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, unenquiring
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 neighbours 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 behaviour 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 neighbours—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 couldn’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
parlour 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 travelling 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 drugstore. 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 drawside 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 everyone 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 hadn’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
didn’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, tonight. 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 wouldn’t think of it for a minute! My own father
couldn’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 teakettle 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 travelling 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-grey 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
colour 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-grey brocades and a tall bonnet with bristling
aigrettes.
Mrs. Cutter painted china so assiduously that even her wash-bowls 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 quarrelled 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 quarrelled 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 wasn’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 I 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 parlour, 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 didn’t know what they believed, and didn’t care, and that
I certainly wasn’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, didn’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 couldn’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 parlour 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 drugstore; 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
didn’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 everyone
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-coloured 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 didn’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 colour 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 Cutters’ 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, 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 didn’t feel
well, and if I couldn’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 wasn’t any other way for
you, it seemed like.’
I put my arms around her. I couldn’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 haven’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 anyone else,
and spent an afternoon trimming a little workbasket. 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 wouldn’t belong to the Owl Club,
either. You’d be just like me.’
She shook her head. ‘I would and I wouldn’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 fervour 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 didn’t believe you could do as well as that. You
didn’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, didn’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 very 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 ‘Aeneid’ 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 elderblow 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. Couldn’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-coloured
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 should 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 under-brush 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, singsong
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 didn’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 quarrelled 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!
Didn’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 underside 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 farm-houses
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 oughtn’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
didn’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 didn’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 didn’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 Lapps 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
wouldn’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
couldn’t tell them. I only knew the schoolbooks 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 disk 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 disk; 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 couldn’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 hadn’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 wouldn’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 didn’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 someone 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 couldn’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 night-shirt, 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 hat-rack, lay
down on the parlour 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 discoloured. 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 night-shirt, 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 everyone 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 drugstore 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 doorbell 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 afterward.
Grandmother would not let her see Ántonia at all, but made her sit down
in the parlour 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 horse-like head and rolling her eyes.
Grandmother said she hadn’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 couldn’t do without was quarrelling with Mrs.
Cutter!