But his watch was one that he knew could be depended on, and anyway the difference was so slight that it hardly mattered. New Haven was roughly a hundred miles from Providence, or so it was supposed to be, though it always turned out to be a little more than that on the road. Add four miles for West Haven, where his home was, and you had maybe a hundred and ten, all told, or slightly more than three hours, average driving.
He would be home in time for dinner, he thought, or at least not so late that there need be much complaining. His wife, Edna, always liked him to be home for his meals “for the family’s sake”, as she put it — and she also liked him to be home in good time, “for the children’s,” and it was sometimes difficult to combine her demands with those of business necessity. But today, having hurried his afternoon calls a little, he was pretty sure he’d be able to make out all right. He’d be home at seven-thirty, he thought, at the latest, and, of course, if he was delayed on the way, he could phone.
The thought of all this as he was angling out from the curb, into the stream of traffic on Westminster Street, where he had parked the car, and yet in a way he wasn’t really thinking. He knew his wife and her little peculiarities, he knew the route and the distance, having travelled it many times, and he was merely checking over the obvious and the familiar — settling into it, really — as a way of relaxing after the tensions and sudden, unpredictable demands of the business day.
It was all clear sailing now. He pulled out behind a truck and turned left on Winter Street; in a minute or two more he was rolling out Broad toward Elmwood and the junction of Route 3 and the Boston Post Road. He didn’t think of time again — or if he did, he wasn’t conscious of it until he had passed New London.
He was going down a stretch of black asphalt then, with a sort of wooden knoll on the one side and what looked like a stretch of salt marsh on the other, and at first he didn’t know where he was; for a moment or two he had that feeling of black unbelongingness that sometimes comes with a sudden awakening, and the road might have been any road in the world and he anywhere upon it, for all the sense of familiarity it brought to him. Then he passed a crossroad with a sign pointing down it that said. “Niantic 2 M”, and that orientated him. He was on the Post road, right enough, about halfway between New London and Saybrook, with a good hour or more of driving ahead of him before he reached New Haven. But the sky seemed darker than he had somehow expected it to be, and when he glanced at his watch, he saw that it was seven-thirty almost exactly.
This was the beginning of a curious episode in Davis Harwell’s life, but at the moment he saw nothing in his lateness to surprise him. There was an odd sense of dullness, or pressure, upon him -he thought afterwards that it was as if a weight had been bearing on his mind and had as yet only partly lifted — and the one clear idea that presented itself to his mind was that if it was that late, and if he was that tired (he felt suddenly very tired), it was time he was having some dinner. It wasn’t till he had stopped at a roadside restaurant a little farther on — it wasn’t, really until he’d finished a plate of clams and was waiting for the dish of fried scallops he’d ordered — that the weight finally lifted and all the incongruities of the situation rushed in upon him.
He was looking at a clock on the restaurant wall at the moment, and the clock said six minutes past eight. It was eight-six by his own watch, too, by that time, but the clock on the wall seemed somehow more impartial and authoritative. It was eight-six, and suddenly, surprisingly, in Davis Harwell’s mind it was eight-six, and on the instant a whole series of questions that had existed before only as a dull disturbance in his consciousness came immediately into focus.
It was eight-six, and here he was, not yet past Saybrook. Why wasn’t he in New Haven? He had left Providence at a little past four-four-eighteen, wasn’t it? yes, he remembered clearly — and he remembered thinking even then that he’d be home by seven-thirty, if not earlier. And he hadn’t stopped anywhere, except once to buy gas, and that had taken — well, maybe five minutes at the most. And yet here he was, only just past Niantic, and if that clock didn’t lie...
The waitress slid a platter with the scallops, some cole slaw, and French-fried potatoes onto the table before him and then stood looking down at him. “Want anything with it?” she said.
“With what?” said Davis. He was still staring at the clock.
“With the scallops.”
“Oh,” said Davis. He remembered the stop for gas distinctly — the yellow-stuccoed little peaked-roofed building with the two pumps before it, and the rather awkward-looking, loose-jowled, elderly man who took care of his needs. He had taken seven gallons, he remembered, and it pleased him to recall the transaction so exactly. He felt lost here, somehow. He should be in New Haven.
“I mean,” the waitress said patiently, “you want some beer or something? Do you want your coffee?”
“No, no coffee” Davis said. “Or 1 mean I’ll have the coffee later. Is that clock up there right?”
“Always has been,” said the waitress. Then she turned and called to a man standing talking to the girl behind the cashier’s desk. “Mr. Osgood, is that clock right, do you suppose?”
The man pulled an old-fashioned hunting-case watch from his pocket, snapped it open, and glanced at it. “On the dot,” he called back, and smiled briefly at Davis Harwell.
“On the dot,” said the waitress. “I was pretty sure.”
He could remember the gas station. He found, when he put his mind to it, that he could remember a good deal about the journey; though he had made the same trip so many times before that it tended to fall into a pattern, there were still little individual incidents that came back to him — a woman’s hand dangling languidly from a car window as he passed the car (that had been about an hour out of Providence), the big truck on the hill that delayed him farther on, the yellow roadster that whizzed past, and the hay wagon with the kids on top, the picnickers — little things in themselves, but things that still distinguished this trip from any other and made it possible for him to say with assurance that he had passed by that way, and remembered.
The trouble was that there were other things he didn’t remember. He ate his scallops and the waitress brought him his coffee. He hardly noticed. The whole thing, he was beginning to realize, was an unusual experience. Somewhere, somehow, he had lost an hour, but that wasn’t all; he had lost memory as well, and there was a whole section of the trip, from well, from about where he’d seen those picnickers (and that had been back on the other side of New London, while he was still in Rhode Island) to the moment of his awakening near Niantic, that had simply dropped out of his mind completely. There were towns that he must have passed through, or he wouldn’t be here; turns and stretches of road that he must have taken, cars and people he must have passed He found now that he couldn’t remember them at all.
It was as if he had been diving in a fog, and the one thing he did remember was an image as precise and as unrelated as something one might see through a sudden parting of a fog — a group of small white houses grouped at an intersection, and a clock (was it on a steeple?) with the clock’s hands pointing to ten minutes to six. There was a faint suggestion of a dirt road, too, but even as he tried to consider it, it floated off into nothingness.
Or the fog, or whatever it was, covered it. There was a blank there, that was it, and he couldn’t help wondering what had happened. He wasn’t worried, exactly. Davis Harwell was a methodical man, and his impulse was to find a logical explanation for the phenomenon that confronted him. Once before, he had had a similar experience when he had gone to his brother-in-law’s wedding and, not being a drinking man, usually, had taken more than he should have before he knew it, and had found himself home next morning, with the car in the garage and him and Edna in bed, without having any idea at all of how he had got there. But he had got through safely then, though he had had some bad moments afterward, and this time, too, he must have managed all right, or he wouldn’t be here.
He had been working too hard — that was probably it. Or he had made the trip back and forth so much that it had become mere routine and he had fallen into it daydream at the wheel-and then, naturally, he had slowed up his driving which would account for the lost time. He was here, anyway, and the main thing to do now was to get on. It’s perhaps significant though, in view of what happened later, that he had paid his bill and left the restaurant, was about to get into his car, before he remembered that he hadn’t yet telephoned Edna, who would of course be wondering.
“I was held up,” he said when he had gone back and called her over the pay phone, and as soon as he heard her reply — “Held up!” she almost screamed — he realized that she had got the wrong meaning.
“No, not that, dear,” he told her patiently. It occurred to him that she was always getting wrong meanings. “I mean held up in a business way. I was delayed. Things came up that upset my schedule. I was late getting started.”
He hung up, and when he got back in the car again, he sat awhile in the dark interior before turning on the headlights and stepping on the starter.
He felt, in a queer way, lonely. In his methodical way, he had decided to disregard the incident, and yet he couldn’t help thinking about it, and as he thought about it, an odd sort of detachment took hold of him; he could see himself there, leaving Providence, driving out in his car among all the other men at the wheels of their cars in the afternoon traffic and then here, late, alone, in a dark car, lonely... For a moment, he had an odd, frightened feeling, in itself quite illogical: Was he even the same person now that he had been, leaving Providence? And if not, what had changed him?
Davis thought about the whole thing a good deal in the days and weeks that followed, but he didn’t allow it to become an obsession. It was an incident, and an odd one, certainly, but in Davis’ mind its very oddness tended to drive it out of his consciousness. He sought logic and not illogic, and the very fact that this strange lapse of his had no apparent explanation was enough to make him give up looking for an explanation.
Yet it stuck in his mind, and when he next drove back from Providence (he made the trip, on an average, twice a month), he found himself, at the beginning of the trip, checking off the places that he remembered — the long hill where the truck had delayed him (it was just before a town called Hope Valley, he discovered); the sharp curves that the yellow roadster had taken so recklessly, and the wooded country where, suddenly, he had come upon the hay wagon; the little knoll where the picnickers had been sitting (it was vacant when he passed this time, but he could still see the old black sedan parked beside the road, the two women and the children, and the man in his shirtsleeves, just unscrewing the top of the thermos as he passed) — and approaching, with trepidation, the invisible point where his memory ended and the unknown began.
He found he couldn’t locate the dividing line exactly. To remember is one thing, but to define what you don’t remember is another, and that, in a way, was what Davis was trying to do. About all he could tell was that somewhere around the state line between Rhode Island and Connecticut a sort of assurance left him; he knew the road from then on, of course, and he followed it, but it seemed, in an odd way, strange to him, and when he reached the Niantic crossroad (“Niantic 2 M.” the sign still said) and found himself again on ground that was completely familiar, a sort of sadness overcame him, as if he had lost something that now might never be regained.
All the way, too, he had been looking for the group of white houses, and the clock, and the steeple. He had looked for them without quite admitting to himself that he was looking, because, in keeping with his common-sense view of things, he had decided that that little scene must be an entirely extraneous impression — a dream, maybe; anyway, something really unconnected with the trip. But he didn’t find it, and that, too, added to the strange sense of loss, and of sadness because of loss, that he felt its he drove on through Saybrook and Clinton and Guilford and — the darkness now fading — the other towns leading into New Haven.
He didn’t find the white houses until nearly six weeks later, and then it was largely by accident. There are two main ways of going from Providence to New Haven — one by the old Boston Post Road, which follows the shore line and the towns along it, windingly, and the other by a newer road, which cuts across the bulging headlands of western Rhode Island in a straight line from Providence to New London, where it joins the old Post Road again. This, being shorter, was the road Davis usually followed, but this time he turned off it. He had heard that there was a new hardware store being opened at Westerly, Rhode Island, and on the chance of getting their account he decided to drive dawn and look the place over.
Westerly is a coastal town, so it’s on the Post Road, and a good deal of the route that Davis followed, getting down to it, was unfamiliar. Yet it had, in an odd way, a feeling of familiarity, too. It was like something that he had seen once and had half forgotten but that recalled itself to him, landmark by landmark, as he went along; it was in that sense, just the opposite of his previous experience, when he had forgotten what he had gone through, and although he had decided to put that out of his mind — and by this time had almost succeeded in doing so; after all, he had had his own regular daily life to occupy him meanwhile — he could not a help a feeling of rising excitement as he drove into the town of Westerly.
Once again, though, it wasn’t the town. There were houses that white (after all, almost all New England houses are white), and they were grouped around an intersection. But they weren’t the right houses, in the right arrangement, and the hardware store, too, turned out to be a disappointment. Two young men were running it, neither of them with any experience to amount to much, and their plans were, if anything, too grandiose. They had taken over an old shop front and were in the midst of having it remodelled. But the scale of things on which they had planned the venture was far above what their chances of profit would warrant, and, after sizing things up, Davis — he thought wisely — decided to go cautiously about establishing relations with them. He asked directions for getting on to New London, followed them through the center of town, lost them somewhere on the outskirts, and then — just as he was deciding that in spite of the stubborn feeling of rightness about the way he was going, he would have to turn back and start over — ran smack into the group of white houses, and the clock, and the steeple.
It was an odd sensation. The whole business was something that he had decided by now to forget about; common sense had demanded it. And yet here it was — or, rather, here they were three houses, two on one side and the other across from them, with a dirt road in between, and with a number of details about them — the picket fence and the elm tree in the yard of one, the dormer windows and the tarred hip roof of another, the lilac bushes — that, though he couldn’t have described them before, now fell instantly into a remembered pattern. Beyond, and set back a little from the road, on the left, was the church, and the steeple. The clock, he noticed, said twenty-seven minutes to six.
Davis stopped the car and sat for a while. Then he did what was for him an unusual thing. He was off the right road by now, and he knew it, and he knew further, that to go on in the way he was headed (unless, just possibly, there was a short cut somewhere — and had he had that thought before?) would take him even more out of the way. Yet he put the car in gear and drove on down the dirt road between the white houses.
It was odd, but as soon as he started, he felt a strange sort of freedom. It was mid-September by then and the country was beginning to take on its autumn coloration; there was red in the sumacs and the climbing ivy along the roadside, and, in the fields beyond, the high grasses were beginning to turn brown at the tips and the stalks were yellowish. There were few houses. The road had dipped a little at the start. Then it rose, and when he came to the top of the rise, the land levelled off again. He was on a sort of tableland now, with that look of limitlessness about it which meant that the sea was its boundary. He was heading out, probably, toward a point of some sort, and that meant, almost certainly, that he’d have to turn back in the end, and yet he couldn’t now, even if he’d wanted to, keep from going on.
For that matter, though, he didn’t want to. He had started with the idea of retracing the way that he must have followed that other time, and if he had came down this road before and the white houses seemed to indicate it — he had thought it would bring back remembrances. It didn’t. He remembered nothing; instead, the road gave him a feeling of newness that was in itself surprising. It and everything about it — the ruts, deep in spots and shallower in others, the wiry strip of brown grass that ran between them, the earth’s look with the sunlight on it — all seemed new in a way that no similar things had ever looked to him before. Farther out, on what seemed to be the ultimate point of the headland, there was a scattering of summer cottages, with the sun flashing here and there on a roof when its angle was right. They looked brand-new, too) and with much the same feeling that a sailor might have setting his boat’s prow for a new shore ahead, Davis set the car’s course for the cottages and drove on.
It was when he passed the first of them that the strange thing occurred. It was a small house, red-roofed and gray-shingled; it had a screened-in porch facing toward the sea and awnings over the windows, a garage and a tiny plot of lawn and a hedge around it, and since the soil, here far out on the headland, was undoubtedly sandy, both the hedge and the lawn looked a little scraggly.
It was a typical summer cottage, and there was a woman on the lawn before it who looked typically summer-resident, too. About all he could tell as he approached was that she was a woman of middle age. She had hair that was either very light or that was graying, but she had a slim, attractive figure, and her legs and her arms were long and brown and fit-looking. She was wearing gray shorts and a snug blue jersey, and when Davis first noticed her, she was kneeling on the lawn, doing something to a row of flowers. She glanced up as the car came past, and saw him; he saw her face, and without even faintly recognizing her; he was sure he had never seen the woman before in his life — he found himself suddenly occupied with a curious impulse, almost a compulsion, to head the car in toward the hedge at the roadside and stop there.
He didn’t, of course, though there had been a weird moment when it had seemed, for some reason, that he must stop, when even the car seemed to want it and he’d almost had to wrestle with it to keep going. But that had probably been simply his imagining — after all, a man’s car didn’t just take things in its hands like that, not sensibly. There had been, too, a moment when it seemed to him that she recognized him, that she’d raised her hand sharply, as if just starting to wave to him, and then dropped it again as the car went past. But that was a thought that came to him later, when he was a little way down the road, so he couldn’t be sure of the details that prompted it, and he put that down, too, to his imagining. And most likely, if she had raised her hand at all, it had been merely to brush back her hair.
About all he knew for certain was that once he had passed the cottage, all the sense of adventurousness left him. Coming down the road, he had had a feeling of newness, as if something unexpected were bound to happen, but he had lost that now; he was simply a man who had taken a wrong turning somewhere on a journey and was getting a little anxious about reaching his destination on time.
He drove on. There were a dozen or so more cottages, growing closer together as he approached the center of the tiny settlement. There was a crossroads there, and a bar in a boxlike building on one corner, and since there were no signposts anywhere, Davis stopped and went into the bar to ask directions.
It was a typical summer-settlement bar. There was a neon-lighted sign, advertising someone’s beer, in the window, and visible in reverse from inside. At the rear, there was a sort of trellis, opening on a large rather cavernous room, dim now and dreary-looking, with a small, polished dance floor and a number of tables neatly arranged around it, all silently awaiting Saturday night’s festivities. The barroom was dim, too, or it seemed so after the sunlight outside, and Davis was just getting his bearings when he heard a voice say, “Well, hel-lo!” and saw the bartender, or the proprietor, coming down from the farther end of the bar.
He was a short, stocky man in an Army shirt, with an air that was at once tough and cheery. and he spoke in such an obviously welcoming tone that Davis. who had merely intended to inquire the nearest way to New London, was taken aback for a moment. By that time, the man was opposite the beer taps. “Beer?” he said, still smiling.
“Yes,” said Davis, and the man picked up a glass and started to fill it. As he did so, he glanced up once at Davis. quickly, and then looked down at the glass, slowly filling. When it was filled, he put it on the drain strip before him, knifed off the foam, and then carried it down and set it before Davis. “You know, it’s funny,” he said. “For a minute there, I thought you was someone I knew. Or — you know — a guy that come into the bar one time. I remember faces. I got a mind for it.” He looked at Davis again. “You never been here before?”
“I—” said Davis, and hesitated. For an instant, he felt himself poised on the edge of something perilous, and his instinct, quite naturally, was to get away from it. “No,” he said. He didn’t look at the man, and he gulped half the beer down hastily. He was wondering why he had ever come down that road at all. “What I wanted to know was, really, could you tell me the nearest way to New London?”
Then the man did a strange thing too. He put his arms down, folded, on the bar and stared silently at Davis for a moment. “You aren’t kidding?” he demanded, almost menacingly, and then, perhaps because he had seen Davis’ look — surprised, puzzled, half fearful — he seemed to change his mind. “O.K., we’ll play it your way,” he said. And slowly. carefully, he gave Davis his road directions.
Davis went back to the headland once more, however, and dove past the house and, this time, turned the car and drove back again. That last time had been in mid-September. Mow it was nearly three weeks later, and at the seaside those few weeks can mark a critical change of seasons. The fields, the grass, the road itself were hardly altered; they looked perhaps a little browner, a little more withered, and that was all. But the thing was that the whole region looked lonelier. It was in the atmosphere — a kind of emptiness, a kind of barrenness. And when he came to the cottage, he was not surprised to find that it looked lonelier, too.
There was no one on the lawn, but then, of course, you couldn’t expect her to be always there, waiting for him. Rut the awnings were down. and the screens, and the wide, seaward-facing porch had a curiously bare, wintry look without them. He drove past, though, cautiously. That first time (or had it been the second?), he had tried as he went on down the road to catch a glimpse of her through the rear-view mirror to see if she were really waving. But the angle had been wrong and he hadn’t seen her, and the mere fact that he’d tried, and hadn’t seen her, gave him, oddly, a greater sense of spying than if he had.
This time, too, he had something of the same feeling. He drove past and she wasn’t there, and he turned and drove back again, and then turned once more and went back before he dared stop the car and get out. There was no one there. He was late this time; the steeple clock had said eight minutes to six when he’d started down the road, and the lateness of the season made it seem later still; it was now almost dark, and if there had been anyone there, there would have been lights on somewhere, and he would have seen them, even behind the shutters. But there was no one, no one.
He walked about the lawn, still cautiously (for some reason, he didn’t go up to the house), and the main thing he remembered afterward was the usualness of everything. He had expected a sign of same sort, but there was none. The grass was just grass underfoot and the gravelled path just gravel; the wind, coming in lightly from the sea (there was a hint of rain in it, he noticed), was the same wind that was blowing in over Providence, New Haven and elsewhere, and he had walked about the place for only a few minutes before he recognized the aimlessness of what he was doing. Though he stopped for a while when he returned to the car, and looked back at the house, he soon realized that that was more aimlessness, too, and he got back in the car and started the motor.
Almost all the other cottages that he passed were closed for the winter, too, but the bar at the corner was still open, and in the growing darkness, the neon-lighted sign in the window shone out boldly “Narragansett Beer”, it said. For a moment, he was tempted to stop there. But then he thought there was no need to, really. The man had given him good enough directions the last time: a left turn at the first traffic light, then a right and another left, and then under the railroad and onto the Post Road. And besides, it was far too late.