第14章 THE THIRD - INSOMNIA(2)

He began to compose an address on Modern Literature (so-called).

It became acrimonious.

Before dawn the birds began to sing.

His mind had seemed to be a little tranquillized, there had been a distinct feeling of subsidence sleepwards, when first one and then another little creature roused itself and the bishop to greet the gathering daylight.

It became a little clamour, a misty sea of sound in which individuality appeared and disappeared.For a time a distant cuckoo was very perceptible, like a landmark looming up over a fog, like the cuckoo in the Pastoral Symphony.

The bishop tried not to heed these sounds, but they were by their very nature insistent sounds.He lay disregarding them acutely.

Presently he pulled the coverlet over his ears.

A little later he sat up in bed.

Again in a slight detail he marked his strange and novel detachment from the world of his upbringing.His hallucination of disillusionment had spread from himself and his church and his faith to the whole animate creation.He knew that these were the voices of "our feathered songsters," that this was "a joyous chorus" greeting the day.He knew that a wakeful bishop ought to bless these happy creatures, and join with them by reciting Ken's morning hymn.He made an effort that was more than half habit, to repeat and he repeated with a scowling face and the voice of a schoolmaster:

"Awake my soul, and with the sunThy daily stage of duty run...."He got no further.He stopped short, sat still, thinking what utterly detestable things singing birds were.A.blackbird had gripped his attention.Never had he heard such vain repetitions.

He struggled against the dark mood of criticism."He prayeth best who loveth best--"No, he did not love the birds.It was useless to pretend.

Whatever one may say about other birds a cuckoo is a low detestable cad of a bird.

Then the bishop began to be particularly tormented by a bird that made a short, insistent, wheezing sound at regular intervals of perhaps twenty seconds.If a bird could have whooping-cough, that, he thought, was the sort of whoop it would have.But even if it had whooping-cough he could not pity it.He hung in its intervals waiting for the return of the wheeze.

And then that blackbird reasserted itself.It had a rich boastful note; it seemed proud of its noisy reiteration of simple self-assertion.For some obscure reason the phrase "oleographic sounds" drifted into the bishop's thoughts.This bird produced the peculiar and irrational impression that it had recently made a considerable sum of money by shrewd industrialism.It was, he thought grimly, a genuine Princhester blackbird.

This wickedly uncharitable reference to his diocese ran all unchallenged through the bishop's mind.And others no less wicked followed it.

Once during his summer holidays in Florence he and Lady Ella had subscribed to an association for the protection of song-birds.He recalled this now with a mild wonder.It seemed to him that perhaps after all it was as well to let fruit-growers and Italians deal with singing-birds in their own way.Perhaps after all they had a wisdom....

He passed his hands over his face.The world after all is not made entirely for singing-birds; there is such a thing as proportion.Singing-birds may become a luxury, an indulgence, an excess.

Did the birds eat the fruit in Paradise?

Perhaps there they worked for some collective musical effect, had some sort of conductor in the place of this--hullabaloo....

He decided to walk about the room for a time and then remake his bed....

The sunrise found the bishop with his head and shoulders out of the window trying to see that blackbird.He just wanted to look at it.He was persuaded it was a quite exceptional blackbird.

Again came that oppressive sense of the futility of the contemporary church, but this time it came in the most grotesque form.For hanging half out of the casement he was suddenly reminded of St.Francis of Assisi, and how at his rebuke the wheeling swallow stilled their cries.

But it was all so different then.

(3)

It was only after he had passed four similar nights, with intervening days of lassitude and afternoon siestas, that the bishop realized that he was in the grip of insomnia.

He did not go at once to a doctor, but he told his trouble to every one he met and received much tentative advice.He had meant to have his talk with Eleanor on the morning next after their conversation in the dining-room, but his bodily and spiritual anaemia prevented him.

The fifth night was the beginning of the Whitsuntide Ember week, and he wore a red cassock and had a distracting and rather interesting day welcoming his ordination candidates.They had a good effect upon him; we spiritualize ourselves when we seek to spiritualize others, and he went to bed in a happier frame of mind than he had done since the day of the shock.He woke in the night, but he woke much more himself than he had been since the trouble began.He repeated that verse of Ken's:

"When in the night I sleepless lie, My soul with heavenly thoughts supply;Let no ill dreams disturb my rest, No powers of darkness me molest."Almost immediately after these there floated into his mind, as if it were a message, the dear familiar words:

"He giveth his Beloved sleep."

These words irradiated and soothed him quite miraculously, the clouds of doubt seemed to dissolve and vanish and leave him safe and calm under a clear sky; he knew those words were a promise, and very speedily he fell asleep and slept until he was called.