The Heart of the Matter: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Greene Graham

Author:Greene, Graham [Graham, Greene,]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion
ISBN: 9780142437995
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 3692
Publisher: Vintage Classics
Published: 1948-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

2

From eight-thirty in the morning until eleven he dealt with a case of petty larceny; there were six witnesses to examine, and he didn’t believe a word that any of them said. In European cases there are words one believes and words one distrusts: it is possible to draw a speculative line between the truth and the lies; at least the cui bono principle to some extent operates, and it is usually safe to assume, if the accusation is theft and there is no question of insurance, that something has at least been stolen. But here one could make no such assumption: one could draw no lines. He had known police officers whose nerves broke down in the effort to separate a single grain of incontestable truth; they ended, some of them, by striking a witness, they were pilloried in the local Creole papers and were invalided home or transferred. It woke in some men a virulent hatred of a black skin, but Scobie had long ago, during his fifteen years, passed through the dangerous stages; now lost in the tangle of lies he felt an extraordinary affection for these people who paralysed an alien form of justice by so simple a method.

At last the office was clear again. There was nothing further on the charge-sheet, and taking out a pad and placing some blotting-paper under his wrist to catch the sweat, he prepared to write to Louise. Letter-writing never came easily to him. Perhaps because of his police training, he could never put even a comforting lie upon paper over his signature. He had to be accurate: he could comfort only by omission. So now, writing the two words My dear upon the paper, he prepared to omit He wouldn’t write that he missed her, but he would leave out any phrase that told unmistakably that he was content. My dear, you must forgive a short letter again. You know I’m not much of a hand at letter writing. I got your third letter yesterday, the one telling me that you were staying -with Mrs Halifax’s friend for a week outside Durban. Here everything is quiet. We had an alarm last night, but it turned out that an American pilot had mistaken a school of porpoises for submarines. The rains have started, of course. The Mrs Rolt I told you about in my last letter is out of hospital and they’ve put her to wait for a boat in one of the Nissen huts behind the transport park, I’ll do what I can to make her comfortable. The boy is still in hospital, but all right. I natty think that’s about all the news. The Tallit affair drags on - I don’t think anything will come of it in the end. Ali had to go and have a couple of teeth out the other day. What a fuss he made! I had to drive him to the hospital or he’d never have gone. He paused: he hated the idea

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