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?”