I

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.