The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [53]
‘Can you read aloud?’ Mrs Bowles asked, rising on her toes.
‘I suppose so. Yes.’
‘You can read to the boy. He’s getting bored and boredom’s bad for him.’
‘Where shall I find a book?’
‘There are plenty at the Mission. Shelves of them.’
Anything was better than doing nothing. He walked up to the Mission and found, as Mrs Bowles said, plenty of books. He wasn’t much used to books, but even to his eye these hardly seemed a bright collection for reading to a sick boy. Damp-stained and late Victorian, the bindings bore titles like Twenty Years in the Mission Field, Lost and Found, The Narrow Way, The Missionary’s Warning. Obviously at some time there had been an appeal for books for the Mission library, and here were the scrapings of many pious shelves at home. The Poems of John Oxenham, Fishers of Men. He took a book at random out of the shelf and returned to the rest-house. Mrs Bowles was in her dispensary mixing medicines.
‘Found something?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are safe with any of those books,’ Mrs Bowles said. ‘They are censored by the committee before they come out. Sometimes people try to send the most unsuitable books. We are not teaching the children here to read in order that they shall read - well, novels.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘Let me see what you’ve chosen.’
He looked at the title himself for the first time: A Bishop among the Bantus.
‘That should be interesting,’ Mrs Bowles said. He agreed doubtfully.
‘You blow where to find him. You can read to him for a quarter of an hour - not more.’
The old lady had been moved into the innermost room where the child had died, the man with the bottle-nose had been shifted into what Mrs Bowles now called the convalescence ward, so that the middle room could be given up to the boy and Mrs Rolt. Mrs Rolt lay facing the wall with her eyes closed. They had apparently succeeded in removing the album from her clutch and it lay on a chair beside the bed. The boy watched Scobie with the bright intelligent gaze of fever.
‘My name’s Scobie. What’s yours?’
‘Fisher.’
Scobie said nervously, ‘Mrs Bowles asked me to read to you.’
‘What are you? A soldier?’
‘No, a policeman.’
‘Is it a murder story?’
‘No. I don’t think it is.’ He opened the book at random and came on a photograph of the bishop sitting in his robes on a hard drawing-room chair outside a little tin-roofed church: he was surrounded by Bantus, who grinned at the camera.
‘I’d like a murder story. Have you ever been in a murder?’
‘Not what you’d call a real murder with clues and a chase.’
‘What sort of a murder then?’
‘Well, people get stabbed sometimes fighting.’ He spoke in a low voice so as not to disturb Mrs Rolt. She lay with her fist clenched on the sheet - a fist not much bigger than a tennis ball.
‘What’s the name of the book you’ve brought? Perhaps I’ve read it. I read Treasure Island on the boat. I wouldn’t mind a pirate story. What’s it called?’
Scobie said dubiously, ‘A Bishop among the Bantus’, ‘What does that mean?’
Scobie drew a long breath. ‘Well, you see, Bishop is the name of the hero.’
‘But you said a Bishop.’
‘Yes. His name was Arthur.’
‘It’s a soppy name.’
‘Yes, but he’s a soppy hero.’ Suddenly, avoiding the boy’s eyes, he noticed that Mrs Rolt was not asleep: she was staring at the wall, listening. He went wildly on, ‘The real heroes are the Bantus.’
‘What are Bantus?’
‘They were a peculiarly ferocious lot of pirates who haunted the West Indies and preyed on all the shipping in that part of the Atlantic.’
‘Does Arthur Bishop pursue them?’
‘Yes. It’s a kind of detective story too because he’s a secret agent of the British Government. He dresses up as an ordinary seaman and sails on a merchantman so that he can be captured by the Bantus. You know they always give the ordinary seamen a chance to join them. If he’d been an officer they would have made him walk the plank. Then he discovers all their secret passwords and hiding-places and their