Three Cheers For The Paraclete Read Online Free Page B

this young man and stranger. During his uncertainty, the student who tended the infirmary came in with Hurst’s breakfast. He frowned, seeing Maitland.
    ‘Pardon my using your sick-room,’ Maitland called to him. ‘I had visitors using my quarters.’
    ‘You’re very welcome, doctor,’ the student said with warmth and some irony. Enough for the priest to see that probably no other teacher or doctor of some sacred science had ever given up his suite (to an itinerant poet or an itinerant anyone) to doss down informally with the sick. Never in all the years the house had stood making priests and providing bishops from its staff and breeding demons in men of Hurst’s kidney. And it was not necessarily a virtue to introduce, into a house that wasn’t his, a late streak of softness for the destitute. His three-year casual occupation of Belgium had taught him a nomadic insouciance which was also not necessarily a virtue. Finally, he thought, inspecting his drenched soles, I must buy new shoes.
    ‘Steak this morning,’ the student told Hurst.
    Maitland left, reciting matins soundlessly with hislips. He heard Hurst claim with some urgency, ‘No, I just don’t need a steak-knife.’
     
    In Maitland’s bedroom, Grete and Brendan browsed timidly among his books. The bed had been made; he suspected that Grete had even tidied his desk and found a broom and besom and garnished the place. He couldn’t be sure: he had a bad memory for the disorder he made there each day.
    They put the books down quickly. Both of them looked well scrubbed and were dressed ready to go. Just inside the door stood Grete’s large hand travelling-bag, to be gathered up in passing.
    Brendan said, ‘We’ll be going, father. Our sincerest thanks.’
    ‘Fodder, you saved us from a terrible night,’ Grete told him softly.
    ‘I hope we haven’t put you in a bad light, father. We met a colleague of yours in the corridor –’
    ‘You haven’t had breakfast yet,’ Maitland said. ‘And where will you stay tonight?’
    ‘We have so many friends. We’ll ask them straight out, too. Tramps’ pride.’
    Somebody knocked on the outside door. Conspiratorial or timid. Since Maitland was not on terms of conspiracy with anyone in the house, he went through to forestall whoever it was that was timid.
    It was a nun with folded linen in her hands.
    ‘Doctor, I believe you needed new linen.’
    She was middle-aged, too old to be running Dr Nolan’s funny errands.
    ‘No, sister. There must have been a mistake.’
    ‘Oh,’ she said. She regretted, therefore, the stairs she’d just climbed. ‘Monsignor Nolan sent a note to the laundry.’
    ‘I’m sorry you’ve had the trouble, sister. Look, leave the linen here and I’ll take it to the laundry when I go down to breakfast.’
    ‘No, doctor. Every man to his trade. Good morning.’
    He called to the two inside and told them he had to see the monsignor for a second. But he did not rush. He waited in the corridor under a picture, so evocative of the awe-struck religion of his childhood, of Ignatius Loyola taking God by storm at Manresa. When he had decided what to say, he went downstairs to the refectory. But, of course, Monsignor Nolan and the students were at breakfast, still stirring tea and listening to the reading. If anything, their massed serenity fed his anger, and he turned into the kitchen and feverishly gathered boiled eggs and sausages for his guests’ breakfast. Once he had juggled their ill-assorted trays up the narrow stairs, he found that they were gone. They had left a few atoms of face-powder on the cover of a book on Hapsburg policy in Bohemia. Also, more deliberately, they had written an apologetic note.
    His loneliness exposed by the presence of the two breakfasts, he sat down. He thought, ‘I must see more people and find some of my old friends. Because they love no one, they imagine that they love … ’ But he found it too hard to imagine what he did love.
     
    Later in the