Chapter III: Part 3

“Let me give you some of my detached thoughts,” he said at last. “I believe in the sense of the past. I believe it to be a living urge in itself but I also believe that it may be explained. Any place that has been lived in long enough will rear a fine fabric of associated ideas stretching back through the centuries. I believe that a philosophy of living may be developed from this sense of the past. I believe that a philosophy of living may unhinge the brain if it is based on vague enough historical urges and cause a man to mistake supernormal phenomena for supernatural things. I believe in the power of the fanatic and so many things may be regarded as fanaticisms--the fanaticism of ego, of evil, of good, of superstition, of a displaced historical sense. This last one alone is worth a treatise in itself. I believe in the suggestion of the more powerful will and its might in causing lesser wills to pervert the realities into mysteries. I believe in the concerted suggestion of the crowd to formulate a seeming atmosphere in any community. Do these thoughts tell you anything about Marlborough?”

“In a way,” answered Dreeme. “But not enough. Give me the key to all this, Humphrey, for you must know it. You’ve lived here for half a century and you have had opportunities to observe.”

“No more than you have,” replied Lathrop quickly. “Haven’t I intimated to you that an idle curiosity was the worst of all evils? Daniel, you must not try to pry into things too closely. I could, perhaps, tell you enough to quicken your curiosity into an intolerable sneakiness. You would go about peering at people, watching their movements, spying upon their activities, surmising their thoughts and reactions and springs of being. And, sooner or later, you would be known for the Paul Pry you would be and your practice would be lost and it would be impossible for you to live in Marlborough. I tell you,” and the doctor slapped his fat knee loudly, “these people _will_ not be watched and analyzed. Let well enough alone.”

Dreeme raised his eyebrows.

“I’m not a Paul Pry,” he said finally. Lathrop seemed to take this remark as a dismissal of the subject and his joviality, which had been somewhat dampened by Dreeme’s insistence, reasserted itself. He hammered the floor lustily with his cane and after a moment a long vinegary countenance thrust itself through the door.

“Lucinda,” ordered Lathrop, “bring a bottle of apple-jack and two tumblers.”

The vinegary face grew still longer. A thin mouth, a mere slit in the wrinkled face, shrivelled in severe disapproval.

“You had some apple-jack this mornin’,” announced a high nasal voice.

“I’m going to have some more now,” answered Lathrop blandly.

The visage swayed for a moment in the doorway and then disappeared to the sound of a loud sigh.

Lathrop winked at Dreeme.

“The old fool,” he said. “Lucinda’s been with me for forty years and she still considers me a giddy dissipated youth.”

“Do you believe in God?” asked Dreeme suddenly, apparently giving utterance to some train of thought in his mind. It was now Lathrop’s turn to sigh as loudly as Lucinda had sighed.

“Daniel, Daniel,” he said, shaking his head. “Can you tell me what you mean by God?”

“That’s the old way of evasion,” said Dreeme impatiently. “Do you believe we exist as individuals after we die?”

“I believe we exist as individuals in a thousand and one ways and eyes and minds and words spoken or written,” answered the old doctor.

“Do you believe that we exist in the consciousness of ourselves as individuals after we die?” persisted Dreeme.

“I do not,” answered Lathrop wearily.

Dreeme slipped back into his train of thought and a moment or so sped by while the stillness of the room was broken only by the buzzing of the fly still entangled in the window-curtain. It shrilled loudly as it darted blindly from the soft folds of cloth to the hard surface of the transparent pane of glass.

“Even in life,” added Lathrop, “I do not believe that we exist as individuals in ourselves, although, of course, our consciousnesses, being what they are, can tell us nothing else.”

The door swung open and Lucinda’s vinegary face appeared over the tray upon which perched the amber-hued apple-jack bottle and two greenish tumblers. She stalked silently to the table and deposited her burden upon it. Lucinda was tall and spare and her arms were extraordinarily thin. Her long face, small black eyes, and pursed mouth registered a deep disapproval beneath the thin graying hair, tied in a back-knot, that covered her narrow head.

“I should think one glass might be enough for you, Humphrey,” she complained, backing from the table like a tall and awkward colt. At the door she turned to add a final word.

“And young men might do better than sit drinkin’ alcohol when there’s plenty of sick people about needin’ attention.”

The door closed noisily behind her. Lathrop’s wheezing chuckle followed her to the kitchen.

“The old fool,” he said softly and tenderly as he poured out the amber liquor.

Dreeme accepted the tumbler that was offered him in an absent-minded manner, placing it on the edge of the table. He sighed loudly and Lathrop, gazing over the top of his glass, scowled pleasantly but said nothing.

“Why do you side-track me, Humphrey, whenever I mention the Westcotts?” inquired the young man at length with asperity in his voice.

“Did I?” asked Lathrop mildly.

Dreeme did not answer but took a brief swallow of apple-jack.

“Good, isn’t it?” questioned the old doctor with a fair degree of enthusiasm. “The national tipple of New England,” he went on. “Eve’s brew,” he concluded, draining off the tumbler.

“What do you know about Eve?” taunted Dreeme with a wan smile.

Lathrop wheezed for a full minute, and then, reaching over with a great effort, dug at Dreeme’s ribs. Then his face sobered.

“Oh dear!” he said. And then: “I didn’t side-track you, Daniel. I merely ignore you.”

Dreeme finished his drink slowly and put the tumbler down. He said:

“I shall find out about the Westcotts, I have been in the farm-house and I can go again.”

“Did they invite you back?” inquired Lathrop.

The young man stared moodily across the table. Lathrop smiled blithely and poured himself a second tumbler of apple-jack.

“You’ll get tipsy,” remarked Dreeme.

“No such luck!” wheezed the old doctor. “I was brought up on this drink. I sucked it in at my mother’s knee.”

“That’s a lie,” answered Dreeme. “You were not permitted to drink anything stronger than milk at home.”

“How did you know that, Daniel?” asked Lathrop with mild surprise. He drained half the tumbler and wiped his mouth. Dreeme sat doggedly in his chair.

“Very well,” said the old doctor with a sigh of defeat. “I give up. What do you want to know about the Westcotts?”

“Everything,” announced Dreeme. He did not change his position but a brief light of excitement danced in his eyes.

Lathrop shook his head. “I can’t tell you that,” he said, “because I don’t know everything. But I’ll tell you what I do know and you may make the most of it. With this preamble....” He cleared his throat. “You just wear a man down, Daniel. I’m departing from the rule of a lifetime. Much good may it do you or me!”

He filled his ubiquitous pipe and lighted it. A piratical odor assailed the air.

“I came to Marlborough in ’57,” he said. “New England in ’57 was a strange place. The old world was breaking into pieces and there were faint, very faint glimmers of a new order of things. It was the days shortly after Dan Webster had thrown his party. Charles Sumner was being assaulted in his seat in the Senate and the Abolitionists were roaring their heads off. It was a curious time because the Republic was rushing straight to perdition. It was State’s Rights and ‘nigger, nigger, who’s got the nigger’ all the time. There was always a nigger in _somebody’s_ wood-pile. Up popped a woolly head and the farmers who had no use for nigger-labor grunted like hedge-hogs for Abolition. I was pretty young and careless about the destiny of our revered Republic so I did not cogitate _too_ much about things (you’d call them phenomena, Daniel) that were for me no more than theoretical problems. It was my business to explore the highways and byways of Marlborough, fish the streams, go fowling for bats, pick blueberries, and sleep in the sun. I don’t imagine I thought much about the people whom I met. Most of them were funny. One of them rather impressed himself upon me for I used to enjoy snooping about the Leeminster Road and there I would meet him stomping along and smacking at the stones with his stick. That was old Captain Uriah Carrier. He had been a ship-mate of Hawthorne of Salem, the one who died of fever at Surinam and whose son wrote books.”

He paused and reached for his can of shag. Then he said:

“Is there anything crazier than writing books, Daniel? It is the ultimate idiocy, the last gasp of the lunatic.”

“All this is getting somewhere?” asked Dreeme.

Lathrop wheezed. He said:

“More or less.”

He settled back and proceeded with his rambling story.

“Let us, my impatient young friend, pause and consider Captain Uriah Carrier. He was the type of man that distinctly does not exist any more. He had hunted whales in the Pacific, had terrorized and robbed the natives of Tahiti, had blackbirded off the African Gold Coast, had carried a Manchu woman about with him for mistress, had retired, returned to Marlborough--for he was born here, joined the Congregational Church, married, raised children, and become the usual pillar of New England. He was a pillar of smoke by day, for his tobacco was vile, and a pillar of fire by night, for his cellar was full of Jamaica rum. He was a tall man with bristling white hair and stained whiskers (a lovely rust-color about his mouth) and an evil eye. He had an invariable greeting for me. ‘Younker,’ he’d say. ‘Look out for the devil.’ I’d say, ‘Where is he, Capt’n?’ ‘In my ’bacca pouch,’ he’d growl, and shake it at me. I was too old for that, though, and would laugh at him, whereupon he’d show his yellow fangs, smack another stone with his stick--it was big and knobby enough to kill Goliath with--and stomp along muttering to himself. A great man, Daniel, but I’m glad that I did not follow in his wicked footsteps.”

He wheezed a soft sigh. Dreeme stirred impatiently in his chair.

“Well, now,” went on Lathrop. “Captain Uriah Carrier had several children, all of whom died young except one and that was Peleg Carrier. I went away to college and came back after the Civil War. The old captain was dead. I heard that he sat up in his huge four-poster after Gettysburg sucking at a rum-bottle and singing some foul old sailor song full of the most terrific obscenities. Then he had fallen back, said ‘What ho, now!’ in faint surprise, and passed out. Peleg Carrier was a quiet sort of boy as I remember him but it is not so much the boy I remember as the man who returned from Germany to Marlborough after I had slipped into the saddle as doctor here. That must have been in the early seventies when Jesse James was shooting up Missouri and Kansas and old Sitting Bull was preparing his revenge and the buildings for the Philadelphia Centennial were being raised. Peleg Carrier was rather different from his blasphemous old scoundrel of a father. He was a melancholiac.”

Lathrop brooded for a moment, one great hand raised to his round face. Dreeme could see the hairy ring of fat about the old doctor’s wrist.

“My memory of Peleg Carrier is revised and aided and abetted by my later analysis of him,” proceeded Lathrop. “I got to thinking about him early in life and for some years he was a pet study of mine. A sort of unusual specimen, you know. He lived all alone in the Carrier house on the Leeminster Road, a house that burned down long before your time. I imagine that leading a lonely rigorous life in a desolate country community induces melancholy. Don’t you, Daniel? Peleg, however, was born a melancholiac. Melancholia, I take it, is not a malady so much as a matter of temperament. It renders its victims austere and dour. They dissimulate violent passions that are exhibited only through tempestuous outbreaks of weeping and nerves. By their nature they are exposed to a continual perturbation of the vital organs, to spasms and obstructions, for instance. These physical disorders induce an unquietness of mind without respite just as bad eating brings horrible dreams. Therefore in their waking hours these unfortunate people are the victims of disordered stomachs, spleens and livers. Their minds as well as their bodies are attacked and such a thing as constitutional anxiety sets in and predisposes them to sombre fancies. These pathological conditions favor an over-development of the interior life and melancholiacs become disposed to the depravities of the imagination. Errors of sense ensue and their enfeebled normalities become the slaves of phantoms. It is but a short step to frenzies and fanaticisms. Peleg Carrier was such a man. Tall, cadaverous, with a face as yellow as old parchment, and a continual twitch of the hands, he passed like a morose ghost through the life of Marlborough. Who knows what preyed upon his perverted mind? Perhaps it was the sins of his father, Uriah. Perhaps the inclination toward those sins was reborn in Peleg and strangled by him through a supreme effort of will. I don’t know. If there was an ethical impulse in him it must have run against a stone wall in Uriah. Perhaps half the dourness of life is in living down the sins of our fathers. This seems to be getting nowhere, Daniel, but I want you to remember both of these Carriers, the first an old ferocious rascal and the second a nervous melancholiac. Peleg married late in life the woman who was his housekeeper and she had one child. The father died the day that Martha was born.”

Dreeme pricked up his ears at the name.

“Well, there you are,” said Lathrop placidly. “There you have Martha Westcott.”

“I can’t see ...” began Dreeme.

“Of course you can’t,” broke in the old doctor, “and neither can I. But we can both guess. Westcott himself I know little about. I have heard that he was the son of one of Peleg Carrier’s German friends, born in those days when Peleg was studying in Germany. I have also heard that he was a grandson of old Uriah Carrier. The first I saw of him was when he suddenly appeared in the valley to take charge of Peleg’s funeral. Who sent for him and from where he came are mysteries to me.”

“Is he so much older than his wife?” asked Dreeme with some surprise.

“Twenty years or so,” remarked Lathrop. “Martha is only twenty-five.”

“What!” exclaimed Dreeme.

Lathrop nodded.

“She’s always looked sort of ageless,” he said. “Westcott brought her up. They lived in the old Carrier house until it burned down. Then they went to Germany. When they came back seven or eight years ago they were married.”

The old doctor yawned and stretched his huge arms. He looked quizzically at Dreeme from beneath his eyebrows.

“So there you are, Daniel,” he said. “It is no story at all, you see.”

“Who do you think Westcott is?” inquired Dreeme.

“Well,” said Lathrop meditatively, “they say that old Uriah had a sort of cloven head. Perhaps he’s the man in the moon, Daniel.”

The soft chime of a clock broke in upon them and Dreeme counted six beats. It was time to go.

“You’re not telling me much about Jeffrey Westcott and his wife,” remarked the young doctor.

Lathrop shook his head despondently.

“I don’t know anything about them, I tell you,” he complained, a faint note of irritation in his voice. “I’ve never been inside their house. I haven’t talked to them for five years. I haven’t seen them. What do you want me to say, Daniel? Do you want me to invent a fine theory concerning them?”

“If you must,” said Dreeme. “But why not tell me the fine theory you have already invented?”

For an instant Lathrop nearly exploded. Then he said softly:

“Darn it!”

He looked at Dreeme in a woeful manner. He said:

“You _will_ have something, won’t you?”

Leaning forward he grasped Dreeme’s hand in his huge soft paw.

“Good-night, Daniel,” he articulated heartily. “Good-night.”

Dreeme disengaged his hand and sat tightly in his chair.

“I have my supper early,” remarked Lathrop in a mildly protesting voice.

His chair creaked as he leaned back in it.

“I hate to talk about people,” he said in a loud voice. “It means no good, I tell you.”

There was a loud crash in the room and both men sat upright suddenly and stared about them. Lathrop’s can of shag had slipped from the table to the floor. The dark curling tobacco lay in an untidy heap between them. The can rocked on its round side for a moment and then ceased.

“Humphrey,” said Dreeme, “you have thought a lot about the Westcotts. You’ve even studied their hereditary strain. You describe a villain and a madman to me and then you introduce a man who has studied in Germany. God knows what he studied. The Black Arts, perhaps.”

“There aren’t any Black Arts,” interjected Lathrop, gazing woefully at his tobacco.

“He studied something, anyway,” went on Dreeme, ignoring the interruption, “and I will venture to assert that it was neither differential calculus nor Emmanuel Kant. He is still studying it. He’s an abnormal creature and so is his wife. Why have you kept hinting at some sort of a fanaticism and pointing out the difference between supernormal and supernatural and insisting on the melancholia of Peleg Carrier?”

Lathrop made a motion as though washing and wiping his hands.

“I refuse to be led into wild theories, Daniel,” he said. “I base my opinions on facts. Any other process means eventual madness. Good Lord, how do you suppose I have lived here for half a century without turning into a sheer lunatic? Principally by minding my own business, which I advise you to do. And by treating a fact as a fact and letting it carry me no farther.”

The twilight, shot with the spent gold of the afternoon, curdled about the corners of the room. It dusted in through the windows and rolled in wispy vapors over the heads of the two men. It crept along the floor and eddied beneath the tables and chairs. Dreeme felt the slow tide rising about his feet and curling about his hands. He made an impatient movement as though to brush it from him. He started to feel Lathrop’s hand suddenly placed on his knee.

“Daniel,” said the old doctor, “thought is a terrible thing. You are too young to grow morbid. Your nerves are on edge. Let them rest. Forget the Westcotts and forget your mystery of Marlborough. It is only by new thought, by bright strenuous acceptances that this sad land may be translated from the barren graveyard of Puritan traditions to the New World that is our heritage. I will not give you half-baked notions to feed on for then you would grow as somber as the people you see about you. I’ve told you what I know about the Westcotts and if I have certain personal reactions to them and to the people in this community it is far better that I keep them to myself. I, at least, can cage my thoughts and let them grumble there and hurt no one. You are too young to keep your opinions to yourself and they would escape and end by devouring you. Eat, sleep, read, do your work, my boy. That is all that you need do.”

“You’ve not kept a single thing from me, have you, Humphrey?” said the young doctor accusingly.

Lathrop pursed his great lips and refused to meet Dreeme’s eyes.

The twilight edged the young man toward the door and he rose reluctantly. Humphrey Lathrop’s huge bulk eased back in his chair to a noisy creaking. He smiled agreeably. Dreeme picked up his hat and held out his hand to the old doctor.

“I’ll drop in and see you soon, Humphrey,” he said.

“That’s the boy,” wheezed Lathrop, patting the back of his hand. “That’s the boy.”

Chapter Four

I

Mrs. Slater moved, a black silhouette, across the yellow glow of the kerosene-lamp, bearing in chubby hands the last of the supper dishes. She kicked the kitchen door open with a grunt and disappeared. It was silent in the room. Walden Slater, having removed his boots with the elastic sides, drifted almost surreptitiously to the back porch, his gray woollen socks touching the floor soundlessly. Reaching his haven he sank with a hoarse sigh of relief into the broken rocker. Dreeme could see his bent form against the misty light of evening whenever the door to the kitchen flapped open. He sat there and rocked to the faint creak-creak of the chair; his talon-like hands grasping the arms of the rocker. He was a personification of a certain aspect of this New England. He was the tired man reeking with dried sweat, earth, and barn-yard odors sitting in the quiet evening and drawing in hoarse and throbbing lung-fulls of fresh air. His bones were tired. His flesh crawled sluggishly with an old weariness. The hinges of his knees were stiff. He was a finality in himself, a period put to a long sentence of history. The kitchen door swung to and fro and Dreeme ceased to look at the farmer. He looked out of the window instead, into the dark side-yard where the Slater children sat huddled together on a broken barrow and talked soberly in low tones. Their voices sounded thin and far away, pinched sounds, words rolled between huge fists. The low light of the evening fell across the sides of their faces. Small impish profiles turned to the brooding night. A dark form passed between Dreeme’s eyes and the children’s faces and the young doctor saw the figure of the reverend George Burroughs, skinny hands clasped behind the frayed skirts of his musty coat, stalk off into the darkness. It was like a brief eclipse, an instant’s impenetrable blackness, and then it was gone. Light footsteps died almost instantaneously in the direction of the Leeminster Road.

Dreeme looked back into the room ... well ... he progressed slowly toward the kitchen door.

“Where is your niece?” he asked Mrs. Slater with a directness that was unusual in Marlborough where people talked by inference. The woman’s eyes fluttered wildly at this unexpected question.

“Deborah ... well, Deborah....” She hurried toward the kitchen door with a massed pillar of plates, a sort of leaning tower of Pisa that threatened to dissolve into fragments at every step. At the door she turned. She said:

“Helping out.... They needed somebody to help out....”

Her voice drifted back through the door.

“Mrs. Westcott ... sent for her....”

Dreeme brooded upon this for an instant, fumbled in his pocket for his pipe, and then sauntered slowly toward the kitchen. Mrs. Slater, at the sink, her sleeves rolled back over her short plump arms, observed him with a suspicious concern, her head cocked on one side, an eye turned back. It was like the eye of a querulous parrot. Dreeme leaned against the wall, and, watching her, filled his pipe.

“Has Mrs. Westcott been here?” he asked.

Mrs. Slater turned to her dishes. She said:

“Oh, no!”

It was inconceivable, of course.

Dreeme waited for a moment as he lighted his pipe.

“Who has?” he inquired.

Mrs. Slater looked reproachfully at him as she fumbled for certain words in her throat.

“We thought we’d have Deborah with us ... especially since....” A clashing of dishes drowned a few words. “But the preacher said ... he saw Mrs. Westcott....”

“You mean Burroughs had your niece sent over to the Westcott farm as hired girl?” broke in Dreeme.

Mrs. Slater did not like the word.

“She’s going to help out ... until Mr. Westcott is better....”

She actually glowered at Dreeme.

“In that lonely hole,” thought Dreeme aloud.

“It’s hard enough to live ...” began Mrs. Slater.

“It _is_,” said the doctor strongly.

Well, it was none of his business. The poor relation. Go where you are sent. All the same ... it was a shame. Cloven head and his malignant eyes. Eyes like wet violets. “Rock of Ages.” Now why had he thought of that? He opened his mouth to speak again to Mrs. Slater, thought better of it, and turned back into the lamp-lit room. He had wanted to talk to the girl, to find out what she thought of things and how this valley had affected her young mind. But now.... Why she might as well be in Timbuktoo. The Westcott farm-gate opened into.... “All hope abandon....” He picked up his hat from the little side table and walked slowly through the hall and into the yard. The hushed voices of the Slater children sounded like a faint drone. He could hear the rocker on the back porch. Creak-creak. The dew was heavy. It was better to keep to the gravel path. Creak-creak. He reached the street and turned toward his own house. Creak-creak. Shine, moon. He looked up at a murky sky. No moon. It was too early for the moon. Creak. “Stars of the summer night.” Longfellow. “Far in yon azure....” Creak. He fumbled (creak) at the knob to his door, pushed it open, and entered the small hall. To go upstairs. Bed. But he was not sleepy. He would go into the back study and read for a while. Or mull over Humphrey Lathrop’s conversation. Humphrey knew.... He felt his way along the dark hall and pushed the door open into the study. The minute he entered the room he knew that there was somebody there. He was not frightened. He leaned back against the door and said softly: “Who is it?”

A throat cleared noisily.

“Wagner,” replied a hoarse voice.

“Are you by the table? There is a lamp there. Light it,” said Dreeme.

The match spurted like a tiny firework and great shadows sprang up on all sides. A dancing ring of Jinns. Wagner’s red beard hung like a sultry smoke above the chimney. The man lowered his head and peered at Dreeme across the table.

“What is it, Wagner?” inquired the doctor. “Is Westcott’s leg bad?”

The shaggy head shook slowly.

“That’s all right,” he replied. “I wash it now. I’m real good at it.”

His eyes narrowed under his bushy brows and his yellow teeth glowed through the mass of hair.

“She said you was to meet her by ten in the back room of the burned mill,” he said slowly in his rusty sepulchral voice. “She told me to tell you.”

A faint throb of anticipation tugged at the doctor’s mind.

“Deborah?” he asked. Wagner said:

“Missus Westcott.”

Dreeme’s mind stopped dead. Automatically he said:

“Tell her I won’t come.”

“She said she guessed you would all right,” replied the hoarse voice.

To think now. Leaning over the well. The white nape of her neck. Heavy boots dragged across the floor.

“What does she want?” he asked softly. There was no response. Boots dragging. A puffing. Dreeme floundered in a sea of amazement. He repeated his question loudly.

“What does she want, I say?”

This silence! Collecting his wits, he peered about the dimly lighted study. Empty, of course. He had gone out. Gone right by him. Dreeme walked over to the table and sat down in the easy chair by it. A tiny white moth dipped and volplaned about the smoky chimney. Now what was this? He would have to think about it. He leaned back in his chair and pulled at his cold pipe.

The faint ticking of the clock was like the tiny regular beating of a miniature tomtom. The minutes danced to it, shaking their small feet in an unending circle. They tripped by him, hands joined, and infinitesimal tapping heels maintaining a regular time that measured off the softly-flowing hours. He watched the vain moth dashing its white wings desperately against the smoky chimney. Sooner or later it would get scorched and flutter to the table, a charred and crumbling pinch of powder. Life was a curious thing. Breathed into a bit of dust it became a moth. Or a man. Something was happening to him now. His two years of dreary silence were breaking down and he was beginning to grow morbid about things in general. He was getting nervous, acutely aware of invisible tentacles that seemed to reach out of this darkness that encircled him on all sides and touch him softly. Humphrey Lathrop had said that it was nerves. But perhaps it was more than that. Perhaps it was a sixth sense slowly coming to birth inside him, a sense nourished by his loneliness that was reaching out into new dimensions. He was pursuing phantoms, hunting through the sun-shot fields about Marlborough for invisible essences that drifted deliberately and had a particular semblance of their own. He was going to solve an intense and formidable riddle. He was going to track down the secret of an atmosphere, the aura of a community. It sounded absurd enough but it was only the absurd things that mattered greatly after all if a man desired to be more than an eating, sleeping, laboring animal. To be a man, and all that _that_ meant, was to walk arm in arm with phantoms, to discourse with shadowy substances, to resolve high mystical riddles. Ah! The moth shrivelled against the hot glass and dropped to the table. So that was that! He turned it over tenderly with a paper-knife and then pushed it to the floor.

Now then! He looked at the ticking clock from which the joined minutes were tripping their fantastic and regular dance. It was nine-thirty. Then it would be in half an hour. His thoughts, held tightly by the leash of his will, were set free and they sprang forward like a pack of ravenous hunting dogs. Up the Leeminster Road they sped and his spectral self followed them as an eager hunter follows his baying hounds. For an instant the face of Deborah flashed in the dark air and then it disappeared, left far behind by this rout of yelping coursers. He had said that he would not go. But she knew that he would, that his curiosity would carry him as far as the mill at least. What she wanted he did not know but he could suspect it. She was assuredly a lonely caged-in creature. She stood at windows and watched the night-sky and wondered about the life that went boiling so turbulently by on the great highroads to the west and the east of her locked doors. She sat in a room lined with books beside a cloven-headed man and a secret sat there with them and she had nobody to share that secret with her, no one, that is, except the man himself who _was_ the secret. Perhaps she wanted to tell him things, to pour out the subterranean stream of her consciousness. He could imagine her muffled voice speaking in the darkness of the mill. It was not strange that she had sent for him, after all. It would have been stranger if she had maintained her silence. Dreeme rose slowly from his chair and blew the light out. Well....

II

She was seated in an embrasure formed where a portion of the brick wall had fallen away and dropped into the yellow-scummed water of the mill-pond. He could see the dark silhouette of her head as it turned sideways against the smoky light of the moon, and for a moment he paused in the doorway watching her, noting the regularity of her boldly-cut features and the cold sensuousness of her rounded lips. It was almost symbolic to find her so, no more than a silhouette, a face seen in a single aspect, a profile clean-cut and set against unsteady light that flowed with the rippling of milky waters. She was like this. She was the outline of a mystery, a part of that riddle that somehow he must solve if he was to have any peace of mind. It was dark and gloomy in the mill. Its fire-blackened walls retained the horror of an old debacle. Two men had been incinerated here. She said:

“I was sure you would come.”

She had not turned her head. She still sat sideways against the moon. But her hand moved. It was pale and indistinct as it shifted into the dim light. He advanced toward her slowly, his footsteps sounding hollowly on the cracked cement floor.

“What is it?” he asked. “What do you want?”

Her head turned and although her face was a blackness he could feel her eyes studying him, fondling his features with a glance that was both tired and expectant.

“I was tired,” she answered in a muffled voice.

That seemed to explain something and he continued his advance until he was beside her. She drew back slightly into her corner of the embrasure and he sat down on the cold crumbling bricks. He said:

“You mean ... of loneliness?”

Her shoulders quivered a trifle. She did not need to answer that. Her movement dislodged a fragment of brick and it dropped with a sharp plop into the mill-pond. Dreeme started nervously at the sound.

“Why were you spying on me through the stone wall today?” she asked suddenly, and then went on, not waiting for an answer. “I knew you would come. You mustn’t loiter about the house, though. It isn’t safe. He would be sure to find it out.”

Dreeme felt like a drowning man, and he made a valiant effort to save himself.

“I had business Leeminster way,” he replied in an uncertain tone. “I just happened that way. I wasn’t spying, I....”

“You needn’t lie,” she returned coolly. She put her hand on his knee. She said:

“You are the first young man I have talked to alone for years.”

The electric touch of her fingers filled Dreeme with a nervous excitement. He fumbled vaguely for words, but his mind was like a great empty sack. Explore as he might there was nothing there.

“He keeps me shut up,” she went on. “I have to ... but no matter.”

Dreeme still sought blindly for words. Her voice and her vaguely-outlined face were dead weights on his intelligence. He could not rise above them or push them aside.

“I like you,” she said. “Does that sound silly? Let it. I liked you the minute I saw you.”

“I think ... I mean ...” began Dreeme.

“You were like a boy with the weary lines of a man’s face impossibly stamped on you,” she remarked slowly. Her eyes studied him a moment. She asked softly:

“Are you afraid?”

His silence, complete and emphatic, was the mute answer to her question. In the milky light he could see that she was almost smiling.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said as though she were speaking to a child.

“I’m not afraid,” replied Dreeme with an effort. “What is there to be afraid of? I don’t understand. That’s all.”

Her face was level with his, and she looked at him for a moment steadily, her dark eyes under their heavy lids full of a vague surmise.

“How long have you been here?” she asked presently.

“Two years,” answered Dreeme much as though he were a school-child being examined.

“So long?” she murmured. “You see how ignorant I am. Men pass outside my window and I never see them.”

Dreeme, in spite of his confusion, doubted that.

“What do you know about me?” she proceeded. There was a faint breathlessness in the question.

“Practically nothing,” he said.

She sighed, and it seemed to Dreeme that she sighed in relief.

“We are not children, are we?” she asked irrelevantly.

Dreeme shook his head.

“It has been so long since I conversed with anyone that I have almost lost the use of words,” she said half to herself. “Yet words were once my favorite play-things. I would shape them into all sorts of patterns.”

She removed her hand from his knee for an instant and then put it back. It seemed to Dreeme as though there had been a brief flaw in the electric current that was pouring into him and which so unsteadied him.

“Be silent, then, and let me talk,” she went on. “I need to say things. I am tired of talking to myself and inanimate objects, tired of reading, tired of working, tired of listening to things that I do not much care about any more.”

She paused for a moment but Dreeme said nothing.

“You see,” she said. “I needed someone.” Her hand closed about his wrist softly. “I needed you. I had not been in the room more than a minute before I realized that you were that sensitive type about.... Do you remember looking at me? Weren’t you trying to say something to me, trying to say it without words?”

Her speech had suddenly become a husky caress. She leaned forward. She murmured in an almost inaudible voice:

“Say it now.”

Dreeme fumbled for words. Had he desired to convey any message to her? He could not find it in the welter of his mind.

“I was wondering,” he stuttered. “I mean, it seemed strange to find that room full of books, that curious man, and ... you.”

He was suddenly aware that he did not desire this relationship between them to establish itself too quickly and too firmly upon a basis of mystical understanding. It was too silly. Two strangers did not reveal themselves so nakedly to one another. He clutched eagerly at the tattered cloak of his New England reticence. She did not appear to understand that he was attempting to convey a polite snub, a discreet hint, as it were, to resume the formal disguises of casual acquaintances, but her hand slipped from his wrist. Dreeme almost breathed with relief.

“It is good to be away from that house and to be able to talk as I wish,” she proceeded. “It is an evil house. It is dominated by an evil man.”

Dreeme said nothing. He sat gazing at the mill-pond in a phlegmatic manner. Her dark eyes narrowed a trifle as she watched him.

“I, too, am evil,” she added.

Her tone was matter-of-fact, as though she were stating a thing already understood. At the same time, there was an implied challenge in it. Dreeme felt that he should say something.

“I don’t think you are evil,” he protested. There was but little conviction in his voice.

“All that is relative, though,” she went on in a voice almost indistinct. “Do you like to ponder over things, to intellectualize them? So do I. Evil is relative. Perhaps he is not evil according to his own lights. Sitting alone in the house I have evolved my own scheme of things.”

“What is it?” he asked suddenly. “What is it in that house? Why is he different from other men? What is it in Marlborough that ... what ...”

He waved his hand expressively, showing for the first time a curious liveliness.

A slow startled look suffused her face. She gazed at him steadily for a moment, and then the corners of her mouth quivered. Behind the cold mask of her face she seemed to smile.

“I will not tell you,” she answered, “At least, not now.”

There was an implicit promise in her voice. But no sooner had she conveyed this slight intimation of future explanations than she seemed to regret it.

“There is nothing,” she said. “It is the loneliness. It is the ingrowing. It is the days passing along and every day the same.”

“Have you lived here all your life?” he asked.

She paused a moment. She said:

“All my life. I have never left this valley. I have never found the door that leads out into the world.”

She was a liar. Dreeme knew that at last. Her voice had again become a husky caress. It strove to reach out and embrace the dubious young doctor. He was conscious of a vague note of insincerity in it. Far back in his mind a sly intuition manifested itself, and it suggested that this woman was very near to acting, that she was cautiously feeling her way into his emotions. She wanted to find out if he could be swayed by passion, pity or intellect. He must be careful, terribly careful. He must avoid the almost overpowering magnetism that emanated from her white slumberous body.

“Life should proceed,” she said, her words sounding like slow calculating steps through the difficult labyrinth of her thoughts. “It should go on and touch different places and different people, accepting and rejecting, considering all. It should meet the passions and accept them all and live through them and with them. But my life is not like that. I am cut off, set apart from things, bounded by walls and the will of one man. My thoughts boil in me to no purpose. My mind revolves and it achieves no friction, no flashing of sparks. It is just an insane wheel whirling endlessly in a vacuum. That is what it really is. I cannot go on like that and remain sane.”

Dreeme did not know what to say. He knew that he was beginning to be frightened.

“I do not live in that house,” she went on. “I exist in it. I stare out of the window in summer and see parched fields stretching to eternity. In the winter it is all an expanse of untrodden snow. Sometimes voices come to me from the road. That is all. That is all, I tell you.”

Her voice rose, deep and husky. Louder than she had spoken before she declared:

“I was born to great acceptances.”

Dreeme was becoming more and more frightened. He did not want to hear these things, these somber intimacies of a household that was no part of his affair and yet he could not stop listening. Her words were a warm web that caught up all his thoughts. He could not stand up and say, “I’m sorry, but this is not my business.” It would be cowardice. He opened his mouth to say something, perhaps that very thing, but she continued to speak as though to hold his wavering will in the balance.

“I don’t have to describe my life to you,” she said. “You know. You know because you know Marlborough, and the strength that exists in the walls of the houses of Marlborough. But there are things that you do not know. You do not know that my husband is ... but why should you know? He is like God, but I cannot tell you what I mean by that.”

She stopped, apparently expecting some exclamation, but Dreeme sat in silent bewilderment and said nothing.

“He directs destinies,” she went on. “He lets nothing stand between him and the objectives he has planned for himself. Not even me. Least of all, me. He has great power over the minds and futures of people when he chooses to exercise it. It is impossible to be independent with him. Once inside the walls of his house there is no individuality left to the visitor,--or rather the intruder, for no one enters his house except intruders. He spreads like a great force over everything. Freedom becomes a secret possession then, something to be cherished darkly at one’s bosom. It is only in an escape from that house that one may assert one’s unique unity. It is by slipping away that I keep myself sane. I have slipped away now. He is busy at his books, and the new girl moving about will, perhaps, seem to be me.”

“What books?” asked Dreeme abruptly. If he could find out what Westcott read he could find out what he thought. That was Westcott’s own idea. Even as he asked the question he realized that he was crudely diverting Martha Westcott from her self-revelation, and he flushed at his unconscious rudeness. She did not seem to notice his divagation. She said:

“I don’t know. He buys old books, sends to Europe constantly for items he finds in the catalogues that come to him, but I never look into them. My mind is my book. I think that he is formulating a new religion from them.”

He was aware of her untruthfulness again, of something held back and reformulated in the mind, of a desire to impress him and yet not to tell him anything substantial.

“A new religion?” he repeated with a shade of curiosity.

She dismissed it vaguely. She said:

“He is fashioning a new god in his own image.”

It sounded silly to Dreeme. He wanted to smile. A cloven-headed man on an avoided farm in a forgotten valley creating a new god. He felt like blurting out, “Oh, come now. That is a bit too thick.” Instead he declared:

“We all fashion God in our own image. It is our unfortunate weakness.”

She was getting impatient with this topic. She did not want to talk about anything but herself.

“But not his kind of a God,” she replied, a vague note of irritation in her tone. “Perhaps, after all, he is fashioning himself into the image of an old god. Would that be unusual? I really can’t tell you. I don’t know. I am only a part of the furniture in that house. I, too, have my philosophy of living.”

She paused for a question.

“Yes?” said Dreeme politely.

She stirred uneasily, and her knee, warm beneath her skirt, struck against his leg. In moving her head bent forward and the fragrance of her hair swept his face. Suddenly he was enveloped in the hot disturbing atmosphere of flesh. He wanted to rise to his feet now, to terminate this ineffectual interview, to explain to her that though she might upset his mental equilibrium by the magnetism of her body, the subtle insinuations of her mysterious eyes, and the leashed ardor so like a caged tigress that moved behind her pale flesh, he was yet aware of her cunning licentiousness that would use him for her own malicious ends. He could view her with a cold intensity from a distance now, could speculate as to her designs; yet, at the same time, he was aware that in her immediate presence she dominated him by a power that was not entirely beauty. It was this that made him uneasy and unsure of himself.

“Yes,” she said, low, husky, half-passionately. “I have my philosophy of living. It is to drink to the dregs the opportunities vouchsafed us by Time, to take advantage of that cruel gaoler, Destiny, and fool him at every turn. We are born free and we should live free. Our blood whispers messages to us and we should answer those low calls that ring in our ears if we are to vindicate ourselves to ourselves. Have you ever rested your head against a woman’s breast and heard the blood racing furiously through all its arteries? What are we put into the world for? We are the fruit of suppressed joy, are we not? It is the liberation of self for which we are ordained. There is only one way of being actually free, and that is to surmount the thousand and one petty laws and dogmas that hedge us about. We speak constantly of obligations, but what do we mean by them? Do we mean the suppression of our free instincts and the obliteration of our integrity before the selfish demands of another’s welfare and peace of mind? Is not that a slavish instinct? What is our debt to humanity but the reverse of humanity’s debt to us. There is a freedom based upon the destruction of all laws, political, religious and moral, a freedom where we may tread the earth as gods in a great tranquil equality, and it is to that freedom that I turn my face. If I am free in myself, if my thoughts and secret passions move as they please, why not this flesh which I carry travel in freedom also?”

He heard the soft sound of her breast struck sharply by her hand.

“I do not say ‘no’ to anything,” she went on. “I merely say ‘does it satisfy me and fill me for the moment?’ If it does it is good. If it does it is an end in itself. Let men and women think what they please and move about with free wills. I abolish slavery.”

It all sounded like a set speech to Dreeme, something she had written out and memorized, something that she had evolved to sap the spiritual integrity of whosoever she might meet in this mood of attack. Well, he would show her that he was adamant.

“You are an anarchist,” he said. He strove to say it lightly, to fashion it into a mere flippant rejoinder. To his chagrin he heard his own voice trembling.

“I am a woman,” she replied. “All women are anarchists at heart. The only laws they respect are the laws of their desires. I am an anarchist of the soul, of the mind, of the flesh. Nothing but the limitations of my body shall stand in my way. And through the limitations of my body I will find my own deliverance.”

She stopped at that as though expecting a sudden flood of answers on his part and her eyes were fastened upon his face. He said nothing but waited.

“I am lonely,” she murmured in a low, almost inaudible voice.

Dreeme, turning his face directly toward her, looked into her eyes. She was speaking through them, steadily, mercilessly. For a moment they stared at one another, and then Dreeme, his face flushing and his body shaking, stood up. In the moonlight so diffused and cloudy her eyes dilated like those of a tigress.

“Have I told you nothing?” she cried. “Have I said nothing to you?”

Her voice was loud and raucous, a terrible sound that caused Dreeme’s body to sway. It was as though she were lashing him with a whip.

“You have told me many things,” he answered in a trembling voice, “and most of them I did not want to hear.”

She stood up before him and put her hands upon his shoulders, the nails of her fingers pressing into his flesh.

“You coward!” she said. “You miserable coward!”

He took her hands from his shoulders, but still retained them in his own. Her hands were cold and the palms were moist.

“I am not a coward,” he answered in an uncertain voice.

She breathed deeply, a long shuddering inhalation, and then put her mouth close to his ear, her long body resting lightly against him.

“Listen!” she said in a husky whisper. “Are you as lonely as I....”

Suddenly she stopped and twisted about toward the door of the mill, a door that yawned on the road and framed in its square a clouded milky haze.

“Do you hear it?” she asked in a low monotone.

He had already concentrated his faculties and was listening intently.

“Yes, I do,” he answered. A cold fever settled on him as he replied, and he knew that he was perspiring icily at every pore.