charge against him, his brilliancy always makes me suspect him
of cheapness.
Here Margaret stopped and glanced at the remaining pages of
this strange love-letter. They seemed to be filled chiefly with
discussions of pictures and books, and with a slow smile she laid
them by.
She rose and began undressing. Before she lay down she went
to open the window. With her hand on the sill, she hesitated,
feeling suddenly as though some danger were lurking outside, some
inordinate desire waiting to spring upon her in the darkness. She
stood there for a long time, gazing at the infinite sweep of the
sky.
"Oh, it is all so little, so little there," she murmured.
"When everything else is so dwarfed, why should one expect love to
be great? Why should one try to read highly coloured suggestions
into a life like that? If only I could find one thing in it all
that mattered greatly, one thing that would warm me when I am
alone! Will life never give me that one great moment?"
As she raised the window, she heard a sound in the plum bushes
outside. It was only the house-dog roused from his sleep, but
Margaret started violently and trembled so that she caught the foot
of the bed for support. Again she felt herself pursued by some
overwhelming longing, some desperate necessity for herself, like
the outstretching of helpless, unseen arms in the darkness, and the
air seemed heavy with sighs of yearning. She fled to her bed with
the words, "I love you more than Christ who died for me!" ringing
in her ears.
III
About midnight the dance at Lockhart's was at its height.
Even the old men who had come to "look on" caught the spirit of
revelry and stamped the floor with the vigor of old Silenus. Eric
took the violin from the Frenchmen, and Minna Oleson sat at the
organ, and the music grew more and more characteristic--rude, half
mournful music, made up of the folksongs of the North, that the
villagers sing through the long night in hamlets by the sea, when
they are thinking of the sun, and the spring, and the fishermen so
long away. To Margaret some of it sounded like Grieg's Peer
Gynt music. She found something irresistibly infectious in
the mirth of these people who were so seldom merry, and she felt
almost one of them. Something seemed struggling for freedom in
them tonight, something of the joyous childhood of the nations
which exile had not killed. The girls were all boisterous with
delight. Pleasure came to them but rarely, and when it came, they
caught at it wildly and crushed its fluttering wings in their
strong brown fingers. They had a hard life enough, most of them.
Torrid summers and freezing winters, labour and drudgery and
ignorance, were the portion of their girlhood; a short wooing, a
hasty, loveless marriage, unlimited maternity, thankless sons,
premature age and ugliness, were the dower of their womanhood. But
what matter? Tonight there was hot liquor in the glass and hot
blood in the heart; tonight they danced.
Tonight Eric Hermannson had renewed his youth. He was no
longer the big, silent Norwegian who had sat at Margaret's feet and
looked hopelessly into her eyes. Tonight he was a man, with a
man's rights and a man's power. Tonight he was Siegfried indeed.
His hair was yellow as the heavy wheat in the ripe of summer, and
his eyes flashed like the blue water between the ice packs in the
north seas. He was not afraid of Margaret tonight, and when he
danced with her he held her firmly. She was tired and dragged on
his arm a little, but the strength of the man was like an all-
pervading fluid, stealing through her veins, awakening under her
heart some nameless, unsuspected existence that had slumbered there
all these years and that went out through her throbbing fingertips
to his that answered. She wondered if the hoydenish blood of some
lawless ancestor, long asleep, were calling out in her tonight,
some drop of a hotter fluid that the centuries had failed to cool,
and why, if this curse were in her, it had not spoken before. But
was it a curse, this awakening, this wealth before undiscovered,
this music set free? For the first time in her life her heart held
something stronger than herself, was not this worthwhile? Then she
ceased to wonder. She lost sight of the lights and the faces and
the music was drowned by the beating of her own arteries. She saw
only the blue eyes that flashed above her, felt only the
warmth of that throbbing hand which held hers and which the blood
of his heart fed. Dimly, as in a dream, she saw the drooping
shoulders, high white forehead and tight, cynical mouth of the man
she was to marry in December. For an hour she had been crowding
back the memory of that face with all her strength.
"Let us stop, this is enough," she whispered. His only answer
was to tighten the arm behind her. She sighed and let that
masterful strength bear her where it would. She forgot that this
man was little more than a savage, that they would part at dawn.
The blood has no memories, no reflections, no regrets for the past,
no consideration of the future.
"Let us go out where it is cooler," she said when the music
stopped; thinking, I am growing faint here, I shall be all
right in the open air. They stepped out into the cool, blue
air of the night.
Since the older folk had begun dancing, the young Norwegians
had been slipping out in couples to climb the windmill tower into
the cooler atmosphere, as is their custom.
"You like to go up?" asked Eric, close to her ear.
She turned and looked at him with suppressed amusement. "How
high is it?"
"Forty feet, about. I not let you fall." There was a note of
irresistible pleading in his voice, and she felt that he
tremendously wished her to go. Well, why not? This was a night of
the unusual, when she was not herself at all, but was living an
unreality. Tomorrow, yes, in a few hours, there would be the
Vestibule Limited and the world.
"Well, if you'll take good care of me. I used to be able to
climb, when I was a little girl."
Once at the top and seated on the platform, they were silent.
Margaret wondered if she would not hunger for that scene all her
life, through all the routine of the days to come. Above them
stretched the great Western sky, serenely blue, even in the night,
with its big, burning stars, never so cold and dead and far away as
in denser atmospheres. The moon would not be up for twenty minutes
yet, and all about the horizon, that wide horizon, which
seemed to reach around the world, lingered a pale white light, as
of a universal dawn. The weary wind brought up to them the heavy
odours of the cornfields. The music of the dance sounded faintly
from below. Eric leaned on his elbow beside her, his legs swinging
down on the ladder. His great shoulders looked more than ever like
those of the stone Doryphorus, who stands in his perfect, reposeful
strength in the Louvre, and had often made her wonder if such men
died forever with the youth of Greece.
"How sweet the corn smells at night," said Margaret nervously.
"Yes, like the flowers that grow in paradise, I think."
She was somewhat startled by this reply, and more startled
when this taciturn man spoke again.
"You go away tomorrow?"
"Yes, we have stayed longer than we thought to now."
"You not come back any more?"
"No, I expect not. You see, it is a long trip halfway across
the continent."
"You soon forget about this country, I guess." It seemed to
him now a little thing to lose his soul for this woman, but that
she should utterly forget this night into which he threw all his
life and all his eternity, that was a bitter thought.
"No, Eric, I will not forget. You have all been too kind to
me for that. And you won't be sorry you danced this one night,
will you?"
"I never be sorry. I have not been so happy before. I not be
so happy again, ever. You will be happy many nights yet, I only
this one. I will dream sometimes, maybe."
The mighty resignation of his tone alarmed and touched her.
It was as when some great animal composes itself for death, as when
a great ship goes down at sea.
She sighed, but did not answer him. He drew a little closer
and looked into her eyes.
"You are not always happy, too?" he asked.
"No, not always, Eric; not very often, I think."
"You have a trouble?"
"Yes, but I cannot put it into words. Perhaps if I could do
that, I could cure it."
He clasped his hands together over his heart, as children do when
they pray, and said falteringly, "If I own all the world, I give
him you."
Margaret felt a sudden moisture in her eyes, and laid her hand
on his.
"Thank you, Eric; I believe you would. But perhaps even then
I should not be happy. Perhaps I have too much of it already."
She did not take her hand away from him; she did not dare.
She sat still and waited for the traditions in which she had always
believed to speak and save her. But they were dumb. She belonged
to an ultra-refined civilization which tries to cheat nature with
elegant sophistries. Cheat nature? Bah! One generation may do
it, perhaps two, but the third-- Can we ever rise above nature or
sink below her? Did she not turn on Jerusalem as upon Sodom, upon
St. Anthony in his desert as upon Nero in his seraglio? Does she
not always cry in brutal triumph: "I am here still, at the bottom
of things, warming the roots of life; you cannot starve me nor tame
me nor thwart me; I made the world, I rule it, and I am its
destiny."
This woman, on a windmill tower at the world's end with a
giant barbarian, heard that cry tonight, and she was afraid! Ah!
the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear
ourselves! Until then we have not lived.
"Come, Eric, let us go down; the moon is up and the music has
begun again," she said.
He rose silently and stepped down upon the ladder, putting his
arm about her to help her. That arm could have thrown Thor's
hammer out in the cornfields yonder, yet it scarcely touched her,
and his hand trembled as it had done in the dance. His face was
level with hers now and the moonlight fell sharply upon it. All
her life she had searched the faces of men for the look that lay in
his eyes. She knew that that look had never shone for her before,
would never shine for her on earth again, that such love comes to
one only in dreams or in impossible places like this, unattainable
always. This was Love's self, in a moment it would die. Stung by
the agonized appeal that emanated from the man's whole being, she
leaned forward and laid her lips on his. Once, twice and again she
heard the deep respirations rattle in his throat while she held
them there, and the riotous force under her head became an
engulfing weakness. He drew her up to him until he felt all the
resistance go out of her body, until every nerve relaxed and
yielded. When she drew her face back from
his, it was white with fear.
"Let us go down, oh, my God! let us go down!" she muttered.
And the drunken stars up yonder seemed reeling to some appointed
doom as she clung to the rounds of the ladder. All that she was to
know of love she had left upon his lips.
"The devil is loose again," whispered Olaf Oleson, as he saw Eric
dancing a moment later, his eyes blazing.
But Eric was thinking with an almost savage exultation of the
time when he should pay for this. Ah, there would be no quailing
then! if ever a soul went fearlessly, proudly down to the gates
infernal, his should go. For a moment he fancied he was there
already, treading down the tempest of flame, hugging the fiery
hurricane to his breast. He wondered whether in ages gone, all the
countless years of sinning in which men had sold and lost and flung
their souls away, any man had ever so cheated Satan, had ever
bartered his soul for so great a price.
It seemed but a little while till dawn.
The carriage was brought to the door and Wyllis Elliot and his
sister said goodbye. She could not meet Eric's eyes as she gave
him her hand, but as he stood by the horse's head, just as the
carriage moved off, she gave him one swift glance that said, "I
will not forget." In a moment the carriage was gone.
Eric changed his coat and plunged his head into the water tank
and went to the barn to hook up his team. As he led his horses to
the door, a shadow fell across his path, and he saw Skinner rising
in his stirrups. His rugged face was pale and worn with looking
after his wayward flock, with dragging men into the way of
salvation.
"Good morning, Eric. There was a dance here last night?" he
asked, sternly.
"A dance? Oh, yes, a dance," replied Eric, cheerfully.
"Certainly you did not dance, Eric?"
"Yes, I danced. I danced all the time."
The minister's shoulders drooped, and an expression of profound
discouragement settled over his haggard face. There was almost
anguish in the yearning he felt for this soul.
"Eric, I didn't look for this from you. I thought God had set
his mark on you if he ever had on any man. And it is for things
like this that you set your soul back a thousand years from God. 0
foolish and perverse generation!"
Eric drew himself up to his full height and looked off to
where the new day was gilding the corn-tassels and flooding the
uplands with light. As his nostrils drew in the breath of the dew
and the morning, something from the only poetry he had ever read
flashed across his mind, and he murmured, half to himself, with
dreamy exultation:
"'And a day shall be as a thousand years, and a thousand years
as a day.'"
The En
chanted Bluff
We had our swim before sundown, and while we were cooking our
supper the oblique rays of light made a dazzling glare on the white
sand about us. The translucent red ball itself sank behind the
brown stretches of cornfield as we sat down to eat, and the warm
layer of air that had rested over the water and our clean sand bar
grew fresher and smelled of the rank ironweed and sunflowers
growing on the flatter shore. The river was brown and sluggish,
like any other of the half-dozen streams that water the Nebraska
corn lands. On one shore was an irregular line of bald clay bluffs
where a few scrub oaks with thick trunks and flat, twisted tops
threw light shadows on the long grass. The western shore was low
and level, with cornfields that stretched to the skyline, and all
along the water's edge were little sandy coves and beaches where
slim cottonwoods and willow saplings flickered.
The turbulence of the river in springtime discouraged milling,
and, beyond keeping the old red bridge in repair, the busy farmers
did not concern themselves with the stream; so the Sandtown boys
were left in undisputed possession. In the autumn we hunted quail
through the miles of stubble and fodder land along the flat shore,
and, after the winter skating season was over and the ice had gone
out, the spring freshets and flooded bottoms gave us our great
excitement of the year. The channel was never the same for two
successive seasons. Every spring the swollen stream undermined a
bluff to the east, or bit out a few acres of cornfield to the west
and whirled the soil away, to deposit it in spumy mud banks
somewhere else. When the water fell low in midsummer, new sand
bars were thus exposed to dry and whiten in the August sun.
Sometimes these were banked so firmly that the fury of the next
freshet failed to unseat them; the little willow seedlings emerged
triumphantly from the yellow froth, broke into spring leaf, shot up
into summer growth, and with their mesh of roots bound together the
moist sand beneath them against the batterings of another April.
Here and there a cottonwood soon glittered among them, quivering in
the low current of air that, even on breathless days when the dust
hung like smoke above the wagon road, trembled along the face of
the water.
It was on such an island, in the third summer of its yellow
green, that we built our watch fire; not in the thicket of dancing
willow wands, but on the level terrace of fine sand which had been
added that spring; a little new bit of world, beautifully ridged
with ripple marks, and strewn with the tiny skeletons of turtles
and fish, all as white and dry as if they had been expertly cured.
We had been careful not to mar the freshness of the place, although
we often swam to it on summer evenings and lay on the sand to rest.
This was our last watch fire of the year, and there were
reasons why I should remember it better than any of the others.
Next week the other boys were to file back to their old places in
the Sandtown High School, but I was to go up to the Divide to teach
my first country school in the Norwegian district. I was already
homesick at the thought of quitting the boys with whom I had always
played; of leaving the river, and going up into a windy plain that
was all windmills and cornfields and big pastures; where there was
nothing wilful or unmanageable in the landscape, no new islands,
and no chance of unfamiliar birds--such as often followed the
watercourses.
Other boys came and went and used the river for fishing or
skating, but we six were sworn to the spirit of the stream, and we
were friends mainly because of the river. There were the two
Hassler boys, Fritz and Otto, sons of the little German tailor.
They were the youngest of us; ragged boys of ten and twelve, with
sunburned hair, weather-stained faces, and pale blue eyes. Otto,