During the next two or three weeks Oscar and Helga went to the cathedral every day, and sometimes Thora went with them, but more frequently she remained at home. A sudden wave of energy seemed to lift Oscar out of himself, and he produced one composition after another. Helga applauded all of them, and her praises intoxicated him like glory.
"I can never be sufficiently grateful to you, Helga," he said, "for all the good things you have poured out on me since you came back to Iceland. You have given my life a new joy, a new splendor!"
"Nonsense!" said Helga. "I am nothing but a voice to awaken your genius. You were born to create music, and whatever happens you must never, never throw away a life which has the glory of a future like that."
To this, and such as this, he always answered "Ah, no!" or "Impossible!" or "It's past praying for," but Helga's words were as the very incense of the dreams which, in vaguer forms, he had been trying to forget since the day he engaged himself to Thora.
"Why shouldn't there be another Wagner, an Icelandic Wagner, a Wagner with a still grander scene and still greater stories--the Sagas and Eddas of this stern old land?"
About a month after Helga returned to Iceland she suggested to Oscar that he should write an anthem on a passage which she selected from one of the Sagas. It was that in which the old gods of the Pagan world, in anger with the family of man for permitting the establishment of Christianity, tore open the bowels of their fruitful valleys with earthquakes, and deluged them with molten lava, and how Christ came through the chaos saying, "Let there be peace!"
"Great! Glorious! A stunning subject! But can I do it?" said Oscar.
"You can, you must," said Helga, and from that moment a continual fever burned in Oscar's blood until the task was done. Thora saw nothing of him for days, except when he bounded in to run over a part of his score with Helga, and then away, without a word, to his work again. When the anthem was written and he was ready to try it on the organ, he said:
"Are you coming across to the cathedral to-day, Thora? No? Perhaps you had better not. We'll have to go over the thing again and again--it might be tiresome."
It was the afternoon of a dull week-day in the early winter, and some of the dreary noises of the work-a-day world followed Oscar into the cathedral. A vessel was unloading in the fiord--he could hear the rumble of the iron trolleys as they rolled up the paved jetty to the Factor's warehouse. A new house was being erected on the corner of the cathedral square--he could hear the thin clank of the mason's trowel. A steamer was on the stocks in the shipyard down the harbor--he could hear the sharp beat of the riveter's hammer.