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 greyness 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.
Tonight, 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 tonight, 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. 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.