The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [75]
‘I’m sorry. I can’t wait,’ Wilson said. ‘Here’s ten bob,’ and he made the preliminary motions of departure, but the old woman paid him no attention at all, blocking the way, smiling steadily like a dentist who knows what’s good for you. Here a man’s colour had no value: he couldn’t bluster as a white man could elsewhere: by entering this narrow plaster passage, he had shed every racial, social and individual trait, he had reduced himself to human nature. If he had wanted to hide, here was the perfect hiding-place; if he had wanted to be anonymous, here he was simply a man. Even his reluctance, disgust and fear were not personal characteristics; they were so common to those who came here for the first time that the old woman knew exactly what each move would be. First the suggestion of a drink, then the offer of money, after that...
Wilson said weakly, ‘Let me by,’ but he knew that she wouldn’t move; she stood watching him, as though he were a tethered animal on whom she was keeping an eye for its owner. She wasn’t interested in him, but occasionally she repeated calmly, ‘Pretty girl jig jig by-and-by.’ He held out a pound to her and she pocketed it and went on blocking the way. When he tried to push by, she thrust him backwards with a casual pink palm, saying, ‘By-an-by. Jig jig.’ It had all happened so many hundreds of times before.
Down the passage the girl came carrying a vinegar bottle filled with palm wine, and with a sigh of reluctance Wilson surrendered. The heat between the walls of rain, the musty smell of his companion, the dim and wayward light of the kerosene lamp reminded him of a vault newly opened for another body to be let down upon its floor. A grievance stirred in him, a hatred of those who had brought him here. In their presence he felt as though his dead veins would bleed again.
PART THREE
Chapter One
1
HELEN said, ‘I saw you on the beach this afternoon.’ Scobie looked up from the glass of whisky he was measuring. Something in her voice reminded him oddly of Louise. He said, ‘I had to find Rees - the Naval Intelligence man.’
‘You didn’t even speak to me.’
‘I was in a hurry.’
‘You are so careful, always,’ she said, and now he realized what was happening and why he had thought of Louise. He wondered sadly whether love always inevitably took the same road. It was not only the act of love itself that was the same. ... How often in the last two years he had tried to turn away at the critical moment from just such a scene - to save himself but also to save the other victim. He laughed with half a heart and said, ‘For once I wasn’t thinking of you. I had other things in mind.’
‘What other things?’
‘Oh, diamonds ...’
‘Your work is much more important to you than I am,’ Helen said, and the banality of the phrase, read in how many bad novels, wrung his heart.
‘Yes,’ he said gravely, ‘but I’d sacrifice it for you.’
‘Why?’
‘I suppose because you are a human being. Somebody may love a dog more than any other possession, but he wouldn’t run down even a strange child to save it’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘why do you always tell me the truth? I don’t want the truth all the time.’
He put the whisky glass in her hand and said, ‘Dear, you are unlucky. You are tied up with a middle-aged man. We can’t be bothered to lie all the time like the young.’
‘If you knew,’ she said, ‘how tired I get of all your caution. You come here after dark and you go after dark. It’s so-so ignoble.’
‘Yes.’
‘We always make love - here. Among the junior official’s furniture. I don’t believe we’d know how to do it anywhere else.’
‘Poor you,’ he said.
She said furiously, ‘I don’t want your pity.’ But it was not a question of whether she wanted it - she had it. Pity smouldered like decay at his heart. He would never rid himself of it. He knew from experience how passion died away and how love went, but pity always stayed. Nothing ever diminished pity. The conditions of life nurtured it. There was only a single person in the world who was unpitiable, oneself.
‘Can’t you ever risk anything?