There are, it would appear, certain wholly unremarkable persons, with
none of the characteristics that invite adventure, who yet once or twice
in the course of their smooth lives undergo an experience so strange
that the world catches its breath—and looks the other way! And it was
cases of this kind, perhaps, more than any other, that fell into the
widespread net of John Silence, the psychic doctor, and, appealing to
his deep humanity, to his patience, and to his great qualities of
spiritual sympathy, led often to the revelation of problems of the
strangest complexity, and of the profoundest possible human interest.
Matters that seemed almost too curious
and fantastic for belief he loved to trace to their hidden sources. To
unravel a tangle in the very soul of things—and to release a suffering
human soul in the process—was with him a veritable passion. And the
knots he untied were, indeed, often passing strange.
The world, of course, asks for some plausible basis to which it
can attach credence—something it can, at least, pretend to explain.
The adventurous type it can understand: such people carry about with
them an adequate explanation of their exciting lives, and their
characters obviously drive them into the circumstances which produce the
adventures. It expects nothing else from them, and is satisfied. But
dull, ordinary folk have no right to out-of-the-way experiences, and the
world having been led to expect otherwise, is disappointed with them,
not to say shocked. Its complacent judgment has been rudely disturbed.
“Such a thing happened to that
man!” it cries—“a commonplace person like that! It is too
absurd! There must he something wrong!
Yet there could be no question that
something did actually happen to little Arthur Vezin, something of the
curious nature he described to Dr. Silence. Outwardly, or inwardly, it
happened beyond a doubt, and in spite of the jeers of his few friends
who heard the tale, and observed wisely that “such a thing might
perhaps have come to Iszard, that crack-brained Iszard, or to that odd
fish Minski, but it could never have happened to commonplace little
Vezin, who was fore-ordained to live and die according to scale.”
But, whatever his method of death was,
Vezin certainly did not “live accordingly to scale” so far as this
particular event in his otherwise uneventful life was concerned; and to
hear him recount it, and watch his pale delicate features change, and
hear his voice grow softer and more hushed as he proceeded, was to know
the conviction that his halting words perhaps failed sometimes to
convey. He lived the thing over again each time he told it. His whole
personality became muffled in the recital. It subdued him more than
ever, so that the tale became a lengthy apology for an experience that
he deprecated. He appeared to excuse himself and ask your pardon for
having dared to take part in so fantastic an episode. For little Vezin
was a timid, gentle, sensitive soul, rarely able to assert himself,
tender to man and beast, and almost constitutionally unable to say No,
or to claim many things that should rightly have been his. His whole
scheme of life seemed utterly remote from anything more exciting than
missing a train or losing an umbrella on an omnibus. And when this
curious event came upon him he was already more years beyond forty than
his friends suspected or he cared to admit.
John Silence, who heard him speak of
his experience more than once, said that he sometimes left out certain
details and put in others; yet they were all obviously true. The whole
scene was unforgettably cinematographed on to his mind. None of the
details were imagined or invented. And when he told the story with them
all complete, the effect was undeniable. His appealing brown eyes shone,
and much of the charming personality, usually so carefully repressed,
came forward and revealed itself. His modesty was always there, of
course, but in the telling he forgot the present and allowed himself to
appear almost vividly as he lived again in the past of his adventure.
He was on his way home when it
happened, crossing Northern France from some mountain trip or other
where he buried himself solitary-wise every summer. He had nothing but
an unregistered bag in the rack, and the train was jammed to
suffocation, most of the passengers being unredeemed holiday English. He
disliked them, not because they were his fellow-countrymen, but because
they were noisy and obtrusive, obliterating with their big limbs and
tweed clothing all the quieter tints of the day that brought him
satisfaction and enabled him to melt into insignificance and forget that
he was anybody. These English clashed about him like a brass band,
making him feel vaguely that he ought to be more self-assertive and
obstreperous, and that he did not claim insistently enough all kinds of
things that he didn’t want and that were really valueless, such as
corner seats, windows up or down, and so forth.
So that he felt uncomfortable in the
train, and wished the journey were over and he was back again living
with his unmarried sister in Surbiton.
And when the train stopped for ten
panting minutes at the little station in Northern France, and he got out
to stretch his legs on the platform, and saw to his dismay a further
batch of the British Isles debouching from another train, it suddenly
seemed impossible to him to continue the journey. Even his
flabby soul revolted, and the idea of staying a night in the little
town and going on next day by a slower, emptier train, flashed into his
mind. The guard was already shouting “en
voiture” and the corridor of his compartment was already packed
when the thought came to him. And, for once, he acted with decision and
rushed to snatch his bag.
Finding the corridor and steps
impassable, he tapped at the window (for he had a corner seat) and
begged the Frenchman who sat opposite to hand his luggage out to him,
explaining in his wretched French that he intended to break the journey
there. And this elderly Frenchman, he declared, gave him a look, half of
warning, half of reproach, that to his dying day he could never forget;
handed the bag through the window of the moving train; and at the same
time poured into his ears a long sentence, spoken rapidly and low, of
which he was able to comprehend only the last few words: “à cause du sommeil et à cause des chats.”
In
reply to Dr. Silence, whose singular psychic acuteness at once seized
upon this Frenchman as a vital point in the adventure, Vezin admitted
that the man had impressed him favourably from the beginnings though
without being able to explain why. They had sat facing one another
during the four hours of the journey, and though no conversation had
passed between them—Vezin was timid about his stuttering French—he
confessed that his eyes were being continually drawn to his face,
almost, he felt, to rudeness, and that each, by a dozen nameless little
politenesses and attentions, had evinced the desire to be kind. The men
liked each other and their personalities did not clash, or would not
have clashed had they chanced to come to terms of acquaintance. The
Frenchman, indeed, seemed to have exercised a silent protective
influence over the insignificant little Englishman. and without words or
gestures betrayed that he wished him well and would gladly have been of
service to him.
“And this sentence that he hurled at
you after the bag?” asked John Silence, smiling that peculiarly
sympathetic smile that always melted the prejudices of his patients, “
were you unable to follow it exactly?”
“It was so quick and low and
vehement.” explained Vezin, in his small voice, “that I missed
practically the whole of it. I only caught the few words at the very
end, because he spoke them so clearly, and his face was bent down out of
the carriage window so near to mine.”
“‘A
cause du sommeil et à cause des chats?” repeated Dr. Silence, as
though half speaking to himself.
“That’s it exactly,” said Vezin;
“which, I take it, means something like ‘because of sleep and
because of the cats,’ doesn’t it?”
“Certainly, that’s how I should
translate it,” the doctor observed shortly, evidently not wishing to
interrupt more than necessary.
“And the rest of the sentence—all
the first part I couldn’t understand, I mean—was a warning not to do
something— not to stop in the town, or at some particular place in the
town, perhaps. That was the impression it made on me.”
Then, of course, the train rushed off,
and left Vezin standing on the platform alone and rather forlorn.
The little town climbed in straggling
fashion up a sharp hill rising out of the plain at the back of the
station, and was crowned by the twin towers of the ruined cathedral
peeping over the summit. From the station itself it looked uninteresting
and modern, but the fact was that the medieval position lay out of sight
just beyond the crest. And once he reached the top and entered the old
streets, he stepped clean out of modern life into a bygone century. The
noise and bustle of the crowded train seemed days away. The spirit of
this silent hill-town, remote from tourists and motor-cars, dreaming its
own quiet life under the autumn sun, rose up and cast its spell upon
him. Long before he recognised this spell he acted under it. He walked
softly, almost on tiptoe, down the winding narrow streets where the
gables all but met over his head, and he entered the doorway of the
solitary inn with a deprecating and modest demeanour that was in itself
an apology for intruding upon the place and disturbing its dream.
At first, however, Vezin said, he
noticed very little of all this. The attempt at analysis came much
later. What struck him then was only the delightful contrast of the
silence and peace after the dust and noisy rattle of the train. He felt
soothed and stroked like a cat.
“Like a cat, you said?” interrupted
John Silence, quickly catching him up.
“Yes. At the very start I felt
that.” He laughed apologetically. “I felt as though the warmth and
the stillness and the comfort made me purr. It seemed to be the
general mood of the whole place—then.”
The inn, a rambling ancient house, the
atmosphere of the old coaching days still about it, apparently did not
welcome him too warmly. He felt he was only tolerated, he said. But it
was cheap and comfortable, and the delicious cup of afternoon tea he
ordered at once made him feel really very pleased with himself for
leaving the train in this bold, original way. For to him it had seemed
bold and original. He felt something of a dog. His room, too, soothed
him with its dark panelling and low irregular ceiling, and the long
sloping passage that led to it seemed the natural pathway to a real
Chamber of Sleep—a little dim cubby-hole out of the world where noise
could not enter. It looked upon the courtyard at the back. It was all
very charming, and made him think of himself as dressed in very soft
velvet somehow, and the floors seemed padded, the walls provided with
cushions. The sounds of the streets could not penetrate there. It was an
atmosphere of absolute rest that surrounded him.
On engaging the two-franc room he had
interviewed the only person who seemed to be about that sleepy
afternoon, an elderly waiter with Dundreary whiskers and a drowsy
courtesy, who had ambled lazily towards him across the stone yard; but
on coming downstairs again for a little promenade in the town before
dinner he encountered the proprietress herself. She was a large woman
whose hands, feet, and features seemed to swim towards him out of a sea
of person. They emerged, so to speak. But she had great dark, vivacious
eyes that counteracted the bulk of her body, and betrayed the fact that
in reality she was both vigorous and alert. When he first caught sight
of her she was knitting in a low chair against the sunlight of the wall,
and something at once made him see her as a great tabby cat, dozing, yet
awake, heavily sleepy, and yet at the same time prepared for
instantaneous action. A great mouser on the watch occurred to him.
She took him in with a single
comprehensive glance that was polite without being cordial. Her neck, he
noticed, was extraordinary stipple in spite of its proportions, for it
turned so easily to follow him, and the head it carried bowed so very
flexibly.
“But when she looked at me, you
know,” said Vezin, with that apologetic smile in his brown eyes, and
that faintly deprecating gesture of the shoulders that was
characteristic of him, “the odd notion came to me that really she had
intended to make quite a different movement, and that with a single
bound she could have leaped at me across the width of that stone yard
and pounced upon me like some huge cat upon a mouse.”
He laughed a little soft laugh, and Dr.
Silence made a note in his book without interrupting, while Vezin
proceeded in a tone as though he feared he had already told too much and
more than we could believe.
“Very soft, yet very active she was,
for all her size and mass, and I felt she knew what I was doing even
after I had passed and was behind her back. She spoke to me, and her
voice was smooth and running. She asked me if I had my luggage, and was
comfortable in my room, and then added that dinner was at seven
o’clock, and that they were very early people in this little country
town. Clearly, she intended to convey that late hours were not
encouraged.”
Evidently, she contrived by voice and
manner to give him the impression that here he would be “managed”,
that everything would be arranged and planned for him, and that he had
nothing to do but fall into the groove and obey. No decided action or
sharp personal effort would be looked for from him. It was the very
reverse of the train. He walked quietly out into the street feeling
soothed and peaceful. He realised that he was in a milieu
that suited him and stroked him the right way. It was so much easier
to be obedient. He began to purr again, and to feel that all the town
purred with him.
About the streets of that little town
he meandered gently, falling deeper and deeper into the spirit of repose
that characterised it. With no special aim he wandered up and down, to
and fro. The September sunshine fell slantingly over the roofs. Down
winding alleyways fringed with tumbling gables and open casements, he
caught fairylike glimpses of the great plain below, and of the meadows
and yellow copses lying like a dream-map in the haze. The spell of the
past held very potently here, he felt.
The streets were full of picturesquely
garbed men and women, all busy enough, going their respective ways; but
no one took any notice of him or turned to stare at his obviously
English appearance. He was even able to forget that with his tourist
appearance he was a false note in a charming picture, and he melted more
and more into the scene, feeling delightfully insignificant and
unimportant and unselfconscious It was like becoming part of a
softly-coloured dream which he did not even realise to be a dream.
On the eastern side the hill fell away
more sharply, and the plain below ran off rather suddenly into a sea of
gathering shadows in which the little patches of woodland looked like
islands and the stubble fields like deep water. Here he strolled along
the old ramparts of ancient fortifications that once had been
formidable, but now were only vision-like with their charming mingling
of broken grey walls and wayward vine and ivy. From the broad coping
on which he sat for a moment, level with the rounded tops of clipped
plane trees he saw the esplanade far below lying in shadow. Here and
there a yellow sunbeam crept in and lay upon the fallen yellow leaves,
and from the height he looked down and saw that the townsfolk were
walking to and fro in the cool of the evening. He could just hear the
sound of their slow footfalls, and the murmur of their voices floated up
to him through the gaps between the trees. The figures looked like
shadows as he caught glimpses of their quiet movements far below.
He sat there for some time pondering,
bathed in the waves of murmurs and half-lost echoes that rose to his
ears, muffled by the leaves of the plane trees. The whole town, and the
little hill out of which it grew as naturally as an ancient wood, seemed
to him like a being lying there half asleep on the plain and crooning to
itself as it dozed.
And, presently, as he sat lazily
melting into its dream, a sound of horns and strings and wood
instruments rose to his ears, and the town band began to play at the far
end of the crowded terrace below to the accompaniment of a very soft,
deep-throated drum. Vezin was very sensitive to music, knew about it
intelligently, and had even ventured, unknown to his friends, upon the
composition of quiet melodies with low-running chords which he played to
himself with the soft pedal when no one was about. And this music
floating up through the trees from an invisible and doubtless very
picturesque band of the townspeople wholly charmed him. He recognised
nothing that they played, and it sounded as though they were simply
improvising without a conductor. No definitely marked time ran through
the pieces, which ended and began oddly after the fashion of wind
through an Æolian harp. It was part of the place and scene, just as the
dying sunlight and faintly-breathing wind were part of the scene and
hour, and the mellow notes of old-fashioned plantive horns, pierced here
and there by the sharper strings, all half smothered by the continuous
booming of the deep drum, touched his soul with a curiously potent spell
that was almost too engrossing to be quite pleasant.
There was a certain queer sense of
bewitchment in it all. The music seemed to him oddly unartificial. It
made him think of trees swept by the wind, of night breezes singing a
among wires and chimney-stacks, or in the rigging of invisible ships;
or—and the simile leaped up in his thoughts with a sudden sharpness of
suggestion—a chorus of animals, of wild creatures, somewhere in
desolate places of the world, crying and singing as animals will, to the
moon. He could fancy he heard the wailing, half-human cries of cats upon
the tiles at night, rising and falling with weird intervals of sound,
and this music, muffled by distance and the trees, made him think of a
queer company of these creatures on some roof far away in the sky,
uttering their solemn music to one another and the moon in chorus.
It was, he felt at the time, a singular
image to occur to him, yet it expressed his sensation pictorially better
than anything else. The instruments played such impossibly odd
intervals and the crescendos and diminuendo5 were so very
suggestive of cat-land on the tiles at night, rising swiftly, dropping
without warning to deep notes again, and all in such strange confusion
of discords and accords. But, at the same time a plaintive sweetness
resulted on the whole, and the discords of these half-broken instruments
were so singular that they did not distress his musical soul like
fiddles out of tune.
He listened a lung time, wholly
surrendering himself as his character was, and then strolled homewards
in the dusk as the air grew chilly.
“There was nothing to alarm?” put
in Dr. Silence briefly.
“Absolutely nothing,” said Vezin:
“but you know it was all so fantastical and charming that my
imagination was profoundly impressed. Perhaps, too,” he continued
gently explanatory, “it was this stirring of my imagination that
caused other impressions; for, as I walked back, the spell of the place
began to steal over me in a dozen ways,
though all intelligible ways. But there were other things I could
not account for in the least, even then.”
“Incidents, you mean?”
“Hardly incidents, I think. A lot of
vivid sensations crowded themselves upon my mind and I could trace them
to no causes. It was just after sunset and the tumbled old buildings
traced magical outlines against an opalescent sky of gold and red. The
dusk was running down the twisted streets. All round the hill the plain
pressed in like a dim sea, its level rising with the darkness. The spell
of this kind of scene, you know, can be very moving and it was so that
night. Yet I felt that what came to me had nothing directly to do with
the mystery and wonder of the scene.”
“Not merely the subtle
transformations of the spirit that come with beauty,” put in the
doctor, noticing his hesitation.
“Exactly,” Vezin went on, duly
encouraged and no longer so fearful of our smiles at his expense. “The
impressions came from somewhere else. For instance, down the busy main
street where men and women were bustling home from work, shopping at
stalls and harrows, idly gossiping in groups, and all the rest of it, I
saw that I aroused no interest and that no one turned to stare at me as
a foreigner and stranger. I was utterly ignored, and my presence among
them excited no special interest or attention.”
“And then, quite suddenly, it dawned
upon me with conviction that all the time this indifference and
inattention were merely feigned. Everybody as a matter of fact was
watching me closely. Every movement I made was known and observed.
Ignoring me was all a pretence—an elaborate pretence.”
He paused a moment and looked at us to
see if we were smiling, and then continued, reassured— “It is
useless to ask me how I noticed this, because I simply cannot explain
it. But the discovery gave me something of a shock. Before I got back to
the inn, however, another curious thing rose up strongly in my mind and
forced my recognition of it as true. And this, too, I may as well say at
once, was equally inexplicable to me. I mean I can only give you the
fact, as fact it was to me.”
The little man left his chair and stood
on the mat before the fire. His diffidence lessened from now onwards, as
he lost himself again in the magic of the old adventure. His eyes shone
a little already as he talked.
“Well,” he went on, his soft voice
rising somewhat with his excitement, “I was in a shop when it came to
me first— though the idea must have been at work for a long time
subconsciously to appear in so complete a form all at once. I was buying
socks, I think,” he laughed, “and struggling with my dreadful
French, when it struck me that the woman in the shop did not care two
pins whether I bought anything or not. She was indifferent whether she
made a sale or did not make a sale. She was only pretending to sell.”
“This sounds a very small and
fanciful incident to build upon what follows. But really it was not
small. I mean it was the spark that lit the line of powder and ran along
to the big blaze in my mind.”
“For the whole town, I suddenly
realised, was something other than I so far saw it. The real activities
and interests of the people were elsewhere and otherwise than appeared.
Their true lives lay somewhere out of sight behind the scenes. Their
busy-ness was but the outward semblance that masked their actual
purposes. They bought and sold, and ate and drank, and walked about the
streets, yet all the while the main stream of their existence lay
somewhere beyond my ken, underground, in secret places. In the shops and
at the stall they did not care whether I purchased their articles or
not; at the inn, they were indifferent to my staying or going; their
life lay remote from my own, springing from hidden, mysterious sources,
coursing out of sight, unknown. It was all a great elaborate pretence,
assumed possibly for my benefit, or possibly for purposes of their
own. But the main current of their energies ran elsewhere. I almost felt
as an unwelcome foreign substance might be expected to feel when it has
found its way into the human system and the whole body organises itself
to eject it or to absorb it. The town was doing this very thing to me.
“This bizarre notion presented itself
forcibly to my mind as I walked home to the inn, and I began busily to
wonder wherein the true life of this town could lie and what were the
actual interest and activities of its hidden life.
“And, now that my eyes were partly
opened, I noticed other things too that puzzled me, first of which, I
think, was the extraordinary silence of the whole place. Positively, the
town was muffled. Although the streets were paved with cobbles the
people moved about silently, softly, with padded feet, like cats.
Nothing made noise. All was hushed, subdued, muted. The very voices
were quiet, low-pitched like purring. Nothing clamorous, vehement or
emphatic seemed able to live in the drowsy atmosphere of soft dreaming
that soothed this little hill-town into its sleep. It was like the woman
at the inn—an outward repose screening intense inner activity and
purpose.
“Yet there was no sign of lethargy or
sluggishness anywhere about it. The people were active and alert. Only
a magical and uncanny softness lay over them all like a spell.”
Vezin passed his hand across his eyes
for a moment as though the memory had become very vivid. His voice had
run off into a whisper so that we heard the last part with difficulty.
He was telling a true thing obviously, yet, something that he both
liked and hated telling.
“I went back to the inn,” he
continued presently in a louder voice, “and dined. I felt a new
strange world about me. My old world of reality receded. Here, whether I
liked it or no, was something new and incomprehensible. I regretted
having left the train so impulsively. An adventure was upon me, and I
loathed adventures as foreign to my nature. Moreover, this was the
beginning apparently of an adventure somewhere deep within me, in a
region I could not check or measure, and a feeling of alarm mingled
itself with my wonder—alarm for the stability of what I had for forty
years recognised as my ‘personality’.
“I went upstairs to bed, my mind
teeming with thoughts that were unusual to me, and of rather a haunting
description. By way of relief I kept thinking of that nice, prosaic
noisy train and all those wholesome, blustering passengers. I almost
wished I were with them again. But my dreams took me elsewhere. I
dreamed of cats, and soft-moving creatures, and the silence of life in a
dim muffled world beyond the senses.”
Vezin stayed on from day to day,
indefinitely, much longer than he had intended, he felt in a kind of
dazed, somnolent condition. He did nothing in particular, but the place
fascinated him and he could not decide to leave. Decisions were always
very difficult for him and he sometimes wondered how he had ever brought
himself to the point of leaving the train. It seemed as though someone
else must have arranged it for him, and once or twice his thoughts ran
to the swarthy Frenchman who had sat opposite. If only he could have
understood that long sentence ending so strangely with “à
cause du sommeil et à cause des chats”. He wondered what it all
meant.
Meanwhile the hushed softness of the
town held him prisoner and he sought in his muddling, gentle way to
find out where the mystery lay, and what it was all about. But his
limited French and his constitutional hatred of active investigation
made it hard for him to buttonhole anybody and ask questions. He was
content to observe, and watch, and remain negative.
The weather held on calm and hazy, and
this just suited him. He wandered about the town till he knew every
street and alley. The people suffered him to come and go without let
or hindrance, though it became clearer to him every day that he was
never free himself from observation. The town watched him as a cat
watches a mouse. And he got no nearer to finding out what they were all
so busy with or where the main stream of their activities lay. This
remained hidden. The people were as soft and mysterious as cats.
But that he was continually under
observation became more evident from day to day.
For instance, when he strolled to the
end of the town and entered a little green public garden beneath the
ramparts and seated himself upon one of the empty benches in the sun, he
was quite alone—at first. Not another seat was occupied; the little
park was empty, the paths deserted. Yet, within ten minutes of his
coming, there must have been fully twenty persons scattered about him,
some strolling aimlessly along the gravel walks, staring at the flowers,
and others seated on the wooden benches enjoying the sun like himself.
None of them appeared to take any notice of him; yet he understood quite
well they had all come there to watch. They kept him under close
observation. In the street they had seemed busy enough, hurrying upon
various errands; yet these were suddenly all forgotten and they had
nothing to do hut loll and laze in the sun, their duties unremembered.
Five minutes after he left, the garden was again deserted, the seats
vacant. But in the crowded street it was the same thing again; he was
never alone. He was ever in their thoughts.
By degrees, too, he began to see how it
was he was so cleverly watched, yet without the appearance of it. The
people did nothing directly. They
behaved obliquely. He laughed
in his mind as the thought thus clothed itself in words, but the phrase
exactly described it. They looked at him from angles which naturally
should have led their sight in another direction altogether. Their
movements were oblique, too, so far as these concerned himself. The
straight, direct thing was not their way evidently. They did nothing
obviously. If he entered a shop to buy, the woman walked instantly away
and busied herself with something at the farther end of the counter,
though answering at once when he spoke, showing that she knew he was
there and that this was only her way of attending to him. It was the
fashion of the cat she followed. Even in the dining-room of the inn, the
be-whiskered and courteous waiter, lithe and silent in all his
movements, never seemed able to come straight to his table for an order
or a dish. He came by zigzags, indirectly, vaguely, so that he appeared
to be going to another table altogether, and only turned suddenly at the
last moment, and was there beside him.
Vezin smiled curiously to himself as he
described how he began to realise these things. Other tourists there
were none in the hostel, but he recalled the figures of one or two old
men, inhabitants, who took their déjeuner
and dinner there, and remembered how fantastically they entered the
room in similar fashion. First, they paused in the doorway, peering
about the room, and then, after a temporary inspection, they came in,
as it were, sideways, keeping close to the walls so that he wondered
which table they were making for, and at the last minute making almost a
little quick run to their particular seats. And again he thought of the
ways and methods of cats.
Other small incidents, too, impressed
him as all part of this queer, soft town with its muffled, indirect
life, for the way some of the people appeared and disappeared with
extraordinary swiftness puzzled him exceedingly. It may have been all
perfectly natural, he knew, yet he could not make it out how the alleys
swallowed them up and shot them forth in a second of time when there
were no visible doorways or openings near enough to explain the
phenomenon. Once he followed two elderly women who, he felt, had been
particularly examining him from across the street—quite near the inn
this was—and saw them turn the corner a few feet only in front of him.
Yet when he sharply followed on their heels he saw nothing but an
utterly deserted alley stretching in front of him with no sign of a
living thing. And the only opening through which they could have escaped
was a porch some fifty yards away, which not the swiftest human runner
could have reached in time.
And in just such sudden fashion people
appeared when he never expected them. Once when he heard a great noise
of fighting going on behind a low wall, and hurried up to see what was
going on, what should he see but a group of girls and women engaged in
vociferous conversation which instantly hushed itself to the normal
whispering note of the town when his head appeared over the wall. And
even then none of them turned to look at him directly, but slunk off
with the most unaccountable rapidity into doors and sheds across the
yard. And their voices, he thought, had sounded so like, so strangely
like, the angry snarling of fighting animals, almost of cats.
The whole spirit of the town, however,
continued to evade him as something elusive, protean, screened from the
outer world, and at the same time intensely, genuinely vital; and. since
he now formed part of its life, this concealment puzzled and irritated
him; more—it began rather to frighten him.
Out of the mists that slowly gathered
about his ordinary surface thoughts, there rose again the idea that the
inhabitants were waiting for him to declare himself, to take an
attitude, to do this, or to do that; and that when he had done so they
in their turn would at length make some direct response, accepting or
rejecting him. Yet the vital matter concerning which his decision was
awaited came no nearer to him.
Once or twice he purposely followed
little processions or groups of the citizens in order to find out, if
possible, on what purpose they were bent; but they always discovered him
in time and dwindled away, each individual going his or her way. It was
always the same: he never could learn what their main interest was. The
cathedral was ever empty, the old church of St. Martin, at the other end
of the town, deserted. They shopped because they had to, and not because
they wished to. The booths stood neglected, the stalls unvisited, the
little cafés desolate. Yet the streets were always full, the townsfolk
ever on the bustle.
“Can it be,’ he thought to himself,
yet with a deprecating laugh that he should have dared to think anything
so odd, can it be that these people are people of the twilight, that
they live only at night their real life, and come out honestly only with
the dusk? That during the day they make a sham though brave pretence,
and after the sun is down their true life begins? Have they the souls of
night-things, and is the whole blessed town in the hands of the cats?”
The fancy somehow electrified him with
little shocks of shrinking and dismay. Yet, though he affected to laugh,
he knew that he was beginning to feel more than uneasy, and that strange
forces were tugging with a thousand invisible cords at the very centre
of his being. Something utterly remote from his ordinary life, something
that had not waked for years, began faintly to stir in his soul, sending
feelers abroad into his brain and heart, shaping queer thoughts and
penetrating even into certain of his minor actions. Something
exceedingly vital to himself, to his soul, hung in the balance.
And, always when he returned to the inn
about the hour of sunset, he saw the figures of the townsfolk stealing
through the dusk from their shop doors, moving sentry-wise to and fro at
the corners of the streets, yet always vanishing silently like shadows
at his near approach. And as the inn invariably closed its doors at ten
o’clock he had never yet found the opportunity he rather
half-heartedly sought to see for himself what account the town could
give of itself at night.
“—à
cause du sommeil et à cause des chats”—the words now rang in
his ears more and more often, though still as yet without any definite
meaning.
Moreover, something made him sleep like
the dead.
It was, I think, on the fifth
day—though in this detail his story sometimes varied—that he made a
definite discovery which increased his alarm and brought him up to a
rather sharp climax. Before that he had already noticed that a change
was going forward and certain subtle transformations being brought
about in his character which modified several of his minor habits. And
he had affected to ignore them. Here, however, was something he could no
longer ignore; and it startled him.
At the best of times he was never very
positive, always negative rather, compliant and acquiescent; yet, when
necessity arose he was capable of reasonably vigorous action and could
take a strongish decision. The discovery he now made that brought him up
with such a sharp turn was that this power had positively dwindled to
nothing. He found it impossible to make up his mind. For, on this fifth
day, he realised that he had stayed long enough in the town and that for
reasons he could only vaguely define to himself it was wiser and
safer that he should leave.
And he found that he could not leave!
This is difficult to describe in words,
and it was more by gesture and the expression of his face that he
conveyed to Dr. Silence the state of impotence he had reached. All this
spying and watching, he said, had as it were spun a net about his feet
so that he was trapped and powerless to escape; he felt like a fly that
had blundered into the intricacies of a great web; he was caught,
imprisoned, and could not get away. It was a distressing sensation. A
numbness had crept over his will till it had become almost incapable of
decision. The mere thought of vigorous action—action towards
escape—began to terrify him. All the currents of his life had turned
inwards upon himself, striving to bring to the surface something that
lay buried almost beyond reach, determined to force his recognition of
something he had long forgotten—forgotten years upon years, centuries
almost ago. It seemed as though a window deep within his being would
presently open and reveal an entirely new world, yet somehow a world
that was not unfamiliar. Beyond that, again, he fancied a great curtain
hung; and when that too rolled up he would see still farther into this
region and at last understand something of the secret life of these
extraordinary people.
“Is this why they wait and watch?”
he asked himself with rather a shaking heart, “for the time when I
shall join them—or refuse to join them? Does the decision rest with me
after all, and not with them?”
And it was at this point that the
sinister character of the adventure first really declared itself, and he
became genuinely alarmed. The stability of his rather fluid little personality
was at stake, he felt, and something in his heart turned coward.
Why otherwise should he have suddenly
taken to walking stealthily, silently, making as little sound as
possible, for ever looking behind him? Why else should he have moved
almost on tiptoe about the passages of the practically deserted inn, and
when he was abroad have found himself deliberately taking advantage of
what cover presented itself? And why, if he was not afraid, should the
wisdom of staying indoors after sundown have suddenly occurred to him as
eminently desirable? Why, indeed?
And, when John Silence gently pressed
him for an explanation of these things, he admitted apologetically
that he had none to give.
“It was simply that I feared
something might happen to me unless I kept a sharp look-out. I felt
afraid. It was instinctive,” was all he could say. “I got the
impression that the whole town was after me—wanted me for something;
and that if it got me I should lose myself, or at least the Self I knew,
in some unfamiliar state of consciousness. But I am not a psychologist,
you know,” he added meekly, “and I cannot define it better than
that.”
It was while lounging in the courtyard
half an hour before the evening meal that Vezin made this discovery, and
he at once went upstairs to his quiet room at the end of the winding
passage to think it over alone. In the yard it was empty enough, true,
but there was always the possibility that the big woman whom he dreaded
would come out of some door, with her pretence of knitting, to sit and
watch him. This had happened several times, and he could not endure the
sight of her. He still remembered his original fancy, bizarre though it
was, that she would spring upon him the moment his back was turned and
land with one single crushing leap upon his neck. Of course it was
nonsense, but then it haunted him, and once an idea begins to do that it
ceases to be nonsense. It has clothed itself in reality.
He went upstairs accordingly. It was
dusk, and the oil lamps had not yet been lit in the passages. He
stumbled over the uneven surface of the ancient flooring, passing the
dim outlines of doors along the corridor—doors that he had never once
seen opened—rooms that seemed never occupied. He moved, as his habit
now was, stealthily and on tiptoe.
Half-way down the last passage to his
own chamber there was a sharp turn, and it was just here, while groping
round the walls with outstretched hands, that his fingers touched
something that was not wall—something that moved. It was soft and warm
in texture, indescribably fragrant, and about the height of his
shoulder; and he immediately thought of a furry, sweet-smelling kitten.
The next minute he knew it was something quite different.
Instead of investigating, however—his
nerves must have been too overwrought for that, he said—he shrank back
as closely as possible against the wall on the other side. The thing,
whatever it was, slipped past him with a sound of rustling, and
retreating with light footsteps down the passage behind him, was gone. A
breath of warm, scented air was wafted to his nostrils.
Vezin caught his breath for an instant
and paused, stock-still, half leaning against the wall—and then almost
ran down the remaining distance and entered his room with a rush,
locking the door hurriedly behind him. Yet it was not fear that made him
run: it was excitement, pleasurable excitement. His nerves were
tingling, and a delicious glow made itself felt all over his body. In a
flash it came to him that this was just what he had felt twenty-five
years ago as a boy when he was in love for the first time. Warm currents
of life ran all over him and mounted to his brain in a whirl of soft
delight. His mood was suddenly become tender, melting, loving.
The room was quite dark, and he
collapsed upon the sofa by the window, wondering what had happened to
him and what it all meant. But the only thing he understood clearly in
that instant was that something in him had swiftly, magically changed:
he no longer wished to leave, or to argue with himself about leaving.
The encounter in the passageway had changed all that. The strange
perfume of it still hung about him, bemusing his heart and mind. For he
knew that it was a girl who had passed him, a girl’s face that his
fingers had brushed in the darkness, and he felt in some extraordinary
way as though he had been actually kissed by her, kissed full upon the
lips.
Trembling, he sat upon the sofa by the
window and struggled to collect his thoughts. He was utterly unable to
understand how the mere passing of a girl in the darkness of a narrow
passage-way could communicate so electric a thrill to his whole being
that he still shook with the sweetness of it. Yet, there it was! And he
found it as useless to deny as to attempt analysis. Some ancient fire
had entered his veins, and now ran coursing throtigh his blood; and that
he was forty-five instead of twenty did not matter one little jot. Out
of all the inner turmoil and confusion emerged the one salient fact that
the mere atmosphere, the merest casual touch, of this girl, unseen,
unknown in the darkness, had been sufficient to stir dormant fires in
the centre of his heart, and rouse his whole being from a state of
feeble sluggishness to one of tearing and tumultuous excitement.
After a time, however, the number of
Vezin’s years began to assert their cumulative power; he grew calmer;
and when a knock came at length upon his door and he heard the
waiter’s voice suggesting that dinner was nearly over, he pulled
himself together and slowly made his way downstairs into the
dining-room.
Everyone looked up as he entered, for
he was very late, but he took his customary seat in the far corner and
began to eat. The trepidation was still in his nerves, but the fact that
he had passed through the courtyard and hall without catching sight of a
petticoat served to calm him a little. He ate so fast that he had almost
caught up with the current stage of the table d’hôte, when a slight
commotion in the room drew his attention.
His chair was so placed that the door
and the greater portion of the long salle
à manger were behind him,
yet it was not necessary to turn round to know that the same person he
had passed in the dark passage had now come into the room. He felt the
presence long before he heard or saw anyone. Then he became aware that
the old men, the only other guests, were rising one by one in their
places, and exchanging greetings with someone who passed among them from
table to table. And when at length he turned with his heart beating
furiously to ascertain for himself, he saw the form of a young girl,
lithe and slim, moving down the centre of the room and making straight
for his own table in the corner. She moved wonderfully, with sinuous
grace, like a young panther, and her approach filled him with such
delicious bewilderment that he was utterly unable to tell at first what
her face was like, or discover what it was about the whole presentment
of the creature that filled him anew with trepidation and delight.
“Ah, Ma’mselle est de retour!” he
heard the old waiter murmur at his side, and he was just able to take in
that she was the daughter of the proprietress, when she was upon him,
and he heard her voice. She was addressing him. Something of red lips
he saw and laughing white teeth, and stray wisps of fine dark hair about
the temples; but all the rest was a dream in which his own emotion rose
like a thick cloud before his eyes and prevented his seeing accurately,
or knowing exactly what he did. He was aware that she greeted him with a
charming little bow, that her beautiful large eyes looked searchingly
into his own; that the perfume he had noticed in the dark passage again
assailed his nostrils, and that she was bending a little towards him and
leaning with one hand on the table at his side. She was quite close to
him—that was the chief thing he knew—explaining that she had been
asking after the comfort of her mother’s guests, and was now
introducing herself to the latest arrival—himself.
M’sieur has already been here a few
days,” he heard the waiter say; and then her own voice, sweet as
singing, replied—
“Ah, but M’sieur is not going to
leave us just yet, I hope. My mother is too old to look after the
comfort of our guests properly, but now I am here I will remedy all
that.” She laughed deliciously. “M’sieur shall be well looked
after.”
Vezin, struggling with his emotion and
desire to be polite, half rose to acknowledge the pretty speech, and to
stammer some sort of reply, but as he did so his hand by chance touched
her own that was resting upon the table, and a shock that was for all
the world like a shock of electricity, passed from her skin into his
body. His soul wavered and shook deep within him. He caught her eyes
fixed upon his own with a look of most curious intentness, and the next
moment he knew that he had sat down wordless again on his chair, that
the girl was already half-way across the room, and that he was trying to
eat his salad with a dessert-spoon and a knife.
Longing for her return, and yet
dreading it, he gulped down the remainder of his dinner, and then went
at once to his bedroom to be alone with his thoughts. This time the
passages were lighted, and he suffered no exciting contretemps; yet
the winding corridor was dim with shadows, and the last portion, from
the bend of the walls onwards, seemed longer than he had ever known it.
It ran downhill like the pathway on a mountain side, and as he tiptoed
softly down it he felt that by rights it ought to have led him clean out
of the house into the heart of a great forest. The world was singing
with him. Strange fancies filled his brain, and once in the room, with
the door securely locked, he did not light the candles, but sat by the
open window thinking long, long thoughts that came unbidden in troops to
his mind.
This part of the story he told to Dr.
Silence, without special coaxing, it is true, yet with much stammering
embarrassment. He could not in the least understand, he said, how the
girl had managed to affect him so profoundly, and even before he had set
eyes upon her. For her mere proximity in the darkness had been
sufficient to set him on fire. He knew nothing of enchantments, and for
years had been a stranger to anything approaching tender relations with
any member of the opposite sex, for he was encased in shyness, and
realised his overwhelming defects only too well. Yet this bewitching
young creature came to him deliberately. Her manner was unmistakable,
and she sought him out on every possible occasion. Chaste and sweet she
was undoubtedly, yet frankly inviting; and she won him utterly with the
first glance of her shining eyes, even if she had not already done so in
the dark merely by the magic of her invisible presence.
“You felt she was altogether
wholesome and good?” queried the doctor. “You had no reaction of any
sort—for instance, of alarm?”
Vezin looked up sharply with one of his
inimitable little apologetic smiles. It was some time before be replied.
The mere memory of the adventure had suffused his shy face with blushes,
and his brown eyes sought the floor again before he answered.
“I don’t think I can quite say
that,” he explained presently. “I acknowledged certain qualms,
sitting up in my room afterwards. A conviction grew upon me that there
was something about her—how shall I express it?— well, something
unholy. It is not impurity in any sense, physical or mental, that I
mean, but something quite indefinable that gave me a vague sensation of
the creeps. She drew me, and at the same time repelled me, more
than—than—”
He hesitated, blushing furiously, and
unable to finish the sentence.
“Nothing like it has ever come to me
before or since,” he concluded, with lame confusion. “I suppose it
was, as you suggested just now, something of an enchantment. At any
rate, it was strong enough to make me feel that I would stay in that
awful little haunted town for years if only I could see her every day,
hear her voice, watch her wonderful movements, and sometimes, perhaps,
touch her hand.”
“Can you explain to me what you felt
was the source of her power?” John Silence asked, looking purposely anywhere but at the
narrator.
“I am surprised that you
should ask me such a question,” answered Vezin, with the nearest
approach to dignity he could manage. “I think no man can describe to
another convincingly wherein lies the magic of the woman who ensnares
him. I certainly cannot. I can only say this slip of a girl bewitched
me, and the mere knowledge that she was living and sleeping in the same
house tilled me with an extraordinary sense of delight.
“But there’s one thing I can tell
you,” he went on earnestly, his eyes aglow, “namely, that she
seemed to sum up and synthesise in herself all the strange hidden forces
that operated so mysteriously in the town and its inhabitants. She had
the silken movements of the panther, going smoothly, silently to and
fro, and the same indirect, oblique methods as the townsfolk, screening,
like them, secret purposes of her own—purposes that I was sure had me
for their objective. She kept me, to my terror and delight,
ceaselessly under observation, yet so carelessly, so consummately,
that another man less sensitive, if I may say so”—he made a
deprecating gesture—“or less prepared by what had gone before, would
never have noticed it at all. She was always still, always reposeful,
yet she seemed to be everywhere at once, so that I never could escape
from her. I was continually meeting the stare and laughter of her great
eyes, in the corners of the rooms, in the passages, calmly looking at me
through the windows, or in the busiest parts of the public streets.”
Their intimacy, it seems, grew very
rapidly after this first encounter which had so violently disturbed the
little man’s equilibrium. He was naturally very prim, and prim folk
live mostly in so small a world that anything violently unusual may
shake them clean out of it, and they therefore instinctively distrust
originality. But Vezin began to forget his primness after a while. The
girl was always modestly behaved, and as her mother’s representative
she naturally had to do with the guests in the hotel. It was not out of
the way that a spirit of camaraderie should spring up. Besides, she was
young, she was charmingly pretty, she was French, and—she obviously
liked him.
At the same time, there was something
indescribable— a certain indefinable atmosphere of other places, other
times—that made him try hard to remain on his guard, and sometimes
made him catch his breath with a sudden start. It was all rather like a
delirious dream, half delight, half dread, he confided in a whisper to
Dr. Silence; and more than once he hardly knew quite what he was doing
or saying, as though he were driven forward by impulses he scarcely
recognised as his own.
And though the thought of leaving
presented itself again and again to his mind, it was each time with less
insistence, so that he stayed on from day to day, becoming more and more
a part of the sleepy life of this dreamy mediæval town, losing more and
more of his recognisable personality. Soon, he felt, the Curtain within
would roll up with an awful rush, and he would find himself suddenly
admitted into the secret purposes of the hidden life that lay behind it
all. Only, by that time, he would have become transformed into an
entirely different being.
And, meanwhile, he noticed various
little signs of the intention to make his stay attractive to him:
flowers in his bedroom, a more comfortable armchair in the corner, and
even special little extra dishes on his private table in the
dining-room. Conversations, too, with “Mademoiselle Ilsé” became
more and more frequent and pleasant, and although they seldom travelled
beyond the weather, or the details of the town, the girl, he noticed,
was never in a hurry to bring them to an end, and often contrived to
interject little odd sentences that he never properly understood, yet
felt to be significant.
And it was these stray remarks, full of
a meaning that evaded him, that pointed to some hidden purpose of her
own and made him feel uneasy. They all had to do, he felt sure, with
reasons for his staying on in the town indefinitely.
“And has M’sieur not even yet come
to a decision?” she said softly in his ear, sitting beside him in the
sunny yard before déjeuner, the
acquaintance having progressed with significant rapidity. “Because, if
it’s so difficult, we must all try together to help him!”
The question startled him, following
upon his own thoughts. It was spoken with a pretty laugh, and a stray
bit of hair across one eye, as she turned and peered at him half
roguishly. Possibly he did not quite understand the French of it, for
her near presence always confused his small knowledge of the language
distressingly. Yet the words, and her manner, and something else that
lay behind it all in her mind, frightened him. It gave such point to his
feeling that the town was waiting for him to make his mind up on some
important matter.
At the same time, her voice, and the
fact that she was there so close beside him in her soft dark dress,
thrilled him inexpressibly.
“It is true I find it difficult to
leave,” he stammered, losing his way deliciously in the depths of her
eyes, “and especially now that Mademoiselle Ilsé has come.”
He was surprised at the success of his
sentence, and quite delighted with the little gallantry of it. But at
the same time he could have bitten his tongue off for having said it.
“Then after all you like our little
town, or you would not be pleased to stay on,” she said, ignoring the
compliment.
“I am enchanted with it, and
enchanted with you,” he cried, feeling that his tongue was somehow
slipping beyond the control of his brain. And he was on the verge of saying
all manner of other things of the wildest description, when the girl
sprang lightly tip from her chair beside him, and made to go.
“It is soupe
à l’oignon to-day!”
she cried, laughing back at him through the sunlight, “and I must go
and see about it. Otherwise, you know, M’sieur will not enjoy his
dinner, and then, perhaps, he will leave us!”
He watched her cross the courtyard,
moving with all the grace and lightness of the feline race, and her
simple black dress clothed her, he thought, exactly like the fur of the
same supple species. She turned once to laugh at him from the porch with
the glass door, and then stopped a moment to speak to her mother, who
sat knitting as usual in her corner seat just inside the hall-way.
But how was it, then, that the moment
his eye fell upon this ungainly woman, the pair of them appeared
suddenly as other than they were? Whence came that transforming dignity
and sense of power that enveloped them both as by magic? What was it
about that massive woman that made her appear instantly regal, and set
her on a throne in some dark and dreadful scenery, wielding a sceptre
over the red glare of some tempestuous orgy? And why did this slender
stripling of a girl, graceful as a willow, lithe as a young leopard,
assume suddenly an air of sinister majesty, and move with flame and
smoke about her head, and the darkness of night beneath her feet?
Vezin caught his breath and sat there
transfixed. Then, almost simultaneously with its appearance, the queer
notion vanished again, and the sunlight of day caught them both, and he
heard her laughing to her mother about the soupe
à l’oignon, and saw her glancing back at him over her dear little
shoulder with a smile that made him think of a dew-kissed rose bending
lightly before summer airs.
And, indeed, the onion soup was
particularly excellent that day, because he saw another cover laid at
his small table and, with fluttering heart, heard the waiter murmur by
way of explanation that “Ma’mselle Ilsé would honour M’sienr
to-day at déjeuner, as her
custom sometimes is with her mother’s guests.”
So actually she sat by him all through
that delirious meal, talking quietly to him in easy French, seeing that
he was well looked after, mixing the salad-dressing, and even helping
him with her own hand. And, later in the afternoon, while he was smoking
in the courtyard, longing for a sight of her as soon as her duties were
done, she came again to his side, and when he rose to meet her, she
stood facing him a moment, full of a perplexing sweet shyness before she
spoke:
“My mother thinks you ought to know
more of the beauties of our little town, and I
think so too! Would M’sieur like me to be his guide, perhaps? I
can show him everything, for our family has lived here for many generations.”
She had him by the hand, indeed, before
he could find a single word to express his pleasure, and led him, all
unresisting, out into the street, yet in such a way that it seemed
perfectly natural she should do so, and without the faintest suggestion
of boldness or immodesty. Her face glowed with the pleasure and interest
of it, and with her short dress and tumbled hair she looked every bit
the charming child of seventeen that she was, innocent and playful,
proud of her native town, and alive beyond her years to the sense of its
ancient beauty.
So they went over the town together,
and she showed him what she considered its chief interest: the tumbledown
old house where her forebears had lived; the sombre,
aristocratic-looking mansion where her mother’s family dwelt for
centuries, and the ancient market-place where several hundred years
before the witches had been burnt by the score. She kept up a lively
running stream of talk about it all, of which he understood not a
fiftieth part as he trudged along by her side, cursing his forty-five
years and feeling all the yearnings of his early manhood revive and jeer
at him. And, as she talked, England and Surbiton seemed very far away
indeed, almost in another age of the world’s history. Her voice
touched something immeasurably old in him, something that slept deep. It
lulled the surface parts of his consciousness to sleep, allowing what
was far more ancient to awaken. Like the town, with its elaborate
pretence of modern active life, the upper layers of his being became
dulled, soothed, muffled, and what lay underneath began to stir in its
sleep. That big Curtain swayed a little to and fro. Presently it might
lift altogether. .
He began to understand a little better
at last. The mood of the town was reproducing itself in him. In
proportion as his ordinary external self became muffled, that inner
secret life, that was far more real and vital, asserted itself. And this
girl was surely the high-priestess of it all, the chief instrument of
its accomplishment. New thoughts, with new interpretations, flooded his
mind as she walked beside him through the winding streets, while the
picturesque old gabled town, softly coloured in the sunset, had never
appeared to him so wholly wonderful and seductive.
And only one curious incident came to
disturb and puzzle him, slight in itself, but utterly inexplicable,
bringing white terror into the child’s face and a scream to her
laughing lips. He had merely pointed to a column of blue smoke that rose
from the burning autumn leaves and made a picture against the red roofs,
and had then run to the wall and called her to his side to watch the
flames shooting here and there through the heap of rubbish. Yet, at the
sight of it, as though taken by surprise, her face had altered
dreadfully, and she had turned and run like the wind, calling out wild
sentences to him as she ran, of which he had not understood a single
word, except that the fire apparently frightened her, and she wanted to
get quickly away from it, and to get him away too.
Yet five minutes later she was as calm
and happy again as though nothing had happened to alarm or waken
troubled thoughts in her, and they had both forgotten the incident.
They were leaning over the ruined
ramparts together listening to the weird music of the band as he had
heard it the first day of his arrival. It moved him again profoundly as
it had done before, and somehow he managed to find his tongue and his
best French. The girl leaned across the stones close beside him. No one
was about. Driven by some remorseless engine within he began to stammer
something—he hardly knew what—of his strange admiration for her.
Almost at the first word she sprang lightly off the wall and came up
smiling in front of him, just touching his knees as he sat there. She
was hatless as usual, and the sun caught her hair and one side of her
cheek and throat.
“Oh, I’m so glad!” she cried,
clapping her little hands softly in his face, “so very glad, because
that means that if you like me you must also like what I do, and what I
belong to.”
Already he regretted bitterly having
lost control of himself. Something in the phrasing of her sentence
chilled him. He knew the fear of embarking upon an unknown and dangerous
sea.
“You will take part in our real life,
I mean,” she added softly, with an indescribable coaxing of manner, as
though she noticed his shrinking. “You will come back to us.”
Already this slip of a child seemed to
dominate him; he felt her power coming over him more and more; something
emanated from her that stole over his senses and made him aware that her
personality, for all its simple grace, held forces that were stately,
imposing, august. He saw her again moving through smoke and flame amid
broken and tempestuous scenery, alarmingly strong, her terrible mother
by her side. Dimly this shone through her smile and appearance of
charming innocence.
“You will, I know,” she repeated,
holding him with her eyes.
They were quite alone up there on the
ramparts, and the sensation that she was overmastering him stirred a
wild sensuousness in his blood. The mingled abandon and reserve in her
attracted him furiously, and all of him that was man rose up and
resisted the creeping influence, at the same time acclaiming it with the
full delight of his forgotten youth. An irresistible desire came to him
to question her, to summon what still remained to him of his own little
personality in an effort to retain the right to his normal self.
The girl had grown quiet again, and was
now leaning on the broad wall close beside him, gazing out across the
darkening plain, her elbows on the coping, motionless as a figure
carved in stone. He took his courage in both hands.
“Tell me, Ilsé,” he said,
unconsciously imitating her own purring softness of voice, yet aware
that he was utterly in earnest, “what is the meaning of this town, and
what is this real life you speak of? And why is it that the people watch
me from morning to night? Tell me what it all means? And, tell me,” he
added more quickly with passion in his voice, “what you really
are—yourself?”
She turned her head and looked at him
through half-closed eyelids, her growing inner excitement betraying
itself by the faint colour that ran like a shadow across her face.
“It seems to me”—he faltered
oddly under her gaze—“that I have some right to know—.”
Suddenly she opened her eyes to the
full. “You love me, then?” she asked softly.
“I swear,” he cried impetuously,
moved as by the force of a rising tide, “I never felt before—I have
never known any other girl who—”
“Then you have
the right to know,” she calmly interrupted his confused
confession; “for love shares all secrets.”
She paused, and a thrill like fire ran
swiftly through him. Her words lifted him off the earth, and he felt a
radiant happiness, followed almost the same instant in horrible contrast
by the thought of death. He became aware that she had turned her eyes
upon his own and was speaking again.
“The real life I speak of,” she
whispered, “is the old, old life within, the life of long ago, the
life to which you, too, once belonged, and to which you still belong.”
A faint wave of memory troubled the
deeps of his soul as her low voice sank into him. What she was saying he
knew instinctively to be true, even though he could not as yet
understand its full purport. His present life seemed slipping from him
as he listened, merging his personality in one that was far older and
greater. It was this loss of his present self that brought to him the
thought of death.
“You came here,” she went on,
“with the purpose of seeking it, and the people felt your presence and
are waiting to know what you decide, whether you will leave them without
having found it, or whether—”
Her eyes remained fixed upon his own,
but her face began to change, growing larger and darker with an
expression of age.
“It is their thoughts constantly
playing about your soul that makes you feel they watch you. They do not
watch you with their eyes. The purposes of their inner life are calling
to you, seeking to claim you. You were all part of the same life long,
long ago, and now they want you back again among them.”
Vezin’s timid heart sank with dread
as he listened; but the girl’s eyes held him with a net of joy so that
he had no wish to escape. She fascinated him, as it were, clean out of
his normal self.
“Alone, however, the people could
never have caught and held you,” she resumed. “The motive force was
not strong enough; it has faded through all these years. But I”—she
paused a moment and looked at him with complete confidence in her
splendid eyes—“I possess the spell to conquer you and hold you: the
spell of old love. I can win you back again and make you live the old
life with me, for the force of the ancient tie between us, if I choose
to use it, is irresistible. And I do choose to use it. I still want you.
And you, dear soul of my dim past”—she pressed closer to him so that
her breath passed across his eyes, and her voice positively sang—“I
mean to have you, for you love me and are utterly at my mercy.”
Vezin heard, and yet did not hear;
understood, yet did not understand. He had passed into a condition of
exaltation. The world was beneath his feet, made of music and flowers,
and he was flying somewhere far above it through the sunshine of pure
delight. He was breathless and giddy with the wonder of her words. They
intoxicated him. And, still, the terror of it all, the dreadful thought
of death, pressed ever behind her sentences. For flames shot through her
voice out of black smoke and licked at his soul.
And they communicated with one another,
it seemed to him, by a process of swift telepathy, for his French could
never have compassed all he said to her. Yet she understood perfectly,
and what she said to him was like the recital of verses long since
known. And the mingled pain and sweetness of it as he listened were
almost more than his little soul could hold.
“Yet I came here wholly by
chance—” he heard himself saying.
“No,” she cried with passion,
“you came here because I called to you. I have called to you for
years, and you came with the whole force of the past behind you. You had
to come, for I own you, and I claim you.”
She rose again and moved closer,
looking at him with a certain insolence in the face—the insolence of
power.
The sun had set behind the towers of
the old cathedral and the darkness rose up from the plain and enveloped
them. The music of the band had ceased. The leaves of the plane trees
hung motionless, but the chill of the autumn evening rose about them and
made Vezin shiver. There was no sound but the sound of their voices and
the occasional soft rustle of the girl’s dress. He could hear the
blood rushing in his ears. He scarcely realised where he was or what he
was doing. Some terrible magic of the imagination drew him deeply down
into the tombs of his own being, telling him in no unfaltering voice
that her words shadowed forth the truth. And this simple little French
maid, speaking beside him with so strange authority, he saw curiously
alter into quite another being. As he stared into her eyes, the picture
in his mind grew and lived, dressing itself vividly to his inner vision
with a degree of reality he was compelled to acknowledge. As once
before, he saw her tall and stately, moving through wild and broken
scenery of forests and mountain caverns, the glare of flames behind her
head and clouds of shifting smoke about her feet. Dark leaves encircled
her hair, flying loosely in the wind, and her limbs shone through the
merest rags of clothing. Others were about her too, and ardent eyes on
all sides cast delirious glances upon her, but her own eyes were always
for One only, one whom she held by the hand. For she was leading the
dance in some tempestuous orgy to the music of chanting voices, and
the dance she led circled about a great and awful Figure on a throne,
brooding over the scene through lurid vapours, while innumerable other
wild faces and forms crowded furiously about her in the dance. But the
one she held by the hand he knew to be himself, and the monstrous shape
upon the throne he knew to be her mother.
The vision rose within him, rushing to
him down the long years of buried time, crying aloud to him with the
voice of memory reawakened.... And then the scene faded away and he saw
the clear circle of the girl’s eyes gazing steadfastly into his own,
and she became once more the pretty little daughter of the innkeeper,
and he found his voice again.
“And you,” he whispered
tremblingly—“you child of visions and enchainment, how is it that
you so bewitch me that I loved you even before I saw?”
She drew herself up beside him with an
air of rare dignity.
The call of the Past,” she said;
“and besides,” she added proudly, “in the real life I am a
princess—”
“A princess!” he cried.
“—and my mother is a queen!
At this, little Vezin utterly lost his
head. Delight tore at his heart and swept him into sheer ecstasy. To
hear that sweet singing voice, and to see those adorable little lips
utter such things, upset his balance beyond all hope of control. He took
her in his arms and covered her unresisting face with kisses.
But even while he did so, and while the
hot passion swept him, he felt that she was soft and loathsome, and that
her answering kisses stained his very soul. . . . And when, presently,
she had freed herself and vanished into the darkness, he stood there,
leaning against the wall in a state of collapse, creeping with horror
from the touch of her yielding body, and inwardly raging at the
weakness that he already dimly realised must prove his undoing.
And from the shadows of the old
buildings into which she disappeared there rose in the stillness of the
night a singular long-drawn cry, which at first he took for laughter,
but which later he was sure he recognised as the almost human wailing of
a cat.
For a long time Vezin leant there
against the wall, alone with his surging thoughts and emotions. He
understood at length that he had done the one thing necessary to call
down upon him the whole force of this ancient Past. For in those
passionate kisses he had acknowledged the tie of olden days, and had
revived it. And the memory of that soft impalpable caress in the
darkness of the inn corridor came back to him with a shudder. The girl
had first mastered him, and then led him to the one act that was
necessary for her purpose. He had been waylaid, after the lapse of centuries—caught,
and conquered.
Dimly he realised this, and sought to
make plans for his escape. But, for the moment at any rate, he was
powerless to manage his thoughts or will, for the sweet, fantastic madness
of the whole adventure mounted to his brain like a spell, and he gloried
in the feeling that he was utterly enchanted and moving in a world so
much larger and wilder than the one he had ever been accustomed to.
The moon, pale and enormous, was just
rising over the sea-like plain, when at last he rose to go. Her slanting
rays drew all the houses into new perspective, so that their roofs,
already glistening with dew, seemed to stretch much higher into the sky
than usual, and their gables and quaint old towers lay far away in its
purple reaches.
The cathedral appeared unreal in a
silver mist. He moved softly, keeping to the shadows; but the streets
were all deserted and very silent; the doors were closed, the shutters
fastened. Not a soul was astir. The hush of night lay over everything;
it was like a town of the dead, a churchyard with gigantic and grotesque
tombstones.
Wondering where all the busy life of
the day had so utterly disappeared to, he made his way to a back door
that entered the inn by means of the stables, thinking thus to reach his
room unobserved, He reached the courtyard safely and crossed it by
keeping close to the shadow of the wall. He sidled down it, mincing
along on tiptoe, just as the old men did when they entered the salle
à manger. He was horrified to find himself doing this
instinctively. A strange impulse came to him, catching him somehow in
the centre of his body—an impulse to drop upon all fours and run
swiftly and silently. He glanced upwards and the idea came to him to
leap up upon his window-sill overhead instead of going round by the
stairs. This occurred to him as the easiest, and most natural way. It
was like the beginning of some horrible transformation of himself into
something else. He was fearfully strung up.
The moon was higher now, and the
shadows very dark along the side of the street where he moved. He kept
among the deepest of them, and reached the porch with the glass doors.
But here there was light; the inmates,
unfortunately, were still about. Hoping to slip across the hall
unobserved and reach the stairs, he opened the door carefully and stole
in. Then he saw that the hall was not empty. A large dark thing lay
against the wall on his left. At first he thought it must be household
articles. Then it moved, and he thought it was an immense cat, distorted
in some way by the play of light and shadow. Then it rose straight up
before him and he saw that it was the proprietress.
What she had been doing in this
position he could only venture a dreadful guess, but the moment she
stood up and faced him he was aware of some terrible dignity clothing
her about that instantly recalled the girl’s strange saying that she
was a queen. Huge and sinister she stood there under the little oil
lamp; alone with him in the empty hall. Awe stirred in his heart, and
the roots of some ancient fear. He felt that he must bow to her and make
some kind of obeisance. The impulse was fierce and irresistible, as of
long habit. He glanced quickly about him. There was no one there. Then
he deliberately inclined his head towards her. He bowed.
“Enfin! M’sieur s’est donc décidé.
C’est bien alors. J’en suis contente.”
Her words came to him sonorously as
through a great open space.
Then th
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From Your Dark Side
