It might have occurred to an impartial observer that Asa
Skinner's God was indeed a vengeful God if he could reserve
vengeance for those of his creatures who were packed into the Lone
Star schoolhouse that night. Poor exiles of all nations; men from
the south and the north, peasants from almost every country of
Europe, most of them from the mountainous, night-bound coast of
Norway. Honest men for the most part, but men with whom the world
had dealt hardly; the failures of all countries, men sobered by
toil and saddened by exile, who had been driven to fight for the
dominion of an untoward soil, to sow where others should gather,
the advance guard of a mighty civilization to be.
Never had Asa Skinner spoken more earnestly than now. He felt
that the Lord had this night a special work for him to do. Tonight
Eric Hermannson, the wildest lad on all the Divide, sat in his
audience with a fiddle on his knee, just as he had dropped in on
his way to play for some dance. The violin is an object of
particular abhorrence to the Free Gospellers. Their antagonism to
the church organ is bitter enough, but the fiddle they regard as a
very incarnation of evil desires, singing forever of worldly
pleasures and inseparably associated with all forbidden things.
Eric Hermannson had long been the object of the prayers of the
revivalists. His mother had felt the power of the Spirit weeks
ago, and special prayer-meetings had been held at her house for her
son. But Eric had only gone his ways laughing, the ways of youth,
which are short enough at best, and none too flowery on the Divide.
He slipped away from the prayer-meetings to meet the Campbell boys
in Genereau's saloon, or hug the plump little French girls at
Chevalier's dances, and sometimes, of a summer night, he even went
across the dewy cornfields and through the wild-plum thicket to
play the fiddle for Lena Hanson, whose name was a reproach through
all the Divide country, where the women are usually too plain and
too busy and too tired to depart from the ways of virtue. On such
occasions Lena, attired in a pink wrapper and silk stockings and
tiny pink slippers, would sing to him, accompanying herself on a
battered guitar. It gave him a delicious sense of freedom and
experience to be with a woman who, no matter how, had lived in big
cities and knew the ways of town folk, who had never worked in the
fields and had kept her hands white and soft, her throat fair and
tender, who had heard great singers in Denver and Salt Lake, and
who knew the strange language of flattery and idleness and mirth.
Yet, careless as he seemed, the frantic prayers of his mother
were not altogether without their effect upon Eric. For days he
had been fleeing before them as a criminal from his pursuers, and
over his pleasures had fallen the shadow of something dark and
terrible that dogged his steps. The harder he danced, the louder
he sang, the more was he conscious that this phantom was gaining
upon him, that in time it would track him down. One Sunday
afternoon, late in the fall, when he had been drinking beer with
Lena Hanson and listening to a song which made his cheeks burn, a
rattlesnake had crawled out of the side of the sod house and thrust
its ugly head in under the screen door. He was not afraid of
snakes, but he knew enough of Gospellism to feel the significance
of the reptile lying coiled there upon her doorstep. His lips were
cold when he kissed Lena goodbye, and he went there no more.
The final barrier between Eric and his mother's faith was his
violin, and to that he clung as a man sometimes will cling to his
dearest sin, to the weakness more precious to him than all his
strength, In the great world beauty comes to men in many guises,
and art in a hundred forms, but for Eric there was only his violin.
It stood, to him, for all the manifestations of art; it was his
only bridge into the kingdom of the soul.
It was to Eric Hermannson that the evangelist directed his
impassioned pleading that night.
"Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? Is there a Saul here
tonight who has stopped his ears to that gentle pleading, who has
thrust a spear into that bleeding side? Think of it, my brother;
you are offered this wonderful love and you prefer the worm that
dieth not and the fire which will not be quenched. What right have
you to lose one of God's precious souls? Saul, Saul, why
persecutest thou me?"
A great joy dawned in Asa Skinner's pale face, for he saw that
Eric Hermannson was swaying to and fro in his seat. The minister
fell upon his knees and threw his long arms up over his head.
"O my brothers! I feel it coming, the blessing we have prayed
for. I tell you the Spirit is coming! just a little more prayer,
brothers, a little more zeal, and he will be here. I can feel his
cooling wing upon my brow. Glory be to God forever and ever,
amen!"
The whole congregation groaned under the pressure of this
spiritual panic. Shouts and hallelujahs went up from every lip.
Another figure fell prostrate upon the floor. From the mourners'
bench rose a chant of terror and rapture:
"Eating honey and drinking wine,
Glory to the bleeding Lamb!
I am my Lord's and he is mine,
Glory to the bleeding Lamb!"
The hymn was sung in a dozen dialects and voiced all the vague
yearning of these hungry lives, of these people who had starved all
the passions so long, only to fall victims to the barest of them
all, fear.
A groan of ultimate anguish rose from Eric Hermannson's bowed
head, and the sound was like the groan of a great tree when it
falls in the forest.
The minister rose suddenly to his feet and threw back his
head, crying in a loud voice:
"Lazarus, come forth! Eric Hermannson, you are lost, going
down at sea. In the name of God, and Jesus Christ his Son, I throw
you the life line. Take hold! Almighty God, my soul for his!"
The minister threw his arms out and lifted his quivering face.
Eric Hermannson rose to his feet; his lips were set and the
lightning was in his eyes. He took his violin by the neck and
crushed it to splinters across his knee, and to Asa Skinner the
sound was like the shackles of sin broken audibly asunder.
II
For more than two years Eric Hermannson kept the austere faith
to which he had sworn himself, kept it until a girl from the East
came to spend a week on the Nebraska Divide. She was a girl of
other manners and conditions, and there were greater distances
between her life and Eric's than all the miles which separated
Rattlesnake Creek from New York City. Indeed, she had no business
to be in the West at all; but ah! across what leagues of land and
sea, by what improbable chances, do the unrelenting gods bring to
us our fate!
It was in a year of financial depression that
Wyllis Elliot
came to Nebraska to buy cheap land and revisit the country where he
had spent a year of his youth. When he had graduated from Harvard
it was still customary for moneyed gentlemen to send their
scapegrace sons to rough it on ranches in the wilds of Nebraska or
Dakota, or to consign them to a living death in the sagebrush of
the Black Hills. These young men did not always return to the ways
of civilized life. But Wyllis Elliot had not married a
half-breed, nor been shot in a cowpunchers' brawl, nor wrecked by
bad whisky, nor appropriated by a smirched adventuress. He had
been saved from these things by a girl, his sister, who had been
very near to his life ever since the days when they read fairy
tales together and dreamed the dreams that never come true. On
this, his first visit to his father's ranch since he left it six
years before, he brought her with him. She had been laid up half
the winter from a sprain received while skating, and had had too
much time for reflection during those months. She was restless and
filled with a desire to see something of the wild country of which
her brother had told her so much. She was to be married the next
winter, and Wyllis understood her when she begged him to take her
with him on this long, aimless jaunt across the continent, to taste
the last of their freedom together. it comes to all women of her
type--that desire to taste the unknown which allures and terrifies,
to run one's whole soul's length out to the wind--just once.
It had been an eventful journey. Wyllis somehow understood that
strain of gypsy blood in his sister, and he knew where to take her.
They had slept in sod houses on the Platte River, made the
acquaintance of the personnel of a third-rate opera company on the
train to Deadwood, dined in a camp of railroad constructors at the
world's end beyond New Castle, gone through the Black Hills on
horseback, fished for trout in Dome Lake, watched a dance at
Cripple Creek, where the lost souls who hide in the hills
gathered for their besotted revelry. And now, last of all, before
the return to thraldom, there was this little shack, anchored on
the windy crest of the Divide, a little black dot against the
flaming sunsets, a scented sea of cornland bathed in opalescent air
and blinding sunlight.
Margaret Elliot was one of those women of whom there are so
many in this day, when old order, passing, giveth place to new;
beautiful, talented, critical, unsatisfied, tired of the world at
twenty-four. For the moment the life and people of the Divide
interested her. She was there but a week; perhaps had she stayed
longer, that inexorable ennui which travels faster even than the
Vestibule Limited would have overtaken her. The week she
tarried there was the week that Eric Hermannson was helping Jerry
Lockhart thresh; a week earlier or a week later, and there would
have been no story to write.
It was on Thursday and they were to leave on Saturday. Wyllis
and his sister were sitting on the wide piazza of the ranchhouse,
staring out into the afternoon sunlight and protesting against the
gusts of hot wind that blew up from the sandy riverbottom twenty
miles to the southward.
The young man pulled his cap lower over his eyes and remarked:
"This wind is the real thing; you don't strike it anywhere
else. You remember we had a touch of it in Algiers and I told you
it came from Kansas. It's the keynote of this country."
Wyllis touched her hand that lay on the hammock and continued
gently:
"I hope it's paid you, Sis. Roughing it's dangerous business;
it takes the taste out of things."
She shut her fingers firmly over the brown hand that was so
like her own.
"Paid? Why, Wyllis, I haven't been so happy since we were
children and were going to discover the ruins of Troy together some
day. Do you know, I believe I could just stay on here forever and
let the world go on its own gait. It seems as though the tension
and strain we used to talk of last winter were gone for good, as
though one could never give one's strength out to such petty things
any more."
Wyllis brushed the ashes of his pipe away from the silk
handkerchief that was knotted about his neck and stared moodily off
at the skyline.
"No, you're mistaken. This would bore you after a while. You
can't shake the fever of the other life. I've tried it. There was
a time when the gay fellows of Rome could trot down into the
Thebaid and burrow into the sandhills and get rid of it. But it's
all too complex now. You see we've made our dissipations so dainty
and respectable that they've gone further in than the flesh, and
taken hold of the ego proper. You couldn't rest, even here. The
war cry would follow you."
"You don't waste words, Wyllis, but you never miss fire. I
talk more than you do, without saying half so much. You must have
learned the art of silence from these taciturn Norwegians. I think
I like silent men."
"Naturally," said Wyllis, "since you have decided to marry the most
brilliant talker you know."
Both were silent for a time, listening to the sighing of the
hot wind through the parched morning-glory vines. Margaret spoke
first.
"Tell me, Wyllis, were many of the Norwegians you used to know
as interesting as Eric Hermannson?"
"Who, Siegfried? Well, no. He used to be the flower of the
Norwegian youth in my day, and he's rather an exception, even now.
He has retrograded, though. The bonds of the soil have tightened
on him, I fancy."
"Siegfried? Come, that's rather good, Wyllis. He looks like
a dragon-slayer. What is it that makes him so different from the
others? I can talk to him; he seems quite like a human being."
"Well," said Wyllis, meditatively, "I don't read Bourget
as much as my cultured sister, and I'm not so well up in analysis,
but I fancy it's because one keeps cherishing a perfectly
unwarranted suspicion that under that big, hulking anatomy of his,
he may conceal a soul somewhere. Nicht wahr?"
"Something like that," said Margaret, thoughtfully, "except
that it's more than a suspicion, and it isn't groundless. He has
one, and he makes it known, somehow, without speaking."
"I always have my doubts about loquacious souls," Wyllis
remarked, with the unbelieving smile that had grown habitual with
him.
Margaret went on, not heeding the interruption. "I knew it
from the first, when he told me about the suicide of his cousin,
the Bernstein boy. That kind of blunt pathos can't be summoned at
will in anybody. The earlier novelists rose to it, sometimes,
unconsciously. But last night when I sang for him I was doubly
sure. Oh, I haven't told you about that yet! Better light your
pipe again. You see, he stumbled in on me in the dark when I was
pumping away at that old parlour organ to please Mrs. Lockhart
It's her household fetish and I've forgotten how many pounds of
butter she made and sold to buy it. Well, Eric stumbled in, and in
some inarticulate manner made me understand that he wanted me to
sing for him. I sang just the old things, of course. It's queer
to sing familiar things here at the world's end. It makes one
think how the hearts of men have carried them around the world,
into the wastes of Iceland and the jungles of Africa and the
islands of the Pacific. I think if one lived here long enough one
would quite forget how to be trivial, and would read only the great
books that we never get time to read in the world, and would
remember only the great music, and the things that are really worth
while would stand out clearly against that horizon over there. And
of course I played the intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana
for him; it goes rather better on an organ than most things do. He
shuffled his feet and twisted his big hands up into knots and
blurted out that he didn't know there was any music like that in
the world. Why, there were tears in his voice, Wyllis! Yes, like
Rossetti, I heard his tears. Then it dawned upon me that it
was probably the first good music be had ever heard in all his
life. Think of it, to care for music as he does and never to hear
it, never to know that it exists on earth! To long for it as we
long for other perfect experiences that never come. I can't tell
you what music means to that man. I never saw any one so
susceptible to it. It gave him speech, he became alive. When I had
finished the intermezzo, he began telling me about a little
crippled brother who died and whom he loved and used to carry
everywhere in his arms. He did not wait for encouragement. He
took up the story and told it slowly, as if to himself, just sort
of rose up and told his own woe to answer Mascagni's. It overcame
me."
"Poor devil," said Wyllis, looking at her with mysterious
eyes, "and so you've given him a new woe. Now he'll go on
wanting Grieg and Schubert the rest of his days and never getting
them. That's a girl's philanthropy for you!"
Jerry Lockhart came out of the house screwing his chin over
the unusual luxury of a stiff white collar, which his wife insisted
upon as a necessary article of toilet while Miss Elliot was
at the house. Jerry sat down on the step and smiled his broad, red
smile at Margaret.
"Well, I've got the music for your dance, Miss Elliot. Olaf
Oleson will bring his accordion and Mollie will play the organ,
when she isn't lookin' after the grub, and a little chap from
Frenchtown will bring his fiddle--though the French don't mix with
the Norwegians much."
"Delightful! Mr. Lockhart, that dance will be the feature of
our trip, and it's so nice of you to get it up for us. We'll see
the Norwegians in character at last," cried Margaret, cordially.
"See here, Lockhart, I'll settle with you for backing her in
this scheme," said Wyllis, sitting up and knocking the ashes out of
his pipe. "She's done crazy things enough on this trip, but to
talk of dancing all night with a gang of half-mad Norwegians and
taking the carriage at four to catch the six o'clock train out of
Riverton--well, it's tommyrot, that's what it is!"
"Wyllis, I leave it to your sovereign power of reason to
decide whether it isn't easier to stay up all night than to get up
at three in the morning. To get up at three, think what that
means! No, sir, I prefer to keep my vigil and then get into a
sleeper."
"But what do you want with the Norwegians? I thought you were
tired of dancing."
"So I am, with some people. But I want to see a Norwegian
dance, and I intend to. Come, Wyllis, you know how seldom it is
that one really wants to do anything nowadays. I wonder when I
have really wanted to go to a party before. It will be something
to remember next month at Newport, when we have to and don't want