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

"mind his own business," he exerted himself in a search for
methods of reconciliation. He sought out every one who seemed
likely to be influential on either side, and did his utmost to
discover the conditions of a settlement. As far as possible and
with the help of a not very efficient chaplain he tried to
combine such interviews with his more normal visiting.

At times, and this was particularly the case on this day, he
seemed to be discovering nothing but the incurable perversity and
militancy of human nature. It was a day under an east wind, when
a steely-blue sky full of colourless light filled a stiff-necked
world with whitish high lights and inky shadows. These bright
harsh days of barometric high pressure in England rouse and
thwart every expectation of the happiness of spring. And as the
bishop drove through the afternoon in a hired fly along a rutted
road of slag between fields that were bitterly wired against the
Sunday trespasser, he fell into a despondent meditation upon the
political and social outlook.

His thoughts were of a sort not uncommon in those days. The
world was strangely restless. Since the passing of Victoria the
Great there had been an accumulating uneasiness in the national
life. It was as if some compact and dignified paper-weight had
been lifted from people's ideas, and as if at once they had begun
to blow about anyhow. Not that Queen Victoria had really been a
paper-weight or any weight at all, but it happened that she died
as an epoch closed, an epoch of tremendous stabilities. Her son,
already elderly, had followed as the selvedge follows the piece,
he had passed and left the new age stripped bare. In nearly every
department of economic and social life now there was upheaval,
and it was an upheaval very different in character from the
radicalism and liberalism of the Victorian days. There were not
only doubt and denial, but now there were also impatience and
unreason. People argued less and acted quicker. There was a pride
in rebellion for its own sake, an indiscipline and disposition to
sporadic violence that made it extremely hard to negotiate any
reconciliations or compromises. Behind every extremist it seemed
stood a further extremist prepared to go one better....

The bishop had spent most of the morning with one of the big
employers, a tall dark man, lean and nervous, and obviously tired
and worried by the struggle. He did not conceal his opinion that
the church was meddling with matters quite outside its sphere.
Never had it been conveyed to the bishop before how remote a rich
and established Englishman could consider the church from
reality.

"You've got no hold on them," he said. "It isn't your sphere."

And again: "They'll listen to you--if you speak well. But