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. O 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.'”