Free The power and the glory by Graham Greene

distance. "What is your name?"

"Luis."

"Well," the lieutenant said, at a loss for words, "you must learn to aim properly."

The boy said passionately: "I wish I could." He had his eye on the holster.

"Would you like to see my gun?" the lieutenant said. He drew his heavy automatic from the holster and held it out: the children drew cautiously in. He said: "This is the safety-catch. Lift it. So. Now it's ready to fire."

"Is it loaded?" Luis asked.

"It's always loaded."

The tip of the boy's tongue appeared: he swallowed. Saliva came from the glands as if he smelt blood. They all stood close in now. A daring child put out his hand and touched the holster. They ringed the lieutenant round: he was surrounded by an insecure happiness as he fitted the gun back on his hip.

"What is it called?" Luis asked.

"A Colt No. 5."

"How many bullets?"

"Six."

"Have you killed somebody with it?"

"Not yet," the lieutenant said.

They were breathless with interest. He stood with his hand on his holster and watched the brown intent patient eyes: it was for these he was fighting. He would eliminate from their childhood everything which had made him miserable, all that was poor, superstitious, and corrupt. They deserved nothing less than the truth-a vacant universe and a cooling world, the right to be happy in any way they chose. He was quite prepared to make a massacre for their sakes-first the Church and then the foreigner and then the politician-even his own chief would one day have to go. He wanted to begin the world again with them, in a desert.

"Oh," Luis said, "I wish... I wish..." as if his ambition were too vast for definition. The lieutenant put out his hand in a gesture of affection-a touch, he didn't know what to do with it. He pinched the boy's ear and saw him flinch away with the pain: they scattered from him like birds and he went on alone across the plaza to the police station, a little dapper figure of hate carrying his secret of love. On the wall of the office the gangster still stared stubbornly in profile towards the first communion party: somebody had inked the priest's head round to detach him from the girls' and the women's faces: the unbearable grin peeked out of a halo. The lieutenant called furiously out into the patio: "Is there nobody here?" Then he sat down at the desk while the gun-butts scraped the floor.

PART II

Chapter One

    THE mule suddenly sat down under the priest: it was not an unnatural thing to do, for they had been travelling through the forest for nearly twelve hours. They had been going west, but news of soldiers met them there and they had turned east: the Red Shirts were active in that direction, so they had tacked north, wading through the swamps, diving into the mahogany darkness. Now they were both tired out and the mule simply sat down. The priest scrambled off and began to laugh. He was feeling happy. It is one of the strange discoveries a man makes that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration: there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.

He came cautiously out of the belt of trees into a marshy clearing: the whole state was like that, river and swamp and forest: he knelt down in the late sunlight and bathed his face in a brown pool which reflected back at him like a piece of glazed pottery the round, stubbly, and hollow features; they were so unexpected that he grinned at them-with the shy evasive untrustworthy smile of a man caught out. In the old days he often practised a gesture a long while in front of a glass so that he had come to know his own face as well as an actor does. It was a form of humility-his own natural face hadn't seemed the right one. It was a buffoon's face, good enough for mild jokes to women, but unsuitable at the altar rail. He had tried to change it-and indeed, he thought, indeed I have succeeded, they'll never recognize me now, and the cause of his happiness came back to him