I
Doctor Dreeme, turning sleepily on his pillow, heard the clatter of a
horse’s hoofs coming down the steep Leeminster Road. The steely clash
on the rock-path tore abruptly through his semi-trance and he opened
his eyes, scowling vaguely at the milky blur of ceiling. The horse
stopped with a rough grating of hoofs below the window and the doctor
sighed. Marlborough was like that. It was undoubtedly another farmer
with a pain in his back who might just as well wait until morning.
It was at night that his taciturn neighbors were most obsessed with
the somber consequences of their lonely ailments. In daylight they
would bear them with the dumb equanimity of animals, sitting behind
drawn curtains or plodding painfully over their stony fields. But they
were horribly afraid of dying at night. The bell clanked feebly. The
doctor threw back his quilted coverlet of great square patches, rose
in the darkness of the room, and strode over to the window. He leaned
out, straining his eyes to see who stood in the gray mist of the moon
outside his door.
“Who is it?” he called sharply. “Who, in the name of Heaven ... at this
time of night....”
A boyish treble answered him.
“Doctor Dreeme? I’m Miles, Jeffrey Westcott’s hired boy. Mr. Westcott’s
taken something awful. He wants for you to come and help him right
away. He’s shot himself and....”
“I’ll be right down,” snapped the doctor.
He fumbled about the room, lit a kerosene oil-lamp, and hastily dressed
himself, drawing his trousers on over his rumpled pyjamas. Pausing an
instant before the cracked mirror he smoothed back his tousled hair and
dashed some cold water from the china bowl upon his sleep-warm face.
It was a square-cut visage, young, thin-lipped, and with long narrow
eyes that stared back briefly at him. Two years’ arduous practice in
Marlborough, a relentless precision of deaths and births and ailments,
had etched tiny lines about his mouth and eyes and forehead, lines of
watchfulness and concentration, but he was still surprisingly youthful
in appearance and alert in action. He grasped his black bag and hurried
down the stairs, slipping the bolt and stepping into the dim lane where
the huge farm-horse pawed impatiently at the ground. The blank windows
of the Slater house stared down at him gloomily as he turned to the
boy, Miles, who perched like a small monkey on his mount.
“Are you sure that Jeffrey Westcott wants me to come?” asked Dreeme as
he climbed to a seat on the blanket that served for a saddle. There was
a minor note of amazement in his voice.
The boy said nothing but chirped to his horse and the huge beast swung
in the lane and mounted the hill, slowly at first and then at a smart
canter as the ascent eased its sharp angle. The blurred moon flew
with them, trailing long bat-like wings of milky opacity across the
crumbling stone walls and the buildings with their lurching outhouses.
Beside them swept their broad shadow, a two-torsoed centaur, indistinct
and formidable in outline. Looking back Dreeme could see the little
town of Marlborough stretched out like a conglomeration of dark tombs.
A cool air tingling with the freshness of impending rain flowed by his
face. Low trees flung chunky green arms across the twisting fences
at him. They were black in the dimmed moonlight. The shaggy hoofs of
the horse thudded heavily on the sand-road. Suddenly the boy answered
Dreeme’s question.
“He told me to fetch you, anyway,” he remarked to the darkness before
him.
The doctor said nothing and the boy, turning his head, observed him
fleetingly. Dreeme caught the flash of a small, dark, imp-like face and
two dull-green eyes.
So far as the doctor knew nobody ever called at the Westcott farm. It
was avoided territory, forbidden to children wandering through the
byways between Marlborough and Leeminster and skirted hastily by
the taciturn farmers who dwelt in its vicinity. Dreeme had observed
the rambling white-washed buildings from the road often enough as
he had passed on his way to various patients and occasionally he
had seen Jeffrey Westcott ride into town for supplies, but that was
all. The Westcotts took no part in the life of Marlborough. Indeed,
they seemed frankly to court an ostracism that had long ago been
willingly granted them by the unusual breed of natives who dwelt in
this part of New England. Dreeme, curious and observant when he first
arrived in Marlborough and took up the practice of his father’s old
friend, Humphrey Lathrop, had asked questions about the Westcotts,
as, indeed, he had about all the farmers in the neighbourhood, for
he believed in mixing as much psychological insight as possible with
his medicinal treatments, but he soon discovered that questions were
not welcome in the town. An excessive reticence possessed these
leather-skinned delvers in the soil, these small-shopkeepers, and even
the brief scattering of professional men who conducted the affairs
of Marlborough. Therefore, as Dreeme was an astute and adaptable
young man, he speedily learned to keep his mouth shut and, at least
outwardly, to suppress his curiosity. It was enough to serve as well as
he could when he was called upon and to expend whatever mental energies
he might have in the study of various profound books on medicine
and psychology. Although time passed slowly it passed agreeably for
loneliness did not obsess Dreeme. He was New England enough himself to
slip naturally into a rut of reticence and to occupy himself with his
own thoughts. Still there were many times when of all the curious folk
in his environment he let his cogitations wander to the Westcotts.
They were unusual in their abandonment of the common intercourse of
daily life. Apparently they had no friends, not even those cursory
friends who met in the Post Office and General Store and discussed in
brief bursts of monosyllables the politics and phenomena of the day.
They were decidedly sufficient unto themselves. Dreeme always thought
of the Westcotts as a plural number although he had never laid eyes
on Mrs. Westcott. He knew that she existed and that was all. This,
of course, was extraordinary in a small New England town where every
individual might be supposed to know intimately the smallest details of
a neighbor’s life; where, as a rule, the women, at least, maintained a
sharp and malicious watch on one another. But this, after all, was an
unusual New England town as Humphrey Lathrop had insisted to the young
man when Dreeme first ventured upon Marlborough.
“You have seen New Englanders all your life,” the older doctor had
said, “and you know their usual characteristics, reticence tinged with
curiosity, religious fervor jaundiced with personal hypocrisy, an old
pride bolstered by a stony soil, a nasal twang possibly induced by
generations of psalm-singing through the nose, a stubborn zeal in labor
and an inborn stinginess. You have seen that type of New Englander
and I do not go so far as to say that you will not find it here; but
there is a type of New Englander in this place that you have never seen
before and of which I knew nothing until I came here. Marlborough and,
to a lesser degree, Leeminster are cul-de-sacs into which an ancient
backwash of old blood has flowed. It has been unrelieved by any new
influx for two hundred years or more. It is not easy to get up here,
you know, and once here there is little to hold an ambitious man. That
is why you will go away some day. These people have dwelt here in this
valley so opportunely surrounded by the Florida mountains and have
intermarried for generations. Some day, perhaps the day when you leave
for ever, I will tell you what curious breed of Puritan drifted into
this valley and established these communities. You will be amazed, for
they are a breed of which you catch but furtive glances and hints in
Pilgrim and Puritan chronicles. A curious intermixture of ethical and
Dionysiac madness produced the forefathers of these people to whom
you must administer as wisely as you can and with a minimum of words
and questions.” The old doctor cleared his throat with a tremendous
harrumph, his elephantine body quivering like a great jelly-fish, and
Dreeme decided that he had been told nothing at all. If he was to solve
the mystery of Marlborough--and there _was_ a mystery, for he
felt it like two huge dark wings hovering over the entire community--he
must do it all by himself.
For two years now the mystery had stood just outside his door, a
dark and disquieting impalpability that teased him into fruitless
suppositions, that revealed itself fleetingly in the swift side-long
glitter of cautious eyes, that threaded the valley and the town with
a dim muffled sense of something unearthly. And yet the sun shone
brightly enough, the farmers went about their business with the usual
grim doggedness of men who scrape a difficult living from miserly soil,
and the thin-faced women, scrawny-armed and bowed in the shoulders,
existed as women do in a small world of ceaseless irritating tasks.
There were moments when Dreeme decided that there was no mystery at
all, that his imagination was playing tricks with him, and that his
intuitions were the idle outgrowths of a mind too much concerned with
itself and revolving inwardly and creating vague bogies for lack of
other occupations. But after such moments of doubt would come still
days when the lurching houses seemed to watch him maliciously and when
the still trees, flinging their black shadows across the yellow glitter
of deserted roads, would stand as symbols of some invisible prowling
specter that patrolled the valley and observed him with blank lidless
eyes. His flesh crawled on his bones and it was only by an effort that
he put the obsession from him. He would say to himself that it was
ennui, that it was a morbid reaction to his existence in a small world
where, in spite of his ministrations, he was an outsider, that it was
nerves, but, considering the matter deliberately, he knew that it was
none of these likely causes. He possessed no nerves; he was not weary
of his loneliness; his mind was not too idle. It was something outside
of him pushing gently against his mind.