The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

He walked up to his bungalow; it was distinguished from the others which lay along the bank by a tiled roof, a flag-post without a flag, a plate on the door with the title ‘Central American Banana Company’. Two hammocks were strung up on the veranda, but there was nobody about. Captain Fellows knew where to find his wife. He burst boisterously through a door and shouted, ‘Daddy’s home.’ A scared thin face peeked at him through a mosquito-net; his boots ground peace into the floor; Mrs Fellows flinched away into the white muslin tent. He said, ‘Pleased to see me, Trix?’ and she drew rapidly on her face the outline of her frightened welcome. It was like a trick you do with a blackboard. Draw a dog in one line without lifting the chalk – and the answer, of course, is a sausage. ‘I’m glad to be home,’ Captain Fellows said, and he believed it. It was his one firm conviction – that he really felt the correct emotions of love and joy and grief and hate. He had always been a good man at zero hour. ‘All well at the office?’ ‘Fine,’ Fellows said, ‘fine.’ ‘I had a bit of fever yesterday.’ ‘Ah, you need looking after. You’ll be all right now,’ he said vaguely, ‘that I’m home.’ He shied merrily away from the subject of fever – clapping his hands, a big laugh, while she trembled in her tent.