Mr Hire's Engagement (2 page)

'You too?'

The concierge glanced from one to the other, her face painfully drawn.

'You think it's him, don't you? Oh, heavens! . . .' She was going to cry. She was crying. They were only tears of nervousness so far, but her thin hands were trembling.

'I'm frightened . . . Don't go away . . . For the last two weeks I've been terrified to death . . .'

Her son was watching her over his exercise-book. The little girl was sitting on the floor.

'A cup of coffee?' suggested the inspector who had been there first. And he poured one out for his fellow-officer. 'What put you on the track?'

'That cut... Then his job ... He's one of those fellows who promise goodness knows how much a day for easy work and then, in return for fifty or sixty francs, send people a paintbox worth twenty, and six post cards for them to colour .. .'

The concierge was disappointed by this. The first inspector stood up, filling the lodge with his bulk.

'It seems there's a bloodstained towel. What I'd like to know is, whether he really cut himself.'

They didn't know what to do. One of them poured himself a drop more coffee.

'I wouldn't dare to pass him on the stairs again,' breathed the concierge. 'In any case I've always felt frightened of him. Everybody has!'...

'Does he ever go out?'

'Only on Sundays. I think he goes to the cinema.'

'Does he ever have any visitors?'

'Never.'

'And who does his housework?'

'He does. I've never been able to get into his room. It must have been by mistake that that catalogue came for him this morning, it's never come before, and I wanted the chance of having a look. I called through the door to say there was a letter…'

The men looked at each other in perplexity.

'You simply must do something, arrest him, or something, I don't know! But I can't go on living with the idea that. . . Why, when he goes past he often pats my little girl on the head. And that frightens me, just as though . . .'

She was crying properly now, without mopping her eyes, for she was making up the stove. They could hear the sound of cars going along the road, further off, the bells of the trams. It was hot, but their feet were frozen.

'Suppose we made an excuse and went up?'

They were ill at ease.

'It might be better to fetch him down. Look, you go and tell him someone wants to speak to him.'

'Me? Never! No, never! . . .'

She was trembling, crying half-heartedly, with short sobs.

'I haven't even a husband to take care of me. At night everything's dead here, except the cars that rush by at about sixty miles an hour.

She pulled her daughter to her feet with a single movement.

'Sit up on a chair.'

'Are you sure he didn't have that cut this morning?'

'I don't know. I don't think he had. I could swear he hadn't. I've been thinking about it all day, till my head aches . . .'

'Shall we go up, old chap?'

There was no need. Someone was coming down the stairs. The concierge listened for a second, rushed to the door and opened it.

'Mr. Hire!'

She was shivering, standing behind the open door, looking at the two men as though to say:

'It's your turn now.'

'Excuse me . . .'

Mr. Hire hesitated apologetically in the doorway, took two steps forward, surprised, embarrassed.

'What can I . . .?'

He could not see the concierge, hidden behind the door. The inspectors nudged each other. The little girl, who was staring at him, suddenly burst into tears.

'Did somebody call me?'

'Just in case. My cousin told me you had hurt yourself. . .' This was the first inspector, throwing himself blindly into the breach. He was pale, and swallowed hard between his words. 'I work in a hospital, and . . .'

And to cut matters short, he reached out roughly, clumsily, seized the corner of the sticking-plaster and ripped it off. They were all crowded together in the cramped lodge. The little girl yelled more loudly than ever.

As for Mr. Hire, he clapped his hand to his cheek and brought it away covered with blood. Drops had already fallen on his collar, on the shoulder of his jacket. The blood spurted, red and fresh, pushing the edges of the cut further and further apart as it flowed. 'Whatever . . .'

The concierge was clenching her hands as though the fingers would snap. The inspector was horrified at the sight of the sharp, fresh razor- gash.

'Oh, excuse me . . . I . . .'

He looked round for the tap, for a handkerchief, anything that would stop the bleeding and get the thing over. Mr. Hire's eyes were round, with dark pupils. He gazed from one to the other of the occupants of the lodge, and he too was at a loss how to staunch all this blood, big drops of which had by this time fallen on the concrete floor.

The little boy was still in his seat, in front of his exercise-book, his pen in mid-air. His sister was rolling on the ground.

'It was ... it was clumsy of me ... if you will allow me to arrange it for you ...'

Mr. Hire looked unlike himself, with blood covering his cheek and still trickling over his chin as though his lip had been split. And he was upset. The round, rosy spots had faded from his cheeks. 'Thank you . .'

He actually seemed to be apologizing, like someone who has unintentionally spilt something in a house to which he has been invited. He bumped into the doorpost. 'You stay here ... I'll go and . .

The inspector had found a dishcloth and held it out to him. 'Thank you . . . thank you . . . I'm sorry .. .'  He was already out in the cold, dark passage, and they heard him mount the stairs with a heavy, hesitant tread; they seemed to see the drops of blood falling on the steps.

'Oh, stop that!' the concierge suddenly yelled, slapping her daughter. Her hair was coming down, her expression vacant. She shook the little boy.

'And you, sitting there without a word!'

The inspectors did not know where to look.

'Please don't worry. To-morrow morning the superintendent. ..'

'Do you really think I'm going to spend the night all alone here? Do you really think that?'

She was clearly on the verge of hysteria. It was only a question of seconds. She started, as she accidentally put her hand on a drop of blood which had 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 you held your breath as the whole house shook.

But all this activity seethed outside the walls. Within the room itself was a compact body of silence, firmly welded, unimpaired, and Mr. Hire sitting over his empty cup, was probably awaiting the end of the comfortable sensation the hot coffee had given him.

At last he got up, buttoned his overcoat, wound a scarf round his neck. He took the bowl from which he had been drinking and washed it under the tap, wiped it with a dish-cloth that hung from a nail, and put it away in the cupboard. He swept the breadcrumbs onto a piece of cardboard, greasy from this habitual usage, threw them into the stove, went over to the bed and turned it down.

What else was there to be done? Wind the alarm-clock, which made a splash of white on the mantelpiece and now marked half-past eight.

Was that all? He took off his shoes and polished them, sitting on the edge of the bed, his neck still held stiffly, his left cheek tinned upwards.

Yes, that was all. The little boy began his exercise over again, and the bow scraped on a second string. The man next door must be reading the newspaper aloud, for his murmuring voice ran on, as monotonously as a running tap.

Mr. Hire left his uncomfortable perch on the bed, settled down in the arm-chair, facing the dead stove and the face of the alarm-clock, and made no further movement except to thrust his hands, which had been freezing on the arms of the chair, into his pockets.

Ten minutes to nine... Nine o'clock... Five past nine ... He never once closed his eyes. He wasn't looking at anything. It was as though he were in a train which would take him nowhere. He didn't even sigh. A little warmth was at last accumulating inside his overcoat, and he hugged it closely to him, while his toes, in the bedroom slippers were stiff with cold.

Twenty past nine . . . twenty-five past. . . twenty-six past. . .

A door banged from time to time. People went downstairs, so noisily that they seemed to be stumbling on every step. Gradually things became so quiet that the policeman's whistle could be heard from the crossroads.

Nine twenty-seven . . . Mr. Hire rose, turned off the electric light, and, in the dark, found his way back to his arm-chair, whence he could now see nothing but the vaguely luminous hands of the alarm-clock.

Not until ten o'clock did he become impatient, and then only to the extent that his fingers moved inside his pockets. The next-door tenants were asleep, but somewhere else a baby was crying, and its mother was crooning to soothe it:

'La ... la ... la ... la .. .'

Mr. Hire got up and walked to the window, outside which all was dark. Shortly afterwards a light was switched on, scarcely three yards away, a window lit up a bedroom whose smallest details were thus revealed.

The woman closed the door behind her with a kick that must have produced a thunderous bang, but the noise did not carry across the courtyard. She was in a hurry, in a bad temper perhaps, for it was with an abrupt movement that she lifted up the bedclothes to slip in a hot-water bottle she had been carrying under her arm.

Mr. Hire did not move. His own room was in darkness. He was standing up, his forehead pressed against the icy window-pane, and only his eyes moved to and fro, watching his neighbour's every gesture.

When she had tucked in the bedclothes again, she proceeded to unpin her hair, which fell to her shoulders, not very long, but thick, auburn-coloured and silky. And she rubbed the back of her neck and her ears, stretching herself with a kind of sensual satisfaction.

There was a mirror in front of her, above a wooden dressing-table. It was into this that she was looking, into this that she continued to gaze as she pulled her black wool dress up by the hem, to draw it over her head. Then, dressed in her slip, she sat down on the edge of the bed to take off her stockings.

Even from Mr. Hire's room it was evident that she had goose-flesh, and having removed everything except her panties, she spent quite a time rubbing back some warmth into her nipples, which had shrivelled up with the cold.