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.
