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 westbound 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 centre of the town
there were two rows of new brick ‘store’ buildings, a brick
schoolhouse, the court-house, 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 neighbour, kept an eye on me, and if my behaviour 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 neighbours 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 womenfolk
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 paperhanger had
put on our parlour 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 threshers.
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 neighbours until Christmas, as she had done the year before; but
grandmother saved her from this by getting her a place to work with our
neighbours, 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 humour, 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 everyday 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 couldn’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 humour. 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 tonight, 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 behaviour 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 didn’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 colour
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 threshers!
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 doorbell 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 anyone 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 practising, 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 practise 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 favourite 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 pocket-book 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 didn’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
didn’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, aren’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 pocket-book and grey
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 wouldn’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 sceptically, 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. ‘Didn’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 wouldn’t
give Nick any land if he married me, so he’s going to marry Annie
Iverson. I wouldn’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 naive 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 didn’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 hadn’t been a little
more cordial to her.
‘I didn’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 needn’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 colour
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 neighbour’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, travelling 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 everyone
realized she was as crazy as ever, and she still ran about barefooted
through the snow, telling her domestic troubles to her neighbours.
Not long after Mary came back from the asylum, I heard a young Dane,
who was helping us to thresh, 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 drawside 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 hadn’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 didn’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 didn’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 travellers in that territory tried to get into Black
Hawk for Sunday. They used to assemble in the parlour 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 parlour and the dining-room, listening to the
music and giggling at the jokes and stories. Lena often said she hoped
I would be a travelling 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 theatres 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 travelling 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
drugstore, 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
neighbour 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
hadn’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 colour best. He seemed so perplexed
that I thought perhaps he hadn’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 neighbour 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 woollen 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 couldn’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 colour
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 coloured 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 colour, 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 parlour, 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 parlour, the back
parlour, 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 creche 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 threshing 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, ma’m, 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 wasn’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 hadn’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 couldn’t drownd himself in one of ‘em.’
‘I told him nobody wanted to drownd themselves, but if we didn’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 didn’t have none when they threshed. “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 threshing 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, ma’m. He hadn’t been seen nowhere except in a little town they
call Conway. He tried to get beer there, but there wasn’t any saloon.
Maybe he came in on a freight, but the brakeman hadn’t seen him. They
couldn’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, wasn’t that strange, Miss Frances?’ Tony asked thoughtfully.
‘What would anybody want to kill themselves in summer for? In threshing
time, too! It’s nice everywhere then.’
‘So it is, Ántonia,’ said Mrs. Harling heartily. ‘Maybe I’ll go home
and help you thresh next summer. Isn’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 grey 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 parlour. The chairs and sofas were already occupied,
and the air smelled pleasantly of cigar smoke. The parlour had once
been two rooms, and the floor was swaybacked 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 travellers. 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 favour when they stayed at her house. Even
the smartest travelling 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 parlour, 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 travelled for a jewellery 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 tonight.’
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, his shrivelled
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 ‘wasn’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 practised 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 couldn’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 practising 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-teacher. 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 anyone 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 practising, passages that were already his, that
lay under the bone 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 wouldn’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 sides 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 colour of
their country upbringing, 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 fancywork 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
roundhouse 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 parlour, 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
lighthearted 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 hadn’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
anyone could dance who paid his money and was orderly; the railroad
men, the roundhouse mechanics, the delivery boys, the iceman, the
farm-hands 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 vigour
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.