Chapter I: Part 1

THE PLACE CALLED DAGON

Herbert Gorman

BOOKS BY HERBERT GORMAN

GOLD BY GOLD
THE FOOL OF LOVE
THE TWO VIRGINITIES
THE PLACE CALLED DAGON
THE PROCESSION OF MASKS
NOTATIONS FOR A CHIMAERA
THE PETERBOROUGH ANTHOLOGY
THE BARCAROLE OF JAMES SMITH
HAWTHORNE: A STUDY IN SOLITUDE
JAMES JOYCE: HIS FIRST FORTY YEARS
A VICTORIAN AMERICAN: HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

The Place Called
Dagon

By Herbert Gorman

NEW YORK

George H. Doran Company

COPYRIGHT, 1927,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

THE PLACE CALLED DAGON

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
MARTHA
a mystery among
mysteries

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE PLACE CALLED DAGON

Chapter One

I

Doctor Dreeme, turning sleepily on his pillow, heard the clatter of a horse’s hoofs coming down the steep Leeminster Road. The steely clash on the rock-path tore abruptly through his semi-trance and he opened his eyes, scowling vaguely at the milky blur of ceiling. The horse stopped with a rough grating of hoofs below the window and the doctor sighed. Marlborough was like that. It was undoubtedly another farmer with a pain in his back who might just as well wait until morning. It was at night that his taciturn neighbors were most obsessed with the somber consequences of their lonely ailments. In daylight they would bear them with the dumb equanimity of animals, sitting behind drawn curtains or plodding painfully over their stony fields. But they were horribly afraid of dying at night. The bell clanked feebly. The doctor threw back his quilted coverlet of great square patches, rose in the darkness of the room, and strode over to the window. He leaned out, straining his eyes to see who stood in the gray mist of the moon outside his door.

“Who is it?” he called sharply. “Who, in the name of Heaven ... at this time of night....”

A boyish treble answered him.

“Doctor Dreeme? I’m Miles, Jeffrey Westcott’s hired boy. Mr. Westcott’s taken something awful. He wants for you to come and help him right away. He’s shot himself and....”

“I’ll be right down,” snapped the doctor.

He fumbled about the room, lit a kerosene oil-lamp, and hastily dressed himself, drawing his trousers on over his rumpled pyjamas. Pausing an instant before the cracked mirror he smoothed back his tousled hair and dashed some cold water from the china bowl upon his sleep-warm face. It was a square-cut visage, young, thin-lipped, and with long narrow eyes that stared back briefly at him. Two years’ arduous practice in Marlborough, a relentless precision of deaths and births and ailments, had etched tiny lines about his mouth and eyes and forehead, lines of watchfulness and concentration, but he was still surprisingly youthful in appearance and alert in action. He grasped his black bag and hurried down the stairs, slipping the bolt and stepping into the dim lane where the huge farm-horse pawed impatiently at the ground. The blank windows of the Slater house stared down at him gloomily as he turned to the boy, Miles, who perched like a small monkey on his mount.

“Are you sure that Jeffrey Westcott wants me to come?” asked Dreeme as he climbed to a seat on the blanket that served for a saddle. There was a minor note of amazement in his voice.

The boy said nothing but chirped to his horse and the huge beast swung in the lane and mounted the hill, slowly at first and then at a smart canter as the ascent eased its sharp angle. The blurred moon flew with them, trailing long bat-like wings of milky opacity across the crumbling stone walls and the buildings with their lurching outhouses. Beside them swept their broad shadow, a two-torsoed centaur, indistinct and formidable in outline. Looking back Dreeme could see the little town of Marlborough stretched out like a conglomeration of dark tombs. A cool air tingling with the freshness of impending rain flowed by his face. Low trees flung chunky green arms across the twisting fences at him. They were black in the dimmed moonlight. The shaggy hoofs of the horse thudded heavily on the sand-road. Suddenly the boy answered Dreeme’s question.

“He told me to fetch you, anyway,” he remarked to the darkness before him.

The doctor said nothing and the boy, turning his head, observed him fleetingly. Dreeme caught the flash of a small, dark, imp-like face and two dull-green eyes.

So far as the doctor knew nobody ever called at the Westcott farm. It was avoided territory, forbidden to children wandering through the byways between Marlborough and Leeminster and skirted hastily by the taciturn farmers who dwelt in its vicinity. Dreeme had observed the rambling white-washed buildings from the road often enough as he had passed on his way to various patients and occasionally he had seen Jeffrey Westcott ride into town for supplies, but that was all. The Westcotts took no part in the life of Marlborough. Indeed, they seemed frankly to court an ostracism that had long ago been willingly granted them by the unusual breed of natives who dwelt in this part of New England. Dreeme, curious and observant when he first arrived in Marlborough and took up the practice of his father’s old friend, Humphrey Lathrop, had asked questions about the Westcotts, as, indeed, he had about all the farmers in the neighbourhood, for he believed in mixing as much psychological insight as possible with his medicinal treatments, but he soon discovered that questions were not welcome in the town. An excessive reticence possessed these leather-skinned delvers in the soil, these small-shopkeepers, and even the brief scattering of professional men who conducted the affairs of Marlborough. Therefore, as Dreeme was an astute and adaptable young man, he speedily learned to keep his mouth shut and, at least outwardly, to suppress his curiosity. It was enough to serve as well as he could when he was called upon and to expend whatever mental energies he might have in the study of various profound books on medicine and psychology. Although time passed slowly it passed agreeably for loneliness did not obsess Dreeme. He was New England enough himself to slip naturally into a rut of reticence and to occupy himself with his own thoughts. Still there were many times when of all the curious folk in his environment he let his cogitations wander to the Westcotts.

They were unusual in their abandonment of the common intercourse of daily life. Apparently they had no friends, not even those cursory friends who met in the Post Office and General Store and discussed in brief bursts of monosyllables the politics and phenomena of the day. They were decidedly sufficient unto themselves. Dreeme always thought of the Westcotts as a plural number although he had never laid eyes on Mrs. Westcott. He knew that she existed and that was all. This, of course, was extraordinary in a small New England town where every individual might be supposed to know intimately the smallest details of a neighbor’s life; where, as a rule, the women, at least, maintained a sharp and malicious watch on one another. But this, after all, was an unusual New England town as Humphrey Lathrop had insisted to the young man when Dreeme first ventured upon Marlborough.

“You have seen New Englanders all your life,” the older doctor had said, “and you know their usual characteristics, reticence tinged with curiosity, religious fervor jaundiced with personal hypocrisy, an old pride bolstered by a stony soil, a nasal twang possibly induced by generations of psalm-singing through the nose, a stubborn zeal in labor and an inborn stinginess. You have seen that type of New Englander and I do not go so far as to say that you will not find it here; but there is a type of New Englander in this place that you have never seen before and of which I knew nothing until I came here. Marlborough and, to a lesser degree, Leeminster are cul-de-sacs into which an ancient backwash of old blood has flowed. It has been unrelieved by any new influx for two hundred years or more. It is not easy to get up here, you know, and once here there is little to hold an ambitious man. That is why you will go away some day. These people have dwelt here in this valley so opportunely surrounded by the Florida mountains and have intermarried for generations. Some day, perhaps the day when you leave for ever, I will tell you what curious breed of Puritan drifted into this valley and established these communities. You will be amazed, for they are a breed of which you catch but furtive glances and hints in Pilgrim and Puritan chronicles. A curious intermixture of ethical and Dionysiac madness produced the forefathers of these people to whom you must administer as wisely as you can and with a minimum of words and questions.” The old doctor cleared his throat with a tremendous harrumph, his elephantine body quivering like a great jelly-fish, and Dreeme decided that he had been told nothing at all. If he was to solve the mystery of Marlborough--and there _was_ a mystery, for he felt it like two huge dark wings hovering over the entire community--he must do it all by himself.

For two years now the mystery had stood just outside his door, a dark and disquieting impalpability that teased him into fruitless suppositions, that revealed itself fleetingly in the swift side-long glitter of cautious eyes, that threaded the valley and the town with a dim muffled sense of something unearthly. And yet the sun shone brightly enough, the farmers went about their business with the usual grim doggedness of men who scrape a difficult living from miserly soil, and the thin-faced women, scrawny-armed and bowed in the shoulders, existed as women do in a small world of ceaseless irritating tasks. There were moments when Dreeme decided that there was no mystery at all, that his imagination was playing tricks with him, and that his intuitions were the idle outgrowths of a mind too much concerned with itself and revolving inwardly and creating vague bogies for lack of other occupations. But after such moments of doubt would come still days when the lurching houses seemed to watch him maliciously and when the still trees, flinging their black shadows across the yellow glitter of deserted roads, would stand as symbols of some invisible prowling specter that patrolled the valley and observed him with blank lidless eyes. His flesh crawled on his bones and it was only by an effort that he put the obsession from him. He would say to himself that it was ennui, that it was a morbid reaction to his existence in a small world where, in spite of his ministrations, he was an outsider, that it was nerves, but, considering the matter deliberately, he knew that it was none of these likely causes. He possessed no nerves; he was not weary of his loneliness; his mind was not too idle. It was something outside of him pushing gently against his mind.

II

The horse thudded ponderously up the road.

“How did Westcott shoot himself?” asked Dreeme suddenly.

The boy turned his thin face and green eyes over his small hunched shoulder, opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it firmly.

“I calculate that he’ll tell you that,” he finally answered. He kicked ferociously at the horse’s ribs with his small bare feet.

A few drops of rain dashed against Dreeme’s face. It was extraordinarily dark now for the moon had disappeared, swallowed up in the soundless rain-cloud that stretched across the sky like a monstrous sable circus-tent. More by sense than anything else the young doctor knew that he had passed the old burned mill and an instant later the horse clattered across the small wooden bridge which spanned the narrow Saccarac River. He was now on the final stretch of dirt-road leading to the Westcott farm. This route was exceedingly familiar to Dreeme for he traversed it often, going either to some farm or to the larger town of Leeminster where there was a bank, a stone school-house, a deserted gin-distillery crumbling to ruin, and a small court-house. The road turned in a great slow arc and was bordered by low stone fences, dejected and wrecked by weather into wide breaches at intervals. Between the roadway and the feeble barriers grew occasional clumps of birch trees and beneath them in season bloomed the dusty black-eyed Susans and asthma-compelling golden-rod. Behind the fences stretched the ploughed fields and grass meadows of the various small farms, all of them sloping downward for the Marlborough-Leeminster road progressed along a ridge. A faint mingled smell of piled dung, rotting hay and skinny poultry permeated the air. Dreeme knew the territory well enough by day. The white-washed houses, set well back from the road and a story more in the rear than they were in front because of the ground slope, lifted tilted smoking chimneys. Dogs, cursed with legions of perpetually active fleas, barked from sagging porches and blear-eyed cocks crowed in the wire-enclosures behind the long lurching kitchens that seemed to have been added as afterthoughts to the dispirited houses. Some of these dwellings were astonishingly old and even the white-wash failed to conceal their dejected venerability. The doors and windows, sunken by the years as though Time had leaned on the lintels and sills with a heavy elbow, leered like the features of a twisted face. All this was in the daytime. At night a profound darkness enveloped these staggering structures. There were no lights in the small opaque windows, nothing but the blank glow of the moon and stars. The farmers of Marlborough sought their beds at an early hour, and the candles and kerosene oil which still sufficed for illumination cost money. Only when the moon was at its brightest did the houses step somewhat out of their brooding night shadow and turn the incurious eyes of their windows toward the curving road. Then they seemed to squat like an unfriendly array of old crones in soiled white wrappers, watching the highway along which so many strange figures had passed since the first mysterious settlers arrived in the valley and found it a likely place wherein to raise their hewn log-houses and their solitary mill.

The horse stopped suddenly and Dreeme, surmising that he had reached his journey’s end, slipped to the ground, his feet clattering on loose pebbles as he maintained his balance. A long ominous growl immediately before him greeted his footsteps and he drew back with some trepidation. He knew all about the half-savage dogs that patrolled the farm-yards at night. The boy hurried by him and there was a sound of poles being pulled out of their sockets at a gateway. A cold damp snout thrust itself against Dreeme’s hand just as the boy hissed an unintelligible phrase and an instant later there was the sound of a heavy body forcing its way through the bushes which lined the road. Dreeme knew that the dog was watching him from a distance with savage curiosity. The boy came back and grasped the rope that served for bridle on the horse. “This is the way, doctor,” he said. “Don’t be afraid of the dog.” They stumbled through what was apparently an aperture in the fence and followed a twisted and hummocky path. Dreeme tripped over unsuspected hollows and small jutting boulders until they circled the dark bulk of the house and were at a rear door. A few drops of rain pattered against his face as he looked up at the rear windows. It was curious that he could perceive no least vestige of light emanating from the blank panes. The building stood morosely in a pool of high trees and this intensified the darkness about it. At the door the boy knocked delicately, his thin knuckles playing upon the splintered woodwork, and, after a moment, while Dreeme felt very foolish and slightly startled, there were a few whispered words with some invisible personage who had shot back a series of bolts. The brief beam of a candle leaped across the doctor’s face and he felt himself urged forward and into a room where the shadows fled sluggishly before the feeble whiplash of light from the cylinder of wax. There was a rattling sound as the bolts were shot and Dreeme knew that he was locked in the Westcott farm-house.

Clutching his black bag, he stared curiously about him but all that he could perceive was a simply furnished room, the usual “sitting room” of a farm-house with its few stuffed chairs, its wax flowers under glass on a side table, its faded family pictures, a framed silver plate from a coffin, and an antiquated spinning wheel that squatted forlornly in a corner. Before him stood a stocky figure holding a fat candle in one hand and directing him toward an opposite door with the other. The meager flame from the candle slanted back and illuminated a deep red beard and two glassy eyes. Dreeme, his vision clearing in the feeble glow, noted that his companion was evidently the hired man, a burly figure absurdly short for his girth and garmented in dejected looking blue overalls and a faded woolen shirt. This apparition was in his stocking feet and he made no sound as he padded across the floor. The hired man said nothing but cleared his throat with a choking sound as though he were endeavoring to loosen unused vocal chords, and then, apparently giving it up as something beyond his powers, proceeded toward the door which he had indicated with an awkward flourish of a square hairy hand. He rapped timidly at the door.

“Wagner?” cried a sharp voice from within.

Wagner opened the door a trifle, thrust in his shaggy red head, and seemed to croak hoarsely.

“All right! All right!” the voice snapped immediately, and Wagner stood back and motioned Doctor Dreeme toward the patch of yellow light that poured through the half-opened door.

III

It was a small room into which Dreeme ventured and one in which the walls seemed to push forward, an aspect intensified, perhaps, by the tall lurching cases of books which surrounded the square table at which Jeffrey Westcott sat. There were books everywhere, in the cases, scattered over the table, and piled in slumping heaps on the floor. The greater portion of them were huge tomes, bound in old buckrams, in worm-eaten moroccos, or in yellow vellum. The dull gold lettering, subdued in the glow of Westcott’s kerosene-lamp, seemed like the sleepy half-shut eyes of somnolent beasts waiting patiently for the word of the master who should bring them to life. But there was no word now. They rested, these mysterious beasts of ancient knowledge, holding their secrets close to their muted hearts. Dreeme paused just inside the door staring about him in amazement.

An impatient exclamation roused him to his professional duties and he turned toward Jeffrey Westcott, observing him closely for the first time.

“Good evening or good morning,” remarked the man seated by the table. “I have lost count of the hours, doctor.”

Westcott was a heavily-built man, smooth-faced, and with a shaven head. This round skull, blue with an incipient growth of dark hair, reminded Dreeme irresistibly of the tonsured cranium of some medieval friar. It was curiously ridged in the center, as though the two sides of the skull had been pressed together while molten and so joined, leaving a cloven line where the bone had bulged upward on either side. The ears were long and rose thin and prominent on either side of this curious head. The broad brow slanted back at an obvious angle and the chin, blue also with incipient hair, thrust forward aggressively, the ensemble giving the impression of semi-malignant imperiousness. Westcott’s nose was broken and this accident accentuated the curious profile which he presented when he turned his head, a profile almost ape-like but redeemed by a certain vitality of knowledge. His eyes, large, coal-black and motionless, glittered dully, but it was not the dull glitter of stupidity. Rather was it a repressed but unceasing watchfulness that was somehow mocking in its semblance of indifference. Dreeme was reminded of the eyes of a cat when it permits a bird to flutter within a few feet of its curved claws.

“It is a very fine library, I assure you,” continued the farmer with a casual flutter of one sun-burned hand toward the lurching cases. Dreeme sensed a purring irony in the man’s voice. “I should like to show it to you but just now I am somewhat inconvenienced by this cursed bullet wound.”

Dreeme with a muttered apology, hurried forward fumbling at the catch to his black bag.

“It is not often--at least in this part of the world--that one sees so many books,” he said. “You must excuse me.”

His amazement was frank and he made no attempt to conceal it.

“You are freely pardoned,” replied the ironic voice.

The doctor knelt and began to remove the bloodstained bandage that swathed the plump calf of the farmer.

“How did this happen?” he inquired as the wrapping slipped away and he saw the black bullet-hole surrounded by a crusted clot of blood.

“Experiment,” returned Westcott shortly.

“Experiment?” echoed Dreeme questioningly, glancing up into the still black eyes. Westcott reached deliberately for a cigar, drawing one from the large box that stood on the table at his elbow. He said nothing but stared blandly at the doctor as he lighted the long dark weed. Dreeme, flushed and feeling foolish, turned back to his labor. He decided that Westcott was an offensive brute.

“I want a pan of hot water,” he said, after inspecting the wound. “I shall have to probe for the bullet. It may pain you a bit.”

He felt a moment’s elation at the idea of giving Westcott pain.

The farmer turned his head and shouted toward the door.

“Wagner!” he cried. “Wagner!”

In the short pause that ensued, Dreeme, still kneeling before the stocky Westcott, studied the worn backs of the books in the case opposite him. They seemed to emanate an atmosphere that was ominous. There was something dark and forbidding about them, an intangible suggestion of an evil culture. The crowding walls advanced stealthily, bringing an aura of suffocation with them.

The farmer cursed softly and pleasantly to himself.

“My dear doctor,” he began, “I am afraid you will have to....”

“What is it, Jeff?” inquired a feminine voice, low and husky, behind them.

Both men turned at this unexpected sound. Westcott was plainly put out and for a moment his large eyes glittered angrily. Dreeme gazed upward at the woman who had so quietly entered the room with a curiosity which almost instantly merged into amazement. There are women who at a first glance arrest the attention not so much by any ulterior beauty or unique qualities of bearing as by an inward spirit which seems to beat fiercely against the thin walls of flesh and strive vehemently to liberate itself from its entangling disguises. These women may not be beautiful in the fleshy sense of the word, but somehow they achieve more than the semblance of beauty in the eyes of the sensitive observer. Dreeme saw such a woman before him and knew instantly and instinctively that it was not alone the comeliness of her features that so casually and indifferently subdued and betrayed the deliberate impartiality of his reason. He saw immediately an extraordinary inward impulse that climbed in her bosom and all but trembled on her blood-red mouth. It was her eyes and mouth that first seized his imagination. These eyes were dark and they glowed beneath large white lids that drooped somewhat as with the ennui of identical days. They seemed endless in depth like half-concealed forest springs and yet a quickening spark glimmered in these unfathomable lakes of hushed amber fire. The mouth was full with curling lips almost archaic in their contour, and Dreeme was vaguely reminded of his adolescent ideas of the snaky-haired Medusa. There was a subtle cruelty in this mouth.

“I told you to stay in your own room, my dear helpful Martha,” said Westcott, his chin thrusting forward, “but since you are here, permit me to present my invaluable friend, Doctor--er--Dreeme, I think. This is my wife, doctor.”

She did not glance toward Dreeme.

“Wagner has gone to the----” She left the sentence unfinished. “I thought you would need hot water.”

“Your mind is always acute, Martha,” remarked Westcott, giving her a malicious look. “And who sent Wagner to the----”

“I did,” she responded coolly, placing the basin of hot water on the floor close by Dreeme who still remained on one knee gazing at her. Westcott smiled sourly and turned to the doctor.

“Come, doctor,” he said. “You must be wanting to get back to your comfortable bed.”

Dreeme flushed and turned confusedly to his labors.

For a moment there was silence.

“The age of amazement,” said Westcott softly to the air, “is worthy of a study in itself. There are so many ways of considering it.”

He winced as the probe touched the raw flesh.

“Softly, doctor, softly,” he begged. “Now take the age of amazement as it affects the individual. Is it not true, my dear doctor, that if we knew why a man was amazed and each time that he was amazed we should know a great deal about him?”

Dreeme, intent on his work, said nothing.

“The question is merely theoretical,” proceeded Westcott. “I do not expect an answer. I, for my own part, mingle so seldom in the world of men that I have but small opportunity to put my theory in practice but whenever I do see a man I strive to observe his surprised reactions to things. It tells me something about him.”

The bullet slipped from the wound and Dreeme busied himself for a moment in washing the torn flesh. At length he looked up for the silence seemed to invite him to speak, to carry on a conversation that was rather meaningless. He stared into Westcott’s dark expressionless eyes.

“And me?” he said, smiling. “What have you learned about me in the few minutes that I have been here?”

Westcott was obviously waiting for the question.

“Your reactions of surprise were obvious,” he answered, cocking his head on one side. He began to count the points off on his fingers.

“Number one. You were amazed at finding so excellent and unexpected a library here. I gather from that that your idea of the literacy of this part of the world is not high. I agree with you in the main--but there are exceptions everywhere, doctor. You were also amazed at finding in me a man not wholly a stranger to the subtleties of the mind. I may be flattering myself in this assumption but I do not think so. In other words, you had thought of me as a mysterious, surly, country clodhopper.”

There was a soft snarl in his voice. Before Dreeme could expostulate he went on with his enumeration.

“Number two. You were amazed to hear that my little wound was the result of an experiment. It piqued a curiosity which, unfortunately for you, I shall not satisfy.”

“I assure you, I----” began Dreeme stiffly, but the soft voice proceeded.

“Number three. You were amazed to see my wife. Well, I hardly blame you. She amazes me at times.”

Again the soft snarl permeated his voice.

Dreeme instinctively glanced at Mrs. Westcott. She was standing by a small window gazing out on the darkness and he could see no more than the cool oval of her face. She seemed to be looking upward toward the rainy sky with a strained attentiveness that suggested the listener. It was, perhaps, the rain to which she was listening, for Dreeme could hear the soft gurgle and suck of the water as it dripped outside the window. With a final skillful twist he fastened the new bandage about Westcott’s calf and stood upright. The farmer looked at him calmly, his lips slightly apart, and Dreeme could see the man’s long yellow teeth.

“I should say from the casual glimpse I have had of you,” remarked Westcott, “that you are a capable doctor, a painstaking man, a sensitive person perhaps a little stiff in reactions to unexpected things, and an individual who must fight against the impulse of being--well, not a busybody but one who is driven too far sometimes by the itch of curiosity.”

Dreeme laughed aloud and picked up his bag. Absurdly enough, he could feel the presence of Mrs. Westcott behind him, a presence like the soft invisible approach of some great feline through the impenetrable darkness of a forest.

“Your analysis is amusing,” he said. “But must I take it too seriously?”

“You must take it for what it is worth,” replied Westcott, fastening his yellow teeth upon his cigar and puffing meditatively. “Be good enough, my dear doctor, to send your little bill by mail. I can dress the wound myself or have it done for me by ... Wagner.”

He looked up sharply, removing his cigar as the hint of a smile died from his face.

“Doctor Dreeme,” he said. “I am a peculiar man. I am a student who has found a secluded harborage. I do not care to make acquaintances. They are unpleasant responsibilities and they deprive me of that leisure which I owe to my researches. I live my own life in my own way. I do not want to be disturbed by the curiosity of--er--neighbors.”

Dreeme bowed silently, his face flushed, and turned to the door. Yes, he decided, Westcott was an offensive brute. The farmer smiled faintly, his cloven head bending forward in the lamp-light.

“You must pardon my abruptness,” he remarked. “I am a solitary anchorite except for my little circle and am not, perhaps, as courteous as I should be.”

Dreeme said nothing. He could sense the faint mockery in the farmer’s stiff speech.

“Will you show the doctor to the door?” said Westcott gently to his wife.

She started from her attitude of rapt listening and turned toward Dreeme, her heavy-lidded casual eyes flitting coolly across his face. Then she moved slowly toward the door. Dreeme’s last picture of Westcott was of a curiously cloven head suddenly bowed above a huge tome. He could hear the soft rustling of Mrs. Westcott’s skirt as she crossed the sitting room floor. His heart pounded rapidly as he moved through the closeness of the room after her. It was as though a strange drug that affected his breathing filled the air. He heard her unbar the door, and, as it opened, a rush of cool rain-washed air swept across his face bringing instant relief from the choked sensation that had overpowered him in the room. It was still raining, a desultory and gloomy patter that rattled on the trees and the tiny roof of the back porch. The wet air was filled with the fresh scent of water and soaked grass. Dreeme drew in long breaths of it as he stepped bare-headed into the rain, wondering somewhat vaguely how he was to be conducted back to town. Just as he was about to bid Mrs. Westcott good-by and was turning toward her he felt her arm fall sharply against his shoulder.

“Do you hear anything?” she asked in her low husky voice.

He strained his ears in some surprise and for a moment in the patter of rain he seemed to hear a thin rushing overhead as though a flock of heavy-winged birds were beating through the night air. The sound swept into nothingness so suddenly that he decided it was no more than the blood beating in his own ears or the upper whir of the rain. It was as though a door had been suddenly closed.

“No,” he answered, “I don’t hear anything but the rain.”

Her hand pressed against him and he could sense in the darkness the soft rise and fall of her bosom. The blood started to race through his pulses again and the choked feeling that had persisted during the short space of time while they had crossed the dark room to the door filled him. He felt his lips trembling as though with a faint palsy. As he strained his eyes violently toward her he could dimly note the outline of her face turned toward his and he knew that her heavy-lidded eyes were wide open and fixed with a disturbing intensity upon him. Her full blood-red lips moved slowly. Then her hand dropped from his arm, and it was as though a strange power had been removed from him.

“Good-night,” she said in her low muffled tones.

The door closed softly and he heard the bolts being shot into place. Still he stood there, knowing that she, too, was standing just on the other side of the bolted door. After a moment’s pause he heard her footsteps passing slowly and evenly through the room. Dreeme turned to the rain, a bewildered smile at his own impressionability creeping to his lips. At the same moment he heard Miles clucking to the horse. Blundering through the dark, he stumbled toward the road. Before he reached the gate it began to rain furiously, a heavy roaring down-pour that soaked him to the skin.

Chapter Two

I

A rainy night abdicated to a warm sun-shot day. Dreeme, who had slept late after his disturbed rest, rose to a world that moved calmly and soberly toward mid-day. From his window he could see the weather-beaten sides of houses basking in the tranquil light and hear the deliberate and heavy footsteps of occasional pedestrians drifting down to the post office or the general store. This was his Marlborough as he knew it best, a sober and silent community that clustered about the narrow Saccarac River and occupied itself with the daily functions of a somewhat abstemious living. Superficially Marlborough was uninteresting although it was not without a certain suggested placidity that might appeal strongly to the man in search of quietness, rest, and an escape from the febrile business of that greater world of cities where life was such a strenuous matter. There was little to see here and still less to beguile one. It is true that occasional youngsters ventured into the river but they did not make a habit of it. There were no halls of entertainment, no motion pictures, no wandering tent shows to raise their canvas on one of the surrounding meadows. Social intercourse was limited to casual greetings and infrequent meals. Each Sunday witnessed the crowding of the small white Congregational church and a dry and unimpressive religious service. Thus for one day in the week the space before the church was crowded with horses and small buggies and even one or two rattling Fords which disappeared as swiftly as ghosts after the service was completed. The reticent church-goers eddied from the door of the house of worship, mumbled a few words to one another, and then sped away toward their separate farms or strolled gloomily to their houses in town, their new Sunday shoes creaking woefully under the strain of unexpected use. Their voices seemed dry and rusty as though with long disuse and an absurd self-consciousness emphasized the natural awkwardness of their bearing. They plucked gingerly at unaccustomed collars and viewed one another with dumbly diffident eyes. Yet they possessed some bond in common, some link of connected life that bound them together into a whole, something that arrayed them against strangers and “furriners” although it was not evidenced in any obvious camaraderie.

It was not alone the bond of environment although that was evident enough. Men could not live year in and year out in the same tiny circumscribed area, scraping at the same granite-pitted soil, walking through the same tree-bordered streets, turning in at doors that were white-washed or green-painted replicas of one another, enduring the same biting winters when the surface of the river was a white plate of steel and the same scorching summers when the locusts shrilled in the brown stubble, witnessing the birth and death of the same flowers and trees, talking the same monosyllabic language and praying in the same manner to a far-away stone-faced God, without becoming infinitesimal portions of something that was unified and progressing in a solitary direction. Therefore the superficial characteristics of the men of Marlborough were the same just as their harsh voices sounded the same unlovely crow-like chord. But their similarity extended beyond this outer covering of manners, gestures, and appearances. Their humorlessness, their extraordinary seriousness, their unimpeachable reticence, their thinly-disguised surliness, all these deplorable and hermit-like traits seemed to point (at least in the young doctor’s mind) toward an unhappy and despairing consciousness. It might be that they were tired of living. They might be a weary race of ghostly fatalists expressing tacitly their disapprobation of existence. It was true, the young doctor realized, that a portion (and a goodly portion, too,) of this desolate aspect of Marlborough might well be the mirage of his own brooding nature. He was imaginative enough, he knew, to see things in a colored guise. His own feelings rushed into his eyes and his mind and shifted his perspective. And his feelings were naturally morbid. Still, he was sure that the subterranean strangeness of Marlborough was not alone due to his gloomy fancy. He might play upon it and enlarge it far beyond its actual proportions but there must be something there to begin with, something that was the core, so to speak, about which the community had grown, covering it with layer after layer of taciturn generations until it disappeared completely. He strove to fix his mind upon these people in a rigidly impartial historical survey. Perhaps in this way he might reach light, might, through a series of logical and psychological deductions, define the spirit of Marlborough to his own satisfaction, but he discovered, after an intensive trial at such cerebration, that the results were meager and dissatisfying. He was not an inspired analyst. He was only a curious young man.

Here is a forgotten valley, he thought, a cul-de-sac in the hills of western New England. Into this sequestered place came the sons of Pilgrims and the Puritans and here they raised their first log-houses, their mills, their trading stations with the Indians, and their fortified church. They had no time for the lighter pleasures of living, and, indeed, their ethical conception of existence forbade them. They eschewed the colored ribbands of life. They were grim, therefore, long-faced and unsmiling and their days were taken up with clearing away virgin forests, struggling with the hordes of painted Indians, raising houses and churches and mills and forts and armories. The dark soil, spotted with boulders, fought with the Indians against them and they subdued it by the might of their tenacious minds and unresting arms. They had no time for love or laughter but they had plenty of time for labor and a taciturn doggedness not always unbroken by sighs. Surely the women must have sighed. Life was not a career but an onerous duty. It was a profound struggle against formidable and illimitable foes. What could such a people do but grow into a fierce, silent, unsmiling, and unimaginative race? What became of their animal natures in such a land of travail as this? Would they be diverted into a fanatical zeal for their God who bore always in His right hand a drawn sword? Or would the Dionysiac passions, the ancient inward pagan urges, break forth at odd and unsuspected moments in bright flares of malignant color? It was difficult to conceive of a complete suppression of all the old zests of living and Dreeme could see no way out for them but by a dark perversion that twisted them into sudden outbreaks or secret and terrible channels.

Well, these were the ancestors of the farmers of Marlborough. They had lived their drab lives and passed away and been buried in the forgotten graveyards and their sons, carrying in their hearts and brains this sullen heritage, had come after them and these sons had been equally reticent, taciturn, somber, and forbidding. With the years a slight leaven might have introduced itself, a gradual lightening of the colors of living, but it had not been enough to erase the ancient characteristics. Elsewhere in New England, in the busy manufacturing districts now dotted with cities and towns where the clacking looms and roaring machinery were never still, it was different. There the old urges were indelibly dead, perished for want of an iron breed to carry them on, overwhelmed by the great floods of foreign immigrations, devoured by a materialistic lust that knew no bounds. And in other places, in the agricultural corners of the land, a kindlier albeit somewhat threadbare tradition manifested itself. Dreeme knew for he had lived in those other portions of the old New England and had seen how drastically the land had changed. An occasional Puritan strain, a brief old-world courtesy--a trifle grim, to be sure, and a propped-up pride still persisted, but for the most part it was as Humphrey Lathrop had said--a land of curiosity, hypocrisy, labor, and stinginess. It was true that in certain secluded corners, in sun-dappled village streets, in twisted roads bordered by crumbling stone fences, in thinned woodlands flashing with the slim-white trunks of swaying birches, a hint of the old New England lingered for the pilgrim imaginative enough to sense it, a hint of mellow days and grave silences. It glowed at its brightest in the red cheeks of the apples and the gold and crimson of the sumach. It was there like a wistful ghost roaming through deserted roads. But it was not in Marlborough and no historical perspective could satisfy Dreeme as to why the community emanated the atmosphere which it undoubtedly did.

He might say that these farmers were the successors of the iron-willed pioneers who had darkened the soil with their blood and sweat, but that was not saying enough. They were all this, and they were something more beside. Behind them was something secret and profound. Under the layers of generations. Although they might be no more than vaguely conscious of it, Dreeme was almost satisfied in his mind that the nature of these natives was colored and subdued by a breed of ancestors who had possessed some inexplicable outlet for their suppressed madnesses. The young doctor could give no logical reasons for his conviction, but there it was. Perhaps Humphrey Lathrop had hinted it to him. These people differed from the other New Englanders, argued Dreeme to himself, in that they had been diverted in some mysterious manner from the obvious development of the New England temperament. Fortune had strangely enough sequestered this community and kept it intact through so many years and generations that the ancient characteristics had persisted on. No influx of foreigners with their European schemes of living had muddied it, for foreigners did not come here. No manufacturing boom had smashed it to pieces and founded a new world upon it. Marlborough stretched out beneath the summer sun and awaited the investigation of the close student of ethnology. Although its doors and windows might be open it seemed as though invisible skeins of mystery swayed before these apertures and defeated the eyes of the brain and intuitions. Dreeme seemed more conscious of this than ever as he perfected his toilet and prepared for what the day might offer. His dormant curiosity, which he had stilled so well, lifted a sluggish head and peered curiously about.

The young doctor descended the stairs slowly for the breakfast which had been prepared for him by his next-door neighbor, Mrs. Slater.

II

Mrs. Slater was methodical. It was her duty to run in during the morning with Dreeme’s breakfast and the mail which she collected at the post office when she did her early morning buying. She never called it “shopping.” For his dinner (served at noon in Marlborough) and supper Dreeme crossed over to Mrs. Slater’s house where he sat in the midst of five pop-eyed children, speechless Walden Slater, the Reverend George Burroughs--invariably called “Preacher” by the community, and Mrs. Slater herself, a small, plump, dumpy woman, originally from Leeminster, who was rather more officious than practical. Not being “born Marlborough” she did not affect the complete reticence of her neighbors. Still, she had lived in the community long enough to learn to refrain from displaying curiosity about things. It was only by a fluttering of her eyes and a somewhat cross-eyed inspection of things in general that she revealed the fact that she was aware of matters which puzzled her. It was this fluttering of the eyes that greeted Dreeme as he entered the room back of his office on the ground-floor, a room which served as a breakfast chamber and a study. He immediately understood that she had heard the arrival of the horse in the night, and he waited, a trifle maliciously, to see if she would refer to it. He had never looked at her intently, and he did not intend to do so now. Indeed, he had never looked at any of the Slater ménage with enough curiosity to fix their features in his mind. He had a general idea, of course, of Slater and the “Preacher,” one was slouchy and the other was dark, but he could not tell the children apart. Indeed, he was uncertain as to their sex. Were three of them boys and two girls, or was it the other way around? He sat down at the table smiling to himself.

Mrs. Slater scurried about the table, removing the blue china cover from the platter of fried eggs and ham and pushing the three letters closer to Dreeme’s plate. There was a highly symbolic dolphin on the blue china cover. It served as a handle. It was a bad handle now for its tail had been smashed off during some disastrous washing.

“It seems as though I would work myself to death,” Mrs. Slater said in her peculiarly breathless voice. “I was out of bed at five-thirty this morning getting Walden off to the field. That man sleeps like a log. You have to shake him and shake him. And now it’s you. And then it will be the boys.”

“You don’t have to shake me, anyway, Mrs. Slater,” said Dreeme, his mouth full of toast.

A small woman shaking a huge man. Get up! Get up! A poodle snapping at a somnolent St. Bernard. Mrs. Slater sighed, fluttered her eyes, and gazed in a very cross-eyed manner at the design on the wall-paper. She caught a wisp of her straw-colored hair and tucked it into the tight knob on the back of her head. Her arms were covered with freckles and her nails were blunted and broken. Dreeme slit his letters open and looked at them briefly, letting them flutter to the floor. One was a catalogue for medical goods. “Use our electric frictioneer; it enlivens the blood.” Another was a subscription blank for an agricultural magazine. How to mix a cheap fertilizer. The third announced a new supply of seeds and bulbs at Williams’ Grain Shop, Main Street, Leeminster.

“Did you sleep well last night, Mrs. Slater?” inquired Dreeme. This was malice aforethought.

“If you worked as hard as I do _you’d_ sleep well,” she replied. The design on the wall-paper enchanted her.

“Well,” said Dreeme, smiling broadly. “You’d better hurry along and get the boys ready for school. It is later than usual, you know.”

Mrs. Slater walked slowly toward the door, small, plump, a bantam of a woman, her eyes fluttering fiercely. When she reached the threshold she paused and turned back.

“I hope you won’t be late for dinner,” she declared. “There’s corn-beef and new cabbage.”

“I’ll be early, then,” announced Dreeme.

She hovered for a moment with fluttering eyes and then walked out, slapping the door to behind her.

Dreeme smiled happily. He was getting to be quite a denizen of Marlborough himself. He could keep his mouth shut and perhaps, after all, it was a good thing. There was strength in silence. There was an advantage in it, too. It was nobody’s business that he had been called to the Westcott farm and he knew in his soul that the natives were all banded together so far as he was concerned. They would tell _him_ nothing. He was a stranger. Although he might live there for fifty years he would still be a stranger. He could open his heart as generously as he might, still he knew that there would be no reciprocity from Marlborough. Even Mrs. Slater (and his daily presence in her house created a sort of inescapable intimacy) kept her own counsels. He was not on the “inside” with anybody.

Finishing his breakfast he rose to his feet and wandered about the small room in a desultory fashion. There was nothing much to see there except his shelves of books and nothing seemed farther away from him at this moment than books or study. He was too restless to read and yet he could hardly define his restlessness. Something spoke to him in the back of his brain but it spoke with a small muffled voice, and he could not understand the words. Without being conscious of it he was brooding about some tangled mystery and he would have to wait until the secret lifted boldly out of the dark waves of his subconsciousness and he could see it in the bright sunshine of understanding. He sensed something. Like a lean dog with dilated nostrils he was aware of a dim carefully-concealed trail that led into the tenebrous gloom of Marlborough. He would have to go to Humphrey Lathrop, he reflected, and force that ancient intellect to divulge the secrets of the community. Humphrey might not know all, but at least he could indicate the right trail, a trail that could be followed to the very end, and at the end of that trail would not be a pot of gold, perhaps, but assuredly a pot of sulphur. It was true that Humphrey had warned him against curiosity, but there were times when curiosity ceased to be a mere impertinence and translated itself into a malady of the soul that could only be cured by the frankest revelation. Dreeme smiled a bit at putting the thought so solemnly to himself, but there it was, and he was forced to admit that his curiosity was steadily developing into a huge monster that would certainly devour him. It was no longer a titillation of the mind, but an agony of the spirit. He had lived in Marlborough for two years now, and he had rigorously caged this curiosity concerning the community, but he had never killed it. It had been drugged by books and the casual meditations of a New England mind, but it had never been put out of the way entirely. There were moments when it had stirred sluggishly behind its bars, rising slowly to its dark feet and peering out into the light with vague green eyes. Now Dreeme felt the fragile bars being snapped one after the other, and he knew that sooner or later the beast would step forth and either destroy him or be destroyed by him. All this, he imagined, was the result of a loneliness that had not preyed too much upon him at first, but which had been there all the time, gathering strength and biding its time. He had not been satisfied all these quiet months. He had been drugged by his own weariness of spirit. And now, at the touch of a hand, he was awake and conscious of a problem looming before him that seemed as high as the Himalayas.