I
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 happen to _that_ man!” it cries--“a commonplace person
like that! It is too absurd! There must be 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
according 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 the 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
beginning, 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 patient, “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 mediæval 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 extraordinarily supple
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 little
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 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, and 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
plaintive 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 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 diminuendos 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 long 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 barrows, 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 stalls 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 interests 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.”