“It shows how deep the Balkan question has its roots,” he said.
We went for a favourite walk of ours across the Downs.
We crossed ridge after ridge, rounded and smoothed by forgotten oceans, with delicate shades of green and mauve blending under the March sun like the colours on the wing of a moth.
Before us as we walked was the dark distant line that marked the beginning of the Weald, and, turning, we looked back across the grey and silver of the Channel. Far away on our right the sun struck a gleam of white from the cliffs of Beachy Head. An old shepherd and his dog slouched after a slowly moving flock of sheep on their browsing way to Lewes. On the sky-line a string of race-horses walked to their stables after a gallop.
The bishop drew long deep draughts of the keen air, and I could see some of the care fade out of his eyes.
“This is England to me,” he said. “So I hope to remember it when my time comes not to see it any more. I hope I shall have earned the right to forget the paved streets under the soot blanket, and those awful rows of red-brick ‘property’—not homes, mind you, but someone’s property, some vulgar greedy person’s ‘property,’ where children die, and women slave, and their husbands avoid. You have not lived among them as I have, and you don’t have to attend ‘Housing Conferences.’ The cant I have had to listen to during the last few days, from sleek unimaginative chairmen of amateur committees of busybodies, and aldermen from the provinces with weird voices and ghastly accents. All these people with a lust for spouting platitudes and a determination not to look things in the face, with their total failure to get anything done.”
“It must be very unpleasant—meeting that sort of people.”
“It is. But one must do it. They stand between all right principles and the unconsciously suffering people, who actually vote for them! They represent the Kakistocracy which we have made of our pretended Democracy.”
I looked at the bishop.
His lean, humorous face was grave and earnest, his eyes shone with enthusiasm. I saw that he was quite serious.