Chương Chương 2 · ANCIENT SORCERIES

. ANCIENT SORCERIES

I

There are, it would appear, certain wholly unremarkable persons, with

none of the characteristics that invite adventure, who yet once or

twice in the course of their smooth lives undergo an experience so

strange that the world catches its breath--and looks the other way! And

it was cases of this kind, perhaps, more than any other, that fell into

the widespread net of John Silence, the psychic doctor, and, appealing

to his deep humanity, to his patience, and to his great qualities of

spiritual sympathy, led often to the revelation of problems of the

strangest complexity, and of the profoundest possible human interest.

Matters that seemed almost too curious and fantastic for belief he

loved to trace to their hidden sources. To unravel a tangle in the

very soul of things--and to release a suffering human soul in the

process--was with him a veritable passion. And the knots he untied

were, indeed, often passing strange.

The world, of course, asks for some plausible basis to which it can

attach credence--something it can, at least, pretend to explain.

The adventurous type it can understand: such people carry about

with them an adequate explanation of their exciting lives, and their

characters obviously drive them into the circumstances which produce

the adventures. It expects nothing else from them, and is satisfied.

But dull, ordinary folk have no right to out-of-the-way experiences,

and the world having been led to expect otherwise, is disappointed

with them, not to say shocked. Its complacent judgment has been rudely

disturbed.

“Such a thing happen to _that_ man!” it cries--“a commonplace person

like that! It is too absurd! There must be something wrong!”

Yet there could be no question that something did actually happen to

little Arthur Vezin, something of the curious nature he described to

Dr. Silence. Outwardly, or inwardly, it happened beyond a doubt, and in

spite of the jeers of his few friends who heard the tale, and observed

wisely that “such a thing might perhaps have come to Iszard, that

crack-brained Iszard, or to that odd fish Minski, but it could never

have happened to commonplace little Vezin, who was fore-ordained to

live and die according to scale.”

But, whatever his method of death was, Vezin certainly did not “live

according to scale” so far as this particular event in his otherwise

uneventful life was concerned; and to hear him recount it, and watch

his pale delicate features change, and hear his voice grow softer

and more hushed as he proceeded, was to know the conviction that his

halting words perhaps failed sometimes to convey. He lived the thing

over again each time he told it. His whole personality became muffled

in the recital. It subdued him more than ever, so that the tale became

a lengthy apology for an experience that he deprecated. He appeared to

excuse himself and ask your pardon for having dared to take part in so

fantastic an episode. For little Vezin was a timid, gentle, sensitive

soul, rarely able to assert himself, tender to man and beast, and

almost constitutionally unable to say No, or to claim many things that

should rightly have been his. His whole scheme of life seemed utterly

remote from anything more exciting than missing a train or losing an

umbrella on an omnibus. And when this curious event came upon him he

was already more years beyond forty than his friends suspected or he

cared to admit.

John Silence, who heard him speak of his experience more than once,

said that he sometimes left out certain details and put in others;

yet they were all obviously true. The whole scene was unforgettably

cinematographed on to his mind. None of the details were imagined

or invented. And when he told the story with them all complete, the

effect was undeniable. His appealing brown eyes shone, and much of the

charming personality, usually so carefully repressed, came forward and

revealed itself. His modesty was always there, of course, but in the

telling he forgot the present and allowed himself to appear almost

vividly as he lived again in the past of his adventure.

He was on the way home when it happened, crossing northern France from

some mountain trip or other where he buried himself solitary-wise

every summer. He had nothing but an unregistered bag in the rack, and

the train was jammed to suffocation, most of the passengers being

unredeemed holiday English. He disliked them, not because they were

his fellow-countrymen, but because they were noisy and obtrusive,

obliterating with their big limbs and tweed clothing all the quieter

tints of the day that brought him satisfaction and enabled him to melt

into insignificance and forget that he was anybody. These English

clashed about him like a brass band, making him feel vaguely that he

ought to be more self-assertive and obstreperous, and that he did not

claim insistently enough all kinds of things that he didn’t want and

that were really valueless, such as corner seats, windows up or down,

and so forth.

So that he felt uncomfortable in the train, and wished the journey were

over and he was back again living with his unmarried sister in Surbiton.

And when the train stopped for ten panting minutes at the little

station in northern France, and he got out to stretch his legs on the

platform, and saw to his dismay a further batch of the British Isles

debouching from another train, it suddenly seemed impossible to him to

continue the journey. Even _his_ flabby soul revolted, and the idea of

staying a night in the little town and going on next day by a slower,

emptier train, flashed into his mind. The guard was already shouting

“_en voiture_” and the corridor of his compartment was already packed

when the thought came to him. And, for once, he acted with decision and

rushed to snatch his bag.

Finding the corridor and steps impassable, he tapped at the window

(for he had a corner seat) and begged the Frenchman who sat opposite

to hand his luggage out to him, explaining in his wretched French that

he intended to break the journey there. And this elderly Frenchman, he

declared, gave him a look, half of warning, half of reproach, that to

his dying day he could never forget; handed the bag through the window

of the moving train; and at the same time poured into his ears a long

sentence, spoken rapidly and low, of which he was able to comprehend

only the last few words: “_à cause du sommeil et à cause des chats_.”

In reply to Dr. Silence, whose singular psychic acuteness at once

seized upon this Frenchman as a vital point in the adventure,

Vezin admitted that the man had impressed him favourably from the

beginning, though without being able to explain why. They had sat

facing one another during the four hours of the journey, and though

no conversation had passed between them--Vezin was timid about his

stuttering French--he confessed that his eyes were being continually

drawn to his face, almost, he felt, to rudeness, and that each, by a

dozen nameless little politenesses and attentions, had evinced the

desire to be kind. The men liked each other and their personalities

did not clash, or would not have clashed had they chanced to come to

terms of acquaintance. The Frenchman, indeed, seemed to have exercised

a silent protective influence over the insignificant little Englishman,

and without words or gestures betrayed that he wished him well and

would gladly have been of service to him.

“And this sentence that he hurled at you after the bag?” asked John

Silence, smiling that peculiarly sympathetic smile that always melted

the prejudices of his patient, “were you unable to follow it exactly?”

“It was so quick and low and vehement,” explained Vezin, in his small

voice, “that I missed practically the whole of it. I only caught the

few words at the very end, because he spoke them so clearly, and his

face was bent down out of the carriage window so near to mine.”

“_‘A cause du sommeil et à cause des chats’?_” repeated Dr. Silence, as

though half speaking to himself.

“That’s it exactly,” said Vezin; “which, I take it, means something

like ‘because of sleep and because of the cats,’ doesn’t it?”

“Certainly, that’s how I should translate it,” the doctor observed

shortly, evidently not wishing to interrupt more than necessary.

“And the rest of the sentence--all the first part I couldn’t

understand, I mean--was a warning not to do something--not to stop in

the town, or at some particular place in the town, perhaps. That was

the impression it made on me.”

Then, of course, the train rushed off, and left Vezin standing on the

platform alone and rather forlorn.

The little town climbed in straggling fashion up a sharp hill rising

out of the plain at the back of the station, and was crowned by the

twin towers of the ruined cathedral peeping over the summit. From the

station itself it looked uninteresting and modern, but the fact was

that the mediæval position lay out of sight just beyond the crest. And

once he reached the top and entered the old streets, he stepped clean

out of modern life into a bygone century. The noise and bustle of the

crowded train seemed days away. The spirit of this silent hill-town,

remote from tourists and motor-cars, dreaming its own quiet life under

the autumn sun, rose up and cast its spell upon him. Long before he

recognised this spell he acted under it. He walked softly, almost on

tiptoe, down the winding narrow streets where the gables all but met

over his head, and he entered the doorway of the solitary inn with a

deprecating and modest demeanour that was in itself an apology for

intruding upon the place and disturbing its dream.

At first, however, Vezin said, he noticed very little of all this. The

attempt at analysis came much later. What struck him then was only the

delightful contrast of the silence and peace after the dust and noisy

rattle of the train. He felt soothed and stroked like a cat.

“Like a cat, you said?” interrupted John Silence, quickly catching him

up.

“Yes. At the very start I felt that.” He laughed apologetically. “I

felt as though the warmth and the stillness and the comfort made me

purr. It seemed to be the general mood of the whole place--then.”

The inn, a rambling ancient house, the atmosphere of the old coaching

days still about it, apparently did not welcome him too warmly. He felt

he was only tolerated, he said. But it was cheap and comfortable, and

the delicious cup of afternoon tea he ordered at once made him feel

really very pleased with himself for leaving the train in this bold,

original way. For to him it had seemed bold and original. He felt

something of a dog. His room, too, soothed him with its dark panelling

and low irregular ceiling, and the long sloping passage that led to it

seemed the natural pathway to a real Chamber of Sleep--a little dim

cubby hole out of the world where noise could not enter. It looked

upon the courtyard at the back. It was all very charming, and made

him think of himself as dressed in very soft velvet somehow, and the

floors seemed padded, the walls provided with cushions. The sounds of

the streets could not penetrate there. It was an atmosphere of absolute

rest that surrounded him.

On engaging the two-franc room he had interviewed the only person

who seemed to be about that sleepy afternoon, an elderly waiter with

Dundreary whiskers and a drowsy courtesy, who had ambled lazily towards

him across the stone yard; but on coming downstairs again for a little

promenade in the town before dinner he encountered the proprietress

herself. She was a large woman whose hands, feet, and features seemed

to swim towards him out of a sea of person. They emerged, so to speak.

But she had great dark, vivacious eyes that counteracted the bulk of

her body, and betrayed the fact that in reality she was both vigorous

and alert. When he first caught sight of her she was knitting in a low

chair against the sunlight of the wall, and something at once made him

see her as a great tabby cat, dozing, yet awake, heavily sleepy, and

yet at the same time prepared for instantaneous action. A great mouser

on the watch occurred to him.

She took him in with a single comprehensive glance that was polite

without being cordial. Her neck, he noticed, was extraordinarily supple

in spite of its proportions, for it turned so easily to follow him, and

the head it carried bowed so very flexibly.

“But when she looked at me, you know,” said Vezin, with that little

apologetic smile in his brown eyes, and that faintly deprecating

gesture of the shoulders that was characteristic of him, “the odd

notion came to me that really she had intended to make quite a

different movement, and that with a single bound she could have leaped

at me across the width of that stone yard and pounced upon me like some

huge cat upon a mouse.”

He laughed a little soft laugh, and Dr. Silence made a note in his book

without interrupting, while Vezin proceeded in a tone as though he

feared he had already told too much and more than we could believe.

“Very soft, yet very active she was, for all her size and mass, and I

felt she knew what I was doing even after I had passed and was behind

her back. She spoke to me, and her voice was smooth and running. She

asked if I had my luggage, and was comfortable in my room, and then

added that dinner was at seven o’clock, and that they were very early

people in this little country town. Clearly, she intended to convey

that late hours were not encouraged.”

Evidently, she contrived by voice and manner to give him the impression

that here he would be “managed,” that everything would be arranged and

planned for him, and that he had nothing to do but fall into the groove

and obey. No decided action or sharp personal effort would be looked

for from him. It was the very reverse of the train. He walked quietly

out into the street feeling soothed and peaceful. He realised that he

was in a _milieu_ that suited him and stroked him the right way. It was

so much easier to be obedient. He began to purr again, and to feel that

all the town purred with him.

About the streets of that little town he meandered gently, falling

deeper and deeper into the spirit of repose that characterised it. With

no special aim he wandered up and down, and to and fro. The September

sunshine fell slantingly over the roofs. Down winding alleyways,

fringed with tumbling gables and open casements, he caught fairylike

glimpses of the great plain below, and of the meadows and yellow copses

lying like a dream-map in the haze. The spell of the past held very

potently here, he felt.

The streets were full of picturesquely garbed men and women, all busy

enough, going their respective ways; but no one took any notice of him

or turned to stare at his obviously English appearance. He was even

able to forget that with his tourist appearance he was a false note in

a charming picture, and he melted more and more into the scene, feeling

delightfully insignificant and unimportant and unselfconscious. It was

like becoming part of a softly-coloured dream which he did not even

realise to be a dream.

On the eastern side the hill fell away more sharply, and the plain

below ran off rather suddenly into a sea of gathering shadows in which

the little patches of woodland looked like islands and the stubble

fields like deep water. Here he strolled along the old ramparts of

ancient fortifications that once had been formidable, but now were

only vision-like with their charming mingling of broken grey walls

and wayward vine and ivy. From the broad coping on which he sat for a

moment, level with the rounded tops of clipped plane trees, he saw the

esplanade far below lying in shadow. Here and there a yellow sunbeam

crept in and lay upon the fallen yellow leaves, and from the height

he looked down and saw that the townsfolk were walking to and fro in

the cool of the evening. He could just hear the sound of their slow

footfalls, and the murmur of their voices floated up to him through the

gaps between the trees. The figures looked like shadows as he caught

glimpses of their quiet movements far below.

He sat there for some time pondering, bathed in the waves of murmurs

and half-lost echoes that rose to his ears, muffled by the leaves of

the plane trees. The whole town, and the little hill out of which it

grew as naturally as an ancient wood, seemed to him like a being lying

there half asleep on the plain and crooning to itself as it dozed.

And, presently, as he sat lazily melting into its dream, a sound of

horns and strings and wood instruments rose to his ears, and the town

band began to play at the far end of the crowded terrace below to

the accompaniment of a very soft, deep-throated drum. 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. 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. 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.

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. All this spying and watching, he said,

had as it were spun a net about his feet so that he was trapped and

powerless to escape; he felt like a fly that had blundered into the

intricacies of a great web; he was caught, imprisoned, and could not

get away. It was a distressing sensation. A numbness had crept over

his will till it had become almost incapable of decision. The mere

thought of vigorous action--action towards escape--began to terrify

him. All the currents of his life had turned inwards upon himself,

striving to bring to the surface something that lay buried almost

beyond reach, determined to force his recognition of something he had

long forgotten--forgotten years upon years, centuries almost ago. It

seemed as though a window deep within his being would presently open

and reveal an entirely new world, yet somehow a world that was not

unfamiliar. Beyond that, again, he fancied a great curtain hung; and

when that too rolled up he would see still farther into this region and

at last understand something of the secret life of these extraordinary

people.

“Is this why they wait and watch?” he asked himself with rather a

shaking heart, “for the time when I shall join them--or refuse to join

them? Does the decision rest with me after all, and not with them?”

And it was at this point that the sinister character of the adventure

first really declared itself, and he became genuinely alarmed. The

stability of his rather fluid little personality was at stake, he felt,

and something in his heart turned coward.

Why otherwise should he have suddenly taken to walking stealthily,

silently, making as little sound as possible, for ever looking behind

him? Why else should he have moved almost on tiptoe about the passages

of the practically deserted inn, and when he was abroad have found

himself deliberately taking advantage of what cover presented itself?

And why, if he was not afraid, should the wisdom of staying indoors

after sundown have suddenly occurred to him as eminently desirable?

Why, indeed?

And, when John Silence gently pressed him for an explanation of these

things, he admitted apologetically that he had none to give.

“It was simply that I feared something might happen to me unless I kept

a sharp look-out. I felt afraid. It was instinctive,” was all he could

say. “I got the impression that the whole town was after me--wanted me

for something; and that if it got me I should lose myself, or at least

the Self I knew, in some unfamiliar state of consciousness. But I am

not a psychologist, you know,” he added meekly, “and I cannot define it

better than that.”

It was while lounging in the courtyard half an hour before the evening

meal that Vezin made this discovery, and he at once went upstairs to

his quiet room at the end of the winding passage to think it over

alone. In the yard it was empty enough, true, but there was always the

possibility that the big woman whom he dreaded would come out of some

door, with her pretence of knitting, to sit and watch him. This had

happened several times, and he could not endure the sight of her. He

still remembered his original fancy, bizarre though it was, that she

would spring upon him the moment his back was turned and land with one

single crushing leap upon his neck. Of course it was nonsense, but then

it haunted him, and once an idea begins to do that it ceases to be

nonsense. It has clothed itself in reality.

He went upstairs accordingly. It was dusk, and the oil lamps had not

yet been lit in the passages. He stumbled over the uneven surface of

the ancient flooring, passing the dim outlines of doors along the

corridor--doors that he had never once seen opened--rooms that seemed

never occupied. He moved, as his habit now was, stealthily and on

tiptoe.

Half-way down the last passage to his own chamber there was a sharp

turn, and it was just here, while groping round the walls with

outstretched hands, that his fingers touched something that was

not wall--something that moved. It was soft and warm in texture,

indescribably fragrant, and about the height of his shoulder; and he

immediately thought of a furry, sweet-smelling kitten. The next minute

he knew it was something quite different.

Instead of investigating, however,--his nerves must have been too

overwrought for that, he said,--he shrank back as closely as possible

against the wall on the other side. The thing, whatever it was, slipped

past him with a sound of rustling, and retreating with light footsteps

down the passage behind him, was gone. A breath of warm, scented air

was wafted to his nostrils.

Vezin caught his breath for an instant and paused, stockstill, half

leaning against the wall--and then almost ran down the remaining

distance and entered his room with a rush, locking the door hurriedly

behind him. Yet it was not fear that made him run: it was excitement,

pleasurable excitement. His nerves were tingling, and a delicious glow

made itself felt all over his body. In a flash it came to him that this

was just what he had felt twenty-five years ago as a boy when he was

in love for the first time. Warm currents of life ran all over him and

mounted to his brain in a whirl of soft delight. His mood was suddenly

become tender, melting, loving.

The room was quite dark, and he collapsed upon the sofa by the window,

wondering what had happened to him and what it all meant. But the only

thing he understood clearly in that instant was that something in him

had swiftly, magically changed: he no longer wished to leave, or to

argue with himself about leaving. The encounter in the passage-way

had changed all that. The strange perfume of it still hung about him,

bemusing his heart and mind. For he knew that it was a girl who had

passed him, a girl’s face that his fingers had brushed in the darkness,

and he felt in some extraordinary way as though he had been actually

kissed by her, kissed full upon the lips.

Trembling, he sat upon the sofa by the window and struggled to collect

his thoughts. He was utterly unable to understand how the mere passing

of a girl in the darkness of a narrow passage-way could communicate

so electric a thrill to his whole being that he still shook with the

sweetness of it. Yet, there it was! And he found it as useless to deny

as to attempt analysis. Some ancient fire had entered his veins, and

now ran coursing through his blood; and that he was forty-five instead

of twenty did not matter one little jot. Out of all the inner turmoil

and confusion emerged the one salient fact that the mere atmosphere,

the merest casual touch, of this girl, unseen, unknown in the darkness,

had been sufficient to stir dormant fires in the centre of his heart,

and rouse his whole being from a state of feeble sluggishness to one of

tearing and tumultuous excitement.

After a time, however, the number of Vezin’s years began to assert

their cumulative power; he grew calmer; and when a knock came at

length upon his door and he heard the waiter’s voice suggesting that

dinner was nearly over, he pulled himself together and slowly made his

way downstairs into the dining-room.

Every one looked up as he entered, for he was very late, but he took

his customary seat in the far corner and began to eat. The trepidation

was still in his nerves, but the fact that he had passed through the

courtyard and hall without catching sight of a petticoat served to calm

him a little. He ate so fast that he had almost caught up with the

current stage of the table d’hôte, when a slight commotion in the room

drew his attention.

His chair was so placed that the door and the greater portion of the

long _salle à manger_ were behind him, yet it was not necessary to

turn round to know that the same person he had passed in the dark

passage had now come into the room. He felt the presence long before he

heard or saw any one. Then he became aware that the old men, the only

other guests, were rising one by one in their places, and exchanging

greetings with some one who passed among them from table to table. And

when at length he turned with his heart beating furiously to ascertain

for himself, he saw the form of a young girl, lithe and slim, moving

down the centre of the room and making straight for his own table in

the corner. She moved wonderfully, with sinuous grace, like a young

panther, and her approach filled him with such delicious bewilderment

that he was utterly unable to tell at first what her face was like, or

discover what it was about the whole presentment of the creature that

filled him anew with trepidation and delight.

“Ah, Ma’mselle est de retour!” he heard the old waiter murmur at his

side, and he was just able to take in that she was the daughter of the

proprietress, when she was upon him, and he heard her voice. She was

addressing him. Something of red lips he saw and laughing white teeth,

and stray wisps of fine dark hair about the temples; but all the rest

was a dream in which his own emotion rose like a thick cloud before

his eyes and prevented his seeing accurately, or knowing exactly what

he did. He was aware that she greeted him with a charming little bow;

that her beautiful large eyes looked searchingly into his own; that the

perfume he had noticed in the dark passage again assailed his nostrils,

and that she was bending a little towards him and leaning with one

hand on the table at his side. She was quite close to him--that was

the chief thing he knew--explaining that she had been asking after the

comfort of her mother’s guests, and was now introducing herself to the

latest arrival--himself.

“M’sieur has already been here a few days,” he heard the waiter say;

and then her own voice, sweet as singing, replied--

“Ah, but M’sieur is not going to leave us just yet, I hope. My mother

is too old to look after the comfort of our guests properly, but now

I am here I will remedy all that.” She laughed deliciously. “M’sieur

shall be well looked after.”

Vezin, struggling with his emotion and desire to be polite, half rose

to acknowledge the pretty speech, and to stammer some sort of reply,

but as he did so his hand by chance touched her own that was resting

upon the table, and a shock that was for all the world like a shock of

electricity, passed from her skin into his body. His soul wavered and

shook deep within him. He caught her eyes fixed upon his own with a

look of most curious intentness, and the next moment he knew that he

had sat down wordless again on his chair, that the girl was already

half-way across the room, and that he was trying to eat his salad with

a dessert-spoon and a knife.

Longing for her return, and yet dreading it, he gulped down the

remainder of his dinner, and then went at once to his bedroom to be

alone with his thoughts. This time the passages were lighted, and he

suffered no exciting contretemps; yet the winding corridor was dim with

shadows, and the last portion, from the bend of the walls onwards,

seemed longer than he had ever known it. It ran downhill like the

pathway on a mountain side, and as he tiptoed softly down it he felt

that by rights it ought to have led him clean out of the house into

the heart of a great forest. The world was singing with him. Strange

fancies filled his brain, and once in the room, with the door securely

locked, he did not light the candles, but sat by the open window

thinking long, long thoughts that came unbidden in troops to his mind.

IV

This part of the story he told to Dr. Silence, without special coaxing,

it is true, yet with much stammering embarrassment. He could not in

the least understand, he said, how the girl had managed to affect him

so profoundly, and even before he had set eyes upon her. For her mere

proximity in the darkness had been sufficient to set him on fire. He

knew nothing of enchantments, and for years had been a stranger to

anything approaching tender relations with any member of the opposite

sex, for he was encased in shyness, and realised his overwhelming

defects only too well. Yet this bewitching young creature came to him

deliberately. Her manner was unmistakable, and she sought him out on

every possible occasion. Chaste and sweet she was undoubtedly, yet

frankly inviting; and she won him utterly with the first glance of her

shining eyes, even if she had not already done so in the dark merely by

the magic of her invisible presence.

“You felt she was altogether wholesome and good?” queried the doctor.

“You had no reaction of any sort--for instance, of alarm?”

Vezin looked up sharply with one of his inimitable little apologetic

smiles. It was some time before he replied. The mere memory of the

adventure had suffused his shy face with blushes, and his brown eyes

sought the floor again before he answered.

“I don’t think I can quite say that,” he explained presently. “I

acknowledged certain qualms, sitting up in my room afterwards. A

conviction grew upon me that there was something about her--how shall I

express it?--well, something unholy. It is not impurity in any sense,

physical or mental, that I mean, but something quite indefinable that

gave me a vague sensation of the creeps. She drew me, and at the same

time repelled me, more than--than----”

He hesitated, blushing furiously, and unable to finish the sentence.

“Nothing like it has ever come to me before or since,” he concluded,

with lame confusion. “I suppose it was, as you suggested just now,

something of an enchantment. At any rate, it was strong enough to make

me feel that I would stay in that awful little haunted town for years

if only I could see her every day, hear her voice, watch her wonderful

movements, and sometimes, perhaps, touch her hand.”

“Can you explain to me what you felt was the source of her power?” John

Silence asked, looking purposely anywhere but at the narrator.

“I am surprised that _you_ should ask me such a question,” answered

Vezin, with the nearest approach to dignity he could manage. “I think

no man can describe to another convincingly wherein lies the magic of

the woman who ensnares him. I certainly cannot. I can only say this

slip of a girl bewitched me, and the mere knowledge that she was living

and sleeping in the same house filled me with an extraordinary sense of

delight.

“But there’s one thing I can tell you,” he went on earnestly, his eyes

aglow, “namely, that she seemed to sum up and synthesise in herself

all the strange hidden forces that operated so mysteriously in the

town and its inhabitants. She had the silken movements of the panther,

going smoothly, silently to and fro, and the same indirect, oblique

methods as the townsfolk, screening, like them, secret purposes of

her own--purposes that I was sure had _me_ for their objective. She

kept me, to my terror and delight, ceaselessly under observation, yet

so carelessly, so consummately, that another man less sensitive, if I

may say so”--he made a deprecating gesture--“or less prepared by what

had gone before, would never have noticed it at all. She was always

still, always reposeful, yet she seemed to be everywhere at once, so

that I never could escape from her. I was continually meeting the stare

and laughter of her great eyes, in the corners of the rooms, in the

passages, calmly looking at me through the windows, or in the busiest

parts of the public streets.”

Their intimacy, it seems, grew very rapidly after this first encounter

which had so violently disturbed the little man’s equilibrium. He was

naturally very prim, and prim folk live mostly in so small a world that

anything violently unusual may shake them clean out of it, and they

therefore instinctively distrust originality. But Vezin began to forget

his primness after awhile. The girl was always modestly behaved, and

as her mother’s representative she naturally had to do with the guests

in the hotel. It was not out of the way that a spirit of camaraderie

should spring up. Besides, she was young, she was charmingly pretty,

she was French, and--she obviously liked him.

At the same time, there was something indescribable--a certain

indefinable atmosphere of other places, other times--that made him try

hard to remain on his guard, and sometimes made him catch his breath

with a sudden start. It was all rather like a delirious dream, half

delight, half dread, he confided in a whisper to Dr. Silence; and more

than once he hardly knew quite what he was doing or saying, as though

he were driven forward by impulses he scarcely recognised as his own.

And though the thought of leaving presented itself again and again to

his mind, it was each time with less insistence, so that he stayed on

from day to day, becoming more and more a part of the sleepy life of

this dreamy mediæval town, losing more and more of his recognisable

personality. Soon, he felt, the Curtain within would roll up with an

awful rush, and he would find himself suddenly admitted into the

secret purposes of the hidden life that lay behind it all. Only, by

that time, he would have become transformed into an entirely different

being.

And, meanwhile, he noticed various little signs of the intention

to make his stay attractive to him: flowers in his bedroom, a more

comfortable arm-chair in the corner, and even special little extra

dishes on his private table in the dining-room. Conversations, too,

with “Mademoiselle Ilsé” became more and more frequent and pleasant,

and although they seldom travelled beyond the weather, or the details

of the town, the girl, he noticed, was never in a hurry to bring them

to an end, and often contrived to interject little odd sentences that

he never properly understood, yet felt to be significant.

And it was these stray remarks, full of a meaning that evaded him, that

pointed to some hidden purpose of her own and made him feel uneasy.

They all had to do, he felt sure, with reasons for his staying on in

the town indefinitely.

“And has M’sieur not even yet come to a decision?” she said softly in

his ear, sitting beside him in the sunny yard before _déjeuner_, the

acquaintance having progressed with significant rapidity. “Because, if

it’s so difficult, we must all try together to help him!”

The question startled him, following upon his own thoughts. It was

spoken with a pretty laugh, and a stray bit of hair across one eye, as

she turned and peered at him half roguishly. Possibly he did not quite

understand the French of it, for her near presence always confused

his small knowledge of the language distressingly. Yet the words, and

her manner, and something else that lay behind it all in her mind,

frightened him. It gave such point to his feeling that the town was

waiting for him to make his mind up on some important matter.

At the same time, her voice, and the fact that she was there so close

beside him in her soft dark dress, thrilled him inexpressibly.

“It is true I find it difficult to leave,” he stammered, losing his

way deliciously in the depths of her eyes, “and especially now that

Mademoiselle Ilsé has come.”

He was surprised at the success of his sentence, and quite delighted

with the little gallantry of it. But at the same time he could have

bitten his tongue off for having said it.

“Then after all you like our little town, or you would not be pleased

to stay on,” she said, ignoring the compliment.

“I am enchanted with it, and enchanted with you,” he cried, feeling

that his tongue was somehow slipping beyond the control of his brain.

And he was on the verge of saying all manner of other things of the

wildest description, when the girl sprang lightly up from her chair

beside him, and made to go.

“It is _soupe à l’onion_ to-day!” she cried, laughing back at him

through the sunlight, “and I must go and see about it. Otherwise, you

know, M’sieur will not enjoy his dinner, and then, perhaps, he will

leave us!”

He watched her cross the courtyard, moving with all the grace and

lightness of the feline race, and her simple black dress clothed her,

he thought, exactly like the fur of the same supple species. She turned

once to laugh at him from the porch with the glass door, and then

stopped a moment to speak to her mother, who sat knitting as usual in

her corner seat just inside the hall-way.

But how was it, then, that the moment his eye fell upon this ungainly

woman, the pair of them appeared suddenly as other than they were?

Whence came that transforming dignity and sense of power that enveloped

them both as by magic? What was it about that massive woman that

made her appear instantly regal, and set her on a throne in some

dark and dreadful scenery, wielding a sceptre over the red glare of

some tempestuous orgy? And why did this slender stripling of a girl,

graceful as a willow, lithe as a young leopard, assume suddenly an air

of sinister majesty, and move with flame and smoke about her head, and

the darkness of night beneath her feet?

Vezin caught his breath and sat there transfixed. Then, almost

simultaneously with its appearance, the queer notion vanished again,

and the sunlight of day caught them both, and he heard her laughing to

her mother about the _soupe à l’onion_, and saw her glancing back at

him over her dear little shoulder with a smile that made him think of a

dew-kissed rose bending lightly before summer airs.

And, indeed, the onion soup was particularly excellent that day,

because he saw another cover laid at his small table and, with

fluttering heart, heard the waiter murmur by way of explanation that

“Ma’mselle Ilsé would honour M’sieur to-day at _déjeuner_, as her

custom sometimes is with her mother’s guests.”

So actually she sat by him all through that delirious meal, talking

quietly to him in easy French, seeing that he was well looked after,

mixing the salad-dressing, and even helping him with her own hand.

And, later in the afternoon, while he was smoking in the courtyard,

longing for a sight of her as soon as her duties were done, she came

again to his side, and when he rose to meet her, she stood facing him a

moment, full of a perplexing sweet shyness before she spoke--

“My mother thinks you ought to know more of the beauties of our little

town, and _I_ think so too! Would M’sieur like me to be his guide,

perhaps? I can show him everything, for our family has lived here for

many generations.”

She had him by the hand, indeed, before he could find a single word

to express his pleasure, and led him, all unresisting, out into the

street, yet in such a way that it seemed perfectly natural she should

do so, and without the faintest suggestion of boldness or immodesty.

Her face glowed with the pleasure and interest of it, and with her

short dress and tumbled hair she looked every bit the charming child of

seventeen that she was, innocent and playful, proud of her native town,

and alive beyond her years to the sense of its ancient beauty.

So they went over the town together, and she showed him what she

considered its chief interest: the tumble-down old house where her

forebears had lived; the sombre, aristocratic-looking mansion where her

mother’s family dwelt for centuries, and the ancient market-place where

several hundred years before the witches had been burnt by the score.

She kept up a lively running stream of talk about it all, of which he

understood not a fiftieth part as he trudged along by her side, cursing

his forty-five years and feeling all the yearnings of his early manhood

revive and jeer at him. And, as she talked, England and Surbiton

seemed very far away indeed, almost in another age of the world’s

history. Her voice touched something immeasurably old in him, something

that slept deep. It lulled the surface parts of his consciousness to

sleep, allowing what was far more ancient to awaken. Like the town,

with its elaborate pretence of modern active life, the upper layers

of his being became dulled, soothed, muffled, and what lay underneath

began to stir in its sleep. That big Curtain swayed a little to and

fro. Presently it might lift altogether....

He began to understand a little better at last. The mood of the town

was reproducing itself in him. In proportion as his ordinary external

self became muffled, that inner secret life, that was far more real and

vital, asserted itself. And this girl was surely the high-priestess of

it all, the chief instrument of its accomplishment. New thoughts, with

new interpretations, flooded his mind as she walked beside him through

the winding streets, while the picturesque old gabled town, softly

coloured in the sunset, had never appeared to him so wholly wonderful

and seductive.

And only one curious incident came to disturb and puzzle him, slight

in itself, but utterly inexplicable, bringing white terror into the

child’s face and a scream to her laughing lips. He had merely pointed

to a column of blue smoke that rose from the burning autumn leaves

and made a picture against the red roofs, and had then run to the

wall and called her to his side to watch the flames shooting here and

there through the heap of rubbish. Yet, at the sight of it, as though

taken by surprise, her face had altered dreadfully, and she had turned

and run like the wind, calling out wild sentences to him as she ran,

of which he had not understood a single word, except that the fire

apparently frightened her, and she wanted to get quickly away from it,

and to get him away too.

Yet five minutes later she was as calm and happy again as though

nothing had happened to alarm or waken troubled thoughts in her, and

they had both forgotten the incident.

They were leaning over the ruined ramparts together listening to

the weird music of the band as he had heard it the first day of his

arrival. It moved him again profoundly as it had done before, and

somehow he managed to find his tongue and his best French. The girl

leaned across the stones close beside him. No one was about. Driven by

some remorseless engine within he began to stammer something--he hardly

knew what--of his strange admiration for her. Almost at the first word

she sprang lightly off the wall and came up smiling in front of him,

just touching his knees as he sat there. She was hatless as usual, and

the sun caught her hair and one side of her cheek and throat.

“Oh, I’m _so_ glad!” she cried, clapping her little hands softly in his

face, “so very glad, because that means that if you like me you must

also like what I do, and what I belong to.”

Already he regretted bitterly having lost control of himself. Something

in the phrasing of her sentence chilled him. He knew the fear of

embarking upon an unknown and dangerous sea.

“You will take part in our real life, I mean,” she added softly,

with an indescribable coaxing of manner, as though she noticed his

shrinking. “You will come back to us.”

Already this slip of a child seemed to dominate him; he felt her power

coming over him more and more; something emanated from her that stole

over his senses and made him aware that her personality, for all its

simple grace, held forces that were stately, imposing, august. He saw

her again moving through smoke and flame amid broken and tempestuous

scenery, alarmingly strong, her terrible mother by her side. Dimly this

shone through her smile and appearance of charming innocence.

“You will, I know,” she repeated, holding him with her eyes.

They were quite alone up there on the ramparts, and the sensation that

she was overmastering him stirred a wild sensuousness in his blood. The

mingled abandon and reserve in her attracted him furiously, and all of

him that was man rose up and resisted the creeping influence, at the

same time acclaiming it with the full delight of his forgotten youth.

An irresistible desire came to him to question her, to summon what

still remained to him of his own little personality in an effort to

retain the right to his normal self.

The girl had grown quiet again, and was now leaning on the broad wall

close beside him, gazing out across the darkening plain, her elbows on

the coping, motionless as a figure carved in stone. He took his courage

in both hands.

“Tell me, Ilsé,” he said, unconsciously imitating her own purring

softness of voice, yet aware that he was utterly in earnest, “what is

the meaning of this town, and what is this real life you speak of? And

why is it that the people watch me from morning to night? Tell me what

it all means? And, tell me,” he added more quickly with passion in his

voice, “what you really are--yourself?”

She turned her head and looked at him through half-closed eyelids, her

growing inner excitement betraying itself by the faint colour that ran

like a shadow across her face.

“It seems to me,”--he faltered oddly under her gaze--“that I have some

right to know----”

Suddenly she opened her eyes to the full. “You love me, then?” she

asked softly.

“I swear,” he cried impetuously, moved as by the force of a rising

tide, “I never felt before--I have never known any other girl who----”

“Then you _have_ the right to know,” she calmly interrupted his

confused confession; “for love shares all secrets.”

She paused, and a thrill like fire ran swiftly through him. Her words

lifted him off the earth, and he felt a radiant happiness, followed

almost the same instant in horrible contrast by the thought of death.

He became aware that she had turned her eyes upon his own and was

speaking again.

“The real life I speak of,” she whispered, “is the old, old life

within, the life of long ago, the life to which you, too, once

belonged, and to which you still belong.”

A faint wave of memory troubled the deeps of his soul as her low

voice sank into him. What she was saying he knew instinctively to be

true, even though he could not as yet understand its full purport.

His present life seemed slipping from him as he listened, merging his

personality in one that was far older and greater. It was this loss of

his present self that brought to him the thought of death.

“You came here,” she went on, “with the purpose of seeking it, and the

people felt your presence and are waiting to know what you decide,

whether you will leave them without having found it, or whether----”

Her eyes remained fixed upon his own, but her face began to change,

growing larger and darker with an expression of age.

“It is their thoughts constantly playing about your soul that makes

you feel they watch you. They do not watch you with their eyes. The

purposes of their inner life are calling to you, seeking to claim you.

You were all part of the same life long, long ago, and now they want

you back again among them.”

Vezin’s timid heart sank with dread as he listened; but the girl’s

eyes held him with a net of joy so that he had no wish to escape. She

fascinated him, as it were, clean out of his normal self.

“Alone, however, the people could never have caught and held you,”

she resumed. “The motive force was not strong enough; it has faded

through all these years. But I”--she paused a moment and looked at him

with complete confidence in her splendid eyes--“I possess the spell to

conquer you and hold you: the spell of old love. I can win you back

again and make you live the old life with me, for the force of the

ancient tie between us, if I choose to use it, is irresistible. And

I do choose to use it I still want you. And you, dear soul of my dim

past”--she pressed closer to him so that her breath passed across his

eyes, and her voice positively sang--“I mean to have you, for you love

me and are utterly at my mercy.”

Vezin heard, and yet did not hear; understood, yet did not understand.

He had passed into a condition of exaltation. The world was beneath his

feet, made of music and flowers, and he was flying somewhere far above

it through the sunshine of pure delight. He was breathless and giddy

with the wonder of her words. They intoxicated him. And, still, the

terror of it all, the dreadful thought of death, pressed ever behind

her sentences. For flames shot through her voice out of black smoke and

licked at his soul.

And they communicated with one another, it seemed to him, by a process

of swift telepathy, for his French could never have compassed all he

said to her. Yet she understood perfectly, and what she said to him was

like the recital of verses long since known. And the mingled pain and

sweetness of it as he listened were almost more than his little soul

could hold.

“Yet I came here wholly by chance----” he heard himself saying.

“No,” she cried with passion, “you came here because I called to you. I

have called to you for years, and you came with the whole force of the

past behind you. You had to come, for I own you, and I claim you.”

She rose again and moved closer, looking at him with a certain

insolence in the face--the insolence of power.

The sun had set behind the towers of the old cathedral and the darkness

rose up from the plain and enveloped them. The music of the band had

ceased. The leaves of the plane trees hung motionless, but the chill

of the autumn evening rose about them and made Vezin shiver. There

was no sound but the sound of their voices and the occasional soft

rustle of the girl’s dress. He could hear the blood rushing in his

ears. He scarcely realised where he was or what he was doing. Some

terrible magic of the imagination drew him deeply down into the tombs

of his own being, telling him in no unfaltering voice that her words

shadowed forth the truth. And this simple little French maid, speaking

beside him with so strange authority, he saw curiously alter into quite

another being. As he stared into her eyes, the picture in his mind grew

and lived, dressing itself vividly to his inner vision with a degree

of reality he was compelled to acknowledge. As once before, he saw her

tall and stately, moving through wild and broken scenery of forests and

mountain caverns, the glare of flames behind her head and clouds of

shifting smoke about her feet. Dark leaves encircled her hair, flying

loosely in the wind, and her limbs shone through the merest rags of

clothing. Others were about her too, and ardent eyes on all sides cast

delirious glances upon her, but her own eyes were always for One only,

one whom she held by the hand. For she was leading the dance in some

tempestuous orgy to the music of chanting voices, and the dance she led

circled about a great and awful Figure on a throne, brooding over the

scene through lurid vapours, while innumerable other wild faces and

forms crowded furiously about her in the dance. But the one she held by

the hand he knew to be himself, and the monstrous shape upon the throne

he knew to be her mother.

The vision rose within him, rushing to him down the long years

of buried time, crying aloud to him with the voice of memory

reawakened.... And then the scene faded away and he saw the clear

circle of the girl’s eyes gazing steadfastly into his own, and she

became once more the pretty little daughter of the innkeeper, and he

found his voice again.

“And you,” he whispered tremblingly--“you child of visions and

enchantment, how is it that you so bewitch me that I loved you even

before I saw?”

She drew herself up beside him with an air of rare dignity.

“The call of the Past,” she said; “and besides,” she added proudly, “in

the real life I am a princess----”

“A princess!” he cried.

“----and my mother is a queen!”

At this, little Vezin utterly lost his head. Delight tore at his heart

and swept him into sheer ecstasy. To hear that sweet singing voice, and

to see those adorable little lips utter such things, upset his balance

beyond all hope of control. He took her in his arms and covered her

unresisting face with kisses.

But even while he did so, and while the hot passion swept him, he

felt that she was soft and loathsome, and that her answering kisses

stained his very soul.... And when, presently, she had freed herself

and vanished into the darkness, he stood there, leaning against the

wall in a state of collapse, creeping with horror from the touch of

her yielding body, and inwardly raging at the weakness that he already

dimly realised must prove his undoing.

And from the shadows of the old buildings into which she disappeared

there rose in the stillness of the night a singular, long-drawn cry,

which at first he took for laughter, but which later he was sure he

recognised as the almost human wailing of a cat.

V

For a long time Vezin leant there against the wall, alone with his

surging thoughts and emotions. He understood at length that he had

done the one thing necessary to call down upon him the whole force of

this ancient Past. For in those passionate kisses he had acknowledged

the tie of olden days, and had revived it. And the memory of that soft

impalpable caress in the darkness of the inn corridor came back to him

with a shudder. The girl had first mastered him, and then led him to

the one act that was necessary for her purpose. He had been waylaid,

after the lapse of centuries--caught, and conquered.

Dimly he realised this, and sought to make plans for his escape. But,

for the moment at any rate, he was powerless to manage his thoughts or

will, for the sweet, fantastic madness of the whole adventure mounted

to his brain like a spell, and he gloried in the feeling that he was

utterly enchanted and moving in a world so much larger and wilder than

the one he had ever been accustomed to.

The moon, pale and enormous, was just rising over the sea-like plain,

when at last he rose to go. Her slanting rays drew all the houses into

new perspective, so that their roofs, already glistening with dew,

seemed to stretch much higher into the sky than usual, and their gables

and quaint old towers lay far away in its purple reaches.

The cathedral appeared unreal in a silver mist. He moved softly,

keeping to the shadows; but the streets were all deserted and very

silent; the doors were closed, the shutters fastened. Not a soul was

astir. The hush of night lay over everything; it was like a town of

the dead, a churchyard with gigantic and grotesque tombstones.

Wondering where all the busy life of the day had so utterly disappeared

to, he made his way to a back door that entered the inn by means of

the stables, thinking thus to reach his room unobserved. He reached

the courtyard safely and crossed it by keeping close to the shadow of

the wall. He sidled down it, mincing along on tiptoe, just as the old

men did when they entered the _salle à manger_. He was horrified to

find himself doing this instinctively. A strange impulse came to him,

catching him somehow in the centre of his body--an impulse to drop upon

all fours and run swiftly and silently. He glanced upwards and the idea

came to him to leap up upon his window-sill overhead instead of going

round by the stairs. This occurred to him as the easiest, and most

natural way. It was like the beginning of some horrible transformation

of himself into something else. He was fearfully strung up.

The moon was higher now, and the shadows very dark along the side of

the street where he moved. He kept among the deepest of them, and

reached the porch with the glass doors.

But here there was light; the inmates, unfortunately, were still about.

Hoping to slip across the hall unobserved and reach the stairs, he

opened the door carefully and stole in. Then he saw that the hall was

not empty. A large dark thing lay against the wall on his left. At

first he thought it must be household articles. Then it moved, and he

thought it was an immense cat, distorted in some way by the play of

light and shadow. Then it rose straight up before him and he saw that

it was the proprietress.

What she had been doing in this position he could only venture a

dreadful guess, but the moment she stood up and faced him he was aware

of some terrible dignity clothing her about that instantly recalled the

girl’s strange saying that she was a queen. Huge and sinister she stood

there under the little oil lamp; alone with him in the empty hall. Awe

stirred in his heart, and the roots of some ancient fear. He felt that

he must bow to her and make some kind of obeisance. The impulse was

fierce and irresistible, as of long habit. He glanced quickly about

him. There was no one there. Then he deliberately inclined his head

towards her. He bowed.

“Enfin! M’sieur s’est donc décidé. C’est bien alors. J’en suis

contente.”

Her words came to him sonorously as through a great open space.

Then the great figure came suddenly across the flagged hall at him and

seized his trembling hands. Some overpowering force moved with her and

caught him.

“On pourrait faire un p’tit tour ensemble, n’est-ce pas? Nous y allons

cette nuit et il faut s’exercer un peu d’avance pour cela. Ilsé, Ilsé,

viens donc ici. Viens vite!”

And she whirled him round in the opening steps of some dance that

seemed oddly and horribly familiar. They made no sound on the stones,

this strangely assorted couple. It was all soft and stealthy. And

presently, when the air seemed to thicken like smoke, and a red glare

as of flame shot through it, he was aware that some one else had joined

them and that his hand the mother had released was now tightly held

by the daughter. Ilsé had come in answer to the call, and he saw her

with leaves of vervain twined in her dark hair, clothed in tattered

vestiges of some curious garment, beautiful as the night, and horribly,

odiously, loathsomely seductive.

“To the Sabbath! to the Sabbath!” they cried. “On to the Witches’

Sabbath!”

Up and down that narrow hall they danced, the women on each side of

him, to the wildest measure he had ever imagined, yet which he dimly,

dreadfully remembered, till the lamp on the wall flickered and went

out, and they were left in total darkness. And the devil woke in his

heart with a thousand vile suggestions and made him afraid.

Suddenly they released his hands and he heard the voice of the mother

cry that it was time, and they must go. Which way they went he did

not pause to see. He only realised that he was free, and he blundered

through the darkness till he found the stairs and then tore up them to

his room as though all hell was at his heels.

He flung himself on the sofa, with his face in his hands, and groaned.

Swiftly reviewing a dozen ways of immediate escape, all equally

impossible, he finally decided that the only thing to do for the moment

was to sit quiet and wait. He must see what was going to happen. At

least in the privacy of his own bedroom he would be fairly safe. The

door was locked. He crossed over and softly opened the window which

gave upon the courtyard and also permitted a partial view of the hall

through the glass doors.

As he did so the hum and murmur of a great activity reached his ears

from the streets beyond--the sound of footsteps and voices muffled by

distance. He leaned out cautiously and listened. The moonlight was

clear and strong now, but his own window was in shadow, the silver

disc being still behind the house. It came to him irresistibly that

the inhabitants of the town, who a little while before had all been

invisible behind closed doors, were now issuing forth, busy upon some

secret and unholy errand. He listened intently.

At first everything about him was silent, but soon he became aware of

movements going on in the house itself. Rustlings and cheepings came

to him across that still, moonlit yard. A concourse of living beings

sent the hum of their activity into the night. Things were on the move

everywhere. A biting, pungent odour rose through the air, coming he

knew not whence. Presently his eyes became glued to the windows of

the opposite wall where the moonshine fell in a soft blaze. The roof

overhead, and behind him, was reflected clearly in the panes of glass,

and he saw the outlines of dark bodies moving with long footsteps over

the tiles and along the coping. They passed swiftly and silently,

shaped like immense cats, in an endless procession across the pictured

glass, and then appeared to leap down to a lower level where he lost

sight of them. He just caught the soft thudding of their leaps.

Sometimes their shadows fell upon the white wall opposite, and then

he could not make out whether they were the shadows of human beings

or of cats. They seemed to change swiftly from one to the other. The

transformation looked horribly real, for they leaped like human beings,

yet changed swiftly in the air immediately afterwards, and dropped like

animals.

The yard, too, beneath him, was now alive with the creeping movements

of dark forms all stealthily drawing towards the porch with the glass

doors. They kept so closely to the wall that he could not determine

their actual shape, but when he saw that they passed on to the great

congregation that was gathering in the hall, he understood that these

were the creatures whose leaping shadows he had first seen reflected in

the window-panes opposite. They were coming from all parts of the town,

reaching the appointed meeting-place across the roofs and tiles, and

springing from level to level till they came to the yard.

Then a new sound caught his ear, and he saw that the windows all about

him were being softly opened, and that to each window came a face. A

moment later figures began dropping hurriedly down into the yard. And

these figures, as they lowered themselves down from the windows, were

human, he saw; but once safely in the yard they fell upon all fours and

changed in the swiftest possible second into--cats--huge, silent cats.

They ran in streams to join the main body in the hall beyond.

So, after all, the rooms in the house had not been empty and unoccupied.

Moreover, what he saw no longer filled him with amazement. For he

remembered it all. It was familiar. It had all happened before just

so, hundreds of times, and he himself had taken part in it and known

the wild madness of it all. The outline of the old building changed,

the yard grew larger, and he seemed to be staring down upon it from

a much greater height through smoky vapours. And, as he looked, half

remembering, the old pains of long ago, fierce and sweet, furiously

assailed him, and the blood stirred horribly as he heard the Call of

the Dance again in his heart and tasted the ancient magic of Ilsé

whirling by his side.

Suddenly he started back. A great lithe cat had leaped softly up from

the shadows below on to the sill close to his face, and was staring

fixedly at him with the eyes of a human. “Come,” it seemed to say,

“come with us to the Dance! Change as of old! Transform yourself

swiftly and come!” Only too well he understood the creature’s soundless

call.

It was gone again in a flash with scarcely a sound of its padded feet

on the stones, and then others dropped by the score down the side of

the house, past his very eyes, all changing as they fell and darting

away rapidly, softly, towards the gathering point. And again he felt

the dreadful desire to do likewise; to murmur the old incantation,

and then drop upon hands and knees and run swiftly for the great

flying leap into the air. Oh, how the passion of it rose within him

like a flood, twisting his very entrails, sending his heart’s desire

flaming forth into the night for the old, old Dance of the Sorcerers

at the Witches’ Sabbath! The whirl of the stars was about him; once

more he met the magic of the moon. The power of the wind, rushing

from precipice and forest, leaping from cliff to cliff across the

valleys, tore him away.... He heard the cries of the dancers and their

wild laughter, and with this savage girl in his embrace he danced

furiously about the dim Throne where sate the Figure with the sceptre

of majesty....

Then, suddenly, all became hushed and still, and the fever died down a

little in his heart. The calm moonlight flooded a courtyard empty and

deserted. They had started. The procession was off into the sky. And he

was left behind--alone.

Vezin tiptoed softly across the room and unlocked the door. The murmur

from the streets, growing momentarily as he advanced, met his ears. He

made his way with the utmost caution down the corridor. At the head of

the stairs he paused and listened. Below him, the hall where they had

gathered was dark and still, but through opened doors and windows on

the far side of the building came the sound of a great throng moving

farther and farther into the distance.

He made his way down the creaking wooden stairs, dreading yet longing

to meet some straggler who should point the way, but finding no one;

across the dark hall, so lately thronged with living, moving things,

and out through the opened front doors into the street. He could not

believe that he was really left behind, really forgotten, that he had

been purposely permitted to escape. It perplexed him.

Nervously he peered about him, and up and down the street; then, seeing

nothing, advanced slowly down the pavement.

The whole town, as he went, showed itself empty and deserted, as

though a great wind had blown everything alive out of it. The doors

and windows of the houses stood open to the night; nothing stirred;

moonlight and silence lay over all. The night lay about him like a

cloak. The air, soft and cool, caressed his cheek like the touch of a

great furry paw. He gained confidence and began to walk quickly, though

still keeping to the shadowed side. Nowhere could he discover the

faintest sign of the great unholy exodus he knew had just taken place.

The moon sailed high over all in a sky, cloudless and serene.