The Heart of the Matter, Page 2

  Third, and a consequence of the second point, Scobie has not enough depth as a character fully to convince us of his self-divisions. It may be that in order for a character to seem self-divided, we must feel the weight both of his composed self and the weights, as it were, of his discomposed halves. Scobie, by contrast, is only monochromatically vivid. He is that knowable type, ‘a policeman,’ and has the temperament familiar to us now from a thousand television shows: work-obsessed, calm, controlling, repressed, bad with women, a grim solitary. He seems to have had almost no childhood, and to have no interests outside his work. Or rather, he has one great passion other than his work, and it is religion; but it is a passion that does not emerge as such until it is negatively provoked. (He feels, oddly, religious pain but no religious joy.) Such memory with which he is endowed seems limited, and functionally limited, so as to enable the text to ‘work’ thematically: his dead daughter, for instance, which provokes, and sanctions, his involvement with theodicy and pain. He lacks the hinterland, the inefficient or irresponsible consciousness that might make his soul—as opposed to his temperament—vivid to us.

  How might Greene reply to this charge? Or better, how does he reply, in the novel itself? Scobie is prey to two kinds of despair, and the novel’s shape suggests that both of them interact to push him toward his fateful act. There is, first, the despair of unbelief. Scobie’s anguished questioning of theodicy, his puzzlement over the mystery of revelation, his heretical determination that Christ was the first, great suicide, and above all his God complex, suggest a mind at war with belief in the traditional, providential God. Scobie is so overcome with the prospect of the world’s suffering that he seems consumed by his twin obligations, ‘pity and responsibility.’ He is not just a policeman but feels himself a kind of surrogate of God, seeing through humanity as its Maker might. He loves the colony’s meanness because here ‘you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst’ It is this hypertrophied sense of religious obligation that leads Scobie, logically enough, toward the extraordinary idea that he is a kind of Christ, who might be able to offer himself as a sacrifice for the peace of Helen and Louise (and finally of God himself): ‘Oh God, I offer up my damnation to you. Take it. Use it for them.’

  Scobie also suffers from what might be called the despair of belief, the form of Christian masochism best articulated by Kierkegaard in The Sickness Unto Death (it is a curiosity that this very Catholic novel, sometimes called ‘Jansenist’ because of its theological fatalism, often sounds very Protestant—one recalls that Greene was a Protestant who converted to Catholicism). Kierkegaard speaks of the ‘offence’ which belief in God causes all but the most devout believer. To believe that God sent His son to die for our sins, that we can pray to Him, that we must imitate Christ’s impossible goodness, and so on—this is offensive to reason. ‘It is too exalted for him [the ordinary believer] because he cannot make sense of it, because he cannot be open and frank in the face of it.’ This is something that can make even a believer ‘unhappy for the rest of his life.’

  One crucial element of this offence, writes Kierkegaard, is the idea of sin. It is the concept of sin that most acutely separates Christianity from paganism, says Kierkegaard. The pagan commits sin, of course, but only the Christian sins ‘before God,’ and only the Christian must bear the burden of the inescapable sin—original sin, Adam’s sin. Greene comes close to Kierkegaard when he has Scobie reflect, at the end of Part One, that the ordinary corrupt or evil man cannot commit the sin of despair. Only ‘the man of goodwill’—and surely Greene here means only the believer—‘reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.’ Later, in the throes of his agony, Scobie thinks that ‘we Catholics are damned by our knowledge.’ The novel’s epigraph, from Péguy, avers that ‘no one is more competent than the sinner in matters of Christianity. No one but the saint.’

  Scobie is in the grip of a religious despair, a fatalism really, that verges on the heretical proposition that since we are all guilty from birth we might as well be damned, and there is nothing we can do to drag ourselves up from our fallen state. If nothing really separates the saint from the sinner, then perhaps it is not we who will really know the difference between sinning and not sinning, but only God. Sure enough, this is one of Scobie’s—and Greene’s—themes. Scobie feels that God would certainly forgive the young suicide, Pemberton; and he cannot really believe that God would condemn his adultery with Helen. Toward the end of the book, he advances the idea that because Christ was himself the first, great suicide, by offering himself on the cross, such a figure might forgive Scobie for his suicide—‘perhaps God could put out a hand of forgiveness into the suicidal darkness.’

  The book ends with Father Rank’s near absolution of Scobie’s action. He tells Scobie’s wife that they should not judge the dead man: ‘I know what the Church says. The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn’t know what goes on in a single human heart.’ Father Rank’s generosity is of a kind that appears in several of Greene’s other novels, and here receives, by virtue of its placement, a kind of authorial blessing. Greene, we know, did indeed cleave to this kind of anti-institutional Catholicism. (Again, it is fundamentally Protestant: it is not the Church, but God who knows best.) But what is interesting is how much his novel needs this appeal to God’s generosity, in order to resolve its own contradictions. In effect, the novel offers up the mysteries of motive to an equally mysterious God. The novel says, in effect: ‘don’t ask the novelist, or any other human, to comprehend Scobie’s action. God alone knows why he did it, and God alone can forgive it.’ The book pushes Scobie’s suicide out of the religious category and into the safely mysterious. The kind of contradiction Orwell identified, and which must occur to any sensible reader, and which probably occurred at some level to Greene, is resolved by placing the matter, quite literally, in higher hands. We cannot know, or even comprehend Scobie, the book tells us. That is God’s task. Those who find Scobie already a somewhat thin character will find this appeal to mystery a little suspect, a way of sealing an already opaque action from further scrutiny. But it has a certain characterological logic. Scobie has consistently betted on God’s forgiveness—it is part of his distinctive pride. He certainly fears the eternal damnation that suicide may bring, but he hopes that God may spare him. Suicide, in this sense, is his biggest gamble.

  James Wood, 2004

  BOOK ONE

  PART ONE

  1

  I

  WILSON SAT ON the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork. It was Sunday and the Cathedral bell clanged for matins. On the other side of Bond Street, in the windows of the High School, sat the young negresses in dark-blue gym smocks engaged on the interminable task of trying to wave their wirespring hair. Wilson stroked his very young moustache and dreamed, waiting for his gin-and-bitters.

  Sitting there, facing Bond Street, he had his face turned to the sea. His pallor showed how recently he had emerged from it into the port: so did his lack of interest in the schoolgirls opposite. He was like the lagging finger of the barometer, still pointing to Fair long after its companion has moved to Stormy. Below him the black clerks moved churchward, but their wives in brilliant afternoon dresses of blue and cerise aroused no interest in Wilson. He was alone on the balcony except for one bearded Indian in a turban who had already tried to tell his fortune: this was not the hour or the day for white men—they would be at the beach five miles away, but Wilson had no car. He felt almost intolerably lonely. On either side of the school the tin roofs sloped towards the sea, and the corrugated iron above his head clanged and clattered as a vulture alighted.

  Three merchant officers from the convoy in the harbour came into view, walking up from the quay. They were surrounded immediately by small boys wearing school caps. The boys’ refrain came faintly up to Wilson like a nursery rhyme: ‘Captain want jig jig, my sist
er pretty girl school-teacher, captain want jig jig.’ The bearded Indian frowned over intricate calculations on the back of an envelope—a horoscope, the cost of living? When Wilson looked down into the street again the officers had fought their way free, and the schoolboys had swarmed again round a single able-seaman: they led him triumphantly away towards the brothel near the police station, as though to the nursery.

  A black boy brought Wilson’s gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel—or a poem. Wilson liked poetry, but he absorbed it secretly, like a drug. The Golden Treasury accompanied him wherever he went, but it was taken at night in small doses—a finger of Longfellow, Macaulay, Mangan: ‘Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love …’ His taste was romantic. For public exhibition he had his Wallace. He wanted passionately to be indistinguishable on the surface from other men: he wore his moustache like a club tie—it was his highest common factor, but his eyes betrayed him—brown dog’s eyes, a setter’s eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street.

  ‘Excuse me,’ a voice said, ‘aren’t you Wilson?’

  He looked up at a middle-aged man in the inevitable khaki shorts with a drawn face the colour of hay.

  ‘Yes, that’s me.’

  ‘May I join you? My name’s Harris.’

  ‘Delighted, Mr Harris.’

  ‘You’re the new accountant at the U.A.C.?’

  ‘That’s me. Have a drink?’

  ‘I’ll have a lemon squash if you don’t mind. Can’t drink in the middle of the day.’

  The Indian rose from his table and approached with deference, ‘You remember me, Mr Harris. Perhaps you would tell your friend, Mr Harris, of my talents. Perhaps he would like to read my letters of recommendation …’ The grubby sheaf of envelopes was always in his hand. ‘The leaders of society.’

  ‘Be off. Beat it, you old scoundrel,’ Harris said.

  ‘How did you know my name?’ Wilson asked.

  ‘Saw it on a cable. I’m a cable censor,’ Harris said. ‘What a job! What a place!’

  ‘I can see from here, Mr Harris, that your fortune has changed considerably. If you would step with me for a moment into the bathroom …’

  ‘Beat it, Gunga Din.’

  ‘Why the bathroom?’ Wilson asked.

  ‘He always tells fortunes there. I suppose it’s the only private room available. I never thought of asking why.’

  ‘Been here long?’

  ‘Eighteen bloody months.’

  ‘Going home soon?’

  Harris stared over the tin roofs towards the harbour. He said, ‘The ships all go the wrong way. But when I do get home you’ll never see me here again.’ He lowered his voice and said with venom over his lemon squash, ‘I hate the place. I hate the people. I hate the bloody niggers. Mustn’t call ’em that you know.’

  ‘My boy seems all right.’

  ‘A man’s boy’s always all right. He’s a real nigger—but these, look at ’em, look at that one with a feather boa down there. They aren’t even real niggers. Just West Indians and they rule the coast. Clerks in the stores, city council, magistrates, lawyers—my God. It’s all right up in the Protectorate. I haven’t anything to say against a real nigger. God made our colours. But these—my God! The Government’s afraid of them. The police are afraid of them. Look down there,’ Harris said, ‘look at Scobie.’

  A vulture flapped and shifted on the iron roof and Wilson looked at Scobie. He looked without interest in obedience to a stranger’s direction, and it seemed to him that no particular interest attached to the squat grey-haired man walking alone up Bond Street. He couldn’t tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined—the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.

  ‘He loves ’em so much,’ Harris said, ‘he sleeps with ’em.’

  ‘Is that the police uniform?’

  ‘It is. Our great police force. A lost thing will they never find—you know the poem.’

  ‘I don’t read poetry,’ Wilson said. His eyes followed Scobie up the sun-drowned street. Scobie stopped and had a word with a black man in a white Panama: a black policeman passed by, saluting smartly. Scobie went on.

  ‘Probably in the pay of the Syrians too if the truth were known.’

  ‘The Syrians?’

  ‘This is the original Tower of Babel,’ Harris said. ‘West Indians, Africans, real Indians, Syrians, Englishmen, Scotsmen in the Office of Works, Irish priests, French priests, Alsatian priests.’

  ‘What do the Syrians do?’

  ‘Make money. They ran all the stores up country and most of the stores here. Run diamonds too.’

  ‘I suppose there’s a lot of that.’

  ‘The Germans pay a high price.’

  ‘Hasn’t he got a wife here?’

  ‘Who? Oh, Scobie. Rather. He’s got a wife. Perhaps if I had a wife like that, I’d sleep with niggers too. You’ll meet her soon. She’s the city intellectual. She likes art, poetry. Got up an exhibition of arts for the shipwrecked seamen. You know the kind of thing—poems on exile by aircraftsmen, watercolours by stokers, pokerwork from the mission schools. Poor old Scobie. Have another gin?’

  ‘I think I will,’ said Wilson.

  II

  Scobie turned up James Street past the Secretariat. With its long balconies it had always reminded him of a hospital. For fifteen years he had watched the arrival of a succession of patients; periodically at the end of eighteen months certain patients were sent home, yellow and nervy, and others took their place—Colonial Secretaries, Secretaries of Agriculture, Treasurers and Directors of Public Works. He watched their temperature charts every one—the first outbreak of unreasonable temper, the drink too many, the sudden stand for principle after a year of acquiescence. The black clerks carried their bedside manner like doctors down the corridors; cheerful and respectful they put up with any insult. The patient was always right.

  Round the corner, in front of the old cotton tree, where the earliest settlers had gathered their first day on the unfriendly shore, stood the law courts and police station, a great stone building like the grandiloquent boast of weak men. Inside that massive frame the human being rattled in the corridors like a dry kernel. No one could have been adequate to so rhetorical a conception. But the idea in any case was only one room deep. In the dark narrow passage behind, in the charge-room and the cells, Scobie could always detect the odour of human meanness and injustice—it was the smell of a zoo, of sawdust, excrement, ammonia, and lack of liberty. The place was scrubbed daily, but you could never eliminate the smell. Prisoners and policemen carried it in their clothing like cigarette smoke.

  Scobie climbed the great steps and turned to his right along the shaded outside corridor to his room: a table, two kitchen chairs, a cupboard, some rusty handcuffs hanging on a nail like an old hat, a filing cabinet: to a stranger it would have appeared a bare uncomfortable room but to Scobie it was home. Other men slowly build up the sense of home by accumulation—a new picture, more and more books, an odd-shaped paper-weight, the ash-tray bought for a forgotten reason on a forgotten holiday; Scobie built his home by a process of reduction. He had started out fifteen years ago with far more than this. There had been a photograph of his wife, bright leather cushions from the market, an easy-chair, a large coloured map of the port on the wall. The map had been borrowed by younger men: it was of no more use to him; he carried the whole coastline of the colony in his mind’s eye: from Kufa Bay to Medley was his beat. As for the cushions and the easy-chair, he had soon discovered how comfort of that kind down in the airless town meant heat. Where the body was touched or enclosed it sweated. Last of all his wife’s photograph had been made unnecessary by her presence. She had joined him the first year of the phoney wa
r and now she couldn’t get away: the danger of submarines had made her as much a fixture as the handcuffs on the nail. Besides, it had been a very early photograph, and he no longer cared to be reminded of the unformed face, the expression calm and gentle with lack of knowledge, the lips parted obediently in the smile the photographer had demanded. Fifteen years form a face, gentleness ebbs with experience, and he was always aware of his own responsibility. He had led the way: the experience that had come to her was the experience selected by himself. He had formed her face.

  He sat down at his bare table and almost immediately his Mende sergeant clicked his heels in the doorway. ‘Sah?’

  ‘Anything to report?’

  ‘The Commissioner want to see you, sah.’

  ‘Anything on the charge sheet?’

  ‘Two black men fight in the market, sah.’

  ‘Mammy trouble?’

  ‘Yes, sah.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Miss Wilberforce want to see you, sah. I tell her you was at church and she got to come back by-and-by, but she stick. She say she no budge.’

  ‘Which Miss Wilberforce is that, sergeant?’

  ‘I don’t know, sah. She come from Sharp Town, sah.’

  ‘Well, I’ll see her after the Commissioner. But no one else, mind.’

  ‘Very good, sah.’

  Scobie, passing down the passage to the Commissioner’s room, saw the girl sitting alone on a bench against the wall: he didn’t look twice: he caught only the vague impression of a young black African face, a bright cotton frock, and then she was already out of his mind, and he was wondering what he should say to the Commissioner. It had been on his mind all that week.

  ‘Sit down, Scobie.’ The Commissioner was an old man of fifty-three—one counted age by the years a man had served in the colony. The Commissioner with twenty-two years’ service was the oldest man there, just as the Governor was a stripling of sixty compared with any district officer who had five years’ knowledge behind him.