The power and the glory by Graham Greene Page B

tongue out at him. The woman said: "You little devil, you," and raised her hand. "No," the priest said. "No." He scrambled into a sitting position. "Don't you dare...

"I'm her mother."

"We haven't any right." He said to the child: "If only I had some cards I could show you a trick or two. You could teach your friends..." He had never known how to talk to children except from the pulpit. She stared back at him with insolence. He said: "Do you know how to send messages with taps-long, short, long?..."

"What on earth, father!" the woman exclaimed.

"It's a game children play. I know." He said to the child: "Have you any friends?"

The child suddenly laughed again knowingly. The seven-year-old body was like a dwarf's: it disguised an ugly maturity.

"Get out of here," the woman said. "Get out before I teach you..."

She made a last impudent and malicious gesture and was gone-perhaps for ever as far as he was concerned. To those you love you do not always say good-bye beside a deathbed, in an atmosphere of leisure and incense. He said: "I wonder what we can teach..." He thought of his own death and her life going on: it might be his hell to watch her rejoining him gradually through the debasing years, sharing his weakness like tuberculosis.... He lay back on the bed and turned his head away from the draining light: he appeared to be sleeping, but he was wide awake. The woman busied herself with small jobs, and as the sun went down the mosquitoes came out, flashing through the air to their mark unerringly, like sailors' knives. "Shall I put up a net, father?"

"No. It doesn't matter." He had had more fevers in the last ten years than he could count: he had ceased to bother: they came and went and made no difference-they were part of his environment.

Presently she left the hut and he could hear her voice gossiping outside. He was astonished and a bit relieved by her resilience: once for five minutes seven years ago they had been lovers-if you could give that name to a relationship in which she had never used his baptismal name: to her it was just an incident, a scratch which heals completely in the healthy flesh: she was even proud of having been the priest's woman. He alone carried a wound, as if a whole world had ended.

It was dark outside: no sign yet of the dawn. Perhaps two dozen people sat on the earth floor of the largest hut while he preached to them. He couldn't see them with any distinctness: the candles on the packing-case smoked steadily upwards-the door was shut and there was no current of air. He was talking about heaven, standing between them and the candles in the ragged peon trousers and the torn shirt. They grunted and moved restlessly: he knew they were longing for the Mass to be over: they had awakened him very early, because there were rumours of police. …

He said: "One of the fathers has told us that joy always depends on pain. Pain is part of joy. We are hungry and then think how we enjoy our food at last. We are thirsty..." He stopped suddenly, with his eyes glancing away into the shadows, expecting the cruel laugh that never came. He said: "We deny ourselves so that we can enjoy. You have heard of rich men in the north who eat salted foods, so that they can be thirsty-for what they call the cocktail. Before the marriage, too, there is the long betrothal. …" Again he stopped. He felt his own unworthiness like a weight at the back of the tongue. There was a smell of hot wax from where a candle drooped in the immense nocturnal heat: people shifted on the hard floor in the shadows. The smell of unwashed human beings warred with the wax. He cried out stubbornly in a voice of authority: "That is why I tell you that heaven is here: this is a part of heaven just as pain is a part of pleasure." He said: "Pray that you will suffer more and more and more. Never get tired of suffering. The police watching you, the soldiers gathering taxes, the beating you always get from the jefe because you are too poor to