Free The power and the glory by Graham Greene Page A

like the taste of brandy, promising temporary relief from fear, loneliness, a lot of things. He was being driven by the presence of the soldiers to the very place where he most wanted to be. He had avoided it for six years, but now it wasn't his fault-it was his duty to go there-it couldn't count as sin. He went back to his mule and kicked it gently: "Up, mule, up"-a small gaunt man in torn peasant's clothes going for the first time in many years, like any ordinary man, to his home.

In any case, even if he could have gone south and avoided the village, it was only one more surrender: the years behind him were littered with similar surrenders-feast-days and fast-days and days of abstinence had been the first to go: then he had ceased to trouble more than occasionally about his breviary-and finally he had left it behind altogether at the port in one of his periodic attempts at escape. Then the altar stone went-too dangerous to carry with him. He had no business to say Mass without it: he was probably liable to suspension, but penalties of the ecclesiastical kind began to seem unreal in a state where the only penalty was the civil one of death. The routine of his life like a dam was cracked and forgetfulness came dribbling in, wiping out this and that. Five years ago he had given way to despair-the unforgivable sin-and he was going back now to the scene of his despair with a curious lightening of the heart. For he had got over despair too. He was a bad priest, he knew it: they had a word for his kind-a whisky priest-but every failure dropped out of sight and out of mind: somewhere they accumulated in secret-the rubble of his failures. One day they would choke up, he supposed, altogether the source of grace. Until then he carried on, with spells of fear, weariness, with a shamefaced lightness of heart.

The mule splashed across the clearing and they entered the forest again. Now that he no longer despaired it didn't mean, of course, that he wasn't damned-it was simply that after a time the mystery became too great, a damned man putting God into the mouths of men: an odd sort of servant, that, for the devil. His mind was full of a simplified mythology: Michael dressed in armour slew a dragon, and the angels fell through space like comets with beautiful streaming hair because they were jealous, so one of the fathers had said, of what God intended for men-the enormous privilege of life-this life.

There were signs of cultivation: stumps of trees and the ashes of fires where the ground was being cleared for a crop. He stopped beating the mule on: he felt a curious shyness.... A woman came out of a hut and watched him lagging up the path on the tired mule. The tiny village, not more than two dozen huts round a dusty plaza, was made to pattern: but it was a pattern which lay close to his heart; he felt secure-he was confident of a welcome-that in this place there would be at least one person he could trust not to betray him to the police. When he was quite close the mule sat down again-this time he had to roll on the ground to escape. He picked himself up and the woman watched him as if he were an enemy. "Ah, Maria," he said, "and how are you?"

"Well," she exclaimed, "it is you, father?"

He didn't look directly at her: his eyes were sly and cautious. He said: "You didn't recognize me?"

"You've changed." She looked him up and down with a kind of contempt. She said: "When did you get those clothes, father?"

"A week ago."

"What did you do with yours?"

"I gave them in exchange."

"Why? They were good clothes."

"They were very ragged-and conspicuous."

"I'd have mended them and hidden them away. It's a waste. You look like a common man."

He smiled, looking at the ground, while she chided him like a house-keeper: it was just as in the old days when there was a presbytery and meetings of the Children of Mary and all the guilds and gossip of a parish, except of course that... He said gently, not looking at her, with the same