"Hush, Storm! I know that I"m not a great preacher; still I couldn"t have believed it possible that you would wish to take the living from me."
Storm made a gesture of protest, which said, in effect, that anything of the sort had never entered his mind, but he had not the courage to put it into words.
The schoolmaster was a man of sixty and, despite all the work and responsibility which had fallen to his lot, he was still master of his forces. There was a great contrast between him and the parson.
Storm was one of the biggest men in Dalecarlia. His head was covered with a ma.s.s of black bushy hair, his skin was as dark as bronze, and his features were strong and clear cut. He looked singularly powerful beside the pastor, who was a little narrow-chested, bald-headed man.
The schoolmaster"s wife thought that her husband, as the stronger, ought to give in, and motioned to him to drop the matter. Whatever of regret he may have felt, there was nothing in his manner to indicate that he had any idea of relinquishing his project.
Then the schoolmaster began to speak plainly and to the point. He said he was certain that before long the heretics would invade their parish; therefore, it was very necessary that they should have a meeting place where one could talk to the people in a more informal way than at a regular church service; where one might choose one"s own text, expound the whole Bible, and interpret its most difficult pa.s.sages to the people.
His wife again signed to him to keep still. She knew what the clergyman was thinking while her husband talked. "So I haven"t taught them anything, and I haven"t given them any sort of protection against unbelief? I must be a poor specimen of a pastor when the schoolmaster in my own parish thinks himself a better preacher than I."
The schoolmaster, however, did not keep still, but went on talking of all that must be done to protect the flock from the wolves.
"I haven"t seen any wolves," said the pastor.
"But I know they are on their way."
"And you, Storm, are opening the door to them," declared the minister, rising. The schoolmaster"s talk had irritated him. The blood mounted to his face, and he regained a little of his old dignity.
"My dear Storm, let us drop the subject," he said. Then turning to the housewife, he pa.s.sed some pleasant remark about the last pretty bride she had dressed. For Mother Stina dressed all the brides in the parish.
Peasant woman though she was, she understood how it must hurt him to be so cruelly reminded of his own impotence. She wept from compa.s.sion, and could not answer him for the tears; so the pastor had to do most of the talking.
Meanwhile, he kept thinking: "Oh, if I only had some of the power and the capacity of my younger days, I would convince this peasant at once of the wrong he is doing." With that he turned again to the schoolmaster:
"Where did you get the money, Storm?" he asked.
"A company has been formed," Storm explained; then he mentioned the names of several men who had pledged their support, just to show the parson that they were the kind of people who would harm neither the church nor its pastor.
"Is Ingmar Ingmarsson in it, too?" the parson exclaimed. The effect of this was like a deathblow. "And to think that I was as sure of Ingmar Ingmarsson as I had been of you, Storm!"
He said nothing more about this just then, but instead turned to Mother Stina and talked to her. He must have seen that she was crying, but acted as if he had not noticed it. In a little while he again addressed the schoolmaster.
"Drop it, Storm!" he begged. "Drop it for my sake. You wouldn"t like it if somebody put up another school next to yours."
The schoolmaster sat gazing at the floor and reflected a moment.
Presently he said, almost reluctantly, "I can"t, Parson."
For fully ten minutes there was a dead silence. Where upon the pastor put on his overcoat and cap, and went toward the door.
The whole evening he had been trying to find words with which to prove to Storm that he was not only doing harm to the pastor with this undertaking, but he was undermining the parish. Although thoughts and words kept crowding into his head, he could neither arrange them into an orderly sequence nor give utterance to them, because he was a broken man. Walking toward the door, he espied Gertrude sitting in her corner playing with her blocks and bits of gla.s.s. He stopped and looked at her. Evidently she had not heard a word of the conversation, for her eyes sparkled with delight and her cheeks were like fresh-blown roses.
The pastor was startled at the sight of all this innocent happiness of the child in contrast to his own heart heaviness.
"What are you making?" he asked, and went up to her.
The little girl had got through with her parish long before that; in fact, she had already pulled it down and started something new.
"If you had only come a minute sooner!" exclaimed the child. "I had made such a beautiful parish, with both church and schoolhouse--"
"But where is it now?"
"Oh, I"ve destroyed the parish, and now I"m building a Jerusalem, and--"
"What?" interrupted the parson. "Have you destroyed the parish in order to build a Jerusalem?"
"Yes," said Gertrude, "and it was such a fine parish! But we read about Jerusalem yesterday in school, and now I have pulled down the parish to build a Jerusalem."
The preacher stood regarding the child. He put his hand to his forehead and thought a moment, then he said: "It is surely someone greater than you that speaks through your mouth."
The child"s words seemed to him so extraordinarily prophetic that he kept repeating them to himself, over and over. Gradually his thoughts drifted back into their old groove, and he began to ponder the ways of Providence and the means by which He works His will.
Presently he went back to the schoolmaster, his eyes shining with a new light, and said in his usual cheery tone:
"I"m no longer angry at you, Storm. You are only doing what you must do. All my life I have been pondering the ways of Providence, and I can"t seem to get any light on them. Nor do I understand this thing, but I understand that you are doing what you needs must do."
"AND THEY SAW HEAVEN OPEN"
The spring the mission house was built there was a great thaw, and the Dal River rose to an alarming height. And what quant.i.ties of water that spring brought! It came in showers from the skies; it came rushing down in streams from the mountainsides, and it welled out of the earth; water ran in every wheel rut and in every furrow.
All this water found its way to the river, which kept rising higher and higher, and rolled onward with greater and greater force. It did not present its usual shiny and placid appearance, but had turned a dirty brown from all the muddy water that kept flowing in.
The surging stream, filled with logs and cakes of ice, looked strangely weird and threatening.
At first the grown folks paid no special heed to the spring flood; only the children ran down to the banks to watch the raging river and all that it carried along.
But timber and ice floes were not the only things that went floating by! Presently the stream came driving with washing piers and bath houses, then with boats and wreckage of bridges.
"It will soon be taking our bridge, too!" the children exclaimed.
They felt a bit uneasy, but were glad at the same time that something so extraordinary was likely to happen.
Suddenly a huge pine, root and branch, came sailing past, followed by a white-stemmed aspen tree, its spreading branches thick with buds which had swelled from being so long in the water. Close upon the trees came a little hay shed, bottom upward; it was still full of hay and straw, and floated on its roof like a boat on its keel.
But when things of that sort began to drift past, the grown-ups, too, bestirred themselves. They realized now that the river had overflowed its banks somewhere up north, and hurried down to the sh.o.r.es with poles and boat hooks, to haul up on land buildings and furniture.
At the northern end of the parish, where the houses were scattered and people were scarce, Ingmar Ingmarsson alone was standing on the bank, gazing out at the river. He was then almost sixty, and looked even older. His face was weatherbeaten and furrowed, his figure bent; he appeared to be as awkward and helpless as ever. He stood leaning on a long, heavy boat hook, his dull, sleepy-looking eyes fixed on the water. The river raged and foamed, arrogantly marching past with all that it had matched from the sh.o.r.es. It was as if it were deriding the peasant for his slowness. "Oh, you"re not the one to wrest from me any of the things I"m carrying away!" it seemed to say.
Ingmar Ingmarsson made no attempt to rescue any of the floating bridges or boat hulls that pa.s.sed quite close to the bank. "All that will be seen to down at the village," he thought. Not for a second did his gaze wander from the river. He took note of everything that drifted past. All at once he sighted something bright and yellow floating on some loosely nailed boards quite a distance up the river. "Ah, this is what I have been expecting all along!" he said aloud. At first he could not quite make out what the yellow was; but for one who knew how little children in Dalecarlia are dressed it was easy to guess. "Those must be youngsters who were out on a washing pier playing," he said, "and hadn"t the sense to get back on land before the river took them."
It was not long until the peasant saw that he had guessed rightly.
Now he could distinctly see three little children, in their yellow homespun frocks and round yellow hats, being carried downstream on a poorly constructed raft that was being slowly torn apart by the swift current and the moving ice floes.
The children were still a long way off. Big Ingmar knew there was a bend in the river where it touched his land. If G.o.d in His mercy would only direct the raft with the children into this current, he thought, he might be able to get them ash.o.r.e.
He stood very still, watching the raft. All at once it seemed as if some one had given it a push; it swung round and headed straight for the sh.o.r.e. By that time the children were so close that he could see their frightened little faces and hear their cries. But they were still too far out to be reached by the boat hook, from the bank at least; so he hurried down to the water"s edge, and waded into the river.
As he did so, he had a strange sort of feeling that some one was calling to him to comeback. "You are no longer a young man, Ingmar; this may prove a perilous business for you!" a voice said to him.