BASTON: That’s nonsense, Mary.
MRS. CALLIFER: Why do you think I was afraid to let James see him when he was dying? Henry could forget so long as he wasn’t reminded. If you are guilty, you want to forget. (To James): You loved your uncle. You half believed—but your father had a wicked tongue and all the arguments. Oh, it was my fault too. I didn’t know how deeply he cut. A child can’t stand confusion.
BASTON: Mary, we aren’t concerned with trivial mistakes in a child’s upbringing. You can’t pretend Henry believed that ignorant gardener’s story.
MRS. CALLIFER: James, I never wanted to tell you this. I wanted to forget too. Sleeping dogs, Dr. Kreuzer, sleeping dogs. Henry was a fake.
BASTON: You appall me. I always thought you loved him.
MRS. CALLIFER: You know I loved him. One can love a fake. Perhaps it’s easier than loving rectitude. All his life he’d written on the necessity for proof. Proof, proof, proof. And then a proof was pushed under his nose, at the bottom of his own garden. Fred, I saw his face. We always knew each other’s thoughts. I could hear him saying to himself, “Must I recall all those books and start again?” But I was trained to my job. I began to protect him—my husband, not my son.
BASTON: But you didn’t believe—
MRS. CALLIFER: No, I didn’t. It was a long time before I realized just how much he did.
In the embarrassed silence a door slams. Voices in the hall. Anne enters, followed by John.
ANNE: Hello, Uncle James. Have you come for Christmas?
JOHN: What a gathering!
MRS. CALLIFER: John, take Anne upstairs to bed. We have a lot to talk about.
ANNE: But you promised me a glass of wine.
MRS. CALLIFER: Tomorrow, Anne. It’s late. Now you’ve had a nice party—
ANNE: It was the most hideous party of the year.
JOHN: I do wish you’d forget that word “hideous,” Anne. You only picked it up last term. Come along.
JAMES: I’ll come up and say good night. I’ve something for you.
ANNE: Thank you, Uncle James. I can trust your promises. (To Mrs. Callifer): All right, I’ll go. But I’ve got hideous suspicions. (She is dragged out by John.)
BASTON: I suppose we must resume—
MRS. CALLIFER: Fred, it’s late. Can’t we sleep on this?
BASTON: It’s gone too far, Mary. We’ve got to decide—(James, reminded by the sight of Anne of his present, draws a toy revolver from his pocket, twirling the chamber to see that it’s in working order. Baston becomes rigid. Neither Sara nor Kreuzer have seen. Mrs. Callifer has, but she recognizes it easily as a toy.) What’s that?
JAMES: A gun!
BASTON: I told you he’s determined to kill himself.
MRS. CALLIFER: Really, Fred, can’t you recognize a toy when you see one?
BASTON (furious): Buffoonery!
JAMES: I bought it on the way for Anne. It seemed a suitable present for a detective. I have a magnifying glass here too—but perhaps that’s more suitable for Dr. Baston.
SARA: James, you came to see me?
JAMES: Yes.
SARA: Then please, all of you, won’t you leave us alone.
BASTON: I won’t take the responsibility.
MRS. CALLIFER: Then I will.
SARA: Dr. Kreuzer, my bag’s in the hall. I’ll be with you in a few minutes.
Mrs. Callifer walks firmly out. Kreuzer follows her. Baston hesitates and then follows too. Pause.
JAMES: Do you think I’m mad?
SARA: I don’t know.
JAMES: Is everyone who believes in a God mad?
SARA: Of course not. I suppose I believe in Him—in a way—on Sundays if the music’s good. But James, I’m in such a fog. I don’t know what I think. It would have been such a useless miracle. It ruined us. It gave you thirty empty years, and your uncle …
JAMES: I don’t understand either. But I couldn’t believe in a god so simple I could understand him.
SARA: Why did you come to see me, James?
JAMES: I want you to marry me.
SARA: Sometimes I’ve dreamed of you saying that. But James, it didn’t work the first time.
JAMES: Can’t we try again?
SARA: I remember the same words, but I spoke them.
JAMES: Poetic justice.
SARA: I don’t want justice. I love you, but love wasn’t enough before, was it? One’s got to understand. When I looked at you, I used to see nothing. But this belief of yours, James—it’s worse than nothing. It’s sent you so far away I can’t follow. I can’t love a God I don’t know exists. I can’t pray to a possibility.
JAMES: I don’t even want to pray. Something happened to me, that’s all. Like a street accident. I don’t want God. I don’t love God, but He’s there—it’s no good pretending; He’s in my lungs like air.
SARA: You haven’t any proof.
JAMES: Not the kind Baston needs. But don’t tell a man who has just seen a ghost he has no proof. I’ve seen the mark of His footsteps going away.
SARA: Footsteps?
JAMES: Have you ever seen a room from which faith has gone? A room without faith—oh, that can be pretty and full of flowers. You can fill it up with Regency furniture and the best modern pictures, but a room from which faith has gone is quite different. Like a marriage from which love has gone. All that’s left are habits and pet names and sentimental objects picked up on beaches and in foreign towns that don’t mean anything any more. And patience, patience everywhere like a fog.
SARA: Like our marriage?
JAMES: No. We were like the room without faith. We hadn’t lost anything valuable.
SARA: Don’t be cruel, James. Not tonight.
JAMES: I didn’t mean to be. I’d no idea what love was in those days. I was the wrong man to make a deathbed marriage. Nothing mattered. If I slept with you, what did it matter? We were all going to be as dead as last year’s dog. Now, when I look at you, I see someone who will never die forever. (Pause. She makes no response.) Sara, you never believed I wanted you and you were right. Your kiss was always a question, and I hadn’t got an answer. I couldn’t love you any more than you can love a tree, a glass of wine, a cat.
SARA: People love cats.
JAMES: Then they don’t know the meaning of the word.
SARA: But James, I wasn’t kissing anyone immortal when I was kissing you. There were no cosmic messages. I was only saying, “I have remembered to order the steaks. And I’ll be here tonight and tomorrow night and the night after.” I don’t want eternity, James. I’m bored with eternity, going on and on like a long litany on a wet day.
JAMES: It’s time that bores us, interminable time. I move my hand. It moves in space and time. When there’s no time there’ll be no movement any more. When we think, we think one thing after another. Time, again. When there’s no time we shan’t think any more.
SARA: A frightening world.
JAMES: I’ve been there and I’m not frightened.
SARA: But time is all I know.
JAMES: Oh, I love time too. I’m not impatient for eternity. It’s the same as when you love a woman. If you are going to see her in a few hours, you love the hours. They have her importance.
SARA: Darling, please try to understand. Even if there was a miracle, I want to forget it.
JAMES: Like my father?
SARA: Not like your father. I love you. But I hate big things—Everest and the Empire State Building. I don’t want to be important. I don’t like important people. They’re—antiaphrodisiac to me.
JAMES: Everest exists.
SARA: I wish you’d brought something back to prove it, then. Like the lover in the story—one out-of-season flower. Dear, I’m scared. Suppose—
JAMES: Yes?
SARA: Suppose this time I failed you. No, don’t speak. You’ve got to understand me. I don’t want to lose you again, but I’d rather lose you than fail you—and if you’re looking for someone important, I won’t come up to the specifications,
that’s all.
JAMES: Sara—
SARA: We don’t have to convince each other. I don’t want to share a faith—only understand. Give me a little time. Time to think. (She goes toward the door.)
JAMES: Don’t go away.
SARA: It would be no good going away. I’m no good at thinking alone.
Mrs. Callifer enters.
MRS. CALLIFER: Oh, I didn’t know you two—
SARA: I’m just going.
MRS. CALLIFER: Not to London, Sara?
SARA: Just to bed. I’m sorry about what I said to you.
MRS. CALLIFER: Home truths are good sometimes.
SARA: I was so smug, wasn’t I, condemning you? At least you were trying to protect someone you loved. And here I am, just trying to protect myself. Good night, Mother. Good night, James.
JAMES: I’ll see you tomorrow.
SARA: Of course. (She goes.)
JAMES: I’m sorry, Mother, too. A miracle in a family must be worse than a murder case.
MRS. CALLIFER: It’s a cruel God you believe in.
JAMES: Perhaps He had no choice.
MRS. CALLIFER: A God who can’t choose?
JAMES: God is conditioned, isn’t He? If He’s all-powerful, He can’t weaken. If He knows everything, He can’t forget. If He’s love, He can’t hate. Perhaps if someone asks with enough love, He has to give.
MRS. CALLIFER: People are asking all the time.
JAMES: Are they? It needs a lot of belief and a lot of love.
MRS. CALLIFER: But your uncle doesn’t believe.
JAMES: Oh, yes, he does. I left him praying.
Pause.
MRS. CALLIFER: Give us time, James. You mustn’t mind the fuss we’ve made. You’ve spoilt our certainties.
JAMES: I didn’t mean to.
MRS. CALLIFER: It seems such an enormous supernatural act. But then our certainties—they were pretty big too. It was all right to doubt the existence of God as your grandfather did in the time of Darwin. Doubt—that was human liberty. But my generation, we didn’t doubt, we knew. I don’t believe in this miracle—but I’m not sure any longer. We are none of us sure. When you aren’t sure, you are alive. What will you do, James?
JAMES: Marry Sara, I hope.
MRS. CALLIFER: That’s a very simple aim.
JAMES: I’ve lived with the complex long enough.
MRS. CALLIFER: When I look at you I don’t see a madman or a miracle.
JAMES: No?
MRS. CALLIFER: I see all those years when you were happy. Days at the seaside. Parties at Christmas. All the ordinary life we had before it happened.
JAMES: And the toy spade?
MRS. CALLIFER: How you loved that spade. You’d kept it all those years. Potter found it under you, as though you’d taken it in your hand when you climbed on that chair.
JAMES: Can I stay here awhile, Mother, and cease to be a stranger?
MRS. CALLIFER: I’ve had your room prepared. I hope they’ve given you enough blankets. But if you’re cold knock on the wall. I shall hear. Go to bed now.
JAMES: Will Anne be asleep?
MRS. CALLIFER: I doubt it.
JAMES: I just wanted to give her this. Good night, Mother.
MRS. CALLIFER: Good night. James.
He passes Dr. Kreuzer in the doorway.
JAMES: Good night, Dr. Kreuzer.
KREUZER: I’m just leaving. Good-bye, Callifer.
JAMES: We’ll be seeing each other soon? Nottingham or elsewhere?
KREUZER: I don’t give up a friend any more than a patient.
James leaves.
KREUZER: Is your daughter ready?
MRS. CALLIFER: Sara won’t be leaving with you, Dr. Kreuzer.
KREUZER: I’m glad. Just now, waiting for her in the dining room, I heard you come in from outside?
MRS. CALLIFER: I’ve been in the garden.
KREUZER: Wasn’t it cold?
MRS. CALLIFER: I went down to the potting shed. And suddenly I wasn’t frightened. There was nothing ghostly there. The ground wasn’t holy. There were no voices and whispers and messages. Only the boxes of seeds and the gardening tools, and I thought perhaps even miracles are ordinary. There was a girl in the village once they thought had died—do you think perhaps things like that are happening all the time everywhere?
KREUZER: I don’t know. I don’t much mind one way or the other.
MRS. CALLIFER: I thought you wanted the truth. You are a scientist.
KREUZER: I only want a relative truth to make life tolerable.
MRS. CALLIFER: That’s not very brave, is it?
KREUZER: Courage can be a very difficult neurosis.
James enters.
JAMES: Anne isn’t in her room.
MRS. CALLIFER: Perhaps the bathroom.
JAMES: I’ve looked everywhere upstairs.
MRS. CALLIFER: The pantry.
JAMES: It was the first place I thought of.
He is looking at the curtains of the window seat. He draws back the curtains. In the window seat Anne lies asleep with the window open behind her.
MRS. CALLIFER: She must have got through the window. The detective asleep at her post.
ANNE (stretching and yawning): Oh, I’ve had such a funny dream. I was going down the path to the potting shed, and there was an enormous lion there fast asleep.
JAMES: What did you do?
ANNE: I woke it up.
MRS. CALLIFER: Did it eat you?
ANNE: No, it only licked my hand.
CURTAIN
About the Author
Graham Greene (1904–1991) is recognized as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, achieving both literary acclaim and popular success. His best known works include Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American, and The Power and the Glory. After leaving Oxford, Greene first pursued a career in journalism before dedicating himself full-time to writing with his first big success, Stamboul Train. He became involved in screenwriting and wrote adaptations for the cinema as well as original screenplays, the most successful being The Third Man. Religious, moral, and political themes are at the root of much of his work, and throughout his life he traveled to some of the wildest and most volatile parts of the world, which provided settings for his fiction. Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1956, 1957 by Graham Greene Estate
Cover design by Ian Koviak
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5429-4
This edition published in 2018 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10038
www.openroadmedia.com
GRAHAM GREENE
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
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