The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [94]
‘How many times?’
‘I don’t know, Father, many times.’
‘Are you married?’
‘Yes.’ He remembered that evening when Father Rank had nearly broken down before him, admitting his failure to help ... Was he, even while he was struggling to retain the complete anonymity of the confessional, remembering it too? He wanted to say, ‘Help me, Father. Convince me that I would do right to abandon her to Bagster. Make me believe in the mercy of God,’ but he knelt silently waiting: he was unaware of the slightest tremor of hope. Father Rank said, ‘Is it one woman?’
‘Yes.’
‘You must avoid seeing her. Is that possible?’
He shook his head.
‘If you must see her, you must never be alone with her. Do you promise to do that, promise God not me?’ He thought: how foolish it was of me to expect the magic word. This is the formula used so many times on so many people. Presumably people promised and went away and came back and confessed again. Did they really believe they were going to try? He thought: I am cheating human beings every day I live, I am not going to try to cheat myself or God. He replied, ‘It would be no good my promising that, Father.’
‘You must promise. You can’t desire the end without desiring the means.’
Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.
Father Rank said, ‘I don’t need to tell you surely that there’s nothing automatic in the confessional or in absolution. It depends on your state of mind whether you are forgiven. It’s no good coming and kneeling hers unprepared. Before you come here you must know the wrong you’ve done.’
‘I do know that’
‘And you must have a real purpose of amendment. We are told to forgive our brother seventy times seven and we needn’t fear God will be any less forgiving than we are, but nobody can begin to forgive the uncontrite. It’s better to sin seventy times and repent each time than sin once and never repent.’ He could see Father Rank’s hand go up to wipe the sweat out of his eyes: it was like a gesture of weariness. He thought: what is the good of keeping him in this discomfort? He’s right, of course, he’s right. I was a fool to imagine that somehow in this airless box I would find a conviction ... He said, ‘I think I was wrong to come, Father.’
‘I don’t want to refuse you absolution, but I think if you would just go away and turn things over in your mind, you’d come back in a better frame of mind.’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘I will pray for you.’
When he came out of the box it seemed to Scobie that for the first time his footsteps had taken him out of sight of hope. There was no hope anywhere he turned his eyes: the dead figure of the God upon the cross, the plaster Virgin, the hideous stations representing a series of events that had happened a long time ago. It seemed to him that he had only left for his exploration the territory of despair.
He drove down to the station, collected a file and returned home. ‘You’ve been a long time,’ Louise said. He didn’t even know the lie he was going to tell before it was on his lips. ‘That pain came back,’ he said, ‘so I waited for a while.’
‘Do you think you ought to have a drink?’
‘Yes. until anybody tells me not to.’
‘And you’ll see a doctor?’
‘Of course.’
That night he dreamed that he was in a boat drifting down just such an underground river as his boyhood hero Allan Quatermain