THE night after his conversation with Eleanor was the first night of the bishop's insomnia.It was the definite beginning of a new phase in his life.
Doctors explain to us that the immediate cause of insomnia is always some poisoned or depleted state of the body, and no doubt the fatigues and hasty meals of the day had left the bishop in a state of unprecedented chemical disorder, with his nerves irritated by strange compounds and unsoothed by familiar lubricants.But chemical disorders follow mental disturbances, and the core and essence of his trouble was an intellectual distress.For the first time in his life he was really in doubt, about himself, about his way of living, about all his persuasions.It was a general doubt.It was not a specific suspicion upon this point or that.It was a feeling of detachment and unreality at once extraordinarily vague and extraordinarily oppressive.It was as if he discovered himself flimsy and transparent in a world of minatory solidity and opacity.It was as if he found himself made not of flesh and blood but of tissue paper.
But this intellectual insecurity extended into his physical sensations.It affected his feeling in his skin, as if it were not absolutely his own skin.
And as he lay there, a weak phantom mentally and bodily, an endless succession and recurrence of anxieties for which he could find no reassurance besieged him.
Chief of this was his distress for Eleanor.
She was the central figure in this new sense of illusion in familiar and trusted things.It was not only that the world of his existence which had seemed to be the whole universe had become diaphanous and betrayed vast and uncontrollable realities beyond it, but his daughter had as it were suddenly opened a door in this glassy sphere of insecurity that had been his abiding refuge, a door upon the stormy rebel outer world, and she stood there, young, ignorant, confident, adventurous, ready to step out.
"Could it be possible that she did not believe?"He saw her very vividly as he had seen her in the dining-room, slender and upright, half child, half woman, so fragile and so fearless.And the door she opened thus carelessly gave upon a stormy background like one of the stormy backgrounds that were popular behind portrait Dianas in eighteenth century paintings.
Did she believe that all be had taught her, all the life he led was--what was her phrase?--a kind of magic world, not really real?
He groaned and turned over and repeated the words:
"A kind of magic world--not really real!"The wind blew through the door she opened, and scattered everything in the room.And still she held the door open.
He was astonished at himself.He started up in swift indignation.Had he not taught the child? Had he not brought her up in an atmosphere of faith? What right had she to turn upon him in this matter? It was--indeed it was--a sort of insolence, a lack of reverence....
It was strange he had not perceived this at the time.
But indeed at the first mention of "questionings" he ought to have thundered.He saw that quite clearly now.He ought to have cried out and said, "On your knees, my Norah, and ask pardon of God!"Because after all faith is an emotional thing....
He began to think very rapidly and copiously of things he ought to have said to Eleanor.And now the eloquence of reverie was upon him.In a little time he was also addressing the tea-party at Morrice Deans'.Upon them too he ought to have thundered.And he knew now also all that he should have said to the recalcitrant employer.Thunder also.Thunder is surely the privilege of the higher clergy--under Jove.
But why hadn't he thundered?
He gesticulated in the darkness, thrust out a clutching hand.
There are situations that must be gripped--gripped firmly.
And without delay.In the middle ages there had been grip enough in a purple glove.
(2)
From these belated seizures of the day's lost opportunities the bishop passed to such a pessimistic estimate of the church as had never entered his mind before.
It was as if he had fallen suddenly out of a spiritual balloon into a world of bleak realism.He found himself asking unprecedented and devastating questions, questions that implied the most fundamental shiftings of opinion.Why was the church such a failure? Why had it no grip upon either masters or men amidst this vigorous life of modern industrialism, and why had it no grip upon the questioning young? It was a tolerated thing, he felt, just as sometimes he had felt that the Crown was a tolerated thing.He too was a tolerated thing; a curious survival....
This was not as things should be.He struggled to recover a proper attitude.But he remained enormously dissatisfied....
The church was no Levite to pass by on the other side away from the struggles and wrongs of the social conflict.It had no right when the children asked for the bread of life to offer them Gothic stone....
He began to make interminable weak plans for fulfilling his duty to his diocese and his daughter.
What could he do to revivify his clergy? He wished he had more personal magnetism, he wished he had a darker and a larger presence.He wished he had not been saddled with Whippham's rather futile son as his chaplain.He wished he had a dean instead of being his own dean.With an unsympathetic rector.He wished he had it in him to make some resounding appeal.He might of course preach a series of thumping addresses and sermons, rather on the lines of "Fors Clavigera," to masters and men, in the Cathedral.Only it was so difficult to get either masters or men into the Cathedral.
Well, if the people will not come to the bishop the bishop must go out to the people.Should he go outside the Cathedral--to the place where the trains met?
Interweaving with such thoughts the problem of Eleanor rose again into his consciousness.
Weren't there books she ought to read? Weren't there books she ought to be made to read? And books--and friends--that ought to be imperatively forbidden? Imperatively!
But how to define the forbidden?
