Three Cheers For The Paraclete Read Online Free Page A

demanded coolly, ‘Then how did this preoccupation with castration arise?’
    ‘I was reading about the Indian wars in the Rockies,’ explained Hurst. ‘It was not a pulp work. It was researched, a bona fide history. I read what the Indians did with the corpses of American soldiers.’
    ‘Let us into the secret,’ begged the robust Costello.
    Hurst grimaced. ‘They mutilated them and forced the results into their mouths.’
    ‘Of course they did. What else would any genial savage do in war?’
    The young man shook his head.
    ‘Now listen, Hurst, you are a man of faith. You have the barbarian beaten. These are his death throes at which you’re so alarmed. Hurst, I tell you as your confessor, summoning all the special graces of the sacrament to my aid, that these are its death throes and that the very presence of these compulsions may be a sign of how far you have advanced towards perfection. Not that there is ever reason for pride …’
    Hurst, his face no more than quiescent, showed, in fact, no glimmer of conceit. He explained, ‘It’s just that if I ever made that simple movement of picking up the bread-knife, I would not be stopped until I’d done what I had in mind. I know that.’
    ‘You’d have to catch your victim first.’
    ‘Not necessarily.’ He took a supreme risk and said, ‘I always have myself at hand.’
    ‘What rubbish!’
    Outside, somewhere on the umbrageous stone façade, pigeons, as if stung by the priest’s electric anger, began to troll.
    Costello said, ‘It’s cowardice to think that way. It is pride to think that you should be exempt from our native insanity, and cowardice to take the compulsion seriously.’
    And anger, being so therapeutic, did the trick. Hurst began to show signs of assent and reason. Costello rose and found a phial of white pills on the table, among the galley-proofs. With his confessional-stole on, and as if it were all part of the sacrament, he extracted two and gave them to Hurst. Then he sat down to absolve.

2
    G RETE AND B RENDAN were present in the side chapel where Maitland said Mass, both young people seeming appallingly certain of what the rite meant: His actual and offered flesh, His actual and offered blood. Seeing his two kinsmen, Maitland was assailed by a nostalgia for lost certitude.
    He remembered a young priest with whom he had shared a meal in France.
    ‘Of course,’ the priest had told him, ‘I don’t believe that the substance of bread becomes the body of Christ and the substance of the wine becomes … well, you know. I mean, that was a suitable way of expressing the Mass in the Middle Ages. But the words of truth change from century to century. Old formulas of belief go out the window the same way old chemical formulas do. Or rather, they should. You know that; you’re a historian.’
    ‘I know that,’ Maitland admitted. ‘Well, what do you think this rite we perform means?’
    ‘I’m working on it.’
    But Maitland, studying for his thesis, had never had the time to work on it. Now he could only close his eyes and pray on into the thick of the mystery.
    After unvesting, he went back to the infirmary, looking for his breviary. It lay in the nest of tangled blankets where he had spent the night. The ruins of hisbed and of Hurst’s were bad testimony to the peace promised him in his youth as emphatically as trainee teachers are promised a superannuation scheme.
    Hurst entered then, limping because of boils. His bedevilled eyes blinked good morning at Maitland, and he raised the infirmary window on the unbedevilled morning. Maitland could see, beyond and below the boy, the beach empty except for someone middle-aged walking dogs. On the balcony of a de luxe flat behind the promenade a man in Bermuda shorts watched the sea and enjoyed his corruptible lot a sight better than Hurst seemed to enjoy his incorruptible one.
    Then, his blankets put away, Maitland searched for matins in his breviary. He wondered what to begin to say to