The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

That was the whole world to Mr Tench: the heat and the forgetting, the putting off till tomorrow, if possible cash down—for what?

he gave an impression of unstable hilarity, as if perhaps he had been celebrating a birthday, alone.

‘What? Oh just the girl I suppose. You don’t often see a pretty piece round here. Just one or two a year worth looking at.’ ‘She is very young.’

Gross

‘Are you a Catholic?’ ‘No, no. Just an expression. I don’t believe in anything like that.’ He said irrelevantly, ‘It’s too hot anyway.’

‘She’s a pretty bit. Of course, in two years she’ll be like all the rest. Fat and stupid. O God, I’d like a drink. Ora pro nobis.’

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. The hot wet river-port and the vultures lay in the wastepaper basket, and he picked them out. We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

Well that's depressing

Pride wavered in his voice like a plant with shallow roots.

He had the air, in his hollowness and neglect, of somebody of no account who had been beaten up incidentally, by ill-health or restlessness.

‘Can’t be too careful,’ he said. ‘Any dentist who’s worth the name has enemies.

‘I shall miss it,’ he said. ‘I am meant to miss it.’ He was shaken by a tiny rage. ‘Give me my brandy.’

‘You know nothing,’ the stranger said fiercely. ‘That is what everyone says all the time—you do no good.’ The brandy had affected him. He said with monstrous bitterness, ‘I can hear them saying it all over the world.’

He felt an unwilling hatred of the child ahead of him and the sick woman—he was unworthy of what he carried.

He had tried to escape, but he was like the King of a West African tribe, the slave of his people, who may not even lie down in case the winds should fail.

his neatness gave an effect of inordinate ambition in the shabby city.

youngish man in a Roman collar sat among the women. You could imagine him petted with small delicacies, preserved for their use in the stifling atmosphere of intimacy and respect. He sat there, plump, with protuberant eyes, bubbling with harmless feminine jokes. ‘It was taken years ago.’ ‘He looks like all the rest,’ the lieutenant said. It was obscure, but you could read into the smudgy photograph a well-shaved, well-powdered jowl much too developed for his age. The good things of life had come to him too early—the respect of his contemporaries, a safe livelihood. The trite religious word upon the tongue, the joke to ease the way, the ready acceptance of other people’s homage … a happy man. A natural hatred as between dog and dog stirred in the lieutenant’s bowels. ‘We’ve shot him half a dozen times,’ he said.

he remembered the smell of incense in the churches of his boyhood, the candles and the laciness and the self-esteem, the immense demands made from the altar steps by men who didn’t know the meaning of sacrifice.

And the priest came round with the collecting-bag taking their centavos, abusing them for their small comforting sins, and sacrificing nothing at all in return—except a little sexual indulgence. And that was easy, the lieutenant thought, easy. Himself he felt no need of women.

‘He is a man at any rate,’ the lieutenant said with approval.

‘A man like that,’ the lieutenant said, ‘does no real harm. A few men dead. We all have to die. The money—somebody has to spend it. We do more good when we catch one of these.’

There was something disinterested in his ambition: a kind of virtue in his desire to catch the sleek respected guest of the first communion party.

‘A lot of them would die, of course.’ ‘Wouldn’t it be worth it?’ the lieutenant demanded. ‘To be rid of those people for ever.’

The new children would have new memories: nothing would ever be as it was. There was something of a priest in his intent observant walk—a theologian going back over the errors of the past to destroy them again.

In the light of a candle it looked as comfortless as a prison or a monastic cell.

It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy—a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all. He knew.

The lieutenant lay on his back with his eyes open while the beetles detonated on the ceiling.

He remembered the priest the Red Shirts had shot against the wall of the cemetery up the hill, another little fat man with popping eyes. He was a monsignor, and he thought that would protect him. He had a sort of contempt for the lower clergy, and right up to the last he was explaining his rank. Only at the very end had he remembered his prayers.

That, of course, was the best solution of all, to leave the living witness to the weakness of their faith. It showed the deception they had practised all these years. For if they really believed in heaven or hell, they wouldn’t mind a little pain now, in return for what immensities

The lieutenant, lying on his hard bed, in the damp hot dark, felt no sympathy at all with the weakness of the flesh.

Two small girls of six and ten sat on the edge of their bed, and a boy of fourteen leant against the wall with an expression of intense weariness.

The boy rubbed his face impatiently against the whitewash and the mild voice droned on. The two little girls sat with beady intense eyes, drinking in the sweet piety.

some day they would reach the last chapter and young Juan would die against a wall shouting, ‘Viva el Christo Rey.’

‘Even Padre José?’ ‘Don’t mention him,’ the mother said. ‘How dare you? That despicable man. A traitor to God.’ ‘He told me he was more of a martyr than the rest.’

‘And the other one—the one who came to see us?’ ‘No, he is not—exactly—like Juan.’ ‘Is he despicable?’ ‘No, no. Not despicable.’

‘I am so worried about the boy.’ ‘Why not about the girls? There is worry everywhere.’ ‘They are two little saints already. But the boy—he asks such questions—about that whisky priest. I wish we had never had him in the house.’

‘They would have caught him if we hadn’t, and then he would have been one of your martyrs. They would write a book about him and you would read it to the children.’ ‘That man—never.’ ‘Well, after all,’ her husband said, ‘he carries on. I don’t believe all that they write in these books. We are all human.’

he was drunk that he took no notice at all and baptized the boy Brigitta. Brigitta!’ ‘Well, it’s a good saint’s name.’

We have been abandoned here. We must get along as best we can. As for the Church—the Church is Padre José and the whisky priest—I don’t know of any other. If we don’t like the Church, well, we must leave it.’

She said, ‘I would rather die.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘of course. That goes without saying. But we have to go on living.’

The glittering worlds lay there in space like a promise—the world was not the universe. Somewhere Christ might not have died. He could not believe that to a watcher there this world could shine with such brilliance: it would roll heavily in space under its fog like a burning and abandoned ship. The whole globe was blanketed with his own sin.

He stood outside himself and wondered whether he was even fit for hell.

But then he remembered the gift he had been given which nobody could take away. That was what made him worthy of damnation—the power he still had of turning the wafer into the flesh and blood of God. He was a sacrilege.

He wasn’t so bad a man, Padre José thought—he would be forgiven, he was just a politician; but he himself, he was worse than that—he was like an obscene picture hung here every day to corrupt children with.

it was no good praying any longer at all: a prayer demanded an act and he had no intention of acting.

there was no respect anywhere left for him in his home, in the town, in the whole abandoned star.

He was borne up on a big tide of boyish joy—doing a man’s job, the heart of the wild: he felt no responsibility for anyone.

In only one other country had he felt more happy, and that was in wartime France, in the ravaged landscape of trenches.

He was home. A very slight cloud marred his happiness. He thought: after all, a man likes to be welcomed.

He burst boisterously through a door and shouted, ‘Daddy’s home.’ A scared thin face peeked at him through a mosquito-net;

‘I’m glad to be home,’ Captain Fellows said, and he believed it. It was his one firm conviction—that he really felt the correct emotions of love and joy and grief and hate.

‘You’ll be all right. Just a touch of the sun. You’ll see—now I’m home.’