Dr Yogel laughed gently and pulled at Raven's lip in a playful way. 'Better get used to it, old man. We'll all be gassed in a day or two.'
'What do you mean?'
'Well, it looks like war, doesn't it?' Dr Yogel said, talking rapidly and unwinding more tube, turning screws in a soft, shaking, inexorable way. 'The Serbs can't shoot a Minister of War like that and get away with it. Italy's ready to come in. And the French are warming up. We'll be in it ourselves inside a week.'
Raven said, 'All that because an old man...' He explained, 'I haven't read the papers.'
'I wish I'd known beforehand,' Dr Yogel said, making conversation, fixing his cylinder. 'I'd have made a fortune in munition shares. They've gone up to the sky, old man. Now lean back. It won't take a moment.' He again approached the mask. He said, 'You've only got to breathe deep, old man.'
Raven said, 'I told you I wouldn't have gas. Get that straight. You can cut me about as much as you like, but I won't have gas.'
'It's very silly of you, old man,' Dr Yogel said. 'It's going to hurt.' He went back to the cabinet and again picked up a knife, but his hand shook more than ever. He was frightened of something. And then Raven heard from outside the tiny tinkle a telephone makes when the receiver is lifted. He jumped up from the couch; it was bitterly cold, but Dr Yogel was sweating; he stood by the cabinet holding his surgical knife, unable to say a word. Raven said, 'Keep quiet. Don't speak.' He flung the door suddenly open and there was the nurse in the little dim hall with the telephone at her ear. Raven stood sideways so that he could keep his eye on both of them. 'Put back that receiver,' he said. She put it back, watching him with her little mean conscienceless eyes. He said furiously, 'You double-crossing—' He said, 'I've got a mind to shoot you both.'
'Old man,' Dr Yogel said, 'old man. You've got it all wrong,' but the nurse said nothing. She had all the guts in their partnership, she was toughened by a long career of illegalities, by not a few deaths. Raven said, 'Get away from that 'phone.' He took the knife out of Dr Yogel's hand and hacked and sawed at the telephone wire. He was touched by something he had never felt before: a sense of injustice stammered on his tongue. These people were of his own kind; they didn't belong inside the legal borders; for the second time in one day he had been betrayed by the lawless. He had always been alone, but never so alone as this. The telephone wire gave. He wouldn't speak another word for fear his temper might master him and he might shoot. This wasn't the time for shooting. He went downstairs in a dark loneliness of spirit, his handkerchief over his face, and from the little wireless shop at the street corner heard, 'We have received the following notice...' The same voice followed him down the street from the open windows of the little impoverished homes, the suave expressionless voice from every house: 'New Scotland Yard. Wanted. James Raven. Aged about twenty-eight. Easily recognizable from his hare-lip. A little above the middle height. Last seen wearing a dark overcoat and a black felt hat. Any information leading to the arrest...' Raven walked away from the voice, out into the traffic of Oxford Street, bearing south.
There were too many things he didn't understand: this war they were talking of, why he had been double-crossed. He wanted to find Cholmondeley. Cholmondeley was of no account, he was acting under orders, but if he found Cholmondeley he could squeeze out of him... He was harassed, hunted, lonely, he bore with him a sense of great injustice and a curious pride. Going down the Charing Cross Road, past the music shops and the rubber goods shops, he swelled with it: after all it needed a man to start a war as he was doing.
He had no idea where Cholmondeley lived; the only clue he had was an accommodation address. It occurred to him there was a faint chance that if he watched the small shop to which Cholmondeley's letters were sent he might see him: a very faint chance, but it was strengthened by the fact of his escape. Already the news was on the air, it would be in the evening papers, Cholmondeley might want to clear out of the way for a while, and there was just a possibility that before he went he would call for letters. But that depended on whether he used that address for other letters besides Raven's. Raven wouldn't have believed there was one chance in a thousand if it were not that Cholmondeley was a fool. You didn't have to eat many ices with him to learn that.
The shop was in a side street opposite a theatre. It was a tiny one-roomed place in which was sold nothing above the level of Film Fun and Breezy Stories. There were postcards from Paris in sealed envelopes, American and French magazines, and books on flagellation in paper jackets for which the pimply youth or his sister, whoever was in the shop, charged twenty shillings, fifteen shillings back if you returned the book. It wasn't an easy shop to watch. A woman policeman kept an eye on the tarts at the corner and opposite there was just the long blank theatre wall, the gallery door. Against the wall you were as exposed as a fly against wall-paper, unless, he thought, waiting for the lights to flash green and let him pass, unless—the play was popular.
And it was popular. Although the doors wouldn't open for another hour, there was quite a long queue for the gallery. Raven hired a camp stool with almost his last small change and sat down. The shop was only just across the way. The youth wasn't in charge, but his sister. She sat there just inside the door in an old green dress that might have been stripped from one of the billiard tables in the pub next door. She had a square face that could never have looked young, a squint that her heavy steel spectacles did nothing to disguise. She might have been any age from twenty to forty, a parody of a woman, dirty and depraved, crouched under the most lovely figures, the most beautiful vacant faces the smut photographers could hire.
Raven watched: with a handkerchief over his mouth, one of sixty in the gallery queue, he watched. He saw a young man stop and eye Plaisirs de Paris furtively and hurry on; he saw an old man go into the shop and come out again with a brown-paper parcel. Somebody from the queue went across and bought cigarettes.
An elderly woman in pince-nez sat beside him. She said over her shoulder, 'That's why I always liked Galsworthy. He was a gentleman. You knew where you were, if you know what I mean.'
'It always seems to be the Balkans.'
'I liked Loyalties.'
'He was such a humane man.'
A man stood between Raven and the shop holding up a little square of paper. He put it in his mouth and held up another square. A tart ambled by on the other side of the road and said something to the girl in the shop. The man put the second piece of paper in his mouth.
'They say the fleet...'
'He makes you think. That's what I like.'
Raven thought: if he doesn't come before the queue begins to move I'll have to go.
'Anything in the papers?'
'Nothing new.'
The man in the road took the papers out of his mouth and began to tear them and fold them and tear them. Then he opened them out and it was a paper St George's Cross, blowing flimsily in the cold wind.
'He used to subscribe heavily to the Anti-Vivisection Society. Mrs Milbanke told me. She showed me one of his cheques with his signature.'
'He was really humane.'
'And a really great writer.'
A girl and a boy who looked happy applauded the man with the paper flag and he took off his cap and began to come down the queue collecting coppers. A taxi drew up at the end of the street and a man got out. It was Cholmondeley. He went into the bookshop and the girl got up and followed him. Raven counted his money. He had two and sixpence and a hundred and ninety-five pounds in stolen notes he could do nothing with. He sank his face deeper in his handkerchief and got up hurriedly like a man taken ill. The paper-tearer reached him, held out his cap, and Raven saw with envy the odd dozen pennies, a sixpence, a threepenny bit. He would have given a hundred pounds for the contents of that cap. He pushed the man roughly and walked away.