I
Doctor Humphrey Lathrop was so huge that it was difficult for him to
move about even with the aid of the two gnarled canes that flanked
either side of his gargantuan reinforced chair, a throne that creaked
ominously as his shifting bulk, a bulk that seemed to roll slowly like
cooling lava, swayed forward in wheezing conversation. He sat like an
enormous and kindly jelly-fish, his stomach resting on his great round
thighs and straining fiercely against the bulging vest spangled with
fobs and seals, his triple chins trembling beneath his wrinkled face,
his broad flat feet encased in comfortable slippers that suggested a
pair of medium-sized Gladstone bags. His black velvet smoking jacket,
odorous with a villainous tobacco, spread over him like a voluminous
cape. The polished baldness of his round cranium was thrust into a
skull-cap that fitted as snugly as a skin. On the back of his neck the
rolls of fat rippled as he stretched a plump arm out and lifted the
tiny green tea-cup in a massive hand. He wheezed softly as he moved,
a pleasant sibilant sound that chimed with the remonstrative creaking
of his over-loaded chair. Dreeme, perched opposite him on the end of
his chair, observed the ancient friend of his father with an approving
and respectful eye. He saw the moon-face and sagging jowls tanned by
many suns and eaten by an intricate net-work of wrinkles (which Lathrop
called “my map to eternity”) and the large blue intelligent eyes gazing
out of the gold circles of precariously balanced spectacles, and
experienced, as always, a curious sense of inferiority and complete
trust in the wisdom of the old doctor. Humphrey Lathrop was more than
an ancient friend. He was a monument of probity and wisdom, a great
quivering idol from whose lips issued counsel and the finalities of an
achieved experience. He was a Mahomet transformed into a mountain. For
fifty years he had been the solitary medical adviser to Marlborough
and it had only been after his bulk had reached such proportions as to
render it impossible for him to get about or climb in or out of his
rusty old buggy that he had turned over a meager and thankless practice
to the son of his boyhood friend. He had done so with misgiving and
regret for he distrusted the vagaries of the young in the profession
which he had honored for half a century. He was old-fashioned, deucedly
so, believing that a doctor’s prime concoction was common-sense
mixed with a little peppermint. It had been enough for him to supply
the simplest of remedies to the ailing and he possessed an undying
suspicion of what he denominated as “applied book-learning” in so far
as the practical treatment of sickness was concerned. He pointed
out time and again that there were no rare diseases in Marlborough.
Children were born in the usual way and men and women died as they had
always died. Between these two important dates were the ailments of the
young, mumps, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and measles. After that there
were accidents, cuts and bruises and broken limbs, and then such major
ailments as typhoid fever, chronic stomach trouble (which, so far as
Doctor Lathrop was concerned, included stomach, kidneys, and liver),
and pneumonia. He scoffed at appendicitis, calling it “an aristocratic
belly-ache.” In spite of his limitations as a doctor, and, perhaps,
because of the wiry health of his patients he had been accounted an
unusually successful practitioner. The thunderous approach of his great
flat feet and thumping canes were the immediate prophecies of relief.
What impressed Dreeme most strongly about him was the excellence and
keenness of his mind when taken apart from his dogged attitude toward
medicine. Though he might be a narrow-minded old fogey of a doctor,
he was, as a thinking man on general topics and life in general,
far-sighted, deliberative in judgment, ratiocinative, and exceedingly
shrewd. He mixed a certain amount of imagination with his observations
and limited it with a complacent fatalism that was less abrupt than
dimly wistful. Therefore, whenever Dreeme was perplexed he visited
Lathrop, finding in him a genial fount of encouragement and pertinent
comment. At this moment he was fumbling toward an utterance of the
problem weighing upon his puzzled mind and the old doctor, fully aware
of the purpose of the visit, studied him with some amusement, his blue
eyes twinkling behind the gold spectacles.
“I was called out to the Westcott farm last night,” said Dreeme
finally, pushing his cup from the edge of the little table.
Lathrop’s blue eyes opened wide and then closed. He wheezed gently and
drank his tea, pausing to blow at the scalding mixture, and then put
the cup down. It tinkled sharply in the silence of the room. Dreeme
heard the monotonous buzzing of a fly in the curtains by the window.
“So?” said Lathrop at last. Then he seemed to dismiss the subject,
reaching for his blackened corncob pipe and stuffing it from the can of
shag on the table.
“You don’t come to see me often, Daniel,” said the old doctor as he lit
a match, applied it to the pipe, and puffed wheezily. The pipe wouldn’t
draw. “Drat it!” he exclaimed, putting down the charred corncob, and
gazing about the room with a calm benevolent smile.
“I don’t see anyone often,” remarked Dreeme somewhat dejectedly.
Lathrop looked at him quickly, pursing his large lips.
“I warned you that this was no place for a young man,” he said. “You
can’t go about here. There is nothing to see and still less to do. I
don’t mind it but I am an old man and I couldn’t get about if I wanted
to. I have to sit in this chair like an old rheumatic hippopotamus and
look out the window.”
“And nobody goes by,” added Dreeme gloomily.
A faint chuckle irrupted from the huge body before him.
“Nothing but the sun and the rain and the clouds and the snow and the
night,” checked off Lathrop on his pudgy fingers. “But I don’t mind. It
isn’t so bad to have the chair placed out in the sun and to doze in it.
It warms me up.”
“I haven’t minded it either,” said Dreeme, “that is, until a day or
so ago. Then my mind got working again and I began to grow curious. I
want to know the ‘why’ of things. I want to know about people and why
communities are what they are.”
“That’s simple,” declared Lathrop. “Environment ... blood ... breeding.”
Dreeme flung out an impatient hand.
“Oh, I know,” he said. “I know all that. But there is something in back
of those things, something that creeps in the soil and climbs in the
trees and looks out of empty window-panes and circulates about you when
you walk in the street, and....” He broke off abruptly. “Do you believe
in magic, Humphrey?” he inquired suddenly.
Lathrop chuckled and wheezed, fumbling for the handkerchief in the side
pocket of his smoking jacket. The blowing of his nose was like the
sounding of a trumpet.
“So that’s it,” he said. “So that’s it. Lordy, Lordy.”
He picked up his pipe again and sought for the pen-knife in his
trousers pocket and began to clean out the stubborn bowl.
“Daniel,” he said, “I’ll tell you what I believe. Perhaps it will help
you and perhaps it won’t.”
He paused and maintained a silence until the pipe was cleaned, filled,
lighted, and drawing comfortably. Then he settled his huge bulk back in
the creaking chair and observed Dreeme with bland blue eyes through the
gold spectacles.
“You’ll have to forgive the inconsistencies, Daniel,” he began.
“I’ve never worked out a system of things. I’ve been too lazy and
too conscious of my own ignorance to do that. But I have certain
instinctive beliefs and I imagine they are unalloyed with the
new-fangled notions that are called modern psychology. I think that we
have two ways of classifying what is strange and mysterious to us--the
supernormal and the supernatural. I do not say ‘no’ to any of the
supernormal things. Against the supernatural I turn my face. It isn’t
reasonable. It isn’t even spiritually reasonable. For instance, the
most ordinary inventions today would have seemed supernatural three
hundred years ago, whereas, at that time, they were merely supernormal,
existing in that unexplored terrain outside of the comprehension and
investigation of the day. So today we have faith that the things which
seem supernatural are merely in _our_ unexplored terrain and that
tomorrow or next year or next century they will be made ordinary to
us. There is a great difference between the radio and Jonah in the
whale’s belly. One is supernormal and the other is supernatural. A
man cannot be heard from San Francisco to New York, as people loosely
state, but a mechanical invention carries the sound of his voice. That
is supernormal but conceivable. But Jonah in the whale’s belly is not
represented by any kind of mechanical contrivance. He is not carried
there and represented by any kind of ultra-wave. He is just there,
his physical self. That is supernatural. A man putting his head in a
pail of water and holding it there for three hours and then coming out
unaffected by the immersion is supernatural. But a man in a diver’s
suit with oxygen tanks attached who goes beneath the sea for three
hours is merely supernormal. I believe in the supernormal--in the vast
and still unexplored terrain that stretches before us but I do not
believe in the supernatural.”
“You believe in the scientific explanation of everything,” said Dreeme.
“I wouldn’t say that,” replied Lathrop, pursing his lips. “No, sir,
I wouldn’t say that. I would even go so far as to say that there are
things which I conceive to be supernormal that cannot be explained by
any scientific theory whatsoever. I do not believe in the levitation
of tables by spirit-hands although I do not say that tables are not
levitated. I do not believe that an ectoplasm is a materialization of
the dead but I do not say that there is nothing unexplainable there for
the eye to see. I do not believe that the dead talk through the lips
of the living although I do not affirm that the words issuing from the
medium’s mouth are always her own.”
Doctor Lathrop waved his pipe at Dreeme.
“I believe in mysteries,” he insisted. “I believe these mysteries to
be intellectually suspected at rare moments but never actually solved.
I do not believe that we will ever solve them. So far as I know they
move on another circle of time or in another dimension or anything
you choose. But I demand that they be called supernormal and not
supernatural.”
“Do you believe that there is a supernormal aspect to Marlborough,
then?” asked Dreeme, seeing at last a short-cut to the thoughts that
boiled so inchoately in his mind.
Lathrop nodded his head and Dreeme laughed triumphantly.
“Then you know what I mean,” he said, “when I say there is something
in back of all this, something in the soil and the air and the very
houses,” and he waved his hand toward the window.
“Yes, yes,” agreed Lathrop, “I haven’t denied it, have I? Every
community has its supernormal aspects, its twisted web of mysteries
floating like a fine skein in the air above it. We’re all tangled up
with supernormal things. I admit it. You cannot go anywhere without
finding yourself pushed against a dark wall of impenetrable silence
that speaks without words and always speaks in a foreign tongue.”
Dreeme’s lean face grew solemn as he hitched his chair closer to the
little table and extended his hand, palm upward, toward Lathrop.
“That may be true enough,” he said. “But the sensation I experience
in Marlborough is different. Every community has its own strange aura
rising from it. Even the veriest over-night town thrown together beside
oil-wells or gold-mines speaks in what you might call a foreign tongue.
But it says brave or bright or progressive things. It lifts itself
toward some sparkle in the adventurous sky above it. I have been in
New York and raised my eyes to the heavens and seen, in my mind’s eye,
at least, a thousand glittering spires which were the reflection not
of the monstrous shafts of granite about me but of the City behind
the city, the great, mad, impressive, unresting urge upon which the
infinite foundations of this finite metropolis are built. It was
awesome but it was not fearful. Marlborough, I tell you, is different.”
Lathrop stirred uneasily, his enormous bulk swaying forward to a
strident creaking of the chair.
“I told you when you first came here that Marlborough was different,”
he said. The shadow of a growing perplexity was in his eyes.
“I know you did,” responded Dreeme, “and telling me so much you told me
nothing. You told me there was a breed of New Englanders here that I
had never seen before. I admit it now. But why is this breed different?
You did not tell me that. You told me that a mixture of ethical and
Dionysiac madnesses produced the forefathers of these people, of the
Bidwells and Barnsons and Westcotts and Slaters. Well, what does that
mean? You opened the door of a dark room to me, a door which I should
have pushed open myself sooner or later, but you did not give me any
lamp. Do you know what the sensation is that I have when I think of
Marlborough?”
Lathrop shook his head slowly, the loose chins beneath his round face
wagging like the wattles on a cock.
“I think constantly of a horrible dead body, a white leprous mass of
flesh, that is striving to live,” answered Dreeme in a low voice. “The
dark circles of the closed eyes quiver, the blue lips roll back, and
the long fingers, struggling against _rigor mortis_, slowly open.
There are only shadows in the palms of the hands.”
“Good God!” exclaimed Lathrop, reaching hastily for his cup of cold
tea. After a moment he laughed in his wheezing way.
“You have the imagination of a penny-dreadful,” he remarked.
“Have I?” asked Dreeme. “Do you really think so, doctor?”
Lathrop drank the last swallow of his chilled beverage and then put the
cup back and turned to his corncob pipe.
“Look here, Daniel,” he commanded. “Do you want me to prescribe for
you? You’re suffering from nerves. Your digestion is bad. Do you sleep
well? How about a nice vacation? Eh, what?”
Dreeme shook his head.
“I’m all right, Humphrey,” he said. “You can’t get rid of me in that
way. You’ve got to tell me things.”
Lathrop sighed loudly.
“I was telling you things,” he remarked. “I was telling you what I
believed. Let me go on. Perhaps there will be a clew in it for you.”
He paused for an instant and whistled loudly as his blue eyes roamed
about the room.
“Let me give you some of my detached thoughts,” he said at last. “I
believe in the sense of the past. I believe it to be a living urge in
itself but I also believe that it may be explained. Any place that has
been lived in long enough will rear a fine fabric of associated ideas
stretching back through the centuries. I believe that a philosophy
of living may be developed from this sense of the past. I believe
that a philosophy of living may unhinge the brain if it is based on
vague enough historical urges and cause a man to mistake supernormal
phenomena for supernatural things. I believe in the power of the
fanatic and so many things may be regarded as fanaticisms--the
fanaticism of ego, of evil, of good, of superstition, of a displaced
historical sense. This last one alone is worth a treatise in itself.
I believe in the suggestion of the more powerful will and its might
in causing lesser wills to pervert the realities into mysteries. I
believe in the concerted suggestion of the crowd to formulate a seeming
atmosphere in any community. Do these thoughts tell you anything about
Marlborough?”
“In a way,” answered Dreeme. “But not enough. Give me the key to all
this, Humphrey, for you must know it. You’ve lived here for half a
century and you have had opportunities to observe.”
“No more than you have,” replied Lathrop quickly. “Haven’t I intimated
to you that an idle curiosity was the worst of all evils? Daniel, you
must not try to pry into things too closely. I could, perhaps, tell you
enough to quicken your curiosity into an intolerable sneakiness. You
would go about peering at people, watching their movements, spying upon
their activities, surmising their thoughts and reactions and springs of
being. And, sooner or later, you would be known for the Paul Pry you
would be and your practice would be lost and it would be impossible for
you to live in Marlborough. I tell you,” and the doctor slapped his fat
knee loudly, “these people _will_ not be watched and analyzed. Let
well enough alone.”
Dreeme raised his eyebrows.
“I’m not a Paul Pry,” he said finally. Lathrop seemed to take this
remark as a dismissal of the subject and his joviality, which had
been somewhat dampened by Dreeme’s insistence, reasserted itself. He
hammered the floor lustily with his cane and after a moment a long
vinegary countenance thrust itself through the door.
“Lucinda,” ordered Lathrop, “bring a bottle of apple-jack and two
tumblers.”
The vinegary face grew still longer. A thin mouth, a mere slit in the
wrinkled face, shrivelled in severe disapproval.
“You had some apple-jack this mornin’,” announced a high nasal voice.
“I’m going to have some more now,” answered Lathrop blandly.
The visage swayed for a moment in the doorway and then disappeared to
the sound of a loud sigh.
Lathrop winked at Dreeme.
“The old fool,” he said. “Lucinda’s been with me for forty years and
she still considers me a giddy dissipated youth.”
“Do you believe in God?” asked Dreeme suddenly, apparently giving
utterance to some train of thought in his mind. It was now Lathrop’s
turn to sigh as loudly as Lucinda had sighed.
“Daniel, Daniel,” he said, shaking his head. “Can you tell me what you
mean by God?”
“That’s the old way of evasion,” said Dreeme impatiently. “Do you
believe we exist as individuals after we die?”
“I believe we exist as individuals in a thousand and one ways and eyes
and minds and words spoken or written,” answered the old doctor.
“Do you believe that we exist in the consciousness of ourselves as
individuals after we die?” persisted Dreeme.
“I do not,” answered Lathrop wearily.
Dreeme slipped back into his train of thought and a moment or so sped
by while the stillness of the room was broken only by the buzzing of
the fly still entangled in the window-curtain. It shrilled loudly as it
darted blindly from the soft folds of cloth to the hard surface of the
transparent pane of glass.
“Even in life,” added Lathrop, “I do not believe that we exist as
individuals in ourselves, although, of course, our consciousnesses,
being what they are, can tell us nothing else.”
The door swung open and Lucinda’s vinegary face appeared over the tray
upon which perched the amber-hued apple-jack bottle and two greenish
tumblers. She stalked silently to the table and deposited her burden
upon it. Lucinda was tall and spare and her arms were extraordinarily
thin. Her long face, small black eyes, and pursed mouth registered a
deep disapproval beneath the thin graying hair, tied in a back-knot,
that covered her narrow head.
“I should think one glass might be enough for you, Humphrey,” she
complained, backing from the table like a tall and awkward colt. At the
door she turned to add a final word.
“And young men might do better than sit drinkin’ alcohol when there’s
plenty of sick people about needin’ attention.”
The door closed noisily behind her. Lathrop’s wheezing chuckle followed
her to the kitchen.
“The old fool,” he said softly and tenderly as he poured out the amber
liquor.
Dreeme accepted the tumbler that was offered him in an absent-minded
manner, placing it on the edge of the table. He sighed loudly and
Lathrop, gazing over the top of his glass, scowled pleasantly but said
nothing.
“Why do you side-track me, Humphrey, whenever I mention the Westcotts?”
inquired the young man at length with asperity in his voice.
“Did I?” asked Lathrop mildly.
Dreeme did not answer but took a brief swallow of apple-jack.
“Good, isn’t it?” questioned the old doctor with a fair degree of
enthusiasm. “The national tipple of New England,” he went on. “Eve’s
brew,” he concluded, draining off the tumbler.
“What do you know about Eve?” taunted Dreeme with a wan smile.
Lathrop wheezed for a full minute, and then, reaching over with a
great effort, dug at Dreeme’s ribs. Then his face sobered.
“Oh dear!” he said. And then: “I didn’t side-track you, Daniel. I
merely ignore you.”
Dreeme finished his drink slowly and put the tumbler down. He said:
“I shall find out about the Westcotts, I have been in the farm-house
and I can go again.”
“Did they invite you back?” inquired Lathrop.
The young man stared moodily across the table. Lathrop smiled blithely
and poured himself a second tumbler of apple-jack.
“You’ll get tipsy,” remarked Dreeme.
“No such luck!” wheezed the old doctor. “I was brought up on this
drink. I sucked it in at my mother’s knee.”
“That’s a lie,” answered Dreeme. “You were not permitted to drink
anything stronger than milk at home.”
“How did you know that, Daniel?” asked Lathrop with mild surprise. He
drained half the tumbler and wiped his mouth. Dreeme sat doggedly in
his chair.
“Very well,” said the old doctor with a sigh of defeat. “I give up.
What do you want to know about the Westcotts?”
“Everything,” announced Dreeme. He did not change his position but a
brief light of excitement danced in his eyes.
Lathrop shook his head. “I can’t tell you that,” he said, “because I
don’t know everything. But I’ll tell you what I do know and you may
make the most of it. With this preamble....” He cleared his throat.
“You just wear a man down, Daniel. I’m departing from the rule of a
lifetime. Much good may it do you or me!”
He filled his ubiquitous pipe and lighted it. A piratical odor assailed
the air.
“I came to Marlborough in ’57,” he said. “New England in ’57 was a
strange place. The old world was breaking into pieces and there were
faint, very faint glimmers of a new order of things. It was the days
shortly after Dan Webster had thrown his party. Charles Sumner was
being assaulted in his seat in the Senate and the Abolitionists were
roaring their heads off. It was a curious time because the Republic
was rushing straight to perdition. It was State’s Rights and ‘nigger,
nigger, who’s got the nigger’ all the time. There was always a nigger
in _somebody’s_ wood-pile. Up popped a woolly head and the farmers
who had no use for nigger-labor grunted like hedge-hogs for Abolition.
I was pretty young and careless about the destiny of our revered
Republic so I did not cogitate _too_ much about things (you’d
call them phenomena, Daniel) that were for me no more than theoretical
problems. It was my business to explore the highways and byways of
Marlborough, fish the streams, go fowling for bats, pick blueberries,
and sleep in the sun. I don’t imagine I thought much about the people
whom I met. Most of them were funny. One of them rather impressed
himself upon me for I used to enjoy snooping about the Leeminster Road
and there I would meet him stomping along and smacking at the stones
with his stick. That was old Captain Uriah Carrier. He had been a
ship-mate of Hawthorne of Salem, the one who died of fever at Surinam
and whose son wrote books.”
He paused and reached for his can of shag. Then he said:
“Is there anything crazier than writing books, Daniel? It is the
ultimate idiocy, the last gasp of the lunatic.”
“All this is getting somewhere?” asked Dreeme.
Lathrop wheezed. He said:
“More or less.”
He settled back and proceeded with his rambling story.
“Let us, my impatient young friend, pause and consider Captain Uriah
Carrier. He was the type of man that distinctly does not exist
any more. He had hunted whales in the Pacific, had terrorized and
robbed the natives of Tahiti, had blackbirded off the African Gold
Coast, had carried a Manchu woman about with him for mistress, had
retired, returned to Marlborough--for he was born here, joined the
Congregational Church, married, raised children, and become the usual
pillar of New England. He was a pillar of smoke by day, for his tobacco
was vile, and a pillar of fire by night, for his cellar was full of
Jamaica rum. He was a tall man with bristling white hair and stained
whiskers (a lovely rust-color about his mouth) and an evil eye. He had
an invariable greeting for me. ‘Younker,’ he’d say. ‘Look out for the
devil.’ I’d say, ‘Where is he, Capt’n?’ ‘In my ’bacca pouch,’ he’d
growl, and shake it at me. I was too old for that, though, and would
laugh at him, whereupon he’d show his yellow fangs, smack another stone
with his stick--it was big and knobby enough to kill Goliath with--and
stomp along muttering to himself. A great man, Daniel, but I’m glad
that I did not follow in his wicked footsteps.”
He wheezed a soft sigh. Dreeme stirred impatiently in his chair.
“Well, now,” went on Lathrop. “Captain Uriah Carrier had several
children, all of whom died young except one and that was Peleg Carrier.
I went away to college and came back after the Civil War. The old
captain was dead. I heard that he sat up in his huge four-poster after
Gettysburg sucking at a rum-bottle and singing some foul old sailor
song full of the most terrific obscenities. Then he had fallen back,
said ‘What ho, now!’ in faint surprise, and passed out. Peleg Carrier
was a quiet sort of boy as I remember him but it is not so much the boy
I remember as the man who returned from Germany to Marlborough after I
had slipped into the saddle as doctor here. That must have been in the
early seventies when Jesse James was shooting up Missouri and Kansas
and old Sitting Bull was preparing his revenge and the buildings for
the Philadelphia Centennial were being raised. Peleg Carrier was rather
different from his blasphemous old scoundrel of a father. He was a
melancholiac.”
Lathrop brooded for a moment, one great hand raised to his round face.
Dreeme could see the hairy ring of fat about the old doctor’s wrist.
“My memory of Peleg Carrier is revised and aided and abetted by my
later analysis of him,” proceeded Lathrop. “I got to thinking about
him early in life and for some years he was a pet study of mine.
A sort of unusual specimen, you know. He lived all alone in the
Carrier house on the Leeminster Road, a house that burned down long
before your time. I imagine that leading a lonely rigorous life in
a desolate country community induces melancholy. Don’t you, Daniel?
Peleg, however, was born a melancholiac. Melancholia, I take it,
is not a malady so much as a matter of temperament. It renders its
victims austere and dour. They dissimulate violent passions that are
exhibited only through tempestuous outbreaks of weeping and nerves.
By their nature they are exposed to a continual perturbation of the
vital organs, to spasms and obstructions, for instance. These physical
disorders induce an unquietness of mind without respite just as bad
eating brings horrible dreams. Therefore in their waking hours these
unfortunate people are the victims of disordered stomachs, spleens and
livers. Their minds as well as their bodies are attacked and such a
thing as constitutional anxiety sets in and predisposes them to sombre
fancies. These pathological conditions favor an over-development of the
interior life and melancholiacs become disposed to the depravities of
the imagination. Errors of sense ensue and their enfeebled normalities
become the slaves of phantoms. It is but a short step to frenzies and
fanaticisms. Peleg Carrier was such a man. Tall, cadaverous, with a
face as yellow as old parchment, and a continual twitch of the hands,
he passed like a morose ghost through the life of Marlborough. Who
knows what preyed upon his perverted mind? Perhaps it was the sins of
his father, Uriah. Perhaps the inclination toward those sins was reborn
in Peleg and strangled by him through a supreme effort of will. I don’t
know. If there was an ethical impulse in him it must have run against
a stone wall in Uriah. Perhaps half the dourness of life is in living
down the sins of our fathers. This seems to be getting nowhere, Daniel,
but I want you to remember both of these Carriers, the first an old
ferocious rascal and the second a nervous melancholiac. Peleg married
late in life the woman who was his housekeeper and she had one child.
The father died the day that Martha was born.”
Dreeme pricked up his ears at the name.
“Well, there you are,” said Lathrop placidly. “There you have Martha
Westcott.”
“I can’t see ...” began Dreeme.
“Of course you can’t,” broke in the old doctor, “and neither can I. But
we can both guess. Westcott himself I know little about. I have heard
that he was the son of one of Peleg Carrier’s German friends, born in
those days when Peleg was studying in Germany. I have also heard that
he was a grandson of old Uriah Carrier. The first I saw of him was when
he suddenly appeared in the valley to take charge of Peleg’s funeral.
Who sent for him and from where he came are mysteries to me.”
“Is he so much older than his wife?” asked Dreeme with some surprise.
“Twenty years or so,” remarked Lathrop. “Martha is only twenty-five.”
“What!” exclaimed Dreeme.
Lathrop nodded.
“She’s always looked sort of ageless,” he said. “Westcott brought her
up. They lived in the old Carrier house until it burned down. Then they
went to Germany. When they came back seven or eight years ago they were
married.”
The old doctor yawned and stretched his huge arms. He looked
quizzically at Dreeme from beneath his eyebrows.
“So there you are, Daniel,” he said. “It is no story at all, you see.”
“Who do you think Westcott is?” inquired Dreeme.
“Well,” said Lathrop meditatively, “they say that old Uriah had a sort
of cloven head. Perhaps he’s the man in the moon, Daniel.”
The soft chime of a clock broke in upon them and Dreeme counted six
beats. It was time to go.
“You’re not telling me much about Jeffrey Westcott and his wife,”
remarked the young doctor.
Lathrop shook his head despondently.
“I don’t know anything about them, I tell you,” he complained, a faint
note of irritation in his voice. “I’ve never been inside their house.
I haven’t talked to them for five years. I haven’t seen them. What do
you want me to say, Daniel? Do you want me to invent a fine theory
concerning them?”
“If you must,” said Dreeme. “But why not tell me the fine theory you
have already invented?”
For an instant Lathrop nearly exploded. Then he said softly:
“Darn it!”
He looked at Dreeme in a woeful manner. He said:
“You _will_ have something, won’t you?”
Leaning forward he grasped Dreeme’s hand in his huge soft paw.
“Good-night, Daniel,” he articulated heartily. “Good-night.”
Dreeme disengaged his hand and sat tightly in his chair.
“I have my supper early,” remarked Lathrop in a mildly protesting voice.
His chair creaked as he leaned back in it.
“I hate to talk about people,” he said in a loud voice. “It means no
good, I tell you.”
There was a loud crash in the room and both men sat upright suddenly
and stared about them. Lathrop’s can of shag had slipped from the table
to the floor. The dark curling tobacco lay in an untidy heap between
them. The can rocked on its round side for a moment and then ceased.
“Humphrey,” said Dreeme, “you have thought a lot about the Westcotts.
You’ve even studied their hereditary strain. You describe a villain and
a madman to me and then you introduce a man who has studied in Germany.
God knows what he studied. The Black Arts, perhaps.”
“There aren’t any Black Arts,” interjected Lathrop, gazing woefully at
his tobacco.
“He studied something, anyway,” went on Dreeme, ignoring the
interruption, “and I will venture to assert that it was neither
differential calculus nor Emmanuel Kant. He is still studying it. He’s
an abnormal creature and so is his wife. Why have you kept hinting
at some sort of a fanaticism and pointing out the difference between
supernormal and supernatural and insisting on the melancholia of Peleg
Carrier?”
Lathrop made a motion as though washing and wiping his hands.
“I refuse to be led into wild theories, Daniel,” he said. “I base my
opinions on facts. Any other process means eventual madness. Good
Lord, how do you suppose I have lived here for half a century without
turning into a sheer lunatic? Principally by minding my own business,
which I advise you to do. And by treating a fact as a fact and letting
it carry me no farther.”
The twilight, shot with the spent gold of the afternoon, curdled about
the corners of the room. It dusted in through the windows and rolled in
wispy vapors over the heads of the two men. It crept along the floor
and eddied beneath the tables and chairs. Dreeme felt the slow tide
rising about his feet and curling about his hands. He made an impatient
movement as though to brush it from him. He started to feel Lathrop’s
hand suddenly placed on his knee.
“Daniel,” said the old doctor, “thought is a terrible thing. You are
too young to grow morbid. Your nerves are on edge. Let them rest.
Forget the Westcotts and forget your mystery of Marlborough. It is only
by new thought, by bright strenuous acceptances that this sad land may
be translated from the barren graveyard of Puritan traditions to the
New World that is our heritage. I will not give you half-baked notions
to feed on for then you would grow as somber as the people you see
about you. I’ve told you what I know about the Westcotts and if I have
certain personal reactions to them and to the people in this community
it is far better that I keep them to myself. I, at least, can cage my
thoughts and let them grumble there and hurt no one. You are too young
to keep your opinions to yourself and they would escape and end by
devouring you. Eat, sleep, read, do your work, my boy. That is all that
you need do.”
“You’ve not kept a single thing from me, have you, Humphrey?” said the
young doctor accusingly.
Lathrop pursed his great lips and refused to meet Dreeme’s eyes.
The twilight edged the young man toward the door and he rose
reluctantly. Humphrey Lathrop’s huge bulk eased back in his chair to a
noisy creaking. He smiled agreeably. Dreeme picked up his hat and held
out his hand to the old doctor.
“I’ll drop in and see you soon, Humphrey,” he said.
“That’s the boy,” wheezed Lathrop, patting the back of his hand.
“That’s the boy.”