Free The Confidential Agent by Graham Greene Page A

in the little bare room to hide them. In a way, too, it was suitable that the future of the poor should depend upon the poor.
    The hours passed slowly. He supposed that this was resting. There was silence in the passage after a while; she hadn’t been able to spin out her dusting any longer. If only I had a gun, he thought, I shouldn’t feel so powerless; but it had been impossible to bring one: it was to risk too much at the customs. Presumably here there were ways of obtaining a revolver secretly, but he didn’t know them. He discovered that he was a little frightened. Time was so short – they were certain to spring something on him soon. If they began with a beating up, their next attempt was likely to be drastic. It felt odd, lonely, terrifying to be the only one in danger; as a rule he had the company of a whole city. Again his mind returned to the prison and the warder coming across the asphalt. He had been alone then. Fighting was better in the old days. Roland had companions at Roncesvalles – Oliver and Turpin: the whole chivalry of Europe was riding up to help him. Men were united by a common belief. Even a heretic would be on the side of Christendom against the Moors; they might differ about the persons of the Trinity, but on the main issue they were like rock. Now there were so many varieties of economic materialism, so many initial letters.
    A few street cries came up through the cold air – old clothes and a man who wanted chairs to mend. He had said that war killed emotion: it was untrue. Those cries were an agony. He buried his head in the pillow as a young man might have done. They brought back the years before his marriage with intensity. They had listened to them together. He felt like a young man who has given all his trust and found himself mocked, cuckolded, betrayed. Or who has himself in a minute of lust spoilt a whole life together. To live was like perjury. How often they had declared that they would die within a week of each other, but he hadn’t died: he had survived prison, the shattered house. The bomb which had wrecked four floors and killed a cat had left him alive. Did L. really imagine that he could trap him with a woman? and was this what London – a foreign peaceful city – had in store for him, the return of feeling, despair?
    The dusk fell; lights came out like hoar frost. He lay on his back again with his eyes open. Oh, to be home. Presently he got up and shaved. It was time to be gone. He buttoned his overcoat round the chin as he stepped out into the bitter night. An east wind blew from the City: it had the stone-cold of big business blocks and banks. You thought of long passages and glass doors and a spiritless routine. It was a wind to take the heart out of a man. He walked up Guilford Street – the after-office rush was over and the theatre traffic hadn’t begun. In the small hotels dinners were being laid, and oriental faces peered out from bed-sitting-rooms with gloomy nostalgia.
    As he turned up a side street he heard a voice behind him, cultured, insinuating, weak: ‘Excuse me, sir. Excuse me.’ He stopped. A man dressed very oddly in a battered bowler and a long black overcoat from which a fur collar had been removed bowed with an air of excessive gentility; he had a white stubble on his chin, his eyes were bloodshot and pouchy, and he carried in front of him a thin worn hand as if it were to be kissed. He began at once to apologise in what remained of a university – or a stage – accent: ‘I felt sure you wouldn’t mind my addressing you, sir. The fact of the matter is, I find myself in a predicament.’
    â€˜A predicament?’
    â€˜A matter of a few shillings, sir.’ D. wasn’t used to this; their beggars at home in the old days had been more spectacular, with lumps of rotting flesh uplifted at the doors of churches.
    The man had an air of badly secreted anxiety. ‘I wouldn’t have