The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

He had his satisfaction, but it was connected with his crime; he had no business to feel pleasure at anything attached to that past. He said mechanically, ‘That’s good,’ while his heart beat with its secret love.

Nobody came forward to kiss his hand and ask his blessing. It was as if he had descended by means of his sin into the human struggle to learn other things besides despair and love, that a man can be unwelcome even in his own home.

the happiness wiped off his face and the smile somehow left behind like the survivor of a wreck.

They came forward one by one and kissed his hand and then stood back and watched him. He said, ‘I am glad to see you …’ he was going to say ‘my children’, but then it seemed to him that only the childless man has the right to call strangers his children.

They were too young to remember the old days when the priests dressed in black and wore Roman collars and had soft superior patronizing hands; he could see they were mystified at the show of respect to a peasant like their parents.

He said furiously, ‘Who did they murder?’ ‘Pedro Montez.’ He gave a little yapping cry like a dog’s—the absurd shorthand of grief.

Happiness was dead again before it had had time to breathe; he was like a woman with a stillborn child—bury it quickly and forget and begin again. Perhaps the next would live.

‘What am I saying now? It’s not what you want or what I want.’

was this all there was in marriage, this evasion and suspicion and lack of ease? When people confessed to him in terms of passion, was this all they meant—the hard bed and the busy woman and the not talking about the past?

Had it become his duty then to run away? He had tried to escape several times, but he had always been prevented … now they wanted him to go.

He thought: if I go, I shall meet other priests: I shall go to confession: I shall feel contrition and be forgiven: eternal life will begin for me all over again. The Church taught that it was every man’s first duty to save his own soul.

If he left them, they would be safe, and they would be free from his example. He was the only priest the children could remember: it was from him they would take their ideas of the faith. But it was from him too they took God—in their mouths. When he was gone it would be as if God in all this space between the sea and the mountains ceased to exist. Wasn’t it his duty to stay, even if they despised him, even if they were murdered for his sake? even if they were corrupted by his example? He was shaken with the enormity of the problem.

He made an attempt to hide the brandy bottle, but there was nowhere … he tried to minimize it in his hands, watching her, feeling the shock of human love.

The child stood there, watching him with acuteness and contempt. They had spent no love in her conception: just fear and despair and half a bottle of brandy and the sense of loneliness had driven him to an act which horrified him—and this scared shame-faced overpowering love was the result.

He was aware of an immense load of responsibility: it was indistinguishable from love. This, he thought, must be what all parents feel: ordinary men go through life like this crossing their fingers, praying against pain, afraid.

For years, of course, he had been responsible for souls, but that was different … a lighter thing. You could trust God to make allowances, but you couldn’t trust smallpox, starvation, men

He caught the look in the child’s eyes which frightened him—it was again as if a grown woman was there before her time, making her plans, aware of far too much. It was like seeing his own mortal sin look back at him, without contrition.

It had been a happy childhood, except that he had been afraid of too many things, and had hated poverty like a crime; he had believed that when he was a priest he would be rich and proud

He put out his hand as if he could drag her back by force from—something; but he was powerless. The man or the woman waiting to complete her corruption might not yet have been born. How could he guard her against the non-existent?

You do not always say good-bye to those you love beside a deathbed, in an atmosphere of leisure and incense.

He felt his own unworthiness like a weight at the back of the tongue.

‘That is why I tell you that heaven is here: this is a part of heaven just as pain is a part of pleasure.’ He said, ‘Pray that you will suffer more and more and more. Never get tired of suffering.

Oh, it is easy to say all the things that there will not be in heaven: what is there is God. That is more difficult. Our words are made to describe what we know with our senses.

He said stubbornly, ‘Above all remember this—heaven is here.’

There was a time when he had approached the Canon of the Mass with actual physical dread—the first time he had consumed the body and blood of God in a state of mortal sin. But then life bred its excuses—it hadn’t after a while seemed to matter very much, whether he was damned or not, so long as these others …

He felt humbled by the pain ordinary men bore voluntarily; his pain was forced on him. ‘Oh Lord, I have loved the beauty of thy house …’ The candles smoked and the people shifted on their knees—an absurd happiness bobbed up in him again before anxiety returned: it was as if he had been permitted to look in from the outside at the population of heaven.

For a matter of seconds he felt an immense satisfaction that he could talk of suffering to them now without hypocrisy—it is hard for the sleek and well-fed priest to praise poverty.

He could hear the sigh of breaths released: God was here in the body for the first time in six years.

you went round making God knew what martyrs—in Concepción or elsewhere—when you yourself were without grace enough to die.

Presumably she had an idea—women were appallingly practical: they built new plans at once out of the ruins of the old.

The child had her hand on his boot. He looked down at her with dark affection. He said with conviction, ‘This child is worth more than the Pope in Rome.

He recited an act of contrition silently with only half a mind—‘… my sins, because they have crucified my loving Saviour … but above all because they have offended …’ He was alone in front of the lieutenant—‘I hereby resolve never more to offend Thee …’ It was a formal act, because a man had to be prepared: it was like making your will and might be as valueless.

‘Let me see your hands,’ he said. The priest held them up: they were as hard as a labourer’s.

The priest looked at the ground—he wasn’t going to make it difficult for the man who gave him away.

‘Why won’t you trust me? I don’t want any of you to die. In my eyes—can’t you understand—you are worth far more than he is. I want to give you’—he made a gesture with his hands which was valueless, because no one saw him—‘everything.’

He could feel all round him the beginning of hate. Because he was no one’s husband or son. He said, ‘Lieutenant …’ ‘What do you want?’ ‘I’m getting too old to be much good in the fields. Take me.’

‘Now perhaps you’ll go—go away altogether. You’re no good any more to anyone,’ she said fiercely. ‘Don’t you understand, father? We don’t want you any more.’ ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I understand. But it’s not what you want—or I want …’ She said savagely, ‘I know about things. I went to school. I’m not like these others—ignorant. I know you’re a bad priest. That time we were together—that wasn’t all you’ve done. I’ve heard things, I can tell you. Do you think God wants you to stay and die—a whisky priest like you?’

‘Suppose you die. You’ll be a martyr, won’t you? What kind of a martyr do you think you’ll be? It’s enough to make people mock.’ That had never occurred to him—that anybody would consider him a martyr. He said, ‘It’s difficult. Very difficult. I’ll think about it. I wouldn’t want the Church to be mocked …’

He said, ‘The next Mass I say will be for her.’ She wasn’t even listening. She said, ‘She’s bad through and through.’ He was aware of faith dying out between the bed and the door—the Mass would soon mean no more to anyone than a black cat crossing the path. He was risking all their lives for the sake of spilt salt or a crossed finger.

he felt that there wasn’t a soul in the place who wasn’t watching him with satisfaction—the trouble-maker who for obscure and superstitious reasons they preferred not to betray to the police. He felt envious of the unknown gringo whom they wouldn’t hesitate to trap—he at any rate had no burden of gratitude to carry round with him.

Every child was born with some kind of knowledge of love, he thought; they took it with the milk at the breast; but on parents and friends depended the kind of love they knew—the saving or the damning kind. Lust too was a kind of love.

He prayed silently, ‘O God, give me any kind of death—without contrition, in a state of sin—only save this child.’

He was a man who was supposed to save souls. It had seemed quite simple once, preaching at Benediction, organizing the guilds, having coffee with elderly ladies behind barred windows, blessing new houses with a little incense, wearing black gloves … It was as easy as saving money: now it was a mystery. He was aware of his own desperate inadequacy.

He said, ‘I would give my life, that’s nothing, my soul … my dear, my dear, try to understand that you are—so important.’

That was the difference, he had always known, between his faith and theirs, the political leaders of the people who cared only for things like the state, the republic: this child was more important than a whole continent.

She stared back at him out of dark and unconscious eyes; he had a sense that he had come too late.

He said, ‘Good-bye, my dear,’ and clumsily kissed her—a silly infatuated ageing man, who as soon as he released her and started padding back to the plaza could feel behind his hunched shoulders the whole vile world coming round the child to ruin her.

One mustn’t have human affections—or rather one must love every soul as if it were one’s own child. The passion to protect must extend itself over a world—but he felt it tethered and aching like a hobbled animal to the tree trunk.

But he wasn’t ready yet for the final surrender—every small surrender had to be paid for in a further endurance, and now he felt the need of somehow ransoming his child. He would stay another month, another year … Jogging up and down on the mule he tried to bribe God with promises of firmness.

His conscience began automatically to work: it was like a slot machine into which any coin could be fitted, even a cheater’s blank disk. The words proud, lustful, envious, cowardly, ungrateful—they all worked the right springs—he was all these things.