The Heart of the Matter (Vintage classics)

by Graham Greene

The book’s Catholic writhings were much discussed at the time of its publication. George Orwell, reviewing the novel in The New Yorker, formulated an objection which is difficult to counter: Scobie is incredible because the two halves of him do not fit together. If he were capable of getting into the kind of mess that is described, he would have got into it years earlier. If he really felt that adultery is mortal sin, he would stop committing it; if he persisted in it, his sense of sin would weaken. If he believed in hell, he would not risk going there merely to spare the feelings of a couple of neurotic women. And one might add that if he were the kind of man we are told he is—that is, a man whose chief characteristic is a horror of causing pain—he would not be an officer in a colonial police force. In fact, the contradiction can be posed even more acutely than Orwell frames it. It is not so much Scobie’s lack of fear of hell that startles, but his willingness to surrender the very God he spends so much time praying to. If ‘human love’ can rob Scobie of his ‘love for eternity,’ then he was never a very passionate Christian; but if he is not the latter, why then his Christian passion? Another novelist’s reply might be that Scobie is simultaneously a passionate Christian and a passionate adulterer, and is sundered by these competing passions.

The kind of contradiction Orwell identified, and which must occur to any sensible reader, and which probably occurred at some level to Greene, is resolved by placing the matter, quite literally, in higher hands. We cannot know, or even comprehend Scobie, the book tells us. That is God’s task. Those who find Scobie already a somewhat thin character will find this appeal to mystery a little suspect, a way of sealing an already opaque action from further scrutiny. But it has a certain characterological logic. Scobie has consistently betted on God’s forgiveness—it is part of his distinctive pride. He certainly fears the eternal damnation that suicide may bring, but he hopes that God may spare him. Suicide, in this sense, is his biggest gamble.

His pallor showed how recently he had emerged from it into the port: so did his lack of interest in the schoolgirls opposite. He was like the lagging finger of the barometer, still pointing to Fair long after its companion has moved to Stormy.

Wilson liked poetry, but he absorbed it secretly, like a drug. The Golden Treasury accompanied him wherever he went, but it was taken at night in small doses—a finger of Longfellow, Macaulay, Mangan: ‘Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love …’ His taste was romantic. For public exhibition he had his Wallace. He wanted passionately to be indistinguishable on the surface from other men: he wore his moustache like a club tie—it was his highest common factor, but his eyes betrayed him—brown dog’s eyes, a setter’s eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street.

In the dark narrow passage behind, in the charge-room and the cells, Scobie could always detect the odour of human meanness and injustice—it was the smell of a zoo, of sawdust, excrement, ammonia, and lack of liberty. The place was scrubbed daily, but you could never eliminate the smell. Prisoners and policemen carried it in their clothing like cigarette smoke.

Scobie climbed the great steps and turned to his right along the shaded outside corridor to his room: a table, two kitchen chairs, a cupboard, some rusty handcuffs hanging on a nail like an old hat, a filing cabinet: to a stranger it would have appeared a bare uncomfortable room but to Scobie it was home. Other men slowly build up the sense of home by accumulation—a new picture, more and more books, an odd-shaped paper-weight, the ash-tray bought for a forgotten reason on a forgotten holiday; Scobie built his home by a process of reduction. He had started out fifteen years ago with far more than this. There had been a photograph of his wife, bright leather cushions from the market, an easy-chair, a large coloured map of the port on the wall. The map had been borrowed by younger men: it was of no more use to him; he carried the whole coastline of the colony in his mind’s eye: from Kufa Bay to Medley was his beat. As for the cushions and the easy-chair, he had soon discovered how comfort of that kind down in the airless town meant heat. Where the body was touched or enclosed it sweated. Last of all his wife’s photograph had been made unnecessary by her presence. She had joined him the first year of the phoney war and now she couldn’t get away: the danger of submarines had made her as much a fixture as the handcuffs on the nail. Besides, it had been a very early photograph, and he no longer cared to be reminded of the unformed face, the expression calm and gentle with lack of...

Women depended so much on pride, pride in themselves, their husbands, their surroundings. They were seldom proud, it seemed to him, of the invisible.

The less he needed Louise the more conscious he became of his responsibility for her happiness. When he called her name he was crying like Canute against a tide—the tide of her melancholy and disappointment.

In the evening the port became beautiful for perhaps five minutes. The laterite roads that were so ugly and clay-heavy by day became a delicate flower-like pink. It was the hour of content. Men who had left the port for ever would sometimes remember on a grey wet London evening the bloom and glow that faded as soon as it was seen: they would wonder why they had hated the coast and for a space of a drink they would long to return.

They walked side by side like a couple of policemen on duty into the lounge where Mrs Halifax was dealing out the library books. It is seldom that anything is quite so bad as one fears: there was no reason to believe that they had been the subject of conversation. ‘Goody, goody,’ Mrs Halifax called to them, ‘the new Clemence Dane’s arrived.’ She was the most inoffensive woman in the station; she had long untidy hair, and one found hairpins inside the library books where she had marked her place. Scobie felt it quite safe to leave his wife in her company, for Mrs Halifax had no malice and no capacity for gossip; her memory was too bad for anything to lodge there for long: she read the same novels over and over again without knowing it.

Ever since Fellowes had snatched his house, Scobie had done his best to like the man—it was one of the rules by which he set his life, to be a good loser. But sometimes he found it very hard to like Fellowes. The hot evening had not been good to him: the thin damp ginger hair, the small prickly moustache, the goosegog eyes, the scarlet cheeks, and the old Lancing tie. ‘Quite,’ said Brigstock, swaying slightly.

‘My name’s Reith. I’m Chief Assistant Col. Sec. This is Scobie, the deputy-commissioner.’ ‘I saw you this morning outside the Bedford Hotel, sir,’ Wilson said. There was something defenceless, it seemed to Scobie, in his whole attitude: he stood there waiting for people to be friendly or unfriendly—he didn’t seem to expect one reaction more than another. He was like a dog. Nobody had yet drawn on his face the lines that make a human being. ‘Have a drink, Wilson.’ ‘I don’t mind if I do, sir.’

Scobie thought: What are those others worth that they have the nerve to sneer at any human being? He knew every one of her faults. How often he had winced at her patronage of strangers. He knew each phrase, each intonation that alienated others. Sometimes he longed to warn her—don’t wear that dress, don’t say that again, as a mother might teach a daughter, but he had to remain silent aching with the foreknowledge of her loss of friends. The worst was when he detected in his colleagues an extra warmth of friendliness towards himself, as though they pitted him. What right have you, he longed to exclaim, to criticize her? This is my doing. This is what I’ve made of her. She wasn’t always like this.

‘I know these poor devils can’t get rice at the controlled price.’ ‘I’ve heard, Major Scobie, that they can’t get their share of the free distribution unless they tip the policeman at the gate.’ It was quite true. There was a retort in this colony to every accusation. There was always a blacker corruption elsewhere to be pointed at. The scandalmongers of the secretariat fulfilled a useful purpose—they kept alive the idea that no one was to be trusted. That was better than complacence. Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn’t had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn’t love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.

and then his anger moved away again, like a shabby man, when he thought of Fraser’s disappointment in the morning—no Portuguese visit, no present for his best girl, only the hot humdrum office day.

He had discovered suddenly how much they had in common: the plaster statues with the swords in the bleeding heart: the whisper behind the confessional curtains: the holy coats and the liquefaction of blood: the dark side chapels and the intricate movements, and somewhere behind it all the love of God. ‘And in Lisbon,’ he said, ‘she will be waiting, she will take me home, she will take away my trousers so that I cannot go out alone; every day it will be drink and quarrels until we go to bed. You will understand. I cannot write to my daughter from Lisbon. She loves me so much and she waits.’ He shifted his fat thigh and said, ‘The pureness of that love,’ and wept. They had in common all the wide region of repentance and longing.

‘What will we care for The why and the wherefore, When you and I Are pushing up the daisies?’ It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old death-bed?

Louise said, ‘I’ve known it for years. You don’t love me.’ She spoke with calm. He knew that calm—it meant they had reached the quiet centre of the storm: always in this region at about this time they began to speak the truth at each other. The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being—it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and ties are worth a thousand truths. He involved himself in what he always knew was a vain struggle to retain the lies. ‘Don’t be absurd, darling. Who do you think I love if I don’t love you?’ ‘You don’t love anybody.’

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practises. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

She had been kind to him, she bore his company, and automatically at any first kindness from a woman love stirred.

The taste of the lipstick was like something he’d never tasted before and that he would always remember. It seemed to him that an act had been committed which altered the whole world.

‘I love you, Louise,’ he said again. ‘How old are you, Wilson?’ ‘Thirty-two.’ ‘A very young thirty-two, and I am an old thirty-eight.’ ‘It doesn’t matter.’ ‘The poetry you read, Wilson, is too romantic. It does matter. It matters much more than love. Love isn’t a fact like age and religion …’ Across the bay the clouds came up: they massed blackly over Bullom and then tore up the sky, climbing vertically: the wind pressed the two of them back against the station. ‘Too late,’ Louise said, ‘we’re caught.’ ‘How long will this last?’ ‘Half an hour.’ A handful of rain was flung in their faces, and then the water came down. They stood inside the station and heard the water hurled upon the roof. They were in darkness, and the chickens moved at their feet. ‘This is grim,’ Louise said. He made a motion towards her hand and touched her shoulder. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Wilson,’ she said, ‘don’t let’s have a petting party.’ She had to speak loud for her voice to carry above the thunder on the iron roof. ‘I’m sorry … I didn’t mean …’ He could hear her shifting further away, and he was glad of the darkness which hid his humiliation. ‘I like you, Wilson,’ she said, ‘but I’m not a nursing sister who expects to be taken whenever she finds herself in the dark with a man. You have no responsibilities towards me, Wilson. I don’t want you.’ ‘I love you, Louise.’

‘I wish I could be of help, sir.’ ‘You can. Stay and have a few more drinks with Louise and cheer her up. She doesn’t often get a chance to talk about books.’ At the word books Wilson saw her mouth tighten just as a moment ago he had seen Scobie flinch at the name of Ticki, and for the first time he realized the pain inevitable in any human relationship—pain suffered and pain inflicted. How foolish one was to be afraid of loneliness. ‘Good-bye,

‘Why do you always call me a friend, Yusef?’ ‘Major Scobie,’ Yusef said, leaning his great white head forward, reeking of hair oil, ‘friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.

I want to explain why in my soul I have always felt your friend. You have made me feel secure. You will not frame me.

But when he slept the unhappy dreams returned. Upstairs Louise was crying, and he sat at a table writing his last letter. ‘It’s a rotten business for you, but it can’t be helped. Your loving husband, Dicky,’ and then as he turned to look for a weapon or a rope, it suddenly occurred to him that this was an act he could never do. Suicide was for ever out of his power—he couldn’t condemn himself for eternity—no cause was important enough.

‘I wanted to give you your ticket. A surprise.’ She was not so happy as he would have expected: she always saw a little farther than he hoped.

They could hear a clatter below stairs as Ali, who had also been watching the sea, brought out the trunks and boxes. It was as if the house were tumbling down around them, and the vultures took off from the roof, rattling the corrupted-iron as though they felt the tremor in the walls. Scobie said, ‘While you are sorting your things upstairs, I’ll pack your books.’ It was as if they had been playing these last two weeks at infidelity, and now the process of divorce had them in its grasp: the division of one life into two: the sharing out of the sad spoils.

‘I’ll come with you.’ Everything had been unreal, but this suddenly was real pain, the moment of death. Like a prisoner he had not believed in the trial: it had been a dream: the condemnation had been a dream and the truck ride, and then suddenly here he was with his back to the blank wall and everything was true. One steeled oneself to end courageously. They went to the end of the passage, leaving the Halifaxes the cabin. ‘Good-bye, dear.’ ‘Good-bye. Ticki, you’ll write every …’ ‘Yes, dear.’ ‘I’m an awful deserter.’ ‘No, no. This isn’t the place for you.’

He let himself into the empty house—he had forgotten the deep tones of silence. Many a time he had come in late, after Louise was asleep, but there had never then been quite this quality of security and impregnability in the silence: his ears had listened for, even though they could not catch, the faint rustle of another person’s breath, the tiny movement. Now there was nothing to listen for. He went upstairs and looked into the bedroom. Everything had been tidied away; there was no sign of Louise’s departure or presence: Ali had even removed the photograph and put it in a drawer. He was indeed alone. In the bathroom a rat moved, and once the iron roof crumpled as a late vulture settled for the night. Scobie sat down in the living-room and put his feet upon another chair. He felt unwilling yet to go to bed, but he was sleepy—it had been a long day. Now that he was alone he could indulge in the most irrational act and sleep in a chair instead of a bed. The sadness was peeling off his mind, leaving contentment. He had done his duty: Louise was happy. He closed his eyes.

Perrot joined them from the bungalow, a drink in either hand: bandy-legged, he wore his mosquito-boots outside his trousers like riding-boots, and gave the impression of having only just got off a horse. ‘Here’s yours, Scobie.’ He said, ‘Of course ye know I find it hard to think of the French as enemies. My family came over with the Huguenots. It makes a difference, ye know.’ His lean long yellow face cut in two by a nose like a wound was all the time arrogantly on the defensive: the importance of Perrot was an article of faith with Perrot—doubters would be repelled, persecuted if he had the chance … the faith would never cease to be proclaimed.

‘You must be thankful your wife’s arrived safely, Major Scobie. Those poor people over there. Forty days in the boats. It shakes one up to think of it.’ ‘It’s the damned narrow channel between Dakar and Brazil that does it every time,’ Perrot said. The doctor came gloomily out on to the verandah. Everything over the river was still and blank again: the torches were all out. The light burning on the small jetty below the bungalow showed a few feet of dark water sliding by. A piece of wood came out of the dark and floated so slowly through the patch of light that Scobie counted twenty before it went into darkness again.

What an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery. He had cut down his own needs to a minimum, photographs were put away in drawers, the dead were put out of mind: a razor-strop, a pair of rusty handcuffs for decoration. But one still has one’s eyes, he thought, one’s ears. Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.

Outside the rest-house he stopped again. The lights inside would have given an extraordinary impression of peace if one hadn’t known, just as the stars on this clear night gave also an impression of remoteness, security, freedom. If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? if one reached what they called the heart of the matter?

He put his head in his hands and wouldn’t look. He had been in Africa when his own child died. He had always thanked God that he had missed that. It seemed after all that one never really missed a thing. To be a human being one had to drink the cup. If one were lucky on one day, or cowardly on another, it was presented on a third occasion.

‘I’d rather you waited till the All Clear. I’m a bit rattled, you know.’ The stamina of women had always amazed Scobie. This one had survived forty days in an open boat and she talked about being rattled. He remembered the casualties in the report the chief engineer had made: the third officer and two seamen who had died, and the stoker who had gone off his head as a result of drinking sea water and drowned himself. When it came to strain it was always a man who broke. Now she lay back on her weakness as on a pillow.

He walked away, feeling an extraordinary happiness, but this he would not remember as happiness, as he would remember setting out in the darkness, in the rain, alone.

The bungalow was divided into a succession of small rooms identically furnished with sofas and cushions and low tables for drinks like the rooms in a brothel.

There are certain places one never leaves behind; the curtains and cushions of this room joined an attic bedroom, an ink-stained desk, a lacy altar in Ealing—they would be there so long as consciousness lasted.

‘I don’t know how to put it, Father, but I feel—tired of my religion. It seems to mean nothing to me. I’ve tried to love God, but—’he made a gesture which the priest could not see, turned sideways through the grille. ‘I’m not sure that I even believe.’ ‘It’s easy,’ the priest said, ‘to worry too much about that. Especially here. The penance I would give to a lot of people if I could is six months’ leave. The climate gets you down. It’s easy to mistake tiredness for—well, disbelief.’ ‘I don’t want to keep you, Father. There are other people waiting. I know these are just fancies. But I feel—empty. Empty.’ ‘That’s sometimes the moment God chooses,’ the priest said. ‘Now go along with you and say a decade of your rosary.’ ‘I haven’t a rosary. At least …’ ‘Well, five Our Father’s and five Hail Marys then.’ He began to speak the words of absolution, but the trouble is, Scobie thought, there’s nothing to absolve. The words brought no sense of relief because there was nothing to relieve. They were a formula: the Latin words hustled together—a hocus pocus. He went out of the box and knelt down again, and this too was part of a routine. It seemed to him for a moment that God was too accessible. There was no difficulty in approaching Him. Like a popular demagogue He was open to the least of His followers at any hour. Looking up at the cross he thought, He even suffers in public.

She stood pressed against him with her hand on his side. When the sound of Bagster’s feet receded, she raised her mouth and they kissed. What they had both thought was safety proved to have been the camouflage of an enemy who works in terms of friendship, trust and pity.

He had left his umbrella behind, setting out on his walk home with an odd jubilation, as though he had rediscovered something he had lost, something which belonged to his youth. In the wet and noisy darkness he had even lifted his voice and tried out a line from Fraser’s song, but his voice was tuneless. Now somewhere between the Nissen hut and home he had mislaid his joy.

In the future—that was where the sadness lay. Was it the butterfly that died in the act of love? But human beings were condemned to consequences. The responsibility as well as the guilt was his—he was not a Bagster: he knew what he was about. He had sworn to preserve Louise’s happiness, and now he had accepted another and contradictory responsibility. He felt tired by all the lies he would some time have to tell; he felt the wounds of those victims who had not yet bled. Lying back on the pillow he stared sleeplessly out towards the grey early morning tide. Somewhere on the face of those obscure waters moved the sense of yet another wrong and another victim, not Louise, nor Helen.

It seemed to Wilson that Scobie was still a novice in the world of deceit: he hadn’t lived in it since childhood, and he felt an odd elderly envy for Scobie, much as an old lag might envy the young crook serving his first sentence, to whom all this was new.

As so many times before Wilson had the sense of a door closed in his face; he was always on the outside of the door.

The brothel was a tin-roofed bungalow half-way down the hill on the right-hand side. In the dry season the girls sat outside in the gutter like sparrows; they chatted with the policeman on duty at the top of the hill. The road was never made up, so that nobody drove by the brothel on the way to the wharf or the Cathedral: it could be ignored. Now it turned a shuttered silent front to the muddy street, except where a door, propped open with a rock out of the roadway, opened on a passage.

‘Dear, you are unlucky. You are tied up with a middle-aged man. We can’t be bothered to lie all the time like the young.’

Pity smouldered like decay at his heart. He would never rid himself of it. He knew from experience how passion died away and how love went, but pity always stayed. Nothing ever diminished pity. The conditions of life nurtured it. There was only a single person in the world who was unpitiable, oneself.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘to couple me with—that woman.’ He couldn’t prevent the wince. He had underrated her power of giving pain. He could see how she had spotted her success: he had delivered himself into her hands. Now she would always know how to inflict the sharpest stab. She was like a child with a pair of dividers who knows her power to injure. You could never trust a child not to use her advantage.

The banality of the phrases saddened him; they seemed to have no truth personal to herself: they had been used too often. If I were young, he thought, I would be able to find the right words, the new words, but all this has happened to me before. He wrote again, I love you. Forgive me, signed and folded the paper.