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.
Here is a forgotten valley, he thought, a cul-de-sac in the hills of western New England. Into this sequestered place came the sons of Pilgrims and the Puritans and here they raised their first log-houses, their mills, their trading stations with the Indians, and their fortified church. They had no time for the lighter pleasures of living, and, indeed, their ethical conception of existence forbade them. They eschewed the colored ribbons of life. They were grim, therefore, long-faced and unsmiling and their days were taken up with clearing away virgin forests, struggling with the hordes of painted Indians, raising houses and churches and mills and forts and armories. The dark soil, spotted with boulders, fought with the Indians against them and they subdued it by the might of their tenacious minds and unresting arms. They had no time for love or laughter but they had plenty of time for labor and a taciturn doggedness not always unbroken by sighs. Surely the women must have sighed. Life was not a career but an onerous duty. It was a profound struggle against formidable and illimitable foes. What could such a people do but grow into a fierce, silent, unsmiling, and unimaginative race? What became of their animal natures in such a land of travail as this? Would they be diverted into a fanatical zeal for their God who bore always in His right hand a drawn sword? Or would the Dionysiac passions, the ancient inward pagan urges, break forth at odd and unsuspected moments in bright flares of malignant color? It was difficult to conceive of a complete suppression of all the old zests of living and Dreeme could see no way out for them but by a dark perversion that twisted them into sudden outbreaks or secret and terrible channels.
Well, these were the ancestors of the farmers of Marlborough. They had lived their drab lives and passed away and been buried in the forgotten graveyards and their sons, carrying in their hearts and brains this sullen heritage, had come after them and these sons had been equally reticent, taciturn, somber, and forbidding. With the years a slight leaven might have introduced itself, a gradual lightening of the colors of living, but it had not been enough to erase the ancient characteristics. Elsewhere in New England, in the busy manufacturing districts now dotted with cities and towns where the clacking looms and roaring machinery were never still, it was different. There the old urges were indelibly dead, perished for want of an iron breed to carry them on, overwhelmed by the great floods of foreign immigrations, devoured by a
