A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays

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Willa Cather

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Title: A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays

Author: Willa Cather

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START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A COLLECTION OF STORIES ***

Produced by Suzanne Shell, Barbara Tozier and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

A Collection of

Stories, Reviews and Essays

by

Willa Cather

CONTENTS

PART

I:

STORIES

Peter On the Divide Eric Hermannson’s Soul The Sentimentality of William Tavener The Namesake The Enchanted Bluff The Joy of Nelly Deane The Bohemian Girl Consequences The Bookkeeper’s Wife Ardessa Her Boss

PART

II:

REVIEWS

AND

ESSAYS

Mark Twain William Dean Howells Edgar Allan Poe Walt Whitman Henry James Harold Frederic Kate Chopin Stephen Crane Frank Norris When I Knew Stephen Crane On the Art of Fiction

PART I

STORIES

Peter

“No, Antone, I have told thee many times, no, thou shalt not sell it

until I am gone.”

“But I need money; what good is that old fiddle to thee? The very

crows laugh at thee when thou art trying to play. Thy hand trembles

so thou canst scarce hold the bow. Thou shalt go with me to the Blue

to cut wood to-morrow. See to it thou art up early.”

“What, on the Sabbath, Antone, when it is so cold? I get so very

cold, my son, let us not go to-morrow.”

“Yes, to-morrow, thou lazy old man. Do not I cut wood upon the

Sabbath? Care I how cold it is? Wood thou shalt cut, and haul it

too, and as for the fiddle, I tell thee I will sell it yet.” Antone

pulled his ragged cap down over his low heavy brow, and went out.

The old man drew his stool up nearer the fire, and sat stroking his

violin with trembling fingers and muttering, “Not while I live, not

while I live.”

Five years ago they had come here, Peter Sadelack, and his wife, and

oldest son Antone, and countless smaller Sadelacks, here to the

dreariest part of south-western Nebraska, and had taken up a

homestead. Antone was the acknowledged master of the premises, and

people said he was a likely youth, and would do well. That he was

mean and untrustworthy every one knew, but that made little

difference. His corn was better tended than any in the county, and

his wheat always yielded more than other men’s.

Of Peter no one knew much, nor had any one a good word to say for

him. He drank whenever he could get out of Antone’s sight long

enough to pawn his hat or coat for whiskey. Indeed there were but

two things he would not pawn, his pipe and his violin. He was a

lazy, absent minded old fellow, who liked to fiddle better than to

plow, though Antone surely got work enough out of them all, for that

matter. In the house of which Antone was master there was no one,

from the little boy three years old, to the old man of sixty, who

did not earn his bread. Still people said that Peter was worthless,

and was a great drag on Antone, his son, who never drank, and was a

much better man than his father had ever been. Peter did not care

what people said. He did not like the country, nor the people, least

of all he liked the plowing. He was very homesick for Bohemia. Long

ago, only eight years ago by the calendar, but it seemed eight

centuries to Peter, he had been a second violinist in the great

theatre at Prague. He had gone into the theatre very young, and had

been there all his life, until he had a stroke of paralysis, which

made his arm so weak that his bowing was uncertain. Then they told

him he could go. Those were great days at the theatre. He had plenty

to drink then, and wore a dress coat every evening, and there were

always parties after the play. He could play in those days, ay, that

he could! He could never read the notes well, so he did not play

first; but his touch, he had a touch indeed, so Herr Mikilsdoff, who

led the orchestra, had said. Sometimes now Peter thought he could

plow better if he could only bow as he used to. He had seen all the

lovely women in the world there, all the great singers and the great

players. He was in the orchestra when Rachel played, and he heard

Liszt play when the Countess d’Agoult sat in the stage box and threw

the master white lilies. Once, a French woman came and played for

weeks, he did not remember her name now. He did not remember her

face very well either, for it changed so, it was never twice the

same. But the beauty of it, and the great hunger men felt at the

sight of it, that he remembered. Most of all he remembered her

voice. He did not know French, and could not understand a word she

said, but it seemed to him that she must be talking the music of

Chopin. And her voice, he thought he should know that in the other

world. The last night she played a play in which a man touched her

arm, and she stabbed him. As Peter sat among the smoking gas jets

down below the footlights with his fiddle on his knee, and looked up

at her, he thought he would like to die too, if he could touch her

arm once, and have her stab him so. Peter went home to his wife very

drunk that night. Even in those days he was a foolish fellow, who

cared for nothing but music and pretty faces.

It was all different now. He had nothing to drink and little to eat,

and here, there was nothing but sun, and grass, and sky. He had

forgotten almost everything, but some things he remembered well

enough. He loved his violin and the holy Mary, and above all else he

feared the Evil One, and his son Antone.

The fire was low, and it grew cold. Still Peter sat by the fire

remembering. He dared not throw more cobs on the fire; Antone would

be angry. He did not want to cut wood tomorrow, it would be Sunday,

and he wanted to go to mass. Antone might let him do that. He held

his violin under his wrinkled chin, his white hair fell over it, and

he began to play “Ave Maria.” His hand shook more than ever before,

and at last refused to work the bow at all. He sat stupefied for a

while, then arose, and taking his violin with him, stole out into

the old sod stable. He took Antone’s shot-gun down from its peg, and

loaded it by the moonlight which streamed in through the door. He

sat down on the dirt floor, and leaned back against the dirt wall.

He heard the wolves howling in the distance, and the night wind

screaming as it swept over the snow. Near him he heard the regular

breathing of the horses in the dark. He put his crucifix above his

heart, and folding his hands said brokenly all the Latin he had ever

known, ”Pater noster, qui in caelum est.“ Then he raised his head

and sighed, “Not one kreutzer will Antone pay them to pray for my

soul, not one kreutzer, he is so careful of his money, is Antone, he

does not waste it in drink, he is a better man than I, but hard

sometimes. He works the girls too hard, women were not made to work

so. But he shall not sell thee, my fiddle, I can play thee no more,

but they shall not part us. We have seen it all together, and we

will forget it together, the French woman and all.” He held his

fiddle under his chin a moment, where it had lain so often, then put

it across his knee and broke it through the middle. He pulled off

his old boot, held the gun between his knees with the muzzle against

his forehead, and pressed the trigger with his toe.

In the morning Antone found him stiff, frozen fast in a pool of

blood. They could not straighten him out enough to fit a coffin, so

they buried him in a pine box. Before the funeral Antone carried to

town the fiddle-bow which Peter had forgotten to break. Antone was

very thrifty, and a better man than his father had been.

The Mahogany Tree

, May 21, 1892

On the Divide

Near Rattlesnake Creek, on the side of a little draw stood Canute’s

shanty. North, east, south, stretched the level Nebraska plain of

long rust-red grass that undulated constantly in the wind. To the

west the ground was broken and rough, and a narrow strip of timber

wound along the turbid, muddy little stream that had scarcely

ambition enough to crawl over its black bottom. If it had not been

for the few stunted cottonwoods and elms that grew along its banks,

Canute would have shot himself years ago. The Norwegians are a

timber-loving people, and if there is even a turtle pond with a few

plum bushes around it they seem irresistibly drawn toward it.

As to the shanty itself, Canute had built it without aid of any

kind, for when he first squatted along the banks of Rattlesnake

Creek there was not a human being within twenty miles. It was built

of logs split in halves, the chinks stopped with mud and plaster.

The roof was covered with earth and was supported by one gigantic

beam curved in the shape of a round arch. It was almost impossible

that any tree had ever grown in that shape. The Norwegians used to

say that Canute had taken the log across his knee and bent it into

the shape he wished. There were two rooms, or rather there was one

room with a partition made of ash saplings interwoven and bound

together like big straw basket work. In one corner there was a cook

stove, rusted and broken. In the other a bed made of unplaned planks

and poles. It was fully eight feet long, and upon it was a heap of

dark bed clothing. There was a chair and a bench of colossal

proportions. There was an ordinary kitchen cupboard with a few

cracked dirty dishes in it, and beside it on a tall box a tin

wash-basin. Under the bed was a pile of pint flasks, some broken,

some whole, all empty. On the wood box lay a pair of shoes of almost

incredible dimensions. On the wall hung a saddle, a gun, and some

ragged clothing, conspicuous among which was a suit of dark cloth,

apparently new, with a paper collar carefully wrapped in a red silk

handkerchief and pinned to the sleeve. Over the door hung a wolf and

a badger skin, and on the door itself a brace of thirty or forty

snake skins whose noisy tails rattled ominously every time it

opened. The strangest things in the shanty were the wide

window-sills. At first glance they looked as though they had been

ruthlessly hacked and mutilated with a hatchet, but on closer

inspection all the notches and holes in the wood took form and

shape. There seemed to be a series of pictures. They were, in a

rough way, artistic, but the figures were heavy and labored, as

though they had been cut very slowly and with very awkward

instruments. There were men plowing with little horned imps sitting

on their shoulders and on their horses’ heads. There were men

praying with a skull hanging over their heads and little demons

behind them mocking their attitudes. There were men fighting with

big serpents, and skeletons dancing together. All about these

pictures were blooming vines and foliage such as never grew in this

world, and coiled among the branches of the vines there was always

the scaly body of a serpent, and behind every flower there was a

serpent’s head. It was a veritable Dance of Death by one who had

felt its sting. In the wood box lay some boards, and every inch of

them was cut up in the same manner. Sometimes the work was very rude

and careless, and looked as though the hand of the workman had

trembled. It would sometimes have been hard to distinguish the men

from their evil geniuses but for one fact, the men were always grave

and were either toiling or praying, while the devils were always

smiling and dancing. Several of these boards had been split for

kindling and it was evident that the artist did not value his work

highly.

It was the first day of winter on the Divide. Canute stumbled into

his shanty carrying a basket of cobs, and after filling the stove,

sat down on a stool and crouched his seven foot frame over the fire,

staring drearily out of the window at the wide gray sky. He knew by

heart every individual clump of bunch grass in the miles of red

shaggy prairie that stretched before his cabin. He knew it in all

the deceitful loveliness of its early summer, in all the bitter

barrenness of its autumn. He had seen it smitten by all the plagues

of Egypt. He had seen it parched by drought, and sogged by rain,

beaten by hail, and swept by fire, and in the grasshopper years he

had seen it eaten as bare and clean as bones that the vultures have

left. After the great fires he had seen it stretch for miles and

miles, black and smoking as the floor of hell.

He rose slowly and crossed the room, dragging his big feet heavily

as though they were burdens to him. He looked out of the window into

the hog corral and saw the pigs burying themselves in the straw

before the shed. The leaden gray clouds were beginning to spill

themselves, and the snowflakes were settling down over the white

leprous patches of frozen earth where the hogs had gnawed even the

sod away. He shuddered and began to walk, tramping heavily with his

ungainly feet. He was the wreck of ten winters on the Divide and he

knew what they meant. Men fear the winters of the Divide as a child

fears night or as men in the North Seas fear the still dark cold of

the polar twilight.

His eyes fell upon his gun, and he took it down from the wall and

looked it over. He sat down on the edge of his bed and held the

barrel towards his face, letting his forehead rest upon it, and laid

his finger on the trigger. He was perfectly calm, there was neither

passion nor despair in his face, but the thoughtful look of a man

who is considering. Presently he laid down the gun, and reaching

into the cupboard, drew out a pint bottle of raw white alcohol.

Lifting it to his lips, he drank greedily. He washed his face in the

tin basin and combed his rough hair and shaggy blond beard. Then he

stood in uncertainty before the suit of dark clothes that hung on

the wall. For the fiftieth time he took them in his hands and tried

to summon courage to put them on. He took the paper collar that was

pinned to the sleeve of the coat and cautiously slipped it under his

rough beard, looking with timid expectancy into the cracked,

splashed glass that hung over the bench. With a short laugh he threw

it down on the bed, and pulling on his old black hat, he went out,

striking off across the level.

It was a physical necessity for him to get away from his cabin once

in a while. He had been there for ten years, digging and plowing and

sowing, and reaping what little the hail and the hot winds and the

frosts left him to reap. Insanity and suicide are very common things

on the Divide. They come on like an epidemic in the hot wind season.

Those scorching dusty winds that blow up over the bluffs from Kansas

seem to dry up the blood in men’s veins as they do the sap in the

corn leaves. Whenever the yellow scorch creeps down over the tender

inside leaves about the ear, then the coroners prepare for active

duty; for the oil of the country is burned out and it does not take

long for the flame to eat up the wick. It causes no great sensation

there when a Dane is found swinging to his own windmill tower, and

most of the Poles after they have become too careless and

discouraged to shave themselves keep their razors to cut their

throats with.

It may be that the next generation on the Divide will be very happy,

but the present one came too late in life. It is useless for men

that have cut hemlocks among the mountains of Sweden for forty years

to try to be happy in a country as flat and gray and as naked as the

sea. It is not easy for men that have spent their youths fishing in

the Northern seas to be content with following a plow, and men that

have served in the Austrian army hate hard work and coarse clothing

and the loneliness of the plains, and long for marches and

excitement and tavern company and pretty barmaids. After a man has

passed his fortieth birthday it is not easy for him to change the

habits and conditions of his life. Most men bring with them to the

Divide only the dregs of the lives that they have squandered in

other lands and among other peoples.

Canute Canuteson was as mad as any of them, but his madness did not

take the form of suicide or religion but of alcohol. He had always

taken liquor when he wanted it, as all Norwegians do, but after his

first year of solitary life he settled down to it steadily. He

exhausted whisky after a while, and went to alcohol, because its

effects were speedier and surer. He was a big man with a terrible

amount of resistant force, and it took a great deal of alcohol even

to move him. After nine years of drinking, the quantities he could

take would seem fabulous to an ordinary drinking man. He never let

it interfere with his work, he generally drank at night and on

Sundays. Every night, as soon as his chores were done, he began to

drink. While he was able to sit up he would play on his mouth harp

or hack away at his window sills with his jack knife. When the

liquor went to his head he would lie down on his bed and stare out

of the window until he went to sleep. He drank alone and in solitude

not for pleasure or good cheer, but to forget the awful loneliness

and level of the Divide. Milton made a sad blunder when he put

mountains in hell. Mountains postulate faith and aspiration. All

mountain peoples are religious. It was the cities of the plains

that, because of their utter lack of spirituality and the mad

caprice of their vice, were cursed of God.

Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness

is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a

bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar. Canute was none of these,

but he was morose and gloomy, and liquor took him through all the

hells of Dante. As he lay on his giant’s bed all the horrors of this

world and every other were laid bare to his chilled senses. He was a

man who knew no joy, a man who toiled in silence and bitterness. The

skull and the serpent were always before him, the symbols of eternal

futileness and of eternal hate.

When the first Norwegians near enough to be called neighbors came,

Canute rejoiced, and planned to escape from his bosom vice. But he

was not a social man by nature and had not the power of drawing out

the social side of other people. His new neighbors rather feared him

because of his great strength and size, his silence and his lowering

brows. Perhaps, too, they knew that he was mad, mad from the eternal

treachery of the plains, which every spring stretch green and rustle

with the promises of Eden, showing long grassy lagoons full of clear

water and cattle whose hoofs are stained with wild roses. Before

autumn the lagoons are dried up, and the ground is burnt dry and

hard until it blisters and cracks open.

So instead of becoming a friend and neighbor to the men that settled

about him, Canute became a mystery and a terror. They told awful

stories of his size and strength and of the alcohol he drank. They

said that one night, when he went out to see to his horses just

before he went to bed, his steps were unsteady and the rotten planks

of the floor gave way and threw him behind the feet of a fiery young

stallion. His foot was caught fast in the floor, and the nervous

horse began kicking frantically. When Canute felt the blood

trickling down in his eyes from a scalp wound in his head, he roused

himself from his kingly indifference, and with the quiet stoical

courage of a drunken man leaned forward and wound his arms about the

horse’s hind legs and held them against his breast with crushing

embrace. All through the darkness and cold of the night he lay

there, matching strength against strength. When little Jim Peterson

went over the next morning at four o’clock to go with him to the

Blue to cut wood, he found him so, and the horse was on its fore

knees, trembling and whinnying with fear. This is the story the

Norwegians tell of him, and if it is true it is no wonder that they

feared and hated this Holder of the Heels of Horses.

One spring there moved to the next “eighty” a family that made a

great change in Canute’s life. Ole Yensen was too drunk most of the

time to be afraid of any one, and his wife Mary was too garrulous to

be afraid of any one who listened to her talk, and Lena, their

pretty daughter, was not afraid of man nor devil. So it came about

that Canute went over to take his alcohol with Ole oftener than he

took it alone. After a while the report spread that he was going to

marry Yensen’s daughter, and the Norwegian girls began to tease Lena

about the great bear she was going to keep house for. No one could

quite see how the affair had come about, for Canute’s tactics of

courtship were somewhat peculiar. He apparently never spoke to her

at all: he would sit for hours with Mary chattering on one side of

him and Ole drinking on the other and watch Lena at her work. She

teased him, and threw flour in his face and put vinegar in his

coffee, but he took her rough jokes with silent wonder, never even

smiling. He took her to church occasionally, but the most watchful

and curious people never saw him speak to her. He would sit staring

at her while she giggled and flirted with the other men.

Next spring Mary Lee went to town to work in a steam laundry. She

came home every Sunday, and always ran across to Yensens to startle

Lena with stories of ten cent theaters, firemen’s dances, and all

the other esthetic delights of metropolitan life. In a few weeks

Lena’s head was completely turned, and she gave her father no rest

until he let her go to town to seek her fortune at the ironing

board. From the time she came home on her first visit she began to

treat Canute with contempt. She had bought a plush cloak and kid

gloves, had her clothes made by the dress-maker, and assumed airs

and graces that made the other women of the neighborhood cordially

detest her. She generally brought with her a young man from town who

waxed his mustache and wore a red necktie, and she did not even

introduce him to Canute.

The neighbors teased Canute a good deal until he knocked one of them

down. He gave no sign of suffering from her neglect except that he

drank more and avoided the other Norwegians more carefully than

ever. He lay around in his den and no one knew what he felt or

thought, but little Jim Peterson, who had seen him glowering at Lena

in church one Sunday when she was there with the town man, said that

he would not give an acre of his wheat for Lena’s life or the town

chap’s either; and Jim’s wheat was so wondrously worthless that the

statement was an exceedingly strong one.

Canute had bought a new suit of clothes that looked as nearly like

the town man’s as possible. They had cost him half a millet crop;

for tailors are not accustomed to fitting giants and they charge for

it. He had hung those clothes in his shanty two months ago and had

never put them on, partly from fear of ridicule, partly from

discouragement, and partly because there was something in his own

soul that revolted at the littleness of the device.

Lena was at home just at this time. Work was slack in the laundry

and Mary had not been well, so Lena stayed at home, glad enough to

get an opportunity to torment Canute once more.

She was washing in the side kitchen, singing loudly as she worked.

Mary was on her knees, blacking the stove and scolding violently

about the young man who was coming out from town that night. The

young man had committed the fatal error of laughing at Mary’s

ceaseless babble and had never been forgiven.

“He is no good, and you will come to a bad end by running with him!

I do not see why a daughter of mine should act so. I do not see why

the Lord should visit such a punishment upon me as to give me such a

daughter. There are plenty of good men you can marry.”

Lena tossed her head and answered curtly, “I don’t happen to want to

marry any man right away, and so long as Dick dresses nice and has

plenty of money to spend, there is no harm in my going with him.”

“Money to spend? Yes, and that is all he does with it I’ll be bound.

You think it very fine now, but you will change your tune when you

have been married five years and see your children running naked and

your cupboard empty. Did Anne Hermanson come to any good end by

marrying a town man?”

“I don’t know anything about Anne Hermanson, but I know any of the

laundry girls would have Dick quick enough if they could get him.”

“Yes, and a nice lot of store clothes huzzies you are too. Now there

is Canuteson who has an ‘eighty’ proved up and fifty head of cattle

and----”

“And hair that ain’t been cut since he was a baby, and a big dirty

beard, and he wears overalls on Sundays, and drinks like a pig.

Besides he will keep. I can have all the fun I want, and when I am

old and ugly like you he can have me and take care of me. The Lord

knows there ain’t nobody else going to marry him.”

Canute drew his hand back from the latch as though it were red hot.

He was not the kind of a man to make a good eavesdropper, and he

wished he had knocked sooner. He pulled himself together and struck

the door like a battering ram. Mary jumped and opened it with a

screech.

“God! Canute, how you scared us! I thought it was crazy Lou,—he has

been tearing around the neighborhood trying to convert folks. I am

afraid as death of him. He ought to be sent off, I think. He is just

as liable as not to kill us all, or burn the barn, or poison the

dogs. He has been worrying even the poor minister to death, and he

laid up with the rheumatism, too! Did you notice that he was too

sick to preach last Sunday? But don’t stand there in the cold,—come

in. Yensen isn’t here, but he just went over to Sorenson’s for the

mail; he won’t be gone long. Walk right in the other room and sit

down.”

Canute followed her, looking steadily in front of him and not

noticing Lena as he passed her. But Lena’s vanity would not allow

him to pass unmolested. She took the wet sheet she was wringing out

and cracked him across the face with it, and ran giggling to the

other side of the room. The blow stung his cheeks and the soapy

water flew in his eyes, and he involuntarily began rubbing them with

his hands. Lena giggled with delight at his discomfiture, and the

wrath in Canute’s face grew blacker than ever. A big man humiliated

is vastly more undignified than a little one. He forgot the sting of

his face in the bitter consciousness that he had made a fool of

himself. He stumbled blindly into the living room, knocking his head

against the door jamb because he forgot to stoop. He dropped into a

chair behind the stove, thrusting his big feet back helplessly on

either side of him.

Ole was a long time in coming, and Canute sat there, still and

silent, with his hands clenched on his knees, and the skin of his

face seemed to have shriveled up into little wrinkles that trembled

when he lowered his brows. His life had been one long lethargy of

solitude and alcohol, but now he was awakening, and it was as when

the dumb stagnant heat of summer breaks out into thunder.

When Ole came staggering in, heavy with liquor, Canute rose at once.

“Yensen,” he said quietly, “I have come to see if you will let me

marry your daughter today.”

“Today!” gasped Ole.

“Yes, I will not wait until tomorrow. I am tired of living alone.”

Ole braced his staggering knees against the bedstead, and stammered

eloquently: “Do you think I will marry my daughter to a drunkard? a

man who drinks raw alcohol? a man who sleeps with rattle snakes? Get

out of my house or I will kick you out for your impudence.” And Ole

began looking anxiously for his feet.

Canute answered not a word, but he put on his hat and went out into

the kitchen. He went up to Lena and said without looking at her,

“Get your things on and come with me!”

The tones of his voice startled her, and she said angrily, dropping

the soap, “Are you drunk?”

“If you do not come with me, I will take you,—you had better come,”

said Canute quietly.

She lifted a sheet to strike him, but he caught her arm roughly and

wrenched the sheet from her. He turned to the wall and took down a

hood and shawl that hung there, and began wrapping her up. Lena

scratched and fought like a wild thing. Ole stood in the door,

cursing, and Mary howled and screeched at the top of her voice. As

for Canute, he lifted the girl in his arms and went out of the

house. She kicked and struggled, but the helpless wailing of Mary

and Ole soon died away in the distance, and her face was held down

tightly on Canute’s shoulder so that she could not see whither he

was taking her. She was conscious only of the north wind whistling

in her ears, and of rapid steady motion and of a great breast that

heaved beneath her in quick, irregular breaths. The harder she

struggled the tighter those iron arms that had held the heels of

horses crushed about her, until she felt as if they would crush the

breath from her, and lay still with fear. Canute was striding across

the level fields at a pace at which man never went before, drawing

the stinging north wind into his lungs in great gulps. He walked

with his eyes half closed and looking straight in front of him, only

lowering them when he bent his head to blow away the snow flakes

that settled on her hair. So it was that Canute took her to his

home, even as his bearded barbarian ancestors took the fair

frivolous women of the South in their hairy arms and bore them down

to their war ships. For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the

conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters

the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong

arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.

When Canute reached his shanty he placed the girl upon a chair,

where she sat sobbing. He stayed only a few minutes. He filled the

stove with wood and lit the lamp, drank a huge swallow of alcohol

and put the bottle in his pocket. He paused a moment, staring

heavily at the weeping girl, then he went off and locked the door

and disappeared in the gathering gloom of the night.

Wrapped in flannels and soaked with turpentine, the little Norwegian

preacher sat reading his Bible, when he heard a thundering knock at

his door, and Canute entered, covered with snow and with his beard

frozen fast to his coat.

“Come in, Canute, you must be frozen,” said the little man, shoving

a chair towards his visitor.

Canute remained standing with his hat on and said quietly, “I want

you to come over to my house tonight to marry me to Lena Yensen.”

“Have you got a license, Canute?”

“No, I don’t want a license. I want to be married.”

“But I can’t marry you without a license, man. It would not be

legal.”

A dangerous light came in the big Norwegian’s eye. “I want you to

come over to my house to marry me to Lena Yensen.”

“No, I can’t, it would kill an ox to go out in a storm like this,

and my rheumatism is bad tonight.”

“Then if you will not go I must take you,” said Canute with a sigh.

He took down the preacher’s bearskin coat and bade him put it on

while he hitched up his buggy. He went out and closed the door

softly after him. Presently he returned and found the frightened

minister crouching before the fire with his coat lying beside him.

Canute helped him put it on and gently wrapped his head in his big

muffler. Then he picked him up and carried him out and placed him in

his buggy. As he tucked the buffalo robes around him he said: “Your

horse is old, he might flounder or lose his way in this storm. I

will lead him.”

The minister took the reins feebly in his hands and sat shivering

with the cold. Sometimes when there was a lull in the wind, he could

see the horse struggling through the snow with the man plodding

steadily beside him. Again the blowing snow would hide them from him

altogether. He had no idea where they were or what direction they

were going. He felt as though he were being whirled away in the

heart of the storm, and he said all the prayers he knew. But at last

the long four miles were over, and Canute set him down in the snow

while he unlocked the door. He saw the bride sitting by the fire

with her eyes red and swollen as though she had been weeping. Canute

placed a huge chair for him, and said roughly,—

“Warm yourself.”

Lena began to cry and moan afresh, begging the minister to take her

home. He looked helplessly at Canute. Canute said simply,—

“If you are warm now, you can marry us.”

“My daughter, do you take this step of your own free will?” asked

the minister in a trembling voice.

“No sir, I don’t, and it is disgraceful he should force me into it!

I won’t marry him.”

“Then, Canute, I cannot marry you,” said the minister, standing as

straight as his rheumatic limbs would let him.

“Are you ready to marry us now, sir?” said Canute, laying one iron

hand on his stooped shoulder. The little preacher was a good man,

but like most men of weak body he was a coward and had a horror of

physical suffering, although he had known so much of it. So with

many qualms of conscience he began to repeat the marriage service.

Lena sat sullenly in her chair, staring at the fire. Canute stood

beside her, listening with his head bent reverently and his hands

folded on his breast. When the little man had prayed and said amen,

Canute began bundling him up again.

“I will take you home, now,” he said as he carried him out and

placed him in his buggy, and started off with him through the fury

of the storm, floundering among the snow drifts that brought even

the giant himself to his knees.

After she was left alone, Lena soon ceased weeping. She was not of a

particularly sensitive temperament, and had little pride beyond that

of vanity. After the first bitter anger wore itself out, she felt

nothing more than a healthy sense of humiliation and defeat. She had

no inclination to run away, for she was married now, and in her eyes

that was final and all rebellion was useless. She knew nothing about

a license, but she knew that a preacher married folks. She consoled

herself by thinking that she had always intended to marry Canute

some day, any way.

She grew tired of crying and looking into the fire, so she got up

and began to look about her. She had heard queer tales about the

inside of Canute’s shanty, and her curiosity soon got the better of

her rage. One of the first things she noticed was the new black suit

of clothes hanging on the wall. She was dull, but it did not take a

vain woman long to interpret anything so decidedly flattering, and

she was pleased in spite of herself. As she looked through the

cupboard, the general air of neglect and discomfort made her pity

the man who lived there.

“Poor fellow, no wonder he wants to get married to get somebody to

wash up his dishes. Batchin’s pretty hard on a man.”

It is easy to pity when once one’s vanity has been tickled. She

looked at the window sill and gave a little shudder and wondered if

the man were crazy. Then she sat down again and sat a long time

wondering what her Dick and Ole would do.

“It is queer Dick didn’t come right over after me. He surely came,

for he would have left town before the storm began and he might just

as well come right on as go back. If he’d hurried he would have

gotten here before the preacher came. I suppose he was afraid to

come, for he knew Canuteson could pound him to jelly, the coward!”

Her eyes flashed angrily.

The weary hours wore on and Lena began to grow horribly lonesome. It

was an uncanny night and this was an uncanny place to be in. She

could hear the coyotes howling hungrily a little way from the cabin,

and more terrible still were all the unknown noises of the storm.

She remembered the tales they told of the big log overhead and she

was afraid of those snaky things on the window sills. She remembered

the man who had been killed in the draw, and she wondered what she

would do if she saw crazy Lou’s white face glaring into the window.

The rattling of the door became unbearable, she thought the latch

must be loose and took the lamp to look at it. Then for the first

time she saw the ugly brown snake skins whose death rattle sounded

every time the wind jarred the door.

“Canute, Canute!” she screamed in terror.

Outside the door she heard a heavy sound as of a big dog getting up

and shaking himself. The door opened and Canute stood before her,

white as a snow drift.

“What is it?” he asked kindly.

“I am cold,” she faltered.

He went out and got an armful of wood and a basket of cobs and

filled the stove. Then he went out and lay in the snow before the

door. Presently he heard her calling again.

“What is it?” he said, sitting up.

“I’m so lonesome, I’m afraid to stay in here all alone.”

“I will go over and get your mother.” And he got up.

“She won’t come.”

“I’ll bring her,” said Canute grimly.

“No, no. I don’t want her, she will scold all the time.”

“Well, I will bring your father.”

She spoke again and it seemed as though her mouth was close up to

the key-hole. She spoke lower than he had ever heard her speak

before, so low that he had to put his ear up to the lock to hear

her.

“I don’t want him either, Canute,—I’d rather have you.”

For a moment she heard no noise at all, then something like a groan.

With a cry of fear she opened the door, and saw Canute stretched in

the snow at her feet, his face in his hands, sobbing on the door

step.

Overland Monthly

, January 1896

Eric Hermannson’s Soul

I.

It was a great night at the Lone Star schoolhouse—a 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

Nature’s 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 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. 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

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

good-by, 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

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 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 basest 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 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 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 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 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 key-note 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

sky-line.

“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 parlor 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 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 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

tommy-rot, 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 to. Remember your own theory

that contrast is about the only thing that makes life endurable.

This is my party and Mr. Lockhart’s; your whole duty to-morrow night

will consist in being nice to the Norwegian girls. I’ll warrant you

were adept enough at it once. And you’d better be very nice indeed,

for if there are many such young valkyrs as Eric’s 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 we’ll have a couple dozen. You see it’s pretty hard

to get a crowd together here any more. Most of ‘em have gone over to

the Free Gospellers, and they’d 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, haven’t they?”

“Well,” said Lockhart, cautiously, “I don’t just like to pass

judgment on any Christian sect, but if you’re to know the chosen by

their works, the Gospellers can’t make a very proud showin’, an’

that’s a fact. They’re responsible for a few suicides, and they’ve

sent a good-sized delegation to the state insane asylum, an’ I don’t

see as they’ve 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. That’s about the way it goes. Now

there’s Eric; that chap used to be a hustler and the spryest dancer

in all this section—called all the dances. Now he’s got no ambition

and he’s glum as a preacher. I don’t suppose we can even get him to

come in to-morrow night.”

“Eric? Why, he must dance, we can’t let him off,” said Margaret,

quickly. “Why, I intend to dance with him myself!”

“I’m afraid he won’t dance. I asked him this morning if he’d help us

out and he said, ‘I don’t 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 sister’s cheek deepened a little, and she laughed

mischievously. “We’ll see about that, sir. I’ll 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 Swede’s; hair as yellow

as the locks of Tennyson’s 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 man’s

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.

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