IT'S A BATTLEFIELD 2

He opened his eyes and saw Milly, quite clearly, in relief against the reading-lamp, blackness all round her and he was aware that she was bewildered and hopeless and needed him and that he was dying; it seemed to him that she was watching him with horror as if he was the first of all men whom sooner or later she must come to know; he unsealed his ears and heard the breathing catch in her throat.  He put his foot against the rail and urged his jaw to open, his muscles to respond;  then there was pain and a sense of something breaking and the taste of blood and his throat filling and a struggle to breathe.

  He never knew that he screamed in spite of his broken jaw; but with curious irrelevance, out of the darkness, after they had left him and his pulses had ceased beating and he was dead, consciousness returned for a fraction of a second, as if his brain had been a hopelessly shattered mirror, of which one piece caught a passing light.  He saw and his brain recorded  the sight:  twelve men lying uneasily awake in the public ward with the wireless headpieces clamped across their ears, and a nurse reading under a lamp, and nobody beside his bed.

Text:  Graham Greene, It’s A Battlefield (1934)

IT'S A BATTLEFIELD

  The Assistant Commissioner was careful of his appearance before meeting men younger than himself.  It gave him the same kind of confidence as dressing for dinner had done in eastern forests.  He opened the cupboard door and brushed his dark suit before the mirror, his narrow yellow face bent close to the glass.  Young men had certain savage qualities; they moved quickly; sometimes they carried poisoned weapons.  He brushed slowly in rhythm with the plodding jungle step of his mind.  He said to his secretary:  "I’ve put my telephone number on the desk.  If there’s anything urgent . . ."  As usual before a sentence was finished he became lost in the difficulties of expression.  Slowly, with a fateful accumulation of hesitant sounds, he hacked his way forward.  “Er - urgent, you will please – er - ring up the number, and - er - ask for me.”  Bowler-hatted, umbrella over the left arm, he passed down long passages lined with little glass cells.  Telephone bells rang, electric buzzers whirred like cicadas along his route, but his thoughts were stepped carefully on, undeflected, undelayed, certainly unhurried. 

 

  By the time he reached the courtyard, he had decided that he did not care for politics. In Northumberland Avenue he said to himself that justice was just not his business.

Text:  Graham Greene, It’s A Battlefield (1934)

Pictures:  1. Massacio - Crucifixion of St. Peter (1426); 2. Massacio -  Holy Trinity (1425); 3.  Gravesite of Graham Greene, Corseaux, Switzerland.