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Thérèse had a certain respect for his work, for he paid her a high salary regularly and was friendly to no one; he never even spoke to her. Sociable people, from a child up, she had always despised; her mother had been one ofthat kind. She performed her own tasks meticulously. She earned her money. Besides, from the very beginning she had a riddle to solve. She enjoyed that.

Punctually at six the Professor got out of his divan bed. Washing and dressing were soon done. In the evening, before going to bed, she turned down his divan and pushed the wash-stand, which was on wheels, into the middle of the study. It was allowed to stand there for the night. A screen of four sections in Spanish leather painted with letters in a foreign language was so arranged as to spare him the disturbing sight. He could not abide articles of furniture. The wash-trolley, as he called it, was an invention of his own, so constructed that the loathsome object could be disposed of as soon as it had performed its office. At a quarter past six he would open his door and violently expel it; it would trundle all the way down the long passage. Close to the kitchen door it would crash into the wall. Thérèse would wait in the kitchen; her own little room was immediately adjoining. She would open the door and call: 'Up already?' He made no answer and bolted himself in again. Then he stayed at home until seven o'clock. Not a soul knew what he did in the long interval until seven o'clock. At other times he always sat at his writing desk and wrote.

The sombre, weighty colossus of a desk was filled to bursting with manuscripts and heavy laden with books. The most cautious stirring of any drawer elicited a shrill squeak. Although the noise was repulsive to him, Kien left the heirloom desk in this state so that the housekeeper, in the event of his absence from home, would know at once if a burglar had got in. Strange species, they usually look for money before they start on the books. He had explained the mechanism of his invaluable desk to Thérèse, briefly yet exhaustively, in three sentences. He had added, in a meaning tone, that there was no possibility of silencing the squeak; even he was unable to do so. During the day she could hear every time Kien looked out a manuscript. She wondered how he could put up with the noise. At night he shut all his papers away. Until eight in the morning the writing desk remained mute. When she was tidying up she never found anything on it but books and a few yellow papers. She looked in vain for clean paper covered with his own handwriting. It was clear that from a quarter past six until seven in the morning, three whole quarters of an hour, he did no work whatever.

Was he saying his prayers? No, she couldn't believe that. Nobody says their prayers. She had no use for praying. You didn't catch her going to church. Look at the sort of people who go to church. A fine crowd they are, cluttered up together. She didn't hold with all that begging either. You have to give them something because everyone is watching you. What they do with it, heaven knows. Say one's prayers at home — why? A waste of beautiful time. A respectable person doesn't need that sort of thing. She'd always kept herself respectable. Other people could pray for all she cared. But she'd like to know what went on in that room between a quarter past six and seven o'clock. She was not curious, no one could call her that. She didn't poke her nose into other people's business. Women were all alike nowadays. Poking their noses into everything. She got on with her own work. Prices going up something shocking. Potatoes cost double already. How to make the money go round. He locked all four doors. Or else you could have seen something from the next room. So particular as he was too, never wasting a minute!

During his morning walk Thérèse examined the rooms entrusted to her care. She suspected a secret vice; its nature remained vague. First of all she decided for a woman's body in a trunk. But there wasn't room for that under the carpets and she renounced a horribly mutilated corpse. There was no cupboard to help her speculations; how gladly she would have welcomed one; one against each wall preferably. Then the hideous crime must be concealed somehow behind one of the books. Where else? She might have satisfied her sense of duty by dusting over their spines only; the immoral secret she was tracking down compelled her to look behind each one. She took each out separately, knocked at it — it might be hollow — inserted her coarse, calloused fingers as far back as the wooden panelling, probed about, and at length withdrew them, dissatisfied, shaking her head. Her interest never misled her into overstepping the exact time laid down for her work. Five minutes before Kien unlocked the door, she was already in the kitchen. Calmly and without haste she searched one section of the shelves after another, never missing anything and never quite giving up hope.

During these months of indefatigable research, she couldn't think of taking her money to the post-office. She wouldn't lay a finger on it; who knew what sort of money it might be? She placed the notes, in the order in which he gave them to her, in a large clean envelope, which contained, still in its entirety, the stock of notepaper she had bought twenty years before. Overcoming serious scruples she put the whole into her trunk, with the trousseau, specially selected and beautifully worked, which had taken her many years and hard-earned money to accumulate.

Little by little she realized that she would not get to the bottom of the mystery as easily as all that. She knew how to wait. She was very well as she was. If something were to come to light one day — no one could blame her. She had been over every corner ofthat library with a fine-tooth comb. Of course if you had a friend in the police, solid and respectable, who wouldn't forget you were in a good job, you might say something to him. Excuse me, she could put up with a lot, but she'd no one to rely on. The things people do these days. Dancing, bathing, fooling around, nothing sensible, not a stroke of work. Her own gentleman, though he was sensible enough, had his goings on like anyone else. Never went to bed before midnight. The best sleep is the sleep before midnight. Respectable people go to bed at nine. Very likely it wasn't anything to write home about.

Gradually the horrible crime dwindled into a mere secret. Thick, tough layers of contempt covered it up. But her curiosity remained; between a quarter past six and seven o'clock she was always on the alert. She counted on rare, but not impossible contingencies. A sudden pain in the stomach might bring him out of his room. Then she would hurry in and ask if he wanted anything. Pains do not go away all in a minute. A few seconds, and she would know all she wanted to know. But the temperate and reasonable life which Kien led suited him too well. For the whole eight long years during which he had employed Thérèse he had never yet had a pain in the stomach.

The very morning on which he had met the blind man and his dog, it happened that Kien urgently wanted to consult certain old treatises. He pulled out all the drawers of the writing desk violently one after the other. A vast accumulation of papers had piled up in them over the years. Rough drafts, corrected scripts, fair copies, anything and everything which had to do with his work, he carefully preserved them all. He found wretched scraps whose contents he had himself long since surpassed and contradicted. The archives went right back to his student days. Merely in order to find a minute detail, which he knew by heart anyway, merely to check a reference, he wasted hours of time. He read over thirty pages and more; one line was all he wanted. Worthless stuff, which had long since served its purpose, came into his hands. He cursed it, why was it there? But once his eye fell upon anything written or printed he could not pass it over. Any other man would have refused to be held up by these digressions. He read every word, from first to last. The ink had faded. He had difficulty in making out the pale outlines. The blind man in the street came into his mind. There was he, playing tricks with his eyes, as if they would last for all eternity. Instead of restricting their hours of service, he increased them wantonly from month to month. Each single paper which he replaced in the drawer cost his eyes a part of their strength. Dogs have short lives and dogs do not read; thus they are able to help out blind men with their eyes. The man who has frittered away the strength of his eyes is a worthy companion of the beast that leads him.

Kien decided to empty his writing desk of rubbish on the following day immediately he got up; at present he was working.

On the following day, at six o'clock precisely, in the very middle of a dream, he started up from his divan bed, flung himself on the crammed giant and pulled out every one of its drawers. Screeching filled the air; it shrilled through the entire library, swelling to a heartrending climax. It was as if each drawer had its own voice and each was vying with its neighbour in a piercing scream for help. They were being robbed, tortured, murdered. They could not know who it was who dared to touch them. They had no eyes; their only organ was a shrill voice. Kien sorted the papers. It took him a long time. He disregarded the noise; what he had begun, he would finish. With a pyramid of waste paper in his lean arms, he stalked across into the fourth room. Here, some distance from the screeching, he tore them, cursing, into small pieces. Someone knocked; he ground his teeth. Again that knock; he stamped his feet. The knocking changed to hammering. 'Quiet!' he ordered and swore. He would willingly have dispensed with the unseemly row. But he was sorry on account of the manuscripts. Rage alone had given him strength to destroy them. At last he stood, a huge lonely stork on guard over a mountain of scraps of paper. Embarrassed and timid, he stroked them with his fingers, softly mourning over them. So as not to injure them unnecessarily, he lifted a cautious leg and cleared them. The graveyard behind him, he breathed again. Outside the door he found the housekeeper. With a weary gesture, he indicated the pyre and said: 'Clear it away!' The screeching had died down; he went back to the writing desk and closed the drawers. They were silent. He had wrenched them open too violently. The mechanism had been broken.

Thérèse was in the very act of finding her way into the starched skirt which completed her attire, when the screeching had broken loose. Terrified out of her wits, she fastened her skirt provisionally and glided fast to the door of the study. 'For Heaven's sake,' she wailed, flute-like, "What has happened ?' She knocked, discreetly at first, then louder. Receiving no answer, she tried the door, in vain. She glided from door to door. In the last room she heard him, shouting angrily. Here she hammered on the door with all her strength. 'Quiet!' he shouted in a rage, in such a rage as she had never heard him. Half indignant, half resigned, she let her hard hands drop against her hard skirt, and stood stiff as a wooden doll. "What a calamity!' she murmured, 'what a calamity!' and was still standing there, out of mere habit, when he opened the door.

Slow by nature, this time she grasped in a flash the opportunity which was being offered to her. "With difficulty she said 'At once', and glided away to the kitchen. On the threshold she had an idea: 'Gracious Heaven, he's bolting himself in, just out of habit! Something will happen, at the last minute, that's life! I've no luck, I've no luck!' It was the first time she had said this, for as a rule she regarded herself as a meritorious and therefore as a lucky person. Anxiety made her head jerk to and fro. She sneaked out into the corridor again. She was stooping far forward. Her legs hesitated before she took a step. Her stiff skirt billowed. She would have reached her goal far more quietly by gliding as usual, but that was too ordinary a process. The solemnity of the occasion demanded its own solemnities. The room was open to her: In the middle of the floor the paper was still lying. She pushed a great fold of the carpet between the door and its frame so that it should not be blown to. Then she went back to the kitchen and waited, dustpan and brush in hand, for the familiar rattle of the wash-trolley. She would have preferred to come and fetch it herself, for she had a long time to wait. "When at last she heard it crash against the wall, she forgot herself and called, out of habit, 'Up already?' She pushed it into the kitchen and, stooping even lower than before, crept into the library. She set down dustpan and brush on the floor. Slowly she picked her way across the intervening rooms to the threshold of his bedroom. After every step she stood still, and turned her head the other way about so as to listen with her right ear, the ear which was the less worn-out of the two. The thirty yards which she traversed took her ten minutes; she thought herself foolhardy. Her terror and her curiosity grew at the same rate. A thousand times she had thought out how to behave when she reached her goal. She squeezed herself tightly against the door frame. She remembered the crackling of her newly starched skirt too late. With one eye she tried to survey the situation. As long as the other one was in reserve she felt safe. She must not be seen, and she must see everything. Her right arm, which she liked to hold akimbo and which was constantly doubling itself up, she forced into stillness.

Kien was pacing calmly up and down in front of his books, making incomprehensible noises. Under his arm he carried the empty briefcase. He came to a halt, thought for a moment, then fetched the ladder and climbed up it. From the topmost shelf he extracted a book, turned over the pages and placed it in the brief-case. On the ground again, he continued his pacing up and down, stopped, pulled at a book, which was recalcitrant, wrinkled his forehead, and when he had it at last in his hands, gave it a sharp slap. Then it too disappeared into the briefcase. He selected five volumes. Four small ones and one large one. Suddenly he was in a hurry. Carrying the heavy brief-case he clambered up to the highest rung of the ladder and pushed the first volume back into its place. His long legs encumbered him; he had all but fallen down.

If he fell and hurt himself, there'd be an end of this wickedness. Therese's arm could be controlled no longer; it reached for her ear and tugged vigorously, at it. Both eyes were fixed, gloating, on her imperilled employer. When his feet at length reached the thick carpet, she could breathe again. So the books were a fraud. Now for the truth. She knew every inch of the library, but secret vices are crafty. There's opium, there's morphia, there's cocaine—who could remember them all? You couldn't fool her. Behind the books, that's it. Why for instance did he never walk straight across the room? He stood by the ladder and what he wanted was on the shelf exacdy opposite. He could fetch it as easy as anything, but no, he must always go creeping round by the wall. Carrying that great heavy thing under his arm, he goes all the way round by the wall. Behind the books, that's it. Murderers are drawn to the scene of the crime. Now the brief-case is full. He can't get anything more into it; she knows the brief-case, she dusts it out every day. Now something must happen. It can't be seven yet. If it's seven he'll go out. Where is it seven? It shan't be seven.