The pistol misfires when Anna fires it at the Gridiron

The pistol misfires when Anna fires it at the Gridiron is a failed attempt at self-destruction whose uncertainty matters as much as its immediate danger. The weapon does not fire: Anna is left trembling, and Cowell Devlin can only ask what happened and wonder whether the misfire was deliberate or arranged. Her silence keeps the event unresolved, while her uncorrected claim to have overcome opium dependence adds another concealment to a scene already shaped by fear and doubt.

Background and Stakes

Two weeks earlier, after Anna had been released from the gaol-house, Devlin’s compassion had already given way to anxiety. He had helped her by lying on her behalf, then worried that his intervention might have been mistaken or self-serving. The gaoler had warned him that Anna was a failed suicide and might be insane. Those doubts return at the Gridiron Hotel when he holds her after the pistol misfires: he wonders whether she has tried, for a second time, to end her life.

The danger is made concrete by the weapon’s position. Anna had pointed its muzzle at her own throat and pulled the hammer, yet there is no bullet lodged in her breastbone. Devlin cannot explain how she could have known the gun would misfire in such a peculiar fashion. His uncertainty does not establish that Anna planned the failure, or even settle what she intended; it shows instead how little the event allows him to know. The pistol becomes an object around which suspicion gathers, while the central question—whether Anna meant to die—remains unanswered.

The Misfire and Its Immediate Aftermath

Anna is still trembling from the shock when Devlin waits for her breathing to steady. He asks what got into her, then proposes two possible explanations: a blank or a false cartridge. Anna shakes her head. When he suggests that she and Joseph Pritchard might have devised something together, she pushes away from him in disgust. Her reaction rejects that suggestion, but it does not provide another account of what happened.

The scene turns on this narrow exchange: Devlin searches for an explanation; Anna declines to give him one. He is relieved to see her brighten in anger, as though the force of that response offers some reassurance, but it cannot resolve the threat that has just passed. He lays the spent pistol carefully on the whatnot beside her bed. That careful placement marks a pause rather than a solution: the gun is no longer in her hand, but the attempt’s meaning is still unsettled.

Concealment and Unequal Knowledge

Anna nearly tells Devlin the truth about where the opium has gone, then stops herself out of shame. During the preceding fortnight, he had praised what he took to be her escape from the pipe, admiring the clarity of her eyes and the strength it seemed to show. Anna cannot bear to disabuse him of that belief. Instead, she explains Joseph Pritchard’s visit by saying that he was lonely. The episode therefore exposes a gap between Devlin’s hopeful reading of Anna’s recovery and what she is willing to disclose to him.

That withheld truth shapes the aftermath without explaining the gunshot. The evidence does not establish that the opium caused the misfire or that the pistol was part of a joint plan. What it does establish is that Anna lets Devlin continue believing she has ended her dependence, even as he asks for an account of a potentially fatal act. His concern is real, but it does not give him access to her reasons; her silence protects her secret and leaves him with conjecture.

Consequences and Significance

After Joseph Pritchard leaves, Devlin holds Anna until her breathing steadies. Their physical closeness recalls his embrace of Agathe Gascoigne, his dead wife, and draws the earlier loss into the present scene. Yet the resemblance does not make Anna a replacement for Agathe: Devlin is caught in comparison, while the tableau that closes the episode insists that he and Anna are not lovers and that the room is not hers. The tenderness of his holding her coexists with his uncertainty about who she is and what she has done.

The misfire also echoes Anna’s earlier encounter with the law. The day after Crosbie Wells’s burial, she was tried for attempted suicide, refused to plead, and was fined five pounds. The new incident thus returns her to the boundary between survival and a legally judged attempt to die, but it offers no clear explanation for either episode. Devlin trails off as he reflects that things keep happening to Anna that nobody can explain. The spent pistol remains beside the bed; the account that might clarify it does not arrive.