A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays

by Willa Sibert Cather

  with the cold. Sometimes when there was a lull in the wind, he could

  see the horse struggling through the snow with the man plodding

  steadily beside him. Again the blowing snow would hide them from him

  altogether. He had no idea where they were or what direction they

  were going. He felt as though he were being whirled away in the

  heart of the storm, and he said all the prayers he knew. But at last

  the long four miles were over, and Canute set him down in the snow

  while he unlocked the door. He saw the bride sitting by the fire

  with her eyes red and swollen as though she had been weeping. Canute

  placed a huge chair for him, and said roughly,—

  “Warm yourself.”

  Lena began to cry and moan afresh, begging the minister to take her

  home. He looked helplessly at Canute. Canute said simply,—

  “If you are warm now, you can marry us.”

  “My daughter, do you take this step of your own free will?” asked

  the minister in a trembling voice.

  “No sir, I don’t, and it is disgraceful he should force me into it!

  I won’t marry him.”

  “Then, Canute, I cannot marry you,” said the minister, standing as

  straight as his rheumatic limbs would let him.

  “Are you ready to marry us now, sir?” said Canute, laying one iron

  hand on his stooped shoulder. The little preacher was a good man,

  but like most men of weak body he was a coward and had a horror of

  physical suffering, although he had known so much of it. So with

  many qualms of conscience he began to repeat the marriage service.

  Lena sat sullenly in her chair, staring at the fire. Canute stood

  beside her, listening with his head bent reverently and his hands

  folded on his breast. When the little man had prayed and said amen,

  Canute began bundling him up again.

  “I will take you home, now,” he said as he carried him out and

  placed him in his buggy, and started off with him through the fury

  of the storm, floundering among the snow drifts that brought even

  the giant himself to his knees.

  After she was left alone, Lena soon ceased weeping. She was not of a

  particularly sensitive temperament, and had little pride beyond that

  of vanity. After the first bitter anger wore itself out, she felt

  nothing more than a healthy sense of humiliation and defeat. She had

  no inclination to run away, for she was married now, and in her eyes

  that was final and all rebellion was useless. She knew nothing about

  a license, but she knew that a preacher married folks. She consoled

  herself by thinking that she had always intended to marry Canute

  some day, any way.

  She grew tired of crying and looking into the fire, so she got up

  and began to look about her. She had heard queer tales about the

  inside of Canute’s shanty, and her curiosity soon got the better of

  her rage. One of the first things she noticed was the new black suit

  of clothes hanging on the wall. She was dull, but it did not take a

  vain woman long to interpret anything so decidedly flattering, and

  she was pleased in spite of herself. As she looked through the

  cupboard, the general air of neglect and discomfort made her pity

  the man who lived there.

  “Poor fellow, no wonder he wants to get married to get somebody to

  wash up his dishes. Batchin’s pretty hard on a man.”

  It is easy to pity when once one’s vanity has been tickled. She

  looked at the window sill and gave a little shudder and wondered if

  the man were crazy. Then she sat down again and sat a long time

  wondering what her Dick and Ole would do.

  “It is queer Dick didn’t come right over after me. He surely came,

  for he would have left town before the storm began and he might just

  as well come right on as go back. If he’d hurried he would have

  gotten here before the preacher came. I suppose he was afraid to

  come, for he knew Canuteson could pound him to jelly, the coward!”

  Her eyes flashed angrily.

  The weary hours wore on and Lena began to grow horribly lonesome. It

  was an uncanny night and this was an uncanny place to be in. She

  could hear the coyotes howling hungrily a little way from the cabin,

  and more terrible still were all the unknown noises of the storm.

  She remembered the tales they told of the big log overhead and she

  was afraid of those snaky things on the window sills. She remembered

  the man who had been killed in the draw, and she wondered what she

  would do if she saw crazy Lou’s white face glaring into the window.

  The rattling of the door became unbearable, she thought the latch

  must be loose and took the lamp to look at it. Then for the first

  time she saw the ugly brown snake skins whose death rattle sounded

  every time the wind jarred the door.

  “Canute, Canute!” she screamed in terror.

  Outside the door she heard a heavy sound as of a big dog getting up

  and shaking himself. The door opened and Canute stood before her,

  white as a snow drift.

  “What is it?” he asked kindly.

  “I am cold,” she faltered.

  He went out and got an armful of wood and a basket of cobs and

  filled the stove. Then he went out and lay in the snow before the

  door. Presently he heard her calling again.

  “What is it?” he said, sitting up.

  “I’m so lonesome, I’m afraid to stay in here all alone.”

  “I will go over and get your mother.” And he got up.

  “She won’t come.”

  “I’ll bring her,” said Canute grimly.

  “No, no. I don’t want her, she will scold all the time.”

  “Well, I will bring your father.”

  She spoke again and it seemed as though her mouth was close up to

  the key-hole. She spoke lower than he had ever heard her speak

  before, so low that he had to put his ear up to the lock to hear

  her.

  “I don’t want him either, Canute,—I’d rather have you.”

  For a moment she heard no noise at all, then something like a groan.

  With a cry of fear she opened the door, and saw Canute stretched in

  the snow at her feet, his face in his hands, sobbing on the door

  step.

  Overland Monthly

  , January 1896

  Eric Hermannson’s Soul

  I.

  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 grayness 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. To-night, 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 to-night, 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. To-night 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

  good-by, 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

  to-night 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 basest 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 sage-brush 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

  cow-punchers’ brawl, nor wrecked by bad whisky, nor appropriated by

  a smirched adventuress. He had been saved from these things by a