They went on to discuss famous courses they’d played. Billy and Mr Robertson had been disappointed by St Andrews, but they were not without reverence for it as a shrine. Mr Robertson, or Chub, as Billy and Father Urban called him, spoke of courses he’d laid out (two of which Father Urban was certain he’d played, and perhaps two more), and then they got onto the subject of famous golfers and famous shots. In the end, as must often happen when good fellows get together, they considered the life and times of the great Walter Hagen. Both Billy and Mr Robertson knew stories that hadn’t appeared in the Haig’s autobiography. “I read the book, but I’m sorry to say I never saw the man play,” said Father Urban. “He was raised in the Church, you know.”
At one point during the evening, Father Urban left the table to make a phone call — to Dickie Thwaites. (“And say hello to your mother.”)
Finally, they pulled themselves together and hit the road, Father Urban driving, and Billy and Mr Robertson singing themselves to sleep in the back seat. Father Urban didn’t disturb them until the Builder, as Billy called it, was actually standing in the station. With the help of a couple of porters, Billy and Mr Robertson got settled for what remained of the night. They all rose late the next morning, had brunch together, and arrived in Chicago at 2 P.M., right on time. “That’s the Builder for you, and what a ride!” said Billy.
Paul met them in the Rolls. He dropped Billy and Mr Robertson off on Michigan Avenue, where they both had their offices, and then he drove Father Urban to his destination. Paul had cried out, “Well, look who’s here!” when he saw Father Urban, but he didn’t get any encouragement to continue along such familiar lines. Father Urban had thought of Paul before he saw him and had decided to straighten out their relationship. Father Urban’s new attitude was not so much cool as grave and preoccupied. When the Rolls turned into the Novitiate grounds, into the Avenue of Elms, as it was called, Father Urban looked up from his breviary and murmured, “Ah, here we are,” and when the Rolls stopped in front of St Clement’s Hall, he murmured, “Ah, thank you, Paul.”
Father Boniface was in his room, recovering from a touch of flu. When he learned the purpose of Father Urban’s visit, he said, “We won’t discuss these matters any further now. These are matters for the chapter to take up in the morning.”
Father Urban spent the rest of the day walking and talking with men who could be helpful to him in the morning, but he also said hello—hello! to a number of dim bulbs whose existence he’d always tried to overlook in the past. “Great to be back, if only for a little while.” In general, he got a warm welcome.
Quite late that night, he smoked a cigar with Father Louis, and the talk turned to Wilf. “Oh, he’s not so bad,” said Father Urban. “Come off it,” said Father Louis — in some ways a man much like Father Urban, another one of Father Placidus’s boys, a few years younger, yes, but almost in his flight as a golfer, a man who cut a good figure, who had a mind he could use if the occasion ever warranted it (he was presently employed as a professor of moral theology), and also a man who’d done a stretch at St Clement’s Hill. He had spent all but one of his seminary years with the Jesuits, and would be with them yet, he said, but for a run-in with his confessor over the value of St Ignatius’s “Exercises” as prose. He had been asked to leave. He had met Father Placidus and joined the Clementines on the first bounce, as a divorced man takes up with the first floosie he meets, so he’d once told Father Urban. “Wait’ll you have to go back there and live with him,” he told Father Urban now, making too much of the fact that Father Urban had been living away from the Hill. “A guy like that wouldn’t last two minutes in any other outfit.” This landed them on familiar ground. At this point, Father Urban usually said, “Like,” and Father Louis said, “Yes, like,” but that night Father Urban, much as he wanted to discourage Father Louis in his “order pride,” a peculiar form of order pride in that it wasn’t his own order he was proud of, let it pass. He had been everybody’s pal that day, and would be the same with the man who was probably his best friend. They went on to discuss the matters to be taken up by the chapter in the morning. “More power to you,” Father Louis said. “In any other outfit, they’d kiss your feet.”
“Everybody’s been very nice, but I doubt that it’ll come to that,” said Father Urban.
It didn’t. The next morning, at the chapter meeting, Father Boniface wore a pained expression while Father Urban spoke in behalf of a golf course at the Hill. Father Urban said it was high time somebody considered the plight of the one man for whom the Church was perhaps doing too little. Probably this man had never made a retreat, he said, and would feel funny about making one at, say, a Trappist monastery. This man just didn’t care to get in that deep, as he might express it himself, and still he was up to a bit more than he could get out of a parish mission. This man — so he imagined anyway — wouldn’t care for the company he’d find in a monastery or, for that matter, at a parish mission. You might say, “Well, isn’t that just too bad?” but that wouldn’t change anything for this man. He’d still stay away, and be the loser for it, and so it really was too bad, wasn’t it? Not every man of this type would be a golfer, of course. Golf was just one way (a good one, Father Urban thought) to get at the problem. It was the old, old problem of the unchurched, you might say. That was the problem, then, and the challenge. Would the Order of St Clement, with a little extra effort and no monetary outlay, respond to the challenge? That, of course, was not for Father Urban to say. That was for Father Provincial and the others to decide, said Father Urban, and sat down. He hadn’t mentioned the slim pickings they’d had from retreatants at the Hill. That could come later, if necessary.
Several men, not known to be partial to Father Urban but men he’d walked and talked with the day before, then spoke in favor of the course. The strongest support came from old Father Excelsior who, when he stood up, head to one side, arms thrust down, fists clenched, seemed to be hanging from a rope. Father Excelsior was director of the Millstone Press, and a revered figure in Catholic publishing circles. Father Siegfried, the new procurator, a man closely associated with the administration in Father Urban’s mind, also spoke for the course. Father Urban hadn’t walked and talked with him, and wondered if this might not be a power play on Father Siegfried’s part. The procurator, with his crewcut, and his open, gushing manner, and his bloody claws, was definitely a man to watch.
Finally, Father Boniface rose and suggested that the money would be better spent on pamphlets. At this two or three notorious suckholes (among them Brother Henry) nodded. But Father Boniface said that since this was not the alternative, he would abide by the will of the others and not exercise his veto. Father Urban and his faction, most of them younger men, easily prevailed when the matter was put to a vote. “Permission granted,” said Father Boniface, “and now the other matter.”
Father Urban rose. He expected less trouble in this matter. “This has to do with the Millstone Press, and if you wonder what that has to do with me, or what I have to do with it, the answer is — nothing,” said Father Urban, and drew a smile from just about everybody. “I just happened to be on the scene, you might say, when this thing broke. Father Excelsior has asked me to tell it to you as I told it to him.” Father Urban told the chapter that he’d been brought in close contact with their benefactress, Mrs Thwaites, and through her he’d come to know her son. Richard Thwaites, a Harvard man who’d retained his habits of study (there was nothing to be gained by mentioning Dickie’s sojourns in religious orders), was now engaged in editing a series of what might be called spiritual classics — leading off with translations of Denzinger’s Enchiridion and the so-called “lost books” of Tertullian. Mr Thwaites felt confident that there was an audience for such works in inexpensive, paperback editions, perhaps a large audience, perhaps a very large audience. Father Urban really didn’t know about this, and, frankly, he was doubtful. Father Excelsior, who knew all there was to know about such things, was also doubtful. Mr Thwaites, however, was fully prepared to subsidize the project — the common procedure where scholarly books were concerned. And so, whether or not Mr Thwaites’s faith was justified in a material way was beside the point, fortunately, and need not be discussed. The point was that books of this type weren’t easy to come by. They would be a credit to any publisher’s list. “Isn’t that right, Father?”