The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [2]
Scobie climbed the great steps and turned to his right along the shaded outside corridor to his room: a table, two kitchen chairs, a cupboard, some rusty handcuffs hanging on a nail like an old hat, a filing cabinet: to a stranger it would have appeared a bare uncomfortable room but to Scobie it was home. Other men slowly build up the sense of home by accumulation - a new picture, more and more books, an odd-shaped paper-weight, the ash-tray bought for a forgotten reason on a forgotten holiday; Scobie built his home by a process of reduction. He had started out fifteen years ago with far more than this. There had been a photograph of his wife, bright leather cushions from the market an easy-chair, a large coloured map of the port on the wall. The map had been borrowed by younger men: it was of no more use to him; he carried the whole coastline of the colony in his mind’s eye: from Kufa Bay to Medley was his beat. As for the cushions and the easy-chair, he had soon discovered how comfort of that kind down in the airless town meant heat. Where the body was touched or enclosed it sweated. Last of all his wife’s photograph had been made unnecessary by her presence. She had joined him the first year of the phoney war and now she couldn’t get away: the danger of submarines had made her as much a fixture as the handcuffs on the nail. Besides, it had been a very early photograph, and he no longer cared to be reminded of the unformed face, the expression calm and gentle with lack of knowledge, the lips parted obediently in the smile the photographer had demanded. Fifteen years form a face, gentleness ebbs with experience, and he was always aware of his own responsibility. He had led the way: the experience that had come to her was the experience selected by himself. He had formed her face.
He sat down at his bare table and almost immediately his Mende sergeant clicked his heels in the doorway. ‘Sah?’
‘Anything to report?’
‘The Commissioner want to see you, sah.’
‘Anything on the charge sheet?’
‘Two black men fight in the market, sah,’
‘Mammy trouble?’
‘Yes, sah,’
‘Anything else?’
‘Miss Wilberforce want to see you, sah, I tell her you was at church and she got to come back by-and-by, but she stick. She say she no budge.’
‘Which Miss Wilberforce is that, sergeant?’
‘I don’t know, sah. She come from Sharp Town, sah.’
‘Well, I’ll see her after the Commissioner. But no one else, mind.’
‘Very good, sah.’
Scobie, passing down the passage to the Commissioner’s room, saw the girl sitting alone on a bench against the wall: he didn’t look twice: he caught only the vague impression of a young black African face, a bright cotton frock, and then she was already out of his mind, and he was wondering what he should say to the Commissioner. It had been on his mind all that week.
‘Sit down, Scobie.’ The Commissioner was an old man of fifty-three - one counted age by the years a man had served in the colony. The Commissioner with twenty-two years’ service was the oldest man there, just as the Governor was a stripling of sixty compared with any district officer who had five years’ knowledge behind him.
‘I’m retiring, Scobie,’ the Commissioner said, ‘after this tour.’
‘I know.’
‘I suppose everyone knows.’
‘I’ve heard the men talking about it.’
‘And yet you are the second man I’ve told. Do they say who’s taking my place?’
Scobie said, ‘They know who isn’t.’
‘It’s damned unfair,’ the Commissioner said. ‘I can do nothing more than I have done, Scobie. You are a wonderful man for picking up enemies. Like Aristides the Just’
‘I don’t think I’m as just as all that’
‘The question is what do you want to do? They are sending a man called Baker from Gambia. He’s younger than you are. Do you want to resign, retire, transfer, Scobie?’
‘I want to stay,’ Scobie said,
‘Your wife won’t like it’
‘I’ve been here too long to go.’ He thought to himself, poor