The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [18]
Scobie believed him. The story was sufficiently irrational to be true. Even in war-time one must sometimes exercise the faculty of belief if it is not to atrophy. He said, ‘I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do about it. Perhaps nothing will happen.’
‘Your authorities,’ the captain said, ‘will blacklist me. You know what that means. The consul will not give a navicert to any ship with me as captain. I shall starve on shore.’
‘There are so many slips,’ Scobie said, ‘in these matters. Files get mislaid. You may hear no more about it.’
‘I shall pray,’ the man said without hope.
‘Why not?’ Scobie said.
‘You are an Englishman. You wouldn’t believe in prayer.’
‘I’m a Catholic, too,’ Scobie said.
The fat face looked quickly up at him. ‘A Catholic?’ he exclaimed with hope. For the first time he began to plead. He was like a man who meets a fellow countryman in a strange continent. He began to talk rapidly of his daughter in Leipzig; he produced a battered pocket-book and a yellowing snap-shot of a stout young Portuguese woman as graceless as himself. The little bathroom was stiflingly hot and the captain repeated again and again. ‘You will understand.’ He had discovered suddenly how much they had in common: the plaster statues with the swords in the bleeding heart: the whisper behind the confessional curtains: the holy coats and the liquefaction of blood: the dark side chapels and the intricate movements, and somewhere behind it all the love of God. ‘And in Lisbon,’ he said, ‘she will be waiting, she will take me home, she will take away my trousers so that I cannot go out alone; every day it will be drink and quarrels until we go to bed. You will under-stand. I cannot write to my daughter from Lisbon. She loves me so much and she waits.’ He shifted his fat thigh and said, ‘The pureness of that love,’ and wept. They had in common all the wide region of repentance and longing.
Their kinship gave the captain courage to try another angle. He said, ‘I am a poor man, but I have enough money to spare ...’ He would never have attempted to bribe an Englishman: it was the most sincere compliment he could pay to their common religion.
‘I’m sorry,’ Scobie said.
‘I have English pounds. I will give you twenty English pounds... fifty.’ He implored. ‘A hundred... that is all I have saved.’
‘It can’t be done,’ Scobie said. He put the letter quickly in his pocket and turned away. The last time he saw the captain as he looked back from the door of the cabin, he was beating his head against the cistern, the tears catching in the folds of his cheeks. As he went down to join Druce in the saloon he could feel the millstone weighing on his breast. How I hate this war, he thought, in the very words the captain had used.
The letter to the daughter in Leipzig, and a small bundle of correspondence found in the kitchens, was the sole result of eight hours’ search by fifteen men. It could be counted an average day. When Scobie reached the police station he looked in to see the Commissioner, but his office was empty, so he sat down in his own room under the handcuffs and began to write his report ‘A special search was made of the cabins and effects of the passengers named in your telegrams . -.. with no result’ The letter to the daughter in Leipzig lay on the desk beside him. Outside it was dark. The smell of the cells seeped in under the door, and in the next office Fraser was singing to him’ self the same tune he had sung every evening since his last leave:
‘What will we care for
The why and the wherefore,
When you and I
Are pushing up the daisies?’
It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have mined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old death-bed? He wrote: A steward who had been dismissed for incompetence reported that the captain had correspondence concealed in his bathroom. I made a search and found the enclosed letter addressed to Frau Groener in Leipzig concealed in the lid of the lavatory cistern. An instruction on this hiding-place might well be circulated, as it has not been encountered before at this station. The letter was fixed by tape above the water-line ...