I
Mrs. Slater moved, a black silhouette, across the yellow glow of the
kerosene-lamp, bearing in chubby hands the last of the supper dishes.
She kicked the kitchen door open with a grunt and disappeared. It was
silent in the room. Walden Slater, having removed his boots with the
elastic sides, drifted almost surreptitiously to the back porch, his
gray woollen socks touching the floor soundlessly. Reaching his haven
he sank with a hoarse sigh of relief into the broken rocker. Dreeme
could see his bent form against the misty light of evening whenever
the door to the kitchen flapped open. He sat there and rocked to the
faint creak-creak of the chair; his talon-like hands grasping the arms
of the rocker. He was a personification of a certain aspect of this
New England. He was the tired man reeking with dried sweat, earth, and
barn-yard odors sitting in the quiet evening and drawing in hoarse and
throbbing lung-fulls of fresh air. His bones were tired. His flesh
crawled sluggishly with an old weariness. The hinges of his knees were
stiff. He was a finality in himself, a period put to a long sentence
of history. The kitchen door swung to and fro and Dreeme ceased to
look at the farmer. He looked out of the window instead, into the dark
side-yard where the Slater children sat huddled together on a broken
barrow and talked soberly in low tones. Their voices sounded thin and
far away, pinched sounds, words rolled between huge fists. The low
light of the evening fell across the sides of their faces. Small impish
profiles turned to the brooding night. A dark form passed between
Dreeme’s eyes and the children’s faces and the young doctor saw the
figure of the reverend George Burroughs, skinny hands clasped behind
the frayed skirts of his musty coat, stalk off into the darkness. It
was like a brief eclipse, an instant’s impenetrable blackness, and
then it was gone. Light footsteps died almost instantaneously in the
direction of the Leeminster Road.
Dreeme looked back into the room ... well ... he progressed slowly
toward the kitchen door.
“Where is your niece?” he asked Mrs. Slater with a directness that was
unusual in Marlborough where people talked by inference. The woman’s
eyes fluttered wildly at this unexpected question.
“Deborah ... well, Deborah....” She hurried toward the kitchen door
with a massed pillar of plates, a sort of leaning tower of Pisa that
threatened to dissolve into fragments at every step. At the door she
turned. She said:
“Helping out.... They needed somebody to help out....”
Her voice drifted back through the door.
“Mrs. Westcott ... sent for her....”
Dreeme brooded upon this for an instant, fumbled in his pocket for his
pipe, and then sauntered slowly toward the kitchen. Mrs. Slater, at the
sink, her sleeves rolled back over her short plump arms, observed him
with a suspicious concern, her head cocked on one side, an eye turned
back. It was like the eye of a querulous parrot. Dreeme leaned against
the wall, and, watching her, filled his pipe.
“Has Mrs. Westcott been here?” he asked.
Mrs. Slater turned to her dishes. She said:
“Oh, no!”
It was inconceivable, of course.
Dreeme waited for a moment as he lighted his pipe.
“Who has?” he inquired.
Mrs. Slater looked reproachfully at him as she fumbled for certain
words in her throat.
“We thought we’d have Deborah with us ... especially since....” A
clashing of dishes drowned a few words. “But the preacher said ... he
saw Mrs. Westcott....”
“You mean Burroughs had your niece sent over to the Westcott farm as
hired girl?” broke in Dreeme.
Mrs. Slater did not like the word.
“She’s going to help out ... until Mr. Westcott is better....”
She actually glowered at Dreeme.
“In that lonely hole,” thought Dreeme aloud.
“It’s hard enough to live ...” began Mrs. Slater.
“It _is_,” said the doctor strongly.
Well, it was none of his business. The poor relation. Go where you are
sent. All the same ... it was a shame. Cloven head and his malignant
eyes. Eyes like wet violets. “Rock of Ages.” Now why had he thought
of that? He opened his mouth to speak again to Mrs. Slater, thought
better of it, and turned back into the lamp-lit room. He had wanted
to talk to the girl, to find out what she thought of things and how
this valley had affected her young mind. But now.... Why she might
as well be in Timbuktoo. The Westcott farm-gate opened into.... “All
hope abandon....” He picked up his hat from the little side table and
walked slowly through the hall and into the yard. The hushed voices
of the Slater children sounded like a faint drone. He could hear the
rocker on the back porch. Creak-creak. The dew was heavy. It was better
to keep to the gravel path. Creak-creak. He reached the street and
turned toward his own house. Creak-creak. Shine, moon. He looked up at
a murky sky. No moon. It was too early for the moon. Creak. “Stars of
the summer night.” Longfellow. “Far in yon azure....” Creak. He fumbled
(creak) at the knob to his door, pushed it open, and entered the small
hall. To go upstairs. Bed. But he was not sleepy. He would go into
the back study and read for a while. Or mull over Humphrey Lathrop’s
conversation. Humphrey knew.... He felt his way along the dark hall and
pushed the door open into the study. The minute he entered the room he
knew that there was somebody there. He was not frightened. He leaned
back against the door and said softly: “Who is it?”
A throat cleared noisily.
“Wagner,” replied a hoarse voice.
“Are you by the table? There is a lamp there. Light it,” said Dreeme.
The match spurted like a tiny firework and great shadows sprang up on
all sides. A dancing ring of Jinns. Wagner’s red beard hung like a
sultry smoke above the chimney. The man lowered his head and peered at
Dreeme across the table.
“What is it, Wagner?” inquired the doctor. “Is Westcott’s leg bad?”
The shaggy head shook slowly.
“That’s all right,” he replied. “I wash it now. I’m real good at it.”
His eyes narrowed under his bushy brows and his yellow teeth glowed
through the mass of hair.
“She said you was to meet her by ten in the back room of the burned
mill,” he said slowly in his rusty sepulchral voice. “She told me to
tell you.”
A faint throb of anticipation tugged at the doctor’s mind.
“Deborah?” he asked. Wagner said:
“Missus Westcott.”
Dreeme’s mind stopped dead. Automatically he said:
“Tell her I won’t come.”
“She said she guessed you would all right,” replied the hoarse voice.
To think now. Leaning over the well. The white nape of her neck. Heavy
boots dragged across the floor.
“What does she want?” he asked softly. There was no response. Boots
dragging. A puffing. Dreeme floundered in a sea of amazement. He
repeated his question loudly.
“What does she want, I say?”
This silence! Collecting his wits, he peered about the dimly lighted
study. Empty, of course. He had gone out. Gone right by him. Dreeme
walked over to the table and sat down in the easy chair by it. A tiny
white moth dipped and volplaned about the smoky chimney. Now what was
this? He would have to think about it. He leaned back in his chair and
pulled at his cold pipe.
The faint ticking of the clock was like the tiny regular beating of
a miniature tomtom. The minutes danced to it, shaking their small
feet in an unending circle. They tripped by him, hands joined, and
infinitesimal tapping heels maintaining a regular time that measured
off the softly-flowing hours. He watched the vain moth dashing its
white wings desperately against the smoky chimney. Sooner or later it
would get scorched and flutter to the table, a charred and crumbling
pinch of powder. Life was a curious thing. Breathed into a bit of dust
it became a moth. Or a man. Something was happening to him now. His two
years of dreary silence were breaking down and he was beginning to grow
morbid about things in general. He was getting nervous, acutely aware
of invisible tentacles that seemed to reach out of this darkness that
encircled him on all sides and touch him softly. Humphrey Lathrop had
said that it was nerves. But perhaps it was more than that. Perhaps
it was a sixth sense slowly coming to birth inside him, a sense
nourished by his loneliness that was reaching out into new dimensions.
He was pursuing phantoms, hunting through the sun-shot fields about
Marlborough for invisible essences that drifted deliberately and had
a particular semblance of their own. He was going to solve an intense
and formidable riddle. He was going to track down the secret of an
atmosphere, the aura of a community. It sounded absurd enough but
it was only the absurd things that mattered greatly after all if a
man desired to be more than an eating, sleeping, laboring animal.
To be a man, and all that _that_ meant, was to walk arm in arm
with phantoms, to discourse with shadowy substances, to resolve high
mystical riddles. Ah! The moth shrivelled against the hot glass and
dropped to the table. So that was that! He turned it over tenderly
with a paper-knife and then pushed it to the floor.
Now then! He looked at the ticking clock from which the joined minutes
were tripping their fantastic and regular dance. It was nine-thirty.
Then it would be in half an hour. His thoughts, held tightly by the
leash of his will, were set free and they sprang forward like a pack
of ravenous hunting dogs. Up the Leeminster Road they sped and his
spectral self followed them as an eager hunter follows his baying
hounds. For an instant the face of Deborah flashed in the dark air and
then it disappeared, left far behind by this rout of yelping coursers.
He had said that he would not go. But she knew that he would, that his
curiosity would carry him as far as the mill at least. What she wanted
he did not know but he could suspect it. She was assuredly a lonely
caged-in creature. She stood at windows and watched the night-sky and
wondered about the life that went boiling so turbulently by on the
great highroads to the west and the east of her locked doors. She sat
in a room lined with books beside a cloven-headed man and a secret sat
there with them and she had nobody to share that secret with her, no
one, that is, except the man himself who _was_ the secret. Perhaps
she wanted to tell him things, to pour out the subterranean stream
of her consciousness. He could imagine her muffled voice speaking in
the darkness of the mill. It was not strange that she had sent for
him, after all. It would have been stranger if she had maintained her
silence. Dreeme rose slowly from his chair and blew the light out.
Well....