Part 12 (2/2)
”You were uprooted. You moved from house to house, and failed to get that curled up safe feeling one has in a real home in any of them.”
”If you saw the fireplaces and the general decoration of the new palace!” admitted the bishop. ”I had practically no control.”
”That confirms me,” said Dr. Dale. ”Insomnia followed, and increased the feeling of physical strangeness by increasing the bodily disturbance. I suspect an intellectual disturbance.”
He paused.
”There was,” said the bishop.
”You were no longer at home anywhere. You were no longer at home in your diocese, in your palace, in your body, in your convictions. And then came the war. Quite apart from everything else the mind of the whole world is suffering profoundly from the shock of this war--much more than is generally admitted. One thing you did that you probably did not observe yourself doing, you drank rather more at your meals, you smoked a lot more. That was your natural and proper response to the shock.”
”Ah!” said the bishop, and brightened up.
”It was remarked by Tolstoy, I think, that few intellectual men would really tolerate the world as it is if it were not for smoking and drinking. Even novelists have their moments of lucidity. Certainly these things soothe the restlessness in men's minds, deaden their sceptical sensibilities. And just at the time when you were getting most dislodged--you gave them up.”
”And the sooner I go back to them the better,” said the bishop brightly.
”I quite see that.”
”I wouldn't say that,” said Dr. Dale....
(3)
”That,” said Dr. Dale, ”is just where my treatment of this case differs from the treatment of ”--he spoke the name reluctantly as if he disliked the mere sound of it--”Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey.”
”Hitherto, of course,” said the bishop, ”I've been in his hands.”
”He,” said Dr. Dale, ”would certainly set about trying to restore your old sphere of illusion, your old familiar sensations and ideas and confidences. He would in fact turn you back. He would restore all your habits. He would order you a rest. He would send you off to some holiday resort, fresh in fact but familiar in character, the High lands, North Italy, or Switzerland for example. He would forbid you newspapers and order you to botanize and prescribe tranquillizing reading; Trollope's novels, the Life of Gladstone, the works of Mr. A. C. Benson, memoirs and so on. You'd go somewhere where there was a good Anglican chaplain, and you'd take some of the services yourself. And we'd wash out the effects of the Princhester water with Contrexeville, and afterwards put you on Salutaris or Perrier. I don't know whether I shouldn't have inclined to some such treatment before the war began. Only--”
He paused.
”You think--?”
Dr. Dale's face betrayed a sudden sombre pa.s.sion. ”It won't do now,” he said in a voice of quiet intensity. ”It won't do now.”
He remained darkly silent for so long that at last the bishop spoke.
”Then what,” he asked, ”do you suggest?
”Suppose we don't try to go back,” said Dr. Dale. ”Suppose we go on and go through.”
”Where?”
”To reality.
”I know it's doubtful, I know it's dangerous,” he went on, ”but I am convinced that now we can no longer keep men's minds and souls in these feathered nests, these spheres of illusion. Behind these veils there is either G.o.d or the Darkness.... Why should we not go on?”
The bishop was profoundly perplexed. He heard himself speaking. ”It would be unworthy of my cloth,” he was saying.
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