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
A Gun for Sale Page 20