The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

Terror was always just behind her shoulder: she was wasted by the effort of not turning round.

She dressed up her fear, so that she could look at it—in the form of fever, rats, unemployment. The real thing was taboo—death coming nearer every year in the strange place:

She stood in the doorway watching them with a look of immense responsibility. Before her serious gaze they became a boy you couldn’t trust and a ghost you could almost puff away, a piece of frightened air.

She came solemnly across the room and kissed him formally upon the forehead—he could feel the lack of meaning. She had other things to think about.

child is said to draw parents together, and certainly he felt an immense unwillingness to entrust himself to this child. Her answers might carry him anywhere. He felt through the net for his wife’s hand, secretively: they were adults together. This was the stranger in their house.

The lieutenant stood there like a little dark menacing question-mark in the sun:

‘They carry their right on their hips.

Captain Fellows was touched with fear; he was aware of an inordinate love which robbed him of authority. You cannot control what you love—you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead. He closed his eyes—he was a happy man—and hummed a tune.

‘Of course he’s here,’ Coral said.

an unhappy man is always prepared.

the word ‘life’ was taboo: it reminded you of death.

‘You see how unworthy I am. Talking like this.’ ‘Unworthy of what?’

Will you pray for me?’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I don’t believe in that.’ ‘Not in praying?’ ‘You see, I don’t believe in God. I lost my faith when I was ten.’

She said, ‘You don’t sound afraid.’ ‘A little drink,’ he said, ‘will work wonders in a cowardly man. With a little brandy, why, I’d defy—the devil.’

She said gently, ‘If they kill you I shan’t forgive them—ever.’ She was ready to accept any responsibility, even that of vengeance, without a second thought.

They were not hard-hearted; they were watching the rare spectacle of something worse off than themselves.

The old man said softly, ‘It would be a pity if the soldiers came before we had time … such a burden on poor souls, father …’ The priest shouldered himself upright against the wall and said furiously, ‘Very well. Begin. I will hear your confession.’

‘Oh, let them come. Let them all come,’ the priest cried angrily. ‘I am your servant.’ He put his hand over his eyes and began to weep.

He is a very holy father. There he is in my hut now weeping for our sins.’

It would have been easier if there had been some purpose behind it other than the vague desire to put on record to somebody that he was still alive.

How surprised she would be at hearing from him after this long while; there had been one letter written by each of them since the little boy died.

Why write at all? He couldn’t remember now what had given him the odd idea.

She was one of those garrulous women who show to strangers the photographs of their children, but all she had to show was a coffin.

Heartbreaking sentence

He was scared, and yet a curious pride bubbled in his throat because he was being treated as a priest again, with respect. ‘If I could,’ he said, ‘my children

Suddenly and unexpectedly there was agony in the cemetery. They had been used to losing children, but they hadn’t been used to what the rest of the world knows best of all—the hope which peters out.

An enormous temptation came to Padre José to take the risk and say a prayer over the grave.

‘Leave me alone.’ He said, ‘I am unworthy. Can’t you see?—I am a coward.’

He knew he was in the grip of the unforgivable sin, despair.

‘Is the shooting going to begin soon?’ the boy asked, moving restlessly against the wall. His mother went relentlessly on:

‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ the boy said, with sullen fury, ‘not a word of it.’ ‘How dare you!’ ‘Nobody could be such a fool.’

‘You don’t remember the time when the Church was here. I was a bad Catholic, but it meant—well, music, lights, a place where you could sit out of this heat—and for your mother, well, there was always something for her to do. If we had a theatre, anything at all instead, we shouldn’t feel so—left.’

He said, ‘I suppose your mother’s angry.’ ‘You aren’t,’ the boy said. ‘What’s the good? It’s not your fault. We have been deserted.’

‘Mother,’ the child said, ‘do you believe there’s a God?’ The question scared Mrs Fellows. She rocked furiously up and down and said, ‘Of course.’ ‘I mean the Virgin Birth—and everything.’ ‘My dear, what a thing to ask. Who have you been talking to?’ ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking, that’s all.’ She didn’t wait for any further answer; she knew quite well there would be none—it was always her job to make decisions.

it hadn’t been any more difficult to accept then than the giant at the top of the beanstalk, and at the age of ten she had discarded both relentlessly.

She felt no resentment at all at being there, looking after things: the word ‘play’ had no meaning to her at all—the whole of life was adult. In one of Henry Beckley’s early reading-books there had been a picture of a doll’s tea-party: it was incomprehensible like a ceremony she hadn’t learned: she couldn’t see the point of pretending.

she felt the sense of responsibility for the first time like a load borne for too many years.

a lot of little crosses leant in the circle of light. He must have lain down among the bananas and tried to relieve his fear by writing something, and this was all he could think of. The child stood in her woman’s pain and looked at them: a horrible novelty enclosed her whole morning: it was as if today everything were memorable.

‘One day they’ll forget there ever was a Church here.’

‘You know I trust you. Do what you think best.’ ‘Will you put that in writing?’ ‘Oh—not necessary. We know each other.’

the lieutenant became aware in his own heart of a sad and unsatisfiable love.

They ringed the lieutenant round: he was surrounded by an insecure happiness as he fitted the gun back on his hip.

He would eliminate from their childhood everything which had made him miserable, all that was poor, superstitious, and corrupt. They deserved nothing less than the truth—a vacant universe and a cooling world, the right to be happy in any way they chose. He was quite prepared to make a massacre for their sakes

he went on alone across the plaza to the police station, a little dapper figure of hate carrying his secret of love.

In the old days he often practised a gesture a long while in front of a glass so that he had come to know his own face as well as an actor does. It was a form of humility—his own natural face hadn’t seemed the right one.

The years behind him were littered with similar surrenders—feast days and fast days and days of abstinence had been the first to go: then he had ceased to trouble more than occasionally about his breviary—and finally he had left it behind altogether at the port in one of his periodic attempts at escape.

penalties of the ecclesiastical kind began to seem unreal in a state where the only penalty was the civil one of death.

Five years ago he had given way to despair—the unforgivable sin—and he was going back now to the scene of his despair with a curious lightening of the heart. For he had got over despair too. He was a bad priest, he knew it. They had a word for his kind—a whisky priest, but every failure dropped out of sight and mind: somewhere they accumulated in secret—the rubble of his failures. One day they would choke up, he supposed, altogether the source of grace. Until then he carried on, with spells of fear, weariness, with a shamefaced lightness of heart.

Now that he no longer despaired it didn’t mean, of course, that he wasn’t damned—it was simply that after a time the mystery became too great, a damned man putting God into the mouths of men: an odd sort of servant, that, for the devil.

‘You’ve changed.’ She looked him up and down with a kind of contempt.

‘How’s Brigitta?’ His heart jumped at the name: a sin may have enormous consequences: