The power and the glory by Graham Greene Page A

landscape of terror and lust-that small malicious child who had laughed at him.

"Go and speak to the father," Maria said. "Go on."

He made an attempt to hide the brandy bottle, but there was nowhere... he tried to minimize it in his hands, watching her, feeling the shock of human love.

"She knows her catechism," Maria said, "but she won't say it...."

The child stood there, watching him with acuteness and contempt. They had spent no love in her conception: just fear and despair and half a bottle of brandy and the sense of loneliness had driven him to an act which horrified him-and this scared shamefaced overpowering love was the result. He said: "Why not? Why won't you say it?" taking quick secret glances, never meeting her gaze, feeling his heart pound in his breast unevenly, like an old donkey engine, with the balked desire to save her from-everything.

"Why should I?"

"God wishes it."

"How do you know?"

He was aware of an immense load of responsibility: it was indistinguishable from love. This, he thought, must be what all parents feel: ordinary men go through life like this crossing their fingers, praying against pain, afraid.... This is what we escape at no cost at all, sacrificing an unimportant motion of the body. For years, of course, he had been responsible for souls, but that was different... a lighter thing. You could trust God to make allowances, but you couldn't trust smallpox, starvation, men. … He said: "My dear," tightening his grip upon the brandy bottle... he had baptized her at his last visit: she had been like a rag doll with a wrinkled, aged face-it seemed unlikely that she would live long.... He had felt nothing but a regret; it was difficult even to feel shame where no one blamed him. He was the only priest most of them had ever known-they took their standard of the priesthood from him. Even the women.

"Are you the gringo?"

"What gringo?"

The woman said: "The silly little creature. It's because the police have been looking for a man." It seemed odd to hear of any other man they wanted but himself.

"What has he done?"

"He's a Yankee. He murdered some people in the north."

"Why should he be here?"

"They think he's making for Quintana Roo-the chicle plantations." It was where many criminals in Mexico ended up; you could work on a plantation and earn good money and nobody interfered.

"Are you the gringo?" the child repeated.

"Do I look like a murderer?"

"I don't know."

If he left the state, he would be leaving her too, abandoned. He said humbly to the woman: "Couldn't I stay a few days here?"

"It's too dangerous, father."

He caught a look in the child's eyes which frightened him-it was again as if a grown woman was there before her time, making her plans, aware of far too much. It was like seeing his own mortal sin look back at him, without contrition. He tried to find some contact with the child and not the woman; he said: "My dear, tell me what games you play. …" The child sniggered. He turned his face quickly away and stared up at the roof, where a spider moved. He remembered a proverb-it came out of the recesses of his own childhood: his father had used it- "The best smell is bread, the best savour salt, the best love that of children." It had been a happy childhood, except that he had been afraid of too many things, and had hated poverty, like a crime: he had believed that when he was a priest he would be rich and proud-that was called having a vocation. He thought of the immeasurable distance a man travels-from the first whipping-top to this bed, on which he lay clasping the brandy. And to God it was only a moment. The child's snigger and the first mortal sin lay together more closely than two blinks of the eye. He put out his hand as if he could drag her back by force from-something; but he was powerless; the man or the woman waiting to complete her corruption might not yet have been born: how could he guard her against the nonexistent?

She started out of his reach and put her