The Confidential Agent by Graham Greene Read Free Book Online

long walk ahead. But I do assure you – quite seriously – you ought to be careful of these people.’ He began to walk towards London; he could hear Captain Currie exclaiming indignantly in the darkness behind, the word ‘infernal’. It seemed to him that it had been a long day, but on the whole a successful one.
    It had not been an unexpected day: this was the atmosphere in which he had lived for two years. If he had found himself on a desert island, he would have expected to infect even the loneliness somehow with violence. You couldn’t escape a war by changing your country; you only changed the technique – fists instead of bombs, the sneak thief instead of the artillery bombardment. Only in sleep did he evade violence; his dreams were almost invariably made up of peaceful images from the past – compensation? wish-fulfilment? He was no longer interested in his own psychology. He dreamed of lecture-rooms, his wife, sometimes of food and wine, very often of flowers.
    He walked in the ditch to escape cars; the world was blanketed in white silence. Sometimes he passed a bungalow dark among chicken coops. The chalky cutting of the road took headlamps like a screen. He wondered what L.’s next move would be; he hadn’t much time left, and to-day had got him nowhere at all. Except that by now he certainly knew about the appointment with Benditch; it had been indiscreet to mention it to Benditch’s daughter, but he hadn’t imagined then this meeting between the two. Practical things began to absorb him, to the exclusion of weariness or pain. The hours went quite rapidly by. He moved automatically; only when he had thought long enough did he begin to consider his feet, the chance of a lift. Presently he heard a lorry grinding up a hill behind him and he stepped into the road and signalled – a battered middle-aged figure who carried himself with an odd limping sprightliness.

[2]
    The early morning trams swung round the public lavatory in Theobald’s Road in the direction of Kingsway. The lorries came in from the eastern counties aiming at Covent Garden. In a big leafless Bloomsbury square a cat walked homewards from some alien rooftop. The city, to D., looked extraordinarily exposed and curiously undamaged; nobody stood in a queue; there was no sign of a war except himself. He carried his infection past the closed shops, a tobacconist’s, a twopenny library. He knew the number he wanted, but he put his hand in his pocket to check it – the notebook was gone. So they had got something for their trouble, but it had contained nothing but his address that was of any significance to them – a recipe he had noticed in a French paper for making the most of cabbage; a quotation he had found somewhere from an English poet of Italian origin which had expressed a mood connected with his own dead:
    â€˜. . . the beat
    Following her daily of thy heart and feet,
    How passionately and irretrievably
    In what fond flight, how many ways and days.’
    There was also a letter from a French quarterly on the subject of the Song of Roland, referring to an old article of his own. He wondered what L. or his chauffeur would make of the quotation. Perhaps they would look for a code: there was no limit to the credulity and also the mistrust inherent in human beings.
    Well, he remembered the number – 35. He was a little surprised to find that it was a hotel, though not a good hotel. The open outer door was a sure mark of its nature in every city in Europe. He took stock of his surroundings – he remembered the district very slightly. Attached to it was a haze of sentiment from his British Museum days, days of scholarship and peace and courtship. The street opened at the end into a great square – trees blackened with frost: the fantastic cupolas of a great inexpensive hotel: an advertisement for Russian baths. He went in and rang at the glass inner door. Somewhere a