Authors: Graham Greene

The Man Within (27 page)

BOOK: The Man Within

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‘They’ve gone,’ he repeated, his eyes turned not to the elderly revenue officer who addressed him, but to Elizabeth. The officer’s eyes followed his and remained fixed in a gradually growing horror and disgust.

‘What’s this?’ he said and suddenly moved round the
table
and came face to face with the body. ‘She’s dead,’ he added, voice falling into a whisper. He looked up. ‘Did they do this? We’ll hang them now.’

‘I killed her,’ Andrews said. ‘You’ll find my name on the knife.’ You are safe now, Carlyon, he thought, not with any bitter, soured or jealous love, but with a quiet and amused friendliness. We are quits. And yet it is true – I did kill her or my father in me. But, father, you too shall die.

Leaning forward, paler than when he entered, the man drew out the knife and read the name in the rude, schoolboy attempt at engraving. ‘You scum,’ he said. He gave an order to his men.

‘I’m coming quietly,’ Andrews said. ‘Didn’t I send for you?’ They watched him with puzzled, suspicious and totally uncomprehending eyes, but made no attempt to bind his hands.

‘There’s nothing more to stay for,’ Andrews said and walked to the door. They followed him as if he were their leader and outside formed round him without a word. It was quite dark, but the moon, like a ship on a land girt lake, sailed in a deep blue gap between the clouds, shedding a pale light upon their crumpled splendour. One star companioned her.

Andrews did not look back upon the cottage. Regret had gone, even remembrance of the graceless body abandoned there. To his own surprise he felt happy and at peace, for his father was slain and yet a self remained, a self which knew neither lust, blasphemy nor cowardice, but only peace and curiosity for the dark, which deepened around him. You were always right, he said, in the hope, not yet belief, that there was something in the night which would hear him, the fourth time has brought peace. His father’s had been a stubborn ghost, but it was laid at last, and he need no longer be torn in two between that spirit and the stern unresting critic which was wont to speak. I am that critic, he said with a sense of discovery and exhilaration.

It was the men around him who seemed overweighted with a kind of despair for the dead. They walked heavily and nervously, forgetting the prisoner in their horror of his act. They did not know how close they were treading to another deed. Aware of his safe presence in their midst they kept their eyes away from him in a kind of shame that any man could be so callous. To Andrews’ sense now there were two stars or it might be two yellow candles in the night around him. One was the sole companion of the moon, the other glimmered more brightly still in the belt of the officer in front of him and bore his own name. Slowly his hand stole out unnoticed on an errand of supreme importance, for between the two candles there was a white set face that regarded him without pity and without disapproval, with wisdom and with sanity.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Man Within
was the first novel of mine to find a publisher. I had already written two novels, both of which I am thankful to Heinemann’s for rejecting. I began this novel in 1926, when I was not quite twenty-two, and it was published with inexplicable success in 1929, so it has now reached the age of its author. The other day I tried to revise it for this edition, but when I had finished my sad and hopeless task, the story remained just as embarrassingly romantic, the style as derivative, and I had eliminated perhaps the only quality it possessed – its youth. So in reprinting not a comma has been altered intentionally. Why reprint then? I can offer no real excuse, but perhaps an author may be allowed one sentimental gesture towards his own past, the period of ambition and hope.

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Epub ISBN 9781409020370

Version 1.0

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