"Wells, H G - Soul Of A Bishop" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wells H G)

and that she was keeping the horror from him. It was in her vein
that she should reproach herself for being a vulnerable side to
him.

Even when the bishop capitulated in favour of Princhester, that
decision only opened a fresh trouble for him. Princhester wanted
the palace to be a palace; it wanted to combine all the best
points of Lambeth and Fulham with the marble splendours of a good
modern bank. The bishop's architectural tastes, on the other
hand, were rationalistic. He was all for building a useful palace
in undertones, with a green slate roof and long horizontal lines.
What he wanted more than anything else was a quite remote wing
with a lot of bright little bedrooms and a sitting-room and so
on, complete in itself, examination hall and everything, with a
long intricate connecting passage and several doors, to prevent
the ordination candidates straying all over the place and getting
into the talk and the tea. But the diocese wanted a proud archway
--and turrets, and did not care a rap if the ordination
candidates slept about on the carpets in the bishop's bedroom.
Ordination candidates were quite outside the sphere of its
imagination.

And he disappointed Princhester with his equipage. Princhester
had a feeling that it deserved more for coming over to the church
from nonconformity as it was doing. It wanted a bishop in a mitre
and a gilt coach. It wanted a pastoral crook. It wanted something
to go with its mace and its mayor. And (obsessed by The Snicker)
it wanted less of Lady Ella. The cruelty and unreason of these
attacks upon his wife distressed the bishop beyond measure, and
baffled him hopelessly. He could not see any means of checking
them nor of defending or justifying her against them.

The palace was awaiting its tenant, but the controversies and
bitternesses were still swinging and swaying and developing when
King George was being crowned. Close upon that event came a wave
of social discontent, the great railway strike, a curious sense
of social and political instability, and the first beginnings of
the bishop's ill health.

(4)


There came a day of exceptional fatigue and significance.

The industrial trouble was a very real distress to the bishop.
He had a firm belief that it is a function of the church to act
as mediator between employer and employed. It was a common saying
of his that the aim of socialism--the right sort of socialism
--was to Christianize employment. Regardless of suspicion on
either hand, regardless of very distinct hints that he should