But the wind suddenly rises and comes blowing out of Stavanger again. The great sea suddenly lifts under his one good leg. And Tobias with his Bibles and his prayer books struggles in the dark of his Grand Avenue bedroom. The devil comes and sits on his window sill, a devil with long locks and bronze wings beside his ears and a three-pronged pitchfork in his hand.
"Ho, ho!" cries this one on the window sill. "What are you doing here, Tobias? With the north wind blowing and the gray seas standing on their heads? Grown old, Tobias, eh? Sitting in a corner and mumbling over litanies."
And it has always been like that since he came to Grand Avenue ten years ago. It has always turned out that Tobias takes off his white shirt and puts on his sailor's black sweater and fastens on his old wooden leg and follows the one on the window sill.
* * * * *
Avast and belay! The night is still young and a sailor man's abroad. The sergeant going off duty at the Chicago Avenue station passes and winks and calls: "Hello, Tobias. Pretty rough tonight."
"Fa'n ta mig!" roars Tobias. "Hold tight." And he steers for Clark Street.
And now the one on the window sill is gone and the storm grows quiet. And
poor Tobias Wooden-Leg, the venerable and pious, who has won the grace of
God through a terrific fight, finds himself again lost and strayed.
Of what good were the prayers and the night after night readings in the old sea captain's Bible stolen forty years ago? Of what good the promises and tears of repentance, when this thing that seemed to rise out of forgotten seas could come and jump up on his window sill and bewitch him as if he were a heedless boy? When it could sit laughing at him until in its laugh he heard the sounds of old winds roaring and old seas standing on their heads, and he put on his black sweater—the moth-eaten badge of his sinfulness—and he put on his wooden leg and lifted out the handful of money from under the corner of the carpet?
What good were the prayers if they couldn't keep him pious? Yes, that was it. And here the habitués along North Clark Street grin. For Tobias Wooden-Leg is coming down the pavement, his head hanging low, his beard no longer bristling and his soul on a hunt for a new God. A strong God. A powerful and commanding God, stronger than the long-locked, bronze-winged one of the window sill.
They grin because this is an old story. Tobias is an old character. Once every two or three months for ten years Tobias has come like this with his head lowered searching for a new and powerful God that would keep him pious and that would kill the devil that seemed never to die inside his old Norske soul.
So he had taken them all—a jumble of gods, a patchwork of religions. Every soapbox apostle in the district had at one time converted him. Holy Roller, Methodist, Jumper, Yogi, Swami, Zionite—he had bowed his head before their and a dozen other varied gods. And the missions in the district had come to know him as "the convert." He had been faithful to each of the creeds as long as he remained sober and as long as he sat in his room of nights reading in his Bible.