This episode takes place in the first part of the second book of the novel ‘’The Heart of the Matter’’ by Graham Greene. It is set at a temporary hospital in Pende, the location in which a torpedoed ship had settled in. the characters involved in this particular scene are the main character of the novel, Scobie, who is the Commissioner of Sierra Leone, together with a young girl who is dying as a result of the traumatic experience she has just gone through. The initial couple of sentences of the extract also feature Mrs. Bowles, the missionary’s wife who is taking care of the injured and/or dying victims of this unfortunate incident. This scene follows the arrival of the surviving individuals of the torpedoed ship at Pende. Scobie is taken aback when he witnesses the arrival of a young girl and boy and a young female adult ‘’clasping a stamp-album’’ on a stretcher who are suffering terrible physical consequences. He questions for himself why the human person is allowed to suffer instead of simply passing on. Later on, Mrs. Bowles requests for Scobie to keep an eye out for the dying young girl. The scenario of the girl suffering in the process of death causes him to recollect his own daughter’s passing. He turns to God to pray for the young child, and selflessly asks Him to take away his own peace forever, ‘’but grant her peace.’’ Towards the end of this extract, the dying victim believes Scobie is her father. He hushes her down, resting her mind that he was by her side, and asks her to sleep.
The themes of pity, compassion and religious faith are very well brought out in this passage. The extract focuses around Scobie’s sense of paternal attitude towards the dying girl. From Scobie’s point of view, the girl seemed as if she were ‘’carrying a weight with great effort up a long hill’’. He believes this is a case of ‘’inhuman situation not being able to carry it for her.’’ These quotations present another aspect of Scobie’s righteous character; that of compassion and selflessness. Scobie experiences a similar situation on an earlier occasion in the novel, when his wife Louise asks him to come up with a way of sending her to South Africa. Here, Scobie too makes the resemblance with ‘’a tired carrier who has slipped his load.’’ The only difference between the latter occasion and the scene from the gobbet extract is that in the incident at Pende, Scobie can only wish to transfer the girl’s suffering onto himself, whereas in the case with his wife, he is aware of how ‘’the load lay beside him now, and he prepared to lift it.’’
Moreover, this extract is unique in that the reader explores Scobie as an individual who places his whole trust in God. At the same time, his prayer poses a feature of arrogance when he prays to God to grant the child peace. As the story of the novel progresses, this level of arrogance increases, until Scobie is too overwhelmed with this intensity of pride that he abandons the unconditional love of the Father. The author makes reference to the fact that ‘’’the sweat broke out on his hands,’’ foreshadowing the peak of Scobie’s downfall and the end of the novel. A similar feature of his arrogance and pride is brought out in the episode in which Scobie attends the last mass before his death and is lost in his own thoughts; he emphasises how he believes it is his job to take care of others, and that he is ‘’conditioned to serve.’’ This is precisely what he meant when asking God to take his own peace once and for all and passing it all on to the suffering child.
The setting in which this scene takes place adds to the emotions accumulating in Scobie’s body. Being set at a hospital in which vulnerable individuals are present causes Scobie to feel a deeper sense of pity and his paternal attitude is greatly heightened, especially in this case, in which the dying girl is in the same position as his own child was years ago. In connection to this, when the young woman - who seemed to him as being another innocent child – is brought in on a stretcher, what is caught by his eye is the way she held onto her stamp album. Aspects such as the latter feature mark the accumulation of feelings like responsibility in the novel’s main character. This sense of responsibility and duty to serve is carried with him throughout the whole novel, beginning with the way he treated his wife with pity and paternal care, to the later episodes where Scobie is engaged in an affair outside his marriage with Helen, the ‘child’ clutching her stamp book upon her arrival at Pende.
This passage is significant in the context of the novel as a whole because it highlights particular aspects from Scobie’s character which contribute in a dominant way to the reason behind his downfall and eventually, to his last, final breaths.