The Troll Garden and Selected Stories Read online

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. Tonight

  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 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

  impassioned 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 God'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 God 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 passions 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 God, and Jesus Christ his Son, I throw

  you the life line. Take hold! Almighty God, 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 gods 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, 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 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 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 parlour 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 be 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 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."

  "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