He slipped away from the prayer-meetings to meet the Campbell boys in Genereau"s saloon, or hug the plump little French girls at Chevalier"s dances, and sometimes, of a summer night, he even went across the dewy cornfields and through the wild-plum thicket to play the fiddle for Lena Hanson, whose name was a reproach through all the Divide country, where the women are usually too plain and too busy and too tired to depart from the ways of virtue. On such occasions Lena, attired in a pink wrapper and silk stockings and tiny pink slippers, would sing to him, accompanying herself on a battered guitar. It gave him a delicious sense of freedom and experience to be with a woman who, no matter how, had lived in big cities and knew the ways of town folk, who had never worked in the fields and had kept her hands white and soft, her throat fair and tender, who had heard great singers in Denver and Salt Lake, and who knew the strange language of flattery and idleness and mirth.
Yet, careless as he seemed, the frantic prayers of his mother were not altogether without their effect upon Eric. For days he had been fleeing before them as a criminal from his pursuers, and over his pleasures had fallen the shadow of something dark and terrible that dogged his steps.
The harder he danced, the louder he sang, the more was he conscious that this phantom was gaining upon him, that in time it would track him down.
One Sunday afternoon, late in the fall, when he had been drinking beer with Lena Hanson and listening to a song which made his cheeks burn, a rattlesnake had crawled out of the side of the sod house and thrust its ugly head in under the screen door. He was not afraid of snakes, but he knew enough of Gospellism to feel the significance of the reptile lying coiled there upon her doorstep. His lips were cold when he kissed Lena goodbye, and he went there no more.
The final barrier between Eric and his mother"s faith was his violin, and to that he clung as a man sometimes will cling to his dearest sin, to the weakness more precious to him than all his strength, In the great world beauty comes to men in many guises, and art in a hundred forms, but for Eric there was only his violin.
It stood, to him, for all the manifestations of art; it was his only bridge into the kingdom of the soul.
It was to Eric Hermannson that the evangelist directed his impa.s.sioned pleading that night.
"_Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?_ Is there a Saul here tonight who has stopped his ears to that gentle pleading, who has thrust a spear into that bleeding side? Think of it, my brother; you are offered this wonderful love and you prefer the worm that dieth not and the fire which will not be quenched. What right have you to lose one of G.o.d"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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sions so long, only to fall victims to the barest of them all, fear.
A groan of ultimate anguish rose from Eric Hermannson"s bowed head, and the sound was like the groan of a great tree when it falls in the forest.
The minister rose suddenly to his feet and threw back his head, crying in a loud voice:
"_Lazarus, come forth!_ Eric Hermannson, you are lost, going down at sea. In the name of G.o.d, and Jesus Christ his Son, I throw you the life line. Take hold! Almighty G.o.d, 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 G.o.ds bring to us our fate!
It was in a year of financial depression that Wyllis Elliot came to Nebraska to buy cheap land and revisit the country where he had spent a year of his youth. When he had graduated from Harvard it was still customary for moneyed gentlemen to send their scapegrace sons to rough it on ranches in the wilds of Nebraska or Dakota, or to consign them to a living death in the sagebrush of the Black Hills. These young men did not always return to the ways of civilized life. But Wyllis Elliot had not married a half-breed, nor been shot in a cowpunchers" brawl, nor wrecked by bad whisky, nor appropriated by a smirched adventuress. He had been saved from these things by a girl, his sister, who had been very near to his life ever since the days when they read fairy tales together and dreamed the dreams that never come true. On this, his first visit to his father"s ranch since he left it six years before, he brought her with him. She had been laid up half the winter from a sprain received while skating, and had had too much time for reflection during those months. She was restless and filled with a desire to see something of the wild country of which her brother had told her so much. She was to be married the next winter, and Wyllis understood her when she begged him to take her with him on this long, aimless jaunt across the continent, to taste the last of their freedom together. It comes to all women of her type--that desire to taste the unknown which allures and terrifies, to run one"s whole soul"s length out to the wind--just once.
It had been an eventful journey. Wyllis somehow understood that strain of gypsy blood in his sister, and he knew where to take her. They had slept in sod houses on the Platte River, made the acquaintance of the personnel of a third-rate opera company on the train to Deadwood, dined in a camp of railroad constructors at the world"s end beyond New Castle, gone through the Black Hills on horseback, fished for trout in Dome Lake, watched a dance at Cripple Creek, where the lost souls who hide in the hills gathered for their besotted revelry. And now, last of all, before the return to thraldom, there was this little shack, anch.o.r.ed 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, pa.s.sing, 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 Sat.u.r.day. Wyllis and his sister were sitting on the wide piazza of the ranchhouse, staring out into the afternoon sunlight and protesting against the gusts of hot wind that blew up from the sandy riverbottom twenty miles to the southward.
The young man pulled his cap lower over his eyes and remarked:
"This wind is the real thing; you don"t strike it anywhere else. You remember we had a touch of it in Algiers and I told you it came from Kansas. It"s the keynote of this country."
Wyllis touched her hand that lay on the hammock and continued gently:
"I hope it"s paid you, Sis. Roughing it"s dangerous business; it takes the taste out of things."
She shut her fingers firmly over the brown hand that was so like her own.
"Paid? Why, Wyllis, I haven"t been so happy since we were children and were going to discover the ruins of Troy together some day. Do you know, I believe I could just stay on here forever and let the world go on its own gait. It seems as though the tension and strain we used to talk of last winter were gone for good, as though one could never give one"s strength out to such petty things any more."
Wyllis brushed the ashes of his pipe away from the silk handkerchief that was knotted about his neck and stared moodily off at the skyline.
"No, you"re mistaken. This would bore you after a while. You can"t shake the fever of the other life. I"ve tried it. There was a time when the gay fellows of Rome could trot down into the Thebaid and burrow into the sandhills and get rid of it. But it"s all too complex now. You see we"ve made our dissipations so dainty and respectable that they"ve gone further in than the flesh, and taken hold of the ego proper. You couldn"t rest, even here. The war cry would follow you."
"You don"t waste words, Wyllis, but you never miss fire. I talk more than you do, without saying half so much. You must have learned the art of silence from these taciturn Norwegians. I think I like silent men."
"Naturally," said Wyllis, "since you have decided to marry the most brilliant talker you know."
Both were silent for a time, listening to the sighing of the hot wind through the parched morning-glory vines. Margaret spoke first.
"Tell me, Wyllis, were many of the Norwegians you used to know as interesting as Eric Hermannson?"
"Who, Siegfried? Well, no. He used to be the flower of the Norwegian youth in my day, and he"s rather an exception, even now. He has retrograded, though. The bonds of the soil have tightened on him, I fancy."
"Siegfried? Come, that"s rather good, Wyllis. He looks like a dragon-slayer. What is it that makes him so different from the others? I can talk to him; he seems quite like a human being."
"Well," said Wyllis, meditatively, "I don"t read Bourget as much as my cultured sister, and I"m not so well up in a.n.a.lysis, but I fancy it"s because one keeps cherishing a perfectly unwarranted suspicion that under that big, hulking anatomy of his, he may conceal a soul somewhere. _Nicht wahr?_"
"Something like that," said Margaret, thoughtfully, "except that it"s more than a suspicion, and it isn"t groundless. He has one, and he makes it known, somehow, without speaking."
"I always have my doubts about loquacious souls," Wyllis remarked, with the unbelieving smile that had grown habitual with him.
Margaret went on, not heeding the interruption. "I knew it from the first, when he told me about the suicide of his cousin, the Bernstein boy. That kind of blunt pathos can"t be summoned at will in anybody. The earlier novelists rose to it, sometimes, unconsciously. But last night when I sang for him I was doubly sure. Oh, I haven"t told you about that yet! Better light your pipe again. You see, he stumbled in on me in the dark when I was pumping away at that old parlour organ to please Mrs.
Lockhart It"s her household fetish and I"ve forgotten how many pounds of b.u.t.ter 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 s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g his chin over the unusual luxury of a stiff white collar, which his wife insisted upon as a necessary article of toilet while Miss Elliot was at the house. Jerry sat down on the step and smiled his broad, red smile at Margaret.
"Well, I"ve got the music for your dance, Miss Elliot. Olaf Oleson will bring his accordion and Mollie will play the organ, when she isn"t lookin" after the grub, and a little chap from Frenchtown will bring his fiddle--though the French don"t mix with the Norwegians much."
"Delightful! Mr. Lockhart, that dance will be the feature of our trip, and it"s so nice of you to get it up for us. We"ll see the Norwegians in character at last," cried Margaret, cordially.
"See here, Lockhart, I"ll settle with you for backing her in this scheme," said Wyllis, sitting up and knocking the ashes out of his pipe.
"She"s done crazy things enough on this trip, but to talk of dancing all night with a gang of half-mad Norwegians and taking the carriage at four to catch the six o"clock train out of Riverton--well, it"s tommyrot, that"s what it is!"
"Wyllis, I leave it to your sovereign power of reason to decide whether it isn"t easier to stay up all night than to get up at three in the morning. To get up at three, think what that means! No, sir, I prefer to keep my vigil and then get into a sleeper."