The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

‘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.’ ‘Oh, I don’t have intentions,’ Mr Tench said wearily. ‘A man may look. I’ve lived alone for fifteen years.’ ‘Here?’ ‘Hereabouts.’

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

The child did not stir. He stood in the hard sunlight looking in with infinite patience. He said his mother was dying. The brown eyes expressed no emotion: it was a fact.

A sour smell came up to the plaza from the river and the vultures were bedded on the roofs, under the tent of their rough black wings. Sometimes, a little moron head peered out and down and a claw shifted.

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.’

It seemed to him like a weakness: this was his own land, and he would have walled it in if he could with steel until he had eradicated from it everything which reminded him of how it had once appeared to a miserable child. He wanted to destroy everything: to be alone without any memories at all. Life began five years ago.

He lifted little pink eyes like those of a pig conscious of the slaughter-room.

Common sense was a horrifying quality she had never possessed: it was common sense which said, ‘The dead can’t hear’ or ‘She can’t know now’ or ‘Tin flowers are more practical’.

The lieutenant stood there like a little dark menacing question-mark in the sun: his attitude seemed to indicate that he wouldn’t even accept the benefit of shade from a foreigner.

Her candour made allowances for nobody: the future, full of compromises, anxieties, and shame, lay outside.

He walked slowly; happiness drained out of him more quickly and completely than out of an unhappy man: an unhappy man is always prepared.

‘Begging for brandy. Shameless.’ ‘But you drink it sometimes.’ ‘My dear,’ Captain Fellows said, ‘when you are older you’ll understand the difference between drinking a little brandy after dinner and—well, needing it.’

‘You are very good. 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.’ ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Then I will pray for you.’

The trouble was—nothing ever happened here. His life was as sober, respectable, regular as even Mrs Marsdyke could require.

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.

‘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.’

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 knelt down in the late sunlight and bathed his face in a brown pool which reflected back at him like a piece of glazed pottery the round, stubbly and hollow features.

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.

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.

He said, ‘I’ll say Mass for you in the morning,’ as if he were offering them a bribe, but it might almost have been stolen money from their expressions of shyness and unwillingness.

When he was gone it would be as if God in all this space between the sea and the mountains ceased to exist.

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.

She made a last impudent malicious gesture and was gone—perhaps for ever as far as he was concerned. You do not always say good-bye to those you love beside a deathbed, in an atmosphere of leisure and incense.

‘One of the Fathers has told us that joy always depends on pain. Pain is part of joy. We are hungry and then think how we enjoy our food at last. We are thirsty …’

‘Heaven is where there is no jefe, no unjust laws, no taxes, no soldiers and no hunger. Your children do not die in heaven.’

‘You’re fools if you still believe what the priests tell you. All they want is your money. What has God ever done for you? Have you got enough to eat? Have your children got enough to eat? Instead of food they talk to you about heaven. Oh, everything will be fine after you are dead, they say. I tell you—everything will be fine when they are dead, and you must help.’

He sketched a cross and blessed her, but she stood impatiently before him, willing him to be gone for ever.

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.

An odd stillness dropped over the forest, and welled up in the mist from the ground. The night had been noisy, but now all was quiet. It was like an armistice with the guns silent on either side: you could imagine the whole world listening to what they had never heard before—peace.

‘Mother of God,’ the beggar said, ‘you’re as hard as a stone. Haven’t you a heart?’

The man in the drill suit leant back on the bed. His chin was cut in several places where he had been shaving too closely; his face was hollow and ill—it gave the impression that he had once been plump and round-faced but had caved in. He had the appearance of a business man who had fallen on hard times.

At the word ‘bastard’ his heart moved painfully, as when a man in love hears a stranger name a flower which is also the name of his woman. ‘Bastard!’ the word filled him with miserable happiness.

‘They’ll shoot you, father,’ the woman’s voice said. ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you afraid?’ ‘Yes. Of course.’

He was just one criminal among a herd of criminals … He had a sense of companionship which he had never experienced in the old days when pious people came kissing his black cotton glove.

He said, ‘Try not to be angry. Pray for me instead.’ ‘The sooner you are dead the better.’

And it came: a mongrel bitch dragging herself across the yard, an ugly creature with bent ears, trailing a wounded or a broken leg, whimpering. There was something wrong with her back. She came very slowly. He could see her ribs like an exhibit in a natural history museum. It was obvious that she hadn’t had food for days: she had been abandoned.

For peace you needed human company—his aloneness was like a threat of things to come.

Fear and death were not the worst things. It was sometimes a mistake for life to go on.

had a sense of expectant happiness all round him, waiting for him to take part, like an audience of children at a cinema or a rodeo; he was aware of how happy he might have been if he had left nothing behind him across the range except a few bad memories.

A virtuous man can almost cease to believe in Hell, but he carried Hell about with him. Sometimes at night he dreamed of it.

‘Didn’t you say he was dying?’ the priest asked. ‘Oh yes, dying, of course. But that can take a long time.’ ‘The longer the better for all of us,’ the priest said.

Pain alters a face—or else successful crime has its own falsity like politics or piety. He was hardly recognizable from the news picture on the police station wall; that was tougher, arrogant, a man who had made good. This was just a tramp’s face. Pain had exposed the nerves and given the face a kind of spurious intelligence.

‘The sooner your confession’s done, the sooner I will be gone.’ ‘You don’t need to trouble about me. I’m through.’ ‘You mean damned?’ the priest said angrily. ‘Sure. Damned,’ the man replied, licking blood away from his lips.

‘You a priest?’ ‘You mustn’t think they are all like me.’ He watched the candlelight blink on the bright buttons. He said, ‘There are good priests and bad priests. It is just that I am a bad priest.’

‘I’m not as dishonest as you think I am. Why do you think I tell people out of the pulpit that they’re in danger of damnation if death catches them unawares? I’m not telling them fairy stories I don’t believe myself. I don’t know a thing about the mercy of God: I don’t know how awful the human heart looks to Him. But I do know this—that if there’s ever been a single man in this state damned, then I’ll be damned too.’

‘I said I suppose you’re hoping for a miracle.’ ‘No.’ ‘You believe in them, don’t you?’ ‘Yes. But not for me. I’m no more good to anyone, so why should God keep me alive?’

‘Perhaps, my dear,’ José said, ‘it’s my duty …’ ‘You aren’t a priest any more,’ the woman said, ‘you’re my husband.’ She used a coarse word. ‘That’s your duty now.’

The lieutenant said, ‘You had better know everything. You’ve been tried and found guilty.’ ‘Couldn’t I have been present at my own trial?’ ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference.’ ‘No.’ He was silent, preparing an attitude. Then he asked with a kind of false jauntiness, ‘And when, if I may ask…?’ ‘Tomorrow.’

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 began to weep; it was as if he had to watch her from the shore drown slowly because he had forgotten how to swim.