Other Main-Travelled Roads Part 11

The girls hung close to the arms of the young men and they went down to the tent and looked in.

It was filled with a motley throng of people, most of them seated on circling benches. A fringe of careless or scoffing onlookers stood back against the tent wall. Many of them were strangers to Ben.

Occasionally a Norwegian farm-hand, or a bevy of young people from some near district, lifted the flap and entered with curious or laughing or insolent faces.

The tent was lighted dimly by kerosene lamps, hung in brackets against the poles, and by stable lanterns set here and there upon the benches.

Ben and Milton ushered the girls in and seated them a little way back.

The girls smiled, but only faintly. The undertone of women's cries moved them in spite of their scorn of it all.

"What cursed foolishness!" said Ben to Milton.

Milton smiled, but did not reply. He only nodded toward the exhorter, a man with a puffy jumble of features and the form of a gladiator, who was uttering wild and explosive phrases.

"Oh, my friends! I bless the Lord for the SHALL in the word. You SHALL get light. You SHALL be saved. Oh, the SHALL in the word! You SHALL be redeemed!"

As he grew more excited, his hoa.r.s.e voice rose in furious screams, as if he were defying h.e.l.l's legions. Foam lay on his lips and flew from his mouth. At every repet.i.tion of the word "shall" he struck the desk a resounding blow with his great palm.

"He's a hard hitter," said Milton.

At length he leaped, apparently in uncontrollable excitement, upon the mourners' bench, and ran up and down close to the listening, moaning audience. He walked with a furious rhythmic, stamping action, like a Sioux in the war dance. Wild cries burst from his audience, antiphonal with his own.

"He 'SHALL' send light!"

"_Send Thy arrows, O Lord._"

"O G.o.d, come!"

"He 'SHALL' keep His word!"

One old negro woman, fat, powerful, and gloomy, suddenly arose and uttered a scream that had the dignity and savagery of a mountain lion's cry. It rang far out into the night.

The exhorter continued his mad, furious, thumping, barbaric walk.

Behind him a row of other exhorters sat, a relay ready to leap to his aid. They urged on the tumult with wild cries.

"A-men, brother."

"YES, brother, YES!" clapping their hands in rhythm.

The exhorter redoubled his fury. He was like a jaded actor rising at applause, carried out of his self-command.

Out of the obscure tumult of faces and tossing hands there came at last certain recognizable features. The people were mainly farming folks of the more ignorant sort, rude in dress and bearing, hard and bent with toil. They were recognizably of a cla.s.s subject to these low forms of religious excitement which were once well-nigh universal.

The outer fringe continued to smile scornfully and to jest, yet they were awed, in a way, by this suddenly revealed deep of barbaric emotion.

The girls were appalled by the increasing clangor. Milton was amused, but Ben grew bitter. Something strong came out in him, too. His lip curled in disgust.

Suddenly, out of the level s.p.a.ce of bowed shoulders, tossing hands, and frenzied, upturned faces, a young girl leaped erect. She was strong and handsome, powerful in the waist and shoulders. Her hair was braided like a child's, and fell down her back in a single strand. Her head was girlish, but her face looked old and drawn and tortured.

She moaned pitifully; she clapped her hands with wild gestures, ending in a quivering motion. The action grew to lightning-like quickness. Her head seemed to set in its socket. Her whole body stiffened. Gasping moans came from her clenched teeth as she fell to the ground and rolled under the seats, wallowing in the muddy straw and beating her feet upon the ground like a dying partridge.

The people crowded about her, but the preacher, roared above the tumult:--

"Si' down! Never mind that party. She's all right; she's in the hands of the Lord!"

The people settled into their seats, and the wild tumult went on again.

Ben rose to go over where the girl was and the others followed.

A young man seated by the struggling sinner held her hand and fanned her with his hat, while some girl friends, scared and sobbing, kept the tossing limbs covered. She rolled from side to side restlessly, thrusting forth her tongue as if her throat were dry. She looked like a dying animal.

Maud clung to Milton.

"Oh, can't something be done?"

"Her soul is burdened for _you_!" cried a wild old woman to the impa.s.sive youth who clung to the frenzied girl's hand.

A moment later, as the demoniacal chorus of yells, songs, incantations, shrieks, groans, and prayers swelled high, a farmer's wife on the left uttered a hoa.r.s.e cry and stiffened and fell backward upon the ground.

She rolled her head from side to side. Her eyes turned in; her lips wore a maniac's laugh, and her troubled brow made her look like the death mask of a tortured murderer, the h.e.l.l horror frozen on it.

She sank at last into a hideous calm, with her strained and stiffened hands pointing weirdly up. She was like marble. She did not move a hair's breadth during the next two hours.

Over to the left a young man leaped to his feet with a scream:--

"Jesus, _Jesus_, JESUS!"

The great negress caught him in her arms as he fell, and laid him down, then leaped up and down, shrieking:--

"O Jesus, come. Come, G.o.d's Lamb!"

Around her a dozen women took up her cry. Most of them had no voices.

Their horrifying screams had become hoa.r.s.e hisses, yet still they strove. Scores of voices were mixed in the pandemonium of prayer.

All order was lost. Three of the preachers now stood shouting before the mourners' bench, two were in the aisles.

One came down the aisle toward the girl with the braided hair. As he came he prayed. Foam was on his lips, but his eyes were cool and calculating; they betrayed him.

As he came he fixed his gaze upon a woman seated near the prostrate girl, and with a horrible outcry the victim leaped into the air and stiffened as if smitten with epilepsy. She fell against some scared boys, who let her fall, striking her head against the seats. She too rolled down upon the straw and lay beside her sister. Both had round, pretty, but childish faces.

Milton's party retreated. They smiled no more; they were horror-stricken.

Squads of "workers" now moved down the aisles; in one they surrounded two people, a tall, fair girl and a young man.

"Why, it's Grace!" exclaimed Maud.

Ben turned quickly, "Where?"

They pointed her out.