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. 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.

“—a cause du sommeil et a 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.

III

It was, I think, on the fifth day—though in this

detail his story sometimes varied—that he made a definite discovery

which increased his alarm and brought him up to a rather sharp climax.

Before that he had already noticed that a change was going forward and

certain subtle transformations being brought about in his character

which modified several of his minor habits. And he had affected to

ignore them. Here, however, was something he could no longer ignore;

and it startled him.

At the best of times he was never very positive,

always negative rather, compliant and acquiescent; yet, when necessity

arose he was capable of reasonably vigorous action and could take a

strongish decision. The discovery he now made that brought him up with

such a sharp turn was that this power had positively dwindled to

nothing. He found it impossible to make up his mind. For, on this fifth

day, he realised that he had stayed long enough in the town and that

for reasons he could only vaguely define to himself it was wiser and

safer that he should leave.

And he found that he could not leave!

This is difficult to describe in words, and it was more by gesture

and the expression of his face that he conveyed to Dr. Silence the

state of impotence he had reached.