A Gun for Sale by Graham Greene Page B

everyone had slept in his clothes. Mr Cholmondeley had eaten too many sweets; his teeth needed cleaning; his breath was sweet and stuffy. He put his head into the corridor and Raven at once turned his back and stared out at the sidings, the trucks heaped with local coal ; a smell of bad fish came in from the glue factory. Mr Cholmondeley dived back across the carriage to the other side trying to make out at which platform the train was drawing in. He said: ‘Excuse me,’ trampling on the feet; Anne smiled softly to herself and hacked his ankle. Mr Cholmondeley glared at her. She said: ‘I’m sorry,’ and began to mend her face with her tissues and her powder, to bring it up to standard, so that she could bear the thought of the Royal Theatre, the little dressing-rooms and the oil-heating, the rivalry and the scandals.
    ‘If you’ll let me by,’ Mr Cholmondeley said fiercely, ‘I’m getting down here.’
    Raven saw his ghost in the window-pane getting down. But he didn’t dare follow him closely. It was almost as if a voice blown over many foggy miles, over the long swelling fields of the hunting counties, the villa’d suburbs creeping up to town, had spoken to him: ‘any man travelling without a ticket,’ he thought, with the slip of white paper the collector had given him in his hand. He opened the door and watched the passengers flow by him to the barrier. He needed time, and the paper in his hand would so quickly identify him. He needed time, and he realized now that he wouldn’t have even so much as a twelve-hour start. They would visit every boarding house, every lodging in Nottwich; there was nowhere for him to stay.
    Then it was that the idea struck him, by the slot machine on No. 2 arrival platform, which thrust him finally into other people’s lives, broke the world in which he walked alone.
    Most of the passengers had gone now, but one girl waited for a returning porter by the buffet door. He went up to her and said, ‘Can I help and carry your bags?’
    ‘Oh, if you would,’ she said. He stood with his head a little bent, so that she mightn’t see his lip.
    ‘What about a sandwich?’ he said. ‘It’s been a hard journey.’
    ‘Is it open,’ she said, ‘this early?’
    He tried the door. ‘Yes, it’s open.’
    ‘Is it an invitation?’ she said. ‘You’re standing treat?’
    He gazed at her with faint astonishment: her smile, the small neat face with the eyes rather too wide apart; he was more used to the absent-minded routine endearments of prostitutes than to this natural friendliness, this sense of rather lost and desperate amusement. He said, ‘Oh yes. It’s on me.’ He carried the bags inside and hammered on the counter. ‘What’ll you have?’ he said. In the pale light of the electric globe he kept his back to her; he didn’t want to scare her yet.
    ‘There’s a rich choice,’ she said. ‘Bath buns, penny buns, last year’s biscuits, ham sandwiches. I’d like a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee. Or will that leave you broke? If so, leave out the coffee.’
    He waited till the girl behind the counter had gone again, till the other’s mouth was full of sandwich so that she couldn’t have screamed if she’d tried. Then he turned his face on her. He was disconcerted when she showed no repulsion, but smiled as well as she could with her mouth full. He said,‘I want your ticket. The police are after me. I’ll do anything to get your ticket.’
    She swallowed the bread in her mouth and began to cough. She said, ‘For God’s sake, hit me on the back.’ He nearly obeyed her ; she’d got him rattled ; he wasn’t used to normal life and it upset his nerve. He said, ‘I’ve got a gun,’ and added lamely, ‘I’ll give you this in return.’ He laid the paper on the counter and she read it with interest between the coughs. ‘First class. All the way to – Why, I’ll be able to get a refund on this. I call that a fine exchange, but why the gun?’
    He said: ‘The