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 realize 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 dejeuner 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 cafes 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.