My Ántonia — Book 2

BOOK II

THE HIRED GIRLS

I

I HAD been living with my grandfather for nearly three years when he
decided to move to Black Hawk. He and grandmother were getting old for the
heavy work of a farm, and as I was now thirteen they thought I ought to be
going to school. Accordingly our homestead was rented to “that good woman,
the Widow Steavens,” and her bachelor brother, and we bought Preacher
White’s house, at the north end of Black Hawk. This was the first town
house one passed driving in from the farm, a landmark which told country
people their long ride was over.

We were to move to Black Hawk in March, and as soon as grandfather had
fixed the date he let Jake and Otto know of his intention. Otto said he
would not be likely to find another place that suited him so well; that he
was tired of farming and thought he would go back to what he called the
“wild West.” Jake Marpole, lured by Otto’s stories of adventure, decided
to go with him. We did our best to dissuade Jake. He was so handicapped by
illiteracy and by his trusting disposition that he would be an easy prey
to sharpers. Grandmother begged him to stay among kindly, Christian
people, where he was known; but there was no reasoning with him. He wanted
to be a prospector. He thought a silver mine was waiting for him in
Colorado.

Jake and Otto served us to the last. They moved us into town, put down the
carpets in our new house, made shelves and cupboards for grandmother’s
kitchen, and seemed loath to leave us. But at last they went, without
warning. Those two fellows had been faithful to us through sun and storm,
had given us things that cannot be bought in any market in the world. With
me they had been like older brothers; had restrained their speech and
manners out of care for me, and given me so much good comradeship. Now
they got on the west-bound train one morning, in their Sunday clothes,
with their oilcloth valises—and I never saw them again. Months afterward
we got a card from Otto, saying that Jake had been down with mountain
fever, but now they were both working in the Yankee Girl mine, and were
doing well. I wrote to them at that address, but my letter was returned to
me, “unclaimed.” After that we never heard from them.

Black Hawk, the new world in which we had come to live, was a clean,
well-planted little prairie town, with white fences and good green yards
about the dwellings, wide, dusty streets, and shapely little trees growing
along the wooden sidewalks. In the center of the town there were two rows
of new brick “store” buildings, a brick schoolhouse, the courthouse, and
four white churches. Our own house looked down over the town, and from our
upstairs windows we could see the winding line of the river bluffs, two
miles south of us. That river was to be my compensation for the lost
freedom of the farming country.

We came to Black Hawk in March, and by the end of April we felt like town
people. Grandfather was a deacon in the new Baptist Church, grandmother
was busy with church suppers and missionary societies, and I was quite
another boy, or thought I was. Suddenly put down among boys of my own age,
I found I had a great deal to learn. Before the spring term of school was
over I could fight, play “keeps,” tease the little girls, and use
forbidden words as well as any boy in my class. I was restrained from
utter savagery only by the fact that Mrs. Harling, our nearest neighbor,
kept an eye on me, and if my behavior went beyond certain bounds I was not
permitted to come into her yard or to play with her jolly children.

We saw more of our country neighbors now than when we lived on the farm.
Our house was a convenient stopping-place for them. We had a big barn
where the farmers could put up their teams, and their women-folk more
often accompanied them, now that they could stay with us for dinner, and
rest and set their bonnets right before they went shopping. The more our
house was like a country hotel, the better I liked it. I was glad, when I
came home from school at noon, to see a farm wagon standing in the back
yard, and I was always ready to run downtown to get beefsteak or baker’s
bread for unexpected company. All through that first spring and summer I
kept hoping that Ambrosch would bring Ántonia and Yulka to see our new
house. I wanted to show them our red plush furniture, and the
trumpet-blowing cherubs the German paper-hanger had put on our parlor
ceiling.

When Ambrosch came to town, however, he came alone, and though he put his
horses in our barn, he would never stay for dinner, or tell us anything
about his mother and sisters. If we ran out and questioned him as he was
slipping through the yard, he would merely work his shoulders about in his
coat and say, “They all right, I guess.”

Mrs. Steavens, who now lived on our farm, grew as fond of Ántonia as we
had been, and always brought us news of her. All through the wheat season,
she told us, Ambrosch hired his sister out like a man, and she went from
farm to farm, binding sheaves or working with the thrashers. The farmers
liked her and were kind to her; said they would rather have her for a hand
than Ambrosch. When fall came she was to husk corn for the neighbors until
Christmas, as she had done the year before; but grandmother saved her from
this by getting her a place to work with our neighbors, the Harlings.

II

GRANDMOTHER often said that if she had to live in town, she thanked God
she lived next the Harlings. They had been farming people, like ourselves,
and their place was like a little farm, with a big barn and a garden, and
an orchard and grazing lots,—even a windmill. The Harlings were
Norwegians, and Mrs. Harling had lived in Christiania until she was ten
years old. Her husband was born in Minnesota. He was a grain merchant and
cattle buyer, and was generally considered the most enterprising business
man in our county. He controlled a line of grain elevators in the little
towns along the railroad to the west of us, and was away from home a great
deal. In his absence his wife was the head of the household.

Mrs. Harling was short and square and sturdy-looking, like her house.
Every inch of her was charged with an energy that made itself felt the
moment she entered a room. Her face was rosy and solid, with bright,
twinkling eyes and a stubborn little chin. She was quick to anger, quick
to laughter, and jolly from the depths of her soul. How well I remember
her laugh; it had in it the same sudden recognition that flashed into her
eyes, was a burst of humor, short and intelligent. Her rapid footsteps
shook her own floors, and she routed lassitude and indifference wherever
she came. She could not be negative or perfunctory about anything. Her
enthusiasm, and her violent likes and dislikes, asserted themselves in all
the every-day occupations of life. Wash-day was interesting, never dreary,
at the Harlings’. Preserving-time was a prolonged festival, and
house-cleaning was like a revolution. When Mrs. Harling made garden that
spring, we could feel the stir of her undertaking through the willow hedge
that separated our place from hers.

Three of the Harling children were near me in age. Charley, the only
son,—they had lost an older boy,—was sixteen; Julia, who was known as the
musical one, was fourteen when I was; and Sally, the tomboy with short
hair, was a year younger. She was nearly as strong as I, and uncannily
clever at all boys’ sports. Sally was a wild thing, with sunburned yellow
hair, bobbed about her ears, and a brown skin, for she never wore a hat.
She raced all over town on one roller skate, often cheated at “keeps,” but
was such a quick shot one could n’t catch her at it.

The grown-up daughter, Frances, was a very important person in our world.
She was her father’s chief clerk, and virtually managed his Black Hawk
office during his frequent absences. Because of her unusual business
ability, he was stern and exacting with her. He paid her a good salary,
but she had few holidays and never got away from her responsibilities.
Even on Sundays she went to the office to open the mail and read the
markets. With Charley, who was not interested in business, but was already
preparing for Annapolis, Mr. Harling was very indulgent; bought him guns
and tools and electric batteries, and never asked what he did with them.

Frances was dark, like her father, and quite as tall. In winter she wore a
sealskin coat and cap, and she and Mr. Harling used to walk home together
in the evening, talking about grain-cars and cattle, like two men.
Sometimes she came over to see grandfather after supper, and her visits
flattered him. More than once they put their wits together to rescue some
unfortunate farmer from the clutches of Wick Cutter, the Black Hawk
money-lender. Grandfather said Frances Harling was as good a judge of
credits as any banker in the county. The two or three men who had tried to
take advantage of her in a deal acquired celebrity by their defeat. She
knew every farmer for miles about; how much land he had under cultivation,
how many cattle he was feeding, what his liabilities were. Her interest in
these people was more than a business interest. She carried them all in
her mind as if they were characters in a book or a play.

When Frances drove out into the country on business, she would go miles
out of her way to call on some of the old people, or to see the women who
seldom got to town. She was quick at understanding the grandmothers who
spoke no English, and the most reticent and distrustful of them would tell
her their story without realizing they were doing so. She went to country
funerals and weddings in all weathers. A farmer’s daughter who was to be
married could count on a wedding present from Frances Harling.

In August the Harlings’ Danish cook had to leave them. Grandmother
entreated them to try Ántonia. She cornered Ambrosch the next time he came
to town, and pointed out to him that any connection with Christian Harling
would strengthen his credit and be of advantage to him. One Sunday Mrs.
Harling took the long ride out to the Shimerdas’ with Frances. She said
she wanted to see “what the girl came from” and to have a clear
understanding with her mother. I was in our yard when they came driving
home, just before sunset. They laughed and waved to me as they passed, and
I could see they were in great good humor. After supper, when grandfather
set off to church, grandmother and I took my short cut through the willow
hedge and went over to hear about the visit to the Shimerdas.

We found Mrs. Harling with Charley and Sally on the front porch, resting
after her hard drive. Julia was in the hammock—she was fond of repose—and
Frances was at the piano, playing without a light and talking to her
mother through the open window.

Mrs. Harling laughed when she saw us coming. “I expect you left your
dishes on the table to-night, Mrs. Burden,” she called. Frances shut the
piano and came out to join us.

They had liked Ántonia from their first glimpse of her; felt they knew
exactly what kind of girl she was. As for Mrs. Shimerda, they found her
very amusing. Mrs. Harling chuckled whenever she spoke of her. “I expect I
am more at home with that sort of bird than you are, Mrs. Burden. They’re
a pair, Ambrosch and that old woman!”

They had had a long argument with Ambrosch about Ántonia’s allowance for
clothes and pocket-money. It was his plan that every cent of his sister’s
wages should be paid over to him each month, and he would provide her with
such clothing as he thought necessary. When Mrs. Harling told him firmly
that she would keep fifty dollars a year for Ántonia’s own use, he
declared they wanted to take his sister to town and dress her up and make
a fool of her. Mrs. Harling gave us a lively account of Ambrosch’s
behavior throughout the interview; how he kept jumping up and putting on
his cap as if he were through with the whole business, and how his mother
tweaked his coat-tail and prompted him in Bohemian. Mrs. Harling finally
agreed to pay three dollars a week for Ántonia’s services—good wages in
those days—and to keep her in shoes. There had been hot dispute about the
shoes, Mrs. Shimerda finally saying persuasively that she would send Mrs.
Harling three fat geese every year to “make even.” Ambrosch was to bring
his sister to town next Saturday.

“She’ll be awkward and rough at first, like enough,” grandmother said
anxiously, “but unless she’s been spoiled by the hard life she’s led, she
has it in her to be a real helpful girl.”

Mrs. Harling laughed her quick, decided laugh. “Oh, I’m not worrying, Mrs.
Burden! I can bring something out of that girl. She’s barely seventeen,
not too old to learn new ways. She’s good-looking, too!” she added warmly.

Frances turned to grandmother. “Oh, yes, Mrs. Burden, you did n’t tell us
that! She was working in the garden when we got there, barefoot and
ragged. But she has such fine brown legs and arms, and splendid color in
her cheeks—like those big dark red plums.”

We were pleased at this praise. Grandmother spoke feelingly. “When she
first came to this country, Frances, and had that genteel old man to watch
over her, she was as pretty a girl as ever I saw. But, dear me, what a
life she’s led, out in the fields with those rough thrashers! Things would
have been very different with poor Ántonia if her father had lived.”

The Harlings begged us to tell them about Mr. Shimerda’s death and the big
snowstorm. By the time we saw grandfather coming home from church we had
told them pretty much all we knew of the Shimerdas.

“The girl will be happy here, and she’ll forget those things,” said Mrs.
Harling confidently, as we rose to take our leave.

III

ON Saturday Ambrosch drove up to the back gate, and Ántonia jumped down
from the wagon and ran into our kitchen just as she used to do. She was
wearing shoes and stockings, and was breathless and excited. She gave me a
playful shake by the shoulders. “You ain’t forget about me, Jim?”

Grandmother kissed her. “God bless you, child! Now you’ve come, you must
try to do right and be a credit to us.”

Ántonia looked eagerly about the house and admired everything. “Maybe I be
the kind of girl you like better, now I come to town,” she suggested
hopefully.

How good it was to have Ántonia near us again; to see her every day and
almost every night! Her greatest fault, Mrs. Harling found, was that she
so often stopped her work and fell to playing with the children. She would
race about the orchard with us, or take sides in our hay-fights in the
barn, or be the old bear that came down from the mountain and carried off
Nina. Tony learned English so quickly that by the time school began she
could speak as well as any of us.

I was jealous of Tony’s admiration for Charley Harling. Because he was
always first in his classes at school, and could mend the water-pipes or
the door-bell and take the clock to pieces, she seemed to think him a sort
of prince. Nothing that Charley wanted was too much trouble for her. She
loved to put up lunches for him when he went hunting, to mend his
ball-gloves and sew buttons on his shooting-coat, baked the kind of
nut-cake he liked, and fed his setter dog when he was away on trips with
his father. Ántonia had made herself cloth working-slippers out of Mr.
Harling’s old coats, and in these she went padding about after Charley,
fairly panting with eagerness to please him.

Next to Charley, I think she loved Nina best. Nina was only six, and she
was rather more complex than the other children. She was fanciful, had all
sorts of unspoken preferences, and was easily offended. At the slightest
disappointment or displeasure her velvety brown eyes filled with tears,
and she would lift her chin and walk silently away. If we ran after her
and tried to appease her, it did no good. She walked on unmollified. I
used to think that no eyes in the world could grow so large or hold so
many tears as Nina’s. Mrs. Harling and Ántonia invariably took her part.
We were never given a chance to explain. The charge was simply: “You have
made Nina cry. Now, Jimmy can go home, and Sally must get her arithmetic.”
I liked Nina, too; she was so quaint and unexpected, and her eyes were
lovely; but I often wanted to shake her.

We had jolly evenings at the Harlings when the father was away. If he was
at home, the children had to go to bed early, or they came over to my
house to play. Mr. Harling not only demanded a quiet house, he demanded
all his wife’s attention. He used to take her away to their room in the
west ell, and talk over his business with her all evening. Though we did
not realize it then, Mrs. Harling was our audience when we played, and we
always looked to her for suggestions. Nothing flattered one like her quick
laugh.

Mr. Harling had a desk in his bedroom, and his own easy-chair by the
window, in which no one else ever sat. On the nights when he was at home,
I could see his shadow on the blind, and it seemed to me an arrogant
shadow. Mrs. Harling paid no heed to any one else if he was there. Before
he went to bed she always got him a lunch of smoked salmon or anchovies
and beer. He kept an alcohol lamp in his room, and a French coffee-pot,
and his wife made coffee for him at any hour of the night he happened to
want it.

Most Black Hawk fathers had no personal habits outside their domestic
ones; they paid the bills, pushed the baby carriage after office hours,
moved the sprinkler about over the lawn, and took the family driving on
Sunday. Mr. Harling, therefore, seemed to me autocratic and imperial in
his ways. He walked, talked, put on his gloves, shook hands, like a man
who felt that he had power. He was not tall, but he carried his head so
haughtily that he looked a commanding figure, and there was something
daring and challenging in his eyes. I used to imagine that the “nobles” of
whom Ántonia was always talking probably looked very much like Christian
Harling, wore caped overcoats like his, and just such a glittering diamond
upon the little finger.

Except when the father was at home, the Harling house was never quiet.
Mrs. Harling and Nina and Ántonia made as much noise as a houseful of
children, and there was usually somebody at the piano. Julia was the only
one who was held down to regular hours of practicing, but they all played.
When Frances came home at noon, she played until dinner was ready. When
Sally got back from school, she sat down in her hat and coat and drummed
the plantation melodies that negro minstrel troupes brought to town. Even
Nina played the Swedish Wedding March.

Mrs. Harling had studied the piano under a good teacher, and somehow she
managed to practice every day. I soon learned that if I were sent over on
an errand and found Mrs. Harling at the piano, I must sit down and wait
quietly until she turned to me. I can see her at this moment; her short,
square person planted firmly on the stool, her little fat hands moving
quickly and neatly over the keys, her eyes fixed on the music with
intelligent concentration.

IV

“I won’t have none of your weevily wheat, and I won’t have none of your barley,
But I’ll take a measure of fine white flour, to make a cake for Charley.”

WE were singing rhymes to tease Ántonia while she was beating up one of
Charley’s favorite cakes in her big mixing-bowl. It was a crisp autumn
evening, just cold enough to make one glad to quit playing tag in the
yard, and retreat into the kitchen. We had begun to roll popcorn balls
with syrup when we heard a knock at the back door, and Tony dropped her
spoon and went to open it. A plump, fair-skinned girl was standing in the
doorway. She looked demure and pretty, and made a graceful picture in her
blue cashmere dress and little blue hat, with a plaid shawl drawn neatly
about her shoulders and a clumsy pocketbook in her hand.

“Hello, Tony. Don’t you know me?” she asked in a smooth, low voice,
looking in at us archly.

Ántonia gasped and stepped back. “Why, it’s Lena! Of course I did n’t know
you, so dressed up!”

Lena Lingard laughed, as if this pleased her. I had not recognized her for
a moment, either. I had never seen her before with a hat on her head—or
with shoes and stockings on her feet, for that matter. And here she was,
brushed and smoothed and dressed like a town girl, smiling at us with
perfect composure.

“Hello, Jim,” she said carelessly as she walked into the kitchen and
looked about her. “I’ve come to town to work, too, Tony.”

“Have you, now? Well, ain’t that funny!” Ántonia stood ill at ease, and
did n’t seem to know just what to do with her visitor.

The door was open into the dining-room, where Mrs. Harling sat crocheting
and Frances was reading. Frances asked Lena to come in and join them.

“You are Lena Lingard, are n’t you? I’ve been to see your mother, but you
were off herding cattle that day. Mama, this is Chris Lingard’s oldest
girl.”

Mrs. Harling dropped her worsted and examined the visitor with quick, keen
eyes. Lena was not at all disconcerted. She sat down in the chair Frances
pointed out, carefully arranging her pocketbook and gray cotton gloves on
her lap. We followed with our popcorn, but Ántonia hung back—said she had
to get her cake into the oven.

“So you have come to town,” said Mrs. Harling, her eyes still fixed on
Lena. “Where are you working?”

“For Mrs. Thomas, the dressmaker. She is going to teach me to sew. She
says I have quite a knack. I’m through with the farm. There ain’t any end
to the work on a farm, and always so much trouble happens. I’m going to be
a dressmaker.”

“Well, there have to be dressmakers. It’s a good trade. But I would n’t
run down the farm, if I were you,” said Mrs. Harling rather severely. “How
is your mother?”

“Oh, mother’s never very well; she has too much to do. She’d get away from
the farm, too, if she could. She was willing for me to come. After I learn
to do sewing, I can make money and help her.”

“See that you don’t forget to,” said Mrs. Harling skeptically, as she took
up her crocheting again and sent the hook in and out with nimble fingers.

“No, ‘m, I won’t,” said Lena blandly. She took a few grains of the popcorn
we pressed upon her, eating them discreetly and taking care not to get her
fingers sticky.

Frances drew her chair up nearer to the visitor. “I thought you were going
to be married, Lena,” she said teasingly. “Did n’t I hear that Nick
Svendsen was rushing you pretty hard?”

Lena looked up with her curiously innocent smile. “He did go with me quite
a while. But his father made a fuss about it and said he would n’t give
Nick any land if he married me, so he’s going to marry Annie Iverson. I
would n’t like to be her; Nick’s awful sullen, and he’ll take it out on
her. He ain’t spoke to his father since he promised.”

Frances laughed. “And how do you feel about it?”

“I don’t want to marry Nick, or any other man,” Lena murmured. “I’ve seen
a good deal of married life, and I don’t care for it. I want to be so I
can help my mother and the children at home, and not have to ask lief of
anybody.”

“That’s right,” said Frances. “And Mrs. Thomas thinks you can learn
dressmaking?”

“Yes, ‘m. I’ve always liked to sew, but I never had much to do with. Mrs.
Thomas makes lovely things for all the town ladies. Did you know Mrs.
Gardener is having a purple velvet made? The velvet came from Omaha. My,
but it’s lovely!” Lena sighed softly and stroked her cashmere folds. “Tony
knows I never did like out-of-door work,” she added.

Mrs. Harling glanced at her. “I expect you’ll learn to sew all right,
Lena, if you’ll only keep your head and not go gadding about to dances all
the time and neglect your work, the way some country girls do.”

“Yes, ‘m. Tiny Soderball is coming to town, too. She’s going to work at
the Boys’ Home Hotel. She’ll see lots of strangers,” Lena added wistfully.

“Too many, like enough,” said Mrs. Harling. “I don’t think a hotel is a
good place for a girl; though I guess Mrs. Gardener keeps an eye on her
waitresses.”

Lena’s candid eyes, that always looked a little sleepy under their long
lashes, kept straying about the cheerful rooms with naïve admiration.
Presently she drew on her cotton gloves. “I guess I must be leaving,” she
said irresolutely.

Frances told her to come again, whenever she was lonesome or wanted advice
about anything. Lena replied that she did n’t believe she would ever get
lonesome in Black Hawk.

She lingered at the kitchen door and begged Ántonia to come and see her
often. “I’ve got a room of my own at Mrs. Thomas’s, with a carpet.”

Tony shuffled uneasily in her cloth slippers. “I’ll come sometime, but
Mrs. Harling don’t like to have me run much,” she said evasively.

“You can do what you please when you go out, can’t you?” Lena asked in a
guarded whisper. “Ain’t you crazy about town, Tony? I don’t care what
anybody says, I’m done with the farm!” She glanced back over her shoulder
toward the dining-room, where Mrs. Harling sat.

When Lena was gone, Frances asked Ántonia why she had n’t been a little
more cordial to her.

“I did n’t know if your mother would like her coming here,” said Ántonia,
looking troubled. “She was kind of talked about, out there.”

“Yes, I know. But mother won’t hold it against her if she behaves well
here. You need n’t say anything about that to the children. I guess Jim
has heard all that gossip?”

When I nodded, she pulled my hair and told me I knew too much, anyhow. We
were good friends, Frances and I.

I ran home to tell grandmother that Lena Lingard had come to town. We were
glad of it, for she had a hard life on the farm.

Lena lived in the Norwegian settlement west of Squaw Creek, and she used
to herd her father’s cattle in the open country between his place and the
Shimerdas’. Whenever we rode over in that direction we saw her out among
her cattle, bareheaded and barefooted, scantily dressed in tattered
clothing, always knitting as she watched her herd. Before I knew Lena, I
thought of her as something wild, that always lived on the prairie,
because I had never seen her under a roof. Her yellow hair was burned to a
ruddy thatch on her head; but her legs and arms, curiously enough, in
spite of constant exposure to the sun, kept a miraculous whiteness which
somehow made her seem more undressed than other girls who went scantily
clad. The first time I stopped to talk to her, I was astonished at her
soft voice and easy, gentle ways. The girls out there usually got rough
and mannish after they went to herding. But Lena asked Jake and me to get
off our horses and stay awhile, and behaved exactly as if she were in a
house and were accustomed to having visitors. She was not embarrassed by
her ragged clothes, and treated us as if we were old acquaintances. Even
then I noticed the unusual color of her eyes—a shade of deep violet—and
their soft, confiding expression.

Chris Lingard was not a very successful farmer, and he had a large family.
Lena was always knitting stockings for little brothers and sisters, and
even the Norwegian women, who disapproved of her, admitted that she was a
good daughter to her mother. As Tony said, she had been talked about. She
was accused of making Ole Benson lose the little sense he had—and that at
an age when she should still have been in pinafores.

Ole lived in a leaky dugout somewhere at the edge of the settlement. He
was fat and lazy and discouraged, and bad luck had become a habit with
him. After he had had every other kind of misfortune, his wife, “Crazy
Mary,” tried to set a neighbor’s barn on fire, and was sent to the asylum
at Lincoln. She was kept there for a few months, then escaped and walked
all the way home, nearly two hundred miles, traveling by night and hiding
in barns and haystacks by day. When she got back to the Norwegian
settlement, her poor feet were as hard as hoofs. She promised to be good,
and was allowed to stay at home—though every one realized she was as crazy
as ever, and she still ran about barefooted through the snow, telling her
domestic troubles to her neighbors.

Not long after Mary came back from the asylum, I heard a young Dane, who
was helping us to thrash, tell Jake and Otto that Chris Lingard’s oldest
girl had put Ole Benson out of his head, until he had no more sense than
his crazy wife. When Ole was cultivating his corn that summer, he used to
get discouraged in the field, tie up his team, and wander off to wherever
Lena Lingard was herding. There he would sit down on the draw-side and
help her watch her cattle. All the settlement was talking about it. The
Norwegian preacher’s wife went to Lena and told her she ought not to allow
this; she begged Lena to come to church on Sundays. Lena said she had n’t
a dress in the world any less ragged than the one on her back. Then the
minister’s wife went through her old trunks and found some things she had
worn before her marriage.

The next Sunday Lena appeared at church, a little late, with her hair done
up neatly on her head, like a young woman, wearing shoes and stockings,
and the new dress, which she had made over for herself very becomingly.
The congregation stared at her. Until that morning no one—unless it were
Ole—had realized how pretty she was, or that she was growing up. The
swelling lines of her figure had been hidden under the shapeless rags she
wore in the fields. After the last hymn had been sung, and the
congregation was dismissed, Ole slipped out to the hitch-bar and lifted
Lena on her horse. That, in itself, was shocking; a married man was not
expected to do such things. But it was nothing to the scene that followed.
Crazy Mary darted out from the group of women at the church door, and ran
down the road after Lena, shouting horrible threats.

“Look out, you Lena Lingard, look out! I’ll come over with a corn-knife
one day and trim some of that shape off you. Then you won’t sail round so
fine, making eyes at the men! . . .”

The Norwegian women did n’t know where to look. They were formal
housewives, most of them, with a severe sense of decorum. But Lena Lingard
only laughed her lazy, good-natured laugh and rode on, gazing back over
her shoulder at Ole’s infuriated wife.

The time came, however, when Lena did n’t laugh. More than once Crazy Mary
chased her across the prairie and round and round the Shimerdas’
cornfield. Lena never told her father; perhaps she was ashamed; perhaps
she was more afraid of his anger than of the corn-knife. I was at the
Shimerdas’ one afternoon when Lena came bounding through the red grass as
fast as her white legs could carry her. She ran straight into the house
and hid in Ántonia’s feather-bed. Mary was not far behind; she came right
up to the door and made us feel how sharp her blade was, showing us very
graphically just what she meant to do to Lena. Mrs. Shimerda, leaning out
of the window, enjoyed the situation keenly, and was sorry when Ántonia
sent Mary away, mollified by an apronful of bottle-tomatoes. Lena came out
from Tony’s room behind the kitchen, very pink from the heat of the
feathers, but otherwise calm. She begged Ántonia and me to go with her,
and help get her cattle together; they were scattered and might be gorging
themselves in somebody’s cornfield.

“Maybe you lose a steer and learn not to make somethings with your eyes at
married men,” Mrs. Shimerda told her hectoringly.

Lena only smiled her sleepy smile. “I never made anything to him with my
eyes. I can’t help it if he hangs around, and I can’t order him off. It
ain’t my prairie.”

V

AFTER Lena came to Black Hawk I often met her downtown, where she would be
matching sewing silk or buying “findings” for Mrs. Thomas. If I happened
to walk home with her, she told me all about the dresses she was helping
to make, or about what she saw and heard when she was with Tiny Soderball
at the hotel on Saturday nights.

The Boys’ Home was the best hotel on our branch of the Burlington, and all
the commercial travelers in that territory tried to get into Black Hawk
for Sunday. They used to assemble in the parlor after supper on Saturday
nights. Marshall Field’s man, Anson Kirkpatrick, played the piano and sang
all the latest sentimental songs. After Tiny had helped the cook wash the
dishes, she and Lena sat on the other side of the double doors between the
parlor and the dining-room, listening to the music and giggling at the
jokes and stories. Lena often said she hoped I would be a traveling man
when I grew up. They had a gay life of it; nothing to do but ride about on
trains all day and go to theaters when they were in big cities. Behind the
hotel there was an old store building, where the salesmen opened their big
trunks and spread out their samples on the counters. The Black Hawk
merchants went to look at these things and order goods, and Mrs. Thomas,
though she was “retail trade,” was permitted to see them and to “get
ideas.” They were all generous, these traveling men; they gave Tiny
Soderball handkerchiefs and gloves and ribbons and striped stockings, and
so many bottles of perfume and cakes of scented soap that she bestowed
some of them on Lena.

One afternoon in the week before Christmas I came upon Lena and her funny,
square-headed little brother Chris, standing before the drug-store, gazing
in at the wax dolls and blocks and Noah’s arks arranged in the frosty show
window. The boy had come to town with a neighbor to do his Christmas
shopping, for he had money of his own this year. He was only twelve, but
that winter he had got the job of sweeping out the Norwegian church and
making the fire in it every Sunday morning. A cold job it must have been,
too!

We went into Duckford’s dry-goods store, and Chris unwrapped all his
presents and showed them to me—something for each of the six younger than
himself, even a rubber pig for the baby. Lena had given him one of Tiny
Soderball’s bottles of perfume for his mother, and he thought he would get
some handkerchiefs to go with it. They were cheap, and he had n’t much
money left. We found a tableful of handkerchiefs spread out for view at
Duckford’s. Chris wanted those with initial letters in the corner, because
he had never seen any before. He studied them seriously, while Lena looked
over his shoulder, telling him she thought the red letters would hold
their color best. He seemed so perplexed that I thought perhaps he had n’t
enough money, after all. Presently he said gravely,—

“Sister, you know mother’s name is Berthe. I don’t know if I ought to get
B for Berthe, or M for Mother.”

Lena patted his bristly head. “I’d get the B, Chrissy. It will please her
for you to think about her name. Nobody ever calls her by it now.”

That satisfied him. His face cleared at once, and he took three reds and
three blues. When the neighbor came in to say that it was time to start,
Lena wound Chris’s comforter about his neck and turned up his jacket
collar—he had no overcoat—and we watched him climb into the wagon and
start on his long, cold drive. As we walked together up the windy street,
Lena wiped her eyes with the back of her woolen glove. “I get awful
homesick for them, all the same,” she murmured, as if she were answering
some remembered reproach.

VI

WINTER comes down savagely over a little town on the prairie. The wind
that sweeps in from the open country strips away all the leafy screens
that hide one yard from another in summer, and the houses seem to draw
closer together. The roofs, that looked so far away across the green
tree-tops, now stare you in the face, and they are so much uglier than
when their angles were softened by vines and shrubs.

In the morning, when I was fighting my way to school against the wind, I
could n’t see anything but the road in front of me; but in the late
afternoon, when I was coming home, the town looked bleak and desolate to
me. The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify—it was like
the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and
the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs
and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter
song, as if it said: “This is reality, whether you like it or not. All
those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of
green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was
underneath. This is the truth.” It was as if we were being punished for
loving the loveliness of summer.

If I loitered on the playground after school, or went to the post-office
for the mail and lingered to hear the gossip about the cigar-stand, it
would be growing dark by the time I came home. The sun was gone; the
frozen streets stretched long and blue before me; the lights were shining
pale in kitchen windows, and I could smell the suppers cooking as I
passed. Few people were abroad, and each one of them was hurrying toward a
fire. The glowing stoves in the houses were like magnets. When one passed
an old man, one could see nothing of his face but a red nose sticking out
between a frosted beard and a long plush cap. The young men capered along
with their hands in their pockets, and sometimes tried a slide on the icy
sidewalk. The children, in their bright hoods and comforters, never
walked, but always ran from the moment they left their door, beating their
mittens against their sides. When I got as far as the Methodist Church, I
was about halfway home. I can remember how glad I was when there happened
to be a light in the church, and the painted glass window shone out at us
as we came along the frozen street. In the winter bleakness a hunger for
color came over people, like the Laplander’s craving for fats and sugar.
Without knowing why, we used to linger on the sidewalk outside the church
when the lamps were lighted early for choir practice or prayer-meeting,
shivering and talking until our feet were like lumps of ice. The crude
reds and greens and blues of that colored glass held us there.

On winter nights, the lights in the Harlings’ windows drew me like the
painted glass. Inside that warm, roomy house there was color, too. After
supper I used to catch up my cap, stick my hands in my pockets, and dive
through the willow hedge as if witches were after me. Of course, if Mr.
Harling was at home, if his shadow stood out on the blind of the west
room, I did not go in, but turned and walked home by the long way, through
the street, wondering what book I should read as I sat down with the two
old people.

Such disappointments only gave greater zest to the nights when we acted
charades, or had a costume ball in the back parlor, with Sally always
dressed like a boy. Frances taught us to dance that winter, and she said,
from the first lesson, that Ántonia would make the best dancer among us.
On Saturday nights, Mrs. Harling used to play the old operas for
us,—”Martha,” “Norma,” “Rigoletto,”—telling us the story while she played.
Every Saturday night was like a party. The parlor, the back parlor, and
the dining-room were warm and brightly lighted, with comfortable chairs
and sofas, and gay pictures on the walls. One always felt at ease there.
Ántonia brought her sewing and sat with us—she was already beginning to
make pretty clothes for herself. After the long winter evenings on the
prairie, with Ambrosch’s sullen silences and her mother’s complaints, the
Harlings’ house seemed, as she said, “like Heaven” to her. She was never
too tired to make taffy or chocolate cookies for us. If Sally whispered in
her ear, or Charley gave her three winks, Tony would rush into the kitchen
and build a fire in the range on which she had already cooked three meals
that day.

While we sat in the kitchen waiting for the cookies to bake or the taffy
to cool, Nina used to coax Ántonia to tell her stories—about the calf that
broke its leg, or how Yulka saved her little turkeys from drowning in the
freshet, or about old Christmases and weddings in Bohemia. Nina
interpreted the stories about the crêche fancifully, and in spite of our
derision she cherished a belief that Christ was born in Bohemia a short
time before the Shimerdas left that country. We all liked Tony’s stories.
Her voice had a peculiarly engaging quality; it was deep, a little husky,
and one always heard the breath vibrating behind it. Everything she said
seemed to come right out of her heart.

One evening when we were picking out kernels for walnut taffy, Tony told
us a new story.

“Mrs. Harling, did you ever hear about what happened up in the Norwegian
settlement last summer, when I was thrashing there? We were at Iversons’,
and I was driving one of the grain wagons.”

Mrs. Harling came out and sat down among us. “Could you throw the wheat
into the bin yourself, Tony?” She knew what heavy work it was.

“Yes, mam, I did. I could shovel just as fast as that fat Andern boy that
drove the other wagon. One day it was just awful hot. When we got back to
the field from dinner, we took things kind of easy. The men put in the
horses and got the machine going, and Ole Iverson was up on the deck,
cutting bands. I was sitting against a straw stack, trying to get some
shade. My wagon was n’t going out first, and somehow I felt the heat awful
that day. The sun was so hot like it was going to burn the world up. After
a while I see a man coming across the stubble, and when he got close I see
it was a tramp. His toes stuck out of his shoes, and he had n’t shaved for
a long while, and his eyes was awful red and wild, like he had some
sickness. He comes right up and begins to talk like he knows me already.
He says: ‘The ponds in this country is done got so low a man could n’t
drownd himself in one of ’em.’

“I told him nobody wanted to drownd themselves, but if we did n’t have
rain soon we’d have to pump water for the cattle.

“‘Oh, cattle,’ he says, ‘you’ll all take care of your cattle! Ain’t you
got no beer here?’ I told him he’d have to go to the Bohemians for beer;
the Norwegians did n’t have none when they thrashed. ‘My God!’ he says,
‘so it’s Norwegians now, is it? I thought this was Americy.’

“Then he goes up to the machine and yells out to Ole Iverson, ‘Hello,
partner, let me up there. I can cut bands, and I’m tired of trampin’. I
won’t go no farther.’

“I tried to make signs to Ole, ’cause I thought that man was crazy and
might get the machine stopped up. But Ole, he was glad to get down out of
the sun and chaff—it gets down your neck and sticks to you something awful
when it’s hot like that. So Ole jumped down and crawled under one of the
wagons for shade, and the tramp got on the machine. He cut bands all right
for a few minutes, and then, Mrs. Harling, he waved his hand to me and
jumped head-first right into the thrashing machine after the wheat.

“I begun to scream, and the men run to stop the horses, but the belt had
sucked him down, and by the time they got her stopped he was all beat and
cut to pieces. He was wedged in so tight it was a hard job to get him out,
and the machine ain’t never worked right since.”

“Was he clear dead, Tony?” we cried.

“Was he dead? Well, I guess so! There, now, Nina’s all upset. We won’t
talk about it. Don’t you cry, Nina. No old tramp won’t get you while
Tony’s here.”

Mrs. Harling spoke up sternly. “Stop crying, Nina, or I’ll always send you
upstairs when Ántonia tells us about the country. Did they never find out
where he came from, Ántonia?”

“Never, mam. He had n’t been seen nowhere except in a little town they
call Conway. He tried to get beer there, but there was n’t any saloon.
Maybe he came in on a freight, but the brakeman had n’t seen him. They
could n’t find no letters nor nothing on him; nothing but an old penknife
in his pocket and the wishbone of a chicken wrapped up in a piece of
paper, and some poetry.”

“Some poetry?” we exclaimed.

“I remember,” said Frances. “It was ‘The Old Oaken Bucket,’ cut out of a
newspaper and nearly worn out. Ole Iverson brought it into the office and
showed it to me.”

“Now, was n’t that strange, Miss Frances?” Tony asked thoughtfully. “What
would anybody want to kill themselves in summer for? In thrashing time,
too! It’s nice everywhere then.”

“So it is, Ántonia,” said Mrs. Harling heartily. “Maybe I’ll go home and
help you thrash next summer. Is n’t that taffy nearly ready to eat? I’ve
been smelling it a long while.”

There was a basic harmony between Ántonia and her mistress. They had
strong, independent natures, both of them. They knew what they liked, and
were not always trying to imitate other people. They loved children and
animals and music, and rough play and digging in the earth. They liked to
prepare rich, hearty food and to see people eat it; to make up soft white
beds and to see youngsters asleep in them. They ridiculed conceited people
and were quick to help unfortunate ones. Deep down in each of them there
was a kind of hearty joviality, a relish of life, not over-delicate, but
very invigorating. I never tried to define it, but I was distinctly
conscious of it. I could not imagine Ántonia’s living for a week in any
other house in Black Hawk than the Harlings’.

VII

WINTER lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and
shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and
men’s affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.
But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and
pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.

Through January and February I went to the river with the Harlings on
clear nights, and we skated up to the big island and made bonfires on the
frozen sand. But by March the ice was rough and choppy, and the snow on
the river bluffs was gray and mournful-looking. I was tired of school,
tired of winter clothes, of the rutted streets, of the dirty drifts and
the piles of cinders that had lain in the yards so long. There was only
one break in the dreary monotony of that month; when Blind d’Arnault, the
negro pianist, came to town. He gave a concert at the Opera House on
Monday night, and he and his manager spent Saturday and Sunday at our
comfortable hotel. Mrs. Harling had known d’Arnault for years. She told
Ántonia she had better go to see Tiny that Saturday evening, as there
would certainly be music at the Boys’ Home.

Saturday night after supper I ran downtown to the hotel and slipped
quietly into the parlor. The chairs and sofas were already occupied, and
the air smelled pleasantly of cigar smoke. The parlor had once been two
rooms, and the floor was sway-backed where the partition had been cut
away. The wind from without made waves in the long carpet. A coal stove
glowed at either end of the room, and the grand piano in the middle stood
open.

There was an atmosphere of unusual freedom about the house that night, for
Mrs. Gardener had gone to Omaha for a week. Johnnie had been having drinks
with the guests until he was rather absent-minded. It was Mrs. Gardener
who ran the business and looked after everything. Her husband stood at the
desk and welcomed incoming travelers. He was a popular fellow, but no
manager.

Mrs. Gardener was admittedly the best-dressed woman in Black Hawk, drove
the best horse, and had a smart trap and a little white-and-gold sleigh.
She seemed indifferent to her possessions, was not half so solicitous
about them as her friends were. She was tall, dark, severe, with something
Indian-like in the rigid immobility of her face. Her manner was cold, and
she talked little. Guests felt that they were receiving, not conferring, a
favor when they stayed at her house. Even the smartest traveling men were
flattered when Mrs. Gardener stopped to chat with them for a moment. The
patrons of the hotel were divided into two classes; those who had seen
Mrs. Gardener’s diamonds, and those who had not.

When I stole into the parlor Anson Kirkpatrick, Marshall Field’s man, was
at the piano, playing airs from a musical comedy then running in Chicago.
He was a dapper little Irishman, very vain, homely as a monkey, with
friends everywhere, and a sweetheart in every port, like a sailor. I did
not know all the men who were sitting about, but I recognized a furniture
salesman from Kansas City, a drug man, and Willy O’Reilly, who traveled
for a jewelry house and sold musical instruments. The talk was all about
good and bad hotels, actors and actresses and musical prodigies. I learned
that Mrs. Gardener had gone to Omaha to hear Booth and Barrett, who were
to play there next week, and that Mary Anderson was having a great success
in “A Winter’s Tale,” in London.

The door from the office opened, and Johnnie Gardener came in, directing
Blind d’Arnault,—he would never consent to be led. He was a heavy, bulky
mulatto, on short legs, and he came tapping the floor in front of him with
his gold-headed cane. His yellow face was lifted in the light, with a show
of white teeth, all grinning, and his shrunken, papery eyelids lay
motionless over his blind eyes.

“Good evening, gentlemen. No ladies here? Good-evening, gentlemen. We
going to have a little music? Some of you gentlemen going to play for me
this evening?” It was the soft, amiable negro voice, like those I
remembered from early childhood, with the note of docile subservience in
it. He had the negro head, too; almost no head at all; nothing behind the
ears but folds of neck under close-clipped wool. He would have been
repulsive if his face had not been so kindly and happy. It was the
happiest face I had seen since I left Virginia.

He felt his way directly to the piano. The moment he sat down, I noticed
the nervous infirmity of which Mrs. Harling had told me. When he was
sitting, or standing still, he swayed back and forth incessantly, like a
rocking toy. At the piano, he swayed in time to the music, and when he was
not playing, his body kept up this motion, like an empty mill grinding on.
He found the pedals and tried them, ran his yellow hands up and down the
keys a few times, tinkling off scales, then turned to the company.

“She seems all right, gentlemen. Nothing happened to her since the last
time I was here. Mrs. Gardener, she always has this piano tuned up before
I come. Now, gentlemen, I expect you’ve all got grand voices. Seems like
we might have some good old plantation songs to-night.”

The men gathered round him, as he began to play “My Old Kentucky Home.”
They sang one negro melody after another, while the mulatto sat rocking
himself, his head thrown back, his yellow face lifted, its shriveled
eyelids never fluttering.

He was born in the Far South, on the d’Arnault plantation, where the
spirit if not the fact of slavery persisted. When he was three weeks old
he had an illness which left him totally blind. As soon as he was old
enough to sit up alone and toddle about, another affliction, the nervous
motion of his body, became apparent. His mother, a buxom young negro wench
who was laundress for the d’Arnaults, concluded that her blind baby was
“not right” in his head, and she was ashamed of him. She loved him
devotedly, but he was so ugly, with his sunken eyes and his “fidgets,”
that she hid him away from people. All the dainties she brought down from
the “Big House” were for the blind child, and she beat and cuffed her
other children whenever she found them teasing him or trying to get his
chicken-bone away from him. He began to talk early, remembered everything
he heard, and his mammy said he “was n’t all wrong.” She named him Samson,
because he was blind, but on the plantation he was known as “yellow
Martha’s simple child.” He was docile and obedient, but when he was six
years old he began to run away from home, always taking the same
direction. He felt his way through the lilacs, along the boxwood hedge, up
to the south wing of the “Big House,” where Miss Nellie d’Arnault
practiced the piano every morning. This angered his mother more than
anything else he could have done; she was so ashamed of his ugliness that
she could n’t bear to have white folks see him. Whenever she caught him
slipping away from the cabin, she whipped him unmercifully, and told him
what dreadful things old Mr. d’Arnault would do to him if he ever found
him near the “Big House.” But the next time Samson had a chance, he ran
away again. If Miss d’Arnault stopped practicing for a moment and went
toward the window, she saw this hideous little pickaninny, dressed in an
old piece of sacking, standing in the open space between the hollyhock
rows, his body rocking automatically, his blind face lifted to the sun and
wearing an expression of idiotic rapture. Often she was tempted to tell
Martha that the child must be kept at home, but somehow the memory of his
foolish, happy face deterred her. She remembered that his sense of hearing
was nearly all he had,—though it did not occur to her that he might have
more of it than other children.

One day Samson was standing thus while Miss Nellie was playing her lesson
to her music-master. The windows were open. He heard them get up from the
piano, talk a little while, and then leave the room. He heard the door
close after them. He crept up to the front windows and stuck his head in:
there was no one there. He could always detect the presence of any one in
a room. He put one foot over the window sill and straddled it. His mother
had told him over and over how his master would give him to the big
mastiff if he ever found him “meddling.” Samson had got too near the
mastiff’s kennel once, and had felt his terrible breath in his face. He
thought about that, but he pulled in his other foot.

Through the dark he found his way to the Thing, to its mouth. He touched
it softly, and it answered softly, kindly. He shivered and stood still.
Then he began to feel it all over, ran his finger tips along the slippery
sides, embraced the carved legs, tried to get some conception of its shape
and size, of the space it occupied in primeval night. It was cold and
hard, and like nothing else in his black universe. He went back to its
mouth, began at one end of the keyboard and felt his way down into the
mellow thunder, as far as he could go. He seemed to know that it must be
done with the fingers, not with the fists or the feet. He approached this
highly artificial instrument through a mere instinct, and coupled himself
to it, as if he knew it was to piece him out and make a whole creature of
him. After he had tried over all the sounds, he began to finger out
passages from things Miss Nellie had been practicing, passages that were
already his, that lay under the bones of his pinched, conical little
skull, definite as animal desires. The door opened; Miss Nellie and her
music-master stood behind it, but blind Samson, who was so sensitive to
presences, did not know they were there. He was feeling out the pattern
that lay all ready-made on the big and little keys. When he paused for a
moment, because the sound was wrong and he wanted another, Miss Nellie
spoke softly. He whirled about in a spasm of terror, leaped forward in the
dark, struck his head on the open window, and fell screaming and bleeding
to the floor. He had what his mother called a fit. The doctor came and
gave him opium.

When Samson was well again, his young mistress led him back to the piano.
Several teachers experimented with him. They found he had absolute pitch,
and a remarkable memory. As a very young child he could repeat, after a
fashion, any composition that was played for him. No matter how many wrong
notes he struck, he never lost the intention of a passage, he brought the
substance of it across by irregular and astonishing means. He wore his
teachers out. He could never learn like other people, never acquired any
finish. He was always a negro prodigy who played barbarously and
wonderfully. As piano playing, it was perhaps abominable, but as music it
was something real, vitalized by a sense of rhythm that was stronger than
his other physical senses,—that not only filled his dark mind, but worried
his body incessantly. To hear him, to watch him, was to see a negro
enjoying himself as only a negro can. It was as if all the agreeable
sensations possible to creatures of flesh and blood were heaped up on
those black and white keys, and he were gloating over them and trickling
them through his yellow fingers.

In the middle of a crashing waltz d’Arnault suddenly began to play softly,
and, turning to one of the men who stood behind him, whispered, “Somebody
dancing in there.” He jerked his bullet head toward the dining-room. “I
hear little feet,—girls, I ‘spect.”

Anson Kirkpatrick mounted a chair and peeped over the transom. Springing
down, he wrenched open the doors and ran out into the dining-room. Tiny
and Lena, Ántonia and Mary Dusak, were waltzing in the middle of the
floor. They separated and fled toward the kitchen, giggling.

Kirkpatrick caught Tiny by the elbows. “What’s the matter with you girls?
Dancing out here by yourselves, when there’s a roomful of lonesome men on
the other side of the partition! Introduce me to your friends, Tiny.”

The girls, still laughing, were trying to escape. Tiny looked alarmed.
“Mrs. Gardener would n’t like it,” she protested. “She’d be awful mad if
you was to come out here and dance with us.”

“Mrs. Gardener’s in Omaha, girl. Now, you’re Lena, are you?—and you’re
Tony and you’re Mary. Have I got you all straight?”

O’Reilly and the others began to pile the chairs on the tables. Johnnie
Gardener ran in from the office.

“Easy, boys, easy!” he entreated them. “You’ll wake the cook, and there’ll
be the devil to pay for me. She won’t hear the music, but she’ll be down
the minute anything’s moved in the dining-room.”

“Oh, what do you care, Johnnie? Fire the cook and wire Molly to bring
another. Come along, nobody’ll tell tales.”

Johnnie shook his head. “‘S a fact, boys,” he said confidentially. “If I
take a drink in Black Hawk, Molly knows it in Omaha!”

His guests laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. “Oh, we’ll make it all
right with Molly. Get your back up, Johnnie.”

Molly was Mrs. Gardener’s name, of course. “Molly Bawn” was painted in
large blue letters on the glossy white side of the hotel bus, and “Molly”
was engraved inside Johnnie’s ring and on his watch-case—doubtless on his
heart, too. He was an affectionate little man, and he thought his wife a
wonderful woman; he knew that without her he would hardly be more than a
clerk in some other man’s hotel.

At a word from Kirkpatrick, d’Arnault spread himself out over the piano,
and began to draw the dance music out of it, while the perspiration shone
on his short wool and on his uplifted face. He looked like some glistening
African god of pleasure, full of strong, savage blood. Whenever the
dancers paused to change partners or to catch breath, he would boom out
softly, “Who’s that goin’ back on me? One of these city gentlemen, I bet!
Now, you girls, you ain’t goin’ to let that floor get cold?”

Ántonia seemed frightened at first, and kept looking questioningly at Lena
and Tiny over Willy O’Reilly’s shoulder. Tiny Soderball was trim and
slender, with lively little feet and pretty ankles—she wore her dresses
very short. She was quicker in speech, lighter in movement and manner than
the other girls. Mary Dusak was broad and brown of countenance, slightly
marked by smallpox, but handsome for all that. She had beautiful chestnut
hair, coils of it; her forehead was low and smooth, and her commanding
dark eyes regarded the world indifferently and fearlessly. She looked bold
and resourceful and unscrupulous, and she was all of these. They were
handsome girls, had the fresh color of their country up-bringing, and in
their eyes that brilliancy which is called,—by no metaphor, alas!—”the
light of youth.”

D’Arnault played until his manager came and shut the piano. Before he left
us, he showed us his gold watch which struck the hours, and a topaz ring,
given him by some Russian nobleman who delighted in negro melodies, and
had heard d’Arnault play in New Orleans. At last he tapped his way
upstairs, after bowing to everybody, docile and happy. I walked home with
Ántonia. We were so excited that we dreaded to go to bed. We lingered a
long while at the Harlings’ gate, whispering in the cold until the
restlessness was slowly chilled out of us.

VIII

THE Harling children and I were never happier, never felt more contented
and secure, than in the weeks of spring which broke that long winter. We
were out all day in the thin sunshine, helping Mrs. Harling and Tony break
the ground and plant the garden, dig around the orchard trees, tie up
vines and clip the hedges. Every morning, before I was up, I could hear
Tony singing in the garden rows. After the apple and cherry trees broke
into bloom, we ran about under them, hunting for the new nests the birds
were building, throwing clods at each other, and playing hide-and-seek
with Nina. Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer
every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can’t stand still, not
even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether
they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.

It must have been in June, for Mrs. Harling and Ántonia were preserving
cherries, when I stopped one morning to tell them that a dancing pavilion
had come to town. I had seen two drays hauling the canvas and painted
poles up from the depot.

That afternoon three cheerful-looking Italians strolled about Black Hawk,
looking at everything, and with them was a dark, stout woman who wore a
long gold watch chain about her neck and carried a black lace parasol.
They seemed especially interested in children and vacant lots. When I
overtook them and stopped to say a word, I found them affable and
confiding. They told me they worked in Kansas City in the winter, and in
summer they went out among the farming towns with their tent and taught
dancing. When business fell off in one place, they moved on to another.

The dancing pavilion was put up near the Danish laundry, on a vacant lot
surrounded by tall, arched cottonwood trees. It was very much like a
merry-go-round tent, with open sides and gay flags flying from the poles.
Before the week was over, all the ambitious mothers were sending their
children to the afternoon dancing class. At three o’clock one met little
girls in white dresses and little boys in the round-collared shirts of the
time, hurrying along the sidewalk on their way to the tent. Mrs. Vanni
received them at the entrance, always dressed in lavender with a great
deal of black lace, her important watch chain lying on her bosom. She wore
her hair on the top of her head, built up in a black tower, with red coral
combs. When she smiled, she showed two rows of strong, crooked yellow
teeth. She taught the little children herself, and her husband, the
harpist, taught the older ones.

Often the mothers brought their fancy-work and sat on the shady side of
the tent during the lesson. The popcorn man wheeled his glass wagon under
the big cottonwood by the door, and lounged in the sun, sure of a good
trade when the dancing was over. Mr. Jensen, the Danish laundryman, used
to bring a chair from his porch and sit out in the grass plot. Some ragged
little boys from the depot sold pop and iced lemonade under a white
umbrella at the corner, and made faces at the spruce youngsters who came
to dance. That vacant lot soon became the most cheerful place in town.
Even on the hottest afternoons the cottonwoods made a rustling shade, and
the air smelled of popcorn and melted butter, and Bouncing Bets wilting in
the sun. Those hardy flowers had run away from the laundryman’s garden,
and the grass in the middle of the lot was pink with them.

The Vannis kept exemplary order, and closed every evening at the hour
suggested by the City Council. When Mrs. Vanni gave the signal, and the
harp struck up “Home, Sweet Home,” all Black Hawk knew it was ten o’clock.
You could set your watch by that tune as confidently as by the Round House
whistle.

At last there was something to do in those long, empty summer evenings,
when the married people sat like images on their front porches, and the
boys and girls tramped and tramped the board sidewalks—northward to the
edge of the open prairie, south to the depot, then back again to the
post-office, the ice-cream parlor, the butcher shop. Now there was a place
where the girls could wear their new dresses, and where one could laugh
aloud without being reproved by the ensuing silence. That silence seemed
to ooze out of the ground, to hang under the foliage of the black maple
trees with the bats and shadows. Now it was broken by light-hearted
sounds. First the deep purring of Mr. Vanni’s harp came in silvery ripples
through the blackness of the dusty-smelling night; then the violins fell
in—one of them was almost like a flute. They called so archly, so
seductively, that our feet hurried toward the tent of themselves. Why had
n’t we had a tent before?

Dancing became popular now, just as roller skating had been the summer
before. The Progressive Euchre Club arranged with the Vannis for the
exclusive use of the floor on Tuesday and Friday nights. At other times
any one could dance who paid his money and was orderly; the railroad men,
the Round House mechanics, the delivery boys, the iceman, the farmhands
who lived near enough to ride into town after their day’s work was over.

I never missed a Saturday night dance. The tent was open until midnight
then. The country boys came in from farms eight and ten miles away, and
all the country girls were on the floor,—Ántonia and Lena and Tiny, and
the Danish laundry girls and their friends. I was not the only boy who
found these dances gayer than the others. The young men who belonged to
the Progressive Euchre Club used to drop in late and risk a tiff with
their sweethearts and general condemnation for a waltz with “the hired
girls.”

IX

THERE was a curious social situation in Black Hawk. All the young men felt
the attraction of the fine, well-set-up country girls who had come to town
to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father struggle
out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of the family
to go to school.

Those girls had grown up in the first bitter-hard times, and had got
little schooling themselves. But the younger brothers and sisters, for
whom they made such sacrifices and who have had “advantages,” never seem
to me, when I meet them now, half as interesting or as well educated. The
older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from
life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all,
like Ántonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender
age from an old country to a new. I can remember a score of these country
girls who were in service in Black Hawk during the few years I lived
there, and I can remember something unusual and engaging about each of
them. Physically they were almost a race apart, and out-of-door work had
given them a vigor which, when they got over their first shyness on coming
to town, developed into a positive carriage and freedom of movement, and
made them conspicuous among Black Hawk women.

That was before the day of High-School athletics. Girls who had to walk
more than half a mile to school were pitied. There was not a tennis court
in the town; physical exercise was thought rather inelegant for the
daughters of well-to-do families. Some of the High-School girls were jolly
and pretty, but they stayed indoors in winter because of the cold, and in
summer because of the heat. When one danced with them their bodies never
moved inside their clothes; their muscles seemed to ask but one thing—not
to be disturbed. I remember those girls merely as faces in the schoolroom,
gay and rosy, or listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders, like
cherubs, by the ink-smeared tops of the high desks that were surely put
there to make us round-shouldered and hollow-chested.

The daughters of Black Hawk merchants had a confident, uninquiring belief
that they were “refined,” and that the country girls, who “worked out,”
were not. The American farmers in our county were quite as hard-pressed as
their neighbors from other countries. All alike had come to Nebraska with
little capital and no knowledge of the soil they must subdue. All had
borrowed money on their land. But no matter in what straits the
Pennsylvanian or Virginian found himself, he would not let his daughters
go out into service. Unless his girls could teach a country school, they
sat at home in poverty. The Bohemian and Scandinavian girls could not get
positions as teachers, because they had had no opportunity to learn the
language. Determined to help in the struggle to clear the homestead from
debt, they had no alternative but to go into service. Some of them, after
they came to town, remained as serious and as discreet in behavior as they
had been when they ploughed and herded on their father’s farm. Others,
like the three Bohemian Marys, tried to make up for the years of youth
they had lost. But every one of them did what she had set out to do, and
sent home those hard-earned dollars. The girls I knew were always helping
to pay for ploughs and reapers, brood-sows, or steers to fatten.

One result of this family solidarity was that the foreign farmers in our
county were the first to become prosperous. After the fathers were out of
debt, the daughters married the sons of neighbors,—usually of like
nationality,—and the girls who once worked in Black Hawk kitchens are
to-day managing big farms and fine families of their own; their children
are better off than the children of the town women they used to serve.

I thought the attitude of the town people toward these girls very stupid.
If I told my schoolmates that Lena Lingard’s grandfather was a clergyman,
and much respected in Norway, they looked at me blankly. What did it
matter? All foreigners were ignorant people who could n’t speak English.
There was not a man in Black Hawk who had the intelligence or cultivation,
much less the personal distinction, of Ántonia’s father. Yet people saw no
difference between her and the three Marys; they were all Bohemians, all
“hired girls.”

I always knew I should live long enough to see my country girls come into
their own, and I have. To-day the best that a harassed Black Hawk merchant
can hope for is to sell provisions and farm machinery and automobiles to
the rich farms where that first crop of stalwart Bohemian and Scandinavian
girls are now the mistresses.

The Black Hawk boys looked forward to marrying Black Hawk girls, and
living in a brand-new little house with best chairs that must not be sat
upon, and hand-painted china that must not be used. But sometimes a young
fellow would look up from his ledger, or out through the grating of his
father’s bank, and let his eyes follow Lena Lingard, as she passed the
window with her slow, undulating walk, or Tiny Soderball, tripping by in
her short skirt and striped stockings.

The country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their
beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background. But anxious
mothers need have felt no alarm. They mistook the mettle of their sons.
The respect for respectability was stronger than any desire in Black Hawk
youth.

Our young man of position was like the son of a royal house; the boy who
swept out his office or drove his delivery wagon might frolic with the
jolly country girls, but he himself must sit all evening in a plush parlor
where conversation dragged so perceptibly that the father often came in
and made blundering efforts to warm up the atmosphere. On his way home
from his dull call, he would perhaps meet Tony and Lena, coming along the
sidewalk whispering to each other, or the three Bohemian Marys in their
long plush coats and caps, comporting themselves with a dignity that only
made their eventful histories the more piquant. If he went to the hotel to
see a traveling man on business, there was Tiny, arching her shoulders at
him like a kitten. If he went into the laundry to get his collars, there
were the four Danish girls, smiling up from their ironing-boards, with
their white throats and their pink cheeks.

The three Marys were the heroines of a cycle of scandalous stories, which
the old men were fond of relating as they sat about the cigar-stand in the
drug-store. Mary Dusak had been housekeeper for a bachelor rancher from
Boston, and after several years in his service she was forced to retire
from the world for a short time. Later she came back to town to take the
place of her friend, Mary Svoboda, who was similarly embarrassed. The
three Marys were considered as dangerous as high explosives to have about
the kitchen, yet they were such good cooks and such admirable housekeepers
that they never had to look for a place.

The Vannis’ tent brought the town boys and the country girls together on
neutral ground. Sylvester Lovett, who was cashier in his father’s bank,
always found his way to the tent on Saturday night. He took all the dances
Lena Lingard would give him, and even grew bold enough to walk home with
her. If his sisters or their friends happened to be among the onlookers on
“popular nights,” Sylvester stood back in the shadow under the cottonwood
trees, smoking and watching Lena with a harassed expression. Several times
I stumbled upon him there in the dark, and I felt rather sorry for him. He
reminded me of Ole Benson, who used to sit on the draw-side and watch Lena
herd her cattle. Later in the summer, when Lena went home for a week to
visit her mother, I heard from Ántonia that young Lovett drove all the way
out there to see her, and took her buggy-riding. In my ingenuousness I
hoped that Sylvester would marry Lena, and thus give all the country girls
a better position in the town.

Sylvester dallied about Lena until he began to make mistakes in his work;
had to stay at the bank until after dark to make his books balance. He was
daft about her, and every one knew it. To escape from his predicament he
ran away with a widow six years older than himself, who owned a
half-section. This remedy worked, apparently. He never looked at Lena
again, nor lifted his eyes as he ceremoniously tipped his hat when he
happened to meet her on the sidewalk.

So that was what they were like, I thought, these white-handed,
high-collared clerks and bookkeepers! I used to glare at young Lovett from
a distance and only wished I had some way of showing my contempt for him.

X

IT was at the Vannis’ tent that Ántonia was discovered. Hitherto she had
been looked upon more as a ward of the Harlings than as one of the “hired
girls.” She had lived in their house and yard and garden; her thoughts
never seemed to stray outside that little kingdom. But after the tent came
to town she began to go about with Tiny and Lena and their friends. The
Vannis often said that Ántonia was the best dancer of them all. I
sometimes heard murmurs in the crowd outside the pavilion that Mrs.
Harling would soon have her hands full with that girl. The young men began
to joke with each other about “the Harlings’ Tony” as they did about “the
Marshalls’ Anna” or “the Gardeners’ Tiny.”

Ántonia talked and thought of nothing but the tent. She hummed the dance
tunes all day. When supper was late, she hurried with her dishes, dropped
and smashed them in her excitement. At the first call of the music, she
became irresponsible. If she had n’t time to dress, she merely flung off
her apron and shot out of the kitchen door. Sometimes I went with her; the
moment the lighted tent came into view she would break into a run, like a
boy. There were always partners waiting for her; she began to dance before
she got her breath.

Ántonia’s success at the tent had its consequences. The iceman lingered
too long now, when he came into the covered porch to fill the
refrigerator. The delivery boys hung about the kitchen when they brought
the groceries. Young farmers who were in town for Saturday came tramping
through the yard to the back door to engage dances, or to invite Tony to
parties and picnics. Lena and Norwegian Anna dropped in to help her with
her work, so that she could get away early. The boys who brought her home
after the dances sometimes laughed at the back gate and wakened Mr.
Harling from his first sleep. A crisis was inevitable.

One Saturday night Mr. Harling had gone down to the cellar for beer. As he
came up the stairs in the dark, he heard scuffling on the back porch, and
then the sound of a vigorous slap. He looked out through the side door in
time to see a pair of long legs vaulting over the picket fence. Ántonia
was standing there, angry and excited. Young Harry Paine, who was to marry
his employer’s daughter on Monday, had come to the tent with a crowd of
friends and danced all evening. Afterward, he begged Ántonia to let him
walk home with her. She said she supposed he was a nice young man, as he
was one of Miss Frances’s friends, and she did n’t mind. On the back porch
he tried to kiss her, and when she protested,—because he was going to be
married on Monday,—he caught her and kissed her until she got one hand
free and slapped him.

Mr. Harling put his beer bottles down on the table. “This is what I’ve
been expecting, Ántonia. You’ve been going with girls who have a
reputation for being free and easy, and now you’ve got the same
reputation. I won’t have this and that fellow tramping about my back yard
all the time. This is the end of it, to-night. It stops, short. You can
quit going to these dances, or you can hunt another place. Think it over.”

The next morning when Mrs. Harling and Frances tried to reason with
Ántonia, they found her agitated but determined. “Stop going to the tent?”
she panted. “I would n’t think of it for a minute! My own father could n’t
make me stop! Mr. Harling ain’t my boss outside my work. I won’t give up
my friends, either. The boys I go with are nice fellows. I thought Mr.
Paine was all right, too, because he used to come here. I guess I gave him
a red face for his wedding, all right!” she blazed out indignantly.

“You’ll have to do one thing or the other, Ántonia,” Mrs. Harling told her
decidedly. “I can’t go back on what Mr. Harling has said. This is his
house.”

“Then I’ll just leave, Mrs. Harling. Lena’s been wanting me to get a place
closer to her for a long while. Mary Svoboda’s going away from the
Cutters’ to work at the hotel, and I can have her place.”

Mrs. Harling rose from her chair. “Ántonia, if you go to the Cutters to
work, you cannot come back to this house again. You know what that man is.
It will be the ruin of you.”

Tony snatched up the tea-kettle and began to pour boiling water over the
glasses, laughing excitedly. “Oh, I can take care of myself! I’m a lot
stronger than Cutter is. They pay four dollars there, and there’s no
children. The work’s nothing; I can have every evening, and be out a lot
in the afternoons.”

“I thought you liked children. Tony, what’s come over you?”

“I don’t know, something has.” Ántonia tossed her head and set her jaw. “A
girl like me has got to take her good times when she can. Maybe there
won’t be any tent next year. I guess I want to have my fling, like the
other girls.”

Mrs. Harling gave a short, harsh laugh. “If you go to work for the
Cutters, you’re likely to have a fling that you won’t get up from in a
hurry.”

Frances said, when she told grandmother and me about this scene, that
every pan and plate and cup on the shelves trembled when her mother walked
out of the kitchen. Mrs. Harling declared bitterly that she wished she had
never let herself get fond of Ántonia.

XI

WICK CUTTER was the money-lender who had fleeced poor Russian Peter. When
a farmer once got into the habit of going to Cutter, it was like gambling
or the lottery; in an hour of discouragement he went back.

Cutter’s first name was Wycliffe, and he liked to talk about his pious
bringing-up. He contributed regularly to the Protestant churches, “for
sentiment’s sake,” as he said with a flourish of the hand. He came from a
town in Iowa where there were a great many Swedes, and could speak a
little Swedish, which gave him a great advantage with the early
Scandinavian settlers.

In every frontier settlement there are men who have come there to escape
restraint. Cutter was one of the “fast set” of Black Hawk business men. He
was an inveterate gambler, though a poor loser. When we saw a light
burning in his office late at night, we knew that a game of poker was
going on. Cutter boasted that he never drank anything stronger than
sherry, and he said he got his start in life by saving the money that
other young men spent for cigars. He was full of moral maxims for boys.
When he came to our house on business, he quoted “Poor Richard’s Almanack”
to me, and told me he was delighted to find a town boy who could milk a
cow. He was particularly affable to grandmother, and whenever they met he
would begin at once to talk about “the good old times” and simple living.
I detested his pink, bald head, and his yellow whiskers, always soft and
glistening. It was said he brushed them every night, as a woman does her
hair. His white teeth looked factory-made. His skin was red and rough, as
if from perpetual sunburn; he often went away to hot springs to take mud
baths. He was notoriously dissolute with women. Two Swedish girls who had
lived in his house were the worse for the experience. One of them he had
taken to Omaha and established in the business for which he had fitted
her. He still visited her.

Cutter lived in a state of perpetual warfare with his wife, and yet,
apparently, they never thought of separating. They dwelt in a fussy,
scroll-work house, painted white and buried in thick evergreens, with a
fussy white fence and barn. Cutter thought he knew a great deal about
horses, and usually had a colt which he was training for the track. On
Sunday mornings one could see him out at the fair grounds, speeding around
the race-course in his trotting-buggy, wearing yellow gloves and a
black-and-white-check traveling cap, his whiskers blowing back in the
breeze. If there were any boys about, Cutter would offer one of them a
quarter to hold the stop-watch, and then drive off, saying he had no
change and would “fix it up next time.” No one could cut his lawn or wash
his buggy to suit him. He was so fastidious and prim about his place that
a boy would go to a good deal of trouble to throw a dead cat into his back
yard, or to dump a sackful of tin cans in his alley. It was a peculiar
combination of old-maidishness and licentiousness that made Cutter seem so
despicable.

He had certainly met his match when he married Mrs. Cutter. She was a
terrifying-looking person; almost a giantess in height, raw-boned, with
iron-gray hair, a face always flushed, and prominent, hysterical eyes.
When she meant to be entertaining and agreeable, she nodded her head
incessantly and snapped her eyes at one. Her teeth were long and curved,
like a horse’s; people said babies always cried if she smiled at them. Her
face had a kind of fascination for me; it was the very color and shape of
anger. There was a gleam of something akin to insanity in her full,
intense eyes. She was formal in manner, and made calls in rustling,
steel-gray brocades and a tall bonnet with bristling aigrettes.

Mrs. Cutter painted china so assiduously that even her washbowls and
pitchers, and her husband’s shaving-mug, were covered with violets and
lilies. Once when Cutter was exhibiting some of his wife’s china to a
caller, he dropped a piece. Mrs. Cutter put her handkerchief to her lips
as if she were going to faint and said grandly: “Mr. Cutter, you have
broken all the Commandments—spare the finger-bowls!”

They quarreled from the moment Cutter came into the house until they went
to bed at night, and their hired girls reported these scenes to the town
at large. Mrs. Cutter had several times cut paragraphs about unfaithful
husbands out of the newspapers and mailed them to Cutter in a disguised
handwriting. Cutter would come home at noon, find the mutilated journal in
the paper-rack, and triumphantly fit the clipping into the space from
which it had been cut. Those two could quarrel all morning about whether
he ought to put on his heavy or his light underwear, and all evening about
whether he had taken cold or not.

The Cutters had major as well as minor subjects for dispute. The chief of
these was the question of inheritance: Mrs. Cutter told her husband it was
plainly his fault they had no children. He insisted that Mrs. Cutter had
purposely remained childless, with the determination to outlive him and to
share his property with her “people,” whom he detested. To this she would
reply that unless he changed his mode of life, she would certainly outlive
him. After listening to her insinuations about his physical soundness,
Cutter would resume his dumb-bell practice for a month, or rise daily at
the hour when his wife most liked to sleep, dress noisily, and drive out
to the track with his trotting-horse.

Once when they had quarreled about household expenses, Mrs. Cutter put on
her brocade and went among their friends soliciting orders for painted
china, saying that Mr. Cutter had compelled her “to live by her brush.”
Cutter was n’t shamed as she had expected; he was delighted!

Cutter often threatened to chop down the cedar trees which half-buried the
house. His wife declared she would leave him if she were stripped of the
“privacy” which she felt these trees afforded her. That was his
opportunity, surely; but he never cut down the trees. The Cutters seemed
to find their relations to each other interesting and stimulating, and
certainly the rest of us found them so. Wick Cutter was different from any
other rascal I have ever known, but I have found Mrs. Cutters all over the
world; sometimes founding new religions, sometimes being forcibly
fed—easily recognizable, even when superficially tamed.

XII

AFTER Ántonia went to live with the Cutters, she seemed to care about
nothing but picnics and parties and having a good time. When she was not
going to a dance, she sewed until midnight. Her new clothes were the
subject of caustic comment. Under Lena’s direction she copied Mrs.
Gardener’s new party dress and Mrs. Smith’s street costume so ingeniously
in cheap materials that those ladies were greatly annoyed, and Mrs.
Cutter, who was jealous of them, was secretly pleased.

Tony wore gloves now, and high-heeled shoes and feathered bonnets, and she
went downtown nearly every afternoon with Tiny and Lena and the Marshalls’
Norwegian Anna. We High-School boys used to linger on the playground at
the afternoon recess to watch them as they came tripping down the hill
along the board sidewalk, two and two. They were growing prettier every
day, but as they passed us, I used to think with pride that Ántonia, like
Snow-White in the fairy tale, was still “fairest of them all.”

Being a Senior now, I got away from school early. Sometimes I overtook the
girls downtown and coaxed them into the ice-cream parlor, where they would
sit chattering and laughing, telling me all the news from the country. I
remember how angry Tiny Soderball made me one afternoon. She declared she
had heard grandmother was going to make a Baptist preacher of me. “I guess
you’ll have to stop dancing and wear a white necktie then. Won’t he look
funny, girls?”

Lena laughed. “You’ll have to hurry up, Jim. If you’re going to be a
preacher, I want you to marry me. You must promise to marry us all, and
then baptize the babies.”

Norwegian Anna, always dignified, looked at her reprovingly.

“Baptists don’t believe in christening babies, do they, Jim?”

I told her I did n’t know what they believed, and did n’t care, and that I
certainly was n’t going to be a preacher.

“That’s too bad,” Tiny simpered. She was in a teasing mood. “You’d make
such a good one. You’re so studious. Maybe you’d like to be a professor.
You used to teach Tony, did n’t you?”

Ántonia broke in. “I’ve set my heart on Jim being a doctor. You’d be good
with sick people, Jim. Your grandmother’s trained you up so nice. My papa
always said you were an awful smart boy.”

I said I was going to be whatever I pleased. “Won’t you be surprised, Miss
Tiny, if I turn out to be a regular devil of a fellow?”

They laughed until a glance from Norwegian Anna checked them; the
High-School Principal had just come into the front part of the shop to buy
bread for supper. Anna knew the whisper was going about that I was a sly
one. People said there must be something queer about a boy who showed no
interest in girls of his own age, but who could be lively enough when he
was with Tony and Lena or the three Marys.

The enthusiasm for the dance, which the Vannis had kindled, did not at
once die out. After the tent left town, the Euchre Club became the Owl
Club, and gave dances in the Masonic Hall once a week. I was invited to
join, but declined. I was moody and restless that winter, and tired of the
people I saw every day. Charley Harling was already at Annapolis, while I
was still sitting in Black Hawk, answering to my name at roll-call every
morning, rising from my desk at the sound of a bell and marching out like
the grammar-school children. Mrs. Harling was a little cool toward me,
because I continued to champion Ántonia. What was there for me to do after
supper? Usually I had learned next day’s lessons by the time I left the
school building, and I could n’t sit still and read forever.

In the evening I used to prowl about, hunting for diversion. There lay the
familiar streets, frozen with snow or liquid with mud. They led to the
houses of good people who were putting the babies to bed, or simply
sitting still before the parlor stove, digesting their supper. Black Hawk
had two saloons. One of them was admitted, even by the church people, to
be as respectable as a saloon could be. Handsome Anton Jelinek, who had
rented his homestead and come to town, was the proprietor. In his saloon
there were long tables where the Bohemian and German farmers could eat the
lunches they brought from home while they drank their beer. Jelinek kept
rye bread on hand, and smoked fish and strong imported cheeses to please
the foreign palate. I liked to drop into his bar-room and listen to the
talk. But one day he overtook me on the street and clapped me on the
shoulder.

“Jim,” he said, “I am good friends with you and I always like to see you.
But you know how the church people think about saloons. Your grandpa has
always treated me fine, and I don’t like to have you come into my place,
because I know he don’t like it, and it puts me in bad with him.”

So I was shut out of that.

One could hang about the drug-store, and listen to the old men who sat
there every evening, talking politics and telling raw stories. One could
go to the cigar factory and chat with the old German who raised canaries
for sale, and look at his stuffed birds. But whatever you began with him,
the talk went back to taxidermy. There was the depot, of course; I often
went down to see the night train come in, and afterward sat awhile with
the disconsolate telegrapher who was always hoping to be transferred to
Omaha or Denver, “where there was some life.” He was sure to bring out his
pictures of actresses and dancers. He got them with cigarette coupons, and
nearly smoked himself to death to possess these desired forms and faces.
For a change, one could talk to the station agent; but he was another
malcontent; spent all his spare time writing letters to officials
requesting a transfer. He wanted to get back to Wyoming where he could go
trout-fishing on Sundays. He used to say “there was nothing in life for
him but trout streams, ever since he’d lost his twins.”

These were the distractions I had to choose from. There were no other
lights burning downtown after nine o’clock. On starlight nights I used to
pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little,
sleeping houses on either side, with their storm-windows and covered back
porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light
wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe.
Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness
some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to
me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save
washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This
guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People’s
speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed.
Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution.
The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice
in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over
the surface of things in the dark. The growing piles of ashes and cinders
in the back yards were the only evidence that the wasteful, consuming
process of life went on at all. On Tuesday nights the Owl Club danced;
then there was a little stir in the streets, and here and there one could
see a lighted window until midnight. But the next night all was dark
again.

After I refused to join “the Owls,” as they were called, I made a bold
resolve to go to the Saturday night dances at Firemen’s Hall. I knew it
would be useless to acquaint my elders with any such plan. Grandfather did
n’t approve of dancing anyway; he would only say that if I wanted to dance
I could go to the Masonic Hall, among “the people we knew.” It was just my
point that I saw altogether too much of the people we knew.

My bedroom was on the ground floor, and as I studied there, I had a stove
in it. I used to retire to my room early on Saturday night, change my
shirt and collar and put on my Sunday coat. I waited until all was quiet
and the old people were asleep, then raised my window, climbed out, and
went softly through the yard. The first time I deceived my grandparents I
felt rather shabby, perhaps even the second time, but I soon ceased to
think about it.

The dance at the Firemen’s Hall was the one thing I looked forward to all
the week. There I met the same people I used to see at the Vannis’ tent.
Sometimes there were Bohemians from Wilber, or German boys who came down
on the afternoon freight from Bismarck. Tony and Lena and Tiny were always
there, and the three Bohemian Marys, and the Danish laundry girls.

The four Danish girls lived with the laundryman and his wife in their
house behind the laundry, with a big garden where the clothes were hung
out to dry. The laundryman was a kind, wise old fellow, who paid his girls
well, looked out for them, and gave them a good home. He told me once that
his own daughter died just as she was getting old enough to help her
mother, and that he had been “trying to make up for it ever since.” On
summer afternoons he used to sit for hours on the sidewalk in front of his
laundry, his newspaper lying on his knee, watching his girls through the
big open window while they ironed and talked in Danish. The clouds of
white dust that blew up the street, the gusts of hot wind that withered
his vegetable garden, never disturbed his calm. His droll expression
seemed to say that he had found the secret of contentment. Morning and
evening he drove about in his spring wagon, distributing freshly ironed
clothes, and collecting bags of linen that cried out for his suds and
sunny drying-lines. His girls never looked so pretty at the dances as they
did standing by the ironing-board, or over the tubs, washing the fine
pieces, their white arms and throats bare, their cheeks bright as the
brightest wild roses, their gold hair moist with the steam or the heat and
curling in little damp spirals about their ears. They had not learned much
English, and were not so ambitious as Tony or Lena; but they were kind,
simple girls and they were always happy. When one danced with them, one
smelled their clean, freshly ironed clothes that had been put away with
rosemary leaves from Mr. Jensen’s garden.

There were never girls enough to go round at those dances, but every one
wanted a turn with Tony and Lena. Lena moved without exertion, rather
indolently, and her hand often accented the rhythm softly on her partner’s
shoulder. She smiled if one spoke to her, but seldom answered. The music
seemed to put her into a soft, waking dream, and her violet-colored eyes
looked sleepily and confidingly at one from under her long lashes. When
she sighed she exhaled a heavy perfume of sachet powder. To dance “Home,
Sweet Home,” with Lena was like coming in with the tide. She danced every
dance like a waltz, and it was always the same waltz—the waltz of coming
home to something, of inevitable, fated return. After a while one got
restless under it, as one does under the heat of a soft, sultry summer
day.

When you spun out into the floor with Tony, you did n’t return to
anything. You set out every time upon a new adventure. I liked to
schottische with her; she had so much spring and variety, and was always
putting in new steps and slides. She taught me to dance against and around
the hard-and-fast beat of the music. If, instead of going to the end of
the railroad, old Mr. Shimerda had stayed in New York and picked up a
living with his fiddle, how different Ántonia’s life might have been!

Ántonia often went to the dances with Larry Donovan, a passenger conductor
who was a kind of professional ladies’ man, as we said. I remember how
admiringly all the boys looked at her the night she first wore her
velveteen dress, made like Mrs. Gardener’s black velvet. She was lovely to
see, with her eyes shining, and her lips always a little parted when she
danced. That constant, dark color in her cheeks never changed.

One evening when Donovan was out on his run, Ántonia came to the hall with
Norwegian Anna and her young man, and that night I took her home. When we
were in the Cutter’s yard, sheltered by the evergreens, I told her she
must kiss me good-night.

“Why, sure, Jim.” A moment later she drew her face away and whispered
indignantly, “Why, Jim! You know you ain’t right to kiss me like that.
I’ll tell your grandmother on you!”

“Lena Lingard lets me kiss her,” I retorted, “and I’m not half as fond of
her as I am of you.”

“Lena does?” Tony gasped. “If she’s up to any of her nonsense with you,
I’ll scratch her eyes out!” She took my arm again and we walked out of the
gate and up and down the sidewalk. “Now, don’t you go and be a fool like
some of these town boys. You’re not going to sit around here and whittle
store-boxes and tell stories all your life. You are going away to school
and make something of yourself. I’m just awful proud of you. You won’t go
and get mixed up with the Swedes, will you?”

“I don’t care anything about any of them but you,” I said. “And you’ll
always treat me like a kid, I suppose.”

She laughed and threw her arms around me. “I expect I will, but you’re a
kid I’m awful fond of, anyhow! You can like me all you want to, but if I
see you hanging round with Lena much, I’ll go to your grandmother, as sure
as your name’s Jim Burden! Lena’s all right, only—well, you know yourself
she’s soft that way. She can’t help it. It’s natural to her.”

If she was proud of me, I was so proud of her that I carried my head high
as I emerged from the dark cedars and shut the Cutters’ gate softly behind
me. Her warm, sweet face, her kind arms, and the true heart in her; she
was, oh, she was still my Ántonia! I looked with contempt at the dark,
silent little houses about me as I walked home, and thought of the stupid
young men who were asleep in some of them. I knew where the real women
were, though I was only a boy; and I would not be afraid of them, either!

I hated to enter the still house when I went home from the dances, and it
was long before I could get to sleep. Toward morning I used to have
pleasant dreams: sometimes Tony and I were out in the country, sliding
down straw-stacks as we used to do; climbing up the yellow mountains over
and over, and slipping down the smooth sides into soft piles of chaff.

One dream I dreamed a great many times, and it was always the same. I was
in a harvest-field full of shocks, and I was lying against one of them.
Lena Lingard came across the stubble barefoot, in a short skirt, with a
curved reaping-hook in her hand, and she was flushed like the dawn, with a
kind of luminous rosiness all about her. She sat down beside me, turned to
me with a soft sigh and said, “Now they are all gone, and I can kiss you
as much as I like.”

I used to wish I could have this flattering dream about Ántonia, but I
never did.

XIII

I NOTICED one afternoon that grandmother had been crying. Her feet seemed
to drag as she moved about the house, and I got up from the table where I
was studying and went to her, asking if she did n’t feel well, and if I
could n’t help her with her work.

“No, thank you, Jim. I’m troubled, but I guess I’m well enough. Getting a
little rusty in the bones, maybe,” she added bitterly.

I stood hesitating. “What are you fretting about, grandmother? Has
grandfather lost any money?”

“No, it ain’t money. I wish it was. But I’ve heard things. You must ‘a’
known it would come back to me sometime.” She dropped into a chair, and
covering her face with her apron, began to cry. “Jim,” she said, “I was
never one that claimed old folks could bring up their grandchildren. But
it came about so; there was n’t any other way for you, it seemed like.”

I put my arms around her. I could n’t bear to see her cry.

“What is it, grandmother? Is it the Firemen’s dances?”

She nodded.

“I’m sorry I sneaked off like that. But there’s nothing wrong about the
dances, and I have n’t done anything wrong. I like all those country
girls, and I like to dance with them. That’s all there is to it.”

“But it ain’t right to deceive us, son, and it brings blame on us. People
say you are growing up to be a bad boy, and that ain’t just to us.”

“I don’t care what they say about me, but if it hurts you, that settles
it. I won’t go to the Firemen’s Hall again.”

I kept my promise, of course, but I found the spring months dull enough. I
sat at home with the old people in the evenings now, reading Latin that
was not in our High-School course. I had made up my mind to do a lot of
college requirement work in the summer, and to enter the freshman class at
the University without conditions in the fall. I wanted to get away as
soon as possible.

Disapprobation hurt me, I found,—even that of people whom I did not
admire. As the spring came on, I grew more and more lonely, and fell back
on the telegrapher and the cigar-maker and his canaries for companionship.
I remember I took a melancholy pleasure in hanging a May-basket for Nina
Harling that spring. I bought the flowers from an old German woman who
always had more window plants than any one else, and spent an afternoon
trimming a little work-basket. When dusk came on, and the new moon hung in
the sky, I went quietly to the Harlings’ front door with my offering, rang
the bell, and then ran away as was the custom. Through the willow hedge I
could hear Nina’s cries of delight, and I felt comforted.

On those warm, soft spring evenings I often lingered downtown to walk home
with Frances, and talked to her about my plans and about the reading I was
doing. One evening she said she thought Mrs. Harling was not seriously
offended with me.

“Mama is as broad-minded as mothers ever are, I guess. But you know she
was hurt about Ántonia, and she can’t understand why you like to be with
Tiny and Lena better than with the girls of your own set.”

“Can you?” I asked bluntly.

Frances laughed. “Yes, I think I can. You knew them in the country, and
you like to take sides. In some ways you’re older than boys of your age.
It will be all right with mama after you pass your college examinations
and she sees you’re in earnest.”

“If you were a boy,” I persisted, “you would n’t belong to the Owl Club,
either. You’d be just like me.”

She shook her head. “I would and I would n’t. I expect I know the country
girls better than you do. You always put a kind of glamour over them. The
trouble with you, Jim, is that you’re romantic. Mama’s going to your
Commencement. She asked me the other day if I knew what your oration is to
be about. She wants you to do well.”

I thought my oration very good. It stated with fervor a great many things
I had lately discovered. Mrs. Harling came to the Opera House to hear the
Commencement exercises, and I looked at her most of the time while I made
my speech. Her keen, intelligent eyes never left my face. Afterward she
came back to the dressing-room where we stood, with our diplomas in our
hands, walked up to me, and said heartily: “You surprised me, Jim. I did
n’t believe you could do as well as that. You did n’t get that speech out
of books.” Among my graduation presents there was a silk umbrella from
Mrs. Harling, with my name on the handle.

I walked home from the Opera House alone. As I passed the Methodist
Church, I saw three white figures ahead of me, pacing up and down under
the arching maple trees, where the moonlight filtered through the lush
June foliage. They hurried toward me; they were waiting for me—Lena and
Tony and Anna Hansen.

“Oh, Jim, it was splendid!” Tony was breathing hard, as she always did
when her feelings outran her language. “There ain’t a lawyer in Black Hawk
could make a speech like that. I just stopped your grandpa and said so to
him. He won’t tell you, but he told us he was awful surprised himself, did
n’t he, girls?”

Lena sidled up to me and said teasingly: “What made you so solemn? I
thought you were scared. I was sure you’d forget.”

Anna spoke wistfully. “It must make you happy, Jim, to have fine thoughts
like that in your mind all the time, and to have words to put them in. I
always wanted to go to school, you know.”

“Oh, I just sat there and wished my papa could hear you! Jim,”—Ántonia
took hold of my coat lapels,—”there was something in your speech that made
me think so about my papa!”

“I thought about your papa when I wrote my speech, Tony,” I said. “I
dedicated it to him.”

She threw her arms around me, and her dear face was all wet with tears.

I stood watching their white dresses glimmer smaller and smaller down the
sidewalk as they went away. I have had no other success that pulled at my
heartstrings like that one.

XIV

THE day after Commencement I moved my books and desk upstairs, to an empty
room where I should be undisturbed, and I fell to studying in earnest. I
worked off a year’s trigonometry that summer, and began Virgil alone.
Morning after morning I used to pace up and down my sunny little room,
looking off at the distant river bluffs and the roll of the blond pastures
between, scanning the Æneid aloud and committing long passages to memory.
Sometimes in the evening Mrs. Harling called to me as I passed her gate,
and asked me to come in and let her play for me. She was lonely for
Charley, she said, and liked to have a boy about. Whenever my grandparents
had misgivings, and began to wonder whether I was not too young to go off
to college alone, Mrs. Harling took up my cause vigorously. Grandfather
had such respect for her judgment that I knew he would not go against her.

I had only one holiday that summer. It was in July. I met Ántonia downtown
on Saturday afternoon, and learned that she and Tiny and Lena were going
to the river next day with Anna Hansen—the elder was all in bloom now, and
Anna wanted to make elder-blow wine.

“Anna’s to drive us down in the Marshalls’ delivery wagon, and we’ll take
a nice lunch and have a picnic. Just us; nobody else. Could n’t you happen
along, Jim? It would be like old times.”

I considered a moment. “Maybe I can, if I won’t be in the way.”

On Sunday morning I rose early and got out of Black Hawk while the dew was
still heavy on the long meadow grasses. It was the high season for summer
flowers. The pink bee-bush stood tall along the sandy roadsides, and the
cone-flowers and rose mallow grew everywhere. Across the wire fence, in
the long grass, I saw a clump of flaming orange-colored milkweed, rare in
that part of the State. I left the road and went around through a stretch
of pasture that was always cropped short in summer, where the gaillardia
came up year after year and matted over the ground with the deep, velvety
red that is in Bokhara carpets. The country was empty and solitary except
for the larks that Sunday morning, and it seemed to lift itself up to me
and to come very close.

The river was running strong for midsummer; heavy rains to the west of us
had kept it full. I crossed the bridge and went upstream along the wooded
shore to a pleasant dressing-room I knew among the dogwood bushes, all
overgrown with wild grapevines. I began to undress for a swim. The girls
would not be along yet. For the first time it occurred to me that I would
be homesick for that river after I left it. The sandbars, with their clean
white beaches and their little groves of willows and cottonwood seedlings,
were a sort of No Man’s Land, little newly-created worlds that belonged to
the Black Hawk boys. Charley Harling and I had hunted through these woods,
fished from the fallen logs, until I knew every inch of the river shores
and had a friendly feeling for every bar and shallow.

After my swim, while I was playing about indolently in the water, I heard
the sound of hoofs and wheels on the bridge. I struck downstream and
shouted, as the open spring wagon came into view on the middle span. They
stopped the horse, and the two girls in the bottom of the cart stood up,
steadying themselves by the shoulders of the two in front, so that they
could see me better. They were charming up there, huddled together in the
cart and peering down at me like curious deer when they come out of the
thicket to drink. I found bottom near the bridge and stood up, waving to
them.

“How pretty you look!” I called.

“So do you!” they shouted altogether, and broke into peals of laughter.
Anna Hansen shook the reins and they drove on, while I zigzagged back to
my inlet and clambered up behind an overhanging elm. I dried myself in the
sun, and dressed slowly, reluctant to leave that green enclosure where the
sunlight flickered so bright through the grapevine leaves and the
woodpecker hammered away in the crooked elm that trailed out over the
water. As I went along the road back to the bridge I kept picking off
little pieces of scaly chalk from the dried water gullies, and breaking
them up in my hands.

When I came upon the Marshalls’ delivery horse, tied in the shade, the
girls had already taken their baskets and gone down the east road which
wound through the sand and scrub. I could hear them calling to each other.
The elder bushes did not grow back in the shady ravines between the
bluffs, but in the hot, sandy bottoms along the stream, where their roots
were always in moisture and their tops in the sun. The blossoms were
unusually luxuriant and beautiful that summer.

I followed a cattle path through the thick underbrush until I came to a
slope that fell away abruptly to the water’s edge. A great chunk of the
shore had been bitten out by some spring freshet, and the scar was masked
by elder bushes, growing down to the water in flowery terraces. I did not
touch them. I was overcome by content and drowsiness and by the warm
silence about me. There was no sound but the high, sing-song buzz of wild
bees and the sunny gurgle of the water underneath. I peeped over the edge
of the bank to see the little stream that made the noise; it flowed along
perfectly clear over the sand and gravel, cut off from the muddy main
current by a long sandbar. Down there, on the lower shelf of the bank, I
saw Ántonia, seated alone under the pagoda-like elders. She looked up when
she heard me, and smiled, but I saw that she had been crying. I slid down
into the soft sand beside her and asked her what was the matter.

“It makes me homesick, Jimmy, this flower, this smell,” she said softly.
“We have this flower very much at home, in the old country. It always grew
in our yard and my papa had a green bench and a table under the bushes. In
summer, when they were in bloom, he used to sit there with his friend that
played the trombone. When I was little I used to go down there to hear
them talk—beautiful talk, like what I never hear in this country.”

“What did they talk about?” I asked her.

She sighed and shook her head. “Oh, I don’t know! About music, and the
woods, and about God, and when they were young.” She turned to me suddenly
and looked into my eyes. “You think, Jimmy, that maybe my father’s spirit
can go back to those old places?”

I told her about the feeling of her father’s presence I had on that winter
day when my grandparents had gone over to see his dead body and I was left
alone in the house. I said I felt sure then that he was on his way back to
his own country, and that even now, when I passed his grave, I always
thought of him as being among the woods and fields that were so dear to
him.

Ántonia had the most trusting, responsive eyes in the world; love and
credulousness seemed to look out of them with open faces. “Why did n’t you
ever tell me that before? It makes me feel more sure for him.” After a
while she said: “You know, Jim, my father was different from my mother. He
did not have to marry my mother, and all his brothers quarreled with him
because he did. I used to hear the old people at home whisper about it.
They said he could have paid my mother money, and not married her. But he
was older than she was, and he was too kind to treat her like that. He
lived in his mother’s house, and she was a poor girl come in to do the
work. After my father married her, my grandmother never let my mother come
into her house again. When I went to my grandmother’s funeral was the only
time I was ever in my grandmother’s house. Don’t that seem strange?”

While she talked, I lay back in the hot sand and looked up at the blue sky
between the flat bouquets of elder. I could hear the bees humming and
singing, but they stayed up in the sun above the flowers and did not come
down into the shadow of the leaves. Ántonia seemed to me that day exactly
like the little girl who used to come to our house with Mr. Shimerda.

“Some day, Tony, I am going over to your country, and I am going to the
little town where you lived. Do you remember all about it?”

“Jim,” she said earnestly, “if I was put down there in the middle of the
night, I could find my way all over that little town; and along the river
to the next town, where my grandmother lived. My feet remember all the
little paths through the woods, and where the big roots stick out to trip
you. I ain’t never forgot my own country.”

There was a crackling in the branches above us, and Lena Lingard peered
down over the edge of the bank.

“You lazy things!” she cried. “All this elder, and you two lying there!
Did n’t you hear us calling you?” Almost as flushed as she had been in my
dream, she leaned over the edge of the bank and began to demolish our
flowery pagoda. I had never seen her so energetic; she was panting with
zeal, and the perspiration stood in drops on her short, yielding upper
lip. I sprang to my feet and ran up the bank.

It was noon now, and so hot that the dogwoods and scrub-oaks began to turn
up the silvery under-side of their leaves, and all the foliage looked soft
and wilted. I carried the lunch-basket to the top of one of the chalk
bluffs, where even on the calmest days there was always a breeze. The
flat-topped, twisted little oaks threw light shadows on the grass. Below
us we could see the windings of the river, and Black Hawk, grouped among
its trees, and, beyond, the rolling country, swelling gently until it met
the sky. We could recognize familiar farmhouses and windmills. Each of the
girls pointed out to me the direction in which her father’s farm lay, and
told me how many acres were in wheat that year and how many in corn.

“My old folks,” said Tiny Soderball, “have put in twenty acres of rye.
They get it ground at the mill, and it makes nice bread. It seems like my
mother ain’t been so homesick, ever since father’s raised rye flour for
her.”

“It must have been a trial for our mothers,” said Lena, “coming out here
and having to do everything different. My mother had always lived in town.
She says she started behind in farm-work, and never has caught up.”

“Yes, a new country’s hard on the old ones, sometimes,” said Anna
thoughtfully. “My grandmother’s getting feeble now, and her mind wanders.
She’s forgot about this country, and thinks she’s at home in Norway. She
keeps asking mother to take her down to the waterside and the fish market.
She craves fish all the time. Whenever I go home I take her canned salmon
and mackerel.”

“Mercy, it’s hot!” Lena yawned. She was supine under a little oak, resting
after the fury of her elder-hunting, and had taken off the high-heeled
slippers she had been silly enough to wear. “Come here, Jim. You never got
the sand out of your hair.” She began to draw her fingers slowly through
my hair.

Ántonia pushed her away. “You’ll never get it out like that,” she said
sharply. She gave my head a rough touzling and finished me off with
something like a box on the ear. “Lena, you ought n’t to try to wear those
slippers any more. They’re too small for your feet. You’d better give them
to me for Yulka.”

“All right,” said Lena good-naturedly, tucking her white stockings under
her skirt. “You get all Yulka’s things, don’t you? I wish father did n’t
have such bad luck with his farm machinery; then I could buy more things
for my sisters. I’m going to get Mary a new coat this fall, if the sulky
plough’s never paid for!”

Tiny asked her why she did n’t wait until after Christmas, when coats
would be cheaper. “What do you think of poor me?” she added; “with six at
home, younger than I am? And they all think I’m rich, because when I go
back to the country I’m dressed so fine!” She shrugged her shoulders.
“But, you know, my weakness is playthings. I like to buy them playthings
better than what they need.”

“I know how that is,” said Anna. “When we first came here, and I was
little, we were too poor to buy toys. I never got over the loss of a doll
somebody gave me before we left Norway. A boy on the boat broke her, and I
still hate him for it.”

“I guess after you got here you had plenty of live dolls to nurse, like
me!” Lena remarked cynically.

“Yes, the babies came along pretty fast, to be sure. But I never minded. I
was fond of them all. The youngest one, that we did n’t any of us want, is
the one we love best now.”

Lena sighed. “Oh, the babies are all right; if only they don’t come in
winter. Ours nearly always did. I don’t see how mother stood it. I tell
you what girls,” she sat up with sudden energy; “I’m going to get my
mother out of that old sod house where she’s lived so many years. The men
will never do it. Johnnie, that’s my oldest brother, he’s wanting to get
married now, and build a house for his girl instead of his mother. Mrs.
Thomas says she thinks I can move to some other town pretty soon, and go
into business for myself. If I don’t get into business, I’ll maybe marry a
rich gambler.”

“That would be a poor way to get on,” said Anna sarcastically. “I wish I
could teach school, like Selma Kronn. Just think! She’ll be the first
Scandinavian girl to get a position in the High School. We ought to be
proud of her.”

Selma was a studious girl, who had not much tolerance for giddy things
like Tiny and Lena; but they always spoke of her with admiration.

Tiny moved about restlessly, fanning herself with her straw hat. “If I was
smart like her, I’d be at my books day and night. But she was born
smart—and look how her father’s trained her! He was something high up in
the old country.”

“So was my mother’s father,” murmured Lena, “but that’s all the good it
does us! My father’s father was smart, too, but he was wild. He married a
Lapp. I guess that’s what’s the matter with me; they say Lapp blood will
out.”

“A real Lapp, Lena?” I exclaimed. “The kind that wear skins?”

“I don’t know if she wore skins, but she was a Lapp all right, and his
folks felt dreadful about it. He was sent up north on some Government job
he had, and fell in with her. He would marry her.”

“But I thought Lapland women were fat and ugly, and had squint eyes, like
Chinese?” I objected.

“I don’t know, maybe. There must be something mighty taking about the Lapp
girls, though; mother says the Norwegians up north are always afraid their
boys will run after them.”

In the afternoon, when the heat was less oppressive, we had a lively game
of “Pussy Wants a Corner,” on the flat bluff-top, with the little trees
for bases. Lena was Pussy so often that she finally said she would n’t
play any more. We threw ourselves down on the grass, out of breath.

“Jim,” Ántonia said dreamily, “I want you to tell the girls about how the
Spanish first came here, like you and Charley Harling used to talk about.
I’ve tried to tell them, but I leave out so much.”

They sat under a little oak, Tony resting against the trunk and the other
girls leaning against her and each other, and listened to the little I was
able to tell them about Coronado and his search for the Seven Golden
Cities. At school we were taught that he had not got so far north as
Nebraska, but had given up his quest and turned back somewhere in Kansas.
But Charley Harling and I had a strong belief that he had been along this
very river. A farmer in the county north of ours, when he was breaking
sod, had turned up a metal stirrup of fine workmanship, and a sword with a
Spanish inscription on the blade. He lent these relics to Mr. Harling, who
brought them home with him. Charley and I scoured them, and they were on
exhibition in the Harling office all summer. Father Kelly, the priest, had
found the name of the Spanish maker on the sword, and an abbreviation that
stood for the city of Cordova.

“And that I saw with my own eyes,” Ántonia put in triumphantly. “So Jim
and Charley were right, and the teachers were wrong!”

The girls began to wonder among themselves. Why had the Spaniards come so
far? What must this country have been like, then? Why had Coronado never
gone back to Spain, to his riches and his castles and his king? I could
n’t tell them. I only knew the school books said he “died in the
wilderness, of a broken heart.”

“More than him has done that,” said Ántonia sadly, and the girls murmured
assent.

We sat looking off across the country, watching the sun go down. The curly
grass about us was on fire now. The bark of the oaks turned red as copper.
There was a shimmer of gold on the brown river. Out in the stream the
sandbars glittered like glass, and the light trembled in the willow
thickets as if little flames were leaping among them. The breeze sank to
stillness. In the ravine a ringdove mourned plaintively, and somewhere off
in the bushes an owl hooted. The girls sat listless, leaning against each
other. The long fingers of the sun touched their foreheads.

Presently we saw a curious thing: There were no clouds, the sun was going
down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disc
rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure
suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining
our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland
farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking
just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it
stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the
disc; the handles, the tongue, the share—black against the molten red.
There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.

Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball dropped
and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields below us
were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk
back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie.

XV

LATE in August the Cutters went to Omaha for a few days, leaving Ántonia
in charge of the house. Since the scandal about the Swedish girl, Wick
Cutter could never get his wife to stir out of Black Hawk without him.

The day after the Cutters left, Ántonia came over to see us. Grandmother
noticed that she seemed troubled and distracted. “You’ve got something on
your mind, Ántonia,” she said anxiously.

“Yes, Mrs. Burden. I could n’t sleep much last night.” She hesitated, and
then told us how strangely Mr. Cutter had behaved before he went away. He
put all the silver in a basket and placed it under her bed, and with it a
box of papers which he told her were valuable. He made her promise that
she would not sleep away from the house, or be out late in the evening,
while he was gone. He strictly forbade her to ask any of the girls she
knew to stay with her at night. She would be perfectly safe, he said, as
he had just put a new Yale lock on the front door.

Cutter had been so insistent in regard to these details that now she felt
uncomfortable about staying there alone. She had n’t liked the way he kept
coming into the kitchen to instruct her, or the way he looked at her. “I
feel as if he is up to some of his tricks again, and is going to try to
scare me, somehow.”

Grandmother was apprehensive at once. “I don’t think it’s right for you to
stay there, feeling that way. I suppose it would n’t be right for you to
leave the place alone, either, after giving your word. Maybe Jim would be
willing to go over there and sleep, and you could come here nights. I’d
feel safer, knowing you were under my own roof. I guess Jim could take
care of their silver and old usury notes as well as you could.”

Ántonia turned to me eagerly. “Oh, would you, Jim? I’d make up my bed nice
and fresh for you. It’s a real cool room, and the bed’s right next the
window. I was afraid to leave the window open last night.”

I liked my own room, and I did n’t like the Cutters’ house under any
circumstances; but Tony looked so troubled that I consented to try this
arrangement. I found that I slept there as well as anywhere, and when I
got home in the morning, Tony had a good breakfast waiting for me. After
prayers she sat down at the table with us, and it was like old times in
the country.

The third night I spent at the Cutters’, I awoke suddenly with the
impression that I had heard a door open and shut. Everything was still,
however, and I must have gone to sleep again immediately.

The next thing I knew, I felt some one sit down on the edge of the bed. I
was only half awake, but I decided that he might take the Cutters’ silver,
whoever he was. Perhaps if I did not move, he would find it and get out
without troubling me. I held my breath and lay absolutely still. A hand
closed softly on my shoulder, and at the same moment I felt something
hairy and cologne-scented brushing my face. If the room had suddenly been
flooded with electric light, I could n’t have seen more clearly the
detestable bearded countenance that I knew was bending over me. I caught a
handful of whiskers and pulled, shouting something. The hand that held my
shoulder was instantly at my throat. The man became insane; he stood over
me, choking me with one fist and beating me in the face with the other,
hissing and chuckling and letting out a flood of abuse.

“So this is what she’s up to when I’m away, is it? Where is she, you nasty
whelp, where is she? Under the bed, are you, hussy? I know your tricks!
Wait till I get at you! I’ll fix this rat you’ve got in here. He’s caught,
all right!”

So long as Cutter had me by the throat, there was no chance for me at all.
I got hold of his thumb and bent it back, until he let go with a yell. In
a bound, I was on my feet, and easily sent him sprawling to the floor.
Then I made a dive for the open window, struck the wire screen, knocked it
out, and tumbled after it into the yard.

Suddenly I found myself running across the north end of Black Hawk in my
nightshirt, just as one sometimes finds one’s self behaving in bad dreams.
When I got home I climbed in at the kitchen window. I was covered with
blood from my nose and lip, but I was too sick to do anything about it. I
found a shawl and an overcoat on the hatrack, lay down on the parlor sofa,
and in spite of my hurts, went to sleep.

Grandmother found me there in the morning. Her cry of fright awakened me.
Truly, I was a battered object. As she helped me to my room, I caught a
glimpse of myself in the mirror. My lip was cut and stood out like a
snout. My nose looked like a big blue plum, and one eye was swollen shut
and hideously discolored. Grandmother said we must have the doctor at
once, but I implored her, as I had never begged for anything before, not
to send for him. I could stand anything, I told her, so long as nobody saw
me or knew what had happened to me. I entreated her not to let
grandfather, even, come into my room. She seemed to understand, though I
was too faint and miserable to go into explanations. When she took off my
nightshirt, she found such bruises on my chest and shoulders that she
began to cry. She spent the whole morning bathing and poulticing me, and
rubbing me with arnica. I heard Ántonia sobbing outside my door, but I
asked grandmother to send her away. I felt that I never wanted to see her
again. I hated her almost as much as I hated Cutter. She had let me in for
all this disgustingness. Grandmother kept saying how thankful we ought to
be that I had been there instead of Ántonia. But I lay with my disfigured
face to the wall and felt no particular gratitude. My one concern was that
grandmother should keep every one away from me. If the story once got
abroad, I would never hear the last of it. I could well imagine what the
old men down at the drug-store would do with such a theme.

While grandmother was trying to make me comfortable, grandfather went to
the depot and learned that Wick Cutter had come home on the night express
from the east, and had left again on the six o’clock train for Denver that
morning. The agent said his face was striped with court-plaster, and he
carried his left hand in a sling. He looked so used up, that the agent
asked him what had happened to him since ten o’clock the night before;
whereat Cutter began to swear at him and said he would have him discharged
for incivility.

That afternoon, while I was asleep, Ántonia took grandmother with her, and
went over to the Cutters’ to pack her trunk. They found the place locked
up, and they had to break the window to get into Ántonia’s bedroom. There
everything was in shocking disorder. Her clothes had been taken out of her
closet, thrown into the middle of the room, and trampled and torn. My own
garments had been treated so badly that I never saw them again;
grandmother burned them in the Cutters’ kitchen range.

While Ántonia was packing her trunk and putting her room in order, to
leave it, the front-door bell rang violently. There stood Mrs.
Cutter,—locked out, for she had no key to the new lock—her head trembling
with rage. “I advised her to control herself, or she would have a stroke,”
grandmother said afterwards.

Grandmother would not let her see Ántonia at all, but made her sit down in
the parlor while she related to her just what had occurred the night
before. Ántonia was frightened, and was going home to stay for a while,
she told Mrs. Cutter; it would be useless to interrogate the girl, for she
knew nothing of what had happened.

Then Mrs. Cutter told her story. She and her husband had started home from
Omaha together the morning before. They had to stop over several hours at
Waymore Junction to catch the Black Hawk train. During the wait, Cutter
left her at the depot and went to the Waymore bank to attend to some
business. When he returned, he told her that he would have to stay
overnight there, but she could go on home. He bought her ticket and put
her on the train. She saw him slip a twenty-dollar bill into her handbag
with her ticket. That bill, she said, should have aroused her suspicions
at once—but did not.

The trains are never called at little junction towns; everybody knows when
they come in. Mr. Cutter showed his wife’s ticket to the conductor, and
settled her in her seat before the train moved off. It was not until
nearly nightfall that she discovered she was on the express bound for
Kansas City, that her ticket was made out to that point, and that Cutter
must have planned it so. The conductor told her the Black Hawk train was
due at Waymore twelve minutes after the Kansas City train left. She saw at
once that her husband had played this trick in order to get back to Black
Hawk without her. She had no choice but to go on to Kansas City and take
the first fast train for home.

Cutter could have got home a day earlier than his wife by any one of a
dozen simpler devices; he could have left her in the Omaha hotel, and said
he was going on to Chicago for a few days. But apparently it was part of
his fun to outrage her feelings as much as possible.

“Mr. Cutter will pay for this, Mrs. Burden. He will pay!” Mrs. Cutter
avouched, nodding her horselike head and rolling her eyes.

Grandmother said she had n’t a doubt of it.

Certainly Cutter liked to have his wife think him a devil. In some way he
depended upon the excitement he could arouse in her hysterical nature.
Perhaps he got the feeling of being a rake more from his wife’s rage and
amazement than from any experiences of his own. His zest in debauchery
might wane, but never Mrs. Cutter’s belief in it. The reckoning with his
wife at the end of an escapade was something he counted on—like the last
powerful liqueur after a long dinner. The one excitement he really could
n’t do without was quarreling with Mrs. Cutter!

Nguồn: Wikisource English — My Ántonia/Book 2. Văn bản được nhập và định dạng lại; CC BY-SA 4.0, có thể áp dụng điều khoản bổ sung của tác phẩm.