Doomsday: A Saga of to-Day

I

WHEN my legs dangled on a rough church bench in my childhood, and the preacher implored the Holy Ghost to ’fill’ his flock, things beyond nature were revealed to me. For something unearthly crawled into my legs and hung on like frost, with a thousand tiny fingers, growing dead heavy. This something never did fill all of my body, — I always feared that it might, — only my legs. And when I limped out of church it sank to my toes like sediment and simmered out peacefully.

After that time I grew aware of other wonders. A dozen times I eluded sudden death. I lived my days of adolescence brimmed with bliss. I found a mate, sound as her native soil. And I learned that chance had won me more than my ancestral share of wealth: brawn, blessed by the great goodness of nature; brains enough to catch a truth or two on the wing; and the greatest of all, because a universe in miniature, blood that could ‘feel’ beauty. My feelings floated in my veins. Yet in the narrow sense I gave neither God nor Devil any credit. My anchor was held by many million chains.

Once I had failed to find God — at eighteen, during a raging spring fever. ‘Too large an order! God is the universe,’ a friend whispered. ‘Too small an order! There is no God,’ roared another. ‘Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein!’ a third quoted. ‘A child’s a functional fool,’ snarled a fourth. ‘The purest of poetry!’ murmured my blood.

As I grew older I came to love the church, save when hymns were sung like jazz, or when the house of God was built of spruce, or when the man of holy orders was very young and raw with tonsilitis. I even joined a church; though I never grew so intimate as did my friends with God and Devil. And I was flustered. Resolved on finding God, though He had once declined to come to me, I set out for an unknown world, eagerly as when I ran away to sea seven years before.

My flight from earth began the spring Margaret took year-old Junior East. Home was hell without her. Restlessly I walked the rounds of the rooms, patting the furniture as I would her little hand. And I lost my appetite and relished nothing save sorghum and pancakes. A mountain slide starts with a pebble. Who can tell whether pancakes were not the prime cause of my flight from earth? Our young Saint Bernard, Fenris, which poor Cameille had given Margaret, died.

When later at college I veered off to other poles, — even becoming an intolerant atheist, — a noted Dante scholar called me ‘a rolling stone that gathers no moss.’ And a fellow of Norse and Gothic nicknamed me ‘ Peer Gynt.’ They were both wrong. I was more of a Brand, crying, ‘All or nothing!’ And I gathered moss a plenty, till a mountain toppled over. I was a Brand, but plus and minus. For I ducked when I saw the mountain coming.

There were other causes, beside the pancakes, for my fierce fanaticism. Yet even a raindrop cannot be fathomed fully until the universe is fathomed. And like all reasons, few and simple, which retrace the winding path of truth, my own, no doubt, are ‘ rationalizations ’ — a useful word of science, and a hideous word that stings my ears, eyes, and larynx.

Mathematics had already pushed me beyond nature by depicting events long ago dead, such as a solar eclipse ages back above a famous battlefield, and by predicting things before they occur, such as the nothingness of matter at absolute zero temperature.

My work pushed me very near the unknown world beyond nature. The X-ray was starting to split the atom. And among the country’s master mechanics I drew and designed huge, powerful X-ray machines. Daily I juggled with a hundred thousand volts, once with a full million, and played with my own bone shadows — from those embracing a gland within my cranium to those which the Holy Ghost of my childhood clutched in my feet.

My work took me to a scientific laboratory and to several medical centres and private clinics, where I found the scientist, whose craving for new knowledge was contagious. I fear that I have angered many a wife during supper, when doctor and I were tossing our thoughts upon swift Tesla waves. These great Americans treated me as they would their equal. Healers, teachers, preachers, they were, healing the sick, teaching man the safest road to life, and preaching about a vast unknown world.

Everywhere I found a milestone pointing toward the mystery beyond nature. At an institution for the insane near Chicago I saw and heard the restless mind grope in a morass of ‘telepathic thought,’ ‘revenge by radio,’ ‘God’s eternal wrath,’ My own thoughts and feelings found excuses to set sail for unknown shores. My will became a bundle of subtle deceptions that furnished me with passport as delusions did these inmates.

Above all else my desire for higher learning drove me out again. But I dared not foster my longing for college until Margaret began to encourage me. In the old country, only nobility and clergy rose to such heights. I sprang from the lowest layer, where a trade ranked and was a climb because of its long apprenticeship.

Before my flight from earth I had planned on electrical engineering. I wanted so badly to grasp the mystery which from the day at fourteen, when I was lineman with my father on the coast of Jutland, had filled me with awe. For until I cut the first metal wire that we strung I had believed a telephone line was but a hollow speaking tube. This mystery had drawn me into serving years as electrician apprentice, had lured me through the night life of Manhattan’s power houses and through Cooper Union’s laboratories, and had drawn me close to my experimental bench and drafting table in Chicago.

My adventure was wide in scope, peddling Doomsday books through the West, hibernating within a Doomsday seminary, hurling fire and brimstone at lumberjacks. And these were useful prerequisites for the State University. For the first secured us rent, tuition, books, during my freshman year; the second gave me seven out of fifteen precious high-school credits needed; and the third trained my tongue to persuade the registrar to give me a trial. Mathematics and physics I had at my finger tips. I tutored co-eds. Blueprints of modern X-ray machines I offered the registrar in lieu of highschool credits; also parchments of three years’ apprenticeship from firms in Manhattan; also a scrawly note from a skipper with the word ‘sobriety’ twice underlined, — for reasons good and true, — and endorsed by an old chief of my stoker days and by a consul somewhere in the Caribbean. Lucky for me that italics are used for emphasis as well as irony. For the last credential filled the gap — unless it was the verbal one, still of the future: ‘Medical missionary to China.’

But I am running ahead of my story. My growth had really been quite logical until Margaret went East. I was then efficiency expert at an electrical plant, timing human motion in fractions of a second, and reducing the fraction. One noon when the whistle blew I smashed my stop watch vehemently against the factory floor amid a group of girls. Two hours later, at a down-town rooming house, a man interviewed me. At night I set out with his crew of magazine canvassers, swamping the towns of old Illinois.

II

‘Junior Is dying of summer complaint. Come at once. — MARGARET’

‘He is not dying, darling. Please come West,’ I wired back, with fare as far as the Mississippi. His viscera revolted against the heat and sudden weaning. Two days later we rushed him to a sanitarium supplied with saintly nurses. Margaret stayed at his bedside night and day, struggling with death and aiding life in his little body. I slept on a slab in the baths.

The patients there were mostly wornout farmers, whom the nurses rejuvenated by ice, steam, and water baths, and by kneading their muscles in creams, soaps, salts, and powders. I gave a hand scrubbing the stiff old men, and learned some of the arts of hydrotherapeutics.

A night nurse was pondering over a Greek testament — a young Sister with a voice like Margaret’s and eyes like Joan of Arc’s. She told me that Doomsday was close at hand; she could prove it mathematically. And mathematics appealed to me — a penniless stranger, stranded with a young wife and a dying child. The magazine canvassing had been a crooked game. A sheriff arrested the manager for pocketing subscription money.

By dawn the night nurse had proved that the day of doom was fast approaching. She was skillful, like my teacher at Cooper Union, both hands working pencils simultaneously at left and right of the equation. Doomsday was at hand. The old historic prophecy grew plain as fact. She showed me the formula in King James: —

‘457 B.C. + 2300 years + threescore and ten — DOOMSDAY.’

And there were many other numbers: days and weeks, months and years, times and generations, hours even. How all pointed to that fatal day! And there was the ‘number of wisdom’ of Revelation xiii, ‘Six hundred threescore and six,’ which none, not even poor Cameille, could ‘count.’ But her answer to this passed judgment upon one of the Holy Fathers, whose picture, for {esthetic reasons and because it resembles Cameille, at present hangs in my library.

‘VICARIVS FILII DEI’ was his title. She scribbled the Latin phrase down on paper. ‘Count the Roman numerals of that title,’ she whispered like an oracle through the quiet summer night. And thrills ran down my spine at the harmony of numbers.

I began to peddle five-dollar Doomsday books in tooled morocco. A country doctor, whose old obsolete X-ray machine I revived, was the first to buy the book. He was hilarious, inviting me to lunch and taking me to his attic to show me a pickled corpse which he was writing a book about.

The next to buy was a young farmer, who was laid up with ‘rheumatics.’ I massaged him as I had seen the nurses do the patients, punching his bones and squeezing dirt out of his joints and knuckles. I buttered his skin for lack of cold cream and rolled and pinched his muscles. I scoured his flesh from neck to toes with sand and salt and scrubbing brush. Soap was scarce, and he had not been washed for moons. I flushed him with well water and rubbed him with wheat sacks — empty ones, of course. His rheumatism vanished that very day.

While I held up another farmer his mare leaped over a fence and got part of a fence post into her thigh. With a halter I hoisted one of her legs up under her belly, crawled beneath, and with my razor sliced out the sliver, sewing up the wound with a fish line. And the owner bought my book.

Farm hands who at night slept beside me — and in heavy underwear — bought the book with a smile and a cheer of good luck. I helped with the chores at dawn.

Whether I found a prim bride in her kitchen, cooking, or a picturesque old farmerette, milking barefoot in the barn, a word of praise brought added beauty into her eyes and opened her heart and pocketbook. The women looked up to me with reverence, for I was to be a missionary. One woman who had a passion for confessing clung to me. The sale of the Doomsday book was at stake. Gently, like a shy girl, I freed myself.

Farmers and townspeople along the Mississippi, and west through Iowa, treated me as though I were Saint John of Patmos. They offered me their best top buggy, riding pony, flivver, bicycle, once even a launch. The Doomsday book sold. I had never in my young life seen so much money. Each week I saved fifty dollars. Yet I should have disliked the canvassing trade if I had peddled dime novels or stereoscope sets or pictures of Washington crossing the Delaware. Money came rolling too easily, as in a poker game among drunks. But I was on a mission, zealously warning the Western farmer. The book had led many a man to sell his farm and go preaching.

I suddenly began to embrace the globe. Doomsday was not pigeonholed because of my fortune. China should know the formula too, while it was yet time. I was in dead earnest in preparing myself and family for the mission field. At the seminary a short course in Doomsday mathematics! Then off to China trumpeting! And Margaret was game, though she insisted — and wisely so — on my becoming a ‘medical’ rather than a ‘Doomsday’ missionary. This would mean the university.

Junior survived. And sixteen weeks from that day in Chicago when I smashed my stop watch we were headed for a seminary located in a fertile Minnesota valley.

III

The Doomsday seminary was a cloister-like building. Its basement was used for laundry, kitchen, dining room; its first, floor for office, classrooms, chapel: its second floor for the women’s dormitory, and its third for the men’s. A farm of thirty pure-bred cows, bathed twice a day, supplied food for two hundred ascetic men and women.

The Bible teacher there was a Lincoln-like graybeard, married to a very young girl suffering from heart trouble. He carried her to chapel in his arms. He was the author of a pamphlet that I memorized from cover to cover, in which he traced the scattered seed of Adam through Biblical generations and up through all the races of earth. But beside being an historian he was a Doomsday mathematician of repute. When he placed a thumb upon a prophecy, and words broke through his beard, Doomsday loomed. It was strange indeed, I thought, that so few people knew of the world’s end, though the doctrine was American and had sprung out of New England soil a whole century before.

The teacher of music was a violinist blind from birth. He taught me hymns on the organ and Margaret minuets on the piano. He groped for my fingers on the keyboard until I felt creepy. When I failed to get the tempo right, his grunts of agony sapped my energy.

And I came out of the music room sweating. Margaret quit him. ‘Too much finger trouble,’ she said. Yet he was a great musician.

I found a gentle doctor from Heidelberg there, with pearly teeth, rosy cheeks, strong blue eyes, a curly beard, and a succulent voice and language. He and his wife were fond of literature, German and English. He was the first to cultivate my taste for the literary arts. And the more orthodox faculty members were not a little disturbed about his worldly influence on me.

We arrived a fortnight early, in the midst of the canning season, and found the teachers busy rinsing, boiling, and sealing the students’ winter ‘grub,’ and wheeling it into huge cellars. No work was too menial for these saints. We adored them from the start. Especially did we love the president. He was a baldheaded philosopher, small of stature like Zacchæus, and, like him, acrobatic. He climbed the cellar stairs on his hands swifter than Margaret on her feet. And he had always time to play, though Doomsday was near. For he worked twice as fast as his spiritual siblings. Yet he was never frivolous.

On a limb of an oak a swing was suspended, upon which one noon he and Margaret faced each other. They swung so high that I gasped. They might whirl around the limb. ‘Higher!’ shouted Margaret. The rope burst. They flew through the air, arms spread like divers, and vanished behind a privet hedge. And they returned stained, not with blood, but with tomatoes. On my shoulder Junior bounced with joy. ‘Higher!’ he shouted.

This man ran the seminary like a clock. Students and teachers alike chummed with him. From seven in the morning until eleven at night he drove us. And we never grew tired of toiling. For he worked harder than any and ‘performed’ while he worked. If Doomsday had come he might have entertained the heavenly host.

Margaret grew popular at once because of her skill in vegetarian cooking. Where had she ever learned that? She was cook of the canning party. I found work also before the students arrived. I mopped floors, cleaned windows, tore down walls to make classrooms larger, nailed up a metal ceiling in the laundry and kitchen, doctored droplights in a hundred dormitory rooms, shortened the chandeliers in the chapel to even out the light, and installed washing machines for the two hundred students, who I soon found were as cleanly as angels.

The president gave me a hand. His rickety ladder ‘stepped’ while he stood on the top rung, stretching on tiptoe. He painted more ceiling than I. In my eagerness to beat him I spilled a quart of white lead. The dear old fellow chuckled and never so much as frowned. And he rinsed jars by the thousand, and gave Margaret a whole gross, and tomatoes and crab apples to fill them, besides twenty bushels of potatoes. He granted me a full year’s free tuition, and paid me forty dollars in cash, and called us ‘a pair of perfect gophers.’

And he never took the matron to account when she smuggled a jar of jam and a dozen of fresh eggs down to our two-room flat above the millinery shop on Main Street. She was very fond of Margaret and too wise to discuss Doomsday. No one knew what she believed. The jam and the eggs did all her preaching.

The students were past the twenties, some in the forties and fifties. They were shy and awkward, yet always on the watch for a Doomsday debate. And they were sly and cunning when they argued. None could rouse their ire. Bible debating was their sport. They told of their debates with men of other faiths as a soldier would about his battles.

At chapel some would whimper, greatly disturbed that they might lose out on Doomsday. Unlike the ‘bums’ of the Bowery mission, they did not brag of their sins. It would be a close competition even for the purest of saints. Slightly more than one eighth of a million would be chosen on the great day. This prophecy puzzled me. For what was the use, then, of my spreading the Doomsday doctrine among China’s half a billion heathen?

After the seminary started its regular schedule the students did two hours’ manual labor daily. And the distribution went as smoothly as in a beehive. Each teacher had charge of a group and completed the work assigned him. The manager of the farm headed the squads that dug potatoes, cut sorghum stalks, bathed and milked the cows, cleaned the barns. The president himself ran a repair shop, printing shop, business office. There were squads for cooking and mopping, sewing and laundry work, painting and blacksmithing, building sheds and barns, breaking new land. The women worked for the matron.

Beside being house electrician I was official architect, drawing up plans for a much needed Greater Doomsday Seminary, which to-day stands strong and massive, but ‘for sale.’ At two bits an hour I also made mechanical drawings for a fellow student, who — Doomsday or no Doomsday — believed himself the inventor of mobile perpetuum.

IV

During the Indian summer of Minnesota we wandered through woodland, enchanted by a thousand gorgeous tints and hues. And as fall advanced we speared black bass through thin ice in the river rushes. When snow fell we bobsleighed down the mile-long seminary hill. And on mild winter nights we skated on the mill dam with Junior packed in a beer box.

Beside all our friends at school we found good friends in the village. A grizzly farm hand, whom I met at the village library, paid us weekly visits with lollipops for Junior and Margaret, and Thomas Paine, Thomas Huxley, and Thomas Browne — always doubting Thomases — for me. His own name was Tomas Tomassen. Margaret grew intimate with a lovely girl of her own age, who was somewhat ostracized for having been betrayed by her sister’s husband. Junior and Franz played together. When the grandmother butchered a pig she sent us pickled pig’s feet and blood bologna. And I would nibble at these favorite dishes of my childhood, though this was a cardinal sin, since pork and blood were taboo, according to Leviticus.

The house we lived in was the oldest on Main Street. Within the woodshed we discovered a well, clean enough for washing. A neighbor’s pump supplied us with water safe enough for cooking. For drinking I fetched butter milk by the bucket, thick with floating butter lumps. Once a week the surplus from a dairy flooded Main Street. A land ‘flowing with milk and honey.’

At country clearings I found fuel. Farmers even paid me for pulling shrubs. A penny for each root they paid. One single day I pulled as many as two hundred roots; but then I began at four iii the morning. When I hauled a trainload of soft coal from depot to seminary, the president once gave me a wagonful. It was then thirty-five below zero. Our potatoes froze hard as rock. I split them with an ice pick. And our precious jars of tomatoes began to burst.

We loved our little home best when the real northwestern winter came. One room was small but lofty, and filled with winter forage. The other was just the reverse, very large but lowly, — it was not designed for tiptoeing, — and furnished in saintly simplicity for an ascetic Doomsday family. A single cot — we slept spoon-fashion and Junior rocked on my chest — slunk elusively along the southern wall. A kitchen table, long-legged, wabbly, and calf-like, leaned against the western wall. An old ten-dollar organ, on which I practised hymns and Margaret minuets, stood against the northern wall, broad and important, and with its two square bellows pedals protruding like peasant feet. If we stepped on one the organ growled, even without our touching the keys. Against the eastern wall, and used in lieu of chairs, lay a flat trunk of clothes and a box of books, salvaged by Chicago friends the day the landlord dumped our worldly goods on the sidewalk.

A trio of wood, coal, and oil stoves stood at attention in the centre. Margaret called them ‘the Trinity.’ She had bought them from a student, and his bride of a week, who to-day are missionaries in China. Sixty-five cents she paid. And the name stuck, even through our college years. For one was a zealous sheet-iron blazer, another was a meek, warm-hearted cannon heater, and the third was a burner for cooking, with a wick and a tank and a warning which we ignored once too often: ‘Do not fill when burning.’

During long winter nights in this, our ‘holiest, of all,’ we watched Junior grow. At birth he had been a bundle of body tissue. At eighteen months he was two bundles; and one was made up of loud thoughts and feelings. His words became flesh, or his flesh became words — I knew not which. He turned into a living soul, or a living soul turned into him — I knew not which. He became a child within a child.

The energy he had, despite his recent illness! He followed me into the woodshed, where his one little hand clung to my knee and the other helped me heave a bucket of water, while he leaned over the well to watch the spill dribble. He crawled through a neighbor’s bramble hedge, where a mastiff with slavering flews leaped at him. Ever after I was sure the Lord of Heaven dropped a brick at my feet that very moment.

A bearded student took him cowriding from the pasture; and twice he climbed over the Holstein horns, down into the drinking trough. I tied a halter round his waist so that I might worship God in peace at chapel times and let him play in a classroom; but he crawled down a ventilator, almost hanging himself. He found the seminary’s coal hole — I shiver at the memory. And while Margaret was busy at the school farm, cooking for an outside threshing crew, he caused the only Doomsday stir of the year by exploring the crowded classrooms.

V

I was a rover like Junior, and, like him, in search of the unknown, sensitive to outside things and strong enough to stand the strain of change. I was a babe unfolding and grew aware of a mystery within. What were the soul and the spirit? What were thought and feeling? But I was not ready to explore the world within.

An idyllic Western village; a bucolic landscape ol farms and pasture, hills and forests, lakes and rivers; the dizzy prairie star in frost — these were new things that took hold of my heart and pulled. Vegetarian food, potatoes and tomatoes, and a huggable mate whom I dared not kiss because of my Doomsday phobia—these were things that made my spirit flighty. Suddenly I was jerked back to mediæval times, to a monklike life among ascetic brethren in a crowded cloister, to early speculations and naïve theology, to fantasticformulæ and discarded doctrines. My feet lost their grip on mother earth. I soared beyond the prairie star, centuries behind the X-ray and stop watch. My eye was turned out and up, not in and down. But my inner world remained sound, unexplored till the time should arrive when I was strong enough to make my final voyage, and succeed by finding, not God, but myself.

As the winter crept on I grew more fanatic, even raising a beard to look like other brethren. Sabbath was kept religiously from sunset to sunset. But our sunset vespers never began on the dot; for Margaret could not keep track of the sun, which went down earlier and earlier before Christmas and later and later after Christmas. She would be washing the floor the very moment that the sun’s edge began to disappear. And it was a race between the two, the sun always winning. The next night at sunset vespers — Margaret called it ‘sun worship’ — she would watch the horizon and even begin to pick up dishes that had piled up from the previous night. As the sun vanished she leaped at her work, chuckling at my mild exhortations. Then she tickled my chin coquettishly and sang a parody of a Doomsday hymn: ‘If only thou wouldst eat a bloody beefsteak.’ And she would dance a teasing gypsy dance to celebrate the passing of Sabbath, risking a splinter or two in her foot and showing an ankle. Never had she been so bewitching. I began to dream.

She had gotten me to join the regular high-school classes instead of matriculating in the famous Doomsday short course which within the winter turned farmers into missionaries. My history course was wide in scope and scant in detail. It began with Adam, 4004 B.C., and rushed me up through the ages of patriarchs, judges, kings, prophets, apostles, saints, stopping abruptly at Charlemagne. And from the last king of my Doomsday history to Gorm den Gamle, the first king of my Danish history, was but a small gap. Between Creation and Doomsday I was, therefore, oriented. I know the reigns of the Hebrew kings as well as I know the reigns of all the Danish kings. And I know Abraham’s birthday and the date young Alexander drank himself to death, and the year Esther appeared before Ahasuerus, and the year Ruth gleaned after Boaz. Yet at the State University later I almost failed to earn my foolscap when I cut a compulsory history course, which I deemed superfluous, off my programme.

Languages were hard for me to master. And Latin was as toilsome as all my other courses put together. I was the dunce, though I did catch the grand system of grammar.

Margaret sang this stanza often — and thumbed her nose at Doomsday.

Perhaps it was the artist within that sought escape. Every child is an artist. His senses desire freedom like the beast’s. Three tales in English literature made profound imprints on my heart: Ivanhoe, The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Ancient Mariner. I identified myself with the heroes, something I had never done in my reading before. I had won fair Rowena and I was a knight. I was a pilgrim in search of a door to Heaven, almost taking Bunyan literally. I had killed, if not the albatross, many a warbling lark. The one nest of my childhood gave me ‘a glittering eye.’

Three American poems entered my blood: The Vision of Sir Launfal — a quest that never ceases till one returns to himself; The Raven — a cry into darkness as yearning as the blind musician’s violin; Snow-Bound — with that New England Doomsday woman, who like myself watched for

The blind musician’s fingers, which wrung sensuous tones out of catgut, stroked the embossed code of a Bible, crawling limberly along the road toward the same unknown world that I was seeking, while his tongue smacked with thought, and his lips thought in whispers, and his eyelids signaled God as a woman her secret, lover. At times he played me into a world of wilder beauty than the one in the valley. He was of Ibsen’s viking stock, a melancholy man, brooding like my grandfather, and with the same power in his violin as the latter in his voice. His tones ‘hung’ upon my checks and shoulders, not unlike the Holy Ghost in my feet at church, or like those bottles of rare Caribbean rum. It was gravity upside down. I sank upward.

YI

Then came spring, and students scattered, either to peddle Doomsday books or to preach. I took a route straight north and peddled sacred wall mottos and a hydrotherapeutic doctor book. That summer’s nourishing sunshine and open air, toil and food, pulled me down to earth again, though it took another year before I fully backslid.

From Hennepin Avenue in the centre of Minneapolis, where I bought Tony, a fine high-strung bicycle, I rode up through northern Minnesota, crossed the steep coulees along the border, rode up through Manitoba to Winnipeg, and farther up to a lake that looked like the ocean, then along the coast from one Icelandic settlement to another, and finally across forest and prairie. Like Louis Hennepin two centuries before, I broke new ground in Canada. And like him I became an adventurous missionary. China’s half a billion was my goal still.

Tony and I encountered many dangers together. A wild-haired prairie minx and her broncho towed us through a strong head wind from a post office somewhere in the wilderness to her father’s homestead. How that barelegged girl rode! And how I clung to Tony, whose pedals kicked my shanks! We were assaulted by halfwild huskies, which, the winter long, hauled the fisherman’s catch from ice holes far from shore. They had never seen a bicycle, these huskies. And my feet, pulling the pedals, maddened them. We daggled through a swamp on Hekla Island, at times lucky enough to leap along a string of logs, which was the King’s mail route. I lost my balance and clung to Tony till the mail came by — a sack conveyed by a barefoot Icelander. How did he ever get those massive books I mailed across that bog?

A tree in the northern timber woods fell just as we came speeding through a stumpy path. It was too late to stop. We hurried by and got entangled in a hill of branches. A thunderstorm that smelled of ozone drove us to a village of aborigines and to the hut of a squaw and her squinting infant. A gaunt chief one night drove us across untrodden prairie, thirty miles with horse and buggy. He had come to the lone prairie store where I found him to buy tea and crystal sugar. And at midnight on the prairie, while wolf and coyote howled, he made a tiny tongue of fire that licked a kettle trembling on a reed.

One night Tony overtook a heavy halfbreed, who was moving farther north with his pigs and horses, his mother and wife, and his daughter, called ‘ Almost-as-white-as-birch-bark.’ That night we dug out an organ from under his wagonload of furniture. And beneath the prairie star, three days’ journey from church, I played the hymns I had learned the previous winter. I taught ‘Birchie’ two, one of which was a Doomsday hymn of weird beauty by my blind music master. While she practised I gave her heavy father a ride on Tony, holding on to the saddle as I ran along. Tony groaned and bucked and at last threw him off against the organ. I still hear the finale of that prairie nocturne — the halfbreed’s long gorilla snort, Tony’s thrumming, ‘Birchic’s’ crystal-clear cry, and the organ jamming the line, ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee,’ into a frantic, impatient yowl.

We lodged with many a rusty prairie bachelor. Once a half-blind senile, before I lay down to sleep beside him, searched my shirt to learn if I were lousy. His cows had died from poisoned well water, and his rain-water barrel was empty. His dog, whose broken leg I set, had been caught in a wolf trap hidden at the well and intended for the enemy. My host chuckled wickedly as he tied a string to the door latch and to the trigger of a shotgun trap that lurked between the ceiling beams. In my dreams of Margaret that night I tripped on a string.

During a hailstorm late one night we found shelter at another bachelor’s cabin. Hail like hen’s eggs had crushed his crop. I showed the frowning host my set of sacred mottoes. When his eye fell on one, ‘GOD BLESS OUR HOME,’ his fist fell upon it heavy and he roared:

‘Have you got a “GOD D—— OUR

HOME”?’ He put me up for the night. And in the morning he bought ‘THOUGH HE SLAY ME, YET WILL I TRUST IN HIM.’

One week-end we made a lucky find in an English nobleman, who tilled a section of wheatland alone. He was a rank infidel; but his curses were fresh and poetic. He got his grub from Winnipeg. Eleven eggs for breakfast, eleven eggs for dinner, eleven eggs for supper, — thirty-three a day, — he cooked for me in a cast-iron frying pan with butter. A dozen tins of peaches I devoured. The leavings he fed to the gophers that swarmed on his land.

What a host he was! At mealtimes he hewed the two-by-fours along his kitchen wall to get chips for the fire. He urged me to stay a week, but I feared his roof might ramble down. He punctured panes of a distant barn window to show me his marksmanship. His horses were within. ‘They are only plough horses, sir. They duck.’ He took me crow-hunting in the northern summer night while aurora borealis sprayed the sky. I aimed his rifle at a solitary crow that slept on a stump, and missed because my host tapped my elbow. ‘It can’t fly,’ he whispered huskily. I handed back his rifle, suddenly reminded of the Ancient Mariner. He shot two on the wing.

I lodged in the cabin of a French Canadian. He could not speak English, nor could any of his children. An altar with candles and the crucified Christ, half-size, crowded the living room. At bedtime he held vespers while his wife and children and I knelt in sand on a hand-hewn floor. His two oldest had taken the veil. That night I slept on the left of the old patriarch. At dawn he awoke me for matins. He kissed me Godspeed on both cheeks as I mounted Tony. And my heart quavered with joy at the sweetness of man. Why should the good God who ‘ loveth all ’ want to destroy him? That day I preached Doomsday to Tony. For a young doubt is conspicuous by its eagerness to shield an old faith.

I found an Icelandic pastor, whose noble name I could trace through the sagas down to another epoch of Western immigration a thousand years ago. He wrote me an Old Norse letter, praising my doctor book to his flock of prosperous settlers. And they greeted me as their forefathers would a son home from a viking tour, urging me into their cabins for curd of sheep’s milk cooled in deep wells, and for a long talk of my travels. Icelandic maidens in homespun hose and hand-woven clothes and soleless sheepskin shoes sang native songs. I responded by singing songs of the sea, and revival jazz of the Bowery, and Doomsday hymns of the seminary. At night the howling huskies followed me in my dreams when I was searching far and wide for Margaret.

I found a log cabin deep in the forest. The owner was a lone Norwegian woman, who spoke an old dialect that I had learned from sailors at sea. Her forehead was queenly and her hemplike hair was twisted into a heavy hawser. She was a vigorous giantess, who ploughed her own fields, cleared the timber in her coulee, and once a month drove her team to town for mail. In her young days she used to ride to town, she told me; but she had grown too heavy for her broncho. Far into the night we talked about Ibsen and Björnson, Lie and Hamsun, and about the lyric poet, Wergeland, whom she quoted from memory. She knew literature from the Elder Edda up. Even the work of Hans Kinck she was familiar with — the least known, and perhaps the greatest. I was charmed by her marvelous memory span and by her poetic brogue.

She gave me the right of way by going to the barn to milk her sheep. I stretched my limbs in bed and was in the midst of prayer when she returned, handing me a drink of milk, warm from the sheep’s udder. ‘I shall not tempt thee (Eg ska inta frista dokka),’ she said as she lay down beside me.

VII

In the midst of my canvassing I had a ‘call.’ And I drove Tony back to Minnesota to a lumber town on the shores of Lake Superior. An old man held Doomsday meetings there. He was once a wealthy farmer, but had sacrificed his land to the Doomsday cause after having read the same book which I had peddled in Iowa. A meek Christian he was, who seven summer nights a week sounded the warning to lumberjacks, and the day long tramped the coast with his good wife, cheering the sick. Like old Simeon, ‘it was revealed unto him by the Holy Ghost, that he should not see death, before he had seen the Lord’s Christ.’ On an empty lot next to the cemetery he had pitched his canvas tabernacle and his three camping tents. He called his camp the ‘Bible Chautauqua.’ There he lived, he and his wife and a younger singer, whom lumberjacks had nicknamed the ‘Tent Lass.’

Yankee, Swede, Ojibwa, — they had all interbred, — flocked to the tent at night to hear the old saint prophesy and to hear the Tent Lass sing. A Swede who owned the sawmill came. The Tent Lass charmed him. Morning, noon, and night he came to hear the alluring melodies flow from her lips. For she practised ‘voice’ the day long.

I helped the tired saint a fortnight, giving the lumber town all that was in me — a dozen Doomsday lectures according to John the Seer. The day long I lay in a hammock within the shady tabernacle, jotting down mathematics and dreaming of Margaret. In the grass at the feet of the Tent Lass the mill owner sat peering into her eyes while a ripsaw down at his mill wailed, ‘ Y-o-u! — Y-o-u!’ in loud, heartbreaking tones, accompanying the singer.

The whole town mustered for my lectures — Yankee, Swede, Ojibwa, the conquerors of the Great West. And after each of these fire-and-brimstone meetings I took a swim at the mill owner’s bachelor bungalow. I was hot. He came to meet me in the moonlight, naked — a stocky Socrates with muscles like a sack of eels. While we swam in the deep dark lake he pestered me with his love for the Tent Lass. And he dived down with a gurgling sigh to wash away his tears. When I was about to make a search for his body he shot to the surface alive, punching a hoary shoulder into my ribs like the sandpaper tail of a shark.

That same summer the old saint dropped dead. And he was buried across the road from his Bible Chautauqua. I had returned home. When the Tent Lass married the wealthy Swede, Margaret was at the wedding.

Our famous stoves stood ready for shipment. It had been a salubrious summer. Margaret had picked berries and had canned ten dozen quarts of fruit, packing them in frost-proof Doomsday magazines and barrels. Five hundred magazines she had purchased wholesale to peddle at a county fair; and she had sold exactly twenty. But during the four following winters at the State University dimes were dear. I disposed of the rest on the streets of Minneapolis.

We took a farewell ride up through Main Street together. Junior hanging on to the handlebar in front, Margaret straddling a grub box above Tony’s hind wheel, and I in the saddle. We barely made the seminary hill. Gravity was no longer upside down.

The train pulled out of the depot with the three of us the only passengers, and Tony the only baggage, and our barrels and crates and sacks of new potatoes the only freight. Never before had we been so wealthy or so much in love.