Free The Man Within by Graham Greene Page A

to avoid us. And when did he escape? Before we were surprised. I’m certain of that. Why is he afraid of meeting me? I know he is.’ His eyes, having taken a sad, suspicious gaze at the world, seemed to hide themselves yet deeper in his skull. ‘You will not understand,’ he said, ‘how he has spoilt everything. It was a rough life, but there seemed something fine in it – adventure, courage, high stakes. Now we are a lot of gaol-birds, murderers. Doesn’t it seem mean to you,’ he cried suddenly, ‘that a man should be shot dead over a case of spirits? What a dull, dirty game it makes it all appear.’
    She looked at him with pity but not with sympathy. ‘It must have been that all along,’ she said.
    He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Yes, but I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘Should I thank him for my enlightenment?’
    She smiled at the tendrils of the fire uncurling themselves and folding again in bud. ‘Is a man’s death and your dream broken worth all this fuss?’ she demanded with voice raised a little as though she would carry her protest against man’s stupidity beyond the room and out into the shrouding mist and night.
    ‘You are so sane,’ he said sadly. ‘You women are all so sane. A dream is often all there is to a man. I think that you are lovely, good and full of pity, but that is only a dream. You know all about yourself, how you are greedy for this and that, afraid of insects, full of disgusting physical needs. You’ll never find a man who will love you for anything but a bare, unfilled-in outline of yourself. A man will even forget his own details when he can, until he appears an epic hero, and it needs his woman to see that he’s a fool. Only a woman can love a real person.’
    ‘You may be right,’ she said, ‘though I don’t understand most of it. I once knew a man, though, who so forgot his own details as you call them, that he believed himself a coward and nothing else.’
    ‘That’s less common,’ Carlyon answered. ‘Women generally show us up to ourselves and we hate them for it. I suppose that man would love the woman who showed him up.’
    She suddenly dropped her seriousness and laughed. ‘Poor man,’ she mocked, ‘and you hate this friend of yours because he’s shown you up. What a fool you are to waste your time on such a hate.’
    He made a small motion with his hands towards the fire, as though he wished to seize its light and heat, and bear them to his brain. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I hate him,’ and then waited, with his eyes peeping, as it were beseechingly, from his low skull in a longing to be convinced of his own futility and of his own hate.
    ‘But what, after all, could you do if you met him?’ she protested.
    ‘I should make sure that I was right,’ he answered, ‘and then I should kill him.’
    ‘And what would be the use of that?’ she asked.
    He edged a little away from her and threw back his head, as though he were protecting something infinitely dear. ‘There would be no use,’ he said, ‘no use, but I have a mission.’
    He saw her lift her eyes full of a pleading friendship. ‘You are in danger of something worse than the law,’ she said.
    He looked at her with suspicion. ‘Why all these arguments?’ he asked. ‘Did you like the man?’ He eyed her with regret and disgust as he would have done a lovely picture soiled with ordure. ‘Did you get fond of him in a night?’
    ‘No,’ she said simply. ‘But I have lived with hate since I was a child. Why don’t you escape from the country? If you stay you’ll only injure yourself or else something you never intended to harm. That’s always the way.’
    He took no notice of her words, but watched her face with curiosity and fascination. ‘If I could take you with me,’ he murmured, ‘I should have with me peace and charity. Have you noticed,’ he said softly, his eyes peering like a dog’s between the bars of a cage, ‘how in the middle of a storm there’s always a moment of