The Place Called Dagon by Herbert Gorman

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 midday. 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 churchgoers 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 whitewashed 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 faraway 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.