The Man Within by Graham Greene Read Free Book Online

middle of the road. His back was turned and his hands were clasped behind him. Andrews could not mistake the light poise of the legs and shoulders that seemed to symbolize a spirit on tiptoe. He had been walking so fast up the hill that when he suddenly checked himself he nearly stumbled forward on his hands and knees. Although he had spent the last three days in almost continuous fear of Carlyon, now when the moment he had dreaded seemed to have arrived, his first instinct was not that of flight. It appeared incredible that he should so fear Carlyon, the man to whom he had turned continually for companionship in an alien and brutal life. He was only saved from stepping forward and touching Carlyon’s elbow by the sight of the man’s hands. Their clasp was tense, strained. They were the hands of a man holding himself as still as he was able in order to listen. Andrews half shifted a foot and the shoulders in front of him stiffened. He remembered a remark that Carlyon had once made to him, prompted by a sudden friendliness, ‘I’d know your step, Andrews, in a thousand.’ He could see quite clearly the strange ugly face of Carlyon as it had looked at him then shaded with an abstract tenderness. The face was a little swarthy, and very angular. A low brow belied the intelligence within. It would have been a crude, almost criminal face if divorced from the quick but heavy body and the eyes which seemed brooding always on indefinable things, save when they lit with a kind of contempt at the body which housed them. The face had once been described as that of a chivalrous ape.
    The hands like the hands of an ape would be strong. Andrews, moving as softly as he was able, took three steps backward and was swallowed in the mist. He waited listening with a racing heart; the sound of its beats he felt would drown any noise there might be. He could no longer see Carlyon and therefore he was certain that Carlyon could not see him. The anxiety that pecked at his nerve was the uncertainty whether or not Carlyon had recognized his tread. He waited, afraid to run, because in doing so he would be forced to turn his back.
    No sound came, except a gentle, reiterated drip from a bough behind his right ear. He tried to persuade himself that Carlyon had heard nothing, and yet he could not banish the image of the tightly clenched hands. His mind changed tack and protested that even if Carlyon had heard and recognized his tread there was no cause for fear. Carlyon had, after all, no reason for supposing that he, Andrews, had been the cause of a certain disastrous fight. Carlyon was his friend. ‘My friend, my friend, my friend,’ he repeated to try to soothe the panic in his heart.
    Minutes must have passed before a sound broke the stillness. It was not a sound which Andrews had expected to hear. It was that of a low whistle, no louder than a man unconsciously might give in amazement. Andrews had counted six louder heartbeats when the whistle was repeated. Then there was silence. Andrews very cautiously withdrew himself to the side of the road and a little farther into the mist. His movements sounded terribly loud to his own ears. He bent forward and listened. A vague orange glow showed where the tunnel of mist came to an abrupt end. A few yards beyond stood the invisible Carlyon. Andrews did not believe that he had shifted so much as a foot.
    Andrews bent a little farther forward. He thought that he could hear a gentle whisper. He shivered. There was something uncanny in the thought of Carlyon with sad, ape-like face standing very still with back turned and tensed clenched hands, whistling and whispering to himself. For a moment Andrews wondered whether his friend (he found it impossible even in flight and fear to think of Carlyon other than as a friend) had been driven mad by the events of the last few days. He wanted to advance out of his tunnel and take Carlyon’s arm. He thought, as he had often thought before, how different everything