Twenty-One Stories

by Graham Greene

At first it was difficult not to laugh, and then after a while there didn’t seem to be much to laugh at: an old man imagining all the fine things going on beyond the international bridge. I think he thought of the town opposite as a combination of London and Norfolk—theatres and cocktail bars, a little shooting and a walk round the field at evening with the dog—that miserable imitation of a setter—poking the ditches. He’d never been across, he couldn’t know it was just the same thing over again—even the same layout; only the streets were paved and the hotels had ten more storeys, and life was more expensive, and everything was a little bit cleaner.

Death doesn’t change comedy to tragedy, and if that last gesture was one of affection, I suppose it was only one more indication of a human being’s capacity for self-deception, our baseless optimism that is so much more appalling than our despair.

She was a year older than I was: she must have been just on the point of eight. I loved her with an intensity I have never felt since, I believe, for anyone. At least I have never made the mistake of laughing at children’s love.

There is something about innocence one is never quite resigned to lose. Now when I am unhappy about a girl, I can simply go and buy another one. Then the best I could think of was to write some passionate message and slip it into a hole (it was extraordinary how I began to remember everything) in the woodwork of the gate.

All I could remember was the purity, the intensity, the pain of that passion.

I had believed I was drawing something with a meaning and beautiful; it was only now after thirty years of life that the picture seemed obscene.

What the Colonel thought of most was Weaver’s claim—‘Proof positive’—proof, he had probably meant, that the spirit outlived the body, that it tasted eternity. But all he had certainly revealed was how, without the body’s aid, the spirit in seven days decayed into whispered nonsense.

He would answer: ‘You can say I’m ill. I won’t go. I’m afraid of the dark.’ And his mother: ‘Don’t be silly. You know there’s nothing to be afraid of in the dark.’ But he knew the falsity of that reasoning; he knew how they taught also that there was nothing to fear in death, and how fearfully they avoided the idea of it. But