The Quiet American

by Graham Greene

do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world. Well, he was in his element now with the whole universe to improve.

No one but Pyle was responsible. Aren’t we all better dead? the opium reasoned within me. But I looked cautiously at Phuong,

She must have loved him in her way: hadn’t she been fond of me and hadn’t she left me for Pyle? She had attached herself to youth and hope and seriousness and now they had failed her more than age and despair.

I said to Vigot, ‘What hours are you interested in?’ ‘Between six and ten.’

‘I had a drink at the Continental at six. The waiters will remember.

took a trishaw to the Vieux Moulin—I suppose I arrived about eight thirty—and had dinner by myself. Granger was there—you can ask him. Then I took a trishaw back about a quarter to ten. You could probably find the driver. I was expecting Pyle at ten, but he didn’t turn up.’

‘And this girl of his?—do you know where she was?’ ‘She was waiting for him outside at midnight. She was anxious. She knows nothing. Why, can’t you see she’s waiting for him still?’ ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘He was in the water under the bridge to Dakow.’ The Vieux Moulin stood beside the bridge.

It wasn’t safe to cross the bridge at night, for all the far side of the river was in the hands of the Vietminh

after dark.

‘To speak plainly,’ Vigot said, ‘I am not altogether sorry. He was doing a lot of harm.’ ‘God save us always,’ I said, ‘from the innocent and the good.’ ‘The good?’ ‘Yes, good. In his way.

They pulled him out like a tray of ice-cubes, and I looked at him. The wounds were frozen into placidity.

‘You recognize him?’ ‘Oh yes.’

He looked more than ever out of place: he should have stayed at home.

He belonged to the skyscraper and the express elevator, the ice-cream and the dry Martinis, milk at lunch, and chicken sandwiches on the Merchant Limited.

‘He was drowned in the mud. We found the mud in his lungs.’

I was no longer on my dignity. Death takes away vanity—even the vanity of the cuckold who mustn’t show his pain. She was still unaware of what it was about,

I had no technique for telling her slowly and gently.

It wouldn’t have done to cable the details of his true career, that before he died he had been responsible for at least fifty deaths, for it would have damaged Anglo-American relations,

‘Where is Pyle?’ Phuong asked. ‘What did they want?’ ‘Come home,’ I said. ‘Will Pyle come?’

‘Another pipe?’ Phuong asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Phuong,’ I said. She was kneading the opium on the bowl. ‘Il est mort, Phuong.’ She held the needle in her hand and looked up at me like a child trying to concentrate, frowning. ‘Tu dis?’ ‘Pyle est mort. Assassiné.’

There was no scene, no tears, just thought—the long private thought of somebody who has to alter a whole course of life.

Pyle was quiet, he seemed modest,

And he was very, very serious.

But he criticized nobody.

‘Have you read York Harding?’

‘York

wrote a book called The Advance of Red China. It’s a very profound book.’ ‘I haven’t read it. Do you know him?’

‘I don’t know him well,’ he said. ‘I guess I only met him twice.’

‘Of course I always like to know what the man on the spot has to say,’ he replied guardedly. ‘And then check it with York?’ ‘Yes.’

‘Have another bottle of beer and I’ll try to give you an idea of things.’ I began, while he watched me intently like a prize pupil, by explaining the situation in the north, in Tonkin, where the French in those days were hanging on to the delta of the Red River, which contained Hanoi and the

only northern port, Haiphong.

‘That’s the north,’ I said. ‘The French may hold, poor devils, if the Chinese don’t come to help the Vietminh. A war of jungle and mountain and marsh, paddy fields where you wade shoulder-high and the enemy simply disappear, bury their arms, put on peasant dress. But you can rot comfortably in the damp in Hanoi.

‘And here in the south?’ ‘The French control the main roads until seven in the evening: they control the watch towers after that, and the towns—part of them. That doesn’t mean you are safe,

‘Take the case of the Caodaists.’ Or

the Hoa-Haos or the Binh Xuyen, all the private armies who sold their services for money or revenge. Strangers found them picturesque, but there is nothing picturesque in treachery and distrust.

‘there’s General Thé. He was Caodaist Chief of Staff, but he’s taken to the hills to fight both side...

I might have saved all of us a lot of trouble, even Pyle, if I had realized the direction of that indefatigable young brain. But I left him with arid bones of background

He would have to learn for himself the real background that held you as a smell does: the gold of the rice-fields under a flat late sun: the fishers’ fragile cranes hovering over the fields like mosquitoes:

the mollusc hats of the girls repairing the road where a mine had burst: the gold and the young green and the bright dresses of the south, and in the north the deep browns and the black clothes and the circle of enemy mountains and the drone of planes.

Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death.

One is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me that morning to take up our old life together.

‘Have you any views?’ he asked. ‘Too many,’ I said.

‘Well, he might have been murdered by the Vietminh.

Or he might have been killed by the Vietnamese Sureté—it’s been known. Perhaps they didn’t like his friends. Perhaps he was killed by Caodaists because he knew General Thé.’

Perhaps he was killed by General Thé because he knew the Caodaists. Perhaps he was killed by the Hoa-Haos for making passes at the General’s concubines. Perhaps

he was just killed by someone who wanted his money.’

‘Or perhaps by the French Sureté,’ I continued, ‘because they didn’t like his contacts.