The Soul of a Bishop

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

And then the Irish Catholic came down on him…

(3)

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

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

(4)

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

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

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

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

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

The bishop nodded his head gravely.

“You unde’stand?” she pressed.

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

“I knew you would!” she cried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“If you – ” she said and paused.

“Could think aloud,” said the bishop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This fearful wa’,” Lady Sunderbund interjected.

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

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

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

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

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

She echoed his gesture.

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

With her hands she acted her sense of his difficulty.

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

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

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

She took that point very brightly.

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

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

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

“The dark young man?”

“The noisy young man.”

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

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

“‘idiculous.”

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

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

That was a revolutionary idea to him.

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

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

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

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

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

“Mr. Hidgeway Kelso?”

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

The dee’ bishop appeared in the sunlit doorway.

(5)

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

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

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

Indeed, he had never heard of Dr. Dale.

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

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

CHAPTER THE FIFTH – THE FIRST VISION

(1)

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

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

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

The bishop went on buttoning up his coat.

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

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

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

(2)

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

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

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

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

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

He did not seem to expect anything from the bishop.

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

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

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

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

With a sigh.

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

He paused.

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

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

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

The bishop nodded.

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

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

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

He paused.

“There was,” said the bishop.

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

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

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

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

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Dr. Dale…

(3)

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

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

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

He paused.

“You think – ?”

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

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

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

“Where?”

“To reality.

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

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

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

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

The bishop felt extremely like letting go.

“But how does this apply to my case?”

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

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

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

He paused.

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

(4)

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

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

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

Again the bishop had a twinge of misgiving.

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

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

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

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

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

“Take it.”

The bishop dismissed his last discretion and drank.

“Well?” said Dr. Dale.

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

(5)

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

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

His doubts glowed into assurance.

Suddenly he perceived that he was sure of God.

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

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

But the tonic was only beginning.

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