It was some while before Mr Davis noticed the student and the sight of the gas-mask for a moment quite shocked him. He thought: these pacifists are going too far: sensational nonsense, and when the man halted Mr Davis and said something which he could not catch through the heavy mask, Mr Davis drew himself up and said haughtily, 'Nonsense. We're well prepared.' Then he remembered and became quite friendly again; it wasn't pacifism after all, it was patriotism. 'Well, well,' he said, 'I quite forgot. Of course, the practice.' The anonymous stare through the thickened eyepieces, the muffled voice made him uneasy. He said jocularly, 'You won't be taking me to the hospital now, will you? I'm a busy man.' The student seemed lost in thought with his hand on Mr Davis's arm. Mr Davis saw a policeman go grinning down the opposite pavement and he found it hard to restrain his irritation. There was a little fog still left in the upper air and a flight of planes drove through it, filling the street with their deep murmur, out towards the south and the aerodrome. 'You see,' Mr Davis said, keeping his temper, 'the practice is over. The sirens will be going any moment now. It would be too absurd to waste a morning at the hospital. You know me. Davis is the name. Everyone in Nottwich knows me. Ask the police there. No one can accuse me of being a bad patriot.'

       'You think it's nearly over?' the man said.

       'I'm glad to see you boys enthusiastic,' Mr Davis said. 'I expect we've met some time at the hospital. I'm up there for all the big functions and I never forget a voice. Why,' Mr Davis said,' it was me who gave the biggest contribution to the new operating theatre.' Mr Davis would have liked to walk on, but the man blocked his way and it seemed a bit undignified to step into the road and go round him. The man might think he was trying to escape: there might be a tussle, and the police were looking on from the corner. A sudden venom spurted up into Mr Davis's mind like the ink a cuttlefish shoots, staining his thoughts with its dark poison. That grinning ape in uniform... I'll have him dismissed... I'll see Calkin about it. He talked on cheerily to the man in the gasmask, a thin figure, little more than a boy's figure on which the white medical coat hung loosely. 'You boys,' Mr Davis said, 'are doing a splendid work. There's no one appreciates that more than I do. If war comes—'

       'You call yourself Davis,' the muffled voice said.

       Mr Davis said with sudden irritation, 'You're wasting my time. I'm a busy man. Of course I'm Davis.' He checked his rising temper with an effort. 'Look here. I'm a reasonable man. I'll pay anything you like to the hospital. Say, ten pounds ransom.'

       'Yes,' the man said, 'where is it?'

       'You can trust me,' Mr Davis said, 'I don't carry that much on me,' and was amazed to hear what sounded like a laugh.

       This was going too far. 'All right,' Mr Davis said, 'you can come with me to my office and I'll pay you the money. But I shall expect a proper receipt from your treasurer.'

       'You'll get your receipt,' the man said in his odd toneless mask-muffled voice and stood on one side to let Mr Davis lead the way. Mr Davis's good humour was quite restored. He prattled on. 'No good offering you a toffee in that thing,' he said. A messenger boy passed in a gas-mask with his cap cocked absurdly on the top of it; he whistled derisively at Mr Davis. Mr Davis went a little pink. His fingers itched to tear the hair, to pull the ear, to twist the wrist. 'The boys enjoy themselves,' he said. He became confiding; a doctor's presence always made him feel safe and oddly important: one could tell the most grotesque things to a doctor about one's digestion and it was as much material for them as an amusing anecdote was for a professional humourist. He said, 'I've been getting hiccups badly lately. After every meal. It's not as if I eat fast... but, of course, you're only a student still. Though you know more about these things than I do. Then too I get spots before my eyes. Perhaps I ought to cut down my diet a bit. But it's difficult. A man in my position has a lot of entertaining to do. For instance—' he grasped his companion's unresponsive arm and squeezed it knowingly—'it would be no good my promising you that I'd go without my lunch today. You medicos are men of the world and I don't mind telling you I've got a little girl meeting me. At the Metropole. At one.' Some association of ideas made him feel in his pocket to make sure his packet of toffee was safe.

       They passed another policeman and Mr Davis waved his hand. His companion was very silent. The boy's shy, Mr Davis thought, he's not used to walking about town with a man like me: it excused a certain roughness in his behaviour; even the suspicion Mr Davis had resented was probably only a form of gawkiness. Mr Davis, because the day was proving fine after all, a little sun sparkling through the cold obscured air, because the kidneys and bacon had really been done to a turn, because he had asserted himself in the presence of Miss Maydew, who was the daughter of a peer, because he had a date at the Metropole with a little girl of talent, because too by this time Raven's body would be safely laid out on its icy slab in the mortuary, for all these reasons Mr Davis felt kindness and Christmas in his spirit; he exerted himself to put the boy at his ease. He said, 'I feel sure we've met somewhere. Perhaps the house surgeon introduced us.' But his companion remained glumly unforthcoming. 'A fine sing-song you all put on at the opening of the new ward.' He glanced again at the delicate wrists. 'You weren't by any chance the boy who dressed up as a girl and sang that naughty song?' Mr Davis laughed thickly at the memory, turning into the Tanneries, laughed as he had laughed more times than he could count over the port, at the club, among the good fellows, at the smutty masculine jokes, 'I was tickled to death.' He put his hand on his companion's arm and pushed through the glass door of Midland Steel.

       A stranger stepped out from round a corner and the clerk behind the inquiries counter told him in a strained voice, 'That's all right. That's Mr Davis.'

       'What's all this?' Mr Davis asked in a harsh no-nonsense voice, now that he was back where he belonged.

       The detective said, 'We are just keeping an eye open.'

       'Raven?' Mr Davis asked in a rather shrill voice. The man nodded. Mr Davis said, 'You let him escape? What fools...'

       The detective said, 'You needn't be scared. He'll be spotted at once if he comes out of hiding. He can't escape this time.'

       'But why,' Mr Davis said, 'are you here? Why do you expect...'

       'We've got our orders,' the man said.

       'Have you told Sir Marcus?'

       'He knows.'

       Mr Davis looked tired and old. He said sharply to his companion, 'Come with me and I'll give you the money. I haven't any time to waste.' He walked with lagging hesitating feet down a passage paved with some black shining composition to the glass lift-shaft. The man in the gas-mask followed him down the passage and into the lift; they moved slowly and steadily upwards together, as intimate as two birds caged. Floor by floor the great building sank below them, a clerk in a black coat hurrying on some mysterious errand which required a lot of blotting paper, a girl standing outside a closed door with a file of papers whispering to herself, rehearsing some excuse, an errand boy walking erratically along a passage balancing a bundle of new pencils on his head. They stopped at an empty floor.

       There was something on Mr Davis's mind. He walked slowly, turned the handle of his door softly, almost as if he feared that someone might be waiting for him inside. But the room was quite empty. An inner door opened, and a young woman with fluffy gold hair and exaggerated horn spectacles said, 'Willie', and then saw his companion. She said, 'Sir Marcus wants to see you, Mr Davis.'

       'That's all right, Miss Connett,' Mr Davis said. 'You might go and find me an ABC.'

       'Are you going away—at once?'

       Mr Davis hesitated. 'Look me up what trains there are for town—after lunch.'

       'Yes, Mr Davis.' She withdrew and the two of them were alone. Mr Davis shivered slightly and turned on his electric fire. The man hi the gas-mask spoke and again the muffled coarse voice pricked at Mr Davis's memory. 'Are you scared of something?'

       'There's a madman loose in this town,' Mr Davis said. His nerves were alert at every sound in the corridor outside, a footstep, the ring of a bell. It had needed more courage than he had been conscious of possessing to say 'after lunch', he wanted to be away at once, clear away from Nottwich. He started at the scrape of a little cleaner's platform which was being lowered down the wall of the inner courtyard. He padded to the door and locked it; it gave him a better feeling of security to be locked into his familiar room, with his desk, his swivel chair, the cupboard where he kept two glasses and a bottle of sweet port, the bookcase, which contained a few technical works on steel, a Whitaker's, a Who's Who and a copy of His Chinese Concubine, than to remember the detective in the hall. He took everything in like something seen for the first time, and it was true enough that he had never so realized the peace and comfort of his small room. Again he started at the creak of the ropes from which the cleaner's platform hung. He shut down his double window. He said in a tone of nervous irritation,' Sir Marcus can wait.'

       'Who's Sir Marcus?'

       'My boss.' Something about the open door of his secretary's room disturbed him with the idea that anyone could enter that way. He was no longer in a hurry, he wasn't busy any more, he wanted companionship. He said, 'You aren't in any hurry. Take that thing off, it must be stuffy, and have a glass of port.' On his way to the cupboard he shut the inner door and turned the key. He sighed with relief, fetching out the port and the glasses, 'Now we are really alone, I want to tell you about these hiccups.' He poured two brimming glasses, but his hand shook and the port ran down the sides. He said, 'Always just after a meal...'

       The muffled voice said, 'The money...'

       'Really,' Mr Davis said, 'you are rather impudent. You can trust me. I'm Davis.' He went to his desk and unlocked a drawer, took out two five-pound notes and held them out. 'Mind,' he said, 'I shall expect a proper receipt from your treasurer.'

       The man put them away. His hand stayed in his pocket. He said, 'Are these phoney notes, too?' A whole scene came back to Mr Davis's mind: a Lyons' Corner House, the taste of an Alpine Glow, the murderer sitting opposite him trying to tell him of the old woman he had killed. Mr Davis screamed: not a word, not a plea for help, just a meaningless cry like a man gives under an anaesthetic when the knife cuts the flesh. He ran, bolted, across the room to the inner door and tugged at the handle. He struggled uselessly as if he were caught on barbed wire between trenches.

       'Come away from there,' Raven said. 'You've locked the door.'

       Mr Davis came back to his desk. His legs gave way and he sat on the ground beside the waste-paper basket. He said, 'I'm sick. You wouldn't kill a sick man.' The idea really gave him hope. He retched convincingly.

       'I'm not going to kill you yet,' Raven said.' Maybe I won't kill you if you keep quiet and do what I say. This Sir Marcus, he's your boss?'

       'An old man,' Mr Davis protested, weeping beside the waste-paper basket.

       'He wants to see you,' Raven said. 'We'll go along.' He said, 'I've been waiting days for this—to find the two of you. It almost seems too good to be true. Get up. Get up,' he repeated furiously to the weak flabby figure on the floor.

       Mr Davis led the way. Miss Connett came down the passage carrying a slip of paper. She said, 'I've got the trains, Mr Davis. The best is the three-five. The two-seven is really so slow that you wouldn't be up more than ten minutes earlier. Then there's only the five-ten before the night train.'

       'Put them on my desk,' Mr Davis said. He hung about there in front of her in the shining modern plutocratic passage as if he wanted to say good-bye to a thousand things if only he had dared, to this wealth, this comfort, this authority; lingering there ('Yes, put them on my desk, May') he might even have been wanting to express at the last some tenderness that had never before entered his mind in connection with 'little girls'. Raven stood just behind him with his hand in his pocket. Her employer looked so sick that Miss Connett said, 'Are you feeling well, Mr Davis?'

       'Quite well,' Mr Davis said. Like an explorer going into strange country he felt the need of leaving some record behind at the edge of civilization, to say to the next chance comer, 'I shall be found towards the north' or 'the west'. He said, 'We are going to Sir Marcus, May.'

       'He's in a hurry for you,' Miss Connett said. A telephone bell rang. 'I shouldn't be surprised if that's him now.' She pattered down the corridor to her room on very high heels and Mr Davis felt again the remorseless pressure on his elbow to advance, to enter the lift. They rose another floor and when Mr Davis pulled the gates apart he retched again. He wanted to fling himself to the floor and take the bullets in his back.

       The long gleaming passage to Sir Marcus's study was like a mile-long stadium track to a winded runner.

       Sir Marcus was sitting in his Bath chair with a kind of bed-table on his knees. He had his valet with him and his back to the door, but the valet could see with astonishment Mr Davis's exhausted entrance in the company of a medical student in a gas-mask. 'Is that Davis?' Sir Marcus whispered. He broke a dry biscuit and sipped a little hot milk. He was fortifying himself for a day's work.

       'Yes, sir.' The valet watched with astonishment Mr Davis's sick progress across the hygienic rubber floor; he looked as if he needed support, as if he was about to collapse at the knees.

       'Get out then,' Sir Marcus whispered.

       'Yes, sir.' But the man in the gas-mask had turned the key of the door; a faint expression of joy, a rather hopeless expectation, crept into the valet's face as if he were wondering whether something at last was going to happen, something different from pushing Bath chairs along rubber floors, dressing and undressing an old man, not strong enough to keep himself clean, bringing him the hot milk or the hot water or the dry biscuits.

       'What are you waiting for?' Sir Marcus whispered.

       'Get back against the wall,' Raven suddenly commanded the valet.

       Mr Davis cried despairingly, 'He's got a gun. Do what he says.' But there was no need to tell the valet that. The gun was out now and had them all three covered, the valet against the wall, Mr Davis dithering in the middle of the room, Sir Marcus who had twisted the Bath chair round to face them.

       'What do you want?'Sir Marcus said.

       'Are you the boss?'

       Sir Marcus said, 'The police are downstairs. You can't get away from here unless I—' The telephone began to ring. It rang on and on and on, and then ceased.

       Raven said, 'You've got a scar under that beard, haven't you? I don't want to make a mistake. He had your photograph. You were in the home together,' and he glared angrily round the large rich office room comparing it in mind with his own memories of cracked bells and stone stairs and wooden benches, and of the small flat too with the egg boiling on the ring. This man had moved further than the old Minister.

       'You're mad,' Sir Marcus whispered. He was too old to be frightened; the revolver represented no greater danger to him than a false step in getting into his chair, a slip in his bath. He seemed to feel only a faint irritation, a faint craving for his interrupted meal. He bent his old lip forward over the bed-table and sucked loudly at the rim of hot milk.

       The valet suddenly spoke from the wall. 'He's got a scar,' he said. But Sir Marcus took no notice of any of them, sucking up his milk untidily over his thin beard.

       Raven twisted his gun on Mr Davis. 'It was him,' he said. 'If you don't want a bullet in your guts tell me it was him.'

       'Yes, yes,' Mr Davis said in horrified subservient haste, 'he thought of it. It was his idea. We were on our last legs here. We'd got to make money. It was worth more than half a million to him.'

       'Half a million!' Raven said. 'And he paid me two hundred phoney pounds.'

       'I said to him we ought to be generous. He said: "Stop your mouth."'

       'I wouldn't have done it,' Raven said, 'if I'd known the old man was like he was. I smashed his skull for him. And the old woman, a bullet in both eyes.' He shouted at Sir Marcus, 'That was your doing. How do you like that?' but the old man sat there apparently unmoved: old age had killed the imagination.'The deaths he had ordered were no more real to him than the deaths he read about in the newspapers. A little greed (for his milk), a little vice (occasionally to put his old hand inside a girl's blouse and feel the warmth of life), a little avarice and calculation (half a million against a death), a very small persistent, almost mechanical, sense of self-preservation: these were his only passions. The last made him edge his chair imperceptibly towards the bell at the edge of his desk. He whispered gently, 'I deny it all. You are mad.'

       Raven said, 'I've got you now where I want you. Even if the police kill me,' he tapped the gun, 'here's my evidence. This is the gun I used. They can pin the murder to this gun. You told me to leave it behind, but here it is. It would put you away a long, long time even if I didn't shoot you.'

       Sir Marcus whispered gently, imperceptibly twisting his silent rubbered wheels, 'A Colt No .7. The factories turn out thousands.'

       Raven said angrily, 'There's nothing the police can't do now with a gun. There are experts—' He wanted to frighten Sir Marcus before he shot him; it seemed unfair to him that Sir Marcus should suffer less than the old woman he hadn't wanted to kill. He said, 'Don't you want to pray? You're a Jew, aren't you? Better people than you,' he said, 'believe in a God,' remembering how the girl had prayed in the dark cold shed. The wheel of Sir Marcus's chair touched the desk, touched the bell, and the dull ringing came up the well of the lift, going on and on. It conveyed nothing to Raven until the valet spoke.' The old bastard,' he said, with the hatred of years, 'he's ringing the bell.' Before Raven could decide what to do, someone was at the door, shaking the handle.

       Raven said to Sir Marcus, 'Tell them to keep back or I'll shoot.'

       'You fool,' Sir Marcus whispered, 'they'll only get you for theft. If you kill me, you'll hang.' But Mr Davis was ready to clutch at any straw. He screamed to the man outside, 'Keep away. For God's sake keep away.'

       Sir Marcus said venomously, 'You're a fool, Davis. If he's going to kill us anyway—' While Raven stood pistol in hand before the two men, an absurd quarrel broke out between them. 'He's got no cause to kill me,' Mr Davis screamed. 'It's you who've got us into this. I only acted for you.'

       The valet began to laugh. 'Two to one on the field,' he said.

       'Be quiet,' Sir Marcus whispered venomously back at Mr Davis. 'I can put you out of the way at any time.'

       'I defy you,' Mr Davis screamed in a high peacock voice. Somebody flung himself against the door.

       'I have the West Rand Goldfields filed,' Sir Marcus said, 'the East African Petroleum Company.'

       A wave of impatience struck Raven. They seemed to be disturbing some memory of peace and goodness which had been on the point of returning to him when he had told Sir Marcus to pray. He raised his pistol and shot Sir Marcus in the chest. It was the only way to silence them. Sir Marcus fell forward across the bed-table, upsetting the glass of warm milk over the papers on his desk. Blood came out of his mouth.

       Mr Davis began to talk very rapidly. He said, 'It was all him, the old devil. You heard him. What could I do? He had me. You've got nothing against me.' He shrieked, 'Go away from that door. He'll kill me if you don't go,' and immediately began to talk again, while the milk dripped from the bed-table to the desk drop by drop. 'I wouldn't have done a thing if it hadn't been for him. Do you know what he did? He went and told the Chief Constable to order the police to shoot you on sight.' He tried not to look at the pistol which remained pointed at his chest. The valet was white and silent by the wall; he watched Sir Marcus's life bleeding away with curious fascination. So this was what it would have been like, he seemed to be thinking, if he himself had had courage … any time... during all these years.

       A voice outside said, 'You had better open this door at once or we'll shoot through it.'

       'For God's sake,' Mr Davis screamed, 'leave me alone. He'll shoot me,' and the eyes watched him intently through the panes of the gas-mask, with satisfaction. 'There's not a thing I've done to you,' he began to protest. Over Raven's head he could see the clock: it hadn't moved more than three hours since his breakfast, the hot stale taste of the kidneys and bacon was still on his palate: he couldn't believe that this was really the end: at one o'clock he had a date with a girl: you didn't die before a date. 'Nothing,' he murmured, 'nothing at all.'

       'It was you,' Raven said, 'who tried to kill...'

       'Nobody. Nothing,' Mr Davis moaned.

       Raven hesitated. The word was still unfamiliar on his tongue. 'My friend.'

       'I don't know. I don't understand.'

       'Keep back,' Raven cried through the door, 'I'll shoot him if you fire,' He said, 'The girl.'

       Mr Davis shook all over. He was like a man with St Vitus's dance. He said, ' She wasn't a friend of yours. Why are the police here if she didn't... who else could have known...?'

       Raven said, 'I'll shoot you for that and nothing else. She's straight.'

       'Why,' Mr Davis screamed at him, 'she's a policeman's girl. She's the Yard man's girl. She's Mather's girl.'

       Raven shot him. With despair and deliberation he shot his last chance of escape, plugged two bullets in where one would do, as if he were shooting the whole world in the person of stout moaning bleeding Mr Davis. And so he was. For a man's world is his life and he was shooting that: his mother's suicide, the long years in the home, the race-course gangs, Kite's death and the old man's and the woman's. There was no other way; he had tried the way of confession, and it had failed him for the usual reason. There was no one outside your own brain whom you could trust: not a doctor, not a priest, not a woman. A siren blew up over the town its message that the sham raid was over, and immediately the church bells broke into a noisy Christmas carol: the foxes have their holes, but the son of man... A bullet smashed the lock of the door. Raven, with his gun pointed stomach-high, said, 'Is there a bastard called Mather out there? He'd better keep away.'

       While he waited for the door to open he couldn't help remembering many things. He did not remember them in detail; they fogged together and formed the climate of his mind as he waited there for the chance of a last revenge: a voice singing above a dark street as the sleet fell: They say that's a snowflower a man brought from Greenland, the cultivated unlived voice of the elderly critic reading Maud: Oh, that 'twere possible after long grief, while he stood in the garage and felt the ice melt at his heart with a sense of pain and strangeness. It was as if he were passing the customs of a land he had never entered before and would never be able to leave: the girl in the café saying, 'He's bad and ugly...', the little plaster child lying in its mother's arms waiting the double-cross, the whips, the nails. She had said to him, 'I'm your friend. You can trust me.' Another bullet burst in the lock.

       The valet, white-faced by the wall, said, 'For God's sake, give it up. They'll get you anyway. He was right. It was the girl. I heard them on the 'phone.'

       I've got to be quick, Raven thought, when the door gives, I must shoot first. But too many ideas besieged his brain at once. He couldn't see clearly enough through the mask and he undid it clumsily with one hand and dropped it on the floor.

       The valet could see now the raw inflamed lip, the dark and miserable eyes. He said, 'There's the window. Get on to the roof.' He was talking to a man whose understanding was dulled, who didn't know whether he wished to make an effort or not, who moved his face so slowly to see the window that it was the valet who noticed first the painter's platform swinging down the wide tall pane. Mather was on the platform, but the detective had not allowed for his own inexperience. The little platform swung this way and that; he held a rope with one hand and reached for the window with the other; he had no hand free for his revolver as Raven turned. He dangled outside the window six floors above the narrow Tanneries, a defenceless mark for Raven's pistol.

       Raven watched him with bemused eyes, trying to take aim. It wasn't a difficult shot, but it was almost as if he had lost interest in killing. He was only aware of a pain and despair which was more like a complete weariness than anything else. He couldn't work up any sourness, any bitterness, at his betrayal. The dark Weevil under the storm of frozen rain flowed between him and any human enemy. Ah, Christ! that it were possible, but he had been marked from his birth for this end, to be betrayed in turn by everyone until every avenue into life was safely closed: by his mother bleeding in the basement, by the chaplain at the home, by the shady doctor off Charlotte Street. How could he have expected to have escaped the commonest betrayal of all: to go soft on a skirt? Even Kite would have been alive now if it hadn't been for a skirt. They all went soft at some time or another: Penrith and Carter, Jossy and Ballard, Barker and the Great Dane. He took aim slowly, absent-mindedly, with a curious humility, with almost a sense of companionship in his loneliness: the Trooper and Mayhew. They had all thought at one time or another that their skirt was better than other men's skirts, that there was something exalted in their relation. The only problem when you were once born was to get out of life more neatly and expeditiously than you had entered it. For the first time the idea of his mother's suicide came to him without bitterness, as he reluctantly fixed his aim and Saunders shot him in the back through the opening door. Death came to him in the form of unbearable pain. It was as if he had to deliver this pain as a woman delivers a child, and he sobbed and moaned in the effort. At last it came out of him and he followed his only child into a vast desolation.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 8

 

 

 

1

 

 

THE smell of food came through into the lounge whenever somebody passed in or out of the restaurant. The local Rotarians were having a lunch in one of the private rooms upstairs and when the door opened Ruby could hear a cork pop and the scrap of a limerick. It was five-past one. Ruby went out and chatted to the porter. She said, 'The worst of it is I'm one of the girls who turn up on the stroke. One o'clock he said and here I am panting for a good meal. I know a girl ought to keep a man waiting, but what do you do if you're hungry? He might go in and start.' She said, 'The trouble is I'm unlucky. I'm the kind of girl who daren't have a bit of fun because she'd be dead sure to get a baby. Well, I don't mean I've had a baby, but I did catch mumps once. Would you believe a grown man could give a girl mumps? But I'm that kind of girl.' She said, 'You look fine in all that gold braid with those medals. You might say something.'

       The market was more than usually full, for everyone had come out late to do their last Christmas shopping now that the gas practice was over. Only Mrs Alfred Piker, as Lady Mayoress, had set an example by shopping in a mask. Now she was walking home, and Chinky trotted beside her, trailing his low fur and the feathers on his legs in the cold slush, carrying her mask between his teeth. He stopped by a lamp-post and dropped it in a puddle. 'O, Chinky, you bad little thing,' Mrs Piker said. The porter in his uniform glared out over the market. He wore the Mons medal and the Military Medal. He had been three times wounded. He swung the glass door as the business men came in for their lunch, the head traveller of Crosthwaite and Crosthwaite, the managing director of the big grocery business in the High Street. Once he darted out into the road and disentangled a fat man from a taxi. Then he came back and stood beside Ruby and listened to her with expressionless good humour.

       'Ten minutes late,' Ruby said, 'I thought he was a man a girl could trust. I ought to have touched wood or crossed my fingers. It serves me right. I'd rather have lost my honour than that steak. Do you know him? He flings his weight about a lot. Called Davis.'

       'He's always in here with girls,' the porter said.

       A little man in pince-nez bustled by. 'A Merry Christmas, Hallows.'

       'A Merry Christmas to you, sir.' The porter said, 'You wouldn't have got far with him.'

       'I haven't got as far as the soup,' Ruby said.

       A newsboy went by calling out a special midday edition of the News, the evening edition of the Journal, and a few minutes later another newsboy went past with a special edition of the Post, the evening edition of the more aristocratic Guardian. It was impossible to hear what they were shouting and the north-east wind flapped their posters, so that on one it was only possible to read the syllable '—gedy' and on the other the syllable '—der'.

       'There are limits,' Ruby said, 'a girl can't afford to make herself cheap. Ten minutes' wait is the outside limit.'

       'You've waited more than that now,' the porter said.

       Ruby said, 'I'm like that. You'd say I fling myself at men, wouldn't you? That's what I think, but I never seem to hit them.' She added with deep gloom, 'The trouble is I'm the kind that's born to make a man happy. It's written all over me. It keeps them away. I don't blame them. I shouldn't like it myself.'

       'There goes the Chief Constable,' the porter said. 'Off to get a drink at the police station. His wife won't let him have them at home. The best of the season to you, sir.'

       'He seems in a hurry.' A newspaper poster flapped 'Trag—' at them. 'Is he the kind that would buy a girl a good rump steak with onions and fried potatoes?'

       'I tell you what,' the porter said. 'You wait around another five minutes and then I shall be going off for lunch.'

       'That's a date,' Ruby said. She crossed her fingers and touched wood. Then she went and sat inside and carried on a long conversation with an imaginary theatrical producer whom she imagined rather like Mr Davis, but a Mr Davis who kept his engagements. The producer called her a little woman with talent, asked her to dinner, took her back to a luxurious flat and gave her several cocktails. He asked her what she would think of a West-End engagement at fifteen pounds a week and said he wanted to show her his flat. Ruby's dark plump gloomy face lightened; she swung one leg excitedly and attracted the angry attention of a business man who was making notes of the midday prices. He found another chair and muttered to himself. Ruby, too, muttered to herself. She was saying, 'This is the dining-room. And through there is the bathroom. And this—elegant, isn't it?—is the bedroom.' Ruby said promptly that she'd like the fifteen pounds a week, but need she have the West-End engagement? Then she looked at the clock and went outside. The porter was waiting for her.

       'What?' Ruby said. 'Have I got to go out with that uniform?'

       'I only get twenty minutes,' the porter said.

       'No rump steak then,' Ruby said. 'Well, I suppose sausages would do.'

       They sat at a lunch counter on the other side of the market and had sausages and coffee. 'That uniform,' Ruby said, 'makes me embarrassed. Everyone'll think you're a guardsman going with a girl for a change.'

       'Did you hear the shooting?' the man behind the counter said.

       'What shooting?'

       'Just round the corner from you at Midland Steel. Three dead. That old devil Sir Marcus, and two others.' He laid the midday paper open on the counter, and the old wicked face of Sir Marcus, the plump anxious features of Mr Davis, stared up at them beyond the sausages, the coffee cups, the pepper-pot, beside the hot-water urn.' So that's why he didn't come,' Ruby said. She was silent for a while reading.

       'I wonder what this Raven was after,' the porter said. 'Look here,' and he pointed to a small paragraph at the foot of the column which announced that the head of the special political department of Scotland Yard had arrived by air and gone straight to the offices of Midland Steel. 'It doesn't mean a thing to me,' Ruby said.

       The porter turned the pages looking for something. He said, 'Funny thing, isn't it? Here we are just going to war again, and they fill up the front page with a murder. It's driven the war on to a back page.'

       'Perhaps there won't be a war.'

       They were silent over their sausages. It seemed odd to Ruby that Mr Davis, who had sat on the box with her and looked at the Christmas tree, should be dead, so violently and painfully dead. Perhaps he had meant to keep the date. He wasn't a bad sort. She said, 'I feel sort of sorry for him.'

       'Who? Raven?'

       'Oh no, not him. Mr Davis, I mean.'

       'I know how you feel. I almost feel sorry too—for the old man. I was in Midland Steel myself once. He had his moments. He used to send round turkeys at Christmas. He wasn't too bad. It's more than they do at the hotel.'

       'Well,' Ruby said, draining her coffee, 'life goes on.'

       'Have another cup.'

       'I don't want to sting you.'

       'That's all right.' Ruby leant against him on the high stool; their heads touched; they were a little quietened because each had known a man who was suddenly dead, but the knowledge they shared gave them a sense of companionship which was oddly sweet and reassuring. It was like feeling safe, like feeling in love without the passion, the uncertainty, the pain.

 

 

 

 

 

2

 

 

Saunders asked a clerk in Midland Steel the way to a lavatory. He washed his hands and thought, 'That job's over.' It hadn't been a satisfactory job; what had begun as a plain robbery had ended with two murders and the death of the murderer. There was a mystery about the whole affair; everything hadn't come out. Mather was up there on the top floor now with the head of the political department; they were going through Sir Marcus's private papers. It really seemed as if the girl's story might be true.

       The girl worried Saunders more than anything. He couldn't help admiring her courage and impertinence at the same time as he hated her for making Mather suffer. He was ready to hate anyone who hurt Mather. 'She'll have to be taken to the Yard,' Mather said. 'There may be a charge against her. Put her in a locked carriage on the three-five. I don't want to see her until this thing's cleared up.' The only cheerful thing about the whole business was that the constable whom Raven had shot in the coal-yard was pulling through.

       Saunders came out of Midland Steel into the Tanneries with an odd sensation of having nothing to do. He went into a public-house at the corner of the market and had half a pint of bitter and two cold sausages. It was as if life had sunk again to the normal level, was flowing quietly by once more between its banks. A card hanging behind the bar next a few cinema posters caught his eye. 'A New Cure for Stammerers. ' Mr Montague Phelps, M. A., was holding a public meeting in the Masonic Hall to explain his new treatment. Entrance was free, but there would be a silver collection. Two o'clock sharp. At one cinema Eddie Cantor. At another George Arliss. Saunders didn't want to go back to the police station until it was time to take the girl to the train. He had tried a good many cures for stammering; he might as well try one more.

       It was a large hall. On the walls hung large photographs of masonic dignitaries. They all wore ribbons and badges of strange significance. There was an air of oppressive well-being, of successful groceries, about the photographs. They hung, the well-fed, the successful, the assured, over the small gathering of misfits, in old mackintoshes, in rather faded mauve felt hats, in school ties. Saunders entered behind a fat furtive woman and a steward stammered at him, 'T-t-t—?'

       'One,' Saunders said. He sat down near the front and heard a stammered conversation going on behind him, like the twitters of two Chinamen. Little bursts of impetuous talk and then the fatal impediment. There were about fifty people in the hall. They eyed each other rather as an ugly man eyes himself in shop windows: from this angle, he thinks, I am really not too bad. They gained a sense of companionship; their mutual lack of communication was in itself like a communication. They waited together for a miracle.

       Saunders waited with them: waited as he had waited on the windless side of the coal truck, with the same patience. He wasn't unhappy. He knew that he probably exaggerated the value of what he lacked; even if he could speak freely, without care to avoid the dentals which betrayed him, he would probably find it no easier to express his admiration and his affection. The power to speak didn't give you words.

       Mr Montague Phelps, M. A., came on to the platform. He wore a frock-coat and his hair was dark and oiled. His blue chin was lightly powdered and he carried himself with a rather aggressive sangfroid, as much as to say to the depressed inhibited gathering, 'See what you too might become with a little more self-confidence, after a few lessons from me.' He was a man of about forty-two who had lived well, who obviously had a private life. One thought in his presence of comfortable beds and heavy meals and Brighton hotels. For a moment he reminded Saunders of Mr Davis who had bustled so importantly into the offices of Midland Steel that morning and had died very painfully and suddenly half an hour later.

       It almost seemed as if Raven's act had had no consequences: as if to kill was just as much an illusion as to dream. Here was Mr Davis all over again; they were turned out of a mould, and you couldn't break the mould, and suddenly over Mr Montague Phelps's shoulder Saunders saw the photograph of the Grand Master of the Lodge, above the platform: an old face and a crooked nose and a tuft of beard, Sir Marcus.

       Major Calkin was very white when he left Midland Steel. He had seen for the first time the effect of violent death. That was war. He made his way as quickly as he could to the police station and was glad to find the superintendent in. He asked quite humbly for a spot of whisky. He said, 'It shakes you up. Only last night he had dinner at my house. Mrs Piker was there with her dog. What a time we had stopping him knowing the dog was there.'

       'That dog,' the superintendent said, 'gives us more trouble than any man in Nottwich. Did I ever tell you the time it got in the women's lavatory in Higham Street? That dog isn't much to look at, but every once in a while it goes crazy. If it wasn't Mrs Piker's we'd have had it destroyed many a time.'

 

 

 

 

 

3

 

 

Major Calkin said, 'He wanted me to give orders to your men to shoot this fellow on sight. I told him I couldn't. Now I can't help thinking we might have saved two lives.'

       'Don't you worry, sir,' the superintendent said, 'we couldn't have taken orders like that. Not from the Home Secretary himself.'

       'He was an odd fellow,' Major Calkin said. 'He seemed to think I'd be certain to have a hold over some of you. He promised me all kinds of things. I suppose he was what you'd call a genius. We shan't see his like again. What a waste.' He poured himself out some more whisky. 'Just at a time, too, when we need men like him. War—' Major Calkin paused with his hand on his glass. He stared into the whisky, seeing things, the remount depot, his uniform in the cupboard. He would never be a colonel now, but on the other hand Sir Marcus could not prevent... but curiously he felt no elation at the thought of once more presiding over the tribunal. He said, 'The gas practice seems to have gone off well. But I don't know that it was wise to leave so much to the medical students. They don't know where to stop.'

       'There was a pack of them,' the superintendent said, 'went howling past here looking for the Mayor. I don't know how it is Mr Piker seems to be like catmint to those students.'

       'Good old Piker,' Major Calkin said mechanically.

       'They go too far,' the superintendent said. 'I had a ring from Higginbotham, the cashier at the Westminster. He said his daughter went into the garage and found one of the students there without his trousers.'

       Life began to come back to Major Calkin. He said, 'That'll be Rose Higginbotham, I suppose. Trust Rose. What did she do?'

       'He said she gave him a dressing down.'

       'Dressing down's good,' Major Calkin said. He twisted his glass and drained his whisky. 'I must tell that to old Piker. What did you say?'

       'I told him his daughter was lucky not to find a murdered man in the garage. You see that's where Raven must have got his clothes and his mask.'

       'What was the boy doing at the Higginbothams' anyway?' Major Calkin said. 'I think I'll go and cash a cheque and ask old Higginbotham that.' He began to laugh; the air was clear again; life was going on quite in the old way: a little scandal, a drink with the super., a story to tell old Piker. On his way to the Westminster he nearly ran into Mrs Piker. He had to dive hastily into a shop to avoid her, and for a horrible moment he thought Chinky, who was some way ahead of her, was going to follow him inside. He made motions of throwing a ball down the street, but Chinky was not a sporting dog and anyway he was trailing a gas-mask in his teeth. Major Calkin had to turn his back abruptly and lean over a counter. He found it was a small haberdasher's. He had never been in the shop before. 'What can I get you, sir?'

       'Suspenders,' Major Calkin said desperately. 'A pair of suspenders.'

       'What colour, sir?' Out of the corner of his eye Major Calkin saw Chinky trot on past the shop door followed by Mrs Piker. 'Mauve,' he said with relief.

 

 

 

 

 

4

 

 

The old woman shut the front door softly and trod on tiptoe down the little dark hall. A stranger could not have seen his way, but she knew exactly the position of the hat rack, of the what-not table, and the staircase. She was carrying an evening paper, and when she opened the kitchen door with the very minimum of noise so as not to disturb Acky, her face was alight with exhilaration and excitement. But she held it in, carrying her basket over to the draining board and unloading there her burden of potatoes, a tin of pineapple chunks, two eggs and a slab of cod.

       Acky was writing a long letter on the kitchen table. He had pushed his wife's mauve ink to one side and was using the best blue-black and a fountain pen which had long ceased to hold ink. He wrote slowly and painfully, sometimes making a rough copy of a sentence on another slip of paper. The old woman stood beside the sink watching him, waiting for him to speak, holding her breath in, so that sometimes it escaped in little whistles. At last Acky laid down his pen. 'Well, my dear?' he said.

       'Oh, Acky,' the old woman said with glee, 'what do you think? Mr Cholmondeley's dead. Killed.' She added, 'It's in the paper. And that Raven too.'

       Acky looked at the paper. 'Quite horrible,' he said with satisfaction. 'Another death as well. A holocaust.' He read the account slowly.

       'Fancy a thing like that 'appening 'ere in Nottwich.'

       'He was a bad man,' Acky said, 'though I wouldn't speak ill of him now that he's dead. He involved us in something of which I was ashamed. I think perhaps now it will be safe for us to stay in Nottwich.' A look of great weariness passed over his face as he looked down at the three pages of small neat classical handwriting.

       'Oh, Acky, you've been tiring yourself.'

       'I think,' Acky said, 'this will make everything clear.'

       'Read it to me, love,' the old woman said. Her little old vicious face was heavily creased with tenderness as she leant back against the sink in an attitude of infinite patience. Acky began to read. He spoke at first in a low hesitating way, but he gained confidence from the sound of his own voice, his hand went up to the lapel of his coat. '"My lord bishop"...' He said, 'I thought it best to begin formally, not to trespass at all on my former acquaintanceship.'

       'That's right, Acky, you are worth the whole bunch.'

       '"I am writing to you for the fourth time... after an interval of some eighteen months.'"

       'Is it so long, love? It was after we took the trip to Clacton.'

       '"Sixteen months... I am quite aware what your previous answers have been, that my case has been tried already in the proper Church Court, but I cannot believe, my lord bishop, that your sense of justice, if once I convince you of what a deeply injured man I am, will not lead you to do all that is in your power to have my case reheard. I have been condemned to suffer all my life for what in the case of other men is regarded as a peccadillo, a peccadillo of which I am not even guilty.'"

       'It's written lovely, love.'

       'At this point, my dear, I come down to particulars. "How, my lord bishop, could the hotel domestic swear to the identity of a man seen once, a year before the trial, in a darkened chamber, for in her evidence she agreed that he had not allowed her to draw up the blind? As for the evidence of the porter, my lord bishop, I asked in court whether it was not true that money had passed from Colonel and Mrs Mark Egerton into his hands, and my question was disallowed. Is this justice, founded on scandal, misapprehension, and perjury?'"

       The old woman smiled with tenderness and pride. 'This is the best letter you've written, Acky, so far.'

       '"My lord bishop, it was well known in the parish that Colonel Mark Egerton was my bitterest enemy on the church council, and it was at his instigation that the inquiry was held. As for Mrs Mark Egerton she was a bitch.'"

       'Is that wise, Acky?'

       'Sometimes, dear, one reaches an impasse, when there is nothing to be done but to speak out. At this point I take the evidence in detail as I have done before, but I think I have sharpened my arguments more than a little. And at the end, my dear, I address the worldly man in the only way he can understand.' He knew this passage off by heart; he reeled it fierily off at her, raising his crazy sunken flawed saint's eyes. '"But even assuming, my lord bishop, that this perjured and bribed evidence were accurate, what then? Have I committed the unforgivable sin that I must suffer all my life long, be deprived of my livelihood, depend on ignoble methods to raise enough money to keep myself and my wife alive? Man, my lord bishop, and no one knows it better than yourself—I have seen you among the flesh-pots at the palace—is made up of body as well as soul. A little carnality may be forgiven even to a man of my cloth. Even you, my lord bishop, have in your time no doubt sported among the haycocks."' He stopped, he was a little out of breath; they stared back at each other with awe and affection.

       Acky said, 'I want to write a little piece, dear, now about you.' He took in with what could only have been the deepest and purest love the black sagging skirt, the soiled blouse, the yellow wrinkled face. 'My dear,' he said, 'what I should have done without—' He began to make a rough draft of yet another paragraph, speaking the phrases aloud as he wrote them. '"What I should have done during this long trial—no, martyrdom—I do not know—I cannot conceive—if I had not been supported by the trust and the unswerving fidelity—no, fidelity and unswerving trust of my dear wife, a wife whom Mrs Mark Egerton considered herself in a position to despise. As if Our Lord had chosen the rich and well-born to serve him. At least this trial—has taught me to distinguish between my friends and enemies. And yet at my trial her word, the word of the woman who loved and believed in me, counted—for nought beside the word—of that—that—trumpery and deceitful scandalmonger."'

       The old woman leant forward with tears of pride and importance in her eyes. She said, 'That's lovely. Do you think the bishop's wife will read it? Oh, dear, I know I ought to go and tidy the room upstairs (we might be getting some young people in), but some'ow, Acky dear, I'd just like to stay right 'ere with you awhile. What you write makes me feel kind of 'oly.' She slumped down on the kitchen chair beside the sink and watched his hand move on, as if she were watching some unbelievably lovely vision passing through the room, something which she had never hoped to see and now was hers. 'And finally, my dear,' Acky said, 'I propose to write: "In a world of perjury and all manner of uncharitableness one woman remains my sheet anchor, one woman I can trust until death and beyond."'

       'They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Oh, Acky, my dear,' she wept, 'to think they've treated you that way. But you've said true. I won't ever leave you. I won't leave you, not even when I'm dead. Never, never, never,' and the two old vicious faces regarded each other with the complete belief, the awe and mutual suffering of a great love, while they affirmed their eternal union.

 

 

 

 

 

5

 

 

Anne cautiously felt the door of the compartment in which she had been left alone. It was locked, as she had thought it would be in spite of Saunders's tact and his attempt to hide what he was doing. She stared out at the dingy Midland station with dismay. It seemed to her that everything which made her life worth the effort of living was lost; she hadn't even got a job, and she watched, past an advertisement of Horlick's for night starvation and a bright blue-and-yellow picture of the Yorkshire coast, the weary pilgrimage which lay before her from agent to agent. The train began to move by the waiting-rooms, the lavatories, the sloping concrete into a waste of rails.

       What a fool, she thought, I have been, thinking I could save us from a war. Three men are dead, that's all. Now that she was herself responsible for so many deaths, she could no longer feel the same repulsion towards Raven. In this waste through which she travelled, between the stacks of coal, the tumbledown sheds, abandoned trucks in sidings where a little grass had poked up and died between the cinders, she thought of him again with pity and distress. They had been on the same side, he had trusted her, she had given her word to him, and then she had broken it without even the grace of hesitation. He must have known of her treachery before he died: in that dead mind she was preserved for ever with the chaplain who had tried to frame him, with the doctor who had telephoned to the police.

       Well, she had lost the only man she cared a damn about: it was always regarded as some kind of atonement, she thought, to suffer too: lost him for no reason at all. For she couldn't stop a war. Men were fighting beasts, they needed war; in the paper that Saunders had left for her on the opposite seat she could read how the mobilization in four countries was complete, how the ultimatum expired at midnight; it was no longer on the front page, but that was only because to Nottwich readers there was a war nearer at hand, fought out to a finish in the Tanneries. How they love it, she thought bitterly, as the dusk came up from the dark wounded ground and the glow of furnaces became visible beyond the long black ridge of slag-heaps. This was war too: this chaos through which the train moved slowly, grinding over point after point like a dying creature dragging itself painfully away through No-Man's Land from the scene of battle.

       She pressed her face against the window to keep her tears away: the cold pressure of the frosting pane stiffened her resistance. The train gathered speed by a small neo-Gothic church, a row of villas, and then the country, the fields, a few cows making for an open gate, a hard broken lane and a cyclist lighting his lamp. She began to hum to keep her spirits up, but the only tunes she could remember were 'Aladdin' and 'It's only Kew'. She thought of the long bus-ride home, the voice on the telephone, and how she couldn't get to the window to wave to him and he had stood there with his back to her while the train went by. It was Mr Davis even then who had ruined everything.

       And it occurred to her, staring out at the bleak frozen countryside, that perhaps even if she had been able to save the country from a war, it wouldn't have been worth the saving. She thought of Mr Davis and Acky and his old wife, of the producer and Miss Maydew and the landlady at her lodging with the bead of liquid on her nose. What had made her play so absurd a part? If she had not offered to go out to dinner with Mr Davis, Raven probably would be in gaol and the others alive. She tried to remember the watching anxious faces studying the sky-signs in Nottwich High Street, but she couldn't remember them with any vividness.

       The door into the corridor was unlocked and staring through the window into the grey fading winter light she thought: more questions. Will they never stop worrying me? She said aloud, 'I've made my statement, haven't I?'

       Mather's voice said, 'There are still a few things to discuss.'

       She turned hopelessly towards him. 'Need you have come?'

       'I'm in charge of this case,' Mather said, sitting down opposite to her with his back to the engine, watching the country which she could see approach flow backwards over her shoulder and disappear. He said, 'We've been checking what you told us. It's a strange story.'

       'It's true,' she repeated wearily.

       He said: 'We've had half the Embassies in London on the 'phone. Not to speak of Geneva. And the Commissioner.'

       She said with a flicker of malice, 'I'm sorry you've been troubled.' But she couldn't keep it up; her formal indifference was ruined by his presence, the large clumsy, once friendly hand, the bulk of the man. 'Oh, I'm sorry,' she said. 'I've said it before, haven't I? I'd say it if I'd spilt your coffee, and I've got to say it after all these people are killed. There are no other words, are there, which mean more? It all worked out wrong; I thought everything was clear. I've failed. I didn't mean to hurt you ever. I suppose the Commissioner...' She began to cry without tears; it was as if those ducts were frozen.

       He said, 'I'm to have promotion. I don't know why. It seems to me as if I'd bungled it.' He added gently and pleadingly, leaning forward across the compartment, 'We could get married—at once—though I dare say you don't want to now, you'll do all right. They'll give you a grant.'

       It was like going into the manager's office expecting dismissal and getting a rise instead—or a speaking part, but it never happened that way. She stared silently back at him.

       'Of course,' he said gloomily, 'you'll be the rage now. You'll have stopped a war. I know I didn't believe you. I've failed. I thought I'd always trust—We've found enough already to prove what you told me and I thought was lies. They'll have to withdraw their ultimatum now. They won't have any choice.' He added with a deep hatred of publicity, 'It'll be the sensation of a century,' sitting back with his face heavy and sad.

       'You mean,' she said with incredulity, 'that when we get in—we can go off straight away and be married?'

       'Will you?'

       She said, 'The taxi won't be fast enough.'

       'It won't be as quick as all that. It takes three weeks. We can't afford a special licence.'

       She said, 'Didn't you tell me about a grant? I'll blow it on the licence,' and suddenly as they both laughed it was as if the past three days left the carriage, were whirled backward down the metals to Nottwich. It had all happened there, and they need never go back to the scene of it. Only a shade of disquiet remained, a fading spectre of Raven. If his immortality was to be on the lips of living men, he was fighting now his last losing fight against extinction.

       'All the same,' Anne said, as Raven covered her with his sack: Raven touched her icy hand, 'I failed.'

       'Failed?' Mather said. 'You've been the biggest success,' and it seemed to Anne for a few moments that this sense of failure would never die from her brain, that it would cloud a little every happiness; it was something she could never explain: her lover would never understand it. But already as his face lost its gloom, she was failing again—failing to atone. The cloud was blown away by his voice; it evaporated under his large and clumsy and tender hand.

       'Such a success.' He was as inarticulate as Saunders, now that he was realizing what it meant. It was worth a little publicity. This darkening land, flowing backwards down the line, was safe for a few more years. He was a countryman, and he didn't ask for more than a few years' safety at a time for something he so dearly loved. The precariousness of its safety made it only the more precious. Somebody was burning winter weeds under a hedge, and down a dark lane a farmer rode home alone from the hunt in a queer old-fashioned bowler hat on a horse that would never take a ditch. A small lit village came up beside his window and sailed away like a pleasure steamer hung with lanterns; he had just time to notice the grey English church squatted among the yews and graves, the thick deaths of centuries, like an old dog who will not leave his corner. On the wooden platform as they whirled by a porter was reading the label on a Christmas tree. 'You haven't failed,' he said.

       London had its roots in her heart: she saw nothing in the dark countryside, she looked away from it to Mather's happy face. 'You don't understand,' she said, sheltering the ghost for a very short while longer, 'I did fail.' But she forgot it herself completely when the train drew in to London over a great viaduct under which the small bright shabby streets ran off like the rays of a star with their sweet shops, their Methodist chapels, their messages chalked on the paving stones. Then it was she who thought: this is safe, and wiping the glass free from steam, she pressed her face against the pane and happily and avidly and tenderly watched, like a child whose mother has died watches the family she must rear without being aware at all that the responsibility is too great. A mob of children went screaming down a street, she could tell they screamed because she was one of them, she couldn't hear their voices or see their mouths; a man was selling hot chestnuts at a corner, and it was on her face that his little fire glowed, the sweet shops were full of white gauze stockings crammed with cheap gifts. 'Oh,' she said with a sigh of unshadowed happiness, 'we're home.'

 

 

 

 

The End