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.