OU_214051 UNIVERSA - Osmania University

THE LODGER 63
" That's better! I've given you a latch-key, haven't I? Now mind
you wrap your throat up well."
He lingered for some minutes, sitting on his bed, until the silence
of the room, in which every object was already like an old friend,
began to work on his nerves. He had only a light overcoat. He put
it on, and knotted a woollen muffler round his neck.
What need had Antoinette to make him read that article in the
paper? Those horrible last words especially, about his head falling
under the guillotine?
Never for a moment had any such idea occurred to him. He
forgot to turn off the light. Standing in the hall, he glanced round
at the kitchen; through the glazed door he could see Antoinette
and her mother still sitting beside the range, in an atmosphere of
quiet so profound that he fancied he heard the ticking of the alarmclock
on the mantelpiece.
The moment he stepped outside he started shivering. The pavement
was like iron underfoot. This was the first time he had seen the
street by night, and it looked quite different.
All the houses were in darkness except the grocery, a little to the
left. To see other lights he had to look far down the street, where
a row of street-lamps marked the beginning of the town proper.
Nobody was about. The only footsteps audible were a good five
hundred yards away. Abruptly they ceased, and there was the
distant tinkle of a bell, the sound of a closing door.
It was too cold to stand about, and he started walking blindly
ahead, his hat pulled down over his eyes, his collar turned up. All
the time he had a sensation that he was not in a real street, or on
the outskirts of a real town.
The houses were not in an unbroken row, as in most workingclass
districts, nor were there any side-streets. After a block of ten
or twelve houses, for instance, all exactly alike, would come an
opening, a forlorn field, with sheds and dumps looming up behind
it. Then another series of houses, anodier gap, from which railwaytracks
shot out across the road. In the background tall chimneys
were belching flames into the darkness, and the cold radiance of the
sky was mottled with patches of angry red.
Elie had quickened his pace, though quite involuntarily. There
was nowhere to go. He passed the windows of a caf£ and saw in it
the green rectangle of a billiard-table; presumably the one Valesco
had referred to.
A family—father, mother, and two children hand in hand—