The Place Called Dagon quotes

The horse stopped with a rough grating of hoofs below the window and the doctor sighed. Marlborough was like that. It was undoubtedly another farmer with a pain in his back who might just as well wait until morning.

It was at night that his taciturn neighbors were most obsessed with the somber consequences of their lonely ailments.

In daylight they would bear them with the dumb equanimity of animals, sitting behind drawn curtains or plodding painfully over their stony fields. But they were horribly afraid of dying at night. The bell clanked feebly.

It was at night that his taciturn neighbors were most obsessed with the somber consequences of their lonely ailments. In daylight they would bear them with the dumb equanimity of animals, sitting behind drawn curtains or plodding painfully over their stony fields.

But they were horribly afraid of dying at night.

The bell clanked feebly. The doctor threw back his quilted coverlet of great square patches, rose in the darkness of the room, and strode over to the window.

Some of these dwellings were astonishingly old and even the whitewash failed to conceal their dejected venerability.

The doors and windows, sunken by the years as though Time had leaned on the lintels and sills with a heavy elbow, leered like the features of a twisted face.

All this was in the daytime. At night a profound darkness enveloped these staggering structures. There were no lights in the small opaque windows, nothing but the blank glow of the moon and stars.

There were books everywhere, in the cases, scattered over the table, and piled in slumping heaps on the floor. The greater portion of them were huge tomes, bound in old buckrams, in worm-eaten moroccos, or in yellow vellum.

The dull gold lettering, subdued in the glow of Westcott’s kerosene-lamp, seemed like the sleepy half-shut eyes of somnolent beasts waiting patiently for the word of the master who should bring them to life.

But there was no word now. They rested, these mysterious beasts of ancient knowledge, holding their secrets close to their muted hearts. Dreeme paused just inside the door staring about him in amazement.

His eyes, large, coal-black and motionless, glittered dully, but it was not the dull glitter of stupidity. Rather was it a repressed but unceasing watchfulness that was somehow mocking in its semblance of indifference.

Dreeme was reminded of the eyes of a cat when it permits a bird to flutter within a few feet of its curved claws.

“It is a very fine library, I assure you,” continued the farmer with a casual flutter of one sunburned hand toward the lurching cases. Dreeme sensed a purring irony in the man’s voice.

“Softly, doctor, softly,” he begged. “Now take the age of amazement as it affects the individual.

Is it not true, my dear doctor, that if we knew why a man was amazed and each time that he was amazed we should know a great deal about him?

”

Humphrey Lathrop was more than an ancient friend. He was a monument of probity and wisdom, a great quivering idol from whose lips issued counsel and the finalities of an achieved experience.

He was a Muhammad transformed into a mountain.

For fifty years he had been the solitary medical adviser to Marlborough and it had only been after his bulk had reached such proportions as to render it impossible for him to get about or climb in or out of his rusty old buggy that …

After that there were accidents, cuts and bruises and broken limbs, and then such major ailments as typhoid fever, chronic stomach trouble (which, so far as Doctor Lathrop was concerned, included stomach, kidneys, and liver), and pneumonia.

He scoffed at appendicitis, calling it “an aristocratic bellyache.”

In spite of his limitations as a doctor, and, perhaps, because of the wiry health of his patients he had been accounted an unusually successful practitioner. The thunderous approach of his great flat feet and thumping canes were the immediate prophecies of relief.

“

Is there anything crazier than writing books, Daniel? It is the ultimate idiocy, the last gasp of the lunatic.

”

… 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?’

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.

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.

He died in half an hour. That was a month ago. Then I had to close up our house … such a little one, sell things, and help finish up father’s business. I had a very good lawyer, Mr. Stopes. Perhaps you knew him?”

“Lawyers,” he said, “are out of my line. They never get sick.”

“He was a very good lawyer,” she insisted. “After the estate was settled there was just enough to pay his fee. Then Aunt Slater sent for me. It was only yesterday that I came over. I walked all the way.

“

If you could imagine cold fire, fire that was just like ice, I think that would be Mrs. Westcott,

” went on the girl. “She didn’t have much to say to me. She moved around the kitchen like some … like some queen, like somebody who didn’t want to be there and didn’t mean to be there very long.

You know what I mean. When you can hardly breathe. And I was thinking how terrible it was to be there, and how miserable and frightened I was. How could I stand it? How could I stay there?

The silence, it⁠ ⁠… it seemed to crawl around the room, to move like a great lazy snake, to slide under the table and up the backs of the chairs, and across the face of the clock.

The air was heavy. Like before a storm, you know. Like. …”

Sooner or later it would erupt, and he would be destroyed by unimaginable fiery lavas. He could picture to himself the silence of that supper without the aid of Deborah.

Around a table sat a group of wax figures with living eyes.

The eyes spoke, but the mouths were speechless. These eyes whispered, laughed, threatened, fought invisible duels. They were glittering assassins moving stealthily toward their defenseless victims. Deborah was a victim. He was a victim.

Mrs. Slater arranged the breakfast plates in a deliberate fashion. Her eyes fluttered as she moved about the table. She said:

“You can’t run away. Girls don’t run away in Marlborough.”

There was no interest in her voice, nothing but a faintly-aggrieved protest.

Dreeme awaited an answer, and as none was forthcoming apparently, he transferred his attention to the rest of the table.

He had sat so many times at this board and had seen nothing and understood everything. Now he saw everything and understood nothing.

This noon, for instance, it was simple enough to perceive that a general unrest pervaded the secretive diners.

Deborah! She, at least, was real. Though Dreeme did not know these other people he knew her. She smiled briefly across the table at him, and it was as though she had flung him a flower.

A small blue flower with a starry heart tossed across a table of strangers.

A flower as blue as her eyes were blue, as starry as the pupils of her eyes. He smiled back at her broadly. The smile was intercepted by everybody at the table. He enjoyed their reactions to it. Mrs.

It was only by a violent effort that the young doctor moved Wagner’s bulky upflung arm sufficiently to study the dead man’s face. He started back with an exclamation of horror at the sight.

Wagner’s eyes had been torn out and a wooden peg had been driven into each socket.

Streamers of blood had flowed from these wounds and coagulated along the tanned cheeks and in the red and bushy beard. The purple lips were drawn back over the yellow teeth in a last ghastly smile of anguish.

“Oh, will he?” said Dreeme. He stood beside the body gazing down at it. Wagner stared up at him with a fixed grin upon his ensanguined face.

He lay like an old sack half-filled with boneless flesh.

He was worm’s meat now. All his toiling in the hot sun and the fierce rains had come to this. His heavy feet had crunched through the last field. His hands, so calloused and split with labor, would guide farm implements no more.

A light dawned on him and he smiled.

“Ah, dear Martha,” he murmured. “Dear talkative Martha.”

He came back and sat down in the embrasure. The moonlight flung great silver arms about him.

“That is a crass way of putting it. There are no old gods. There are only new gods, gods builded out of our invincible wills and forced by the strength of intelligence into the domains of high powers.

The greatest of all gods is man’s will.

If a man possesses enough knowledge he can do anything, shape the destinies of those about him, influence the comings and goings upon the surface of the earth, cause wars and the breakup of nations, and even, when the seed is sprouted and the tree …

“To fashion myself in the image of an old god,” he murmured. “That is a crass way of putting it.

There are no old gods. There are only new gods, gods builded out of our invincible wills and forced by the strength of intelligence into the domains of high powers.

The greatest of all gods is man’s will.

We have misunderstood evil so long, masked it in outrageous masks and clothed it in obscene garments, that we forget that it is a pure essence, that it is evil—as we understand evil—only when we compare it with our artificially created good.

The animals know no evil because they know no good.

They know nothing but a great impulse pulling them one way always—the way of self-emancipation. It should be so with us.

Dreeme rose to his feet, still smiling.

“This is a nice social neighborhood,” he said to the moon.

Walden Slater thrust his pipe back in his mouth and resumed his inspection of the great white globe that floated in the heavens above him. Dreeme turned the corner of the house slowly.

Unconsciously they hastened their pace, passing through the square and the narrow side street that led toward the lower end of the town. The houses thinned out, falling away like specters from them, and an instant later they were trudging along a country road.

“If you follow this road far enough,” he said with an effort at lightness, “you’ll reach the real world.”

“I shall travel on it soon,” she answered. There was a break in her voice.

“What is the real world like?” she asked after a moment.

“It is full of people,” he said. “It is full of cities. It is like a noisy jungle. It is easy to hide there.”

She did not answer him. For a long time they walked in silence, their shoulders touching lightly as their bodies swayed over the uneven road.

He bent down to her and kissed her for the first time. Her lips were like damp rose-petals and they clung to his greedily.

“If it was only yesterday,” he said, “how long our Paradise will be.”

She disengaged herself from him and they walked slowly up the street toward the Slater house, hand in hand.

“

I carry that house about inside me.

It was an old rambling structure. It must have been centuries old. My forefathers had lived in it since the first one came into the valley and raised it.

After that the full-flushed madness of the summer would descend on the valley and the wide fields would bear their yield and the heat would buzz in the air.

August was a feverish madman running through lush grass and waving his fiery torch.

This season became to me the end and purpose of being, the complete passion of the sensual earth, the triumphant vindication of self.

You can imagine that carousing colony near enough to Boston to cause the good Puritans a prodigious loss of sleep. It was something that they hated and feared because it stirred in them the covered embers of their own suppressed excesses, I suppose.

Uncommitted sins that are buried in the blood and brain are fearful things, Daniel.

I imagine that most of the Puritans sublimated their fleshly longings into a religious ardor but this would make them fear the downright honesty of openly committed sin more than ever.

“No, Daniel,” he protested,

“I’m the man who sits in a chair all day.”

He reverted to the phenomena that Dreeme had adumbrated during his story.

“A fine crop makes a fine profit,” added Dreeme, saying the first thing that popped into his mind.

“A fine knife makes a fine point,” declared Walden Slater. “This knife is dull.”

He handed it back without any thanks, and the preacher stowed it away in his pocket. Dreeme drifted back through the kitchen preparatory to returning to his study. The conversation was altogether too dull.

“Where are we going?” His voice rose in a shout. “To the Westcott farm?”

“Dagon, damn it, Dagon!” shouted back the farmer. “We’re going to the place called Dagon!”

They ran all the faster through the relentless rain.

“They wouldn’t dare to kill her!” exploded Dreeme.

“There’s some things worse than death,” answered Walden Slater.

He moved toward the door and Dreeme followed him.

“Do you know who killed him?” asked Dreeme. “Was it Jeffrey Westcott?”

“I know that the pegs driven into his eye-sockets were whittled by a mighty dull knife,” returned the farmer grimly.

They plodded on in silence after that, their heads bowed against the driving wind and rain. Occasionally they stumbled over hammocks of wet grass and once Walden Slater sprawled upon the ground, his lantern rolling from his hand and blinking out.

It is the land of lean farms and thin mouths, too. It is a land of humming commercial cities, of great businesses, of the New Day. But it is more than this, as well.

How if all this glittering commercial civilization is no more than a huge shell, an incrustation of years, beneath which lurk the old pagan madnesses that were corollaries of the Puritan repression?

How if the ancient Dionysiac urge did not perish but remained like an ominous monster in a deep cavern biding its time and waiting its day?

It was fear that was the great enemy, fear of the unknown, fear of the stronger will, fear of the old wife’s tales that thousands of years of self-preservation against mysterious phenomena had planted in the feeble mortal body.

There was no safety in life except by the deliberate massacre of one’s fears.

Well, he would throttle these unworthy spasms and surmount the horror of these cruel tricks. He fastened his entire intelligence again upon the scene before him.

“What … happened?” inquired the young doctor breathlessly and bewilderedly.

“Judgment Day,” replied Walden Slater. His voice was grim.

Behind them they could hear confused voices.

He coughed loudly and spat into the darkness.

“Nothing to fight about,” he added. “Nothing to make these fool farmers mad now. It’s all over.”

They went on in silence after that. It was not until they had left the swamp, climbed the open stretch into Briony Wood, and were once more among the trees that Walden Slater spoke again.