XVIII

 

 

 

WHEN on the day after my first mountain climb I stepped out of my house and went down the street, I became aware of a man standing at the street corner staring at me with two gleaming cat’s eyes. I went on my way, but I felt he was sneaking after me. When I turned round he looked aside, when I halted he stood and gazed at the wares in a shop window. I entered a house: when I came out I was met by two gleaming cat’s eyes from the street corner.

 

Since that time he has followed me, persecuted me, day out day in, year after year.

 

When I enter an hotel he slinks after me and sits down with his friends at the nearest table. I can hear him cackle with his peculiar laugh that resembles a night-jar’s note, and I have a presentiment that he is talking about me. If it should happen that I hurt my foot and strike the sore place on one of the cobble stones in the street, so that I wince and my face works with the pain, he comes to meet me with an elated self-satisfied air, and doffs his hat to his knees as he greets me, accentuating his politeness so that I may notice the insult concealed under it; but if I should happen to have a handful of aces and trumps he slinks down a bye-lane as soon as he sees me, even from a great distance, for in that case he has no desire to meet me. I only get a glimpse of his crooked back, which reminds me of a whipped cur’s, and a furtive spiteful look out of his gleaming cat’s eyes.

 

But, yesterday, as I saw him from afar turn suddenly into a side alley, I hastily took a cross-cut and met him; planted myself right in front of him, and looked him in the face. He laughed in the way men laugh in desperate confusion, and his cat’s eyes dropped as a weapon dashed out of an opponent’s hand.

 

“Why do enclose your dirty guts in glass?” asked I.

 

At that he jumped as if I had stuck a knife through him, and shot a furtive look at me so no full of spite, so stark with gall that I felt as if the uncleanness of it spurted over my face; and he blushed suddenly with an unspeakable shame, as if I had taken him in adultery.

 

Then I cried gleefully: “Now I have you! You are one of those who trade upon the coward’s shame over himself, and his spite against sins that really exist in his own evil conscience.”