Грэм Грин - The Comedians

I remembered Martha saying, 'You are a prкtre manquй.' How strangely one must appear to other people. I had left involvement behind me, I was certain, in the College of the Visitation: I had dropped it like the roulette-token in the offertory. I had felt myself not merely incapable of love — many are incapable of that, but even of guilt. There were no heights and no abysses in my world — I saw myself on a great plain, walking and walking on the interminable flats. Once I might have taken a different direction, but it was too late now. When I was a boy the fathers of the Visitation had told me that one test of a belief was this: that a man was ready to die for it. So Doctor Magiot thought too, but for what belief did Jones die?

Perhaps, under the circumstances, it was only natural that I should dream of Jones. He lay among the dry rocks on the flat plain beside me and he said, 'Don't ask me to find water. I can't. I'm tired, Brown, tired. After the seven hundredth performance I sometimes dry up on my lines — and I've only two.'

I said to him, 'Why are you dying, Jones?'

'It's in my part, old man, it's in my part. But I've got this comic line — you should hear the whole theatre laugh when I say it. The ladies in particular.'

'What is it?'

'That's the trouble. I've forgotten it.'

'Jones, you must remember.'

'I've got it now. I have to say — just look at these bloody rocks — "This is a good place," and everyone laughs till the tears come. Then you say, "To hold the bastards up?" and I reply, "I didn't mean that." '

The ringing of the telephone woke me — I had overslept. The call came, so far as I could make out, from Mr Fernandez who was summoning me to my first assignment.