The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

‘The forgiveness of sins,’ ‘You don’t believe much in that, do you?’ ‘Oh yes, I believe,’ the little man said obstinately. ‘Then what are you worried about?’ ‘I’m not ignorant, you see. I’ve always known what I’ve been doing. And I can’t absolve myself.’

‘Would Father José coming here have made all that difference?’ He had to wait a long while for his answer, and then he didn’t understand it when it came. ‘Another man … it makes it easier …’ ‘Is there nothing more I can do for you?’ ‘No. Nothing.’

He couldn’t remember afterwards anything of his dreams except laughter, laughter all the time, and a long passage in which he could find no door.

He said, ‘Oh God, help her. Damn me, I deserve it, but let her live for ever.’ This was the love he should have felt for every soul in the world: all the fear and the wish to save concentrated unjustly on the one child.

He thought: This is what I should feel all the time for everyone, and he tried to turn his brain away towards the half-caste, the lieutenant, even a dentist he had once sat with for a few minutes, the child at the banana station,

He prayed, ‘God help them,’ but in the moment of prayer he switched back to his child beside the rubbish-dump, and he knew it was for her only that he prayed. Another failure.

He thought: If I hadn’t been so useless, useless. … The eight hard hopeless years seemed to him to be only a caricature of service: a few communions, a few confessions, and an endless bad example. He thought: If I had only one soul to offer, so that I could say, Look what I’ve done….

People had died for him, they had deserved a saint, and a tinge of bitterness spread across his mind for their sake that God hadn’t thought fit to send them one.

‘How does he know it only lasts a second? How long’s a second?’

But he sat on, just waiting, paying no attention to the God over the altar, as though that were a God for other people and not for him.

asked, ‘What is it?’ ‘News,’ the child said, watching him with a stern, responsible and interested gaze.

He woke with a huge feeling of hope which suddenly and completely left him at the first sight of the prison yard. It was the morning of his death.

He caught sight of his own shadow on the cell wall; it had a look of surprise and grotesque unimportance.

‘But we agreed, dear, didn’t we, that it was better just to say nothing at all, ever. We mustn’t be morbid.’

They gave an odd effect of being children, lost in a strange town, without adult care.

They had both been deserted. They had to stick together. ‘You won’t leave me alone, will you, dear?’

‘I was just thinking of that priest. A queer fellow. He drank. I wonder if it’s him.’ ‘If it is, I expect he deserves all he gets.’

‘But the odd thing is—the way she went on afterwards—as if he’d told her things.’

‘Darling,’ Mrs Fellows repeated, with harsh weakness from the bed, ‘your promise.’ ‘Yes, I’m sorry. I was trying, but ...

Mr Tench woke with a jump, and coming forward to his cabinet, began to lay out the drill needles in a little metallic row of pain.