Free The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

captain burst out, ‘how I hate this war.’
    ‘We’ve got cause to hate it too, you know,’ Scobie said.
    ‘A man is ruined because he writes to his daughter.’
    ‘Daughter?’
    ‘Yes. She is Frau Groener. Open it and read. You will see.’
    ‘I can’t do that. I must leave it to the censorship. Why didn’t you wait to write till you got to Lisbon, captain?’
    The man had lowered his bulk on to the edge of the bath as though it were a heavy sack his shoulders could no longer bear. He kept on wiping his eyes with the back of his hand like a child—an unattractive child, the fat boy of the school. Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast. Scobie knew he should have taken the letter and gone; he could do no good with his sympathy.
    The captain moaned, ‘If you had a daughter you’d understand. You haven’t got one,’ he accused, as though there were a crime in sterility.
    ‘No.’
    ‘She is anxious about me. She loves me,’ he said, raising his tear-drenched face as though he must drive the unlikely statement home. ‘She loves
me
,’ he repeated mournfully.
    ‘But why not write from Lisbon?’ Scobie asked again. ‘Why run this risk?’
    ‘I am alone. I have no wife,’ the captain said. ‘One cannot always wait to speak. And in Lisbon—you know how things go—friends, wine. I have a little woman there too who is jealous even of my daughter. There are rows, the time passes. In a week I must be off again. It was always so easy before this voyage.’
    Scobie believed him. The story was sufficiently irrational to be true. Even in war-time one must sometimes exercise the faculty of belief if it is not to atrophy. He said, ‘I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do about it. Perhaps nothing will happen.’
    ‘Your authorities,’ the captain said, ‘will blacklist me. You know what that means. The consul will not give a navicert to any ship with me as captain. I shall starve on shore.’
    ‘There are so many slips,’ Scobie said, ‘in these matters. Files get mislaid. You may hear no more about it.’
    ‘I shall pray,’ the man said without hope.
    ‘Why not?’ Scobie said.
    ‘You are an Englishman. You wouldn’t believe in prayer.’
    ‘I’m a Catholic, too,’ Scobie said.
    The fat face looked quickly up at him. ‘A Catholic?’ he exclaimed with hope. For the first time he began to plead. He was like a man who meets a fellow countryman in a strange continent. He began to talk rapidly of his daughter in Leipzig; he produced a battered pocket-book and a yellowing snap-shot of a stout young Portuguese woman as graceless as himself. The little bathroom was stiflingly hot and the captain repeated again and again. ‘You will understand.’ He had discovered suddenly how much they had in common: the plaster statues with the swords in the bleeding heart: the whisper behind the confessional curtains: the holy coats and the liquefaction of blood: the dark side chapels and the intricate movements, and somewhere behind it all the love of God. ‘And in Lisbon,’ he said, ‘she will be waiting, she will take me home, she will take away my trousers so that I cannot go out alone; every day it will be drink and quarrels until we go to bed. You will understand. I cannot write to my daughter from Lisbon. She loves me so much and she waits.’ He shifted his fat thigh and said, ‘The pureness of that love,’ and wept. They had in common all the wide region of repentance and longing.
    Their kinship gave the captain courage to try another angle. He said, ‘I am a poor man, but I have enough money to spare …’ He would never have attempted to bribe an Englishman: it was the most sincere compliment he could pay to their common religion.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Scobie said.
    ‘I have English pounds. I will give you twenty English pounds … fifty.’ He implored. ‘A hundred … that is all