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

(6)


That morning in the long galleries of the bishop's imagination
a fresh painting had been added. It was a big wall painting
rather in the manner of Puvis de Chavannes. And the central
figure had been the bishop of Princhester himself. He had been
standing upon the steps of the great door of the cathedral that
looks upon the marketplace where the tram-lines meet, and he had
been dressed very magnificently and rather after the older use.
He had been wearing a tunicle and dalmatic under a chasuble, a
pectoral cross, purple gloves, sandals and buskins, a mitre and
his presentation ring. In his hand he had borne his pastoral
staff. And the clustering pillars and arches of the great doorway
were painted with a loving flat particularity that omitted
nothing but the sooty tinge of the later discolourations.

On his right hand had stood a group of employers very richly
dressed in the fashion of the fifteenth century, and on the left
a rather more numerous group of less decorative artisans. With
them their wives and children had been shown, all greatly
impressed by the canonicals. Every one had been extremely
respectful.

He had been reconciling the people and blessing them and
calling them his "sheep" and his "little children."

But all this was so different.

Neither party resembled sheep or little children in the least
degree. .

The labour leader became impatient with the ritualistic
controversy; he set his tea-cup aside out of danger and leant
across the corner of the table to the bishop and spoke in a
sawing undertone. "You see," he said, "the church does not talk
our language. I doubt if it understands our language. I doubt if
we understand clearly where we are ourselves. These things have
to be fought out and hammered out. It's a big dusty dirty noisy
job. It may be a bloody job before it's through. You can't
suddenly call a halt in the middle of the scrap and have a sort
of millennium just because you want it....

"Of course if the church had a plan," he said, "if it had a
proposal to make, if it had anything more than a few pious
palliatives to suggest, that might be different. But has it?"

The bishop had a bankrupt feeling. On the spur of the moment he
could say no more than: "It offers its mediation."