Graham Greene - The Lawless Roads

Graham Greene

TO THE 1939 EDITION

This is the personal impression of a small part of Mexico at a particular time, the spring of 1938. Time has happily proved the author wrong in at least one of his conclusionsthe religious apathy in Tabasco was more apparent than real. A month after the author left Villahermosa, the capital, peasants tried to put up an altar in a ruined church. Bloodshed and an appeal to the Federal Government followed, with the result that as this book goes to press, news comes that the Bishop of Tabasco has been allowed to return to his diocese, the first resident bishop for fourteen years. There remains Chiapas

What made the change? The hills and towers

Stand otherwise than they should stand,

And without fear the lawless roads

Ran wrong through all the land.

E DWIN M UIR

Mans like the earth, his hair like grasse is grown,

His veins the rivers are, his heart the stone.

Wits Recreations (1640)

To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and requirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken, of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truth, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostles words, having no hope, and without God in the worldall this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution.

What shall be said to this heart-piercing, reason-bewildering fact? I can only answer, that either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from His presence if there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity.

C ARDINAL N EWMAN

I was, I suppose, thirteen years old. Otherwise why should I have been therein secreton the dark croquet lawn? I could hear the rabbit moving behind me, munching the grass in his hutch; an immense building with small windows, rather like Keble College, bounded the lawn. It was the school; from somewhere behind it, from across the quad, came a faint sound of music: Saturday night, the school orchestra was playing Mendelssohn. I was alone in mournful happiness in the dark.

Two countries just here lay side by side. From the croquet lawn, from the raspberry canes, from the greenhouse and the tennis lawn you could always seedominatinglythe great square Victorian buildings of garish brick: they looked down like skyscrapers on a small green countryside where the fruit trees grew and the rabbits munched. You had to step carefully: the border was close beside your gravel path. From my mothers bedroom windowwhere she had borne the youngest of us to the sound of school chatter and the disciplinary bellyou looked straight down into the quad, where the hall and the chapel and the classrooms stood. If you pushed open a green baize door in a passage by my fathers study, you entered another passage deceptively similar, but none the less you were on alien ground. There would be a slight smell of iodine from the matrons room, of damp towels from the changing rooms, of ink everywhere. Shut the door behind you again, and the world smelt differently: books and fruit and eau-de-Cologne.

One was an inhabitant of both countries: on Saturday and Sunday afternoons of one side of the baize door, the rest of the week of the other. How can life on a border be other than restless? You are pulled by different ties of hate and love. For hate is quite as powerful a tie: it demands allegiance. In the land of the skyscrapers, of stone stairs and cracked bells ringing early, one was aware of fear and hate, a kind of lawlessnessappalling cruelties could be practised without a second thought; one met for the first time characters, adult and adolescent, who bore about them the genuine quality of evil. There was Collifax, who practised torments with dividers; Mr. Cranden with three grim chins, a dusty gown, a kind of demoniac sensuality; from these heights evil declined towards Parlow, whose desk was filled with minute photographsadvertisements of art photos. Hell lay about them in their infancy.

There lay the horror and the fascination. One escaped surreptitiously for an hour at a time: unknown to frontier guards, one stood on the wrong side of the border looking backone should have been listening to Mendelssohn, but instead one heard the rabbit restlessly cropping near the croquet hoops. It was an hour of releaseand also an hour of prayer. One became aware of God with an intensitytime hung suspendedmusic lay on the air; anything might happen before it became necessary to join the crowd across the border. There was no inevitability anywhere faith was almost great enough to move mountains the great buildings rocked in the darkness.

And so faith came to oneshapelessly, without dogma, a presence above a croquet lawn, something associated with violence, cruelty, evil across the way. One began to believe in heaven because one believed in hell, but for a long while it was only hell one could picture with a certain intimacythe pitchpine partitions in dormitories where everybody was never quiet at the same time; lavatories without locks: There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison ; walks in pairs up the suburban roads; no solitude anywhere, at any time. The Anglican Church could not supply the same intimate symbols for heaven; only a big brass eagle, an organ voluntary, Lord, Dismiss Us with Thy Blessing, the quiet croquet lawn where one had no business, the rabbit, and the distant music.

Those were primary symbols; life later altered them; in a midland city, riding on trams in winter past the Gothic hotel, the super-cinema, the sooty newspaper office where one worked at night, passing the single professional prostitute trying to keep the circulation going under the blue and powdered skin, one began slowly, painfully, reluctantly, to populate heaven. The Mother of God took the place of the brass eagle: one began to have a dim conception of the appalling mysteries of love moving through a ravaged worldthe Cur dArs admitting to his mind all the impurity of a province, Pguy challenging God in the cause of the damned. It remained something one associated with misery, violence, evil, all the torments and agonies, Rilke wrote, wrought on scaffolds, in torture chambers, madhouses, operating theatres, underneath vaults of bridges in late autumn.

Vaults of bridges: I think of a great metal bridge by the railway-station of my old home, a sense of grit and the great reverberation of plates as the trains went by overhead and the nursemaids pushed their charges on past the ruined castle, the watercress beds, towards the common, past the shuttered private entrance which the local lord had not used for a generation. It was a place without lawI felt that even then, obscurely: no one really was responsible for anyone else. Only a few walls were left of the castle Chaucer had helped to build; the lords house had been sold to politicians. I remember the small sunk almshouses by the canal and a man running furiously into one of themI was with my nursehe looked angry about something: he was going to cut his throat with a knife if he could get away from his neighbours, having no hope, and without God in the world.