She was seated in an embrasure formed where a portion of the brick
wall had fallen away and dropped into the yellow-scummed water of
the mill-pond. He could see the dark silhouette of her head as it
turned sideways against the smoky light of the moon, and for a moment
he paused in the doorway watching her, noting the regularity of her
boldly-cut features and the cold sensuousness of her rounded lips. It
was almost symbolic to find her so, no more than a silhouette, a face
seen in a single aspect, a profile clean-cut and set against unsteady
light that flowed with the rippling of milky waters. She was like this.
She was the outline of a mystery, a part of that riddle that somehow he
must solve if he was to have any peace of mind. It was dark and gloomy
in the mill. Its fire-blackened walls retained the horror of an old
debacle. Two men had been incinerated here. She said:
“I was sure you would come.”
She had not turned her head. She still sat sideways against the moon.
But her hand moved. It was pale and indistinct as it shifted into
the dim light. He advanced toward her slowly, his footsteps sounding
hollowly on the cracked cement floor.
“What is it?” he asked. “What do you want?”
Her head turned and although her face was a blackness he could feel her
eyes studying him, fondling his features with a glance that was both
tired and expectant.
“I was tired,” she answered in a muffled voice.
That seemed to explain something and he continued his advance until he
was beside her. She drew back slightly into her corner of the embrasure
and he sat down on the cold crumbling bricks. He said:
“You mean ... of loneliness?”
Her shoulders quivered a trifle. She did not need to answer that. Her
movement dislodged a fragment of brick and it dropped with a sharp plop
into the mill-pond. Dreeme started nervously at the sound.
“Why were you spying on me through the stone wall today?” she asked
suddenly, and then went on, not waiting for an answer. “I knew you
would come. You mustn’t loiter about the house, though. It isn’t safe.
He would be sure to find it out.”
Dreeme felt like a drowning man, and he made a valiant effort to save
himself.
“I had business Leeminster way,” he replied in an uncertain tone. “I
just happened that way. I wasn’t spying, I....”
“You needn’t lie,” she returned coolly. She put her hand on his knee.
She said:
“You are the first young man I have talked to alone for years.”
The electric touch of her fingers filled Dreeme with a nervous
excitement. He fumbled vaguely for words, but his mind was like a
great empty sack. Explore as he might there was nothing there.
“He keeps me shut up,” she went on. “I have to ... but no matter.”
Dreeme still sought blindly for words. Her voice and her
vaguely-outlined face were dead weights on his intelligence. He could
not rise above them or push them aside.
“I like you,” she said. “Does that sound silly? Let it. I liked you the
minute I saw you.”
“I think ... I mean ...” began Dreeme.
“You were like a boy with the weary lines of a man’s face impossibly
stamped on you,” she remarked slowly. Her eyes studied him a moment.
She asked softly:
“Are you afraid?”
His silence, complete and emphatic, was the mute answer to her
question. In the milky light he could see that she was almost smiling.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said as though she were speaking to a child.
“I’m not afraid,” replied Dreeme with an effort. “What is there to be
afraid of? I don’t understand. That’s all.”
Her face was level with his, and she looked at him for a moment
steadily, her dark eyes under their heavy lids full of a vague surmise.
“How long have you been here?” she asked presently.
“Two years,” answered Dreeme much as though he were a school-child
being examined.
“So long?” she murmured. “You see how ignorant I am. Men pass outside
my window and I never see them.”
Dreeme, in spite of his confusion, doubted that.
“What do you know about me?” she proceeded. There was a faint
breathlessness in the question.
“Practically nothing,” he said.
She sighed, and it seemed to Dreeme that she sighed in relief.
“We are not children, are we?” she asked irrelevantly.
Dreeme shook his head.
“It has been so long since I conversed with anyone that I have almost
lost the use of words,” she said half to herself. “Yet words were once
my favorite play-things. I would shape them into all sorts of patterns.”
She removed her hand from his knee for an instant and then put it
back. It seemed to Dreeme as though there had been a brief flaw in the
electric current that was pouring into him and which so unsteadied him.
“Be silent, then, and let me talk,” she went on. “I need to say things.
I am tired of talking to myself and inanimate objects, tired of
reading, tired of working, tired of listening to things that I do not
much care about any more.”
She paused for a moment but Dreeme said nothing.
“You see,” she said. “I needed someone.” Her hand closed about his
wrist softly. “I needed you. I had not been in the room more than a
minute before I realized that you were that sensitive type about....
Do you remember looking at me? Weren’t you trying to say something to
me, trying to say it without words?”
Her speech had suddenly become a husky caress. She leaned forward. She
murmured in an almost inaudible voice:
“Say it now.”
Dreeme fumbled for words. Had he desired to convey any message to her?
He could not find it in the welter of his mind.
“I was wondering,” he stuttered. “I mean, it seemed strange to find
that room full of books, that curious man, and ... you.”
He was suddenly aware that he did not desire this relationship between
them to establish itself too quickly and too firmly upon a basis
of mystical understanding. It was too silly. Two strangers did not
reveal themselves so nakedly to one another. He clutched eagerly at
the tattered cloak of his New England reticence. She did not appear
to understand that he was attempting to convey a polite snub, a
discreet hint, as it were, to resume the formal disguises of casual
acquaintances, but her hand slipped from his wrist. Dreeme almost
breathed with relief.
“It is good to be away from that house and to be able to talk as I
wish,” she proceeded. “It is an evil house. It is dominated by an evil
man.”
Dreeme said nothing. He sat gazing at the mill-pond in a phlegmatic
manner. Her dark eyes narrowed a trifle as she watched him.
“I, too, am evil,” she added.
Her tone was matter-of-fact, as though she were stating a thing already
understood. At the same time, there was an implied challenge in it.
Dreeme felt that he should say something.
“I don’t think you are evil,” he protested. There was but little
conviction in his voice.
“All that is relative, though,” she went on in a voice almost
indistinct. “Do you like to ponder over things, to intellectualize
them? So do I. Evil is relative. Perhaps he is not evil according to
his own lights. Sitting alone in the house I have evolved my own scheme
of things.”
“What is it?” he asked suddenly. “What is it in that house? Why is he
different from other men? What is it in Marlborough that ... what ...”
He waved his hand expressively, showing for the first time a curious
liveliness.
A slow startled look suffused her face. She gazed at him steadily for
a moment, and then the corners of her mouth quivered. Behind the cold
mask of her face she seemed to smile.
“I will not tell you,” she answered, “At least, not now.”
There was an implicit promise in her voice. But no sooner had she
conveyed this slight intimation of future explanations than she seemed
to regret it.
“There is nothing,” she said. “It is the loneliness. It is the
ingrowing. It is the days passing along and every day the same.”
“Have you lived here all your life?” he asked.
She paused a moment. She said:
“All my life. I have never left this valley. I have never found the
door that leads out into the world.”
She was a liar. Dreeme knew that at last. Her voice had again become
a husky caress. It strove to reach out and embrace the dubious young
doctor. He was conscious of a vague note of insincerity in it. Far back
in his mind a sly intuition manifested itself, and it suggested that
this woman was very near to acting, that she was cautiously feeling her
way into his emotions. She wanted to find out if he could be swayed by
passion, pity or intellect. He must be careful, terribly careful. He
must avoid the almost overpowering magnetism that emanated from her
white slumberous body.
“Life should proceed,” she said, her words sounding like slow
calculating steps through the difficult labyrinth of her thoughts. “It
should go on and touch different places and different people, accepting
and rejecting, considering all. It should meet the passions and accept
them all and live through them and with them. But my life is not like
that. I am cut off, set apart from things, bounded by walls and the
will of one man. My thoughts boil in me to no purpose. My mind revolves
and it achieves no friction, no flashing of sparks. It is just an
insane wheel whirling endlessly in a vacuum. That is what it really
is. I cannot go on like that and remain sane.”
Dreeme did not know what to say. He knew that he was beginning to be
frightened.
“I do not live in that house,” she went on. “I exist in it. I stare out
of the window in summer and see parched fields stretching to eternity.
In the winter it is all an expanse of untrodden snow. Sometimes voices
come to me from the road. That is all. That is all, I tell you.”
Her voice rose, deep and husky. Louder than she had spoken before she
declared:
“I was born to great acceptances.”
Dreeme was becoming more and more frightened. He did not want to hear
these things, these somber intimacies of a household that was no part
of his affair and yet he could not stop listening. Her words were a
warm web that caught up all his thoughts. He could not stand up and
say, “I’m sorry, but this is not my business.” It would be cowardice.
He opened his mouth to say something, perhaps that very thing, but she
continued to speak as though to hold his wavering will in the balance.
“I don’t have to describe my life to you,” she said. “You know. You
know because you know Marlborough, and the strength that exists in the
walls of the houses of Marlborough. But there are things that you do
not know. You do not know that my husband is ... but why should you
know? He is like God, but I cannot tell you what I mean by that.”
She stopped, apparently expecting some exclamation, but Dreeme sat in
silent bewilderment and said nothing.
“He directs destinies,” she went on. “He lets nothing stand between
him and the objectives he has planned for himself. Not even me. Least
of all, me. He has great power over the minds and futures of people
when he chooses to exercise it. It is impossible to be independent
with him. Once inside the walls of his house there is no individuality
left to the visitor,--or rather the intruder, for no one enters his
house except intruders. He spreads like a great force over everything.
Freedom becomes a secret possession then, something to be cherished
darkly at one’s bosom. It is only in an escape from that house that
one may assert one’s unique unity. It is by slipping away that I keep
myself sane. I have slipped away now. He is busy at his books, and the
new girl moving about will, perhaps, seem to be me.”
“What books?” asked Dreeme abruptly. If he could find out what Westcott
read he could find out what he thought. That was Westcott’s own idea.
Even as he asked the question he realized that he was crudely diverting
Martha Westcott from her self-revelation, and he flushed at his
unconscious rudeness. She did not seem to notice his divagation. She
said:
“I don’t know. He buys old books, sends to Europe constantly for items
he finds in the catalogues that come to him, but I never look into
them. My mind is my book. I think that he is formulating a new religion
from them.”
He was aware of her untruthfulness again, of something held back and
reformulated in the mind, of a desire to impress him and yet not to
tell him anything substantial.
“A new religion?” he repeated with a shade of curiosity.
She dismissed it vaguely. She said:
“He is fashioning a new god in his own image.”
It sounded silly to Dreeme. He wanted to smile. A cloven-headed man
on an avoided farm in a forgotten valley creating a new god. He felt
like blurting out, “Oh, come now. That is a bit too thick.” Instead he
declared:
“We all fashion God in our own image. It is our unfortunate weakness.”
She was getting impatient with this topic. She did not want to talk
about anything but herself.
“But not his kind of a God,” she replied, a vague note of irritation in
her tone. “Perhaps, after all, he is fashioning himself into the image
of an old god. Would that be unusual? I really can’t tell you. I don’t
know. I am only a part of the furniture in that house. I, too, have my
philosophy of living.”
She paused for a question.
“Yes?” said Dreeme politely.
She stirred uneasily, and her knee, warm beneath her skirt, struck
against his leg. In moving her head bent forward and the fragrance
of her hair swept his face. Suddenly he was enveloped in the hot
disturbing atmosphere of flesh. He wanted to rise to his feet now, to
terminate this ineffectual interview, to explain to her that though
she might upset his mental equilibrium by the magnetism of her body,
the subtle insinuations of her mysterious eyes, and the leashed ardor
so like a caged tigress that moved behind her pale flesh, he was yet
aware of her cunning licentiousness that would use him for her own
malicious ends. He could view her with a cold intensity from a distance
now, could speculate as to her designs; yet, at the same time, he was
aware that in her immediate presence she dominated him by a power that
was not entirely beauty. It was this that made him uneasy and unsure of
himself.
“Yes,” she said, low, husky, half-passionately. “I have my philosophy
of living. It is to drink to the dregs the opportunities vouchsafed
us by Time, to take advantage of that cruel gaoler, Destiny, and fool
him at every turn. We are born free and we should live free. Our blood
whispers messages to us and we should answer those low calls that ring
in our ears if we are to vindicate ourselves to ourselves. Have you
ever rested your head against a woman’s breast and heard the blood
racing furiously through all its arteries? What are we put into the
world for? We are the fruit of suppressed joy, are we not? It is the
liberation of self for which we are ordained. There is only one way
of being actually free, and that is to surmount the thousand and one
petty laws and dogmas that hedge us about. We speak constantly of
obligations, but what do we mean by them? Do we mean the suppression
of our free instincts and the obliteration of our integrity before the
selfish demands of another’s welfare and peace of mind? Is not that
a slavish instinct? What is our debt to humanity but the reverse of
humanity’s debt to us. There is a freedom based upon the destruction
of all laws, political, religious and moral, a freedom where we may
tread the earth as gods in a great tranquil equality, and it is to that
freedom that I turn my face. If I am free in myself, if my thoughts and
secret passions move as they please, why not this flesh which I carry
travel in freedom also?”
He heard the soft sound of her breast struck sharply by her hand.
“I do not say ‘no’ to anything,” she went on. “I merely say ‘does it
satisfy me and fill me for the moment?’ If it does it is good. If it
does it is an end in itself. Let men and women think what they please
and move about with free wills. I abolish slavery.”
It all sounded like a set speech to Dreeme, something she had written
out and memorized, something that she had evolved to sap the spiritual
integrity of whosoever she might meet in this mood of attack. Well, he
would show her that he was adamant.
“You are an anarchist,” he said. He strove to say it lightly, to
fashion it into a mere flippant rejoinder. To his chagrin he heard his
own voice trembling.
“I am a woman,” she replied. “All women are anarchists at heart. The
only laws they respect are the laws of their desires. I am an anarchist
of the soul, of the mind, of the flesh. Nothing but the limitations of
my body shall stand in my way. And through the limitations of my body I
will find my own deliverance.”
She stopped at that as though expecting a sudden flood of answers on
his part and her eyes were fastened upon his face. He said nothing but
waited.
“I am lonely,” she murmured in a low, almost inaudible voice.
Dreeme, turning his face directly toward her, looked into her eyes. She
was speaking through them, steadily, mercilessly. For a moment they
stared at one another, and then Dreeme, his face flushing and his body
shaking, stood up. In the moonlight so diffused and cloudy her eyes
dilated like those of a tigress.
“Have I told you nothing?” she cried. “Have I said nothing to you?”
Her voice was loud and raucous, a terrible sound that caused Dreeme’s
body to sway. It was as though she were lashing him with a whip.
“You have told me many things,” he answered in a trembling voice, “and
most of them I did not want to hear.”
She stood up before him and put her hands upon his shoulders, the
nails of her fingers pressing into his flesh.
“You coward!” she said. “You miserable coward!”
He took her hands from his shoulders, but still retained them in his
own. Her hands were cold and the palms were moist.
“I am not a coward,” he answered in an uncertain voice.
She breathed deeply, a long shuddering inhalation, and then put her
mouth close to his ear, her long body resting lightly against him.
“Listen!” she said in a husky whisper. “Are you as lonely as I....”
Suddenly she stopped and twisted about toward the door of the mill, a
door that yawned on the road and framed in its square a clouded milky
haze.
“Do you hear it?” she asked in a low monotone.
He had already concentrated his faculties and was listening intently.
“Yes, I do,” he answered. A cold fever settled on him as he replied,
and he knew that he was perspiring icily at every pore.
Over the narrow wooden bridge that spanned the Saccarac River sounded
slow footsteps. He could hear them distinctly in the nerve-wracking
silence of the night, a measured advance that increased in sound as the
invisible traveler neared the mill. One of the bridge-boards creaked
beneath the weight of this unknown, and then there was a brief silence.
The unseen wanderer had apparently paused, and Dreeme could imagine
him leaning on the wood rail of the bridge and gazing into the black
water that flowed so sluggishly beneath the cloudy sky. There were
no stars reflected in that water. There was not even the reflection
of the face of the noctambulist who was leaning over and gazing into
nothingness. Even as the thought flashed through Dreeme’s mind he heard
the tread resumed, this time to the accompanying crunch of gravel.
Whoever it was had crossed the bridge and was following the path
that skirted the ruined shell of the mill. Suddenly, with surprising
strength, Martha Westcott thrust Dreeme away from the broken embrasure
where they had sat in the murky glow of the half-drowned moon and
against the charred side-wall of the mill. From that dark corner they
could stare obliquely at the door. They stood there crushed against the
wall, the acrid smell of burned timbers in their nostrils, while the
crunching footsteps deliberately progressed toward them. The invisible
wanderer was passing the angle of the mill now, following the blackened
wall, just about to cross the milky square of the doorway. At this
moment the sound ceased, stopping with a startling abruptness as though
the hidden prowler had paused with one foot in the air. Dreeme could
hear the woman beside him catch her breath in a tiny strangled sob.
Both of them, flattened against the blackened beams, their shoulders
touching, watched the dimly-glowing frame of the entrance with dilated
eyes. In the silence that surged back about them like a dark wave,
Dreeme could hear Martha Westcott’s heart beating. It was like a drum.
It seemed to increase in volume until the whole interior was throbbing
with the sound. Then slowly, ever so slowly, a dark shadow obscured
the doorway, although there were no accompanying footsteps. The shadow
hovered for an instant as though it were poised in the air, and then,
to Dreeme’s horror, a low monotonous humming filled the wrecked room.
The shadow, enlarged by the deceiving rays of the cloudy moon, appeared
to sway, to diminish, to swell in rhythm with this unceasing drone.
Dreeme, his nerves at the breaking point, started impulsively forward,
but the tight clutch of Martha Westcott’s hand on his wrist caught
him back. At this moment he recognized a melody in the low humming.
“Rock of Ages.” Somebody was standing in the doorway of the mill and
monotonously humming, “Rock of Ages.” Immediately Dreeme’s imagination
shaped before him a shallow-faced figure in a frayed frock coat. A lean
figure with dead eyes.
He had barely time to identify the man in the doorway before the
humming ceased, and the shadow withdrew as noiselessly as it had
appeared. There was the instant’s pause and Dreeme suddenly recollected
that there was a patch of soft earth before the mill door. Of course.
The loiterer was crossing that, returning to the gravel path again.
Even as his mind began to function rationally once more he heard the
crunching footsteps, this time decreasing in sound as the wanderer
progressed along the road to Marlborough. They were slow, casual, a
retarded crunch-crunch, a deliberate and unexcited dwindling. Presently
there was silence. Dreeme, relaxed and almost smiling at the fever of
fear into which he had been thrust by the nocturnal rambler, turned to
Martha Westcott. He expected to find her relieved, but instead of this
he could faintly decipher a concentrated expression of mingled fear and
anger on her face.
“Well,” he said, “our unexpected caller has departed.”
“You knew him?” she asked.
They were both walking toward the door, tacitly admitting that the
rendezvous was at an end.
“The worthy Burroughs?” said Dreeme lightly. “Of course. He was taking
his usual evening promenade.”
She said nothing until they reached the milky square of obscured
moonlight. Then she asked:
“Will you meet me here tomorrow night?”
“No,” said Dreeme.
She frowned at that.
“I have certain things I want to tell you,” she went on. “I need your
advice about a number of matters.”
“Why don’t you come to my office?” he inquired.
“You know very well why,” she replied.
He said nothing but stood restlessly outside the door, anxious to leave
her and unwilling to be too abrupt.
“Burroughs didn’t see us anyway,” he said inconsequentially. “It was
too dark in that corner.”
She opened her eyes wide at that and regarded him with a mocking
expression.
“It isn’t wise to meet in this clandestine way,” he insisted. “Somebody
might see us, and you know how people gossip. I don’t like gossip when
there isn’t any reason for it. It’s ... it’s too nerve-racking.”
He teetered on one foot and turned toward Marlborough. She was leaning
easily against the door. She said:
“I will tell you a great many things tomorrow night.”
Dreeme made an impatient gesture, and started to walk away.
“He did see us,” remarked Martha Westcott, not so much to the young
doctor, as to the night about them. “Of course he saw us.”
Dreeme did not turn about, but kept on his way down the road. The air
was cool and frolicksome, and it ruffled the hair on his forehead. It
was fresh and pleasant. It was not like the acrid smell of burned wood.
Two men had been incinerated in the mill. That was a long time ago, and
still the charred timbers stood there waiting for somebody to rebuild
them. He wondered how late it was. There was not a single light in
any of the houses. If he turned back now he would see Martha Westcott
leaning against the door of the mill, her heavy-lidded eyes and archaic
mouth turned toward him. He would not turn back though. The road
twisted a trifle, and he knew that the mill was hidden, that if he
looked back he would see nothing but the sprawling angle of a stone
wall. An invisible weight seemed to fall from him. He had not realized
he was so tired.