BOOK V. Cuzak’s Boys

I

II

III

INTRODUCTION

Last summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of

intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling

companion James Quayle Burden—Jim Burden, as we still call him in the

West. He and I are old friends—we grew up together in the same Nebraska

town—and we had much to say to each other. While the train flashed

through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and

bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in

the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red

dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind,

reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to

spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and

corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the

world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is

fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds

and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole

country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one

who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about

it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.

Although Jim Burden and I both live in New York, and are old friends, I

do not see much of him there. He is legal counsel for one of the great

Western railways, and is sometimes away from his New York office for

weeks together. That is one reason why we do not often meet. Another is

that I do not like his wife.

When Jim was still an obscure young lawyer, struggling to make his way

in New York, his career was suddenly advanced by a brilliant marriage.

Genevieve Whitney was the only daughter of a distinguished man. Her

marriage with young Burden was the subject of sharp comment at the

time. It was said she had been brutally jilted by her cousin, Rutland

Whitney, and that she married this unknown man from the West out of

bravado. She was a restless, headstrong girl, even then, who liked to

astonish her friends. Later, when I knew her, she was always doing

something unexpected. She gave one of her town houses for a Suffrage

headquarters, produced one of her own plays at the Princess Theater,

was arrested for picketing during a garment-makers’ strike, etc. I am

never able to believe that she has much feeling for the causes to which

she lends her name and her fleeting interest. She is handsome,

energetic, executive, but to me she seems unimpressionable and

temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm. Her husband’s quiet tastes

irritate her, I think, and she finds it worth while to play the

patroness to a group of young poets and painters of advanced ideas and

mediocre ability. She has her own fortune and lives her own life. For

some reason, she wishes to remain Mrs. James Burden.

As for Jim, no disappointments have been severe enough to chill his

naturally romantic and ardent disposition. This disposition, though it

often made him seem very funny when he was a boy, has been one of the

strongest elements in his success. He loves with a personal passion the

great country through which his railway runs and branches. His faith in

it and his knowledge of it have played an important part in its

development. He is always able to raise capital for new enterprises in

Wyoming or Montana, and has helped young men out there to do remarkable

things in mines and timber and oil. If a young man with an idea can

once get Jim Burden’s attention, can manage to accompany him when he

goes off into the wilds hunting for lost parks or exploring new

canyons, then the money which means action is usually forthcoming. Jim

is still able to lose himself in those big Western dreams. Though he is

over forty now, he meets new people and new enterprises with the

impulsiveness by which his boyhood friends remember him. He never seems

to me to grow older. His fresh color and sandy hair and quick-changing

blue eyes are those of a young man, and his sympathetic, solicitous

interest in women is as youthful as it is Western and American.

During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept

returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had known long

ago and whom both of us admired. More than any other person we

remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions,

the whole adventure of our childhood. To speak her name was to call up

pictures of people and places, to set a quiet drama going in one’s

brain. I had lost sight of her altogether, but Jim had found her again

after long years, had renewed a friendship that meant a great deal to

him, and out of his busy life had set apart time enough to enjoy that

friendship. His mind was full of her that day. He made me see her

again, feel her presence, revived all my old affection for her.

“I can’t see,” he said impetuously, “why you have never written

anything about Ántonia.”

I told him I had always felt that other people—he himself, for one knew

her much better than I. I was ready, however, to make an agreement with

him; I would set down on paper all that I remembered of Ántonia if he

would do the same. We might, in this way, get a picture of her.

He rumpled his hair with a quick, excited gesture, which with him often

announces a new determination, and I could see that my suggestion took

hold of him. “Maybe I will, maybe I will!” he declared. He stared out

of the window for a few moments, and when he turned to me again his

eyes had the sudden clearness that comes from something the mind itself

sees. “Of course,” he said, “I should have to do it in a direct way,

and say a great deal about myself. It’s through myself that I knew and

felt her, and I’ve had no practice in any other form of presentation.”

I told him that how he knew her and felt her was exactly what I most

wanted to know about Ántonia. He had had opportunities that I, as a

little girl who watched her come and go, had not.

Months afterward Jim Burden arrived at my apartment one stormy winter

afternoon, with a bulging legal portfolio sheltered under his fur

overcoat. He brought it into the sitting-room with him and tapped it

with some pride as he stood warming his hands.

“I finished it last night—the thing about Ántonia,” he said. “Now, what

about yours?”

I had to confess that mine had not gone beyond a few straggling notes.

“Notes? I didn’t make any.” He drank his tea all at once and put down

the cup. “I didn’t arrange or rearrange. I simply wrote down what of

herself and myself and other people Ántonia’s name recalls to me. I

suppose it hasn’t any form. It hasn’t any title, either.” He went into

the next room, sat down at my desk and wrote on the pinkish face of the

portfolio the word, “Ántonia.” He frowned at this a moment, then

prefixed another word, making it “My Ántonia.” That seemed to satisfy

him.

“Read it as soon as you can,” he said, rising, “but don’t let it

influence your own story.”

My own story was never written, but the following narrative is Jim’s

manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me.

NOTE: The Bohemian name Ántonia is strongly accented on the first

syllable, like the English name Anthony, and the ‘i’ is, of course,

given the sound of long ‘e’. The name is pronounced An’-ton-ee-ah.