoon were the noblest you ever did in your life. I wish I had been there. It must have been splendid to be there. I’ve not told you before – I’ve been dying to… I’d promised not to say a word – not to remind you. I promised the doctor. But now you ask me, now you are well again, I can tell you. Kitty Kingdom has told me all about it, how it felt. It was like light and order coming into a hopeless dark muddle. What you said was like what we have all been trying to think – I mean all of us young people. Suddenly it was all clear.”

She stopped short. She was breathless with the excitement of her confession.

Her father too remained silent for a little while. He was reminded of his weakness; he was, he perceived, still a little hysterical. He felt that he might weep at her youthful enthusiasm if he did not restrain himself.

“I’m glad,” he said, and patted her shoulder. “I’m glad, Norah.”

She looked away from him out across the lank brown sands and water pools to the sea. “It was what we have all been feeling our way towards, the absolute simplification of religion, the absolute simplification of politics and social duty; just God, just God the King.”

“But should I have said that – in the cathedral?”

She felt no scruples. “You had to,” she said.

“But now think what it means,” he said. “I must leave the church.”

“As a man strips off his coat for a fight.”

“That doesn’t dismay you?”

She shook her head, and smiled confidently to sea and sky.

“I’m glad if you’re with me,” he said. “Sometimes – I think – I’m not a very self-reliant man.”

“You’ll have all the world with you,” she was convinced, “in a little time.”

“Perhaps rather a longer time than you think, Norah. In the meantime – ”

She turned to him once more.

“In the meantime there are a great many things to consider. Young people, they say, never think of the transport that is needed to win a battle. I have it in my mind that I should leave the church. But I can’t just walk out into the marketplace and begin preaching there. I see the family furniture being carried out of the palace and put into vans. It has to go somewhere…”

“I suppose you will go to London.”

“Possibly. In fact certainly. I have a plan. Or at least an opportunity… But that isn’t what I have most in mind. These things are not done without emotion and a considerable strain upon one’s personal relationships. I do not think this – I do not think your mother sees things as we do.”

“She will,” said young enthusiasm, “when she understands.”

“I wish she did. But I have been unlucky in the circumstances of my explanations to her. And of course you understand all this means risks – poverty perhaps – going without things – travel, opportunity, nice possessions – for all of us. A loss of position too. All this sort of thing,” he stuck out a gaitered calf and smiled, “will have to go. People, some of them, may be disasagreeable to us…”

“After all, Daddy,” she said, smiling, “it isn’t so bad as the cross and the lions and burning pitch. And you have the Truth.”

“You do believe – ?” He left his sentence unfinished.

She nodded, her face aglow. “We know you have the Truth.”

“Of course in my own mind now it is very clear. I had a kind of illumination…” He would have tried to tell her of his vision, and he was too shy. “It came to me suddenly that the whole world was in confusion because men followed after a thousand different immediate aims, when really it was quite easy, if only one could be simple it was quite easy, to show that nearly all men could only be fully satisfied and made happy in themselves by one single aim, which was also the aim that would make the whole world one great order, and that aim was to make God King of one’s heart and the whole world. I saw that all this world, except for a few base monstrous spirits, was suffering hideous things because of this war, and before the war it was full of folly, waste, social injustice and suspicion for the same reason, because it had not realized the kingship of God. And that is so simple; the essence of God is simplicity. The sin of this war lies with men like myself, men who set up to tell people about God, more than it lies with any other class – ”

“Kings?” she interjected. “Diplomatists? Finance?”

“Yes. Those men could only work mischief in the world because the priests and teachers let them. All things human lie at last at the door of the priest and teacher. Who differentiate, who qualify and complicate, who make mean unnecessary elaborations, and so divide mankind. If it were not for the weakness and wickedness of the priests, every one would know and understand God. Every one who was modest enough not to set up for particular knowledge. Men disputed whether God is Finite or Infinite, whether he has a triple or a single aspect. How should they know? All we need to know is the face he turns to us. They impose their horrible creeds and distinctions. None of those things matter. Call him Christ the God or call him simply God, Allah, Heaven; it does not matter. He comes to us, we know, like a Helper and Friend; that is all we want to know. You may speculate further if you like, but it is not religion. They dispute whether he can set aside nature. But that is superstition. He is either master of nature and he knows that it is good, or he is part of nature and must obey. That is an argument for hair-splitting metaphysicians. Either answer means the same for us. It does not matter which way we come to believe that he does not idly set the course of things aside. Obviously he does not set the course of things aside. What he does do for certain is to give us courage and save us from our selfishness and the bitter hell it makes for us. And every one knows too what sort of things we want, and for what end we want to escape from ourselves. We want to do right. And right, if you think clearly, is just truth within and service without, the service of God’s kingdom, which is mankind, the service of human needs and the increase of human power and experience. It is all perfectly plain, it is all quite easy for any one to understand, who isn’t misled and chattered at and threatened and poisoned by evil priests and teachers.”

“And you are going to preach that, Daddy?”

“If I can. When I am free – you know I have still to resign and give up – I shall make that my message.”

“And so God comes.”

“God comes as men perceive him in his simplicity… Let men but see God simply, and forthwith God and his kingdom possess the world.”

She looked out to sea in silence for awhile.

Then she turned to her father. “And you think that His Kingdom will come – perhaps in quite a little time – perhaps in our lifetimes? And that all these ridiculous or wicked little kings and emperors, and these political parties, and these policies and conspiracies, and this nationalist nonsense and all the patriotism and rowdyism, all the private profit-seeking and every baseness in life, all the things that it is so horrible and disgusting to be young among and powerless among, you think they will fade before him?”

The bishop pulled his faith together.

“They will fade before him – but whether it will take a lifetime or a hundred lifetimes or a thousand lifetimes, my Norah – ”

He smiled and left his sentence unfinished, and she smiled back at him to show she understood.

And then he confessed further, because he did not want to seem merely sentimentally hopeful.

“When I was in the cathedral, Norah – and just before that service, it seemed to me – it was very real… It seemed that perhaps the Kingdom of God is nearer than we suppose, that it needs but the faith and courage of a few, and it may be that we may even live to see the dawning of his kingdom, even – who knows? – the sunrise. I am so full of faith and hope that I fear to be hopeful with you. But whether it is near or far – ”

“We work for it,” said Eleanor.

Eleanor thought, eyes downcast for a little while, and then looked up.

“It is so wonderful to talk to you like this, Daddy. In the old days, I didn’t dream – Before I went to Newnham. I misjudged you. I thought Never mind what I thought. It was silly. But now I am so proud of you. And so happy to be back with you, Daddy, and find that your religion is after all just the same religion that I have been wanting.”

CHAPTER THE NINTH – THE THIRD VISION

(1)

ONE afternoon in October, four months and more after that previous conversation, the card of Mr. Edward Scrope was brought up to Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey. The name awakened no memories. The doctor descended to discover a man so obviously in unaccustomed plain clothes that he had a momentary disagreeable idea that he was facing a detective. Then he saw that this secular disguise draped the familiar form of his old friend, the former Bishop of Princhester. Scrope was pale and a little untidy; he had already acquired something of the peculiar, slightly faded quality one finds in a don who has gone to Hampstead and fallen amongst advanced thinkers and got mixed up with the Fabian Society. His anxious eyes and faintly propitiatory manner suggested an impending appeal.

Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey had the savoir-faire of a successful consultant; he prided himself on being all things to all men; but just for an instant he was at a loss what sort of thing he had to be here. Then he adopted the genial, kindly, but by no means lavishly generous tone advisable in the case of a man who has suffered considerable social deterioration without being very seriously to blame.

Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was a little round-faced man with defective eyesight and an unsuitable nose for the glasses he wore, and he flaunted – God knows why – enormous side-whiskers.

“Well,” he said, balancing the glasses skilfully by throwing back his head, “and how are you? And what can I do for you? There’s no external evidence of trouble. You’re looking lean and a little pale, but thoroughly fit.”

“Yes,” said the late bishop, “I’m fairly fit – ”

“Only – ?” said the doctor, smiling his teeth, with something of the manner of an old bathing woman who tells a child to jump.

“Well, I’m run down and – worried.”

“We’d better sit down,” said the great doctor professionally, and looked hard at him. Then he pulled at the arm of a chair.

The ex-bishop sat down, and the doctor placed himself between his patient and the light.

“This business of resigning my bishopric and so forth has involved very considerable strains,” Scrope began. “That I think is the essence of the trouble. One cuts so many associations… I did not realize how much feeling there would be… Difficulties too of readjusting one’s position.”

“Zactly. Zactly. Zactly,” said the doctor, snapping his face and making his glasses vibrate. “Run down. Want a tonic or a change?”

“Yes. In fact – I want a particular tonic.”

Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey made his eyes and mouth round and interrogative.

“While you were away last spring – ”

“Had to go,” said the doctor, “unavoidable. Gas gangrene. Certain enquiries. These young investigators all very well in their way. But we older reputations – Experience. Maturity of judgment. Can’t do without us. Yes?”

“Well, I came here last spring and saw, an assistant I suppose he was, or a supply, – do you call them supplies in your profession? – named, I think – Let me see – D – ?”

“Dale!”

The doctor as he uttered this word set his face to the unaccustomed exercise of expressing malignity. His round blue eyes sought to blaze, small cherubic muscles exerted themselves to pucker his brows. His colour became a violent pink. “Lunatic!” he said. “Dangerous Lunatic! He didn’t do anything – anything bad in your case, did he?”

He was evidently highly charged with grievance in this matter. “That man was sent to me from Cambridge with the highest testimonials. The very highest. I had to go at twenty-four hours’ notice. Enquiry – gas gangrene. There was nothing for it but to leave things in his hands.”

Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey disavowed responsibility with an open, stumpy-fingered hand.

“He did me no particular harm,” said Scrope.

“You are the first he spared,” said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey.

“Did he – ? Was he unskilful?”

“Unskilful is hardly the word.”

“Were his methods peculiar?”

The little doctor sprang to his feet and began to pace about the room. “Peculiar!” he said. “It was abominable that they should send him to me. Abominable!”

He turned, with all the round knobs that constituted his face, aglow. His side-whiskers waved apart like wings about to flap. He protruded his face towards his seated patient. “I am glad that he has been killed,” he said. “Glad! There!”

His glasses fell off – shocked beyond measure. He did not heed them. They swung about in front of him as if they sought to escape while he poured out his feelings.

“Fool!” he spluttered with demonstrative gestures. “Dangerous fool! His one idea – to upset everybody. Drugs, Sir! The most terrible drugs! I come back. Find ladies. High social position. Morphine-maniacs. Others. Reckless use of the most dangerous expedients… Cocaine not in it. Stimulants – violent stimulants. In the highest quarters. Terrible. Exalted persons. Royalty! Anxious to be given war work and become anonymous… Horrible! He’s been a terrible influence. One idea – to disturb soul and body. Minds unhinged. Personal relations deranged. Shattered the practice of years. The harm he has done! The harm!”

He looked as though he was trying to burst – as a final expression of wrath. He failed. His hands felt trembling to recover his pince-nez. Then from his tail pocket he produced a large silk handkerchief and wiped the glasses. Replaced them. Wriggled his head in his collar, running his fingers round his neck. Patted his tie.

“Excuse this outbreak!” he said. “But Dr. Dale has inflicted injuries!”

Scrope got up, walked slowly to the window, clasping his hands behind his back, and turned. His manner still retained much of his episcopal dignity. “I am sorry. But still you can no doubt tell from your books what it was he gave me. It was a tonic that had a very great effect on me. And I need it badly now.”

Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was quietly malignant. “He kept no diary at all,” he said. “No diary at all.”

“But

“If he did,” said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey, holding up a flat hand and wagging it from side to side, “I wouldn’t follow his treatment.” He intensified with the hand going faster. “I wouldn’t follow his treatment. Not under any circumstances.”

“Naturally,” said Scrope, “if the results are what you say. But in my case it wasn’t a treatment. I was sleepless, confused in my mind, wretched and demoralized; I came here, and he just produced the stuff – It clears the head, it clears the mind. One seems to get away from the cloud of things, to get through to essentials and fundamentals. It straightened me out… You must know such a stuff. Just now, confronted with all sorts of problems arising out of my resignation, I want that tonic effect again. I must have it. I have matters to decide – and I can’t decide. I find myself uncertain, changeable from hour to hour. I don’t ask you to take up anything of this man Dale’s. This is a new occasion. But I want that drug.”

At the beginning of this speech Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey’s hands had fallen to his hips. As Scrope went on the doctor’s pose had stiffened. His head had gone a little on one side; he had begun to play with his glasses. At the end he gave vent to one or two short coughs, and then pointed his words with his glasses held out.

“Tell me,” he said, “tell me.” (Cough.) “Had this drug that cleared your head – anything to do with your resignation?”

And he put on his glasses disconcertingly, and threw his head back to watch the reply.

“It did help to clear up the situation.”

“Exactly,” said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey in a tone that defined his own position with remorseless clearness. “Exactly.” And he held up a flat, arresting hand.

“My dear Sir,” he said. “How can you expect me to help you to a drug so disastrous? – even if I could tell you what it is.”

“But it was not disastrous to me,” said Scrope.

“Your extraordinary resignation – your still more extraordinary way of proclaiming it!”

“I don’t think those were disasters.”

“But my dear Sir!”

“You don’t want to discuss theology with me, I know. So let me tell you simply that from my point of view the illumination that came to me – this drug of Dr. Dale’s helping – has been the great release of my life. It crystallized my mind. It swept aside the confusing commonplace things about me. Just for a time I saw truth clearly… I want to do so again.”

“Why?”

“There is a crisis in my affairs – never mind what. But I cannot see my way clear.”

Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was meditating now with his eyes on his carpet and the corners of his mouth tucked in. He was swinging his glasses pendulum-wise. “Tell me,” he said, looking sideways at Scrope, “what were the effects of this drug? It may have been anything. How did it give you this – this vision of the truth – that led to your resignation?”

Scrope felt a sudden shyness. But he wanted Dale’s drug again so badly that he obliged himself to describe his previous experiences to the best of his ability.

“It was,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone, “a golden, transparent liquid. Very golden, like a warm-tinted Chablis. When water was added it became streaked and opalescent, with a kind of living quiver in it. I held it up to the light.”

“Yes? And when you took it?”

“I felt suddenly clearer. My mind – I had a kind of exaltation and assurance.”

“Your mind,” Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey assisted, “began to go twenty-nine to the dozen.”

“It felt stronger and clearer,” said Scrope, sticking to his quest.

“And did things look as usual?” asked the doctor, protruding his knobby little face like a clenched fist.

“No,” said Scrope and regarded him. How much was it possible to tell a man of this type?

“They differed?” said the doctor, relaxing.

“Yes… Well, to be plain… I had an immediate sense of God. I saw the world – as if it were a transparent curtain, and then God became – evident… Is it possible for that to determine the drug?”

“God became – evident,” the doctor said with some distaste, and shook his head slowly. Then in a sudden sharp cross-examining tone: “You mean you had a vision? Actually saw ‘um?”

“It was in the form of a vision.” Scrope was now mentally very uncomfortable indeed.

The doctor’s lips repeated these words noiselessly, with an effect of contempt. “He must have given you something – It’s a little like morphia. But golden – opalescent? And it was this vision made you astonish us all with your resignation?”

“That was part of a larger process,” said Scrope patiently. “I had been drifting into a complete repudiation of the Anglican positions long before that. All that this drug did was to make clear what was already in my mind. And give it value. Act as a developer.”

The doctor suddenly gave way to a botryoidal hilarity. “To think that one should be consulted about visions of God – in Mount Street!” he said. “And you know, you know you half want to believe that vision was real. You know you do.”

So far Scrope had been resisting his realization of failure. Now he gave way to an exasperation that made him reckless of Brighton-Pomfrey’s opinion. “I do think,” he said, “that that drug did in some way make God real to me. I think I saw God.”

Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey shook his head in a way that made Scrope want to hit him.

“I think I saw God,” he repeated more firmly. “I had a sudden realization of how great he was and how great life was, and how timid and mean and sordid were all our genteel, professional lives. I was seized upon, for a time I was altogether possessed by a passion to serve him fitly and recklessly, to make an end to compromises with comfort and self-love and secondary things. And I want to hold to that. I want to get back to that. I am given to lassitudes. I relax. I am by temperament an easy-going man. I want to buck myself up, I want to get on with my larger purposes, and I find myself tired, muddled, entangled… The drug was a good thing. For me it was a good thing. I want its help again.”

“I know no more than you do what it was.”

“Are there no other drugs that you do know, that have a kindred effect? If for example I tried morphia in some form?”

“You’d get visions. They wouldn’t be divine visions. If you took small quantities very discreetly you might get a temporary quickening. But the swift result of all repeated drug-taking is, I can assure you, moral decay – rapid moral decay. To touch drugs habitually is to become hopelessly unpunctual, untruthful, callously selfish and insincere. I am talking mere textbook, mere everyday common-places, to you when I tell you that.”

“I had an idea. I had a hope…”

“You’ve a stiff enough fight before you,” said the doctor, “without such a handicap as that.”

“You won’t help me?”

The doctor walked up and down his hearthrug, and then delivered himself with an extended hand and waggling fingers.

“I wouldn’t if I could. For your good I wouldn’t. And even if I would I couldn’t, for I don’t know the drug. One of his infernal brews, no doubt. Something – accidental. It’s lost – for good – for your good, anyhow…”

(2)

Scrope halted outside the stucco portals of the doctor’s house. He hesitated whether he should turn to the east or the west.

“That door closes,” he said. “There’s no getting back that way.”…

He stood for a time on the kerb. He turned at last towards Park Lane and Hyde Park. He walked along thoughtfully, inattentively steering a course for his new home in Pembury Road, Notting Hill.

(3)

At the outset of this new phase in Scrope’s life that had followed the crisis of the confirmation service, everything had seemed very clear before him. He believed firmly that he had been shown God, that he had himself stood in the presence of God, and that there had been a plain call to him to proclaim God to the world. He had realized God, and it was the task of every one who had realized God to help all mankind to the same realization. The proposal of Lady Sunderbund had fallen in with that idea. He had been steeling himself to a prospect of struggle and dire poverty, but her prompt loyalty had come as an immense relief to his anxiety for his wife and family. When he had talked to Eleanor upon the beach at Hunstanton it had seemed to him that his course was manifest, perhaps a little severe but by no means impossible. They had sat together in the sunshine, exalted by a sense of fine adventure and confident of success, they had looked out upon the future, upon the great near future in which the idea of God was to inspire and reconstruct the world.

It was only very slowly that this pristine clearness became clouded and confused. It had not been so easy as Eleanor had supposed to win over the sympathy of Lady Ella with his resignation. Indeed it had not been won over. She had become a stern and chilling companion, mute now upon the issue of his resignation, but manifestly resentful. He was secretly disappointed and disconcerted by her tone. And the same hesitation of the mind, instinctive rather than reasoned, that had prevented a frank explanation of his earlier doubts to her, now restrained him from telling her naturally and at once of the part that Lady Sunderbund was to play in his future ministry. In his own mind he felt assured about that part, but in order to excuse his delay in being frank with his wife, he told himself that he was not as yet definitely committed to Lady Sunderbund’s project. And in accordance with that idea he set up housekeeping in London upon a scale that implied a very complete cessation of income. “As yet,” he told Lady Ella, “we do not know where we stand. For a time we must not so much house ourselves as camp. We must take some quite small and modest house in some less expensive district. If possible I would like to take it for a year, until we know better how things are with us.”

He reviewed a choice of London districts.

Lady Ella said her bitterest thing. “Does it matter where we hide our heads?”

That wrung him to: “We are not hiding our heads.”

She repented at once. “I am sorry, Ted,” she said. “It slipped from me.”…

He called it camping, but the house they had found in Pembury Road, Notting Hill, was more darkened and less airy than any camp. Neither he nor his wife had ever had any experience of middle-class house-hunting or middle-class housekeeping before, and they spent three of the most desolating days of their lives in looking for this cheap and modest shelter for their household possessions. Hitherto life had moved them from one established and comfortable home to another; their worst affliction had been the modern decorations of the Palace at Princhester, and it was altogether a revelation to them to visit house after house, ill-lit, ill-planned, with dingy paint and peeling wallpaper, kitchens for the most part underground, and either without bathrooms or with built-out bathrooms that were manifestly grudging afterthoughts, such as harbour the respectable middle classes of London. The house agents perceived intimations of helplessness in their manner, adopted a “rushing” method with them strange to people who had hitherto lived in a glowing halo of episcopal dignity. “Take it or leave it,” was the note of those gentlemen; “there are always people ready for houses.” The line that property in land and houses takes in England, the ex-bishop realized, is always to hold up and look scornful. The position of the land-owning, house-owning class in a crowded country like England is ultra-regal. It is under no obligation to be of use, and people are obliged to get down to the land somewhere. They cannot conduct business and rear families in the air. England’s necessity is the landlord’s opportunity…

Scrope began to generalize about this, and develop a new and sincerer streak of socialism in his ideas. “The church has been very remiss,” he said, as he and Lady Ella stared at the basement “breakfast room” of their twenty-seventh dismal possibility. “It should have insisted far more than it has done upon the landlord’s responsibility. No one should tolerate the offer of such a house as this – at such a rent – to decent people. It is unrighteous.”

At the house agent’s he asked in a cold, intelligent ruling-class voice, the name of the offending landlord.

“It’s all the property of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners that side of the railway,” said the agent, picking his teeth with a pin. “Lazy lot. Dreadfully hard to get ‘em to do anything. Own some of the worst properties in London.”

Lady Ella saw things differently again. “If you had stayed in the church,” she said afterwards, “you might have helped to alter such things as that.”

At the time he had no answer.

“But,” he said presently as they went back in the tube to their modest Bloomsbury hotel, “if I had stayed in the church I should never have realized things like that.”

(4)

But it does no justice to Lady Ella to record these two unavoidable expressions of regret without telling also of the rallying courage with which she presently took over the task of resettling herself and her stricken family. Her husband’s change of opinion had fallen upon her out of a clear sky, without any premonition, in one tremendous day. In one day there had come clamouring upon her, with an effect of revelation after revelation, the ideas of drugs, of heresy and blasphemy, of an alien feminine influence, of the entire moral and material breakdown of the man who had been the centre of her life. Never was the whole world of a woman so swiftly and comprehensively smashed. All the previous troubles of her life seemed infinitesimal in comparison with any single item in this dismaying debacle. She tried to consolidate it in the idea that he was ill, “disordered.” She assured herself that he would return from Hunstanton restored to health and orthodoxy, with all his threatenings of a resignation recalled; the man she had loved and trusted to succeed in the world and to do right always according to her ideas. It was only with extreme reluctance that she faced the fact that with the fumes of the drug dispelled and all signs of nervous exhaustion gone, he still pressed quietly but resolutely toward a severance from the church. She tried to argue with him and she found she could not argue. The church was a crystal sphere in which her life was wholly contained, her mind could not go outside it even to consider a dissentient proposition.

While he was at Hunstanton, every day she had prayed for an hour, some days she had prayed for several hours, in the cathedral, kneeling upon a harsh hassock that hurt her knees. Even in her prayers she could not argue nor vary. She prayed over and over again many hundreds of times: “Bring him back, dear Lord. Bring him back again.”

In the past he had always been a very kind and friendly mate to her, but sometimes he had been irritable about small things, especially during his seasons of insomnia; now he came back changed, a much graver man, rather older in his manner, carefully attentive to her, kinder and more watchful, at times astonishingly apologetic, but rigidly set upon his purpose of leaving the church. “I know you do not think with me in this,” he said. “I have to pray you to be patient with me. I have struggled with my conscience… For a time it means hardship, I know. Poverty. But if you will trust me I think I shall be able to pull through. There are ways of doing my work. Perhaps we shall not have to undergo this cramping in this house for very long…”