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.”


II

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.