BOOK II. The Hired Girls

I

I had been living with my grandfather for nearly three years when he

decided to move to Black Hawk. He and grandmother were getting old for

the heavy work of a farm, and as I was now thirteen they thought I

ought to be going to school. Accordingly our homestead was rented to

‘that good woman, the Widow Steavens,’ and her bachelor brother, and we

bought Preacher White’s house, at the north end of Black Hawk. This was

the first town house one passed driving in from the farm, a landmark

which told country people their long ride was over.

We were to move to Black Hawk in March, and as soon as grandfather had

fixed the date he let Jake and Otto know of his intention. Otto said he

would not be likely to find another place that suited him so well; that

he was tired of farming and thought he would go back to what he called

the ‘wild West.’ Jake Marpole, lured by Otto’s stories of adventure,

decided to go with him. We did our best to dissuade Jake. He was so

handicapped by illiteracy and by his trusting disposition that he would

be an easy prey to sharpers. Grandmother begged him to stay among

kindly, Christian people, where he was known; but there was no

reasoning with him. He wanted to be a prospector. He thought a silver

mine was waiting for him in Colorado.

Jake and Otto served us to the last. They moved us into town, put down

the carpets in our new house, made shelves and cupboards for

grandmother’s kitchen, and seemed loath to leave us. But at last they

went, without warning. Those two fellows had been faithful to us

through sun and storm, had given us things that cannot be bought in any

market in the world. With me they had been like older brothers; had

restrained their speech and manners out of care for me, and given me so

much good comradeship. Now they got on the 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.

That was before the day of high-school athletics. Girls who had to walk

more than half a mile to school were pitied. There was not a

tennis-court in the town; physical exercise was thought rather

inelegant for the daughters of well-to-do families. Some of the

high-school girls were jolly and pretty, but they stayed indoors in

winter because of the cold, and in summer because of the heat. When one

danced with them, their bodies never moved inside their clothes; their

muscles seemed to ask but one thing—not to be disturbed. I remember

those girls merely as faces in the schoolroom, gay and rosy, or

listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders, like cherubs, by the

ink-smeared tops of the high desks that were surely put there to make

us round-shouldered and hollow-chested.

The daughters of Black Hawk merchants had a confident, 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!