Greene pulls us completely into the dark—into the “jump-jump” of Francis’ heart—not only through his narrative suspense, but also through his careful descriptions. We hear the hushed movements of the seekers: “Feet moving on a carpet, hands brushing a wall, a curtain pulled apart, a clicking handle, the opening of a cupboard door.” We, too, rely on touch, seeking with a “groping hand” in the blackness.
But, above all, what do we see? In the visual matrix of Greene’s story up to this point, we see, with fitting irony, exquisite images of light, which burn like afterimages in the dark: the “central radiance of the chandelier” under which jeering children, whose faces glow with a “vacancy of wide sunflowers” as the game begins. On the chandelier, symbolic bats “have squatted round with hooded wings,” bats that flitted in “dusk-filled gardens” on the boys’ way over to the party. We see, too, the “pool of radiance cast by ten candles on Colin Henne-Falcon’s birthday cake.” The “nurse’s electric torch making a short luminous trail through the darkness,” making a “yellow circle” as the boys walked to the party across the “dimly phosphorescent lawn.” And yet earlier, too, in the silver “first light” of day as the story began, we see the “night-light” that “had guttered into a pool of water.”
The story’s most vivid and tangible imagery isn’t of darkness. It’s of light. As the story builds to its pitch, it’s as if even the light only forebodes and reveals its own extinction, a shifting and creeping and fluid signal.
At the end of the game, the lights “burst like a fruit tree into bloom” and Mrs. Henne-Falcon screams: