The Heart of the Matter

by Graham Greene

Round the corner, in front of the old cotton tree, where the earliest settlers had gathered their first day on the unfriendly shore, stood the law courts and police station, a great stone building like the grandiloquent boast of weak men. Inside that massive frame the human being rattled in the corridors like a dry kernel.

She would have taken every opening for improvement: she would have steered agilely up the ladders and left the snakes alone. I’ve landed her here he thought, with the odd premonitory sense of guilt he always felt as though he were responsible for something in the future he couldn’t even foresee.

Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn’t had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth.

They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.

‘He’ll do anything for me.’ He said bitterly, ‘A moment ago you said he didn’t love you.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘but he has a terrible sense of responsibility.’

He felt no jealousy, only the dreariness of a man who tries to write an important letter on a damp sheet and finds the characters blur.

in the confusing night he forgot for the while what experience had taught him—that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness.

It was as if they were in a conspiracy together to do no harm: even innocence in Yusef’s hands took on a dubious colour.

Shall I really be so desperate? Scobie wondered, as though in the Syrian’s voice he had heard the genuine accent of prophecy.

you. Here a man’s colour had no value: he couldn’t bluster as a white man could elsewhere: by entering this narrow plaster passage, he had shed every racial, social and individual trait, he had reduced himself to human nature.

… But with open mouth (the time had come) he made one last attempt at prayer, ‘O God, I offer up my damnation to you. Take it. Use it for them,’ and was aware of the pale papery taste of an eternal sentence on the tongue.

He laid his pen down again and loneliness sat across the table opposite him.

Life is going to start again: this nightmare of love is finished.

all. He leant over her and wrenched at the car door: her tears touched his cheek. He could feel the mark like a burn.