“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.