The Naylors Read Online Free PDF

with his eyebrows that perhaps signalled an ironical view of this provision. ‘It was almost what we now call an ecumenical gesture. He was a cardinal, after all, by that time. They had tagged him, I seem to recollect, Cardinal of St George in Velabro.’
    ‘He was certainly that,’ George said a shade stiffly.
    ‘Even two chaplains were a little awkward for the Pattison household as it then was. Miss Pattison had to scratch round for a couple of fowls for them. Or such is the story.’
    ‘Two men wouldn’t eat two fowls.’
    ‘Dr Newman himself was extremely ascetic – although indeed it is said that at an earlier time he had introduced the Oriel Common Room to the pleasures of claret. His chaplains may well have been kept on short commons at the Oratory. That is as it may be. The sad part of the story is that there proved to be no possible meeting of those two minds: the Rector’s and the Cardinal’s.’
    ‘Yes,’ George said. He had realised that he was listening to an anecdote in fact familiar to him, and variously recounted in various places. Only his own extreme disarray had caused him to forget this.
    ‘Newman supposed that it must be some obscure point of doctrine – some patristic quiddity, my dear Naylor, of the sort you know far more about than I do – by which Pattison was perturbed as his last hours approached. That it could be anything worse than that was beyond Newman’s comprehension, and he braced himself, competent theologian as he was, to clear the matter up for his old friend in a jiffy.’ Father Hooker paused on this, as if to let his command of the more colloquial uses of language sink in. ‘But the truth was that Pattison’s loss of faith had become absolute. So sunk was he in hardened agnosticism that he had even continued to celebrate Holy Communion in the college chapel long after concluding it to be mumbo-jumbo. To cease doing so, he felt, would create needless fuss. And I suppose he was anxious to guard his position as a scholar. He had spent a good deal of time in Germany and brought back notions of severe Gelehrsamkeit.’
    ‘It was a very desirable import at that time, so far as the English universities were concerned.’ George said this with a sharpness he at once regretted. ‘And so,’ he added in a more responsive tone, ‘Newman returned to Birmingham sadly conscious of the failure of a mission.’
    ‘Just so. He had been suddenly confronted with dereliction and apostasy, and it had not been granted to him to counter it.’
    ‘Dereliction?’ George repeated misdoubtingly – and realised that he was in danger of being lured (like Mrs Archer) into debate. But his query was met only with an impressive (if slightly uncivil) silence. This gave him leisure to tell himself that he had not taken a hasty dislike to Father Hooker.
    But now Father Hooker, having sufficiently if obliquely expressed his sense of the gravity of his fellow-priest’s lapsed condition, turned to general conversation. George supposed that he judged this to be the urbane thing. He also led the conversation, as a North Oxford lady might do with an awkward undergraduate at a tea-party. As he was younger than George, this didn’t seem quite right. But George didn’t resent it. The situation was as difficult for Father Hooker as for himself, and as the chap was a specialist in running down and rounding up lost sheep, he was entitled to his own techniques. Yet George, as he managed adequate chat on the weather and politics and cricket matches and ‘light’ reading and other insignificant topics, did find himself wondering what had prompted the Bishop to choose this personally unappealing professional apologist in the present instance, and to set him on the hunt with such indecent expedition. The discreet spiritual counsellor provided on a previous occasion, old Dr Hunter, had been a quietly humorous Scot, and also one of the Hunters of Drumdrummie. There certainly wasn’t a spark of humour in Hooker.