Never an Empire by James Green Page A

own special source providing her with news.
    Strangely, she had been silent about the raid on the American post, although she must have known about it. Not that Father Enrique cared. In his opinion the revolutionaries couldn’t win. They might announce a dozen republics, form as many governments, and score as many small victories, it would never amount to anything more than an annoyance to the Americans. Having got the Philippines the Americans would hold onto them. Fighting them was a useless waste of life; they were too powerful for a few idealistic dreamers to throw them back into the sea.
    He turned the pages of the paper, looking for other more interesting news but found that nothing could engage his mind because, try as he might to avoid it, his eyes kept leaving the page and turning to his bed which stood to one side of the door. Last night, through that door when he was asleep, she had come. The first he had known of it was when he felt someone slip into bed beside him and a small, soft hand was placed over his mouth and he had felt her breasts press against his back. He had lain quite still, unable to move or think while her hand had slipped from his mouth, slowly made its way down his chest, across his stomach until it came to rest, holding him, and suddenly he found himself lost in a world he had heard about only in lectures on moral theology or read about in pious textbooks. In the seminary sex was presented as a necessity created only for procreation. To Father Enrique it had seemed something vaguely unpleasant or, if performed for animal pleasure, gravely sinful. Last night his world view had been changed. Nature, in the form of the naked young woman who gently stroked him, had taken over. He had turned to her and discovered the most wonderful experience in the world, an experience for which he would willingly let his soul burn in Hell for all eternity.
    He looked at the bed and felt the stirrings of desire. She would come, he knew it, she would come and they would make love again.
    There was a knock at the door. He dropped the newspaper on the floor and hurried across. It was his housekeeper.
    â€˜What am I to do about the young woman?’
    â€˜Do?’
    â€˜She is in the kitchen. You have said nothing. You must decide what to do about her.’
    The housekeeper stood waiting for an answer.
    â€˜I will think about it.’
    The housekeeper nodded.
    â€˜Yes, Father, it would be well to think about it.’
    Father Enrique closed the door, went back to his chair, ignored the newspaper, and left it where it had fallen. He looked at the bed and began to think about it. He thought about the feeling of her naked body pressed against his, of him turning to her, of feeling her softness under him, and that, he knew very well, was not at all what his housekeeper had meant.
    With an effort he decided he must do something to take his mind off what had happened. She was beginning to possess him. He felt a sense of sin seeping back and with it now a sense of betrayal. He had betrayed his Church and his bishop, he had smeared his immortal soul with the dark stain of sin and, worst of all, he had betrayed his loving saviour, Jesus, who had suffered and died on the cross for him. His eyes turned to the large, dark crucifix hanging on the wall. On the cross hung the naked, twisted body of a broken man wearing a crown of thorns and with a gaping wound in the side of his chest, the Christ dying for sinful humanity. All that love, all that suffering, for him and for all mankind and he had rejected it for the pleasure a woman’s body could give him and, what was worse, he knew he would do it again, do it many times. He was once again as he had been before saying Mass that morning, a lost soul, a sinner, a creature who had placed himself beyond the mercy of God.
    There was once more a knock. Slowly he got up, went to the door, and stopped. What would he say? He could not send the young woman away but nor could