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That was the whole world to Mr Tench: the heat and the forgetting, the putting off till tomorrow, if possible cash down—for what?
Home: it was a phrase one used to mean four walls behind which one slept. There had never been a home.
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.
‘Any dentist who’s worth the name has enemies.’
He said his mother was dying. The brown eyes expressed no emotion: it was a fact. You were born, your parents died, you grew old, you died yourself.
‘I shall miss it,’ he said. ‘I am meant to miss it.’
The lieutenant walked in front of his men with an air of bitter distaste. He might have been chained to them unwillingly—perhaps the scar on his jaw was the relic of an escape.
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.
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‘He can pass as a gringo. He spent six years at some American seminary.
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.
Himself he felt no need of women.
‘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.
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.
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.
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.
The boy squashed a beetle with his bare foot and thought gloomily that after all everything had an end—some day they would reach the last chapter and young Juan would die against a wall shouting, ‘Viva el Christo Rey.’ But then, he supposed, there would be another book; they were smuggled in every month from Mexico City: if only the customs men had known where to look.
‘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.’
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.’
He wore only a shirt and trousers; his feet were bare, but there remained something unmistakably clerical in his manner. Forty years of the priesthood had branded him.
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 thought with envy of the men who had died: it was over so soon. They were taken up there to the cemetery and shot against the wall: in two minutes life was extinct. And they called that martyrdom.
He stood outside himself and wondered whether he was even fit for hell. He was just a fat old impotent man mocked and taunted between the sheets. 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. Wherever he went, whatever he did, he defiled God.
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.
A scared thin face peeked at him through a mosquito-net; his boots ground peace into the floor; Mrs Fellows flinched away into the white muslin tent.
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: everybody packing up and leaving, while she stayed in a cemetery no one visited, in a big above-ground tomb.
Life hadn’t got at her yet; she had a false air of impregnability. But she had been reduced already, as it were, to the smallest terms—everything was there but on the thinnest lines. That was what the sun did to a child, reduced it to a framework.
Coral—he was accustomed to it by now—had an answer to everything. She never spoke without deliberation; she was prepared—but sometimes the answers she had prepared seemed to him of a wildness … They were based on the only life she could remember,
why wouldn't they be?
A 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.
‘I told him that. I said we couldn’t refuse him a hammock for the night when he arrived so late. But now he must go.’ ‘And he disobeyed you?’ ‘He said he wanted to speak to you.’ ‘He little knew,’
So Coral is in charge
‘They carry their right on their hips. It wouldn’t have done any harm to let him look.’
‘Lying? Good God,’ Captain Fellows said, ‘you don’t mean he’s here.’ ‘Of course he’s here,’ Coral said. ‘Where?’ ‘In the big barn,’ she explained gently. ‘We couldn’t let them catch him.’
She was independent of both of them: they belonged together in the past.
The usually happy and the always unhappy one watched the night thicken from the bed with distrust. They were companions cut off from all the world: there was no meaning anywhere outside their own hearts: they were carried like children in a coach through the huge spaces without any knowledge of their destination.
she had a keen desire to learn. The Reform Bill and Senlac and a little French lay like treasure-trove in her brain. She expected answers to every question, and she absorbed them hungrily.
‘But can’t you,’ she said logically, ‘just give yourself up?’ He had answers as plain and understandable as her questions. He said, ‘There’s the pain. To choose pain like that—it’s not possible. And it’s my duty not to be caught. You see, my bishop is no longer here.’ Curious pedantries moved him. ‘This is my parish.’
