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 some one 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 but 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 own 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.