Jerusalem Inn Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Haven’t a clue. What does it mean, exactly?”
    The priest pursed his lips in a smile. “Perhaps that nothing means much, ‘exactly.’ ” He pointed to the journal Jury had leafed through. “Semiology is more or less the study of signs.” He searched through some pamphlets, causing a small landslide of papers, found a pen, and proceeded to draw on the back of one of his journals. He held up his drawing, nothing more than a square, with crossbars like a large X joining the corners. “The semiotic square. We live by contraries, don’t we? Life, death. Thought, nonthought. We think by contraries.”To each corner he added a letter, the same letter — M. “I’d say you, of all people, might be able to appreciate the notion.” Again, that small purse of a smile, that cut-glass gaze. “One might finally arrive at some paradigmatic model which would be universal enough to take in all possibilities.” Father Rourke tore off the back cover of the periodical, handed it to Jury. “A structure that might simplify thought.”
    Jury laughed, folded the thick paper in quarters, and put it in his back pocket. “Father Rourke, you’re doing anything but simplifying my thoughts. And what’s the M stand for?”
    The priest looked amused. “Really, Superintendent. Mystery, of course. Fill it in. It’s but an interpretation of signs.” He shrugged. Simple.
    â€œThis is the way of interpreting the Gospels you favor, then?”
    The priest folded his hands over his stomach and seemed to search the room for approaches. “No, for me, it’s the psychological. Dreams, visions — are not they like miracles and parables? And so much that is Freudian. One only has to read some of the chapters of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. And the Prodigal Son, now isn’t that ever a working out of the Oedipal myth? If one studies the text, notices the omissions, the slips, the gaps —” His old eyes sparkled like Waterford glass as he smiled at Jury. “ — a policeman should appreciate that. You’re used to it — the little discordancies in suspects’ statements, that sort of thing. Why if I hadn’t been a priest a tall, I’d have been a cop, now wouldn’t I? Not a very good one; you’ve been letting me ramble and I’m sure you didn’t come for a lecture on biblical methodology. You want to know about Helen Minton.”
    â€œYes.”
    The tea had been brought in by a dour housekeeper who now stood frowningly with her hands folded beneath her big white apron, perhaps to see if the scones (small flat ones likepancakes) met with the Father’s approval. Jury guessed he was used to this ubiquitous watching at the porch, for he merely thanked her and waved her away, and she too slunk off like the mangy cat.
    â€œHelen Minton,” he said again. The priest put jam on a scone. The wash-blue eyes were still shrewd as they looked at Jury. “It was her heart, I heard. You don’t think so.”
    â€œNo, I don’t think so.” He looked at the pale violet pattern, nearly faded away, inside his teacup. Like the priest’s eyes and the violets, the whole room bore signs of fading — the flowered cretonne, the curtains with their sprays of brown ferns which did not match the slipcovers — the room a busy, untended garden going to seed. And outside, Jury had seen the moss that clung to the stones of the cottage creeping up the sides and mixing with the ivy, unrestrained. Something seemed, like the cat, to creep and hover and wait. It reminded him of the headstones that Helen had been so intently examining when he first saw her.
    He told Father Rourke how he had met her (but not that it had been only yesterday, feeling that might disqualify him as “friend”).
    â€œWhy would she do that, Father? She said she was interested in the Washington