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.