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 windowpanes 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 penknife 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 newfangled 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 shortcut 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
