The Quiet American

by Graham Greene

‘Not for toys,’ Mr Heng said. ‘It is like parts of a rod.’ ‘The shape is unusual.’ ‘I can’t see what it could be for.’

But even while I made my speech

I knew I was inventing a character just as much as Pyle was. One never knows another human being; for all I could tell, she was as scared as the rest of us: she didn’t have the gift of

expression, that ...

‘Things all right with you again—with her?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Strange. I got the impression that you are—well—unhappy.’ ‘Surely there are plenty of possible reasons for that, Vigot.’ I added bluntly, ‘You should know.’ ‘Me?’

‘You’re not a very happy man yourself.’ ‘Oh, I’ve nothing to complain about. “A ruined house is not miserable.”’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘Pascal again. It’s an argument for being proud of misery. “A tree is not miserable.”’

the Third Force, but this was what it came down to—this was It.

I was in a small shed

It contained one piece of machinery that at first sight seemed like a cage of rods and wires furnished with innumerable perches to hold some wingless adult bird—it

found the name of a manufacturer—somebody in Lyons and a patent number—patenting what? I switched on the current and the old machine came alive: the rods had a purpose—the

I examined the press more closely; there were traces of a white powder. Diolacton, I thought, something in common with milk. There was no sign of a drum or a mould.

drawer where she kept her scarves, and they were not there. I went to the bookshelf—the pictorial Life of the Royal Family had gone too. She had taken her dowry with her. In the moment of shock there is little pain; pain began about three A.M. when I began to plan the life I had still somehow to live

I went to the American Legation and asked for Pyle.

I saw that Pyle wasn’t there. Joe sat behind the desk: the Economic Attaché:

‘I came here to see Pyle, but I suppose he’s hiding.’

Captain Trouin insisted that night on being my host in the opium house, though he would not smoke himself. He liked the smell, he said, he liked the sense of quiet at the end of the day,

hadn’t smoked since Phuong left me. Across the way a métisse with long and lovely legs lay coiled after her smoke reading a glossy woman’s paper, and in the cubicle next to her two middle-aged Chinese transacted business, sipping tea, their pipes laid aside.

I smoked my first pipe. I tried not to think of all the pipes I had smoked at home.

He watched me as I stretched out for my second

pipe. ‘I envy you your means of escape.’ ‘You don’t know what I’m escaping from. It’s not from the war. That’s no concern of mine. I’m not involved.’

‘That photograph you showed me once …’ ‘Oh, I’ve torn that one up. She left me.’ ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘It’s the way things happen. One leaves people oneself and then the tide turns. It almost makes me believe in justice.’

‘That’s why I won’t be involved.’ ‘It’s not a matter of reason or justice. We all get involved in a moment of emotion and then we cannot get out. War and Love—they have always been compared.’

we have to go on fighting till the politicians tell us to stop. Probably they will get together and agree to the same peace that we could have had at

the beginning, making nonsense of all these years.’

‘Hullo, Thomas.’ ‘Hullo, Pyle.

Joe told me you’d been to the Legation. I thought it would be easier to talk here.’ ‘What about?’ He gave a lost gesture, like a boy put up to speak at some school function who cannot find the grown-up words.

All the time that his innocence had angered me, some judge within myself had summed up in his favour, had compared his idealism, his half-baked ideas founded on the works of York Harding, with my cynicism. Oh, I was right about the facts, but wasn’t he right too

This Third Force—it comes out of a book, that’s all. General Thé’s only a bandit with a few thousand men: he’s not a national democracy.’

you can’t trust men like Thé. They aren’t going to

save the East from Communism. We know their kind.’

‘I thought you took no sides.’ ‘I don’t, Pyle, but if someone has got to make a mess of things in your outfit, leave it to Joe. Go home with Phuong. Forget the Third Force.’ ‘Of course I always value your advice, Thomas,’ he said formally.

Phuong’s in the milk-bar.’ ‘No, no,’ he said.

‘How do you know? Where’s your card?’ ‘I warned her not to go.’

then the word ‘warn’ reached my consciousness. I took Pyle by the arm. ‘Warn?’ I said. ‘What do you mean “warn”?’ ‘I told her to keep away this morning.’ The pieces fell together in my mind.

Pyle said, ‘It’s awful.’ He looked at the wet on his shoes and said in a sick voice, ‘What’s that?’ ‘Blood,’ I said. ‘Haven’t you ever seen it before?’ He said, ‘I must get them cleaned before I see the Minister.’ I don’t think he knew what he was saying. He was seeing a real war for the first time:

‘They should have called it off.’ ‘And missed the fun?’ I asked him. ‘Do you expect General Thé to lose his demonstration? This is better than a parade. Women and children are news, and soldiers aren’t, in a war. This will hit the world’s Press. You’ve put General Thé on the map

You’ve got the Third Force and National Democracy all over your right shoe.

I thought, ‘What’s the good? he’ll always be innocent, you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.’

‘Thé wouldn’t have done this. I’m sure he wouldn’t. Somebody deceived him. The Communists …’ He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance.

A two-hundred-pound bomb does not discriminate.

How many dead colonels justify a child’s or a trishaw driver’s death when you are building a national democratic front?

There it is on your shelf. The Role of the West. Who is this York Harding?’ ‘He’s the man you are looking for, Vigot. He killed Pyle—at long range.’

call them diplomatic correspondents. He gets hold of an idea and then alters every situation to fit the idea. Pyle came out here full of York Harding’s idea.

Pyle made the mistake of putting his idea into practice. Harding wrote about a Third Force. Pyle formed one—a shoddy little bandit with two thousand men and a couple of tame tigers.

‘I drive through the streets and I care not a damn, The people they stare, and they ask who I am; And if I should chance to run over a cad, I can pay for the damage if ever so bad. So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho! So pleasant it is to have money.’

‘In a way you could say they died for democracy,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t know how to translate that into Vietnamese.’

had betrayed my own principles; I had become as engagé as Pyle, and it seemed to me that no decision would ever be simple again.

March 1952—June 1955