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
night at the Lone Star schoolhouse, when he had broken his violin
across his knee. After that, the gloom of his people settled down
upon him, and the gospel of maceration began its work. “_If thine
eye offend thee, pluck it out_,” et cetera. The pagan smile that
once hovered about his lips was gone, and he was one with sorrow.
Religion heals a hundred hearts for one that it embitters, but when
it destroys, its work is quick and deadly, and where the agony of
the cross has been, joy will not come again. This man understood
things literally: one must live without pleasure to die without
fear; to save the soul it was necessary to starve the soul.
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