The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  “Barsham Harbor in twenty minutes, boss. Better be gettin’ up.”

  “All right. Thanks.” My whisper must have suggested how thankful I was because he chuckled as he moved away down the aisle.

  I began to wrestle my way into my clothes. The process of getting dressed in an upper berth is degrading, especially for a man of my height. It took me so long that by the time I got to the washroom there was no time to shave. The place smelled stalely of last night’s cigars and the water was lukewarm. I cursed myself, the hour, the railroad company, and everything else I could think of, including the necessity for hurry. The whole trip was probably unnecessary anyway. Even before the last strap on my bag was tugged and buckled the brakes were beginning to grind heavily under the floor.

  The sleep I hadn’t had was heavy behind my eyes and there was a flat taste in my mouth. I stumbled down the Pullman steps and onto the rickety boards of the station platform at Barsham Harbor completely unprepared for the impact of a Maine morning in September. Its sharp brightness struck me like a physical blow and suddenly I was wide-awake.

  The sun must have been up for a good hour before I landed on that platform, but a night coldness was still in the air. I shivered as I drew in my first breaths of it. Behind me in the sleeping car Western Lake the atmosphere was part of the New York I had left seven hours ago. It had been warm, heavy with the exhalations of people and machinery. This stuff I was taking into my lungs now was different—thin, cold, and reporting the open sweep of fields, hills, and the river. I felt bewildered and out of place. This entry into an unfamiliar air and landscape was too abrupt.

  The porter took my tip with a sleepy mumble of acknowledgment and slung his metal stepping stool back into the car. When he heaved himself up after it, there was a sudden wrench in my mind as if I were losing a friend. He was my last contact with the familiar things I had abandoned to come up to this Godforsaken place and I didn’t want him to leave me behind. For one instant I had an impulse to toss my bag up into the vestibule after him, swing aboard, and go on with the train. It would be returning to New York that night, I thought, and I wanted to be on it when it did. The prompting not to be left was so strong that I stooped and actually caught hold of the suitcase handle.

  Given two more seconds of grace, I might really have got back aboard. I don’t know. It was a strong impulse, and as I think over the steps by which I became involved in the mystery and the disappearance of Julian Blair it is easy to believe that there was something prophetic about it. There’s no great difficulty about being wise after the event. Anyhow, as I lifted the bag the train hissed, clanked, and began to move. The opportunity was gone.

  Not that I knew it was an opportunity. At the moment I was surprised at myself. A psychologist, particularly one with enough confidence in his science to spend his life teaching its rudiments to the youth and flower of a reputable university, had no business giving in to such infantile whimsies as that half effort of mine to return to the train. So I reminded myself, but instead of turning away at once I stood there with my bag in my hand, watching the steel walls of the Pullmans moving past my eyes in a crescendo of speed and irrevocability. One part of my mind, the professional part, informed me that I was acting like a fool. But there was a less articulate something that reproached me for not being on it. “Why?” I demanded impatiently, but there was no answer. Not then, at any rate.

  With a dwindling roar the train shrank down the track and I turned to confront Barsham Harbor and whatever the day was to produce. The most immediate fact was that Julian had not come to the station to meet me. Of course I knew him too well to suppose it would even occur to him to come, but when I saw he wasn’t on hand I damned him under my breath all the same. Anne was not there either, and I discovered that I was disappointed about that. Five years ago she would have insisted on welcoming me, would, as a matter of fact, have driven the car down herself and let the policemen who didn’t approve of fifteen-year-old girls driving lump it. No doubt she had changed. She was twenty now, of course, and even at twenty most women have developed a reluctance to getting up with the sun. For that matter, I admitted to myself, so have most men.

  None of which went far toward deciding what I was supposed to do next. Hire a car, presumably, and go on out to the house, wherever it was. On that point Julian’s letter, to my city mind, had not seemed very helpful. I hauled it out of my pocket and looked at it again to make sure.

  Barsham Harbor, Me.

  September second.

  Dear Richard:

  I have been extremely busy since we saw each other last. My work has now reached the point where I am in need of your friendly advice and counsel. The problem is one on which I should be willing to consult only such an old friend as yourself. If you possibly can, please come up for a few days before the academic year begins. I beg you not to fail me, if only for the sake of auld lang syne. Anne is with me, of course, and anxious to see “Uncle Dick” again. Come as soon as you can, the sooner the better. I think I can promise you that this is profoundly important.

  Sincerely,

  Julian Blair

  Characteristically, there was a postscript added with a blunt pencil at the end:

  P.S. We are living in a house they call the Talcott place. I had much rather you regarded this address and letter as confidential.

  Looking it over, I had to smile. That phrase “since we saw each other last” covered a matter of well over four years. But time never meant much to Julian. It had come as a shock, even to me, to realize just how long it had been since we had forgathered, and when his letter reached me I had, in a burst of self-reproach, canceled a number of engagements and caught the first train. Apparently my wire asking him to meet me at the station had failed to penetrate his usual absentminded absorption.

  Two nondescript sedans were parked along the far edge of the platform, and a faded sticker on the windshield of the one on the left said “Taxi.” The driver was sitting behind his wheel staring at the station and paying no attention to me in spite of the fact that I was the only passenger on the train who had been fool enough to get off at Barsham Harbor. The man’s indifference puzzled me. Without being insulting, there was something contemptuous about it. I didn’t want to lug my suitcase across the platform and ask him if he would be so kind as to drive me away in his car, and yet that was just about what I should have to do if I didn’t want to spend the morning standing right where I was. In New York, the cab drivers are actually eager to have you ride in their hacks, but not this man.

  Before I approached him, I took a minute to survey the town, this place to which Julian Blair had seen fit to come for some obscure reason of his own. My heart sank as I stared toward it. There was something malapropos about the idea of Julian’s living in this village. It didn’t even look as if the local power plant would be able to supply enough electricity for his ordinary laboratory requirements, assuming that he had built a laboratory. He certainly wouldn’t find one ready-made in this fly-in-amber of a colonial town. The thought of a great electrophysicist in a place that looked as if it must still be using whale-oil lamps was incongruous. An uneasiness crept into my mind. Quaint, even beautiful as this town was, it was no place for Julian Blair unless . . . I disliked putting the thought clearly, even to myself, but what it amounted to was, unless he wanted to be secret, unless what he was doing was something as unbalanced and pitiful as the obsession that had led to his leaving the university almost five years ago.

  Barsham Harbor is built on the rising land along the right bank of the Kennebec. Its main street runs diagonally away from the station, where I was standing, toward the water, and it is no level city avenue but a dirt-surfaced town road that dips and rises to the modeling of the land itself. The huge old trees on each side of the way were solid fountains of green that morning, jetting superbly up against a thin blue sky. Between their boles I could see the white fronts of the houses, square, solid, three stories high. Most of them seemed to have porticoed fronts that
expressed inescapably what the people who originally built these houses had thought of themselves. Above the trees one sudden, narrow spire leaped up into the morning sun and glittered like hammered metal.

  Beyond the trees and the houses I saw that the road dipped again, and the distant buildings there looked gray and weathered. Stores, probably. In the notch between the last of them was a fleck of blue water, like a tile in a mosaic, and past that again a distant row of hills on the other side of the valley, checkered minutely with farms and wood lots. The whole air of the landscape was glowing with the early sun and the reflected light from the broad surface of the Kennebec.

  Yes, impossible as it would be for me to return to it, there is no denying the fact that Barsham Harbor is beautiful. A hundred years and more ago, when it was alive, when it had some meaning and significance of its own, it must have been comparable to any town of its size in the world. Those were the days when Kennebec men were building and sailing the fast ships that had gone down this river before me and away to the four corners of the world. In the sweltering ports of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta they had sold their cargoes and even their ballast—great chunks of ice sawed in blocks from the frozen river itself and worth a fortune in the heat of the tropics. They had come home again with gold clinking in their strongboxes and their holds full of rum, silks, spices, tea—all the wealth of Ormus and of Ind for Yankee merchants in Boston, Portland, and Bath. Their captains and owners had built those pillared houses in the days when Barsham Harbor was closer to India than to Illinois.

  On that bright morning their town was as clear and unchanging as the profile on a Roman cameo. Dead for a century though it had been, its aspect was still beautiful and proud. In all the future decades and centuries through which the town might manage to preserve its shell, I could not imagine that anything of importance would ever happen here again. As I looked at those white houses they seemed as truly mausoleums as if they had stood in a cemetery. The past was buried in them, not to stir again until the day of resurrection. Barsham Harbor was through with life and with the only phase of time which matters to living beings—the duration of change.

  I was wrong about that. One thing more was to happen in Barsham Harbor, a thing both violent and terrible, which its citizens have surely not understood to this day. It is incredible that with even an inkling of the truth behind the events to which they were all witnesses, those people could go on living in their village; it is hard enough even for me to sleep without dreaming of it. How can they look down their own streets and across the river to the point where Julian’s house once stood without feeling the hairs lift on the backs of their necks?

  I wonder that they can walk the streets of their town and not know that every shadow is haunted. There must be something that is more than night darkness in their lanes after the sun has set. What do they think when they turn their eyes toward Setauket Point, black against the water? Even in the calmest weather the villagers along the lower Mississippi look now and again toward the levee that rises above their roofs. Where the river in flood has once broken through there can be no absolute security and peace again.

  Hysterical words. Perhaps I don’t mean them too literally. After all, no further danger exists for those townsmen. Lightning does not strike twice in the same place, and if the thing I mean continues to exist at all it does so only in the brain of some man who, like Julian Blair, sets out to travel one certain, dreadful roadway of the mind. It is the people around that man who are in danger without knowing it, not the folk of Barsham Harbor. They are as safe as any of the rest of us. Cut as they are from the remnants of a greater cloth than they can weave for themselves, they are unlikely to produce a man or woman who will duplicate Julian’s experiment. Even while he was there among them they did not know what he was about, really. They simply resented him with the blindly obstinate dislike of the countryman for the “foreigner.” Now that he is never coming back, they will have forgotten him in a year or two more.

  3.

  FOR THE second time I stooped to the handle of my suitcase. However unlikely Barsham Harbor might look, it was Julian’s address and my destination. I was impatient to finish my journey. Also, there was a hollow under my belt where no breakfast rested as yet and I wanted to fill that. I crossed the platform and halted beside the sedan.

  “Good morning,” I said. No reply; the driver went on looking into space. “Is this a taxicab?”

  He turned his head deliberately, then, and looked me over from head to foot without speaking. There was no expression on his narrow face or around the pale flatness of his eyes. When his inspection was completed he nodded once and said, “Ayuh.”

  The man was disconcerting and, when I spoke again, it annoyed me to hear that my tone sounded apologetic. “I was expecting a friend to meet me, but he doesn’t seem to have showed up. I suppose I better go out to his place. It’s Mr. Blair. He lives in the old Talcott house.”

  Something happened behind the flat eyes that were watching me, but I couldn’t tell what it was. After a minute he looked away and said indifferently, “Reckon I know where it is.” He thrust back a thin, brown arm and opened the tonneau door beside me. I slung in my bag and started to follow it. “It’ll be a dollar,” he said.

  “That’s all right. Do you want me to pay you now?”

  “Please yerself.”

  I took a bill out of my pocket at once. Something in his manner made me want to put him in my debt. “Here,” I told him, “and if you’re not sure about the place, we can ask in town.”

  He was putting the bill into a battered wallet with meticulous care and thoroughness. “I said I knew where it was.” After buttoning his wallet into a hip pocket he added, “Don’t have much occasion to go out that way lately.”

  “I suppose not,” I said. “To tell you the truth I didn’t expect to find anyone who would know the way so easily. Mr. Blair’s letter wasn’t very clear on directions. I wasn’t sure anybody would know where he lived.”

  He smiled temporarily, and his teeth were the yellow-brown of a tobacco chewer’s. Later I understood that smile. It was for my city man’s assumption that anyone could live in Barsham Harbor for more than a few days without being known to every living inhabitant. When he was through being amused, the same indifference, tinged with something stronger this time, returned to his manner. “Ever’body round here knows the Talcott place,” he remarked briefly and swung the car down the station drive.

  I settled back in my seat with a grunt. “Oh,” I remembered suddenly, “I haven’t had any breakfast yet. Is there a place in town where I can get something?”

  “Ee-lite’ll be open, I reckon,” he said and cut the car into the street. We went unhurriedly down along its rolling length with the high white houses on either side of us. Most of their windows were still shuttered but the chimneys were smoking. Except for that there was scarcely an indication of life. Our car was the only moving object in sight; everything else seemed transfixed by the brightness of the morning.

  The driver cleared his throat. “That’ll be extra,” he observed.

  I reassured him. “All right, but I won’t keep you waiting long. How much of a trip out there is it, anyway?” For all I knew the house might be right in the town. If it was then his charge of a dollar was robbery. When he said, “ ’Bout six miles,” I felt better.

  The four business blocks, when we reached them, were a seedy contrast to the stately places we had been passing. Most of the stores were cheaply constructed frame buildings in need of paint, and their show windows were not quite clean. The merchandise behind them looked as if it had been there a long time. More than anything else, this part of the town was without any character of its own. It might as well have been a piece of Gary, Indiana, or Gallup, New Mexico. The Elite Lunch turned out to be an epitome of the meager standardization of the rest. Its nickel coffee urn was not tarnished, but neither was it bright. The stools along the counter were upholstered in a sleazy, imitation red leather, and th
ere was a perceptible film of grease on the surface of the white table where I ate my breakfast.

  That meal was far from elite. The coffee was hot enough, but thin and bitter, the egg hinted at cold storage, and the toast was abominable. But I downed all three and the emptiness under my belt disappeared. Some of the uncomfortableness with which the day had begun faded from my mind, but not all of it. The more I saw of the town the less I could understand Julian’s being here. It had gone to seed too obviously. The street beyond my window was rutted and lined on its opposite side with haggard ice houses and frowsy garages. There was litter around them all. The clean sweep of the river, which I could glimpse between them, was a pleasant contrast.

  It was inconceivable that there was a decent laboratory within a hundred miles of this place. It takes apparatus and a complex set of facilities to work in the field of electrophysics today, and usually a staff of research assistants. Surely Julian didn’t have money enough to build and equip a complete place of his own? Even if he had, why locate it here? What had his letter meant by “advice”? The only advice that occurred to me then was to tell him to get out of this place and back into the world where he belonged.

  There was just one answer. He was still living in that tragic dream, born of despair and grief, that had taken possession of him the day of Helen’s funeral. He had come here to work on it in secret because there was enough of the old Julian left, somewhere, to realize what his colleagues would think of him if they got wind of it. He had not been able to reconcile himself to the fact of her death and now, after years of inevitably wasted time and effort, he wanted help of some sort from me. How could I help him? What I suspected him of needing was a psychiatrist, not a psychologist.