|
Eric Hermannsons Soul
By Willa Cather
|
|
I.
It was a great night at the Lone Star schoolhousea night
when the Spirit was present with power and when God
was very near to man. So it seemed to Asa Skinner, servant of
God and Free Gospeller. The schoolhouse was crowded with
the saved and sanctified, robust men and women, trembling
and quailing before the power of some mysterious psychic
force. Here and there among this cowering, sweating multitude
crouched some poor wretch who had felt the pangs of an
awakened conscience, but had not yet experienced that complete
divestment of reason, that frenzy born of a convulsion
of the mind, which, in the parlance of the Free Gospellers, is
termed the Light. On the floor, before the mourners
bench, lay the unconscious figure of a man in whom outraged
nature had sought her last resort. This trance state is the
highest evidence of grace among the Free Gospellers, and indicates
a close walking with God.
Before the desk stood Asa Skinner, shouting of the mercy
and vengeance of God, and in his eyes shone a terrible earnestness,
an almost prophetic flame. Asa was a converted train
gambler who used to run between Omaha and Denver. He
was a man made for the extremes of life; from the most debauched
of men he had become the most ascetic. His was a
bestial face, a face that bore the stamp of Natures eternal
injustice. The forehead was low, projecting over the eyes, and
the sandy hair was plastered down over it and then brushed
back at an abrupt right angle. The chin was heavy, the nostrils
were low and wide, and the lower lip hung loosely except in
his moments of spasmodic earnestness, when it shut like a
steel trap. Yet about those coarse features there were deep,
rugged furrows, the scars of many a hand-to-hand struggle
with the weakness of the flesh, and about that drooping lip
were sharp, strenuous lines that had conquered it and taught
it to pray. Over those seamed cheeks there was a certain pallor,
a grayness caught from many a vigil. It was as though,
after Nature had done her worst with that face, some fine
chisel had gone over it, chastening and almost transfiguring it.
To-night, as his muscles twitched with emotion, and the perspiration
dropped from his hair and chin, there was a certain
convincing power in the man. For Asa Skinner was a man
possessed of a belief, of that sentiment of the sublime before
which all inequalities are leveled, that transport of conviction
which seems superior to all laws of condition, under which
debauchees have become martyrs; which made a tinker an artist
and a camel-driver the founder of an empire. This was with
Asa Skinner to-night, as he stood proclaiming the vengeance
of God.
It might have occurred to an impartial observer that Asa
Skinners 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. To-night 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 Genereaus saloon, or
hug the plump little French girls at Chevaliers 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 good-by, and he went there no more.
The final barrier between Eric and his mothers 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
to-night 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 Gods precious
souls? Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?
A great joy dawned in Asa Skinners 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 Lords 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
basest of them all, fear.
A groan of ultimate anguish rose from Eric Hermannsons
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 Erics 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 sage-brush 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
cow-punchers 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 fathers 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 typethat desire to
taste the unknown which allures and terrifies, to run ones
whole souls length out to the windjust 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 worlds 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 river-bottom twenty miles to the southward.
The young man pulled his cap lower over his eyes and remarked:
This wind is the real thing; you dont strike it anywhere
else. You remember we had a touch of it in Algiers and I told
you it came from Kansas. Its the key-note of this country.
Wyllis touched her hand that lay on the hammock and continued
gently:
I hope its paid you, Sis. Roughing its 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 havent 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 ones
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 sky-line.
No, youre mistaken. This would bore you after a while.
You cant shake the fever of the other life. Ive 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 its all too complex now. You see weve made our dissipations
so dainty and respectable that theyve gone further
in than the flesh, and taken hold of the ego proper. You
couldnt rest, even here. The war-cry would follow you.
You dont 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 hes rather an exception,
even now. He has retrograded, though. The bonds of the soil
have tightened on him, I fancy.
Siegfried? Come, thats 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 dont read Bourget as
much as my cultured sister, and Im not so well up in analysis,
but I fancy its 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 its more than a suspicion, and it isnt 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 cant 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 havent 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 parlor organ
to please Mrs. Lockhart. Its her household fetish and Ive
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. Its queer to sing familiar
things here at the worlds 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 didnt 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 he
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 cant 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 Mascagnis. It overcame
me.
Poor devil, said Wyllis, looking at her with mysterious
eyes, and so youve given him a new woe. Now hell go on
wanting Grieg and Schubert the rest of his days and never
getting them. Thats a girls 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, Ive got the music for your dance, Miss Elliot. Olaf
Oleson will bring his accordion and Mollie will play the organ,
when she isnt lookin after the grub, and a little chap
from Frenchtown will bring his fiddlethough the French
dont mix with the Norwegians much.
Delightful! Mr. Lockhart, that dance will be the feature
of our trip, and its so nice of you to get it up for us. Well
see the Norwegians in character at last, cried Margaret,
cordially.
See here, Lockhart, Ill settle with you for backing her in
this scheme, said Wyllis, sitting up and knocking the ashes
out of his pipe. Shes 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 oclock
train out of Rivertonwell, its tommy-rot, thats what
it is!
Wyllis, I leave it to your sovereign power of reason to
decide whether it isnt 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 dont want to. Remember your own
theory that contrast is about the only thing that makes life
endurable. This is my party and Mr. Lockharts; your whole
duty to-morrow night will consist in being nice to the Norwegian
girls. Ill warrant you were adept enough at it once.
And youd better be very nice indeed, for if there are many
such young valkyrs as Erics sister among them, they would
simply tie you up in a knot if they suspected you were guying
them.
Wyllis groaned and sank back into the hammock to consider
his fate, while his sister went on.
And the guests, Mr. Lockhart, did they accept?
Lockhart took out his knife and began sharpening it on the
sole of his plowshoe.
Well, I guess well have a couple dozen. You see its pretty
hard to get a crowd together here any more. Most of em
have gone over to the Free Gospellers, and theyd rather put
their feet in the fire than shake em to a fiddle.
Margaret made a gesture of impatience.
Those Free Gospellers have just cast an evil spell over this
country, havent they?
Well, said Lockhart, cautiously, I dont just like to pass
judgment on any Christian sect, but if youre to know the
chosen by their works, the Gospellers cant make a very proud
showin, an thats a fact. Theyre responsible for a few suicides,
and theyve sent a good-sized delegation to the state
insane asylum, an I dont see as theyve made the rest of us
much better than we were before. I had a little herdboy last
spring, as square a little Dane as I want to work for me, but
after the Gospellers got hold of him and sanctified him, the
little beggar used to get down on his knees out on the prairie
and pray by the hour and let the cattle get into the corn, an I
had to fire him. Thats about the way it goes. Now theres
Eric; that chap used to be a hustler and the spryest dancer in
all this sectioncalled all the dances. Now hes got no ambition
and hes glum as a preacher. I dont suppose we can even
get him to come in to-morrow night.
Eric? Why, he must dance, we cant let him off, said Margaret,
quickly. Why, I intend to dance with him myself!
Im afraid he wont dance. I asked him this morning if
hed help us out and he said, I dont dance now, any more,
said Lockhart, imitating the labored English of the Norwegian.
The Miller of Hoffbau, the Miller of Hoffbau, O my
Princess! chirped Wyllis, cheerfully, from his hammock.
The red on his sisters cheek deepened a little, and she
laughed mischievously. Well see about that, sir. Ill not admit
that I am beaten until I have asked him myself.
Every night Eric rode over to St. Anne, a little village
in the heart of the French settlement, for the mail. As the
road lay through the most attractive part of the Divide country,
on several occasions Margaret Elliot and her brother
had accompanied him. To-night Wyllis had business with
Lockhart, and Margaret rode with Eric, mounted on a
frisky little mustang that Mrs. Lockhart had broken to the
side-saddle. Margaret regarded her escort very much as she
did the servant who always accompanied her on long rides
at home, and the ride to the village was a silent one. She
was occupied with thoughts of another world, and Eric was
wrestling with more thoughts than had ever been crowded
into his head before. He rode with his eyes riveted on that
slight figure before him, as though he wished to absorb it
through the optic nerves and hold it in his brain forever.
He understood the situation perfectly. His brain worked
slowly, but he had a keen sense of the values of things. This
girl represented an entirely new species of humanity to him,
but he knew where to place her. The prophets of old, when
an angel first appeared unto them, never doubted its high
origin.
Eric was patient under the adverse conditions of his life,
but he was not servile. The Norse blood in him had not entirely
lost its self-reliance. He came of a proud fisher line, men
who were not afraid of anything but the ice and the devil, and
he had prospects before him when his father went down off
the North Cape in the long Arctic night, and his mother,
seized by a violent horror of seafaring life, had followed her
brother to America. Eric was eighteen then, handsome as
young Siegfried, a giant in stature, with a skin singularly pure
and delicate, like a Swedes; hair as yellow as the locks of
Tennysons amorous Prince, and eyes of a fierce, burning blue,
whose flash was most dangerous to women. He had in those
days a certain pride of bearing, a certain confidence of approach,
that usually accompanies physical perfection. It was
even said of him then that he was in love with life, and inclined
to levity, a vice most unusual on the Divide. But the
sad history of those Norwegian exiles, transplanted in an arid
soil and under a scorching sun, had repeated itself in his case.
Toil and isolation had sobered him, and he grew more and
more like the clods among which he labored. It was as though
some red-hot instrument had touched for a moment those
delicate fibers of the brain which respond to acute pain or
pleasure, in which lies the power of exquisite sensation, and
had seared them quite away. It is a painful thing to watch the
light die out of the eyes of those Norsemen, leaving an expression
of impenetrable sadness, quite passive, quite hopeless,
a shadow that is never lifted. With some this change
comes almost at once, in the first bitterness of homesickness,
with others it comes more slowly, according to the time it
takes each mans heart to die.
Oh, those poor Northmen of the Divide! They are dead
many a year before they are put to rest in the little graveyard
on the windy hill where exiles of all nations grow akin.
The peculiar species of hypochondria to which the exiles of
his people sooner or later succumb had not developed in Eric
until that night at the Lone Star schoolhouse, when he had
broken his violin across his knee. After that, the gloom of his
people settled down upon him, and the gospel of maceration
began its work. If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, et cetera.
The pagan smile that once hovered about his lips was gone,
and he was one with sorrow. Religion heals a hundred hearts
for one that it embitters, but when it destroys, its work is
quick and deadly, and where the agony of the cross has been,
joy will not come again. This man understood things literally:
one must live without pleasure to die without fear; to save the
soul it was necessary to starve the soul.
The sun hung low above the cornfields when Margaret and
her cavalier left St. Anne. South of the town there is a stretch
of road that runs for some three miles through the French
settlement, where the prairie is as level as the surface of a lake.
There the fields of flax and wheat and rye are bordered by
precise rows of slender, tapering Lombard poplars. It was a
yellow world that Margaret Elliot saw under the wide light of
the setting sun.
The girl gathered up her reins and called back to Eric, It
will be safe to run the horses here, wont it?
Yes, I think so, now, he answered, touching his spur to
his ponys flank. They were off like the wind. It is an old
saying in the West that new-comers always ride a horse or
two to death before they get broken in to the country. They
are tempted by the great open spaces and try to outride the
horizon, to get to the end of something. Margaret galloped
over the level road, and Eric, from behind, saw her long veil
fluttering in the wind. It had fluttered just so in his dreams
last night and the night before. With a sudden inspiration of
courage he overtook her and rode beside her, looking intently
at her half-averted face. Before, he had only stolen occasional
glances at it, seen it in blinding flashes, always with
more or less embarrassment, but now he determined to let
every line of it sink into his memory. Men of the world
would have said that it was an unusual face, nervous, finely
cut, with clear, elegant lines that betokened ancestry. Men of
letters would have called it a historic face, and would have
conjectured at what old passions, long asleep, what old sorrows
forgotten time out of mind, doing battle together in
ages gone, had curved those delicate nostrils, left their unconscious
memory in those eyes. But Eric read no meaning
in these details. To him this beauty was something more
than color and line; it was as a flash of white light, in which
one cannot distinguish color because all colors are there. To
him it was a complete revelation, an embodiment of those
dreams of impossible loveliness that linger by a young mans
pillow on midsummer nights; yet, because it held something
more than the attraction of health and youth and shapeliness,
it troubled him, and in its presence he felt as the Goths
before the white marbles in the Roman Capitol, not knowing
whether they were men or gods. At times he felt like uncovering
his head before it, again the fury seized him to
break and despoil, to find the clay in this spirit-thing and
stamp upon it. Away from her, he longed to strike out with
his arms, and take and hold; it maddened him that this
woman whom he could break in his hands should be so
much stronger than he. But near her, he never questioned
this strength; he admitted its potentiality as he admitted the
miracles of the Bible; it enervated and conquered him. To-night,
when he rode so close to her that he could have
touched her, he knew that he might as well reach out his
hand to take a star.
Margaret stirred uneasily under his gaze and turned questioningly
in her saddle.
This wind puts me a little out of breath when we ride
fast, she said.
Eric turned his eyes away.
I want to ask you if I go to New York to work, if I maybe
hear music like you sang last night? I been a purty good hand
to work, he asked, timidly.
Margaret looked at him with surprise, and then, as she
studied the outline of his face, pityingly.
Well, you mightbut youd lose a good deal else. I
shouldnt like you to go to New Yorkand be poor, youd
be out of atmosphere, some way, she said, slowly. Inwardly
she was thinking: There he would be altogether sordid,
impossiblea machine who would carry ones trunks upstairs,
perhaps. Here he is every inch a man, rather picturesque;
why is it? No, she added aloud, I shouldnt like
that.
Then I not go, said Eric, decidedly.
Margaret turned her face to hide a smile. She was a trifle
amused and a trifle annoyed. Suddenly she spoke again.
But Ill tell you what I do want you to do, Eric. I want
you to dance with us to-morrow night and teach me some of
the Norwegian dances; they say you know them all. Wont
you?
Eric straightened himself in his saddle and his eyes flashed
as they had done in the Lone Star schoolhouse when he broke
his violin across his knee.
Yes, I will, he said, quietly, and he believed that he delivered
his soul to hell as he said it.
They had reached the rougher country now, where the
road wound through a narrow cut in one of the bluffs along
the creek, when a beat of hoofs ahead and the sharp neighing
of horses made the ponies start and Eric rose in his stirrups.
Then down the gulch in front of them and over the steep clay
banks thundered a herd of wild ponies, nimble as monkeys
and wild as rabbits, such as horse-traders drive east from the
plains of Montana to sell in the farming country. Margarets
pony made a shrill sound, a neigh that was almost a scream,
and started up the clay bank to meet them, all the wild blood
of the range breaking out in an instant. Margaret called to
Eric just as he threw himself out of the saddle and caught her
ponys bit. But the wiry little animal had gone mad and was
kicking and biting like a devil. Her wild brothers of the range
were all about her, neighing, and pawing the earth, and striking
her with their fore feet and snapping at her flanks. It was
the old liberty of the range that the little beast fought for.
Drop the reins and hold tight, tight! Eric called, throwing
all his weight upon the bit, struggling under those frantic
fore feet that now beat at his breast, and now kicked at the
wild mustangs that surged and tossed about him. He succeeded
in wrenching the ponys head toward him and crowding
her withers against the clay bank, so that she could not
roll.
Hold tight, tight! he shouted again, launching a kick at
a snorting animal that reared back against Margarets saddle.
If she should lose her courage and fall now, under those
hoofsHe struck out again and again, kicking right and
left with all his might. Already the negligent drivers had galloped
into the cut, and their long quirts were whistling over
the heads of the herd. As suddenly as it had come, the struggling,
frantic wave of wild life swept up out of the gulch and
on across the open prairie, and with a long despairing whinny
of farewell the pony dropped her head and stood trembling in
her sweat, shaking the foam and blood from her bit.
Eric stepped close to Margarets side and laid his hand on
her saddle. You are not hurt? he asked, hoarsely. As he
raised his face in the soft starlight she saw that it was white
and drawn and that his lips were working nervously.
No, no, not at all. But you, you are suffering; they struck
you! she cried in sharp alarm.
He stepped back and drew his hand across his brow.
No, it is not that, he spoke rapidly now, with his hands
clenched at his side. But if they had hurt you, I would beat
their brains out with my hands, I would kill them all. I was
never afraid before. You are the only beautiful thing that has
ever come close to me. You came like an angel out of the sky.
You are like the music you sing, you are like the stars and the
snow on the mountains where I played when I was a little
boy. You are like all that I wanted once and never had, you
are all that they have killed in me. I die for you to-night,
to-morrow, for all eternity. I am not a coward; I was afraid
because I love you more than Christ who died for me, more
than I am afraid of hell, or hope for heaven. I was never afraid
before. If you had fallenoh, my God! he threw his arms
out blindly and dropped his head upon the ponys mane,
leaning limply against the animal like a man struck by some
sickness. His shoulders rose and fell perceptibly with his
labored breathing. The horse stood cowed with exhaustion
and fear. Presently Margaret laid her hand on Erics head and
said gently:
You are better now, shall we go on? Can you get your
horse?
No, he has gone with the herd. I will lead yours, she is not
safe. I will not frighten you again. His voice was still husky,
but it was steady now. He took hold of the bit and tramped
home in silence.
When they reached the house, Eric stood stolidly by the
ponys head until Wyllis came to lift his sister from the saddle.
The horses were badly frightened, Wyllis. I think I was
pretty thoroughly scared myself, she said as she took her
brothers arm and went slowly up the hill toward the house.
No, Im not hurt, thanks to Eric. You must thank him for
taking such good care of me. Hes a mighty fine fellow. Ill
tell you all about it in the morning, dear. I was pretty well
shaken up and Im going right to bed now. Good-night.
When she reached the low room in which she slept, she
sank upon the bed in her riding-dress face downward.
Oh, I pity him! I pity him! she murmured, with a long
sigh of exhaustion. She must have slept a little. When she rose
again, she took from her dress a letter that had been waiting
for her at the village post-office. It was closely written in a
long, angular hand, covering a dozen pages of foreign note-paper,
and began:
My Dearest Margaret: If I should attempt to say how like a
winter hath thine absence been, I should incur the risk of being
tedious. Really, it takes the sparkle out of everything. Having
nothing better to do, and not caring to go anywhere in
particular without you, I remained in the city until Jack
Courtwell noted my general despondency and brought me
down here to his place on the sound to manage some open-air
theatricals he is getting up. As You Like It is of course
the piece selected. Miss Harrison plays Rosalind. I wish you
had been here to take the part. Miss Harrison reads her lines
well, but she is either a maiden-all-forlorn or a tomboy; insists
on reading into the part all sorts of deeper meanings and
highly colored suggestions wholly out of harmony with the
pastoral setting. Like most of the professionals, she exaggerates
the emotional element and quite fails to do justice to
Rosalinds facile wit and really brilliant mental qualities.
Gerard will do Orlando, but rumor says he is epris of your
sometime friend, Miss Meredith, and his memory is treacherous
and his interest fitful.
My new pictures arrived last week on the Gascogne. The
Puvis de Chavannes is even more beautiful than I thought it
in Paris. A pale dream-maiden sits by a pale dream-cow, and a
stream of anemic water flows at her feet. The Constant, you
will remember, I got because you admired it. It is here in all
its florid splendor, the whole dominated by a glowing sensuosity.
The drapery of the female figure is as wonderful as you
said; the fabric all barbaric pearl and gold, painted with an
easy, effortless voluptuousness, and that white, gleaming line
of African coast in the background recalls memories of you
very precious to me. But it is useless to deny that Constant
irritates me. Though I cannot prove the charge against him,
his brilliancy always makes me suspect him of cheapness.
Here Margaret stopped and glanced at the remaining pages
of this strange love-letter. They seemed to be filled chiefly
with discussions of pictures and books, and with a slow smile
she laid them by.
She rose and began undressing. Before she lay down she
went to open the window. With her hand on the sill, she
hesitated, feeling suddenly as though some danger were lurking
outside, some inordinate desire waiting to spring upon
her in the darkness. She stood there for a long time, gazing at
the infinite sweep of the sky.
Oh, it is all so little, so little there, she murmured.
When everything else is so dwarfed, why should one expect
love to be great? Why should one try to read highly colored
suggestions into a life like that? If only I could find one thing
in it all that mattered greatly, one thing that would warm
me when I am alone! Will life never give me that one great
moment?
As she raised the window, she heard a sound in the plum-bushes
outside. It was only the house-dog roused from his
sleep, but Margaret started violently and trembled so that she
caught the foot of the bed for support. Again she felt herself
pursued by some overwhelming longing, some desperate necessity
for herself, like the outstretching of helpless, unseen
arms in the darkness, and the air seemed heavy with sighs of
yearning. She fled to her bed with the words, I love you
more than Christ, who died for me! ringing in her ears.
III.
About midnight the dance at Lockharts was at its height.
Even the old men who had come to look on caught the
spirit of revelry and stamped the floor with the vigor of old
Silenus. Eric took the violin from the Frenchman, and Minna
Oleson sat at the organ, and the music grew more and more
characteristicrude, half-mournful music, made up of the
folk-songs of the North, that the villagers sing through the
long night in hamlets by the sea, when they are thinking of
the sun, and the spring, and the fishermen so long away. To
Margaret some of it sounded like Griegs Peer Gynt music.
She found something irresistibly infectious in the mirth of
these people who were so seldom merry, and she felt almost
one of them. Something seemed struggling for freedom in
them to-night, something of the joyous childhood of the nations
which exile had not killed. The girls were all boisterous
with delight. Pleasure came to them but rarely, and when it
came, they caught at it wildly and crushed its fluttering wings
in their strong brown fingers. They had a hard life enough,
most of them. Torrid summers and freezing winters, labor and
drudgery and ignorance, were the portion of their girlhood; a
short wooing, a hasty, loveless marriage, unlimited maternity,
thankless sons, premature age and ugliness, were the dower of
their womanhood. But what matter? To-night there was hot
liquor in the glass and hot blood in the heart; to-night they
danced.
To-night Eric Hermannson had renewed his youth. He was
no longer the big, silent Norwegian who had sat at Margarets
feet and looked hopelessly into her eyes. To-night he
was a man, with a mans rights and a mans power. To-night
he was Siegfried indeed. His hair was yellow as the heavy
wheat in the ripe of summer, and his eyes flashed like the blue
water between the ice-packs in the North Seas. He was not
afraid of Margaret to-night, and when he danced with her he
held her firmly. She was tired and dragged on his arm a little,
but the strength of the man was like an all-pervading fluid,
stealing through her veins, awakening under her heart some
nameless, unsuspected existence that had slumbered there all
these years and that went out through her throbbing fingertips
to his that answered. She wondered if the hoydenish
blood of some lawless ancestor, long asleep, were calling out
in her to-night, some drop of a hotter fluid that the centuries
had failed to cool, and why, if this curse were in her, it had
not spoken before. But was it a curse, this awakening, this
wealth before undiscovered, this music set free? For the first
time in her life her heart held something stronger than herself,
was not this worth while? Then she ceased to wonder.
She lost sight of the lights and the faces, and the music was
drowned by the beating of her own arteries. She saw only the
blue eyes that flashed above her, felt only the warmth of that
throbbing hand which held hers and which the blood of his
heart fed. Dimly, as in a dream, she saw the drooping shoulders,
high white forehead and tight, cynical mouth of the man
she was to marry in December. For an hour she had been
crowding back the memory of that face with all her strength.
Let us stop, this is enough, she whispered. His only
answer was to tighten the arm behind her. She sighed and let
that masterful strength bear her where it would. She forgot
that this man was little more than a savage, that they would
part at dawn. The blood has no memories, no reflections, no
regrets for the past, no consideration of the future.
Let us go out where it is cooler, she said when the music
stopped; thinking, I am growing faint here, I shall be all
right in the open air. They stepped out into the cool, blue air
of the night.
Since the older folk had begun dancing, the young Norwegians
had been slipping out in couples to climb the windmill
tower into the cooler atmosphere, as is their custom.
You like to go up? asked Eric, close to her ear.
She turned and looked at him with suppressed amusement.
How high is it?
Forty feet, about. I not let you fall. There was a note of
irresistible pleading in his voice, and she felt that he tremendously
wished her to go. Well, why not? This was a night of
the unusual, when she was not herself at all, but was living an
unreality. To-morrow, yes, in a few hours, there would be the
Vestibule Limited and the world.
Well, if youll take good care of me. I used to be able to
climb, when I was a little girl.
Once at the top and seated on the platform, they were silent.
Margaret wondered if she would not hunger for that
scene all her life, through all the routine of the days to come.
Above them stretched the great Western sky, serenely blue,
even in the night, with its big, burning stars, never so cold
and dead and far away as in denser atmospheres. The moon
would not be up for twenty minutes yet, and all about the
horizon, that wide horizon, which seemed to reach around
the world, lingered a pale, white light, as of a universal dawn.
The weary wind brought up to them the heavy odors of the
cornfields. The music of the dance sounded faintly from below.
Eric leaned on his elbow beside her, his legs swinging
down on the ladder. His great shoulders looked more than
ever like those of the stone Doryphorus, who stands in his
perfect, reposeful strength in the Louvre, and had often made
her wonder if such men died forever with the youth of
Greece.
How sweet the corn smells at night, said Margaret nervously.
Yes, like the flowers that grow in paradise, I think.
She was somewhat startled by this reply, and more startled
when this taciturn man spoke again.
You go away to-morrow?
Yes, we have stayed longer than we thought to now.
You not come back any more?
No, I expect not. You see, it is a long trip; half-way across
the continent.
You soon forget about this country, I guess. It seemed to
him now a little thing to lose his soul for this woman, but
that she should utterly forget this night into which he threw
all his life and all his eternity, that was a bitter thought.
No, Eric, I will not forget. You have all been too kind to
me for that. And you wont be sorry you danced this one
night, will you?
I never be sorry. I have not been so happy before. I not be
so happy again, ever. You will be happy many nights yet, I
only this one. I will dream sometimes, maybe.
The mighty resignation of his tone alarmed and touched
her. It was as when some great animal composes itself for
death, as when a great ship goes down at sea.
She sighed, but did not answer him. He drew a little closer
and looked into her eyes.
You are not always happy, too? he asked.
No, not always, Eric; not very often, I think.
You have a trouble?
Yes, but I cannot put it into words. Perhaps if I could do
that, I could cure it.
He clasped his hands together over his heart, as children do
when they pray, and said falteringly, If I own all the world, I
give him you.
Margaret felt a sudden moisture in her eyes, and laid her
hand on his.
Thank you, Eric; I believe you would. But perhaps even
then I should not be happy. Perhaps I have too much of it
already.
She did not take her hand away from him; she did not
dare. She sat still and waited for the traditions in which she
had always believed to speak and save her. But they were
dumb. She belonged to an ultra-refined civilization which
tries to cheat nature with elegant sophistries. Cheat nature?
Bah! One generation may do it, perhaps two, but the
third Can we ever rise above nature or sink below her?
Did she not turn on Jerusalem as upon Sodom, upon St. Anthony
in his desert as upon Nero in his seraglio? Does she not
always cry in brutal triumph: I am here still, at the bottom of
things, warming the roots of life; you cannot starve me nor
tame me nor thwart me; I made the world, I rule it, and I am
its destiny.
This woman, on a windmill tower at the worlds end with a
giant barbarian, heard that cry to-night, and she was afraid!
Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we
fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.
Come, Eric, let us go down; the moon is up and the music
has begun again, she said.
He rose silently and stepped down upon the ladder, putting
his arm about her to help her. That arm could have thrown
Thors hammer out in the cornfields yonder, yet it scarcely
touched her, and his hand trembled as it had done in the
dance. His face was level with hers now and the moonlight
fell sharply upon it. All her life she had searched the faces of
men for the look that lay in his eyes. She knew that that look
had never shone for her before, would never shine for her on
earth again, that such love comes to one only in dreams or in
impossible places like this, unattainable always. This was
Loves self, in a moment it would die. Stung by the agonized
appeal that emanated from the mans whole being, she leaned
forward and laid her lips on his. Once, twice and again she
heard the deep respirations rattle in his throat while she held
them there, and the riotous force under her heart became an
engulfing weakness. He drew her up to him until he felt all
the resistance go out of her body, until every nerve relaxed
and yielded. When she drew her face back from his, it was
white with fear.
Let us go down, oh, my God! let us go down! she
muttered. And the drunken stars up yonder seemed reeling
to some appointed doom as she clung to the rounds of the
ladder. All that she was to know of love she had left upon
his lips.
The devil is loose again, whispered Olaf Oleson, as he
saw Eric dancing a moment later, his eyes blazing.
But Eric was thinking with an almost savage exultation of
the time when he should pay for this. Ah, there would be no
quailing then! If ever a soul went fearlessly, proudly down to
the gates infernal, his should go. For a moment he fancied he
was there already, treading down the tempest of flame, hugging
the fiery hurricane to his breast. He wondered whether
in ages gone, all the countless years of sinning in which men
had sold and lost and flung their souls away, any man had
ever so cheated Satan, had ever bartered his soul for so great a
price.
It seemed but a little while till dawn.
The carriage was brought to the door and Wyllis Elliot and
his sister said good-by. She could not meet Erics eyes as she
gave him her hand, but as he stood by the horses head, just
as the carriage moved off, she gave him one swift glance that
said, I will not forget. In a moment the carriage was gone.
Eric changed his coat and plunged his head into the watertank
and went to the barn to hook up his team. As he led his
horses to the door, a shadow fell across his path, and he saw
Skinner rising in his stirrups. His rugged face was pale and
worn with looking after his wayward flock, with dragging
men into the way of salvation.
Good-morning, Eric. There was a dance here last night?
he asked, sternly.
A dance? Oh, yes, a dance, replied Eric, cheerfully.
Certainly you did not dance, Eric?
Yes, I danced. I danced all the time.
The ministers shoulders drooped, and an expression of
profound discouragement settled over his haggard face. There
was almost anguish in the yearning he felt for this soul.
Eric, I didnt look for this from you. I thought God had
set his mark on you if he ever had on any man. And it is for
things like this that you set your soul back a thousand years
from God. O foolish and perverse generation!
Eric drew himself up to his full height and looked off to
where the new day was gilding the corn-tassels and flooding
the uplands with light. As his nostrils drew in the breath of
the dew and the morning, something from the only poetry he
had ever read flashed across his mind, and he murmured, half
to himself, with dreamy exultation:
And a day shall be as a thousand years, and a thousand
years as a day.
Cosmopolitan, April 1900
355 W Olive Avenue, Suite 207, Sunnyvale, CA 94086 | 408-738-8384
| info@improveyourenglish.com
Copyright 2003-2010, Improve Your English. All rights reserved.
|