The power and the glory by Graham Greene

furiously: "Whom did they murder?"

"Pedro Montez."

He gave a little yapping cry like a dog's-the absurd shorthand of grief. The old-young child laughed. He said: "Why don't they catch me? The fools. Why don't they catch me?" The little girl laughed again: he stared at her sightlessly, as if he could hear the sound, but couldn't see the face. Happiness was dead again before it had had time to breathe; he was like a woman with a stillborn child-bury it quickly and forget and begin again. Perhaps the next would live.

"You see, father," one of the men said, "why..."

He felt as a guilty man does before his judges. He said: 'Would you rather that I was like... like Padre José in the capital... you have heard of him...?"

They said unconvincingly: "Of course not, father."

He said: "What am I saying now? It's not what you want or what I want." He said sharply, with authority: "I will sleep now... You can wake me an hour before dawn... half an hour to hear your confessions... then Mass, and I will be gone."

But where? There wouldn't be a village in the state to which he wouldn't be an unwelcome danger now.

The woman said: "This way, father."

He followed her into a small room where all the furniture had been made out of packing-cases-a chair, a bed of boards tacked together and covered with a straw mat, a crate on which a cloth had been laid, and on the cloth an oil-lamp. He said: "I don't want to turn anybody out of here."

"It's mine."

He looked at her doubtfully: "Where will you sleep?" He was afraid of claims. He watched her covertly: was this all there was in marriage, this evasion and suspicion and lack of ease? When people confessed to him in terms of passion, was this all they meant-the hard bed and the busy woman and the not talking about the past...?

"When you are gone."

The light flattened out behind the forest and the long shadows of the trees pointed towards the door. He lay down upon the bed, and the woman busied herself somewhere out of sight: he could hear her scratching at the earth floor. He couldn't sleep. Had it become his duty then to run away? He had tried to escape several times, but he had always been prevented... now they wanted him to go. Nobody would stop him, saying a woman was ill or a man dying. He was a sickness now.

"Maria," he said. "Maria, what are you doing?"

"I have saved a little brandy for you."

He thought: If I go, I shall meet other priests: I shall go to confession: I shall feel contrition and be forgiven: eternal life will begin for me all over again. The Church taught that it was every man's first duty to save his own soul. The simple ideas of hell and heaven moved in his brain: life without books, without contact with educated men, had peeled away from his memory everything but the simplest outline of the mystery.

"There," the woman said. She carried a small medicine bottle filled with spirit.

If he left them, they would be safe: and they would be free from his example: he was the only priest the children could remember. It was from him they would take their ideas of the faith. But it was from him too they took God-in their mouths. When he was gone it would be as if God in all this space between the sea and the mountains ceased to exist. Wasn't it his duty to stay, even if they despised him, even if they were murdered for his sake, even if they were corrupted by his example? He was shaken with the enormity of the problem: he lay with his hands over his eyes: nowhere, in all the wide flat marshy land, was there a single person he could consult. He raised the brandy bottle to his mouth.

He said shyly: "And Brigida... is she... well?"

"You saw her just now."

"No." He couldn't believe that he hadn't recognized her. It was making light of his mortal sin: you couldn't do a thing like that and then not even recognize...

"Yes, she was there." Maria went to the door and called: "Brigida, Brigida," and the priest turned on his side and watched her come in out of the outside