The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [47]
‘Down here,’ Perrot said, ‘I’d have had ‘em both in jail.’
‘Up in town,’ Scobie said, ‘we have to think about the law.’
Mrs Perrot turned the knob of the radio and a voice shouted with unexpected vigour, ‘Kick him in the pants.’
‘I’m for bed,’ the doctor said. ‘Tomorrow’s going to be a hard day.’
Sitting up in bed under his mosquito-net Scobie opened his diary. Night after night for more years than he could remember he had kept a record - the barest possible record - of his days. If anyone argued a date with him he could check up; if he wanted to know which day the rains had begun in any particular year, when the last but one Director of Public Works had been transferred to East Africa, the facts were all there, in one of the volumes stored in the tin box under his bed at home. Otherwise he never opened a volume - particularly that volume where the barest fact of all was contained - C. died. He couldn’t have told himself why he stored up this record - it was certainly not for posterity. Even if posterity were to be interested in the life of an obscure policeman in an unfashionable colony, it would have learned nothing from these cryptic entries. Perhaps the reason was that forty years ago at a preparatory school he had been given a prize - a copy of Allan Quatermain - for keeping a diary throughout one summer holiday, and the habit had simply stayed. Even the form the diary took had altered very little. Had sausages for breakfast. Fine day. Walk in morning. Riding lesson in afternoon. Chicken for lunch. Treacle roll. Almost imperceptibly this record had changed into Louise left. Y. called in the evening. First typhoon 2 a.m. His pen was powerless to convey the importance of any entry: only he himself, if he had cared to read back, could have seen in the last phrase but one the enormous breach pity had blasted through his integrity. Y. not Yusef.
Scobie wrote: May 5. Arrived Pende to meet survivors of s.s. 43 (he used the code number for security). Druce with me. He hesitated for a moment and then added, Wilson here. He closed the diary, and lying flat on his back under the net he began to pray. This also was a habit. He said the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and then, as sleep began to clog his lids, he added an act of contrition. It was a formality, not because he felt himself free from serious sin but because it had never occurred to him that his life was important enough one way or another. He didn’t drink, he didn’t fornicate, he didn’t even lie, but he never regarded this absence of sin as virtue. When he thought about it at all, he regarded himself as a man in the ranks, the member of an awkward squad, who had no opportunity to break the more serious military rules. ‘I missed Mass yesterday for insufficient reason. I neglected my evening prayers.’ This was no more than admitting what every soldier did - that he had avoided a fatigue when the occasion offered. ‘O God, bless -’ but before he could mention names he was asleep.
2
They stood on the jetty next morning: the first light lay in cold strips along the eastern sky. The huts in the village were still shuttered with silver. At two that morning there had been a typhoon - a wheeling pillar of black cloud driving up from the coast, and the air was cold yet with the rain. They stood with coat-collars turned up watching the French shore, and the carriers squatted on the ground behind them. Mrs Perrot came down the path from the bungalow wiping the white sleep from her eyes, and from across the water very faintly came the bleating of a goat. ‘Are they late?’ Mrs Perrot asked.
‘No, we are early.’ Scobie kept his glasses focused on the opposite shore. He said, ‘They are stirring.’
‘Those poor souls,’ Mrs Perrot said, and shivered with the morning chill.
‘They are alive,’ the doctor said.
‘Yes.’
‘In my profession we have to consider that important.’
‘Does one ever get over a shock like that? Forty days in open boats.’
‘If you survive at all,’ the doctor said, ‘you get over it. It’s failure people don’t get over, and this you see is a kind of