Mr Hire's Engagement Read Free Page A

splashed onto the table. 'We'll stay . . . That is, one of us . . .'
    She could not decide whether to calm down. She looked at them and they tried to assume an air of decision. 'You go along and report.'
    The water had been boiling for the last quarter of an hour. The glass panes were misted over. 'But mind you come back!'
    The concierge took the kettle off the stove and stirred up the red-hot coals with a poker.
    'I've not been able to sleep for the last two weeks,' she concluded. 'You've seen him. I'm not crazy . . .'
    II
     
    When the blood at last stopped flowing, Mr. Hire was obliged to move with caution, holding his head very straight, so as not to reopen the wound. One end of his moustache was drooping, and blood-stained water had spread a pink colour-wash over his face.
    Mr. Hire first emptied the washbasin and wiped it out with a duster. Then his eye lighted on the iron stove, which was out. Except for his motionless head, which he carried on his shoulders like a foreign body, he was exactly as he had been in the tram, in the Métro and in the cellar in the Rue Saint-Maur, all his movements calm and measured, as though decreed by the successive rites of some ceremony.
    He took a newspaper from his overcoat pocket, crumpled it up, and pushed it down into the stove. On the black marble mantelpiece was a bundle of kindling-wood, which he arranged on top of the paper. He was surrounded by silence and cold. The only sounds were those he made by knocking against the poker or the coal-scuttle. He knelt down, still with head held up, his neck rigid, to push a match under the grid and set light to the paper. He groped. He struck three matches before he was successful, and the smoke came oozing out of every chink in the stove.
    It was colder in the room than outside. While waiting for the stove to warm up, Mr. Hire put on his overcoat again, a heavy coat of black cloth with a velvet collar, and he opened the cupboard that served him as a kitchen, lit a gas ring, poured water into a saucepan. His hand found what he wanted, without his looking for the things. He put a bowl, a knife and a plate on the table; then, after a moment's thought, put the plate back on its shelf, doubtless remembering that the incident in the concierge's lodge had prevented him from doing his shopping.
    He still had some bread and some butter. He took some ready- ground coffee out of a biscuit tin, wrinkled his brows, looked at the stove, which had stopped smoking and was no longer roaring as before. The wood had burnt up and the coal had not caught. There was no more wood on the mantelpiece. Mr. Hire frowned; then he poured the boiling water from the saucepan onto the coffee and warmed his hands over that.
    On the right of the room there was a bed, a washbasin and a bedside table; on the left, the cupboard containing the gas-ring, and a table covered with an oilcloth.
    Mr. Hire sat down at this table and began to eat bread and butter and drink coffee, sedately, gazing straight in front of him. When he had finished he sat motionless for an instant, as though stuck fast in time and space. Noises began to be heard, slight and unidentifiable at first, creakings, steps, hangings, and before long the whole world surrounding the room was astir with furtive sound.
    In the next-door flat plates were rattling and people were talking. The queer thing was that the sound of the plates was not distorted in the least It seemed to come from within this same room, whereas the voices were fused in a deep-toned, mechanical-sounding murmur.
    Downstairs, as usual in the evening, a little boy was playing the violin, the same exercises being practised over and over again. There, too, a rumbling voice was heard at times to make him try once more.
    Then there was the road, the gradual sucking noise of a car rushing forward from afar, the sharp sound as it passed-the house, drawn rapidly on into space on the far horizon. Only the heavy lorries moved slowly, crashing by so that