The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

‘Surely,’ he asked in bewilderment, ‘that is not likely?’ She said airily, ‘These things do happen.’

‘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.’

‘I hope you’ll escape.’ A faint sigh came out of the darkness. 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. It was her life.

He had nearly reached the state of permanency too, but he carried about with him the scars of time—the damaged shoes implied a different past, the lines of his face suggested hopes and fears of the future.

The animal was tired and they waited for the next move. They were not hard-hearted; they were watching the rare spectacle of something worse off than themselves.

‘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.

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. It might prove awkward if she had married again, but in that case she wouldn’t hesitate to tear the letter up.

Sylvia,

The best old school name

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

The years really meant nothing to him—they drifted fairly rapidly by without changing a habit.

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

There was a sense of intimacy—you could go anywhere and see anything. Life here had withdrawn altogether.

They were quite accustomed to people dying, but an unforeseen hope of happiness had bobbed up among the tombs: they could boast after this that one at least of their family had gone into the ground with an official-prayer.

innocent,’ he said. The word in the little stony town sounded odd and archaic and local, outdated like the Lopez tomb, belonging only here.

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. The woman began to cry, dryly, without tears, the trapped noise of something wanting to be released; the old man fell on his knees with his hands held out.

He knew it was absurd: a lifetime of self-analysis enabled him to see himself as he was, fat and ugly and old and humiliated. It was as if a whole seducing choir of angels had silently withdrawn and left the voices of the children in the patio—‘Come to bed, José, come to bed,’ sharp and shrill and worse than they had ever been. He knew he was in the grip of the unforgivable sin, despair.

‘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.’

‘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.’

The little shabby books had come by post from a firm in Paternoster Row called Private Tutorials, Ltd—a whole education which began with ‘Reading Without Tears’ and went methodically on to the Reform Bill and Lord Palmerston and the poems of Victor Hugo.

She didn’t wait for any further answer; she knew quite well there would be none—it was always her job to make decisions.

She carried her responsibilities carefully like crockery across the hot yard: there was no question she wasn’t prepared to answer; the vultures rose languidly at her approach.

After half an hour she began to feel tired—she wasn’t used to weariness so early in the day. She leant against the wall and it scorched her shoulder-blades. 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.

It was a new pain (not worms this time), but it didn’t scare her; it was as if her body had expected it, had grown up to it, as the mind grows up to the loss of tenderness. You couldn’t call it childhood draining out of her: of childhood she had never really been conscious.

Never before had it occurred to her to do a job unwillingly—if she didn’t do a thing nobody would—but today she wanted to lie down, to sleep: if all the bananas didn’t get away it was her father’s fault.

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.

The situation was ignoble; he wanted to eliminate anything in the state at which a foreigner might have cause to sneer.

It was a Sunday and all the shops closed at noon—that was the only relic of the old time. No bells rang anywhere.

Where will you start?’ ‘His parish, I think, Concepción, and then—perhaps—his home.’ ‘Why there?’ ‘He may think he’s safe there.’ He brooded past the shuttered shops. ‘It’s worth a few deaths, but will he, do you think, support me if they make a fuss in Mexico City?’

‘That’s right, but you must aim better.’ He kicked the broken bottle into the road and tried to think of words which would show these children that they were on the same side. He said, ‘I suppose the gringo was one of those rich Yankees …’ and surprised an expression of devotion in the boy’s face; it called for something in return, and the lieutenant became aware in his own heart of a sad and unsatisfiable love. He said, ‘Come here.’ The child approached, while his companions stood in a scared semicircle and watched from a safe distance. ‘What is your name?’ ‘Luis.’

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—first the Church and then the foreigner and then the politician—even his own chief would one day have to go. He wanted to begin the world again with them, in a desert.

It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.

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. It was a buffoon’s face, good enough for mild jokes to women, but unsuitable at the altar-rail. He had tried to change it—and indeed, he thought, indeed I have succeeded, they’ll never recognize me now, and the cause of his happiness came back to him like the taste of brandy, promising temporary relief from fear, loneliness, a lot of things.

The routine of his life like a dam was cracked and forgetfulness came dribbling through, wiping out this and that.

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.

He felt secure—he was confident of a welcome, confident that in this place there would be at least one person he could trust not to betray him to the police.

He smiled, looking at the ground, while she chided him like a housekeeper: it was just as in the old days when there was a presbytery and meetings of the Children of Mary and all the guilds and gossip of a parish, except of course that … He said gently, not looking at her, with the same embarrassed smile, ‘How’s Brigitta?’ His heart jumped at the name: a sin may have enormous consequences: it was six years since he had been—home.

Oh no he didn't.

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.

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.

He watched her covertly: 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?

He had tried to escape several times, but he had always been prevented … now they wanted him to go. Nobody would stop him, saying a woman was ill or a man dying. He was a sickness now.

The Church taught that it was every man’s first duty to save his own soul. The simple ideas of hell and heaven moved in his brain; life without books, without contact with educated men, had peeled away from his memory everything but the simplest outline of the mystery.

He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t recognized her. It was making light of his mortal sin: you couldn’t do a thing like that and then not even recognize

Oh but he did...

feeling the shock of human love.

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.

feeling his heart pound in his breast unevenly, like an old donkey engine, with the baulked desire to save her from—everything.

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.

had hated poverty like a crime; he had believed that when he was a priest he would be rich and proud—that was called having a vocation.