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.