The Soul of a Bishop

The bishop laid down his knife and fork.

“One may read in books, one may even talk of things, without fully understanding,” he said.

Lady Ella tried to entertain this comforting thought. “It isn’t like that,” she said at last. “She talks like a grown-up person. This – this escapade is just an accident. But things have gone further than that. She seems to think – that she is not being educated properly here, that she ought to go to a College. As if we were keeping things from her…”

The bishop reconsidered his plate.

“But what things?” he said.

“She says we get all round her,” said Lady Ella, and left the implications of that phrase to unfold.

(9)

For a time the bishop said very little.

Lady Ella had found it necessary to make her first announcement standing behind him upon the hearthrug, but now she sat upon the arm of the great armchair as close to him as possible, and spoke in a more familiar tone.

The thing, she said, had come to her as a complete surprise. Everything had seemed so safe. Eleanor had been thoughtful, it was true, but it had never occurred to her mother that she had really been thinking – about such things as she had been thinking about. She had ranged in the library, and displayed a disposition to read the weekly papers and the monthly reviews. But never a sign of discontent.

“But I don’t understand,” said the bishop. “Why is she discontented? What is there that she wants different?”

“Exactly,” said Lady Ella.

“She has got this idea that life here is secluded in some way,” she expanded. “She used words like ‘secluded’ and ‘artificial’ and – what was it? – ‘cloistered.’ And she said – ”

Lady Ella paused with an effect of exact retrospection.

“‘Out there,’ she said, ‘things are alive. Real things are happening.’ It is almost as if she did not fully believe – ”

Lady Ella paused again.

The bishop sat with his arm over the back of his chair, and his face downcast.

“The ferment of youth,” he said at last. “The ferment of youth. Who has given her these ideas?”

Lady Ella did not know. She could have thought a school like St. Aubyns would have been safe, but nowadays nothing was safe. It was clear the girls who went there talked as girls a generation ago did not talk. Their people at home encouraged them to talk and profess opinions about everything. It seemed that Phoebe Walshingham and Lady Kitty Kingdom were the leaders in these premature mental excursions. Phoebe aired religious doubts.

“But little Phoebe!” said the bishop.

“Kitty,” said Lady Ella, “has written a novel.”

“Already!”

“With elopements in it – and all sorts of things. She’s had it typed. You’d think Mary Crosshampton would know better than to let her daughter go flourishing the family imagination about in that way.”

“Eleanor told you?”

“By way of showing that they think of – things in general.”

The bishop reflected. “She wants to go to College.”

“They want to go in a set.”

“I wonder if college can be much worse than school… She’s eighteen – ? But I will talk to her…”

(10)

All our children are changelings. They are perpetually fresh strangers. Every day they vanish and a new person masquerades as yesterday’s child until some unexpected development betrays the cheat.

The bishop had still to learn this perennial newness of the young. He learnt it in half an hour at the end of a fatiguing day.

He went into the dining-room. He went in as carelessly as possible and smoking a cigarette. He had an honourable dread of being portentous in his family; almost ostentatiously he laid the bishop aside. Eleanor had finished her meal, and was sitting in the arm-chair by the fire with one hand holding her sprained wrist.

“Well,” he said, and strolled to the hearthrug. He had had an odd idea that he would find her still dirty, torn, and tearful, as her mother had described her, a little girl in a scrape. But she had changed into her best white evening frock and put up her hair, and became in the firelight more of a lady, a very young lady but still a lady, than she had ever been to him before. She was dark like her mother, but not of the same willowy type; she had more of her father’s sturdy build, and she had developed her shoulders at hockey and tennis. The firelight brought out the gracious reposeful lines of a body that ripened in adolescence. And though there was a vibration of resolution in her voice she spoke like one who is under her own control.

“Mother has told you that I have disgraced myself,” she began.

“No,” said the bishop, weighing it. “No. But you seem to have been indiscreet, little Norah.”

“I got excited,” she said. “They began turning out the other women – roughly. I was indignant.”

“You didn’t go to interrupt?” he asked.

She considered. “No,” she said. “But I went.”

He liked her disposition to get it right. “On that side,” he assisted.

“It isn’t the same thing as really meaning, Daddy,” she said.

“And then things happened?”

“Yes,” she said to the fire.

A 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.