The Quiet American by Graham Greene Read Free Book Online

her. “Import, export. She can do short-
    I wish we had more like her in the Economic Mission.” “I will speak to her,” Phuong said. “She would like to work for the Americans.”
    After dinner they danced again. I am a bad dancer too and I hadn’t the unselfconsciousness of Pyle-or had I possessed it, I wondered, in the days when I was first in love with Phuong? There must have been many occasions at the Grand Monde before the memorable night of Miss Hei’s illness when I had danced with Phuong just for an opportunity to speak to her. Pyle was taking no such opportunity as they came round the floor again; he had relaxed a little, that was all, and was holding her less at arm’s length, but they were both silent. Suddenly watching her feet, so light and precise and mistress of his shuffle, I was in love again. I could hardly believe that in an hour, two hours, she would be coming back with me to that dingy room with the communal closet and the old women squatting on the landing.
    I wished I had never heard the rumour about Phat Diem, or that the rumour had dealt with any other town than the one place in the north where my friendship with a French naval officer would allow me to slip in, uncensored, uncontrolled. A newspaper scoop? Not in those days when all the world wanted to read about was Korea. A chance of death? Why should I want to die when Phuong slept beside me every night? But I knew the answer to that question. From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year, Phuong would leave me. If not next year, in three years. Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people al-
    Always. Everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.
    “Forgive me for taking Miss Phuong from you,” Pyle’s said.
    “Oh. I’m no dancer, but I like watching her dance.” One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace.
    The first cabaret of the evening began: a singer, a jug-gler, a comedian-he was very obscene, but when I looked at Pyle he obviously couldn’t follow the argot. He smiled when Phuong smiled and laughed uneasily when I laughed. “I wonder where Granger is now,” I said, and Pyle looked at me reproachfully.
    Then came the turn of the evening: a troupe of female impersonators. I had seen many of them during the day in the rue Catinat walking up and down, in old slacks and sweaters, a bit blue about the chin, swaying their hips. Now in low-cut evening dresses, with false jewellery and false breasts and husky voices, they appeared at least as desirable as most of the European women in Saigon. A group of young Air Force officers whistled to them and they smiled glamorously back. I was astonished by the sudden violence of Pyle’s protest. “Fowlair,” he said, “let’s go. We’ve had enough, haven’t we? This isn’t a bit suitable for her.”
     
     

CHAPTER IV
     
    From the bell tower of the Cathedral, the battle was only picturesque, fixed like a panorama of the Boer War in an old Illustrated London News. An aeroplane was parachuting supplies to an isolated post in the calcaire those strange weather-eroded mountains on the Annam border that look like piles of pumice, and because it always returned to the same place for its glide, it might never have moved, and the parachute was always there in the same