The Quiet American by Graham Greene & Robert Stone

Author:Graham Greene & Robert Stone [Greene, Graham & Stone, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780143039020
Amazon: 0143039024
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Published: 2004-09-28T05:00:00+00:00

4

“Are you hurt?” Pyle said.

“Something hit my leg. Nothing serious.”

“Let’s get on,” Pyle urged me. I could just see him because he seemed to be covered with a fine white dust. Then he simply went out like a picture on the screen when the lamps of the projector fail: only the soundtrack continued. I got gingerly up on to my good knee and tried to rise without putting any weight on my bad left ankle, and then I was down again breathless with pain. It wasn’t my ankle: something had happened to my left leg. I couldn’t worry—pain took away care. I lay very still on the ground hoping that pain wouldn’t find me again. I even held my breath, as one does with toothache. I didn’t think about the Viets who would soon be searching the ruins of the tower: another shell exploded on it—they were making quite sure before they came in. What a lot of money it costs, I thought as the pain receded, to kill a few human beings—you can kill horses so much cheaper. I can’t have been fully conscious, for I began to think I had strayed into a knacker’s yard which was the terror of my childhood in the small town where I was born. We used to think we heard the horses whinnying with fear and the explosion of the painless killer.

It was some while since the pain had returned, now that I was lying still and holding my breath—that seemed to me just as important. I wondered quite lucidly whether perhaps I ought to crawl towards the fields. The Viets might not have time to search far. Another patrol would be out by now trying to contact the crew of the first tank. But I was more afraid of the pain than of the partisans, and I lay still. There was no sound anywhere of Pyle: he must have reached the fields. Then I heard someone weeping. It came from the direction of the tower, or what had been the tower. It wasn’t like a man weeping: it was like a child who is frightened of the dark and yet afraid to scream. I supposed it was one of the two boys—perhaps his companion had been killed. I hoped that the Viets wouldn’t cut his throat. One shouldn’t fight a war with children and a little curled body in a ditch came back to mind. I shut my eyes—that helped to keep the pain away, too, and waited. A voice called something I didn’t understand. I almost felt I could sleep in this darkness and loneliness and absence of pain.

Then I heard Pyle whispering, “Thomas. Thomas.” He had learnt footcraft quickly; I had not heard him return.

“Go away,” I whispered back.

He found me then and lay down flat beside me. “Why didn’t you come? Are you hurt?”

“My leg. I think it’s broken.”

“A bullet?”

“No, no. Log of wood. Stone. Something from the tower. It’s not bleeding.”

“You’ve got to make an effort.”

“Go away, Pyle.

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