Journey Without Maps by Graham Greene

Author:Graham Greene
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House

Rats

Rats indeed take some getting used to. There are said to be as many rats as human beings even in England in the large towns, but the life they lead is subterranean. Unless you go down into the sewers or haunt the huge rubbish dumps which lie beyond the waste building lots under a thin fume of smoke, you are unlikely to meet a rat. It needs an effort of imagination in Piccadilly Circus to realize that for every passing person, there is a rat in the tunnels underneath.

They are shy creatures; even while I slept among them, and heard them round me all night, I never saw one until I arrived in Ganta, where they were bolder and didn’t wait till dark. Flash a torch: they always avoided its beam; leave a lamp burning: and they played just as furiously in the shadow outside the range of light. *

I remembered the first live rat I ever saw. I had returned with my brother from a revue in Paris to a famous hotel on the left bank near the Luxembourg. It was about one o’clock in the morning; my brother went upstairs first; and lolloping behind him, like a small rabbit, went a rat. I could hardly believe my eyes as I followed them; it didn’t go with the dapper lounge, the wealthy international guests. But I wasn’t drunk; I could see quite distinctly the rough brown fur at its neck. I suppose one of the million or two rats in Paris was reconnoitring. Its appearance had a premeditated sinister air. I thought of the first Uhlans appearing at the end of a Belgian country road.

The next rat I saw was dead. I had taken a cottage in Gloucestershire and the country scared me. Something used to make a noise in the thatch every night, and I thought of rats: I knew the villagers went ratting along the hedge at the bottom of my garden. The rat-catcher, a rat-like man himself in old army breeches who was said by cruel village rumour to have allowed his first wife to starve, came with his ferrets; they scrambled along the thatch, rearing at the chimney stack like tiny polar bears; one of them couldn’t keep his footing and continually fell off until he had to be put back in the bag. There weren’t any rats, the catcher said, and refused payment. He had a pride in his profession and would only be paid by results, at the rate of a shilling a rat. But that night there was a knock on the door. A village woman stood in the door and held out a dead rat, jumping with fleas. She said, ‘I thought maybe you might like to see a rat. We’ve caught twenty down the hedge,’ dangling the body under my lamp.

It is not, after all, unreasonable to fear a rat. The fear of moths, of birds and bats – this may be nerves, but the fear of the rat is rational.

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