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!