Graham Greene – The Heart of the Matter Nov 16, 2018

Heart Of The Matter - First Edition, 1948

Greene in his epigraph to this novel quotes Charles Péguy to the effect that no one can know Christianity better than a sinner – unless it be a saint. 

Thommo, Geetha, Devika, Saras, Sudesh Jain, Priya

There is a lot about Catholicism in this novel which led to Greene being called a Catholic novelist, instead of a novelist who happened to be Catholic (which he preferred). The suicide ending the novel is made to appear as an irreconcilable conflict between Scobie's religious beliefs and and his sinful ways. But suicide is usually a result of clinical depression, complete despair, isolation, and seeing no way out of a morass of troubles. The other kind of suicide is the Japanaese seppuku, to retrieve honour in an extreme situation.

Sudesh Jain, Priya, KumKum, Zakia

Pity is a word much used in this novel (thirty-five times to be precise), and forms the basis for the marital bond, as well as the extra-marital foray of Scobie. Scobie has raised Pity to the level of a Cardinal Virtue, so that he may be called the Patron Saint of Pity. The depth of this feeling tears him apart when two pities are ranged on opposing parties.

Priya and KumKum

Equally, one may say it is Scobie's overweening sense of personal Responsibility for the happiness of others that lies at the root of his moral perplexity. It does not occur to him that people are quite capable of taking care of their own happiness (or unhappiness), and can reconcile with their own frustrations and unmet expectations. Søren Kierkegaard would say he is seeking spiritual and ethical integrity, but not focusing on it single-mindedly (cf. Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing).

Sudesh Jain

Here are a few memorable quotations from the novel:

We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.

The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being—it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

The group presented themselves at the end of the session, which included refreshments for Geetha's birthday; Zakia had to leave early. 

Geetha, Devika, Saras, KumKum, Priya (standing) Sudesh Jain, Joe, Thommo (sitting)

Photo by Yousuf Karsh of Ottawa

Graham Greene – The Heart of the Matter

Full Account and Record of the Reading on Nov 16, 2018

Present: Geetha, Devika, Saras, KumKum, Priya, Zakia, Joe, Thommo 
Virtually Present: Gopa, Pamela
Absent: Sunil, Preeti, Kavita, Shoba, Hemjit
Guest: Sudesh Jain

Here is the final list of Novels selected for reading in 2019:--

Jan — Saras, Devika

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

Mar — Preeti, Kavita, Geetha

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

May — Hemjit, Pamela, Gopa

The Devil's Advocate by Morris West

Jul — Zakia, Shoba, Sunil

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Sep — Thommo, Priya 

Puckoon by Spike Milligan

Nov — KumKum & Joe

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The date for the next Poetry Reading is Dec 7 at 5:30pm, followed by dinner for KRG members and their SO’s at the Cochin Yacht Club Dining Room. The dinner is sponsored by KRG.

The reading of The Heart of the Matter was introduced with a biography of Graham Greene by Joe. What follows is an expanded version.

Graham Greene Biography

Graham Greene was born in 1904 in Hereford, England near the Welsh border; his mother was a cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson. He had an early love for tales of adventure such as Stevenson wrote. Greene went to Berkhamsted School, hundred miles to the east of Hereford, where his father was headmaster. He was miserable there and suffered depression, and toyed with suicide even as a boy – played Russian Roulette by himself, they say, but one doubts a boy of that age in England could have laid his hands on a loaded revolver. At sixteen he underwent psychoanalysis; he remained a victim of depression all his life.

He went on to read History at Oxford at a time when Evelyn Waugh was also there. Later they became friends. Greene was born a Protestant, but took instruction to become a Catholic because his wife-to-be, Vivien, was a Catholic; the priest who instructed him had played a villain on the London stage for years. But while subscribing to the faith, he remained in doubt to the end and had theological arguments with himself, which spill over into his books. His interpretation of Catholicism tended to be liberal, not rigid as it was at the time.

Vivien Greene in 1941 - when Graham Greene received an honorary degree at Oxford, he did not invite her

He was successful and wrote a lot of novels in the 30s and 40s. He was a rebel and an iconoclast. He wrote 500 to 900 words a day in the morning, and stopped by about 9am. One can finish a book pretty quickly with such discipline. His first book, a collection of poems, was called Baffling April; many were love poems to Vivien.

In 1929, Greene published his first novel, The Man Within, which sold 13,000 copies, an unheard of number for a first novel. It got him a contract for three more. He went on to produce fifty works of all kinds: novels, biographies, detective yarns, plays, travel books, children's books, and screenplays. Many of his novels were adapted to the big screen. He lived a reclusive existence, guarding the anonymity that he needed to observe people. His politics were distinctively left wing, and he even joined the Communist Party in 1922 briefly.

During the War (WWII) he became an MI6 agent and his experience in West Africa gave rise to the colour in the novel we are reading, set in Sierra Leone as he later said when asked. He was recruited by his sister who joined before him, and he worked for Kim Philby, the spy and double agent who defected to Moscow later; he wrote the preface for Philby’s memoirs.

Kim Philby had no regrets about betraying Britain to the Soviet Union

His best novels — Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and The End of the Affair (1951) — all treat Catholic themes. The moral failure of the protagonists is featured in all his novels. The Heart of the Matter (1948) was the novel which won him great commercial success, selling 300,000 copies in UK on its release.

Trevor Howard as Scobie, Maria Schell as Helen, in the 1953 film

When he left Vivien after the War he wrote:

You see, my restlessness, moods, melancholia, even my outside relationships, are symptoms of a disease . . . & the disease, which has been going on ever since my childhood . . . lies in a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life. Unfortunately, the disease is also one's material. Cure the disease & I doubt whether a writer would remain.

Anita Björk, Swedish leading lady with over 80 roles in theatre and 50 films, had a relationship with novelist Graham Greene from 1954 to 1959

He had four mistresses in succession: Dorothy Glover, English and a stage designer; Catherine Walston, Catholic and American, married to an MP – she had a passion for travel, alcohol, sex, and religion matching him very well in those respects; an immensely successful Swedish actress Anita Björk, whose youth infatuated Green; and Yvonne Cloetta, married and French, who was his lover during the final 32 years in Antibes and then in Vevey, Switzerland. After making Greene his dinner, Cloetta would return home and make another for her husband. Hers was an ‘open marriage.’

Lady Catherine Walston was a classic beauty

Greene had a long relationship with Lady Catherine Walston, the unsatisfied wife of a civil servant, and this led to the classic 1951 novel The End of the Affair, which has twice been made into a film. In poems he wrote he contrasts the passion he found in Catherine with the staid life he had with Vivien.

In a plane your hair was blown

And in an island the older car

Lingered from inn to inn

Like a fly on a map

A mattress was spread on a cottage floor

And a door closed on a world, but another door

Opened, and I was far

From the old world sadly known

Where the fruitless seeds were sowed

And they called that virtue and this sin

Did I ever love God before I knew the place I rest in now, with my hand

Set in stone, never to move?

For this is love, and this I love

And even my God is here.

Graham Greene with Yvonne Cloetta - his companion for the last 32 years of his life

The final years with Yvonne Cloetta provided him with a comfort that he needed, even more than the passion of his early affairs.

A poem called Little Peace has these lines:

But love is a little peace as well as a little death

In an hour our pulse shall cease

Stopped like the breath

Our bodies thrown down like clothes on a chair

Abandoned like choice

You see, the heart said

We too have cause to rejoice

Here in Il Pace, il Pace.

Graham Greene Cocktail invented in the Hanoi Metropole Hotel - 25ml Vermouth, 1 dash Crème De Cassis; 50ml Dry Gin; a couple of Juniper Berries crushed

Greene’s life runs a close parallel to that of Scobie, in having illicit affairs and yet professing the Catholic faith. He writes:

No … I've broken the rules. They are rules I respect, so I haven't been to communion for nearly thirty years …. In my private life, my situation is not regular. If I went to communion, I would have to confess and make promises. I prefer to excommunicate myself.

Greene was a great traveller (he wrote three travel books). From Haiti where he attended a voodoo ceremony he describes a ritual enthusiastically:

The man carrying the hen swung it like a censer, & then would dash to this & that member of the congregation & plaster his face & body with the live bird . . . . More interminable prayers & then the bird's feet were cracked off like cheese biscuits & the attendant put the live bird's head in his mouth and bit if off -- the body of course went on flapping while he squeezed the blood out of the trunk …

He received many awards (Companion of Honor - 1966, Order of Merit - 1986) and was even considered for the Nobel Literature Prize in 1967. He moved from Antibes to Vevey, Switzerland, in 1990 suffering from leukaemia and died a year later there.

Graham Greene’s grave in Corseaux, Switzerland

During his life he had fun joining competitions run sometimes by newspapers to parody the types of famous authors – even winning a second prize in a competition to parody his own style. He wrote screenplays for movies and became a film critic (writing over 800 pieces of criticism) and once reviewed Shirley Temple as an actress aged 10, criticising her ‘dubious coquetry which appealed to middle aged men and clergymen.’ 

Shirley Temple got slut-shamed by Graham Greene

Twentieth Century Fox sued for libel and won and the magazine he wrote for went bankrupt; Greene had to flee the country and go to Mexico. But it was a happy exile for he wrote the novel The Power and the Glory while there, and it became one of his very successful novels. Greene led a high-adventure life throughout.

Evelyn Waugh described Greene's writing style in Commonweal thus: ‘Greene’s style was not a specifically literary style at all; the words are functional, devoid of sensuous attraction, of ancestry and of independent life.’ That is to say, in Evelyn's opinion Greene did not think he had to follow any line of English writers in a great tradition.

‘Nothing deflects Greene from the main business of holding the reader’s attention.’ (Virginia Quarterly Review)

Greene’s Catholicism can drive you crazy. He was a wayward Catholic, having affairs, visiting brothels, and so on. He invented the whisky priest of The Power and the Glory and the novel came near to being put on the now obsolete Vatican Index of Prohibited Books, but when he met the Pope (Paul VI) he was told to forget the critics and get on with his writing.

Orwell was hard on Greene and his display of Catholicism in his novels, thinking it elitist and his heaven as a place for a select group. He wanted the novelist to get beyond religion, aspire to humanity, and allow each one to evolve their own code. However V.S. Pritchett credited Greene with bringing evil back into literature.

Greene kept journals. While he was stayed with Vivien (they never divorced) he wrote parallel journals, one containing the adultery he was involved in at the time, and another minus all that, which he could share with his wife.

The Heart of the Matter is about Scobie, a police officer in Sierra Leone during WWII who is leading a humdrum life with a sour wife in a remote colony of the British Empire. He has been relatively incorrupt, with a sense of right and wrong, meting out justice and performing investigations impartially. The novel turns on three crises that arise in his hitherto uneventful life.

The first misstep occurs because his wife insists on going away to South Africa; she can’t bear to face the humiliation of living with a husband who has been passed over for promotion. Scobie, having no resources to fund his wife’s flight has to borrow from a recognised smuggler, Yusef – the considerable sum of 500 pounds. But once he has put himself in debt to a person whom he might have to investigate in future, he is on a downward slope to becoming more and more entangled in compromises.

The second crisis he faces is a constant struggle between his Catholic faith and an adulterous affair casually entered into when his wife departs. He takes up with a young woman he has rescued from a shipwreck. She does not seem more than a shallow temptress, and there is no novelistic preamble of passion leading up to the dreary affair. It seems to be a case of ordinary loneliness, exaggerated and overblown by Scobie’s sense of needing to feel responsible for the fate of others. The affair is monotonous and forms the least convincing part of the novel. Did other readers find the attachment Scobie feels for Helen Rolt as inexplicable as I did?

The third crisis is a rarefied matter of Catholic piety. Scobie’s wife Louise returns from South Africa with her suspicions raised, but what does she conjure? An athletic romp in bed after a long absence? A night of swoons and caresses? A romantic walk in the woods? No, the the only thing on her mind is to drive her husband to the communion rail at Mass next Sunday. Her over-arching concern is that the outward norms of pious Catholic practice should be adhered to! Unfortunately, because her husband has been an adulterer he can’t in good conscience receive communion (the bread and wine that constitutes for the faithful the body and blood of Jesus Christ) in his iniquitous state. It would be a sacrilege. This is an incredible event to lay out in a modern novel. But perhaps that's why it’s considered a ‘Catholic’ novel.

All the crises and his own angina condition are resolved by committing suicide, an act by which Scobie realises he is putting himself beyond the pale of the Redemption preached by his faith. Geetha's reading below is very much to the point.

https://grahamgreenesendoftheaffair.wordpress.com/the-author/

A Biographical Timeline of Graham Greene’s Life

https://grahamgreenesendoftheaffair.wordpress.com/other-and-related-works/

A complete list of works by Graham Greene

https://amsaw.org/amsaw-ithappenedinhistory-100203-greene.html

Graham Greene’s Biography at the American Society of Authors and Writers

1. Joe

Joe read from notes on a biography he had prepared after reading about the life and times of Graham Greene. A somewhat expanded version of it is inscribed above. KumKum added that Greene had championed R.K. Narayan and done the copy-editing for the novel, The Guide, before it was published, as noted in our account of that reading. A week before this reading a story appeared in The Hindu of the making of the popular TV serial Malgudi Days by director Shankar Nag, who situated it in the forgotten hamlet of Agumbe in Karnataka. All the episodes of R.K. Narayan's stories shot for Doordarshan are available on Youtube, beginning with Swami and Friends.

Devika, Saras

As Joe ventured to read his passage about the Cockroach Championship, a chorus of cries arose from other readers (Devika, Saras, Priya) who had the same piece in mind, labelling it the one comical episode in the whole book. Joe himself had fun reading it, as Harris and his new-found mate, Wilson, sharing rooms, go about hunting for cockroaches in the corners of their house. They even have an elaborate set of rules for the game, including one called the ‘D.D.’, short for Down the Drain, when a cockroach is flushed down a pipe without killing it.

The hunt is emblematic of the bleak social life in colonial society and the few avenues for entertainment in this backwater of the British Empire in West Africa (Sierra Leone, as Green clarified in an interview).

2. Devika – The Suicide

Scobie goes about his planned suicide clinically, with the ten sleeping pills he has saved of evipan (an older barbiturate that induces sedation rapidly, but whose effect does not last long). There's nothing dramatic in the way Greene narrates the suicide:

He dredged his consciousness up from an infinite distance in order to make some reply. He said aloud, "Dear God, I love . . ." but the effort was too great and he did not feel his body when it struck the floor or hear the small tinkle of the medal as it span like a coin under the ice-box—the saint whose name nobody could remember.

Did the killing of Ali by Yusef's men to counter Scobie's suspicions about his man-servant contribute to his sense of guilt? Ali was the most loyal soul he had, and yet he condemned him to a deadly fate just to save himself. Perhaps he meant Ali only to be warned with a roughing up, but there is no knowing what may happen when you drop a suggestion like this to hatchet men. Recall what happened to Mr Jamal Khashoggi on Oct 2, 2018:

Khashoggi wandered
By the Saudi consulate —
He got remaindered.

They made diced meat, if not bisque, out of Mr Khashoggi.

3. Saras

Scobie writes a letter to Louise, his wife, who has decamped for South Africa because she could not stand the humiliation of his being passed over for promotion to Police Commissioner (how absurd is that!). He does not wish to give any sign that he is at peace and writes about mundane events, adding the innocuous phrase, ‘I'll do what I can to make her comfortable,’ concerning the eager young derelict, Helen Rolt; but Ms Rolt, after losing her husband in a shipwreck, is on the look out for the next man to ensnare.

An interview with the Commissioner, introducing an MI5 man who has come to investigate the suicide of the young police officer, Pemberton, ends in banalities and they discuss the tussle for influence between Syrian Catholic and Syrian Muslim traders.

KumKum said the death of Catherine, their only daughter, caused a trauma in the life of Louise; that, plus the geographical confinement in a cramped colonial society, exacerbated her general discontent with life. The novel makes it clear it was her dissatisfaction with her husband's lack of promotion that made her take flight. This is the most fatuous of reasons for compromising her husband by forcing him to borrow ‎£500 from a smuggler, to buy her a passage to South Africa. And that leads inexorably to a train of events that puts Scobie in the clutches of men he should have been policing.

In this passage there is a confession of weakness, the weakness Scobie feels for the latest pitiable human wreck who has crossed his path, Helen Rolt, the teenage widow whose husband has drowned in a shipwreck which she survived. Thommo said Scobie calls her ‘dirty looking’ –really? Priya asked if she was ugly. My goodness, it is Maria Schell who acts as Helen Rolt in the 1953 film:

Maria Schell acted as Helen Rolt in the 1953 film

In extenuation of Louise, Saras mentioned that when she was in Kottakal during one of her husband’s postings as a doctor, she felt totally out of place. Sudesh Jain said it was the only time Scobie took a stand (?).

People mentioned the moral struggle going on in Scobie's heart. He is unable to bear the consequences of his actions, said Zakia.

4. Zakia

Casually conversing with Helen, Scobie discovers the real source of his feelings for her is pity. Even when she says she doesn't want his pity ...

Pity smouldered like decay at his heart. He would never rid himself of it. He knew from experience how passion died away and how love went, but pity always stayed.

Scobie is unique among modern heroes in this. Men may be inclined to feel sympathy for an unfortunate woman, but to take up with them sexually on that account seems a bit over the top. This peculiar pity seems to be the cause of Scobie's downfall, for it is combined with the fatal conviction that if he lets go of his pity, and the connection to the woman that gave rise to it, she would not know how to deal with the matter. The fact is people deal all the time with unmet expectations, and know very well to get on with their lives and survive in the face of disappointments.

In Zakia's summary view the driving force of Scobie's attachment to Helen Rolt was pity, but he is the one who is pitiable.

5. Priya

Priya took up the religious bit in the story, about Scobie being urged by his pious Catholic wife to go to Mass and receive Holy Communion – which he cannot do in good conscience since he is in a state of serious sin (married to one woman while bedding another, for pity's sake).

In the religious realm this scene shows Scobie to be a man of scruples, as indeed he was in his life as a policeman, meting out justice; in the civil realm he has been compromised by accepting money from a smuggler; in the marital realm nothing more vivid than a weak pity for a washed up woman has made him disloyal to his marriage vows. And though he practises self-knowledge and strikes his breast, he cannot lift himself out of his shallow adultery, devoid of all passion, and consign the woman for whom he feels only pity to the tender mercies of the flippant lothario called Bagster (By the way, Urbandictionary.com claims a bagster is a crossbreed between a douchebag and a hipster.)

The suicide therefore turns on rather small matters: his inability to jettison a perfunctory extra-marital relationship, and the lethal appeal to Yusef to silence Ali, his faithful man servant. Scobie dies believing his suicide is to make amends for his sins in this regard. But isn't it better to make recompense by living and correcting things within one’s control as far as possible – not by giving up? He is convinced he is taking the Japanese way of honour, seppuku.

6. KumKum

Scobie is in one of his moods of self-reflection. A colonial policeman analysing himself? Not likely, but then this is a neurotic Catholic policeman out of Greene's zoo of characters, wandering the beat of Freetown.

He finds himself alone, completely alone, forsaken by his God even, with nobody to speak the truth to.

“...loneliness seated itself like a companion who doesn't need to speak.”

Greene is right to paint the picture of Scobie's loneliness as a precursor to his suicide. His wife is near, his mistress only a few hundred yards away, his boss the Commissioner, not far – yet he cannot confide in any of them without revealing the untruths he has been living.

Priya volunteered that Scobie made just two missteps: 1) burning the letter of the captain of the ship Esperança. 2) borrowing money from Yusef. Louise had some responsibility in the latter. These missteps led to increasing complications that left him paralysed for action to resolve the impasse.

7. Thommo

Thommo's choice of passage was dictated by his experience of colonial clubs and the overt colour discrimination that was practised in India in such clubs before Independence. Mr Weaver, a British executive, who was married to a Lebanese woman, was a member of the Quilon Club. His wife was not welcome there, however.

The nub of the passage is a member's comment: “Honorary members should not be allowed to introduce guests.” Wilson was the guest thus introduced. A common liking for poetry bonds him to Louise, Scobie's wife, over a brief conversation. Scobie is relieved that Louise won't be a snob with the stranger and will enjoy Wilson's company. One less worry for him in keeping his wife happy.

8. Geetha

Geetha chose the most revealing passage in the book. It is Scobie at prayer. He starts by telling God ‘I can't desert either of them [Helen or Louise] while I'm alive, but I can die and remove myself from their blood-stream.’ He vows that he can't give pain to either of them, and prefers to give pain to God. He longs for peace and imagines he'll have it once God forgets him.

No one can speak a monologue for long alone — another voice will always make itself heard: every monologue sooner or later becomes a discussion. So now he couldn't keep the other voice silent: it spoke from the cave of his body:

Scobie hears that voice and there is a back and forth. ‘I am not pleading for mercy ... You'll be able to forget me, God, for eternity.’The voice replies:

You say you love me, and yet you'll do this to me—rob me of you for ever. I made you with love. I've wept your tears. I've saved you from more than you will ever know; I planted in you this longing for peace only so that one day I could satisfy your longing and watch your happiness. And now you push me away, you put me out of your reach.

Scobie takes up the thread of the conversation with his soul:

The voice was silent in the cave ... No. I don't trust you. I love you, but I've never trusted you. ... you made this feeling of responsibility that I've always carried about like a sack of bricks. ... I can't make one of them suffer so as to save myself. I'm responsible and I'll see it through the only way I can. —everybody has to die. We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

And thus with a few bon mots Scobie relinquishes hope and goes on to the fate he has willed. Geetha said Scobie is like many people who become fixated on the little things. Priya sees him as neither villainous, nor heroic. Geetha has observed people in families who want to keep everyone happy, and in the process make themselves miserable. Scobie is like that. Saras and KumKum blamed the loneliness all around Scobie. These colonials did not have the money to enjoy periodic visits home to rest and have recreation before returning to the rigours of a highly constraining life in West Africa.

9. Pamela

Pamela, keen reader that she is, sent us a voice file from Oslo, Norway, where she is currently visiting her daughter, Sharon, and her new baby. The file is linked below:

Pamela reading

Pamela read the same passage as Zakia's above. She said: “I would have liked to read the whole chapter because it ends with Scobie again feeling pity, and writing a letter to her which got him into trouble. In lots of incidents Scobie went wrong because of his feeling of pity, and what he expresses about pity here really got my attention. I hope you all discus more on this.”

10. Gopa

Gopa sent us her voice file from Bengaluru:

Gopa reading

Scobie is going up to see Yusef, the only man who fully understands him and with whom he is at ease (‘his only companionship, the only man he could trust’). This is in spite of the fact that Yusef has a hold on him via the loan to buy a passage for his wife to South Africa. Scobie does not mind his being observed by the internal spy, Wilson.

In the exchange Scobie takes no umbrage at Wilson's telling him he loves his wife. He replies that Wilson is overwrought and ought to go and lie down. Wilson threatens to ruin Scobie with the secret notes he's kept, but Scobie doesn't care. He is concerned with bigger things.

The Readings

1. Joe – The Cockroach Championship

'I couldn't sleep until we'd had our hunt. The idea's grown on me, old man. We might have a monthly prize. I can see the time coming when other people will want to join in.'

Wilson said with irony, 'There might be a silver cup.'

'Stranger things have happened, old man. The Cockroach Championship.'

He led the way, walking softly on the boards to the middle of his room: the iron bed stood under its greying net, the armchair with collapsible back, the dressing-table littered with old Picture Posts. It shocked Wilson once again to realize that a room could be a degree more cheerless than his own.

'We'll draw our rooms alternate nights, old man.'

'What weapon shall I use?'

'You can borrow one of my slippers.' A board squeaked under Wilson's feet and Harris turned warningly. 'They have ears like rats,' he said.

'I'm a bit tired. Don't you think that tonight ...

'Just five minutes, old man. I couldn't sleep without a hunt. Look, there's one—over the dressing-table. You can have first shot,' but as the shadow of the slipper fell upon the plaster wall, the insect shot away.

'No use doing it like that, old man. Watch me.' Harris stalked his prey. The cockroach was half-way up the wall, and Harris, as he moved on tiptoe across the creaking floor, began to weave the light of his torch backwards and forwards over the cockroach. Then suddenly he struck and left a smear of blood. 'One up,' he said. 'You have to mesmerize them.'

To and fro across the room they padded, weaving their lights, smashing down their shoes, occasionally losing their heads and pursuing wildly into corners: the lust of the hunt touched Wilson's imagination. At first their manner to each other was 'sporting'; they would call out, 'Good-shot' or 'Hard Luck', but once they met together against the wainscot over the same cockroach when the score was even, and their tempers became frayed.

'No point in going after the same bird, old man,' Harris said.

'I started him.'

'You lost your one, old man. This was mine.'

'It was the same. He did a double turn.'

'Oh no.'

'Anyway, there's no reason Why I shouldn't go for the same one. You drove it towards me. Bad play on your part.'

'Not allowed in the rules,' Harris said shortly.

'Perhaps not in your rules.'

'Damn it all,' Harris said, 'I invented the game.'

A cockroach sat upon the brown cake of soap in the washbasin. Wilson spied it and took a long shot with the shoe from six feet away. The shoe landed smartly on the soap and the cockroach span into the basin: Harris turned on the tap and washed it down. 'Good shot, old man,' he said placatingly. 'One D.D.'

'D.D. be damned,' Wilson said. 'It was dead when you turned on the tap.'

'You couldn't be sure of that. It might have been just unconscious—concussion. It's D.D. according to the rules.'

'Your rules again.'

'My rules are the Queensberry rules in this town.'

'They won't be for long,' Wilson threatened. He slammed the door hard behind him and the walls of his own room vibrated round him from the shock. His heart beat with rage and the hot night: the sweat drained from his armpits. But as he stood there beside his own bed, seeing the replica of Harris's room around him, the washbasin, the table, the grey mosquito-net, even the cockroach fastened on the wall, anger trickled out of him and loneliness took its place. It was like quarrelling with one's own image in the glass. I was crazy, he thought. What made me fly out like that? I've lost a friend.

That night it took him a long while to sleep, and when he slept at last he dreamed that he had committed a crime, so that he woke with the sense of guilt still heavy upon him. On his way down to breakfast he paused outside Harris's door. There was no sound. He knocked, but there was no answer. He opened the door a little way and saw obscurely through the grey net Harris's damp bed.

He asked softly, 'Are you awake?'

'What is it?'

'I'm You are quite right. It was D.D.’ sorry Harris, about last night.'

'My fault, old man. I've got a touch of fever. I was sickening for it. Touchy.'

‘No. It's my fault. You are quite right. It was D.D.’

2. Devika – Scobie commits suicide

“They sounded like Truth, but he rejected them. Comfort can come too easily: he thought, Those hands will never hold my fall: I slip between the fingers, I am greased with falsehood, treachery: ”

“trust was a dead language of which he had forgotten the grammar.

"Dear, you are half asleep."

'For a moment.'

"I'll go up now. Don't stay long. Perhaps you won't need your evipan tonight."

He watched her go: the lizard lay still upon the wall, but before she had reached the stairs he called her back. "Say good night, Louise, before you go. You may be asleep."

She kissed him perfunctorily on the forehead and he gave her hand a casual caress. There must be nothing strange on this last night, and nothing she would remember with regret. "Good night, Louise. You know I love you," he said with careful lightness.

"Of course, and I love you."

"Yes. Good night, Louise."

"Good night, Ticki."

It was the best he could do with safety.

“As soon as he heard the door close above, he took out the cigarette carton in which he kept the ten doses of evipan. He added two more doses for greater certainty—to have exceeded by two doses in ten days could not, surely, be regarded as suspicious. After that he took a long drink of whisky and sat still and waiting for courage with the tablets like seeds in the palm of his hand. Now, he thought, I am absolutely alone", this was freezing point.

But he was wrong. Solitude itself has a voice. It said to him, Throw away those tablets. You'll never be able to collect enough again. You'll be saved. Give up play-acting. Mount the stairs to bed and have a good night's sleep. In the morning you'll be woken by your boy, and you'll drive down to the police station for a day's ordinary work. The voice dwelt on the word ordinary as it might have dwelt on the word ‘happy’ or ‘peaceful.’

"No," Scobie said aloud, "no." He pushed the tablets in his mouth, six at a time, and drank them down in two draughts. Then he opened his diary and wrote against November 12: Called on H.R. out; temperature at 2 p.m. . . . and broke abruptly off as though at that moment he had been gripped by the final pain. Afterwards he sat bolt upright and waited what seemed a long while for any indication at all of approaching death: he had no idea how it would come to him. He tried to pray, but the Hail Mary evaded his memory, and he was aware of his heart-beats like a clock striking the hour. He tried out an Act of Contrition, but when he reached, "I am sorry and beg pardon," a cloud formed over the door and drifted down over the whole room and he couldn't remember what it was that he had to be sorry for. He had to hold himself upright with both hands, but he had forgotten the reason why he so held himself. Somewhere far away he thought he heard the sounds of pain. "A storm," he said aloud, "there's going to be a storm," as the cloud grew, and he tried to get up to close the windows. "Ali," he called, "Ali." It seemed to him as though someone outside the room were seeking him, calling him, and he made a last effort to indicate that he was here. He got on his feet and heard the hammer of his heart beating out a reply. He had a message to convey, but the darkness and the storm drove it back within the case of his breast, and all the time outside the house, outside the world that drummed like hammer blows within his ear, someone wandered, seeking to get in, someone appealing for help, someone in need of him. And automatically at the call of need, at the cry of a victim, Scobie strung himself to act. He dredged his consciousness up from an infinite distance in order to make some reply. He said aloud, "Dear God, I love . . ." but the effort was too great and he did not feel his body when it struck the floor or hear the small tinkle of the medal as it span like a coin under the ice-box—the saint whose name nobody could remember.”

3. Saras – The Commissioner has a chat with Scobie about Tallit, the Syrian trader

“At last the office was clear again: there was nothing further on the charge sheet, and taking out a pad and placing some blotting paper under his wrist to catch the sweat, he prepared to write to Louise. Letter-writing never came easily to him. Perhaps because of his police training, he could never put even a comfortable lie upon paper over his signature. He had to be accurate: he could comfort only by omission. So now, writing the two words My dear upon the paper, he prepared to omit. He wouldn't write that he missed her, but he would leave out any phrase that told unmistakably that he was content. My dear, you must forgive a short letter again. You know I'm not much hand at letter-writing. I got your third letter yesterday, the one telling me that you were staying with Mrs. Halifax's friend for a week outside Durban. Here everything is quiet. We had an alarm last night, but it turned out that an American pilot had mistaken a school of porpoises for submarines. The rains have started, of course. The Mrs. Rolt I told you about in my last letter is out of hospital “and they've put her to wait for a boat in one of the Nissen huts behind the transport park. I'll do what I can to make her comfortable. The boy is still in hospital but all right. I really think that's about all the news. The Tallit affair drags on — I don't think anything will come of it in the end. Ali had to go and have a couple of teeth out the other day. What a fuss he made! I had to drive him to the hospital or he'd never have gone. He paused: he hated the idea of the censors—who happened to be Mrs. Carter and Galloway —reading these last phrases of affection. Look after yourself, my dear, and don't worry about me. As long as you are happy, I'm happy. In another nine months I can take my leave and we'll be together. He was going to write, "You are in my mind always” but that was not a statement he could sign. He wrote instead, You are in my mind so often during the day, and then pondered the signature. Reluctantly, because he believed it would please her, he wrote Your Ticki. Ticki—for a moment he was reminded of that other letter signed "Dicky*' which had come back to him two or three times in dreams.

“The sergeant entered, marched to the middle of the floor, turned smartly to face him, saluted. He had time to address the envelope while all this was going on. "Yes, sergeant?"

"The Commissioner, sah, he ask you to see him."

"Right."

The Commissioner was not alone. The Colonial Secretary's face shone gently with sweat in the dusky room, and beside him sat a tall bony man Scobie had not seen before —he must have arrived by air, for there had been no ship in during the last ten days. He wore a colonel's badges as though they didn't belong to him on his loose untidy uniform.

"This is Major Scobie. Colonel Wright." He could tell the Commissioner was worried and irritated. He said, "Sit down, Scobie. It's about this Tallit business." The rain darkened the room and kept out the air. "Colonel Wright has come up from Cape Town to hear about it."

"From Cape Town, sir?" The Commissioner moved his legs, playing with a penknife. He said, "Colonel Wright is the M.I.5 Representative.

“The Colonial Secretary said softly, so that everybody had to bend their heads to hear him, "The whole thing's been unfortunate." The Commissioner began to whittle the corner of his desk, ostentatiously not listening. "I don't think the police should have acted—quite in the way they did—not without consultation."

Scobie said, "I've always understood it was our duty to stop diamond-smuggling."

In his soft obscure voice the Colonial Secretary said, "There weren't a hundred pounds' worth of diamonds found."

"They are the only diamonds that have ever been found."

"The evidence against Tallit, Scobie, was too slender for an arrest."

"He wasn't arrested. He was interrogated.

“His lawyers say he was brought forcibly to the police station."

"His lawyers are lying. You surely realize that much."

The Colonial Secretary said to Colonel Wright, "You see the kind of difficulty we are up against. The Roman Catholic Syrians are claiming they are a persecuted minority and that the police are in the pay of the Moslem Syrians."

Scobie said, "The same thing would have happened the other way round—only it would have been worse. Parliament has more affection for Moslems than Catholics." He had a sense that no one had mentioned the real purpose of this meeting. The Commissioner flaked chip after chip off his desk, disowning everything, and Colonel Wright sat back on his shoulder-blades saying nothing at all.

4. Zakia – Scobie chats with Helen and discovers the real source of his feelings for her is pity.

Part Three I

Helen said, ‘I saw you at the beach this afternoon.’ Scobie looked apprehensively up from the glass of whisky he was measuring. Something in her voice reminded him oddly of Louise. He said, "I had to find Rees —the Naval Intelligence man."

"You didn't even speak to me."

"I was in a hurry.'

"You are so careful, always' she said, and now he realized what was happening and why he had thought of Louise. He wondered sadly whether love always inevitably took the same road. It was not only the act of love itself that was the same. . . . How often in the last two years he had tried to turn away at the critical moment from just such a scene—to save himself but also to save the other victim. He laughed with half a heart and said, "For once I wasn't thinking of you. I had other things in mind."

"What other things?"

"Oh, diamonds . . ."

“Your work is much more important to you than I am,' Helen said, and the banality of the phrase, read in how many books, wrung his heart like the too mature remark of a child.

"Yes," he said gravely, "but I'd sacrifice it for you."

"Why?"

"I suppose because you are a human being. One may love a dog more than any other possession, but one wouldn't run down even a strange child to save it."

"Oh," she said impatiently, "why do you always tell me the truth? I don't want the truth all the time."

He put the whisky glass in her hand and said, "My dear, you are unlucky. You are tied up with a middle-aged man. We can't be bothered to lie all the time like the young.

“If you knew," she said, "how tired I get of all your caution. You come here after dark and you go after dark. It's so—so ignoble."

"Yes.”

"We always make love—here. Among the junior official's furniture. I don't believe we'd know how to do it anywhere else."

"Poor dear," he said.

She said furiously, "I don't want your pity." But it was not a question of whether she wanted it—she had it. Pity smouldered like decay at his heart. He would never rid himself of it. He knew from experience how passion died away and how love went, but pity always stayed. Nothing ever diminished pity. The conditions of life nurtured it. There was only one person in the world who was unpitiable—himself.

5. Priya – Scobie attends Mass and receives Communion in a state of serious sin, committing a sacrilege.

The words of the Mass were like an indictment. "I will go in unto the altar of God: to God who giveth joy to my youth." But there was no joy anywhere. He looked up from between his hands, and the plaster images of the Virgin and the Saints seemed to be holding out hands to everyone, on either side, beyond him. He was the unknown guest at a party who is introduced to no one. The gentle painted smiles were unbearably directed elsewhere. When the Kyrie Eleison was reached he again tried to pray. "Lord, have mercy . . . Christ, have mercy . . . Lord, have mercy . . ." but the fear and the shame of the act he was going to commit chilled his brain. Those ruined priests who presided at a Black Mass, consecrating the Host over the naked body of a woman, consuming God in an absurd and horrifying ritual, were at least performing the act of damnation with an emotion larger than human love: they were doing it from hate of God or some odd perverse devotion to God's enemy. But he had no love of evil or hate of God: how was he to hate this God who of His own accord was surrendering Himself into his power?

He was desecrating God because he loved a woman—was it even love, or was it just a feeling of pity and responsibility? He tried again to excuse himself: "You can look after yourself. You survive the Cross every day. You can only suffer. You can never be lost. Admit that you must come second to these others" And myself, he thought, watching the priest pour the wine and water into the chalice, his own damnation being prepared like a meal at the altar, I must come last: I am the Deputy Commissioner of Police: a hundred men serve under me: I am the responsible man. It is my job to look after the others. I am conditioned to serve.

Sanctus. Sanctus. Sanctus. The Canon of the Mass had started: Father Rank's whisper at the altar hurried remorselessly towards the consecration. "To order our days in thy peace . . . that we be preserved from eternal damnation . . ." Pax, pacis, pacem: all the declinations of the word "peace" drummed on his ears through the Mass. He thought: I have left even the hope of peace for ever. I am the responsible man. I shall soon have gone too far in my design of deception ever to go back. Hoc est enim Corpus: the bell rang, and Father Rank raised God in his fingers —this God as light now as a wafer whose coming lay on Scobie's heart as heavily as lead. Hoc est enim Corpus meum: the bell rang, and Father Rank raised his fingers – this God s light now as a wafer whose coming lay on Scobie's heart as heavily as lead. Hic est enim calix sanguinis meiand the second bell.

Louise touched his hand. "Dear, are you well?" He thought: Here is the second chance. The return of my pain. I can go out. And who indeed is in pain if I am not in pain? But if he went out of church now, he knew that there would be only one thing left to do—to follow Father Rank's advice, to settle his affairs, to desert, to come back in a few days' time and take God with a clear conscience and a knowledge that he had pushed innocence back where

it properly belonged—under the Atlantic surge. Innocence must die young if it isn't to kill the souls of men.

"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you."

"I'm all right," he said, the old longing pricking at the eyeballs, and looking up towards the Cross on the altar he thought savagely: Take your sponge of gall. You made me what I am. Take the spear thrust. He didn't need to open his Missal to know how this prayer ended. "May the receiving of Thy Body, O Lord Jesus Christ, which I unworthy presume to take, turn not to my judgment and condemnation." He shut his eyes and let the darkness in. Mass rushed towards its end:
Domine, non sum dignus . . . Domine, non sum dignus . . . Domine, non sum dignus. ... At the foot of the scaffold he opened his eyes and saw the old black women shuffling up towards the altar rail, a few soldiers, an aircraft mechanic, one of his own policemen, a clerk from the bank: they moved sedately towards peace, and Scobie felt an envy of their simplicity, their goodness. Yes, now at this moment of time they were good.

"Aren't you coming, dear?" Louise asked, and again the hand touched him: the kindly firm detective hand. He rose and followed her and knelt by her side like a spy in a foreign land who has been taught the customs and to speak the language like a native. Only a miracle can save me now, Scobie told himself, watching Father Rank at the altar opening the tabernacle, but God would never work a miracle to save Himself. I am the Cross, he thought: He will never speak the word to save Himself from the Cross, but if only wood were made so that it didn't feel, if only the nails were senseless as people believe.

Father Rank came down the steps from the altar bearing God. The saliva had dried in Scobie's mouth: it was as though his veins had dried. He couldn't look up: he saw only the priest's skirt like the skirt of the mediaeval war-horse bearing down upon him: the flapping of feet: the charge of God. If only the archers would let fly from ambush: and for a moment he dreamed that the priest's steps had indeed faltered: perhaps after all something may yet happen before he reaches me: some incredible interposition. „ . . But with open mouth (the time had come) he made one last attempt at prayer, “O God, I offer up my damnation to you. Take it. Use it for them” and was aware of the pale papery taste of his eternal sentence on the tongue,”

6. KumKum – Scobie is cast into loneliness, unable to trust anyone

Louise was asleep upstairs, and Scobie sat at the table with his diary open. He had written down against the date October 31: Commissioner told me this morning I am to succeed him.. Took some furniture to H.R. Told Louise news, which pleased her. The other life—bare and undisturbed and built of facts—lay like Roman foundations under his hand. This was the life he was supposed to lead: no one reading this record would visualize the obscure shameful scene in the garage, the interview with the Portuguese captain, Louise striking out blindly with the painful truth, Helen accusing him of hypocrisy . . . He thought: This is how it ought to be: I am too old for emotion. I am too old to be a cheat. Lies are for the young. They have a lifetime of truth to recover in. He looked at his watch—eleven-forty-five—and wrote: Temperature at 2 p.m. 92°. The lizard pounced upon the wall, the tiny jaws clamping on a moth. Something scratched outside the door—a pye-dog? He laid his pen down again and loneliness sat across the table opposite him. No man surely was less alone, with his wife upstairs and his mistress little more than five hundred yards away up the hill, and yet it was loneliness that seated itself like a companion who doesn't need to speak. It seemed to him that he had never been so alone before.

There was nobody now to whom he could speak the truth. There were things the Commissioner must not know, Louise must not know, there were even limits to what he could tell Helen, for what was the use, when he had sacrificed so much in order to avoid pain, of inflicting it needlessly? As for God, he could speak to Him only as one speaks to an enemy—there was bitterness between them. He moved his hand on the table, and it was as though his loneliness moved too and touched the tips of his fingers. "You and I," his loneliness said, "you and I," It occurred to him that the outside world, if they knew the facts, might envy him: Bagster would envy him Helen, and Wilson, Louise. What a hell of a quiet dog, Fraser would exclaim with a lick of the lips. They would imagine, he thought with amazement, that I get something out of it, but it seemed to him that no man had ever got less. Even self-pity was denied him because he knew so exactly the extent of his guilt. He felt as though he had exiled himself so deeply in the desert that his skin had taken on the colour of the sand.

...

"You are coming, Ticki?" Louise called with what seemed to him a sudden anxiety, as though perhaps suspicion had momentarily breathed on her again—and he thought again: Can Ali really be trusted? and all the stale Coast wisdom of the traders and the remittance-men told him, "Never trust a black. They'll let you down in the end. Had my boy fifteen years . . ." The ghosts of distrust came out on All Souls' Night and gathered around his glass.

"Oh, yes, my dear, I'm coming."

"You have only to say the word," he addressed God, "and legions of angels . . ." and he struck with his ringed hand under the eye and saw the bruised skin break. He thought: And again at Christmas, thrusting the Child's face into the filth of the stable. He cried up the stairs, "What's that you said, dear?"

"Oh, only that we've got so much to celebrate tomorrow. Being together and the commissionership. Life is so happy, Ticki."

And that, he told his loneliness with defiance, is my reward, splashing the whisky across the table, defying the ghosts to do their worst, watching God bleed.

7. Thommo – Class distinctions and forming friendships in colonial clubs

What's the trouble?" Scobie asked.

Reith said, "He thinks we are not exclusive enough" He spoke with the comfortable irony of a man who had in his time been completely exclusive, who had in fact excluded from his solitary table in the Protectorate every one but himself. Fellowes said hotly, "There are limits," fingering for confidence the Lancing tie.

"Tha's so," said Brigstock.

"I knew it would happen," Fellowes said, "as soon as we made every officer in the place an honorary member. Sooner or later they would begin to bring in undesirables. I'm not a snob, but in a place like this you've got to draw lines —for the sake of the women. It's not like it is at home."

"But what's the trouble?" Scobie asked.

"Honorary members," Fellowes said, "should not be allowed to introduce guests. Only the other day we had a private brought in. The army can be democratic if it likes, but not at our expense. That's another thing, there's not enough drink to go round as it is without these fellows."

"Tha's a point," Brigstock said, swaying more violently.

"I wish I knew what it was all about," Scobie said.

"The dentist from the Forty-ninth has brought in a civilian called Wilson, and this man wants to join the Club. It puts everybody in a very embarrassing position."

"What's wrong with him?"

"He's one of the U.A.C. clerks. He can join the club in Sharp Town. What does he want to come up here for?"

"That club's not functioning," Reith said.

"Well, that's their fault, isn't it?" Over the Sanitary Inspector's shoulder Scobie could see the enormous range of the night. The fireflies signalled to and fro along the edge of the hill and the lamp of a patrol boat moving on the bay could be distinguished only by its steadiness. "Blackout time/' Reith said. "We'd better go in."

"Which is Wilson?" Scobie asked him.

"That's him over there. The poor devil looks lonely. He's only been out a few days."

Wilson stood uncomfortably alone in a wilderness of arm-chairs, pretending to look at a map on the wall. His pale face shone and trickled like plaster. He had obviously bought his tropical suit from a shipper who had worked off on him an unwanted line: it was oddly striped and liverish in colour. "You're Wilson, aren't you?" Reith said. "I saw your name in the Col. Sec.'s book today."

"Yes, that's me," Wilson said.

"My name's Reith. I'm Chief Assistant Col. Sec. This is Scobie, the Deputy Commissioner."

"I saw you this morning outside the Bedford Hotel, sir," Wilson said. There was something defenceless, it seemed to Scobie, in his whole attitude: he stood there waiting for people to be friendly or unfriendly—he didn't seem to expect one reaction more than another. He was like a dog. Nobody had yet drawn on his face the lines that make a human being.

"Have a drink, Wilson."

"I don't mind if I do, sir."

"Here's my wife," Scobie said. "Louise, this is Mr, Wilson."

"I've heard a lot about Mr. Wilson already," Louise said stiffly.

"You see, you're famous, Wilson," Scobie said. "You're a man from the town and you've gate-crashed Cape Station Club."

"I didn't know I was doing anything wrong. Major Cooper invited me."

"That reminds me," Reith said, "I must make an appointment with Cooper. I think I've got an abscess." He slid away.

"Cooper was telling me about the library," Wilson said, "and I thought perhaps . , ."

"Do you like reading?" Louise asked, and Scobie realized with relief that she was going to be kind to the poor devil. It was always a bit of a toss-up with Louise. Sometimes she could be the worst snob in the station, and it occurred to him with pity that perhaps now she believed she couldn't afford to be snobbish. Any new face that didn't "know" was welcome.

"Well," Wilson said, and fingered desperately at his thin moustache, "well . . ," It was as if he were gathering strength for a great confession or a great evasion.

"Detective stories?" Louise asked.

"I don't mind detective stories," Wilson said uneasily, "Some detective stories."

“Personally," Louise said, "I like poetry."

"Poetry," Wilson said, "yes." He took his fingers reluctantly away from his moustache, and something in his dog-like look of gratitude and hope made Scobie think with happiness: Have I really found her a friend?

"I like poetry myself," Wilson said.

Scobie moved away towards the bar: once again a load was lifted from his mind. The evening was not spoilt: she would come home happy, go to bed happy. During one night a mood did not change, and happiness would survive until he left to go on duty. He could sleep. . . .

8. Geetha – Scobie prays in despair, and finds it turning into a dialogue.

“If he couldn't pray he could at least talk, sitting there at the back, as far as he could get from Golgotha. He said,

O God, I am the only guilty one because I've known the answers all the time. I've preferred to give you pain rather than give pain to Helen or my wife because I can't observe your suffering. I can only imagine it. But there are limits to what I can do to you—or them. I can't desert either of them while I'm alive, but I can die and remove myself from their blood-stream. They are ill with me and I can cure them. And you too, God—you are ill with me. I can't go on, month after month, insulting you. I can't face coming up to the altar at Christmas—your birthday feast—and taking your body and blood for the sake of a lie. I can't do that. You'll be better off if you lose me once and for all.

I know what I'm doing. I'm not pleading for mercy. I am going to damn myself, whatever that means. I've longed for peace and I'm never going to know peace again. But you'll be at peace when I am out of your reach. It will be no use then sweeping the floor to find me or searching for me over the mountains. You'll be able to forget me, God, for eternity. One hand clasped the package in his pocket like a promise.

No one can speak a monologue for long alone — another voice will always make itself heard: every monologue sooner or later becomes a discussion. So now he couldn't keep the other voice silent: it spoke from the cave of his body: it was as if the sacrament which had lodged there for his damnation gave tongue: You say you love me, and yet you'll do this to me—rob me of you for ever. I made you with love. I've wept your tears. I've saved you from more than you will ever know; I planted in you this longing for peace only so that one day I could satisfy your longing and watch your happiness. And now you push me away, you put me out of your reach. There are no capital letters to separate us when we talk together. I am not Thou but simply you, when you speak to me; I am humble as any other beggar. Can't you trust me as you'd trust a faithful dog? I have been faithful to you for two thousand years. All you have to do now is ring a bell, go into a box, confess . . . the repentance is already there, straining at your heart. It's not repentance you lack, just a few simple actions: to go up to the Nissen hut and say good-bye. Or if you must, continue rejecting me but without lies any more. Go to your house and say good-bye to your wife and live with your mistress. If you live you will come back to me sooner or later. One of them will suffer, but can't you trust me to see that the suffering isn't too great?

The voice was silent in the cave and his own voice replied hopelessly: No. I don't trust you. I love you, but I've never trusted you. If you made me, you made this feeling of responsibility that I've always carried about like a sack of bricks. I'm not a policeman for nothing—responsible for order, for seeing justice is done. There was no other profession for a man of my kind. I can't shift my responsibility to you. If I could, I would be someone else. I can't make one of them suffer so as to save myself. I'm responsible and I'll see it through the only way I can. A sick man's death means to them only a short suffering—everybody has to die. We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

So long as you live, the voice said, I have hope. There's no human hopelessness like the hopelessness of God. Can't you just go on, as you are doing now? the voice pleaded, lowering the terms every time it spoke, like a dealer in a market. It explained: There are worse acts. But— No, he said, No. That's impossible. I love you and I won't go on insulting you at your own altar. You see, it's an impasse, God, an impasse, he said, clutching the package in his pocket. He got up and turned his back on the altar and went out. Only when he saw his face in the driving mirror did he realize that his eyes were bruised with suppressed tears. He drove on towards the police station and the Commissioner.

9. Pamela

Pamela read the same passage as Zakia's above. She said: “I would have liked to read the whole chapter because it ends with him again feeling pity, and writing a letter to her which got him into trouble. In lots of incidents Scobie went wrong because of his feeling of pity and what he expresses about pity here really got my attention. I hope you all discus more on this.”

10. Gopa – Scobie goes to meet Yusef late at night in the office on the quay, and is observed by Wilson.

He could tell that Yusef was working late in his office on the quay. The little white two-storied building stood beside the wooden jetty on the edge of Africa, just beyond the army dumps of petrol, and a line of light showed under the curtains in the landward window. A policeman saluted Scobie as he picked his way between the crates. "All quiet, corporal?

"All quiet, sah."

"Have you patrolled at the Kru Town end?"

"Oh, yes, sah. All quiet, sah." He could tell from the promptitude of the reply how untrue it was.

"The wharf rats out, eh?"

"Oh, no, sah. All very quiet like the grave." The stale literary phrase showed that the man had been educated at a mission school.

"Well, good night."

"Good night, sah."

Scobie went on. It was many weeks now since he had seen Yusef—not since the night of the black-mail, and now he felt an odd yearning towards his tormentor. The little white building magnetized him, as though concealed there was his only companionship, the only man he could trust. At least his black-mailer knew him as no one else did: he could sit opposite that fat absurd figure and tell the whole truth. In this new world of lies his black-mailer was at home: he knew the paths: he could advise: even help. . . . Round the corner of a crate came Wilson. Scobie's torch lit his face like a map.

"Why, Wilson," Scobie said, "you are out late."

"Yes," Wilson said; and Scobie thought uneasily, how he hates me.

"You've got a pass for the quay?"

"Yes,"

"Keep away from the Kru Town end. It's not safe there alone. No more nose-bleeding?"

"No," Wilson said. He made no attempt to move: it seemed always his way—to stand blocking a path: a man one had to walk round.

"Well, I'll be saying good night, Wilson. Look in any time. Louise . . ."

Wilson said, "I love her, Scobie."

"I thought you did," Scobie said. "She likes you, Wilson."

"I love her," Wilson repeated. He plucked at the tarpaulin over the crate and said, "You wouldn't know what that means."

"What means?"

"Love. You don't love anybody except yourself, your dirty self."

"You are overwrought, Wilson. It's the climate. Go and lie down."

"You wouldn't act as you do if you loved her." Over the black tide, from an invisible ship, came the sound of a gramophone playing some popular heart-rending tune. A sentry challenged, by the Field. Security post, and somebody replied with a password. Scobie lowered his torch till it lit only Wilson's mosquito boots. He said, "Love isn't as simple as you think it is, Wilson. You read too much poetry.

"What would you do if I told her everything—about Mrs. Rolt?" .

"But you have told her, Wilson. What you believe. But she prefers my story."

"One day I'll ruin you, Scobie."

"Would that help Louise?"

"I could make her happy," Wilson claimed ingenuously, with a breaking voice that took Scobie back over fifteen years—to a much younger man than this soiled specimen who listened to Wilson at the sea's edge, hearing under the words the low sucking of water against wood. He said gently, "You'd try. I know you'd try. Perhaps . . ." but he had no idea himself how that sentence was supposed to finish, what vague comfort for Wilson had brushed his mind and gone again. Instead an irritation took him against the gangling romantic figure by the crate who was so ignorant and yet knew so much. He said, "I wish meanwhile you'd stop spying on me."

"It's my job," Wilson admitted, and his boots moved in the torch-light.

"The things you find out are so unimportant." He left Wilson beside the petrol dump and walked on. As he climbed the steps to Yusef's office he could see, looking back, an obscure thickening of the darkness where Wilson stood and watched and hated. He would go home and draft a report. "At 11:25 I observed Major Scobie going obviously by appointment.