Chapter II: Part 2

The touch of a hand! Dreeme had been forcing his mind away from the thought that tugged at him, but now he gave way to it as he picked up his hat and walked out of the house and up the lane toward the old burned mill and the bridge over the Saccarac River. His feet fell pleasantly on the dark soil as he strode along. He had been curious before, but he could date the fierce restlessness of his curiosity to that moment the night before when Mrs. Westcott had pressed against him in the rain and listened to noises that were no noises, after all, in the black clouds. As he walked along the narrow rising street bordered with the unblinking windows of the clapboard houses, his thoughts revolved about the Westcotts. He had seen the surly type of New England farmer, the secret drunkard, the illiterate misogynist, but none of them had been like Jeffrey Westcott. There was a curious finish to Westcott, the evident marks of a culture that extended far beyond Marlborough and which possessed something European in its fleeting polish. It had not been manifested in words so much as in an easy insolence of demeanor, a sureness of self that emanated from an ugly but intelligent face. This man might have been reared among these hills, but he had certainly not received his knowledge of the world here. He had gone beyond the hills and the seas and into the most curious places. And having done so it was all the more remarkable that he should choose to settle in the intellectually-arid valley that could boast no better civilization than the taciturn towns of Leeminster and Marlborough. To think about the Westcotts at all meant to creep upon them logically and deliberately. Dreeme realized that he would have to adjust his thoughts in a precise manner if he was to arrive at any reasonable deductions regarding them.

As he sauntered along the road and nodded vaguely to the few tanned expressionless faces which passed him he sought to place his thoughts in order and achieve a sort of deductive acumen so far as the Westcotts were concerned. He would consider Jeffrey Westcott first of all. Or, no, he would take the farm first and its occupants last. What had he known about Westcott before he had been called to the farm the preceding night? Practically nothing at all. He had been aware of a farm, however, because he had passed it numberless times. It was a large farm for it ran all the way to the profitless soil of Briony Wood. And Dreeme sought to fix the farm firmly in his mind, for, after all, the soil played its part in the development of any man. It was the soil that counted, the soil that colored the mind. Well, the farm faced on the Leeminster Road and it boasted the usual sprawling building with a number of ells built on like afterthoughts. There were several outhouses that faced the reddish dirt of the road and the untidy yard. Then there were the fields in back of the white-washed structures. Dreeme had never walked through them, but he imagined they were, for the most part, uncultivated. Except for occasional patches of ploughed land, small squares of fecundity in a neglected expanse, they stretched sere and yellow in the parching sun or green and unkempt through the heavy rains to the slightly elevated territory upon which grew the acre or so of closely set trees which were called Briony Wood. This wood was a gloomy and deserted place, deserted, perhaps, because one could not reach it without first passing through Westcott’s land, and there were good reasons for not taking this weed-choked road. Behind Briony Wood was Nigger Swamp or perhaps it would be better to say that Briony Wood degenerated into Nigger Swamp. Dreeme had never been near Nigger Swamp, but he had heard of it as a miasmic stretch of sunken land into which the Saccarac River seeped through subterranean channels. It was an unhealthy spot, the home of buzzing insects and slimy reptiles. As to why it was called Nigger Swamp, Dreeme possessed no idea. Perhaps negroes had been secreted there during the pre-Civil War days of the Underground Railroad, those feverish times when the escaped slaves were rushed through to the Canadian border. Anyway, it was obvious that black men had had something to do with the swamp in the past. Or, perhaps again, it was merely the darkness and desolation of the place that occasioned the cognomen. These things, however, threw no light on Jeffrey Westcott. He could hardly be connected with Nigger Swamp. Indeed, it was difficult to associate him with the farm. It was true that he lived there constantly and that he cultivated a corner of his extensive holding, but that was all. He was not primarily a farmer.

Having disposed of the land and having reached no conclusions whatsoever, Dreeme, who had reached the ruins of the old burned mill, a black gaping maw of crumbling bricks and beams, paused to look back and down at Marlborough. It seemed a pleasant enough town in the bright sunlight with its white and yellow houses, its gonfalons of thin smoke waving from the chimneys, and its shade trees rising in the narrow streets. From this distance it was New England to the backbone, marked by that sweet austerity and pleasant simplicity that is the aspect of the older communities. There was nothing gothic or strained or unearthly about it, and yet, looking back so, Dreeme was more than ever convinced of the mystery that hovered over the town. It was an obsession with him now. The houses were masks and their true features were never turned to the light of the day. Beside him the destroyed mill gloomed, and gazing into its gutted walls through the wide square of doorway he could see the black cell of the interior and the broken embrasure of a crumbling window that over-looked the mill-pond. Proceeding on his way to the faint music of crunching footsteps, Dreeme reached the small wooden bridge that crossed the Saccarac River, and here he paused to lean on the worn railing and gaze down on the sparkling stream that wandered on at so sedate and silent a pace. It was pleasant to watch the water while the warm sun caressed the back of his head. The river ran like a dream, like something seen in a trance. He must go on with his surmises now, for his unquiet mind pricked him constantly forward and along the Leeminster Road. Well, he had disposed of the land and learned nothing from it. There remained the human beings who occupied that land. He would take them in order, considering the less important first.

There was the boy Miles. What was there about Miles that was unusual? He was small, warped in body, large-headed, and obviously older than his size suggested. His face was twisted, his eyes were of a greenish hue, and he had a disconcerting way of answering questions. That was all. The queerness of Miles might be attributed to incipient epilepsy. And then Dreeme recalled Humphrey Lathrop’s remark about these people intermarrying from generation to generation. Did he mean incest? Dreeme had heard of such practices in the lonelier quarters of New England where the deserted farms were far from communal centers and a savage ingrowth, physical and spiritual, persisted. But Marlborough was a fairly good-sized community and it was difficult to imagine that Lathrop really meant that. What he undoubtedly meant was that the original families (and there might have been dozens of them to start with) intermarried and did not welcome unions with strangers who wandered by chance into the valley. Miles was possibly of an old breed that had worn thin. He was just an eccentric and stupid boy who knew no more than the loneliness of hard labor on an avoided farm and who, therefore, was a stranger in a strange land when he discoursed with strangers. Dreeme decided that there was nothing to be gotten out of an analysis of Miles. Well, there was Wagner, the shaggy, red-bearded hired man. Wagner was obviously the hard-worker on the Westcott farm. It was he who developed the soil and raised the few crops and tore the boulders up and did all the excessive heart-breaking manual labor that warped the shoulders, lengthened the arms, bowed the legs, and tanned the red leathery skin. He was the pack-horse, the human brute in action. He could be dismissed, after all, as a grown-up Miles, a laboring animal of excessive stupidity who talked so seldom that his voice had rusted in his throat. There was little to glean from these lesser figures and Dreeme’s thoughts, held rigorously back, now turned to the Westcotts themselves.

Of course there was Jeffrey Westcott to start with. Dreeme drew a long breath as he turned from his inspection of the water and proceeded along the bridge to the Leeminster Road, walking slowly and gazing casually at the flickering glimpses of houses through the trees on either side of him. It was not enough to say that Westcott avoided and was avoided. That was merely the beginning. Now that Dreeme had seen the farmer in his house and heard his voice he suspected that there was much more behind this, much, perhaps, that might be explained easily if the answers were forthcoming but much again for which there was no answer. Westcott, first of all, was a cultured man, apparently a scholar. He spent less time tilling the soil than he did poring through his huge books. He was an unlikeable person. There was no doubt of that in Dreeme’s mind. There was an oily menace in him, a soft snarl in his speech, a barely-concealed cruelty of demeanor that was emphasized by the superficial polish of the man. His whole being was dominated by an unclean spirit. As Dreeme thought of Westcott’s appearance, his cloven head and black sparkless eyes, a slow wave of fear, impossible to restrain, crept up his flesh. Yet there was nothing that the young doctor could actually adduce as evidence of any evil on the farmer’s part. Considered logically Westcott was no more than a man who desired to be left alone with his books. He troubled no one and he wanted no one to trouble him. That was reasonable enough. But logic meant little so far as Westcott was concerned. There are bodies out of which souls speak without words and Dreeme had seen one of them in Westcott. He had sensed an unclean atmosphere about the farmer just as he had sensed an atmosphere of evil emanating from the huge volumes that lined the farmer’s room. These things were matters of instinct and intuition and Dreeme could not dismiss them by any logical explanations or deductions. Something fierce and fanatic and commanding lurked inside Westcott’s sturdy body and watched the world with a slow maliciousness. What this spirit was could not be deduced by any casual study of the man. It had a purpose, Dreeme was sure, and that purpose was monstrous in its intent and merciless in the steps which it took toward its ordained objective. So much bespoke a fanatic and Dreeme was sure that if he could ferret out the reason for this fanaticism he would be well on the way toward solving the mystery of Marlborough. The young doctor was not conscious of any logical chain of reasoning by which he tied the secret purpose of Jeffrey Westcott up with Marlborough but was convinced that the tie between the community and the man was close and unbreakable. There were moments when all this seemed like the wildest reasoning of an imaginative boy to him and he strove, even in the midst of his revery, to laugh at his assumptions but something stifled the ridicule in his throat. Though he might brood about secret objectives and fanatical purposes and buried evils and unclean spirits without the slightest proof to bolster them up he found himself incapable of raising his head and scattering all these thoughts as the misgivings of a neurotic romanticism that was the result of a too lonely living among dour people. No, there _was_ something there. And Dreeme, unable to restrain himself, proceeded with his thoughts even as he proceeded with his stroll up the Leeminster Road.

There was Martha Westcott to be considered. Even as her name thrust itself into Dreeme’s consciousness a slight giddiness took him and he experienced a brief choking sensation in his throat. It was as though a thin vapor had suddenly risen in the air beside him and drifted across his face. At least, _she_ was unexplainable. She was a walking mystery, a veiled being whose veil was flesh, a detached spirit wandering in a commonplace world. Dreeme thought of her as he saw her standing at the window and listening and it seemed to him now that she was like a person standing at a door she hesitated to open and yet must open. It was impossible to analyze her in any way, to say that her heavy-lidded eyes were the result of too much sunlight or too much snow, that her blood-red mouth had grown so weary from an endless loneliness, that her quietness was the quietness of a shunned person. She existed beyond her flesh and yet her flesh, too, so cool and yet so stirred with a still life, existed beyond the flesh of other people. How she had become Jeffrey Westcott’s wife and who she was, from what family in the valley she had sprung, were mysteries as yet, mysteries that, perhaps, Humphrey Lathrop, if he were goaded hard enough, might solve, but even the solution of these temporal gestures would hardly clarify her. Dreeme was amazed at his reactions to Martha Westcott and a small voice of reason kept thrusting into his thoughts and arguing a sudden fascination. But Dreeme knew that this fascination was not the usual type of blind worship. He had not fallen in love at first sight and there was no question of his ever falling in love with Martha Westcott. It was something else altogether that compelled him to surmise in such mystical terms about the farmer’s wife. There was a power in her mere presence that unsettled him and he did not strive too arduously to make it clear to himself for he knew that it would be impossible.

His mind was growing into a hungry octopus now and it stretched out a dozen and one tentacles that grasped feebly to right and left, adventuring weakly in search of enlightenment. But the clear illumination for which he sought was not to be found. Vague lights like indistinct marsh-lights glittered wanly for a moment and then were enveloped by the tenebrosities of a sheer ignorance that was maddening in itself. He was seeking for something that was hardly to be found without the most obvious clews. And there were no clews. Nothing but endless speculation, surmises, unreasonable intuitions, objectless guesses. Though he might ponder on the Westcotts and the life they followed it all led to nothing. For a moment he doubted his own rationality, pointing out to himself with a mocking elaboration of mental gesture that he was spinning mysteries out of the imbroglio of his disconcerted mind. There was really nothing to go on, no abrupt transitions from the normalities of existence, no vindictive flashes of evil lighting up this valley as lightning might illuminate it, no ominous gestures revealing the unsuspected. There was nothing about the Westcotts to suggest the uncleanness of being which he associated with them. It was all in his own mind, in his restless intuitions. He _felt_ these things and feeling them he could do no more than give full vent to his morbid fancies. He might be a fool ... it was very possible that he was ... but even this humiliating reflection failed to subdue that uneasiness of spirit that shook him when he brooded upon Marlborough and the Westcotts. It was as though a far-off and forgotten voice was speaking somewhere in the jungle of his intelligence telling him the most terrible things in the most deliberate manner. He could not gather the sense of the message. He could not even hear the voice. But somehow he knew that it was there and speaking. It was like a small obsession making itself more and more evident as he brooded more and more about it. There was no escape from it now. He would have to make up his mind to _that_, at least. No escape....

Dreeme lifted his head, rising like a swimmer from the turbid waters of his thoughts, and saw half-concealed in the trees ahead of him the shapeless mass of the Westcott farm-house. He stopped instantly and stood indecisively in the road meditating whether to go on or to turn in his tracks and retrace his steps to Marlborough. Even as he meditated he knew that he had wandered along this road with only one purpose and that he would not achieve any ease of mind, if, indeed, he did then, until he had fulfilled it. Turning aside he left the road and strode through the bushes into the field, Bidwell’s meadow, that bordered on Westcott’s property. The dry grass crackled beneath his feet and great grasshoppers leaped industriously about the crushed growth. He could hear a locust grinding its rasping note. Otherwise it was still ... a hot windless stillness that caused him to pant slightly as he forced his way toward the twisting stone-fence that guarded Westcott’s land. Reaching it he sank in the tall dry grass by a crumbling breach where the stone had pitched forward into the farmer’s yard. From this vantage point he could see the blank side of the house, once a dirty white but now a streaked colorlessness. A thin curl of smoke rose from the chimney of the built-on kitchen. The curtains of the windows were drawn against the sun. A solitary rooster crooked sleepily as he turned a glassy side-long eye at the stone-fence and the man concealed behind it. Dreeme could see the uneven rocky path by which he had circled the house the night before. He was surprised to discover that it was much shorter than he had thought it to be in the darkness. Darkness was like that. It lengthened things and translated them. For fifteen minutes or so the young doctor squatted in the grass and spied upon the house and the empty yard. He could feel the hot press of the sun on the back of his head and the sharp thrusts of the dry stalks beneath him. He would wait now. Until....

The door at the rear of the house opened slowly and Martha Westcott walked down the steps, a white china pitcher in her hand.

Dreeme lowered his head quickly and peered between the uneven stones of the fence. He saw her traverse the yard slowly and pause by the wooden square of the well. She lowered the bucket, running it downward with long even thrusts of her arm. As she turned her head the sun glistened upon her blue-black hair and the dead white nape of her neck. The curving sweep of her broad shoulders and arm was a beautiful thing to watch. She was like some fatal goddess in action, in sleepy action. Astarte Syriaca. The name sprang suddenly into Dreeme’s mind. He had not sought for it. It came of its own volition. Well ... Astarte Syriaca, then ... an evil goddess. She drew the brimming bucket up to the shelf of the well, and, tipping it, filled the white china pitcher with a curving arc of water that glittered like silver in the sun. Then she hooked the bucket and turned toward the house. As she did so her eyes swept along the stone wall and the expanse of sun-parched field beyond. They traveled steadily, large and still and dark under the heavy lids. Dreeme, crouched in the grass, felt his heart beat furiously and a slow color crept up his face. It would be ridiculous to.... Her eyes hesitated an instant at the very spot through which the young doctor was peering at her. He could see the great motionless pupils as fixed as the stare of some huge cat and the tiny scarlet blood-sacs in the inner corners of her eyes. There was absolutely no expression in these eyes that seemed to look through stone walls. They were frozen pools of stillness that seemed to take the world as they found it without any surprise and with a knowledge that was as ancient as the browned stones upon which the sleepy green slivers of lizards dozed. Dreeme, pressed abjectly against the stone wall, experienced an agitation through all his limbs. A choking sensation welled up in his dry throat and his hands, clinging fiercely to the parched stalks by his knees, shook as though with a palsy. It was only for an instant. Her eyes continued their blank survey and reached the house. Turning, she walked slowly back to the door, the white china pitcher outlined against her black dress, and slipped silently in. The door shut behind her without a sound. Dreeme remained for several minutes against the stone wall fearing to test the strength of his legs. Then he rose to his feet and tramped back through the burnt and brittle grass, crashing through the bushes to the road. He walked swiftly along the Leeminster Road to Marlborough without looking back.

III

The girl’s eyes were like wet violets, a soaked blue so deep as to be astonishing. Mrs. Slater had said: “Deborah.... This is Doctor Dreeme ...” and then she had added in a grudging tone: “My niece ... Deborah is my niece ...” Dreeme remembered that he had bowed and mumbled vaguely in his throat. It did not surprise him that Mrs. Slater had a niece. She looked as though she had nieces. Besides, all New Englanders had nieces. It was the penalty of the country. That ... or ... well, perhaps, no nieces. It was all a question of family, of children, of course. Grandfathers were at a premium in New England now but nieces and nephews and cousins were the common coinage of pride. It was impossible to go into a musty Back Bay parlor, for instance, without hearing something about: “He’s a cousin of ...” or “She’s the niece of....” It was like that. Being reduced to mop up one’s lesser relatives, so to speak. Or to reach out through a dubious cousinal (_could_ there be such a word?) connection and so getting a foot _in_. Families scattered and broke up; the main stem shattered; there was nothing but twigs left. “I am a twig of the Winthrops.” A wind-blown twig without any leaves. Mrs. Slater scraped his chair back and he sank into it. She was staring at him with fluttering eyes. There were snapping eyes all around the table. He was getting choppy in his thoughts. Choppy ... choppy.

He assumed a bland indifference and waited for the smoking bowl of cabbage to be pushed his way. The long red slices of corned beef lay like so many tongues at his elbow. He forked one neatly and slapped it onto his plate.

Physiognomy, they said, was a science in itself. The twist of a man’s mind from the twist of his mouth. _His_ slant from the slant of his nose. But what about a man with a cloven head? What about a woman with ... oh, wonderful! The cabbage, a pale browny-green glistening with tiny jewels of grease, reached him and he speared an efficient mound of it. A long walk induced hunger. Take faces now. The sly student ran his eyes over a face and solved it as easily as a rebus is solved, a rebus put together for infantile intellects. One assumed that the student was right but one did not really know. Still ... there must be a lot in it. If the proper perspective was achieved the face fell into an approximate map of the mind. Easy. Like pulling a rabbit out of a silk hat. But you had to catch your rabbit first. Dreeme put his knife and fork down softly. He was light-headed. Giddy. Too much sun. But if he was going to get anywhere he would have to study faces, covertly, tracking out half-obliterated urges, deciphering.... Mrs. Slater asked him if he would like some vinegar on his cabbage. Good God, no! “Thank you,” he said and shook his head. He picked up the fork and thrust it into his smoking mound of cabbage. The little jewels of grease dripped from the raised portion. He gazed about him, stifling an intensity of stare behind an assumed nonchalance.

He was surrounded by masticating jaws. Walden Slater, the Reverend George Burroughs, five little Slaters with pop eyes and glistening chins down which cabbage grease ran. And ... that girl. Mrs. Slater, having placed everything on the table, sank with a sigh of relief into her seat. Her eyes fluttered as one brown, freckled hand reached for the corned beef platter. She, at least, was patent. Her plumpness bulged at the caught-in house-wrapper. Her face was a small moon with a turned-up nose, a wide mouth that inclined downwards at the corners, and round eyes that thrust forward from the puffed circles that contained them. Her wispy straw-colored hair was drawn back in a sort of door-knob and the heads of three metal hair-pins stood up from it like tiny croquet arches. She was an aunt, after all. It was quite reasonable. Opposite her Walden Slater’s long upper lip snapped feverishly at a dangling bit of cabbage. The lip of a camel. The cocks-comb of hair stood upright on his head and the thousand and one wrinkles in his red weather-beaten neck rippled as he leaned forward over his plate. The tuft of ragged hair beneath his lower lip glistened with cabbage grease. There were marks of perspiration about the arm-pits of his blue denim shirt. His broken nails carried a fair share of the dark soil of Marlborough. Now and then he would raise his watery gray eyes and look swiftly about the table. The heavy brows above them, bristling with a nondescript brush of hair, rose and fell as his long jaw moved up and down. Jabbing his fork into a long tongue of corned beef he tossed it dexterously upward and caught it with a lip that seemed, rubber-like, to stretch down to meet it. It was a triumph of coordination and Dreeme watched it with a pleased and sleepy satisfaction. Now if he could catch corned beef like that ... on the wing, so to speak.... The five little Slaters cracked their iron-shod heels against the legs of their chairs as they dribbled food. Give them time. They would grow as dexterous as Walden. They were a regimented quintet. They rushed out to school with a great clattering of feet and rushed back again to dinner with the same infernal racket. Their immature minds were small muddy circles into which the schoolmaster flung flawed pearls. The jewels sank to the bottom and were seen no more.

Dreeme’s mind revolved, for an instant, about educational processes. Tomorrow this community of Marlborough would be changed. It would be renewed by the five little Slaters and their companions in age. What would they make of the valley and the dour town? Would things remain the same? Would that persistent shadow of mystery that hovered over the place be lifted or would its darkness, like the impalpable darkness of invisible wings, deepen and remain? Who could prophesy what would be the state of affairs at that not-so-distant time? There was no reason why the outer world should impinge too strongly on Marlborough, for, after all, the valley was a cul-de-sac, a cache into which the Past had thrust an untidy bundle of urges and traditions and left them there to rot in the sunlight. And Dreeme seemed to see the Marlborough of the future stretching out like a corpse in the bright sunlight of the valley and striving ... striving.... He shuddered at the picture so suddenly brought up before his mind, a picture of a white leprous mass struggling to live, dead and yet never dying, with closed eyes that continually quivered, with blue lips rolling back over yellow decayed teeth, with long skeleton fingers opening and shutting and fighting against the _rigor mortis_ of Time. He slowly put down the....

“If you _please_!”

The Reverend George Burroughs’ sallow face was thrust appealingly at him and the mechanical portion of Dreeme’s brain slowly grasped the request.

“Cabbage? What cabbage? Oh, yes,” he said hurriedly and pushed the decimated platter of curdling grease along the table.

Mr. Burroughs, his face drawn into a severe and disapproving recognition of wool-gathering in general, accepted the glistening remnants with some degree of asperity. Like a little horse. Like a little yellow withered horse. Mr. Burroughs certainly had an equine appearance. Dreeme permitted his eyes to survey the preacher with a faint degree of curiosity. Though he had sat at the same table with him for two years he had never developed enough curiosity about the skinny man of God to observe him closely. Now he would do it. He would fix him in his mind as a butterfly is fixed in a box. He would thrust the sharp pin of his comprehension through the withered thorax of the Reverend George Burroughs. The preacher dropped his face and successfully eluded his silent inquisitor. Dreeme almost called out, “Hey, there!” The preacher’s bald forehead bent above his second helping of cabbage. Dark hair, starting from the ridge of that high forehead grew downward and lost itself in the musty black coat that huddled over the dingy collar. The man’s skin was as sallow as a Chinaman with the jaundice. Though partially concealed by the amusing foreshortening attendant to a lowered head Dreeme could see a fairly long face with high cheek-bones, eyes set far apart, and a good-sized mouth. “He will raise his head and neigh at me in a minute,” thought Dreeme. The preacher did raise his head but he did not neigh. Instead of that he looked fixedly at the young doctor for an instant with horribly still eyes and then transferred his attention to his cabbage. For no reason at all Dreeme was embarrassed at this expressionless study and he hastily diverted his eyes elsewhere.

The girl’s eyes were like wet violets, a soaked blue so deep as to be astonishing.

Mrs. Slater had said.... Why yes, she was a niece.... A New England niece. Now that was funny for she did not look like a niece at all. Nieces were ... oh, _nieces_! She was a slender pliant wisp in a matter-of-fact gray dress and with a tiny white collar and cuffs. She ate daintily, nibbling at the bits of corned beef which she raised on the tip of a fork held in the smallest hand for an adult that Dreeme had ever seen. Her absurdly miniature mouth was slightly pursed as though an infant bee had stung it, the smallest of stings, so to speak. Her hair was a bright soft bronze, the sort of hair that ... well, thought Dreeme, it probably feels like warm mist. Now that he was fairly looking at her he could see how porcelain-like she was, how small in bones and fastidious in gestures. Such a niece for Mrs. Slater! It was almost impossible and Dreeme’s glance flitted swiftly over the five children kicking their heels and gulping their food and Walden Slater conducting a successful foray against a chunk of corned beef that had desperately striven to elude his remorseless fork. The young doctor’s eyes returned to the girl. Deborah. Her name was Deborah. Mrs. Slater had said.... The girl looked up and caught Dreeme’s glance with a bright flash of her absurdly blue eyes. The smallest hint of a smile touched her pursed lips and she turned back to her food. Dreeme suddenly felt quite elated. It was not that he _cared_. He was not a lady’s man in any sense of the word. Just a hard-working doctor who, at this moment, was neglecting his work because of certain silly obsessions that were driving him to distraction, obsessions that Humphrey Lathrop would have to clear away. He would see Humphrey that afternoon, drop in late and smoke a pipe with him, perhaps. Anyway.... Deborah looked up again. Her eyes seemed to say, “We have a joke together, haven’t we? Niece? How absurd!” Dreeme pushed his plate back and waited for somebody to speak.

Nobody did. Marlborough meals were like this. A greedy silence lowered over the table.

Walden Slater, overcoming the resistance of the last bit of corned beef on his plate, rose awkwardly to his feet, scraped once or twice, belched forth a triumphant elegy of wind over the meal, and turned toward the door. He shambled out, long arms dangling. His exit was a signal for a general clattering of chairs. The five children avalanched toward the front yard for their fifteen minutes of surly play before the warning bell of the little one-room school-house across the way made them still surlier. Mr. Burroughs walked softly to the window and stood there humming “Rock of Ages.” He was atrociously out of key, a droning whine that clung tenaciously to one note. His still eyes wandered absently toward Deborah as he lulled his dinner to sleep. Dreeme said:

“So you’re Mrs. Slater’s niece?”

The girl looked up brightly.

“Her poor relation,” she replied. “She is very kind to me. Since father died she....”

“You might bring out some dishes,” broke in Mrs. Slater vigorously.

She was a small girl and she carried the stack of greasy plates with an instinctive grace that pleased Dreeme. When she came back she renewed her bright attention toward the young doctor.

“We lived in Leeminster, you know,” she said.

Dreeme did not know but he nodded understandingly.

“Perhaps you read about father,” went on the girl, as she piled saucers in a high heap. “It was in the county paper. The bag of cement fell on him, you know.”

“Of course,” said Dreeme politely.

“The Lord gives and the Lord takes,” insinuated the neighing voice of Mr. Burroughs, who broke off his humming for this shaft of divine wisdom and then instantly resumed it.

“He died in half an hour,” added the girl.

“Really?” exclaimed Dreeme.

He watched her go out with interested eyes. Mr. Burroughs’ humming got on his nerves and he writhed uneasily at the dreary drone. The preacher was like an old bumble bee with bronchitis. He stood in the window, his large mouth pursed, his horsey forehead slightly lowered, and intimated sadly that the Rock had been cleft especially for _him_. In the flattest of whines he announced his burning desire to fly to Its bosom. “May it fall upon you and crush you!” thought Dreeme somewhat vindictively, the unending whine scraping along his nerves. He waited, in some expectancy, for the reappearance of the girl. But it was not she who came through the door and gathered up the remaining débris of the meal. It was Mrs. Slater, a Mrs. Slater with fluttering eyes and quick lumbering movements. Dreeme felt like smiling but instead of giving way to any such impulse he rose to his feet and sauntered toward the door. A lugubrious whine followed him, creeping up his back and gently pushing him toward the hot early afternoon sunlight. At the lintel he paused and looked back. A musty expanse of black coat and an oblong of black hair. Behind it a shapeless hum that drearily mangled a helpless hymn. A dumpy woman folding a red and white checked table-cloth. She was expressionless now. A big clock ticking. Also expressionless. A waterfall design in pink wall-paper. Curved pink water falling indecently into black base-boards. Scattered chairs to be placed discreetly against the wall until supper. They stood about dejectedly, awaiting the touch of a hand ... what was it? He stepped through the hall and into the street. The heat was oppressive. It rose at him on scarlet haunches and panted against his face. He stood looking up and down the thoroughfare at nothing before he returned to his next-door office in the little cottage. At nothing. Absolutely nothing. That was it. That was where _he_ stood. That was where they put _him_. A niece, eh? Well, why not? Mrs. Slater probably had a dozen nephews and nieces living within a radius of ten miles and the fact that _he_ had seen none of them in two years really meant nothing. Mrs. Slater was like that. Marlborough was like that. She didn’t want the girl to grow too friendly with him. To tell him things. Not even obvious things. Ridiculous. He would ply the girl with questions at suppertime and shock, astound, disconcert, and upset the whole table. Well.... He stood smiling at his own thoughts. Let them, then.... Now what did that mean? He was growing reckless as well as nervously excitable. It was time to see Humphrey Lathrop. Decidedly, Marlborough was getting.... He progressed slowly to his own door and placed a hand upon the polished knob.

Chapter Three

I

Doctor Humphrey Lathrop was so huge that it was difficult for him to move about even with the aid of the two gnarled canes that flanked either side of his gargantuan reinforced chair, a throne that creaked ominously as his shifting bulk, a bulk that seemed to roll slowly like cooling lava, swayed forward in wheezing conversation. He sat like an enormous and kindly jelly-fish, his stomach resting on his great round thighs and straining fiercely against the bulging vest spangled with fobs and seals, his triple chins trembling beneath his wrinkled face, his broad flat feet encased in comfortable slippers that suggested a pair of medium-sized Gladstone bags. His black velvet smoking jacket, odorous with a villainous tobacco, spread over him like a voluminous cape. The polished baldness of his round cranium was thrust into a skull-cap that fitted as snugly as a skin. On the back of his neck the rolls of fat rippled as he stretched a plump arm out and lifted the tiny green tea-cup in a massive hand. He wheezed softly as he moved, a pleasant sibilant sound that chimed with the remonstrative creaking of his over-loaded chair. Dreeme, perched opposite him on the end of his chair, observed the ancient friend of his father with an approving and respectful eye. He saw the moon-face and sagging jowls tanned by many suns and eaten by an intricate net-work of wrinkles (which Lathrop called “my map to eternity”) and the large blue intelligent eyes gazing out of the gold circles of precariously balanced spectacles, and experienced, as always, a curious sense of inferiority and complete trust in the wisdom of the old doctor. Humphrey Lathrop was more than an ancient friend. He was a monument of probity and wisdom, a great quivering idol from whose lips issued counsel and the finalities of an achieved experience. He was a Mahomet transformed into a mountain. For fifty years he had been the solitary medical adviser to Marlborough and it had only been after his bulk had reached such proportions as to render it impossible for him to get about or climb in or out of his rusty old buggy that he had turned over a meager and thankless practice to the son of his boyhood friend. He had done so with misgiving and regret for he distrusted the vagaries of the young in the profession which he had honored for half a century. He was old-fashioned, deucedly so, believing that a doctor’s prime concoction was common-sense mixed with a little peppermint. It had been enough for him to supply the simplest of remedies to the ailing and he possessed an undying suspicion of what he denominated as “applied book-learning” in so far as the practical treatment of sickness was concerned. He pointed out time and again that there were no rare diseases in Marlborough. Children were born in the usual way and men and women died as they had always died. Between these two important dates were the ailments of the young, mumps, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and measles. After that there were accidents, cuts and bruises and broken limbs, and then such major ailments as typhoid fever, chronic stomach trouble (which, so far as Doctor Lathrop was concerned, included stomach, kidneys, and liver), and pneumonia. He scoffed at appendicitis, calling it “an aristocratic belly-ache.” In spite of his limitations as a doctor, and, perhaps, because of the wiry health of his patients he had been accounted an unusually successful practitioner. The thunderous approach of his great flat feet and thumping canes were the immediate prophecies of relief. What impressed Dreeme most strongly about him was the excellence and keenness of his mind when taken apart from his dogged attitude toward medicine. Though he might be a narrow-minded old fogey of a doctor, he was, as a thinking man on general topics and life in general, far-sighted, deliberative in judgment, ratiocinative, and exceedingly shrewd. He mixed a certain amount of imagination with his observations and limited it with a complacent fatalism that was less abrupt than dimly wistful. Therefore, whenever Dreeme was perplexed he visited Lathrop, finding in him a genial fount of encouragement and pertinent comment. At this moment he was fumbling toward an utterance of the problem weighing upon his puzzled mind and the old doctor, fully aware of the purpose of the visit, studied him with some amusement, his blue eyes twinkling behind the gold spectacles.

“I was called out to the Westcott farm last night,” said Dreeme finally, pushing his cup from the edge of the little table.

Lathrop’s blue eyes opened wide and then closed. He wheezed gently and drank his tea, pausing to blow at the scalding mixture, and then put the cup down. It tinkled sharply in the silence of the room. Dreeme heard the monotonous buzzing of a fly in the curtains by the window.

“So?” said Lathrop at last. Then he seemed to dismiss the subject, reaching for his blackened corncob pipe and stuffing it from the can of shag on the table.

“You don’t come to see me often, Daniel,” said the old doctor as he lit a match, applied it to the pipe, and puffed wheezily. The pipe wouldn’t draw. “Drat it!” he exclaimed, putting down the charred corncob, and gazing about the room with a calm benevolent smile.

“I don’t see anyone often,” remarked Dreeme somewhat dejectedly.

Lathrop looked at him quickly, pursing his large lips.

“I warned you that this was no place for a young man,” he said. “You can’t go about here. There is nothing to see and still less to do. I don’t mind it but I am an old man and I couldn’t get about if I wanted to. I have to sit in this chair like an old rheumatic hippopotamus and look out the window.”

“And nobody goes by,” added Dreeme gloomily.

A faint chuckle irrupted from the huge body before him.

“Nothing but the sun and the rain and the clouds and the snow and the night,” checked off Lathrop on his pudgy fingers. “But I don’t mind. It isn’t so bad to have the chair placed out in the sun and to doze in it. It warms me up.”

“I haven’t minded it either,” said Dreeme, “that is, until a day or so ago. Then my mind got working again and I began to grow curious. I want to know the ‘why’ of things. I want to know about people and why communities are what they are.”

“That’s simple,” declared Lathrop. “Environment ... blood ... breeding.”

Dreeme flung out an impatient hand.

“Oh, I know,” he said. “I know all that. But there is something in back of those things, something that creeps in the soil and climbs in the trees and looks out of empty window-panes and circulates about you when you walk in the street, and....” He broke off abruptly. “Do you believe in magic, Humphrey?” he inquired suddenly.

Lathrop chuckled and wheezed, fumbling for the handkerchief in the side pocket of his smoking jacket. The blowing of his nose was like the sounding of a trumpet.

“So that’s it,” he said. “So that’s it. Lordy, Lordy.”

He picked up his pipe again and sought for the pen-knife in his trousers pocket and began to clean out the stubborn bowl.

“Daniel,” he said, “I’ll tell you what I believe. Perhaps it will help you and perhaps it won’t.”

He paused and maintained a silence until the pipe was cleaned, filled, lighted, and drawing comfortably. Then he settled his huge bulk back in the creaking chair and observed Dreeme with bland blue eyes through the gold spectacles.

“You’ll have to forgive the inconsistencies, Daniel,” he began. “I’ve never worked out a system of things. I’ve been too lazy and too conscious of my own ignorance to do that. But I have certain instinctive beliefs and I imagine they are unalloyed with the new-fangled notions that are called modern psychology. I think that we have two ways of classifying what is strange and mysterious to us--the supernormal and the supernatural. I do not say ‘no’ to any of the supernormal things. Against the supernatural I turn my face. It isn’t reasonable. It isn’t even spiritually reasonable. For instance, the most ordinary inventions today would have seemed supernatural three hundred years ago, whereas, at that time, they were merely supernormal, existing in that unexplored terrain outside of the comprehension and investigation of the day. So today we have faith that the things which seem supernatural are merely in _our_ unexplored terrain and that tomorrow or next year or next century they will be made ordinary to us. There is a great difference between the radio and Jonah in the whale’s belly. One is supernormal and the other is supernatural. A man cannot be heard from San Francisco to New York, as people loosely state, but a mechanical invention carries the sound of his voice. That is supernormal but conceivable. But Jonah in the whale’s belly is not represented by any kind of mechanical contrivance. He is not carried there and represented by any kind of ultra-wave. He is just there, his physical self. That is supernatural. A man putting his head in a pail of water and holding it there for three hours and then coming out unaffected by the immersion is supernatural. But a man in a diver’s suit with oxygen tanks attached who goes beneath the sea for three hours is merely supernormal. I believe in the supernormal--in the vast and still unexplored terrain that stretches before us but I do not believe in the supernatural.”

“You believe in the scientific explanation of everything,” said Dreeme.

“I wouldn’t say that,” replied Lathrop, pursing his lips. “No, sir, I wouldn’t say that. I would even go so far as to say that there are things which I conceive to be supernormal that cannot be explained by any scientific theory whatsoever. I do not believe in the levitation of tables by spirit-hands although I do not say that tables are not levitated. I do not believe that an ectoplasm is a materialization of the dead but I do not say that there is nothing unexplainable there for the eye to see. I do not believe that the dead talk through the lips of the living although I do not affirm that the words issuing from the medium’s mouth are always her own.”

Doctor Lathrop waved his pipe at Dreeme.

“I believe in mysteries,” he insisted. “I believe these mysteries to be intellectually suspected at rare moments but never actually solved. I do not believe that we will ever solve them. So far as I know they move on another circle of time or in another dimension or anything you choose. But I demand that they be called supernormal and not supernatural.”

“Do you believe that there is a supernormal aspect to Marlborough, then?” asked Dreeme, seeing at last a short-cut to the thoughts that boiled so inchoately in his mind.

Lathrop nodded his head and Dreeme laughed triumphantly.

“Then you know what I mean,” he said, “when I say there is something in back of all this, something in the soil and the air and the very houses,” and he waved his hand toward the window.

“Yes, yes,” agreed Lathrop, “I haven’t denied it, have I? Every community has its supernormal aspects, its twisted web of mysteries floating like a fine skein in the air above it. We’re all tangled up with supernormal things. I admit it. You cannot go anywhere without finding yourself pushed against a dark wall of impenetrable silence that speaks without words and always speaks in a foreign tongue.”

Dreeme’s lean face grew solemn as he hitched his chair closer to the little table and extended his hand, palm upward, toward Lathrop.

“That may be true enough,” he said. “But the sensation I experience in Marlborough is different. Every community has its own strange aura rising from it. Even the veriest over-night town thrown together beside oil-wells or gold-mines speaks in what you might call a foreign tongue. But it says brave or bright or progressive things. It lifts itself toward some sparkle in the adventurous sky above it. I have been in New York and raised my eyes to the heavens and seen, in my mind’s eye, at least, a thousand glittering spires which were the reflection not of the monstrous shafts of granite about me but of the City behind the city, the great, mad, impressive, unresting urge upon which the infinite foundations of this finite metropolis are built. It was awesome but it was not fearful. Marlborough, I tell you, is different.”

Lathrop stirred uneasily, his enormous bulk swaying forward to a strident creaking of the chair.

“I told you when you first came here that Marlborough was different,” he said. The shadow of a growing perplexity was in his eyes.

“I know you did,” responded Dreeme, “and telling me so much you told me nothing. You told me there was a breed of New Englanders here that I had never seen before. I admit it now. But why is this breed different? You did not tell me that. You told me that a mixture of ethical and Dionysiac madnesses produced the forefathers of these people, of the Bidwells and Barnsons and Westcotts and Slaters. Well, what does that mean? You opened the door of a dark room to me, a door which I should have pushed open myself sooner or later, but you did not give me any lamp. Do you know what the sensation is that I have when I think of Marlborough?”

Lathrop shook his head slowly, the loose chins beneath his round face wagging like the wattles on a cock.

“I think constantly of a horrible dead body, a white leprous mass of flesh, that is striving to live,” answered Dreeme in a low voice. “The dark circles of the closed eyes quiver, the blue lips roll back, and the long fingers, struggling against _rigor mortis_, slowly open. There are only shadows in the palms of the hands.”

“Good God!” exclaimed Lathrop, reaching hastily for his cup of cold tea. After a moment he laughed in his wheezing way.

“You have the imagination of a penny-dreadful,” he remarked.

“Have I?” asked Dreeme. “Do you really think so, doctor?”

Lathrop drank the last swallow of his chilled beverage and then put the cup back and turned to his corncob pipe.

“Look here, Daniel,” he commanded. “Do you want me to prescribe for you? You’re suffering from nerves. Your digestion is bad. Do you sleep well? How about a nice vacation? Eh, what?”

Dreeme shook his head.

“I’m all right, Humphrey,” he said. “You can’t get rid of me in that way. You’ve got to tell me things.”

Lathrop sighed loudly.

“I was telling you things,” he remarked. “I was telling you what I believed. Let me go on. Perhaps there will be a clew in it for you.”

He paused for an instant and whistled loudly as his blue eyes roamed about the room.