Three Cheers For The Paraclete Read Online Free

barbarians until eight hundred years ago. And eight hundred years is no time, no time, a relative instant. So there is that part of us that wants to return to … well, to the forests where it was happy under the law of blood. These compulsions of which you speak, they’re no more than an indigestion of the spirit and aren’t to be taken seriously. Now you have taken yours too seriously, you have been too easily shocked. For your soul’s sake you must not be too easily shocked in future. Put your trust …’
    He listed a number of supernatural agencies.
    ‘Relax too,’ he said, and exhaled. ‘Panic is what kills. Consciously control the breathing, which is a gauge and determinant of normality.’
    In some crumbly fox-hole beneath his skull Hurst shuddered and called, ‘Christ, my Christ!’, and his breath slopped in and out.
    In the meantime Costello squinted out of the windows at the darkness plangent with insects.
    ‘Do you think I need to see a doctor?’ Hurst asked.
    ‘I don’t really think so. Faith is what ultimately cures. The doctors themselves will tell you that. And faith is merely a highly informed form of relaxing. Put it thus.’ Costello drew himself up in his chair and extended both hands, clenched to represent that both horns of the young man’s agony were in fact padded.
    ‘Either you will succumb to this compulsion or you won’t. If you succumb, you will be no way guilty, becauseyou’ll have gone mad – an impossible contingency: even you can see that. If you don’t succumb, then the compulsion is what statesmen call a paper tiger, and the question arises then: Why in the hell all this anguish?’
    ‘I see,’ Hurst said, opening his eyes, but there was so much doubt ingrained in the corners of his mouth.
    ‘Now these psychiatrists are not altogether reliable. They have a smattering of theology and tend to pontificate. In the end, all they can do for you is give you sleeping-pills, and I have some of my own here that I’ll give you in any case.’
    Hurst said, ‘Thank you, father’. But he had hoped he was sick enough to need a battery of doctors, for if he wasn’t, then this was normality, and if this was normality, he wanted to die.
    Then Costello questioned him about the origins of his compulsion.
    ‘It is all part of the same –’ Hurst’s open hands considered such words as demon and torment , but he did not, before this priest breathing so episcopally, have the courage of his own bitterness – ‘thing.’ He explained how he had begun by feeling liable, in God’s terrible eye, for all the corner-cutting, jay-walking, bus-hanging and variously endangered humans of that city. He had once pulled the emergency chain on a ferry because children were running around the decks. Not that he thought of their lungs bursting fathoms down in the bay. But he was convinced that he was liable with unlimited liability. Under God.
    ‘Scruples,’ Costello said perfunctorily. ‘Some of Europe’s greatest souls have suffered in this way.’
    Hurst raised frightened eyes to the priest. They slewed away like gulls at the sight of the white coverlet. An expanse of white could provoke the barbarian as anexpanse of canvas provoked the artist. ‘Then the foulest blasphemies began to rise in my mind,’ he went on. ‘Chapel became a long battle to keep the lid on these ideas. The – thing always picked what I feared most and played on it. It used my eyes and my soul to choose what it would torment me with next. If it had been a Communist interrogator, it could not have –’
    ‘Don’t be melodramatic,’ Costello told him. ‘The thing is you . Well, there’s every good chance that it’s you. I sometimes think that the battle with oneself is harder than the battle with any prince of darkness. None the less, there’s never any excuse for hysteria.’
    Hurst gave up, covered his eyes again. His complexion was streaky white and remote from the ruddy mania that absorbed him.
    Costello