权力与荣耀-Part two chapter4

IT WAS still very early in the morning when he crossed the river, and came dripping up the other bank. He wouldn't have expected anybody to be about. The bungalow, the tin-roofed shed, the flag-staff: he had an idea that all Englishmen lowered their flags at sunset and sang "God Save the King." He came carefully round the comer of the shed and the door gave to his pressure. He was inside in the dark where he had been before: how many weeks ago? He had no idea. He only remembered that then the rains were a long way off: now they were beginning to break. In another week only an aeroplane would be able to cross the mountains.
   He felt around him with his foot: he was so hungry that even a few bananas would be better than nothing—he had had no food for two days—but there was none here, none at all. He must have arrived on a day when the crop had gone downriver. He stood just inside the door trying to remember what the child had told him—the Morse code, her window: across the dead-white dusty yard the mosquito wire caught the sun. He was reminded suddenly of an empty larder. He began to listen anxiously: there wasn't a sound anywhere—the day here hadn't yet begun with that first sleepy slap of a shoe on a cement floor, the claws of a dog scratching as it stretched, the knock-knock of a hand on a door. There was just nothing, nothing at all.
   What was the time? How many hours of light had there [133] been? It was impossible to tell: time was elastic: it stretched to snapping-point. Suppose, after all, it was not very early—it might be six, seven. ... He realized how much he had counted on this child. She was the only person who could help him without endangering herself. Unless he got over the mountains in the next few days he was trapped—he might as well hand himself over to the police, because how could he live through the rains with nobody daring to give him food or shelter? It would have been better, quicker, if he had been recognized in the police station a week ago: so much less trouble. Then he heard a sound: it was like hope coming tentatively back: a scratching and a whining: this was what one meant by dawn—the noise of life. He waited for it—hungrily—in the doorway.
   And it came: a monGREl bitch dragging herself across the yard: an ugly creature with bent ears, trailing a wounded or a broken leg, whimpering. There was something wrong with her back. She came very slowly: he could see her ribs like an exhibit in a natural history museum: it was obvious that she hadn't had food for days: she had been abandoned.
   Unlike him, she retained a kind of hope. Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair. Watching her wounded proGREss he had a sense that this had happened daily—perhaps for weeks: he was watching one of the well-rehearsed effects of the new day, like bird-song in happier regions. She dragged herself up to the veranda door and began to scratch with one paw, lying oddly spread-eagled: her nose was down to a crack: she seemed to be breathing in the unused air of empty rooms: then she whined impatiently, and once her tail beat as if she heard something move inside. At last she began to howl.
   The priest could bear it no longer: he knew now what it meant: he might as well let his eyes see. He came out into the yard and the animal turned awkwardly—the parody of a watchdog—and began to bark at him. It wasn't anybody she wanted: she wanted what she was used to: she wanted the old world back.
   He looked in through a window—perhaps this was the child's room. Everything has been removed from it except the useless or the broken. There was a cardboard box full of torn [134] paper and a small chair which had lost a leg. There was a large nail in the whitewashed wall where a mirror perhaps had been hung—or a picture. There was a broken shoe-horn.
   The bitch was dragging itself along the veranda growling: instinct is like a sense of duty—one can confuse it with loyalty very easily. He avoided the animal simply by stepping out into the sun: it couldn't turn quickly enough to follow him: he pushed at the door and it opened—nobody had bothered to lock up. An ancient alligator's skin which had been badly cut and inefficiently dried hung on the wall. There was a snuffle behind him and he turned: the bitch had two paws over the threshold, but now that he was established in the house, she didn't mind him. He was there, in possession, the master, and there were all kinds of smells to occupy her mind. She pushed herself across the floor, making a wet noise.
   The priest opened a door on the left—perhaps it had been the bedroom: in a corner lay a pile of old medicine bottles: small fingers of crudely coloured liquid lay in some of them. There were medicines for headaches, stomach-aches, Medicine to be taken after meals and before meals. Somebody must have been very ill to need so many. There was a hair-slide, broken, and a ball of hair-combings—very fair hair turning dusty white. He thought with relief: It is her mother, only her mother.
   He tried another room which faced, through the mosquito wire, the slow and empty river. This had been the living-room, for they had left behind the table—a folding card-table of plywood bought for a few shillings which hadn't been worth taking with them—wherever they'd gone. Had the mother been dying? he wondered. They had cleared the crop perhaps, and gone to the capital, where there was a hospital. He left that room and entered another: this was the one he had seen from the outside—the child's. He turned over the contents of the waste-paper box with sad curiosity. He felt as if he were clearing up after a death, deciding what would be too painful to keep.
   He read: "The immediate cause of the American War of Independence was what is called the Boston Tea Party." It seemed to be part of an essay written in large firm letters, carefully. "But the real issue" (the word was spelt wrong, crossed [135] out, and rewritten) "was whether it was right to tax people who were not represented in Parliament." It must have been a rough copy—there were so many corrections. He picked out another scrap at random—it was about people called Whigs and Tories—the words were incomprehensible to him. Something like a duster flopped down off the roof into the yard: it was a buzzard. He read on: "If five men took three days to mow a meadow of four acres five rods, how much would two men mow in one day?" There was a neat line ruled under the question, and then the calculations began—a hopeless muddle of figures which didn't work out. There was a hint of heat and irritation in the scrumpled paper tossed aside. He could see her very clearly, dispensing with that question decisively: the neat accurately moulded face with the two pinched pigtails. He remembered her readiness to swear eternal enmity against anyone who hurt him—and he remembered his own child enticing him by the rubbish-dump.
   He shut the door carefully behind him as if he were preventing an escape. He could hear the bitch——somewhere—growling, and followed her into what had once been the kitchen. She lay in a deathly attitude over a bone with her old teeth bared. An Indian's face hung outside the mosquito wire like something hooked up to dry—dark, withered, and unappetizing. He had his eyes on the bone as if he coveted it. He looked up as the priest came across the kitchen and immediately was gone as if he had never been there, leaving the house just as abandoned. The priest, too, looked at the bone.
   There was a lot of meat on it still: a small cloud of flies hung above it a few inches from the bitch's muzzle, and the bitch kept her eye fixed, now that the Indian was gone, on the priest. They were all in competition. The priest advanced a step or two and stamped twice: "Go," he said, "go," flapping his hands, but the monGREl wouldn't move, flattened above the bone, with all the resistance left in the broken body concentrated in the yellow eyes, burring between her teeth. It was like hate on a deathbed. The priest came cautiously forward: he wasn't yet used to the idea that the animal couldn't spring—one associates a dog with action, but this creature, like any crippled human being, could only think. You could see the thoughts—hunger and hope and hatred—stuck on the eyeball.
   [136] The priest put out his hand towards the bone and the flies buzzed upwards: the animal became silent, watching. "There, there," the priest said cajolingly; he made little enticing movements in the air and the animal stared back. Then the priest turned and moved away as if he were abandoning the bone: he droned gently to himself a phrase from the Mass, elaborately paying no attention. Then he switched quickly round again: it hadn't worked: the bitch watched him, screwing round her neck to follow his ingenious movements.
   For a moment he became furious—that a monGREl bitch with a broken back should steal the only food. He swore at it—popular expressions picked up beside bandstands: he would have been surprised in other circumstances that they came so readily to his tongue. Then suddenly he laughed: this was human dignity disputing with a bitch over a bone. When he laughed the animal's ears went back, twitching at the tips—apprehensive. But he felt no pity her life had no importance beside that of a human being: he looked round for something to throw, but the room had been cleared of nearly everything except the bone; perhaps—who knows?—that had been left deliberately for this mongrel; he could imagine the child remembering that, before she left with the sick mother and the stupid father: he had the impression that it was always she who had to think. He could find for his purpose nothing better than a broken wire rack which had been used for vegetables.
   He advanced again towards the bitch and struck her lightly on the muzzle. She snapped at the wire with her old broken teeth and wouldn't move. He beat at her again more fiercely and she caught the wire—he had to rasp it away. He struck again and again before he realized that she couldn't, except with GREat exertion, move at all: she was unable to escape his blows or leave the bone. She had to endure: her eyes yellow and scared and malevolent shining back at him between the blows.
   So then he changed his method: he used the vegetable rack as a kind of muzzle, holding back the teeth with it, while he bent and captured the bone. One paw tugged at it and gave way; he lowered the wire and jumped back—the animal tried without success to follow him, then lapsed upon the floor. The [137] priest had won: he had his bone. The bitch no longer tried to growl.
   The priest tore off some of the raw meat with his teeth and began to chew: no food had ever tasted so good, and now that for the moment he was happy he began to feel a little pity. He thought: I will eat just so much and she can have the rest. He marked mentally a point upon the bone and tore off another piece. The nausea he had felt for hours now began to die away and leave an honest hunger: he ate on and the bitch watched him. Now that the fight was over she seemed to bear no malice: her tail began to beat the floor, hopefully, questioningly. The priest reached the point he had marked, but now it seemed to him that his previous hunger had been imaginary: this was hunger, what he felt now: a man's need was GREater than a dog's: he would leave that knuckle of meat at the joint. But when the moment came he ate that too—after all, the dog had teeth: she would eat the bone itself. He dropped it under her muzzle and left the kitchen.
   He made one more proGREss through the empty rooms. A broken shoe-horn: Medicine bottles: an essay on the American War of Independence—there was nothing to tell him why they had gone away. He came out onto the veranda and saw through a gap in the planks that a book had fallen to the ground and lay between the rough pillars of brick which raised the house out of the track of ants. It was months since he had seen a book, It was almost like a promise, mildewing there under the piles, of better things to come—life going on in private houses with wireless sets and bookshelves and beds made ready for the night and a cloth laid for food. He knelt down on the ground and reached for it. He suddenly realized that when once the long struggle was over and he had crossed the mountains and the state line, life might, after all, be enjoyed again.
   It was an English book—but from his years in an American seminary he retained enough English to read it, with a little difficulty. Even if he had been unable to understand a word, it would still have been a book. It was called Jewels Five Words Long, A Treasury of English Verse, and on the fly-leaf was pasted a printed certificate—Awarded to ... and then the name Coral Fellows filled up in ink ... for proficiency in English [138] Composition, Third Grade. There was an obscure coat-of-arms, which seemed to include a griffin and an oak leaf, a Latin motto: "Virtus Laudata Crescit," and a signature from a rubber stamp, Henry Beckley, B.A., Principal of Private Tutorials, Ltd.
   The priest sat down on the veranda steps. There was silence everywhere—no life around the abandoned banana station except the buzzard which hadn't yet given up hope. The Indian might never have existed at all. After a meal, the priest thought with sad amusement, a little reading, and opened the book at random. Coral—so that was the child's name; he thought of the shops in Vera Cruz full of it—the hard brittle jewellery which was thought for some reason so suitable for young girls after their first communion. He read:
  
   "I come from haunts of coot and hern,
   I make a sudden sally,
   And sparkle out among the fern,
   To bicker down a valley."
  
   It was a very obscure poem, full of words which were like Esperanto. He thought: So this is English poetry: how odd. The little poetry he knew dealt mainly with agony, remorse, and hope. These verses ended on a philosophical note—"For men may come and men may go. But I go on for ever." The triteness and untruth of "for ever" shocked him a little: a poem like this ought not to be in a child's hands. The buzzard came picking its way across the yard, a dusty and desolate figure: every now and then it lifted sluggishly from the earth and flapped down twenty yards on. The priest read:
  
   " 'Come back! Come back!' he cried in grief
   Across the stormy water,
   'And I'll forgive your Highland chief
   My daughter, O my daughter.' "
  
   That sounded to him more impressive—though hardly, perhaps, any more than the other—stuff for children. He felt in the foreign words the ring of genuine passion and repeated to himself on his hot and lonely perch the last line—"My [139] daughter, O my daughter." The words seemed to contain all that he felt himself of repentance, longing, and unhappy love.
  
   It was the oddest thing that ever since that hot and crowded night in the cell he had passed into a region of abandonment—almost as if he had died there with the old man's head on his shoulder and now wandered in a kind of limbo, because he wasn't good or bad enough. ... life didn't exist any more: it wasn't merely a matter of the banana station. Now as the storm broke and he scurried for shelter he knew quite well what he would find—nothing.
   The huts leapt up in the lightning and stood there shaking—then disappeared again in the rumbling darkness. The rain hadn't come yet: it was sweeping up from Campeche Bay in GREat sheets, covering the whole state in its methodical advance. Between the thunderbreaks he could imagine that he heard it—a gigantic rustle moving across towards the mountains which were now so close to him—a matter of twenty miles.
   He reached the first hut: the door was open, and as the lightning quivered he saw, as he expected, nobody at all. Just a pile of maize and the indistinct GREy movement of—perhaps—a rat. He dashed for the next hut, but it was the same as ever (the maize and nothing else), just as if all human life were receding before him, as if Somebody had determined that from now on he was to be left alone—altogether alone. As he stood there the rain reached the clearing: it came out of the forest like thick white smoke and moved on. It was as if an enemy were laying a gas-cloud across a whole territory, carefully, to see that nobody escaped. The rain spread and stayed just long enough, as though the enemy had his stop-watch out and knew to a second the limit of the lungs' endurance. The roof held the rain out for a while and then let it through—the twigs bent under the weight of water and shot apart: it came through in half a dozen places, pouring down in black funnels: then the downpour stopped and the roof dripped and the rain moved on, with the lightning quivering on its flanks like a protective barrage. In a few minutes it would reach the mountains: a few more storms like this and they would be impassable.
   [140] He had been walking all day and he was very tired: he found a dry spot and sat down. When the lightning struck he could see the clearing: all around was the gentle noise of the dripping water. It was nearly like peace, but not quite. For peace you needed human company—his aloneness was like a threat of things to come. Suddenly he remembered—for no apparent reason—a day of rain at the American seminary, the glass windows of the library steamed over with the central heating, the tall shelves of sedate books, and a young man—a stranger from Tucson—drawing his initials on the pane with his finger—that was peace. He looked at it from the outside: he couldn't believe that he would ever again get in. He had made his own world, and this was it—the empty broken huts, the storm going by, and fear again—fear because he was not alone after all.
   Somebody was moving outside, cautiously. The footsteps would come a little way and then stop. He waited apathetically, and the roof dripped behind him. He thought of the half-caste padding around the city, seeking a really cast-iron occasion for his betrayal. A face peered round the hut door at him and quickly withdrew—an old woman's face, but you could never tell with Indians—she mightn't have been more than twenty. He got up and went outside—she scampered back from before him in her heavy sack-like skirt, her black plaits swinging heavily. Apparently his loneliness was only to be broken by these evasive faces—creatures who looked as if they had come out of the Stone Age, who withdrew again quickly.
   He was stirred by a sort of sullen anger—this one should not withdraw. He pursued her across the clearing, splashing in the pools, but she had a start and no sense of shame and she got into the forest before him. It was useless looking for her there, and he returned towards the nearest hut. It wasn't the hut which he had been sheltering in before, but it was just as empty. What had happened to these people? He knew well enough that these more or less savage encampments were temporary only: the Indians would cultivate a small patch of ground and when they had exhausted the soil for the time being, they would simply move away—they knew nothing about the rotation of crops, but when they moved they would take their maize with them. This was more like flight—from [141] force or disease. He had heard of such flights in the case of sickness, and the horrible thing, of course, was that they carried the sickness with them wherever they moved: sometimes they became panicky like flies against a pane, but discreetly, letting nobody know, muting their hubbub. He turned moodily again to stare out at the clearing, and there was the Indian woman creeping back—towards the hut where he had sheltered. He called out to her sharply and again she fled, shambling, towards the forest. Her clumsy proGREss reminded him of a bird feigning a broken wing. … He made no movement to follow her, and before she reached the trees she stopped and watched him; he began to move slowly back towards the other hut. Once he turned: she was following him at a distance, keeping her eyes on him. Again he was reminded of something animal or bird-like, full of anxiety. He walked on, aiming directly at the hut far away beyond it the lightning stabbed down, but you could hardly hear the thunder: the sky was clearing overhead and the moon came out. Suddenly he heard an odd artificial cry, and turning he saw the woman making back towards the forest—then she stumbled, flung up her arms, and fell to the ground—like the bird offering herself.
   He felt quite certain now that something valuable was in the hut, perhaps hidden among the maize, and he paid her no attention, going in. Now that the lightning had moved on, he couldn't see—he felt across the floor until he reached the pile of maize. Outside the padding footsteps came nearer. He began to feel all over it—perhaps food was hidden there—and the dry crackle of the leaves was added to the drip of water and the cautious footsteps, like the faint noises of people busy about their private Businesses. Then he put his hand on a face.
   He couldn't be frightened any more by a thing like that—it was something human he had his fingers on. They moved down the body: it was that of a child who lay completely quiet under his hand. In the doorway the moonlight showed the woman's face indistinctly: she was probably convulsed with anxiety, but you couldn't tell. He thought —I must get this into the open where I can see. …
   It was a male child—perhaps three years old: a withered bullet head with a mop of black hair: unconscious—but not dead: he could feel the faintest movement in the breast. He [142] thought of disease again until he took out his hand and found that the child was wet with blood, not sweat. Horror and disgust touched him—violence everywhere: was there no end to violence? He said to the woman sharply: "What happened?" It was as if man in all this state had been left to man.
   The woman knelt two or three feet away, watching his hands. She knew a little Spanish, because she replied: "Americano." The child wore a kind of brown one-piece smock: he lifted it up to the neck: he had been shot in three places. life was going out of him all the time: there was nothing—really—to be done, but one had to try. … He said "Water" to the woman, "Water," but she didn't seem to understand, squatting there, watching him. It was a mistake one easily made, to think that just because the eyes expressed nothing, there was no grief. When he touched the child he could see her move on her haunches—she was ready to attack him with her teeth if the child so much as moaned.
   He began to speak slowly and gently (he couldn't tell how much she understood): "We must have water. To wash him. You needn't be afraid of me. I will do him no harm." He took off his shirt and began to tear it into strips—it was hopelessly insanitary, but what else was there to do? except pray, of course, but one didn't pray for life, this life. He repeated again: "Water." The woman seemed to understand—she gazed hopelessly round at where the rain stood in pools—that was all there was. Well, he thought, the earth's as clean as any vessel would have been. He soaked a piece of his shirt and leant over the child: he could hear the woman slide closer along the ground—a menacing approach. He tried to reassure her again: "You needn't be afraid of me. I am a priest."
   The word "priest" she understood: she leant forward and grabbed at the hand which held the wet scrap of shirt and kissed it. At that moment, while her lips were on his hand, the child's face wrinkled, the eyes opened and glared at them, the tiny body shook with a kind of fury of pain; they watched the eyeballs roll up and suddenly become fixed, like marbles in a solitaire-board, yellow and ugly with death. The woman let go his hand and scrambled to a pool of water, cupping her fingers for it. The priest said: "We don't need that any more," standing up with his hands full of wet shirt. The woman [143] opened her fingers and let the water fall. She said "Father" imploringly, and he wearily went down on his knees and began to pray.
   He could feel no meaning any longer in prayers like these—the Host was different: to lay that between a dying man's lips was to lay God. That was a fact—something you could touch, but this was no more than a pious aspiration. Why should Anyone listen to his prayers? Sin was like a constriction which prevented their escape: he could feel his prayers like undigested food heavy in his body, unable to escape.
   When he had finished he lifted up the body and carried it back into the hut like a piece of furniture—it seemed a waste of time to have taken it out, like a chair you carry out into the garden and back again because the grass is wet. The woman followed him meekly—she didn't seem to want to touch the body, just watched him put it back in the dark upon the maize. He sat down on the ground and said slowly: "It will have to be buried."
   She understood that, nodding.
   He said: "Where is your husband? Will he help you?" She began to talk rapidly: it might have been Camacho she was speaking: he couldn't understand more than an occasional Spanish word here and there. The word "Americano " occurred again—and he remembered the wanted man whose portrait had shared the wall with his. He asked her: "Did he do this?" She shook her head. What had happened? he wondered. Had the man taken shelter here and had the soldiers fired into huts? It was not unlikely. He suddenly had his attention caught: she had said the name of the banana station but there had been no dying person there: no sign of violence—unless silence and desertion were signs. He had assumed the mother had been taken ill: it might be something worse—and he imagined that stupid Captain Fellows taking down his gun, presenting himself clumsily armed to a man whose chief talent was to draw quickly or to shoot directly from the pocket. That poor child … what responsibilities she had perhaps been forced to undertake.
   He shook the thought away and said: "Have you a spade?" She didn't understand that, and he had to go through the motions of digging. Another roll of thunder came between them: [144] a second storm was coming up, as if the enemy had discovered that the first barrage after all had left a few survivors—this would flatten them. Again he could hear the enormous breathing of the rain miles away: he realized the woman had spoken the one word "church." Her Spanish consisted of isolated words. He wondered what she meant by that. Then the rain reached them—It came down like a wall between him and escape, fell altogether in a heap and built itself up around them. All the light went out except when the lightning FLASHed.
   The roof couldn't keep out this rain: it came dripping through everywhere: the dry maize leaves where the dead child lay crackled like burning wood. He shivered with cold: he was probably on the edge of fever—he must get away before he was incapable of moving at all. The woman (he couldn't see her now) said "Iglesia" again imploringly. It occurred to him that she wanted her child buried near a church or perhaps only taken to an altar, so that he might be touched by the feet of a Christ. It was a fantastic notion.
   He took advantage of a long quivering stroke of blue light to describe with his hands his sense of the impossibility. "The soldiers," he said, and she replied immediately: "Americano." That word always came up, like one with many meanings which depends on the accent whether it is to be taken as an explanation, a warning, or a threat. Perhaps she meant that the soldiers were all occupied in the chase—but even so, this rain was ruining everything. It was still twenty miles to the border, and the mountain paths after the storm were probably impassable—and a church—he hadn't the faintest idea of where there would be a church. He hadn't so much as seen such a thing for years now: it was difficult to believe that they still existed only a few days' journey off. When the lightning went on again he saw the woman watching him with stony patience.
  
   For the last thirty hours they had had only sugar to eat large brown lumps of it the size of a baby's skull: they had seen no one, and they had exchanged no words at all. What was the use when almost the only words they had in common were "Iglesia" and "Americano"? The woman followed at his heels with the dead child strapped on her back: she seemed never to tire. A day and a night brought them out of the [145] marshes to the foot-hills: they slept fifty feet up above the slow GREen river, under a projecting piece of rock where the soil was dry—everywhere else was deep mud. The woman sat with her knees drawn up, and her head down—she showed no emotion, but she put the child's body behind her as if it needed protection from marauders like other lifeless possessions. They had travelled by the sun until the black wooded bar of mountain told them where to go. They might have been the only survivors of a world which was dying out—they carried the visible marks of the dying with them.
   Sometimes he wondered whether he was safe, but when there are no visible boundaries between one state and another—no passport examination or customs house—danger just seems to go on, travelling with you, lifting its heavy feet in the same way as you do. There seemed to be so little proGREss: the path would rise steeply, perhaps five hundred feet, and fall again, dogged with mud. Once it took an enormous hairpin bend, so that after three hours they had returned to a point opposite their starting-place, less than a hundred yards away.
   At sunset on the second day they came out onto a wide plateau covered with short grass: an odd grove of crosses stood up blackly against the sky, leaning at different angles—some as high as twenty feet, some not much more than eight. They were like trees that had been left to seed. The priest stopped and stared at them: they were the first Christian symbols he had seen for more than five years publicly exposed—if you could call this empty plateau in the mountains a public place. No priest could have been concerned in the strange rough group; it was the work of Indians and had nothing in common with the tidy vestments of the Mass and the elaborately worked out symbols of the liturgy. It was like a short cut to the dark and magical heart of the faith—to the night when the graves opened and the dead walked. There was a movement behind him and he turned.
   The woman had gone down on her knees and was shuffling slowly across the cruel ground towards the group of crosses: the dead baby rocked on her back. When she reached the tallest cross she unhooked the child and held the face against the wood and afterwards the loins: then she crossed herself, not as ordinary Catholics do, but in a curious and complicated [146] pattern which included the nose and ears. Did she expect a miracle? And if she did, why should it not be granted her? the priest wondered. Faith, one was told, could move mountains, and here was faith—faith in the spittle that healed the blind man and the voice that raised the dead. The evening star was out: it hung low down over the edge of the plateau: it looked as if it was within reach: and a small hot wind stirred. The priest found himself watching the child for some movement. When none came, it was as if God had missed an opportunity. The woman sat down, and taking a lump of sugar from her bundle, began to eat, and the child lay quiet at the foot of the cross. Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?
   "Vamos," the priest said, but the woman scraped the sugar with her sharp front teeth, paying no attention. He looked up at the sky and saw the evening star blotted out by black clouds. "Vamos." There was no shelter anywhere on this plateau.
   The woman never stirred: the broken snub-nosed face between the black plaits was completely passive: it was as if she had fulfilled her duty and could now take up her everlasting rest. The priest suddenly shivered: the ache which had pressed like a stiff hat-rim across his forehead all day dug deeper in. He thought: I have to get to shelter—a man's first duty is to himself—even the Church taught that, in a way. The whole sky was blackening: the crosses stuck up like dry and ugly cacti: he made off to the edge of the plateau. Once, before the path led down, he looked back—the woman was still biting at the lump of sugar, and he remembered that it was all the food they had.
   The way was very steep—so steep he had to turn and go down backwards: on either side trees GREw perpendicularly out of the grey rock, and five hundred feet below the path climbed up again. He began to sweat, and he had an appalling thirst: when the rain came it was at first a kind of relief. He stayed where he was, hunched back against a boulder—there was no shelter before he reached the bottom of the barranca, and it hardly seemed worth while to make that effort. He was shivering now more or less continuously, and the ache seemed no longer inside his head—it was something outside, almost anything, a noise, a thought, a smell. The senses were jumbled [147] up together. At one moment the ache was like a tiresome voice explaining to him that he had taken the wrong path: he remembered a map he had once seen of the two adjoining states. The state from which he was escaping was peppered with villages—in the hot marshy land people bred as readily as mosquitoes, but in the next state—in the north-west corner—there was hardly anything but blank white paper. You're on the blank paper now, the ache told him. But there's a path, he argued wearily. Oh, a path, the ache said, a path may take you fifty miles before it reaches anywhere at all: you know you won't last that distance. There's just white paper all around.
   At another time the ache was a face. He became convinced that the American was watching him—he had a skin all over spots like a newspaper photograph. Apparently he had followed them all the way because he wanted to kill the mother as well as the child: he was sentimental that way. It was necessary to do something: the rain was like a curtain behind which almost anything might happen. He thought: I shouldn't have left her alone like that, God forgive me. I have no responsibility; what can you expect of a whisky priest? And he struggled to his feet and began to climb back towards the plateau. He was tormented by ideas: it wasn't t only the woman: he was responsible for the American as well: the two faces—his own and the gunman's—were hanging together on the police-station wall, as if they were brothers in a family portrait gallery. You didn't put temptation in a brother's way.
   Shivering and sweating and soaked with rain he came up over the edge of the plateau. There was nobody there—a dead child was not somebody, just a useless object abandoned at the foot of one of the crosses: the mother had gone Home. She had done what she wanted to do. The surprise lifted him, as it were, out of his fever before it dropped him back again. A small lump of sugar—all that was left—lay by the child's mouth—in case a miracle should still happen or for the spirit to eat? The priest bent down with an obscure sense of shame and took it: the dead child couldn't growl back at him like a broken dog: but who was he to disbelieve in miracles? He hesitated, while the rain poured down: then he put the sugar in his mouth. If God chose to give back life, couldn't He give food as well?
   [148] Immediately he began to eat, the fever returned: the sugar stuck in his throat: he felt an appalling thirst. Crouching down he tried to lick some water from the uneven ground: he even sucked at his soaked trousers. The child lay under the streaming rain like a dark heap of cattle dung. The priest moved away again, back to the edge of the plateau and down the barranca side: it was loneliness he felt now—even the face had gone; he was moving alone across that blank white sheet, going deeper every moment into the abandoned land.
   Somewhere, in some direction, there were towns, of course: go far enough and you reached the coast, the Pacific, the railway track to Guatemala: there were roads there and motorcars. He hadn't seen a railway train for ten years. He could imagine the black line following the coast along the map, and he could see the fifty, hundred miles of unknown country. That was where he was: he had escaped too completely from men. Nature would kill him now.
   All the same, he went on: there was no point in going back towards the deserted village, the banana station with its dying monGREl and its shoe-horn. There was nothing you could do except put one foot forward and then the other: scrambling down and then scrambling up: from the top of the barranca, when the rain passed on, there was nothing to see except a huge scrumpled land, forest and mountain, with the grey wet veil moving over. He looked once and never looked again. It was too like watching despair.
   It must have been hours later that he ceased to climb: it was evening and forest: monkeys crashed invisibly among the trees with an effect of clumsiness and recklessness, and what were probably snakes hissed away like match-flames through the grass. He wasn't afraid of them: they were a form of life, and he could feel life retreating from him all the time. It wasn't only people who were going: even the animals and the reptiles moved away: presently he would be left alone with nothing but his own breath. He began to recite to himself: "O God, I have loved the beauty of Thy house," and the smell of soaked and rotting leaves and the hot night and the darkness made him believe that he was in a mine shaft, going down into the earth to bury himself. Presently he would find his grave.
   When a man came towards him carrying a gun he did [149] nothing at all. The man approached cautiously: you didn't expect to find another person underground. He said: "Who are you?" with his gun ready.
   The priest gave his name to a stranger for the first time in ten years: Father So-and-so, because he was tired and there seemed no object in going on living.
   "A priest?" the man asked, with astonishment. "Where have you come from?"
   The fever lifted again: a little reality seeped back: he said: "It is all right. I will not bring you any trouble. I am going on." He screwed up all his remaining energy and walked on: a puzzled face penetrated his fever, and receded: there were going to be no more hostages, he assured himself aloud. Footsteps followed him, he was like a dangerous man you see safely off an estate before you go Home. He repeated aloud: "It is all right. I am not staying here. I want nothing."
   "Father ..." the voice said, humbly and anxiously.
   "I will go right away." He tried to run and came suddenly out of the forest onto a long slope of grass. There were lights and huts, below, and up here at the edge of the forest a big whitewashed building—a barracks? were there soldiers? He said: "If I have been seen I will give myself up. I assure you no one shall get into trouble because of me."
   "Father …" He was racked with his headache; he stumbled and put his hand against the wall for support. He felt immeasurably tired. He asked: "The barracks?"
   "Father," the voice said, puzzled and worried, "it is our church."
   "A church?" The priest ran his hands incredulously over the wall like a blind man trying to recognize a particular house, but he was too tired to feel anything at all. He heard the man with the gun babbling out of sight: "Such an honour, father. The bell must be rung ..." and he sat down suddenly on the rain-drenched grass, and leaning his head against the white wall, he fell asleep, with Home behind his shoulder-blades.
   His dream was full of a jangle of cheerful noise.