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, anchored 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, passing, 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 Saturday. 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 river-bottom 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 key-note 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
sky-line.
“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 analysis, 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 parlor organ to please Mrs. Lockhart. It’s her household
fetish and I’ve forgotten how many pounds of butter 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 screwing 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
tommy-rot, 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.”
“But what do you want with the Norwegians? I thought you were tired
of dancing.”
“So I am, with some people. But I want to see a Norwegian dance, and
I intend to. Come, Wyllis, you know how seldom it is that one really
wants to do anything nowadays. I wonder when I have really wanted to
go to a party before. It will be something to remember next month at
Newport, when we have to and don’t want to. Remember your own theory
that contrast is about the only thing that makes life endurable.
This is my party and Mr. Lockhart’s; your whole duty to-morrow night
will consist in being nice to the Norwegian girls. I’ll warrant you
were adept enough at it once. And you’d better be very nice indeed,
for if there are many such young valkyrs as Eric’s sister among
them, they would simply tie you up in a knot if they suspected you
were guying them.”
Wyllis groaned and sank back into the hammock to consider his fate,
while his sister went on.
“And the guests, Mr. Lockhart, did they accept?”
Lockhart took out his knife and began sharpening it on the sole of
his plowshoe.
“Well, I guess we’ll have a couple dozen. You see it’s pretty hard
to get a crowd together here any more. Most of ‘em have gone over to
the Free Gospellers, and they’d rather put their feet in the fire
than shake ‘em to a fiddle.”
Margaret made a gesture of impatience.
“Those Free Gospellers have just cast an evil spell over this
country, haven’t they?”
“Well,” said Lockhart, cautiously, “I don’t just like to pass
judgment on any Christian sect, but if you’re to know the chosen by
their works, the Gospellers can’t make a very proud showin’, an’
that’s a fact. They’re responsible for a few suicides, and they’ve
sent a good-sized delegation to the state insane asylum, an’ I don’t
see as they’ve made the rest of us much better than we were before.
I had a little herdboy last spring, as square a little Dane as I
want to work for me, but after the Gospellers got hold of him and
sanctified him, the little beggar used to get down on his knees out
on the prairie and pray by the hour and let the cattle get into the
corn, an’ I had to fire him. That’s about the way it goes. Now
there’s Eric; that chap used to be a hustler and the spryest dancer
in all this section—called all the dances. Now he’s got no ambition
and he’s glum as a preacher. I don’t suppose we can even get him to
come in to-morrow night.”
“Eric? Why, he must dance, we can’t let him off,” said Margaret,
quickly. “Why, I intend to dance with him myself!”
“I’m afraid he won’t dance. I asked him this morning if he’d help us
out and he said, ‘I don’t dance now, any more,’” said Lockhart,
imitating the labored English of the Norwegian.
“‘The Miller of Hoffbau, the Miller of Hoffbau, O my Princess!’”
chirped Wyllis, cheerfully, from his hammock.
The red on his sister’s cheek deepened a little, and she laughed
mischievously. “We’ll see about that, sir. I’ll not admit that I am
beaten until I have asked him myself.”
Every night Eric rode over to St. Anne, a little village in the
heart of the French settlement, for the mail. As the road lay
through the most attractive part of the Divide country, on several
occasions Margaret Elliot and her brother had accompanied him.
To-night Wyllis had business with Lockhart, and Margaret rode with
Eric, mounted on a frisky little mustang that Mrs. Lockhart had
broken to the side-saddle. Margaret regarded her escort very much as
she did the servant who always accompanied her on long rides at
home, and the ride to the village was a silent one. She was occupied
with thoughts of another world, and Eric was wrestling with more
thoughts than had ever been crowded into his head before. He rode
with his eyes riveted on that slight figure before him, as though he
wished to absorb it through the optic nerves and hold it in his
brain forever. He understood the situation perfe
ctly. His brain
worked slowly, but he had a keen sense of the values of things. This
girl represented an entirely new species of humanity to him, but he
knew where to place her. The prophets of old, when an angel first
appeared unto them, never doubted its high origin.
Eric was patient under the adverse conditions of his life, but he
was not servile. The Norse blood in him had not entirely lost its
self-reliance. He came of a proud fisher line, men who were not
afraid of anything but the ice and the devil, and he had prospects
before him when his father went down off the North Cape in the long
Arctic night, and his mother, seized by a violent horror of
seafaring life, had followed her brother to America. Eric was
eighteen then, handsome as young Siegfried, a giant in stature, with
a skin singularly pure and delicate, like a Swede’s; hair as yellow
as the locks of Tennyson’s amorous Prince, and eyes of a fierce,
burning blue, whose flash was most dangerous to women. He had in
those days a certain pride of bearing, a certain confidence of
approach, that usually accompanies physical perfection. It was even
said of him then that he was in love with life, and inclined to
levity, a vice most unusual on the Divide. But the sad history of
those Norwegian exiles, transplanted in an arid soil and under a
scorching sun, had repeated itself in his case. Toil and isolation
had sobered him, and he grew more and more like the clods among
which he labored. It was as though some red-hot instrument had
touched for a moment those delicate fibers of the brain which
respond to acute pain or pleasure, in which lies the power of
exquisite sensation, and had seared them quite away. It is a painful
thing to watch the light die out of the eyes of those Norsemen,
leaving an expression of impenetrable sadness, quite passive, quite
hopeless, a shadow that is never lifted. With some this change comes
almost at once, in the first bitterness of homesickness, with others
it comes more slowly, according to the time it takes each man’s
heart to die.
Oh, those poor Northmen of the Divide! They are dead many a year
before they are put to rest in the little graveyard on the windy
hill where exiles of all nations grow akin.
The peculiar species of hypochondria to which the exiles of his
people sooner or later succumb had not developed in Eric until that
A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays Page 4
