The Naylors Read Online Free PDF Page B

And as for Drumdrummie – although this was, of course, totally beside the point – Hooker wouldn’t recognise the place if he saw it.
    George was properly perturbed by the snobbish slant in his thought here. Nevertheless it was perhaps still active in the back of his mind when he now went on to reflect that the Bishop might have acted with an eye to wholesome and deterrent penance. George had done it once too often, so let Hooker be loosed on him. Perhaps the Bishop had first thought of old Father Fisher in Cambridge, whose exquisitely adroit handling of such conditions as George’s within the Anglican communion scarcely fell short of that achieved by his uncle, Father Fisher of Oxford, who had turned to Rome long after the John Henry Newman of this Hooker’s so evidently standard anecdote, but with scarcely less éclat. George felt that, as a kind of recidivist or at least as an obstinate case, he had in a sense earned the top treatment of Father Fisher of Cambridge. But now there had come this horrid thought. It was almost a picture, indeed. There was the Bishop at his desk in his archaically denominated palace; in front of him was a memorandum; he wrote in its margin the single word ‘Hooker’, leaned back in his chair, and murmured to himself, ‘That will teach him.’
    All this was unfair to Father Hooker, about whom George still knew little, and whose only fault so far revealed was a certain heavy-handedness incompatible with the customary amenities of polite intercourse. But now George’s thoughts took a more relevant and sensible turn. Why should the Bishop of Tower Hamlets be much bothering about George Naylor (a totally obscure labourer in his thronged diocese) at all? There were two possible explanations. Either the Bishop felt that the loss of faith suffered by even a single Christian soul was a matter of infinite moment, to be striven against with the united might of Christians everywhere, etc., or he had acted merely in aid of the swift obviating or damping down of a very minor ecclesiastical scandal. Could these two motives be rationally linked or combined, or did each belong to a scheme of things incompatible with the other? George realised that here was a difficult question. He was going to plunge into a bog of difficult questions with Father Hooker.
    And this was to begin almost at once. In fact it had begun already. George had a considerable regard for the Bishop of Tower Hamlets. He was a man admirably equipped for his sacred office: courteous, tactful but tenacious, a clear-headed and expeditious administrator. But George wished he had been a little less expeditious on the present occasion. George always took pleasure in a return to Plumley, whatever might be the circumstances of his visit. There was a good deal of creature comfort, for one thing: plenty of hot water and warm dry towels, excellent food of an uncomplicated sort, the space and privacy of the park with its not disagreeable suggestion of consequence in the county. As a break from life at the mission, all this had its charm. But what George chiefly liked was his family. His elder brother, Edward, although possessed of less sense of religion or even of the numinous than a Hottentot or probably a Neanderthal man, always treated him with a kind of puzzled respect, even deference, which was pleasing because entirely genuine; his sister-in-law was a reliable woman who seldom gushed or fussed; his nephews, although probably regarding his persuasions (or late persuasions) as chimerical, were friendly enough; his niece, Hilda, was attentive to his conversation and had indeed an air of considering him worth a good deal of thought. George liked everything about the lot of them, down to those no-nonsense Christian names, a taste for which had resulted in his own ‘George’ when he might have been Mervyn or Evelyn or Tarquin or something of the sort.
    And now his present arrival was going to be wrecked by Hooker. It did have to be put as