Vezin said, he noticed very little of all this. Theattempt at analysis came much later. What struck him then was only thedelightful contrast of the silence and peace after the dust and noisyrattle of the train. He felt soothed and stroked like a cat.
"Like a cat, you said?" interrupted John Silence, quickly catching himup.
"Yes. At the very start I felt that." He laughed apologetically. "I feltas though the warmth and the stillness and the comfort made me purr. Itseemed to be the general mood of the whole place--then."
The inn, a rambling ancient house, the atmosphere of the old coachingdays still about it, apparently did not welcome him too warmly. He felthe was only tolerated, he said. But it was cheap and comfortable, andthe delicious cup of afternoon tea he ordered at once made him feelreally very pleased with himself for leaving the train in this bold,original way. For to him it had seemed bold and original. He feltsomething of a dog. His room, too, soothed him with its dark panellingand low irregular ceiling, and the long sloping passage that led to itseemed the natural pathway to a real Chamber of Sleep--a little dimcubby hole out of the world where noise could not enter. It looked uponthe courtyard at the back. It was all very charming, and made him thinkof himself as dressed in very soft velvet somehow, and the floors seemedpadded, the walls provided with cushions. The sounds of the streetscould not penetrate there. It was an atmosphere of absolute rest thatsurrounded him.
On engaging the two-franc room he had interviewed the only person whoseemed to be about that sleepy afternoon, an elderly waiter withDundreary whiskers and a drowsy courtesy, who had ambled lazily towardshim across the stone yard; but on coming downstairs again for a littlepromenade in the town before dinner he encountered the proprietressherself. She was a large woman whose hands, feet, and features seemed toswim towards him out of a sea of person. They emerged, so to speak. Butshe had great dark, vivacious eyes that counteracted the bulk of herbody, and betrayed the fact that in reality she was both vigorous andalert. When he first caught sight of her she was knitting in a low chairagainst the sunlight of the wall, and something at once made him see heras a great tabby cat, dozing, yet awake, heavily sleepy, and yet at thesame time prepared for instantaneous action. A great mouser on the watchoccurred to him.
She took him in with a single comprehensive glance that was politewithout being cordial. Her neck, he noticed, was extraordinarily supplein spite of its proportions, for it turned so easily to follow him, andthe head it carried bowed so very flexibly.
"But when she looked at me, you know," said Vezin, with that littleapologetic smile in his brown eyes, and that faintly deprecating gestureof the shoulders that was characteristic of him, "the odd notion came tome that really she had intended to make quite a different movement, andthat with a single bound she could have leaped at me across the width ofthat 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 bookwithout interrupting, while Vezin proceeded in a tone as though hefeared 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 Ifelt she knew what I was doing even after I had passed and was behindher back. She spoke to me, and her voice was smooth and running. Sheasked if I had my luggage, and was comfortable in my room, and thenadded that dinner was at seven o'clock, and that they were very earlypeople in this little country town. Clearly, she intended to convey thatlate hours were not encouraged."
Evidently, she contrived by voice and manner to give him the impressionthat here he would be "managed," that everything would be arranged andplanned for him, and that he had nothing to do but fall into the grooveand obey. No decided action or sharp personal effort would be looked forfrom him. It was the very reverse of the train. He walked quietly outinto the street feeling soothed and peaceful. He realised that he was ina _milieu_ that suited him and stroked him the right way. It was so mucheasier to be obedient. He began to purr again, and to feel that all thetown purred with him.
About the streets of that little town he meandered gently, fallingdeeper and deeper into the spirit of repose that characterised it. Withno special aim he wandered up and down, and to and fro. The Septembersunshine fell slantingly over the roofs. Down winding alleyways, fringedwith tumbling gables and open casements, he caught fairylike glimpses ofthe great plain below, and of the meadows and yellow copses lying like adream-map in the haze. The spell of the past held very potently here, hefelt.
The streets were full of picturesquely garbed men and women, all busyenough, going their respective ways; but no one took any notice of himor turned to stare at his obviously English appearance. He was even ableto forget that with his tourist appearance he was a false note in acharming picture, and he melted more and more into the scene, feelingdelightfully insignificant and unimportant and unselfconscious. It waslike becoming part of a softly coloured dream which he did not evenrealise to be a dream.
On the eastern side the hill fell away more sharply, and the plain belowran off rather suddenly into a sea of gathering shadows in which thelittle patches of woodland looked like islands and the stubble fieldslike deep water. Here he strolled along the old ramparts of ancientfortifications that once had been formidable, but now were onlyvision-like with their charming mingling of broken grey walls andwayward vine and ivy. From the broad coping on which he sat for amoment, level with the rounded tops of clipped plane trees, he saw theesplanade far below lying in shadow. Here and there a yellow sunbeamcrept in and lay upon the fallen yellow leaves, and from the height helooked down and saw that the townsfolk were walking to and fro in thecool of the evening. He could just hear the sound of their slowfootfalls, and the murmur of their voices floated up to him through thegaps between the trees. The figures looked like shadows as he caughtglimpses of their quiet movements far below.
He sat there for some time pondering, bathed in the waves of murmurs andhalf-lost echoes that rose to his ears, muffled by the leaves of theplane trees. The whole town, and the little hill out of which it grew asnaturally as an ancient wood, seemed to him like a being lying therehalf asleep on the plain and crooning to itself as it dozed.
And, presently, as he sat lazily melting into its dream, a sound ofhorns and strings and wood instruments rose to his ears, and the townband began to play at the far end of the crowded terrace below to theaccompaniment of a very soft, deep-throated drum. Vezin was verysensitive to music, knew about it intelligently, and had even ventured,unknown to his friends, upon the composition of quiet melodies withlow-running chords which he played to himself with the soft pedal whenno one was about. And this music floating up through the trees from aninvisible and doubtless very picturesque band of the townspeople whollycharmed him. He recognised nothing that they played, and it sounded asthough they were simply improvising without a conductor. No definitelymarked time ran through the pieces, which ended and began oddly afterthe fashion of wind through an Aeolian harp. It was part of the placeand scene, just as the dying sunlight and faintly breathing wind werepart of the scene and hour, and the mellow notes of old-fashionedplaintive horns, pierced here and there by the sharper strings, all halfsmothered by the continuous booming of the deep drum, touched his soulwith a curiously potent spell that was almost too engrossing to be quitepleasant.
There was a certain queer sense of bewitchment in it all. The musicseemed to him oddly unartificial. It made him think of trees swept bythe wind, of night breezes singing among wires and chimney-stacks, or inthe rigging of invisible ships; or--and the simile leaped up in histhoughts with a sudden sharpness of suggestion--a chorus of animals, ofwild creatures, somewhere in desolate places of the world, crying andsinging as animals will, to the moon. He could fancy he heard thewailing, half-human cries of cats upon the tiles at night, rising andfalling with weird intervals of sound, and this music, muffled bydistance and the trees, made him think of a queer company of thesecreatures on some roof far away in the sky, uttering their solemn musicto one another and
the moon in chorus.
It was, he felt at the time, a singular image to occur to him, yet itexpressed his sensation pictorially better than anything else. Theinstruments played such impossibly odd intervals, and the crescendos anddiminuendos were so very suggestive of cat-land on the tiles at night,rising swiftly, dropping without warning to deep notes again, and all insuch strange confusion of discords and accords. But, at the same time aplaintive sweetness resulted on the whole, and the discords of thesehalf-broken instruments were so singular that they did not distress hismusical soul like fiddles out of tune.
He listened a long time, wholly surrendering himself as his characterwas, 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 sofantastical and charming that my imagination was profoundly
Three John Silence Stories Page 13
