The power and the glory by Graham Greene Read Free Book Online

inanimate things: it was like an infection. You could look at nothing for long without becoming aware that it, too, carried the germ... the word "sheet" even. She threw the sheet off her and said: "It's so hot, it's so hot." The usually happy and the always unhappy one watched the night thicken from the bed with distrust. They were companions cut off from all the world: there was no meaning anywhere outside their own hearts: they were carried like children in a coach through the huge spaces without any knowledge of their destination. He began to hum with desperate cheerfulness a song of the war years: he wouldn't listen to the footfall in the yard outside, going in the direction of the barn.

Coral put down the chicken legs and tortillas on the ground and unlocked the door. She carried a bottle of Cerveza Moctezuma under her arm. There was the same scuffle in the dark: the noise of a frightened man. She said: "It's me," to quieten him, but she didn't turn on the torch. She said: "There's a bottle of beer here, and some food."

"Thank you. Thank you."

"The police have gone from the village-south. You had better go north."

He said nothing.

She asked, with the cold curiosity of a child: "What would they do to you if they found you?"

"Shoot me."

"You must be very frightened," she said with interest.

He felt his way across the barn towards the door and the pale starlight. He said: "I am frightened," and stumbled on a bunch of bananas.

"Can't you escape from here?"

"I tried. A month ago. The boat was leaving and then-I was summoned."

"Somebody needed you?"

"She didn't need me," he said bitterly. Coral could just see his face now, as the world swung among the stars: what her father would call an untrustworthy face. He said: "You see how unworthy I am. Talking like this."

"Unworthy of what?"

He clasped his little attaché case closely and said: "Could you tell me what month it is? Is it still February?"

"No. It's the seventh of March."

"I don't often meet people who know. That means another month-six weeks-before the rains." He went on: "When the rains come I am nearly safe. You see, the police can't get about."

"The rains are best for you?" she asked: she had a keen desire to learn. The Reform Bill and Senlac and a little French Jay like treasure-trove in her brain. She expected answers to every question, and she absorbed them hungrily.

"Oh, no, no. They mean another six months living like this." He tore at a chicken leg. She could smell his breath: it was disagreeable, like something which has lain about too long in the heat. He said: "I'd rather be caught."

"But can't you," she said logically, "just give yourself up?"

He had answers as plain and understandable as her questions. He said: "There's the pain. To choose pain like that-it's not possible. And it's my duty not to be caught. You see, my bishop is no longer here." Curious pedantries moved him. "This is my parish." He found a tortilla and began to eat ravenously.

She said solemnly: "It's a problem." She could hear a gurgle as he drank out of the bottle. He said: "I try to remember how happy I was once." A firefly lit his face like a torch and then went out-a tramp's face: what could ever have made it happy? He said: "In Mexico City now they are saying Benediction. The bishop's there... Do you imagine he ever thinks …? They don't even know I'm alive."

She said: "Of course you could-renounce."

"I don't understand."

"Renounce your faith," she said, using the words of her European History.

He said: "It's impossible. There's no way. I'm a priest. It's out of my power."

The child listened intently. She said: "Like a birthmark" She could hear him sucking desperately at the bottle. She said: "I think I could find my father's brandy."

"Oh, no, you mustn't steal." He drained the beer: a long whistle in the darkness: the last drop must have gone. He said: "I must go. At once."

"You can always come back here."

"Your father would not like it."

"He needn't