第15章 THE THIRD - INSOMNIA(3)

But the next day was a troubled one.Whippham had muddled his timetable and crowded his afternoon; the strike of the transport workers had begun, and the ugly noises they made at the tramway depot, where they were booing some one, penetrated into the palace.He had to snatch a meal between services, and the sense of hurry invaded his afternoon lectures to the candidates.He hated hurry in Ember week.His ideal was one of quiet serenity, of grave things said slowly, of still, kneeling figures, of a sort of dark cool spiritual germination.But what sort of dark cool spiritual germination is possible with an ass like Whippham about?

In the fresh courage of the morning the bishop had arranged for that talk with Eleanor he had already deferred too long, and this had proved less satisfactory than he had intended it to be.

The bishop's experience with the ordination candidates was following the usual course.Before they came there was something bordering upon distaste for the coming invasion; then always there was an effect of surprise at the youth and faith of the neophytes and a real response of the spirit to the occasion.

Throughout the first twenty-four hours they were all simply neophytes, without individuality to break up their uniformity of self-devotion.Then afterwards they began to develop little personal traits, and scarcely ever were these pleasing traits.

Always one or two of them would begin haunting the bishop, giving way to an appetite for special words, special recognitions.He knew the expression of that craving on their faces.He knew the way-laying movements in room and passage that presently began.

This time in particular there was a freckled underbred young man who handed in what was evidently a carefully prepared memorandum upon what he called "my positions." Apparently he had a muddle of doubts about the early fathers and the dates of the earlier authentic copies of the gospels, things of no conceivable significance.

The bishop glanced through this bale of papers--it had of course no index and no synopsis, and some of the pages were not numbered--handed it over to Whippham, and when he proved, as usual, a broken reed, the bishop had the brilliant idea of referring the young man to Canon Bliss (of Pringle), "who has a special knowledge quite beyond my own in this field."But he knew from the young man's eye even as he said this that it was not going to put him off for more than a day or so.

The immediate result of glancing over these papers was, however, to enhance in the bishop's mind a growing disposition to minimize the importance of all dated and explicit evidences and arguments for orthodox beliefs, and to resort to vague symbolic and liberal interpretations, and it was in this state that he came to his talk with Eleanor.

He did not give her much time to develop her objections.He met her half way and stated them for her, and overwhelmed her with sympathy and understanding.She had been "too literal." "Too literal" was his keynote.He was a little astonished at the liberality of his own views.He had been getting along now for some years without looking into his own opinions too closely and he was by no means prepared to discover how far he had come to meet his daughter's scepticisms.But he did meet them.He met them so thoroughly that he almost conveyed that hers was a needlessly conservative and oldfashioned attitude.

Occasionally he felt he was being a little evasive, but she did not seem to notice it.As she took his drift, her relief and happiness were manifest.And he had never noticed before how clear and pretty her eyes were; they were the most honest eyes he had ever seen.She looked at him very steadily as he explained, and lit up at his points.She brightened wonderfully as she realized that after all they were not apart, they had not differed; simply they had misunderstood....

And before he knew where he was, and in a mere parenthetical declaration of liberality, he surprised himself by conceding her demand for Newnham even before she had repeated it.It helped his case wonderfully.

"Call in every exterior witness you can.The church will welcome them....No, I want you to go, my dear...."But his mind was stirred again to its depths by this discussion.And in particular he was surprised and a little puzzled by this Newnham concession and the necessity of making his new attitude clear to Lady Ella....

It was with a sense of fatality that he found himself awake again that night, like some one lying drowned and still and yet perfectly conscious at the bottom of deep cold water.

He repeated, "He giveth his Beloved sleep," but all the conviction had gone out of the words.

(4)

Neither the bishop's insomnia nor his incertitudes about himself and his faith developed in a simple and orderly manner.

There were periods of sustained suffering and periods of recovery; it was not for a year or so that he regarded these troubles as more than acute incidental interruptions of his general tranquillity or realized that he was passing into a new phase of life and into a new quality of thought.He told every one of the insomnia and no one of his doubts; these he betrayed only by an increasing tendency towards vagueness, symbolism, poetry and toleration.Eleanor seemed satisfied with his exposition; she did not press for further enlightenment.She continued all her outward conformities except that after a time she ceased to communicate; and in September she went away to Newnham.Her doubts had not visibly affected Clementina or her other sisters, and the bishop made no further attempts to explore the spiritual life of his family below the surface of its formal acquiescence.