The Man Within by Graham Greene Page A

that,’ he said. ‘But you seem so wise – understanding. As if you knew as much as any woman who had ever been born and were yet not bitter about it.’
    ‘I have learned a lot in the last year,’ she replied. ‘Perhaps before I was rebellious, unwise, but wasn’t I younger?’ she asked with a sad laugh.
    ‘No, you don’t belong to any age,’ Andrews said.
    ‘Don’t I? I think I belonged to an age then – my own age. I was eighteen and frightened of him, but not with any clear idea of what he wanted. I held him off with tricks, played on his fear with quotations from the Bible, and when one day – or rather one night – he told me with a complete, and I think brutal, candour what he wanted me to do, I told him with equal directness that if he forced me to do it, I should leave him for ever. Oh, I had begun to grow up terribly quickly. You see, I traded on his desire for me and by my emphasis on the word “force”, gave him to understand, without another word said, that one day I might come to him voluntarily. And so I held him off, narrowly, always with a sense of danger, till he died.’
    ‘Then you won,’ Andrews commented with a sigh of relief which he did not trouble to hide.
    ‘And what a triumph!’ she said sadly not cynically. ‘He had been good to me, kept me in food and clothing from a child without any idea that one day I should be a woman. And when for the first time he wanted something from me in return more than mere cooking or Bible reading I refused. I showed my disgust and I think that at times it hurt him. And now he is dead, and what would it have mattered if I had given myself to him?’
    ‘Then there would have been two Judases in Sussex,’ Andrews said with a wry smile.
    ‘Would it have been a betrayal?’ she thought aloud. ‘It would have been turned to a good purpose, surely?’
    Andrews put his head between his hands. ‘Yes,’ he said, in sullen sorrow, ‘there’s the difference.’
    She watched him for a moment, puzzled, and then stretched out her hand in vehement protest. ‘But I didn’t mean that,’ she cried; ‘how could you think it?’ She hesitated. ‘I am your friend,’ she said.
    The face which he raised to her was like that of one dazed and stunned by an unexampled good fortune. ‘If I could believe that…’ he murmured in halting, incredulous tones. With a sudden lightening of the spirit he put out his hand to touch her.
    ‘Your friend,’ she repeated warningly.
    ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I am sorry. My friend,’ and he dropped his hand to his side. ‘I don’t deserve even that.’ For the first time his words of self-humiliation were not repeated mockingly by the critic within. ‘If there was some way I could retrieve…’ he gave a small, hopeless gesture with his hands.
    ‘But is there none?’ she asked. ‘Couldn’t you come forward and deny all that you had written to the officers?’
    ‘I can’t unsay a man’s death,’ he said. ‘And if I were able, I don’t believe that I would do it. I can’t go back to that life – the sneers, the racket, that infernal sea, world without end. Even in the middle of this fear and flight, you’ve given me more peace than I’ve known since I left school.’
    ‘Well, if you can’t undo what you’ve done, follow it out to the end,’ she said.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘You were driven to the side of the law,’ she said. ‘Stay there. Go into the open and bear witness against the men they’ve caught. You have made yourself an informer, at least you can be an open one.’
    ‘But you don’t understand.’ He watched her with fascinated, imploring eyes. ‘The risk.’
    Elizabeth laughed. ‘But that’s the very reason. Don’t you see that by all this nameless work of yours, this flight, you’ve made the whole pack of them, that mad boy, better men than you are.’
    ‘They were always that,’ he murmured sadly under his breath, his head bowed again so that he might not see her