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“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.