II

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 wallpaper. 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 wallpaper 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 whitewashed 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 overlooked the millpond. 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 heartbreaking manual labor that warped the shoulders, lengthened the arms, bowed the legs, and tanned the red leathery skin. He was the packhorse, 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 bloodred 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 clues. And there were no clues. 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 farmhouse. 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 sidelong 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.