A Gun for Sale by Graham Greene Read Free Book Online

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.
    At the other end of the road there was a taxi rank. He stood there bowed against the wall, a sick man, until Cholmondeley