Free The power and the glory by Graham Greene Page B

embarrassed smile: "How's Brigida?" His heart jumped at the name: a sin may have enormous consequences: it was six years since he had been -home.

"She's as well as the rest of us. What did you expect?"

He had his satisfaction: it was connected with his crime: he had no business to feel pleasure at anything attached to that past. He said mechanically: "That's good," while his heart beat with its secret and appalling love. He said: "I'm very tired. The police were about near Zapata..."

"Why didn't you make for Montecristo?"

He looked quickly up with anxiety. It wasn't the welcome that he had expected: a small knot of people had gathered between the huts and watched him from a safe distance-there was a little decaying bandstand and a single stall for gaseosas-people had brought their chairs out for the evening. Nobody came forward to kiss his hand and ask his blessing. It was as if he had descended by means of his sin into the human struggle to learn other things besides despair and love, that a man can be unwelcome even in his own home. He said: "The Red Shirts were there."

"Well, father," the woman said, "we can't turn you away. You'd better come along." He followed her meekly, tripping once in the long peon trousers, with the happiness wiped off his face and the smile somehow left behind like the survivor of a wreck. There were seven or eight men, two women, half a dozen children: he came among them like a beggar. He couldn't help remembering the last time... the excitement, the gourds of spirit brought out of holes in the ground... his guilt had still been fresh, yet how he had been welcomed. It was as if he had returned to them in their vicious prison as one of themselves-an émigré who comes back to his native place enriched.

"This is the father," the woman said. Perhaps it was only that they hadn't recognized him, he thought, and waited for their greetings. They came forward one by one and kissed his hand and then stood back and watched him. He said: "I am glad to see you..." He was going to say "my children," but then it seemed to him that only the childless man has the right to call strangers his children. The real children were coming up now to kiss his hand, one by one, under the pressure of their parents. They were too young to remember the old days when the priests dressed in black and wore Roman collars and had soft superior patronizing hands: he could see they were mystified at the show of respect to a peasant like their parents. He didn't look at them directly, but he was watching them closely all the same. Two were girls: a thin washed-out child-of five, six, seven? he couldn't tell-and one who had been sharpened by hunger into an appearance of devilry and malice beyond her age. A young woman stared out of the child's eyes. He watched them disperse again, saying nothing: they were strangers.

One of the men said: "Will you be here long, father?"

He said: "I thought, perhaps …I could rest... a few days." One of the other men said: "Couldn't you go a bit farther north, father, to Pueblita?"

"We've been travelling for twelve hours, the mule and I" The woman suddenly spoke for him, angrily: "Of course he'll stay here tonight. It's the least we can do."

He said: "I'll say Mass for you in the morning," as if he were offering them a bribe, but it might almost have been stolen money from their expressions of shyness and unwillingness. Somebody said: "If you don't mind, father, very early... in the night perhaps..."

"What is the matter with you all?" he said. "Why should you be afraid?"

"Haven't you heard...?"

"Heard?"

"They are taking hostages now-from all the villages where they think you've been. And if people don't tell... somebody is shot... and then they take another hostage. It happened in Concepcion."

"Conception?" One of his lids began to twitch, up and down, up and down: in such trivial ways the body expresses anxiety, horror, or despair. He said: "Who?" They looked at him stupidly. He said