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Exegetical6
But he did not sleep perfectly that night.
He did not sleep indeed very badly, but he lay for some time thinking, thinking not onward but as if he pressed his mind against very strong barriers that had closed again. His vision of God which had filled the heavens, had become now gem-like, a minute, hard, clear-cut conviction in his mind that he had to disentangle himself from the enormous complications of symbolism and statement and organization and misunderstanding in the church and achieve again a simple and living worship of a simple and living God. Likeman had puzzled and silenced him, only upon reflection to convince him that amidst such intricacies of explanation the spirit cannot live. Creeds may be symbolical, but symbols must not prevaricate. A church that can symbolize everything and anything means nothing.
It followed from this that he ought to leave the church. But there came the other side of this perplexing situation. His feelings as he lay in his bed were exactly like those one has in a dream when one wishes to run or leap or shout and one can achieve no movement, no sound. He could not conceive how he could possibly leave the church.
His wife became as it were the representative of all that held him helpless. She and he had never kept secret from one another any plan of action, any motive, that affected the other. It was clear to him that any movement towards the disavowal of doctrinal Christianity and the renunciation of his see must be first discussed with her. He must tell her before he told the world.
And he could not imagine his telling her except as an incredibly shattering act.
So he left things from day to day, and went about his episcopal routines. He preached and delivered addresses in such phrases as he knew people expected, and wondered profoundly why it was that it should be impossible for him to discuss theological points with Lady Ella. And one afternoon he went for a walk with Eleanor along the banks of the Prin, and found himself, in response to certain openings of hers, talking to her in almost exactly the same terms as Likeman had used to him.
Then suddenly the problem of this theological eclaircissement was complicated in an unexpected fashion.
He had just been taking his Every Second Thursday Talk with Diocesan Men Helpers. He had been trying to be plain and simple upon the needless narrowness of enthusiastic laymen. He was still in the Bishop Andrews cap and purple cassock he affected on these occasions; the Men Helpers loved purple; and he was disentangling himself from two or three resolute bores--for our loyal laymen can be at times quite superlative bores--when Miriam came to him.
"Mummy says, `Come to the drawing-room if you can.` There is a Lady Sunderbund who seems particularly to want to see you."
He hesitated for a moment, and then decided that this was a conversation he ought to control.
He found Lady Sunderbund looking very tall and radiantly beautiful in a sheathlike dress of bright crimson trimmed with snow-white fur and a white fur toque. She held out a long white-gloved hand to him and cried in a tone of comradeship and profound understanding: "I`ve come, Bishop!"
"You`ve come to see me?" he said without any sincerity in his polite pleasure.
"I`ve come to P`inchesta to stay!" she cried with a bright triumphant rising note.
She evidently considered Lady Ella a mere conversational stop-gap, to be dropped now that the real business could be commenced. She turned her pretty profile to that lady, and obliged the bishop with a compact summary of all that had preceded his arrival. "I have been telling Lady Ella," she said, "I`ve taken a house, fu`nitua and all! Hea. In P`inchesta! I`ve made up my mind to sit unda you--as they say in Clapham. I`ve come `ight down he` fo` good. I`ve taken a little house--oh! a sweet little house that will be all over `oses next month. I`m living f`om `oom to `oom and having the othas done up. It`s in that little quiet st`eet behind you` ga`den wall. And he` I am!"
"Is it the old doctor`s house?" asked Lady Ella.
"Was it an old docta?" cried Lady Sunderbund. "How delightful! And now I shall be a patient!"
She concentrated upon the bishop.
"Oh, I`ve been thinking all the time of all the things you told me. Ova and ova. It`s all so wondyful and so--so like a G`ate Daw opening. New light. As if it was all just beginning."
She clasped her hands.
The bishop felt that there were a great number of points to this situation, and that it was extremely difficult to grasp them all at once. But one that seemed of supreme importance to his whirling intelligence was that Lady Ella should not know that he had gone to relieve his soul by talking to Lady Sunderbund in London. It had never occurred to him at the time that there was any shadow of disloyalty to Lady Ella in his going to Lady Sunderbund, but now he realized that this was a thing that would annoy Lady Ella extremely. The conversation had in the first place to be kept away from that. And in the second place it had to be kept away from the abrupt exploitation of the new theological developments.
He felt that something of the general tension would be relieved if they could all three be got to sit down.
"I`ve been talking for just upon two hours," he said to Lady Ella. "It`s good to see the water boiling for tea."
He put a chair for Lady Sunderbund to the right of Lady Ella, got her into it by infusing an ecclesiastical insistence into his manner, and then went and sat upon the music-stool on his wife`s left, so as to establish a screen of tea-things and cakes and so forth against her more intimate enthusiasm. Meanwhile he began to see his way clearer and to develop his line.
"Well, Lady Sunderbund," he said, "I can assure you that I think you will be no small addition to the church life of Princhester. But I warn you this is a hard-working and exacting diocese. We shall take your money, all we can get of it, we shall take your time, we shall work you hard."
"Wo`k me hard!" cried Lady Sunderbund with passion.
"We will, we will," said the bishop in a tone that ignored her passionate note.
"I am sure Lady Sunderbund will be a great help to us," said Lady Ella. "We want brightening. There`s a dinginess...."
Lady Sunderbund beamed an acknowledgment. "I shall exact a `eturn," she said. "I don`t mind wo`king, but I shall wo`k like the poo` students in the Middle Ages did, to get my teaching. I`ve got my own soul to save as well as help saving othas. Since oua last talk--"
She found the bishop handing her bread and butter. For a time the bishop fought a delaying action with the tea-things, while he sought eagerly and vainly in his mind for some good practical topic in which he could entangle and suppress Lady Sunderbund`s enthusiasms. From this she broke away by turning suddenly to Lady Ella.
"Youa husband`s views," she said, "we`e a `eal `evelation to me. It was like not being blind--all at once."
Lady Ella was always pleased to hear her husband praised. Her colour brightened a little. "They seem very ordinary views," she said modestly.
"You share them?" cried Lady Sunderbund.
"But of course," said Lady Ella.
"Wondyful!" cried Lady Sunderbund.
"Tell me, Lady Sunderbund," said the bishop, "are you going to alter the outer appearance of the old doctor`s house?" And found that at last he had discovered the saving topic.
"Ha`dly at all," she said. "I shall just have it pointed white and do the doa--I`m not su` how I shall do the doa. Whetha I shall do the doa gold or a vehy, vehy `itch blue."
For a time she and Lady Ella, to whom these ideas were novel, discussed the animation of grey and sombre towns by house painting. In such matter Lady Sunderbund had a Russian mind. "I can`t bea` g`ey," she said. "Not in my su`oundings, not in my k`eed, nowhe`e." She turned to the bishop. "If I had my way I would paint you` cathed`al inside and out."
"They used to be painted," said the bishop. "I don`t know if you have seen Ely. There the old painting has been largely restored...."
From that to the end there was no real danger, and at last the bishop found himself alone with his wife again.
"Remarkable person," he said tentatively. "I never met any one whose faults were more visible. I met her at Wimbush House."
He glanced at his watch.
"What did she mean," asked Lady Ella abruptly, "by talking of your new views? And about revelations?"
"She probably misunderstood something I said at the Garstein Fellows`," he said. "She has rather a leaping mind."
He turned to the window, looked at his nails, and appeared to be suddenly reminded of duties elsewhere....
It was chiefly manifest to him that the difficulties in explaining the changes of his outlook to Lady Ella had now increased enormously.
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