Герберт Джордж Уэллс
The Soul of a Bishop
He was a social animal. He had an instinctive disposition to act according to the expectations of the people about him, whether they were reasonable or congenial expectations or whether they were not. That, he saw for the first time, had been the ruling motive of his life; it was the clue to him. Man is not a reasonable creature; he is a socially responsive creature trying to be reasonable in spite of that fact. From the days in the rectory nursery when Scrope had tried to be a good boy on the whole and just a little naughty sometimes until they stopped smiling, through all his life of school, university, curacy, vicarage and episcopacy up to this present moment, he perceived now that he had acted upon no authentic and independent impulse. His impulse had always been to fall in with people and satisfy them. And all the painful conflicts of those last few years had been due to a growing realization of jarring criticisms, of antagonized forces that required from him incompatible things. From which he had now taken refuge – or at any rate sought refuge – in God. It was paradoxical, but manifestly in God he not only sank his individuality but discovered it.
It was wonderful how much he had thought and still thought of the feelings and desires of Lady Sunderbund, and how little he thought of God. Her he had been assiduously propitiating, managing, accepting, for three months now. Why? Partly because she demanded it, and there was a quality in her demand that had touched some hidden spring – of vanity perhaps it was – in him, that made him respond. But partly also it was because after the evacuation of the palace at Princhester he had felt more and more, felt but never dared to look squarely in the face, the catastrophic change in the worldly circumstances of his family. Only this chapel adventure seemed likely to restore those fallen and bedraggled fortunes. He had not anticipated a tithe of the dire quality of that change. They were not simply uncomfortable in the Notting Hill home. They were miserable. He fancied they looked to him with something between reproach and urgency. Why had he brought them here? What next did he propose to do? He wished at times they would say it out instead of merely looking it. Phoebe’s failing appetite chilled his heart.
That concern for his family, he believed, had been his chief motive in clinging to Lady Sunderbund’s projects long after he had realized how little they would forward the true service of God. No doubt there had been moments of flattery, moments of something, something rather in the nature of an excited affection; some touch of the magnificent in her, some touch of the infantile, – both appealed magnetically to his imagination; but the real effective cause was his habitual solicitude for his wife and children and his consequent desire to prosper materially. As his first dream of being something between Mohammed and Peter the Hermit in a new proclamation of God to the world lost colour and life in his mind, he realized more and more clearly that there was no way of living in a state of material prosperity and at the same time in a state of active service to God. The Church of the One True God (by favour of Lady Sunderbund) was a gaily-coloured lure.
And yet he wanted to go on with it. All his imagination and intelligence was busy now with the possibility of in some way subjugating Lady Sunderbund, and modifying her and qualifying her to an endurable proposition. Why?
Why?
There could be but one answer, he thought. Brought to the test of action, he did not really believe in God! He did not believe in God as he believed in his family. He did not believe in the reality of either his first or his second vision; they had been dreams, autogenous revelations, exaltations of his own imaginations. These beliefs were upon different grades of reality. Put to the test, his faith in God gave way; a sword of plaster against a reality of steel.
And yet he did believe in God. He was as persuaded that there was a God as he was that there was another side to the moon. His intellectual conviction was complete. Only, beside the living, breathing – occasionally coughing – reality of Phoebe, God was something as unsubstantial as the Binomial Theorem…
Very like the Binomial Theorem as one thought over that comparison.
By this time he had reached the banks of the Serpentine and was approaching the grey stone bridge that crosses just where Hyde Park ends and Kensington Gardens begins. Following upon his doubts of his religious faith had come another still more extraordinary question: “Although there is a God, does he indeed matter more in our ordinary lives than that same demonstrable Binomial Theorem? Isn’t one’s duty to Phoebe plain and clear?” Old Likeman’s argument came back to him with novel and enhanced powers. Wasn’t he after all selfishly putting his own salvation in front of his plain duty to those about him? What did it matter if he told lies, taught a false faith, perjured and damned himself, if after all those others were thereby saved and comforted?
“But that is just where the whole of this state of mind is false and wrong,” he told himself. “God is something more than a priggish devotion, an intellectual formula. He has a hold and a claim – he should have a hold and a claim – exceeding all the claims of Phoebe, Miriam, Daphne, Clementina – all of them… But he hasn’t’!..”
It was to that he had got after he had left Lady Sunderbund, and to that he now returned. It was the thinness and unreality of his thought of God that had driven him post-haste to Brighton-Pomfrey in search for that drug that had touched his soul to belief.
Was God so insignificant in comparison with his family that after all with a good conscience he might preach him every Sunday in Lady Sunderbund’s church, wearing Lady Sunderbund’s vestments?
Before him he saw an empty seat. The question was so immense and conclusive, it was so clearly a choice for all the rest of his life between God and the dear things of this world, that he felt he could not decide it upon his legs. He sat down, threw an arm along the back of the seat and drummed with his fingers.
If the answer was “yes” then it was decidedly a pity that he had not stayed in the church. It was ridiculous to strain at the cathedral gnat and then swallow Lady Sunderbund’s decorative Pantechnicon.
For the first time, Scrope definitely regretted his apostasy.
A trivial matter, as it may seem to the reader, intensified that regret. Three weeks ago Borrowdale, the bishop of Howeaster, had died, and Scrope would have been the next in rotation to succeed him on the bench of bishops. He had always looked forward to the House of Lords, intending to take rather a new line, to speak more, and to speak more plainly and fully upon social questions than had hitherto been the practice of his brethren. Well, that had gone…
(9)
Regrets were plain now. The question before his mind was growing clear; whether he was to persist in this self-imposed martyrdom of himself and his family or whether he was to go back upon his outbreak of visionary fanaticism and close with this last opportunity that Lady Sunderbund offered of saving at least the substance of the comfort and social status of his wife and daughters. In which case it was clear to him he would have to go to great lengths and exercise very considerable subtlety – and magnetism – in the management of Lady Sunderbund…
He found himself composing a peculiar speech to her, very frank and revealing, and one that he felt would dominate her thoughts… She attracted him oddly… At least this afternoon she had attracted him…
And repelled him…
A wholesome gust of moral impatience stirred him. He smacked the back of the seat hard, as though he smacked himself.
No. He did not like it…
A torn sunset of purple and crimson streamed raggedly up above and through the half stripped trecs of Kensington Gardens, and he found himself wishing that Heaven would give us fewer sublimities in sky and mountain and more in our hearts. Against the background of darkling trees and stormily flaming sky a girl was approaching him. There was little to be seen of her but her outline. Something in her movement caught his eye and carried his memory back to a sundown at Hunstanton. Then as she came nearer he saw that it was Eleanor.
It was odd to see her here. He had thought she was at Newnham.
But anyhow it was very pleasant to see her. And there was something in Eleanor that promised an answer to his necessity. The girl had a kind of instinctive wisdom. She would understand the quality of his situation better perhaps than any one. He would put the essentials of that situation as fully and plainly as he could to her. Perhaps she, with that clear young idealism of hers, would give him just the lift and the light of which he stood in need. She would comprehend both sides of it, the points about Phoebe as well as the points about God.
When first he saw her she seemed to be hurrying, but now she had fallen to a loitering pace. She looked once or twice behind her and then ahead, almost as though she expected some one and was not sure whether this person would approach from east or west. She did not observe her father until she was close upon him.
Then she was so astonished that for a moment she stood motionless, regarding him. She made an odd movement, almost as if she would have walked on, that she checked in its inception. Then she came up to him and stood before him. “It’s Dad,” she said.
“I didn’t know you were in London, Norah,” he began.
“I came up suddenly.”
“Have you been home?”
“No. I wasn’t going home. At least – not until afterwards.”
Then she looked away from him, east and then west, and then met his eye again.
“Won’t you sit down, Norah?”
“I don’t know whether I can.”
She consulted the view again and seemed to come to a decision. “At least, I will for a minute.”
She sat down. For a moment neither of them spoke…
“What are you doing here, little Norah?”
She gathered her wits. Then she spoke rather volubly. “I know it looks bad, Daddy. I came up to meet a boy I know, who is going to France to-morrow. I had to make excuses – up there. I hardly remember what excuses I made.”
“A boy you know?”
“Yes.”
“Do we know him?”
“Not yet.”
For a time Scrope forgot the Church of the One True God altogether. “Who is this boy?” he asked.
With a perceptible effort Eleanor assumed a tone of commonsense conventionality. “He’s a boy I met first when we were skating last year. His sister has the study next to mine.”
Father looked at daughter, and she met his eyes. “Well?”
“It’s all happened so quickly, Daddy,” she said, answering all that was implicit in that “Well?” She went on, “I would have told you about him if he had seemed to matter. But it was just a friendship. It didn’t seem to matter in any serious way. Of course we’d been good friends – and talked about all sorts of things. And then suddenly you see,” – her tone was offhand and matter-of-fact – “he has to go to France.”
She stared at her father with the expression of a hostess who talks about the weather. And then the tears gathered and ran down her cheek.
She turned her face to the Serpentine and clenched her fist.
But she was now fairly weeping. “I didn’t know he cared. I didn’t know I cared.”
His next question took a little time in coming.
“And it’s love, little Norah?” he asked.
She was comfortably crying now, the defensive altogether abandoned. “It’s love, Daddy… Oh! love!.. He’s going tomorrow.” For a minute or so neither spoke. Scrope’s mind was entirely made up in the matter. He approved altogether of his daughter. But the traditions of parentage, his habit of restrained decision, made him act a judicial part. “I’d like just to see this boy,” he said, and added: “If it isn’t rather interfering…”
“Dear Daddy!” she said. “Dear Daddy!” and touched his hand. “He’ll be coming here…”
“If you could tell me a few things about him,” said Scrope. “Is he an undergraduate?”
“You see,” began Eleanor and paused to marshal her facts. “He graduated this year. Then he’s been in training at Cambridge. Properly he’d have a fellowship. He took the Natural Science tripos, zoology chiefly. He’s good at philosophy, but of course our Cambridge philosophy is so silly – McTaggart blowing bubbles… His father’s a doctor, Sir Hedley Riverton.”
As she spoke her eyes had been roving up the path and down. “He’s coming,” she interrupted. She hesitated. “Would you mind if I went and spoke to him first, Daddy?”
“Of course go to him. Go and warn him I’m here,” said Scrope.
Eleanor got up, and was immediately greeted with joyful gestures by an approaching figure in khaki. The two young people quickened their paces as they drew nearer one another. There was a rapid greeting; they stood close together and spoke eagerly. Scrope could tell by their movements when he became the subject of their talk. He saw the young man start and look over Eleanor’s shoulder, and he assumed an attitude of philosophical contemplation of the water, so as to give the young man the liberty of his profile.
He did not look up until they were quite close to him, and when he did he saw a pleasant, slightly freckled fair face a little agitated, and very honest blue eyes. “I hope you don’t think, Sir, that it’s bad form of me to ask Eleanor to come up and see me as I’ve done. I telegraphed to her on an impulse, and it’s been very kind of her to come up to me.”
“Sit down,” said Scrope, “sit down. You’re Mr. Riverton?”
“Yes, Sir,” said the young man. He had the frequent “Sir” of the subaltern. Scrope was in the centre of the seat, and the young officer sat down on one side of him while Eleanor took up a watching position on her father’s other hand. “You see, Sir, we’ve hardly known each other – I mean we’ve been associated over a philosophical society and all that sort of thing, but in a more familiar way, I mean…”
He hung for a moment, just a little short of breath. Scrope helped him with a grave but sympathetic movement of the head. “It’s a little difficult to explain,” the young man apologized.
“We hadn’t understood, I think, either of us very much. We’d just been friendly – and liked each other. And so it went on even when I was training. And then when I found I had to go out – I’m going out a little earlier than I expected – I thought suddenly I wouldn’t ever go to Cambridge again at all perhaps – and there was something in one of her letters… I thought of it a lot, Sir, I thought it all over, and I thought it wasn’t right for me to do anything and I didn’t do anything until this morning. And then I sort of had to telegraph. I know it was frightful cheek and bad form and all that, Sir. It is. It would be worse if she wasn’t different – I mean, Sir, if she was just an ordinary girl… But I had a sort of feeling – just wanting to see her. I don’t suppose you’ve ever felt anything, Sir, as I felt I wanted to see her – and just hear her speak to me…”
He glanced across Scrope at Eleanor. It was as if he justified himself to them both.
Scrope glanced furtively at his daughter who was leaning forward with tender eyes on her lover, and his heart went out to her. But his manner remained judicial.
“All this is very sudden,” he said.
“Or you would have heard all about it, Sir,” said young Riverton. “It’s just the hurry that has made this seem furtive. All that there is between us, Sir, is just the two telegrams we’ve sent, hers and mine. I hope you won’t mind our having a little time together. We won’t do anything very committal. It’s as much friendship as anything. I go by the evening train to-morrow.”
“Mm,” said Serope with his eye on Eleanor.
“In these uncertain times,” he began.
“Why shouldn’t I take a risk too, Daddy?” said Eleanor sharply.
“I know there’s that side of it,” said the young man. “I oughtn’t to have telegraphed,” he said.
“Can’t I take a risk?” exclaimed Eleanor. “I’m not a doll. I don’t want to live in wadding until all the world is safe for me.”
Scrope looked at the glowing face of the young man.
“Is this taking care of her?” he asked.
“If you hadn’t telegraphed – !” she cried with a threat in her voice, and left it at that.
“Perhaps I feel about her – rather as if she was as strong as I am – in those ways. Perhaps I shouldn’t. I could hardly endure myself, Sir – cut off from her. And a sort of blank. Nothing said.”
“You want to work out your own salvation,” said Scrope to his daughter.
“No one else can,” she answered. “I’m – I’m grown up.”
“Even if it hurts?”
“To live is to be hurt somehow,” she said. “This – This – ” She flashed her love. She intimated by a gesture that it is better to be stabbed with a clean knife than to be suffocated or poisoned or to decay…
Scrope turned his eyes to the young man again. He liked him. He liked the modelling of his mouth and chin and the line of his brows. He liked him altogether. He pronounced his verdict slowly. “I suppose, after all,” he said, “that this is better than the tender solicitude of a safe and prosperous middleaged man. Eleanor, my dear, I’ve been thinking to-day that a father who stands between his children and hardship, by doing wrong, may really be doing them a wrong. You are a dear girl to me. I won’t stand between you two. Find your own salvation.” He got up. “I go west,” he said, “presently. You, I think, go east.”
“I can assure you, Sir,” the young man began.
Scrope held his hand out. “Take your life in your own way,” he said.
He turned to Eleanor. “Talk as you will,” he said.
She clasped his hand with emotion. Then she turned to the waiting young man, who saluted.
“You’ll come back to supper?” Scrope said, without thinking out the implications of that invitation.
She assented as carelessly. The fact that she and her lover were to go, with their meeting legalized and blessed, excluded all other considerations. The two young people turned to each other.
Scrope stood for a moment or so and then sat down again.
For a time he could think only of Eleanor… He watched the two young people as they went eastward. As they walked their shoulders and elbows bumped amicably together.
(10)
Presently he sought to resume the interrupted thread of his thoughts. He knew that he had been dealing with some very tremendous and urgent problem when Eleanor had appeared. Then he remembered that Eleanor at the time of her approach had seemed to be a solution rather than an interruption. Well, she had her own life. She was making her own life. Instead of solving his problems she was solving her own. God bless those dear grave children! They were nearer the elemental things than he was. That eastward path led to Victoria – and thence to a very probable death. The lad was in the infantry and going straight into the trenches.
Love, death, God; this war was bringing the whole world back to elemental things, to heroic things. The years of comedy and comfort were at an end in Europe; the age of steel and want was here. And he had been thinking – What had he been thinking?
He mused, and the scheme of his perplexities reshaped itself in his mind. But at that time he did not realize that a powerful new light was falling upon it now, cast by the tragic illumination of these young lovers whose love began with a parting. He did not see how reality had come to all things through that one intense reality. He reverted to the question as he had put it to himself, before first he recognized Eleanor. Did he believe in God? Should he go on with this Sunderbund adventure in which he no longer believed? Should he play for safety and comfort, trusting to God’s toleration? Or go back to his family and warn them of the years of struggle and poverty his renunciation cast upon them?
Somehow Lady Sunderbund’s chapel was very remote and flimsy now, and the hardships of poverty seemed less black than the hardship of a youthful death.
Did he believe in God? Again he put that fundamental question to himself.
He sat very still in the sunset peace, with his eyes upon the steel mirror of the waters. The question seemed to fill the whole scene, to wait, even as the water and sky and the windless trees were waiting…
And then by imperceptible degrees there grew in Scrope’s mind the persuasion that he was in the presence of the living God. This time there was no vision of angels nor stars, no snapping of bow-strings, no throbbing of the heart nor change of scene, no magic and melodramatic drawing back of the curtain from the mysteries; the water and the bridge, the ragged black trees, and a distant boat that broke the silvery calm with an arrow of black ripples, all these things were still before him. But God was there too. God was everywhere about him. This persuasion was over him and about him; a dome of protection, a power in his nerves, a peace in his heart. It was an exalting beauty; it was a perfected conviction… This indeed was the coming of God, the real coming of God. For the first time Scrope was absolutely sure that for the rest of his life he would possess God. Everything that had so perplexed him seemed to be clear now, and his troubles lay at the foot of this last complete realization like a litter of dust and leaves in the foreground of a sunlit, snowy mountain range.
It was a little incredible that he could ever have doubted.
(11)
It was a phase of extreme intellectual clairvoyance. A multitude of things that hitherto had been higgledy-piggledy, contradictory and incongruous in his mind became lucid, serene, full and assured. He seemed to see all things plainly as one sees things plainly through perfectly clear still water in the shadows of a summer noon. His doubts about God, his periods of complete forgetfulness and disregard of God, this conflict of his instincts and the habits and affections of his daily life with the service of God, ceased to be perplexing incompatibilities and were manifest as necessary, understandable aspects of the business of living.
It was no longer a riddle that little immediate things should seem of more importance than great and final things. For man is a creature thrusting his way up from the beast to divinity, from the blindness of individuality to the knowledge of a common end. We stand deep in the engagements of our individual lives looking up to God, and only realizing in our moments of exaltation that through God we can escape from and rule and alter the whole world-wide scheme of individual lives. Only in phases of illumination do we realize the creative powers that lie ready to man’s hand. Personal affections, immediate obligations, ambitions, self-seeking, these are among the natural and essential things of our individual lives, as intimate almost as our primordial lusts and needs; God, the true God, is a later revelation, a newer, less natural thing in us; a knowledge still remote, uncertain, and confused with superstition; an apprehension as yet entangled with barbaric traditions of fear and with ceremonial surgeries, blood sacrifices, and the maddest barbarities of thought. We are only beginning to realize that God is here; so far as our minds go he is still not here continually; we perceive him and then again we are blind to him. God is the last thing added to the completeness of human life. To most His presence is imperceptible throughout their lives; they know as little of him as a savage knows of the electric waves that beat through us for ever from the sun. All this appeared now so clear and necessary to Scrope that he was astonished he had ever found the quality of contradiction in these manifest facts.
In this unprecedented lucidity that had now come to him, Scrope saw as a clear and simple necessity that there can be no such thing as a continuous living presence of God in our lives. That is an unreasonable desire. There is no permanent exaltation of belief. It is contrary to the nature of life. One cannot keep actively believing in and realizing God round all the twenty-four hours any more than one can keep awake through the whole cycle of night and day, day after day. If it were possible so to apprehend God without cessation, life would dissolve in religious ecstasy. But nothing human has ever had the power to hold the curtain of sense continually aside and retain the light of God always. We must get along by remembering our moments of assurance. Even Jesus himself, leader of all those who have hailed the coming kingdom of God, had cried upon the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” The business of life on earth, life itself, is a thing curtained off, as it were, from such immediate convictions. That is in the constitution of life. Our ordinary state of belief, even when we are free from doubt, is necessarily far removed from the intuitive certainty of sight and hearing. It is a persuasion, it falls far short of perception…
“We don’t know directly,” Scrope said to himself with a checking gesture of the hand, “we don’t see. We can’t. We hold on to the remembered glimpse, we go over our reasons.”…
And it was clear too just because God is thus manifest like the momentary drawing of a curtain, sometimes to this man for a time and sometimes to that, but never continuously to any, and because the perception of him depends upon the ability and quality of the perceiver, because to the intellectual man God is necessarily a formula, to the active man a will and a commandment, and to the emotional man love, there can be no creed defining him for all men, and no ritual and special forms of service to justify a priesthood. “God is God,” he whispered to himself, and the phrase seemed to him the discovery of a sufficient creed. God is his own definition; there is no other definition of God. Scrope had troubled himself with endless arguments whether God was a person, whether he was concerned with personal troubles, whether he loved, whether he was finite. It were as reasonable to argue whether God was a frog or a rock or a tree. He had imagined God as a figure of youth and courage, had perceived him as an effulgence of leadership, a captain like the sun. The vision of his drug-quickened mind had but symbolized what was otherwise inexpressible. Of that he was now sure. He had not seen the invisible but only its sign and visible likeness. He knew now that all such presentations were true and that all such presentations were false. Just as much and just as little was God the darkness and the brightness of the ripples under the bows of the distant boat, the black beauty of the leaves and twigs of those trees now acid-clear against the flushed and deepening sky. These riddles of the profundities were beyond the compass of common living. They were beyond the needs of common living. He was but a little earth parasite, sitting idle in the darkling day, trying to understand his infinitesimal functions on a minor planet. Within the compass of terrestrial living God showed himself in its own terms. The life of man on earth was a struggle for unity of spirit and for unity with his kind, and the aspect of God that alone mattered to man was a unifying kingship without and within. So long as men were men, so would they see God. Only when they reached the crest could they begin to look beyond. So we knew God, so God was to us; since we struggled, he led our struggle, since we were finite and mortal he defined an aim, his personality was the answer to our personality; but God, except in so far as he was to us, remained inaccessible, inexplicable, wonderful, shining through beauty, shining beyond research, greater than time or space, above good and evil and pain and pleasure.
(12)
Serope’s mind was saturated as it had never been before by his sense of the immediate presence of God. He floated in that realization. He was not so much thinking now as conversing starkly with the divine interlocutor, who penetrated all things and saw into and illuminated every recess of his mind. He spread out his ideas to the test of this presence; he brought out his hazards and interpretations that this light might judge them.
There came back to his mind the substance of his two former visions; they assumed now a reciprocal quality, they explained one another and the riddle before him. The first had shown him the personal human aspect of God, he had seen God as the unifying captain calling for his personal service, the second had set the stage for that service in the spectacle of mankind’s adventure. He had been shown a great multitude of human spirits reaching up at countless points towards the conception of the racial unity under a divine leadership, he had seen mankind on the verge of awakening to the kingdom of God. “That solves no mystery,” he whispered, gripping the seat and frowning at the water; “mysteries remain mysteries; but that is the reality of religion. And now, now, what is my place? What have I to do? That is the question I have been asking always; the question that this moment now will answer; what have I to do?..”
God was coming into the life of all mankind in the likeness of a captain and a king; all the governments of men, all the leagues of men, their debts and claims and possessions, must give way to the world republic under God the king. For five troubled years he had been staring religion in the face, and now he saw that it must mean this – or be no more than fetishism, Obi, Orphic mysteries or ceremonies of Demeter, a legacy of mental dirtiness, a residue of self-mutilation and superstitious sacrifices from the cunning, fear-haunted, ape-dog phase of human development. But it did mean this. And every one who apprehended as much was called by that very apprehension to the service of God’s kingdom. To live and serve God’s kingdom on earth, to help to bring it about, to propagate the idea of it, to establish the method of it, to incorporate all that one made and all that one did into its growing reality, was the only possible life that could be lived, once that God was known.
He sat with his hands gripping his knees, as if he were holding on to his idea. “And now for my part,” he whispered, brows knit, “now for my part.”
