The Soul of a Bishop. Герберт Уэллс
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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?”
The girl knitted her brows and seemed to be reading her answer out of the depths of the coals. She was on the verge of speaking, altered her mind and tried a different beginning.
“I think that every one must do their thinking – his thinking – for – oneself,” she said awkwardly.
“You mean you can’t trust – ?”
“It isn’t trusting. But one knows best for oneself when one is hungry.”
“And you find yourself hungry?”
“I want to find out for myself what all this trouble about votes and things means.”
“And we starve you – intellectually?”
“You know I don’t think that. But you are busy…”
“Aren’t you being perhaps a little impatient, Eleanor? After all – you are barely eighteen… We have given you all sorts of liberties.”
Her silence admitted it. “But still,” she said after a long pause, “there are other girls, younger than I am, in these things. They talk about – oh, all sorts of things. Freely…”
“You’ve been awfully good to me,” she said irrelevantly. “And of course this meeting was all pure accident.”
Father and daughter remained silent for awhile, seeking a better grip.
“What exactly do you want, Eleanor?” he asked.
She looked up at him. “Generally?” she asked.
“Your mother has the impression that you are discontented.”
“Discontented is a horrid word.”
“Well – unsatisfied.”
She remained still for a time. She felt the moment had come to make her demand.
“I would like to go to Newnham or Somerville – and work. I feel – so horribly ignorant. Of all sorts of things. If I were a son I should go – ”
“Ye – es,” said the bishop and reflected.
He had gone rather far in the direction of the Woman Suffrage people; he had advocated equality of standard in all sorts of matters, and the memory of these utterances hampered him.
“You could read here,” he tried.
“If I were a son, you wouldn’t say that.”
His reply was vague. “But in this home,” he said, “we have a certain atmosphere.”
He left her to imply her differences in sensibility and response from the hardier male.
Her hesitation marked the full gravity of her reply. “It’s just that,” she said. “One feels – ” She considered it further. “As if we were living in a kind of magic world – not really real. Out there – ” she glanced over her shoulder at the drawn blind that hid the night. “One meets with different sorts of minds and different – atmospheres. All this is very beautiful. I’ve had the most wonderful home. But there’s a sort of feeling as though it couldn’t really go on, as though all these strikes and doubts and questionings – ”
She stopped short at questionings, for the thing was said.
The bishop took her meaning gallantly and honestly.
“The church of Christ, little Norah, is built upon a rock.”
She made no answer. She moved her head very slightly so that he could not see her face, and remained sitting rather stiffly and awkwardly with her eyes upon the fire.
Her silence was the third and greatest blow the bishop received that day…
It seemed very long indeed before either of them spoke. At last he said: “We must talk about these things again, Norah, when we are less tired and have more time… You have been reading books… When Caxton set up his printing-press he thrust a new power between church and disciple and father and child… And I am tired. We must talk it over a little later.”
The girl stood up. She took her father’s hands. “Dear, dear Daddy,” she said, “I am so sorry to be a bother. I am so sorry I went to that meeting… You look tired out.”
“We must talk – properly,” said the bishop, patting one hand, then discovering from her wincing face that it was the sprained one. “Your poor wrist,” he said.
“It’s so hard to talk, but I want to talk to you, Daddy. It isn’t that I have hidden things…”
She kissed him, and the bishop had the odd fancy that she kissed him as though she was sorry for him…
It occurred to him that really there could be no time like the present for discussing these “questionings” of hers, and then his fatigue and shyness had the better of him again.
The papers got hold of Eleanor’s share in the suffragette disturbance. The White Blackbird said things about her.
It did not attack her. It did worse. It admired her …impudently.
It spoke of her once as “Norah,” and once as “the Scrope Flapper.”
Its headline proclaimed: “Plucky Flappers Hold Up L. G.”
CHAPTER THE THIRD – INSOMNIA
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