BOOK III. Lena Lingard

I

At the university I had the good fortune to come immediately under the

influence of a brilliant and inspiring young scholar. Gaston Cleric had

arrived in Lincoln only a few weeks earlier than I, to begin his work

as head of the Latin Department. He came West at the suggestion of his

physicians, his health having been enfeebled by a long illness in

Italy. When I took my entrance examinations, he was my examiner, and my

course was arranged under his supervision.

I did not go home for my first summer vacation, but stayed in Lincoln,

working off a year’s Greek, which had been my only condition on

entering the freshman class. Cleric’s doctor advised against his going

back to New England, and, except for a few weeks in Colorado, he, too,

was in Lincoln all that summer. We played tennis, read, and took long

walks together. I shall always look back on that time of mental

awakening as one of the happiest in my life. Gaston Cleric introduced

me to the world of ideas; when one first enters that world everything

else fades for a time, and all that went before is as if it had not

been. Yet I found curious survivals; some of the figures of my old life

seemed to be waiting for me in the new.

In those days there were many serious young men among the students who

had come up to the university from the farms and the little towns

scattered over the thinly settled state. Some of those boys came

straight from the cornfields with only a summer’s wages in their

pockets, hung on through the four years, shabby and underfed, and

completed the course by really heroic self-sacrifice. Our instructors

were oddly assorted; wandering pioneer school-teachers, stranded

ministers of the Gospel, a few enthusiastic young men just out of

graduate schools. There was an atmosphere of endeavour, of expectancy

and bright hopefulness about the young college that had lifted its head

from the prairie only a few years before.

Our personal life was as free as that of our instructors. There were no

college dormitories; we lived where we could and as we could. I took

rooms with an old couple, early settlers in Lincoln, who had married

off their children and now lived quietly in their house at the edge of

town, near the open country. The house was inconveniently situated for

students, and on that account I got two rooms for the price of one. My

bedroom, originally a linen-closet, was unheated and was barely large

enough to contain my cot-bed, but it enabled me to call the other room

my study. The dresser, and the great walnut wardrobe which held all my

clothes, even my hats and shoes, I had pushed out of the way, and I

considered them non-existent, as children eliminate incongruous objects

when they are playing house. I worked at a commodious green-topped

table placed directly in front of the west window which looked out over

the prairie. In the corner at my right were all my books, in shelves I

had made and painted myself. On the blank wall at my left the dark,

old-fashioned wall-paper was covered by a large map of ancient Rome,

the work of some German scholar. Cleric had ordered it for me when he

was sending for books from abroad. Over the bookcase hung a photograph

of the Tragic Theatre at Pompeii, which he had given me from his

collection.

When I sat at work I half-faced a deep, upholstered chair which stood

at the end of my table, its high back against the wall. I had bought it

with great care. My instructor sometimes looked in upon me when he was

out for an evening tramp, and I noticed that he was more likely to

linger and become talkative if I had a comfortable chair for him to sit

in, and if he found a bottle of Benedictine and plenty of the kind of

cigarettes he liked, at his elbow. He was, I had discovered,

parsimonious about small expenditures—a trait absolutely inconsistent

with his general character. Sometimes when he came he was silent and

moody, and after a few sarcastic remarks went away again, to tramp the

streets of Lincoln, which were almost as quiet and oppressively

domestic as those of Black Hawk. Again, he would sit until nearly

midnight, talking about Latin and English poetry, or telling me about

his long stay in Italy.

I can give no idea of the peculiar charm and vividness of his talk. In

a crowd he was nearly always silent. Even for his classroom he had no

platitudes, no stock of professorial anecdotes. When he was tired, his

lectures were clouded, obscure, elliptical; but when he was interested

they were wonderful. I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being

a great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his bursts of

imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much

in the heat of personal communication. How often I have seen him draw

his dark brows together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a

figure in the carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image

that was in his brain. He could bring the drama of antique life before

one out of the shadows—white figures against blue backgrounds. I shall

never forget his face as it looked one night when he told me about the

solitary day he spent among the sea temples at Paestum: the soft wind

blowing through the roofless columns, the birds flying low over the

flowering marsh grasses, the changing lights on the silver, cloud-hung

mountains. He had wilfully stayed the short summer night there, wrapped

in his coat and rug, watching the constellations on their path down the

sky until ‘the bride of old Tithonus’ rose out of the sea, and the

mountains stood sharp in the dawn. It was there he caught the fever

which held him back on the eve of his departure for Greece and of which

he lay ill so long in Naples. He was still, indeed, doing penance for

it.

I remember vividly another evening, when something led us to talk of

Dante’s veneration for Virgil. Cleric went through canto after canto of

the ‘Commedia,’ repeating the discourse between Dante and his ‘sweet

teacher,’ while his cigarette burned itself out unheeded between his

long fingers. I can hear him now, speaking the lines of the poet

Statius, who spoke for Dante: ‘I was famous on earth with the name

which endures longest and honours most. The seeds of my ardour were the

sparks from that divine flame whereby more than a thousand have

kindled; I speak of the “Aeneid,” mother to me and nurse to me in

poetry.’

Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived

about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never

lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt

to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures

scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the

new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from

me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my

own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now,

like the image of the plough against the sun. They were all I had for

an answer to the new appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto

and Russian Peter took up in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with

other things. But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those

early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they

accompanied me through all my new experiences. They were so much alive

in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive

anywhere else, or how.

II

One March evening in my sophomore year I was sitting alone in my room

after supper. There had been a warm thaw all day, with mushy yards and

little streams of dark water gurgling cheerfully into the streets out

of old snow-banks. My window was open, and the earthy wind blowing

through made me indolent. On the edge of the prairie, where the sun had

gone down, the sky was turquoise blue, like a lake, with gold light

throbbing in it. Higher up, in the utter clarity of the western slope,

the evening star hung like a lamp suspended by silver chains—like the

lamp engraved upon the title-page of old Latin texts, which is always

appearing in new heavens, and waking new desires in men. It reminded

me, at any rate, to shut my window and light my wick in answer. I did

so regretfully, and the dim objects in the room emerged from the

shadows and took their place about me with the helpfulness which custom

breeds.

I propped my book open and stared listlessly at the page of the

‘Georgics’ where tomorrow’s lesson began. It opened with the melancholy

reflection that, in the lives of mortals the best days are the first to

flee. ‘Optima dies... prima fugit.’ I turned back to the beginning of

the third book, which we had read in class that morning. ‘Primus ego in

patriam mecum... deducam Musas’; ‘for I shall be the first, if I live,

to bring the Muse into my country.’ Cleric had explained to us that

‘patria’ here meant, not a nation or even a province, but the little

rural neighbourhood on the Mincio where the poet was born. This was not

a boast, but a hope, at once bold and devoutly humble, that he might

bring the Muse (but lately come to Italy from her cloudy Grecian

mountains), not to the capital, the palatia Romana, but to his own

little I country’; to his father’s fields, ‘sloping down to the river

and to the old beech trees with broken tops.’

Cleric said he thought Virgil, when he was dying at Brindisi, must have

remembered that passage. After he had faced the bitter fact that he was

to leave the ‘Aeneid’ unfinished, and had decreed that the great

canvas, crowded with figures of gods and men, should be burned rather

than survive him unperfected, then his mind must have gone back to the

perfect utterance of the ‘Georgics,’ where the pen was fitted to the

matter as the plough is to the furrow; and he must have said to

himself, with the thankfulness of a good man, ‘I was the first to bring

the Muse into my country.’

We left the classroom quietly, conscious that we had been brushed by

the wing of a great feeling, though perhaps I alone knew Cleric

intimately enough to guess what that feeling was. In the evening, as I

sat staring at my book, the fervour of his voice stirred through the

quantities on the page before me. I was wondering whether that

particular rocky strip of New England coast about which he had so often

told me was Cleric’s patria. Before I had got far with my reading, I

was disturbed by a knock. I hurried to the door and when I opened it

saw a woman standing in the dark hall.

‘I expect you hardly know me, Jim.’

The voice seemed familiar, but I did not recognize her until she

stepped into the light of my doorway and I beheld—Lena Lingard! She was

so quietly conventionalized by city clothes that I might have passed

her on the street without seeing her. Her black suit fitted her figure

smoothly, and a black lace hat, with pale-blue forget-me-nots, sat

demurely on her yellow hair.

I led her toward Cleric’s chair, the only comfortable one I had,

questioning her confusedly.

She was not disconcerted by my embarrassment. She looked about her with

the naive curiosity I remembered so well. ‘You are quite comfortable

here, aren’t you? I live in Lincoln now, too, Jim. I’m in business for

myself. I have a dressmaking shop in the Raleigh Block, out on O

Street. I’ve made a real good start.’

‘But, Lena, when did you come?’

‘Oh, I’ve been here all winter. Didn’t your grandmother ever write you?

I’ve thought about looking you up lots of times. But we’ve all heard

what a studious young man you’ve got to be, and I felt bashful. I

didn’t know whether you’d be glad to see me.’ She laughed her mellow,

easy laugh, that was either very artless or very comprehending, one

never quite knew which. ‘You seem the same, though—except you’re a

young man, now, of course. Do you think I’ve changed?’

‘Maybe you’re prettier—though you were always pretty enough. Perhaps

it’s your clothes that make a difference.’

‘You like my new suit? I have to dress pretty well in my business.’

She took off her jacket and sat more at ease in her blouse, of some

soft, flimsy silk. She was already at home in my place, had slipped

quietly into it, as she did into everything. She told me her business

was going well, and she had saved a little money.

‘This summer I’m going to build the house for mother I’ve talked about

so long. I won’t be able to pay up on it at first, but I want her to

have it before she is too old to enjoy it. Next summer I’ll take her

down new furniture and carpets, so she’ll have something to look

forward to all winter.’

I watched Lena sitting there so smooth and sunny and well-cared-for,

and thought of how she used to run barefoot over the prairie until

after the snow began to fly, and how Crazy Mary chased her round and

round the cornfields. It seemed to me wonderful that she should have

got on so well in the world. Certainly she had no one but herself to

thank for it.

‘You must feel proud of yourself, Lena,’ I said heartily. ‘Look at me;

I’ve never earned a dollar, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be able

to.’

‘Tony says you’re going to be richer than Mr. Harling some day. She’s

always bragging about you, you know.’

‘Tell me, how IS Tony?’

‘She’s fine. She works for Mrs. Gardener at the hotel now. She’s

housekeeper. Mrs. Gardener’s health isn’t what it was, and she can’t

see after everything like she used to. She has great confidence in

Tony. Tony’s made it up with the Harlings, too. Little Nina is so fond

of her that Mrs. Harling kind of overlooked things.’

‘Is she still going with Larry Donovan?’

‘Oh, that’s on, worse than ever! I guess they’re engaged. Tony talks

about him like he was president of the railroad. Everybody laughs about

it, because she was never a girl to be soft. She won’t hear a word

against him. She’s so sort of innocent.’

I said I didn’t like Larry, and never would.

Lena’s face dimpled. ‘Some of us could tell her things, but it wouldn’t

do any good. She’d always believe him. That’s Ántonia’s failing, you

know; if she once likes people, she won’t hear anything against them.’

‘I think I’d better go home and look after Ántonia,’ I said.

‘I think you had.’ Lena looked up at me in frank amusement. ‘It’s a

good thing the Harlings are friendly with her again. Larry’s afraid of

them. They ship so much grain, they have influence with the railroad

people. What are you studying?’ She leaned her elbows on the table and

drew my book toward her. I caught a faint odour of violet sachet. ‘So

that’s Latin, is it? It looks hard. You do go to the theatre sometimes,

though, for I’ve seen you there. Don’t you just love a good play, Jim?

I can’t stay at home in the evening if there’s one in town. I’d be

willing to work like a slave, it seems to me, to live in a place where

there are theatres.’

‘Let’s go to a show together sometime. You are going to let me come to

see you, aren’t you?’

‘Would you like to? I’d be ever so pleased. I’m never busy after six

o’clock, and I let my sewing girls go at half-past five. I board, to

save time, but sometimes I cook a chop for myself, and I’d be glad to

cook one for you. Well’—she began to put on her white gloves—‘it’s been

awful good to see you, Jim.’

‘You needn’t hurry, need you? You’ve hardly told me anything yet.’

‘We can talk when you come to see me. I expect you don’t often have

lady visitors. The old woman downstairs didn’t want to let me come up

very much. I told her I was from your home town, and had promised your

grandmother to come and see you. How surprised Mrs. Burden would be!’

Lena laughed softly as she rose.

When I caught up my hat, she shook her head. ‘No, I don’t want you to

go with me. I’m to meet some Swedes at the drugstore. You wouldn’t care

for them. I wanted to see your room so I could write Tony all about it,

but I must tell her how I left you right here with your books. She’s

always so afraid someone will run off with you!’ Lena slipped her silk

sleeves into the jacket I held for her, smoothed it over her person,

and buttoned it slowly. I walked with her to the door. ‘Come and see me

sometimes when you’re lonesome. But maybe you have all the friends you

want. Have you?’ She turned her soft cheek to me. ‘Have you?’ she

whispered teasingly in my ear. In a moment I watched her fade down the

dusky stairway.

When I turned back to my room the place seemed much pleasanter than

before. Lena had left something warm and friendly in the lamplight. How

I loved to hear her laugh again! It was so soft and unexcited and

appreciative gave a favourable interpretation to everything. When I

closed my eyes I could hear them all laughing—the Danish laundry girls

and the three Bohemian Marys. Lena had brought them all back to me. It

came over me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls

like those and the poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like them

in the world, there would be no poetry. I understood that clearly, for

the first time. This revelation seemed to me inestimably precious. I

clung to it as if it might suddenly vanish.

As I sat down to my book at last, my old dream about Lena coming across

the harvest-field in her short skirt seemed to me like the memory of an

actual experience. It floated before me on the page like a picture, and

underneath it stood the mournful line: ‘Optima dies... prima fugit.’

III

In Lincoln the best part of the theatrical season came late, when the

good companies stopped off there for one-night stands, after their long

runs in New York and Chicago. That spring Lena went with me to see

Joseph Jefferson in ‘Rip Van Winkle,’ and to a war play called

‘Shenandoah.’ She was inflexible about paying for her own seat; said

she was in business now, and she wouldn’t have a schoolboy spending his

money on her. I liked to watch a play with Lena; everything was

wonderful to her, and everything was true. It was like going to revival

meetings with someone who was always being converted. She handed her

feelings over to the actors with a kind of fatalistic resignation.

Accessories of costume and scene meant much more to her than to me. She

sat entranced through ‘Robin Hood’ and hung upon the lips of the

contralto who sang, ‘Oh, Promise Me!’

Toward the end of April, the billboards, which I watched anxiously in

those days, bloomed out one morning with gleaming white posters on

which two names were impressively printed in blue Gothic letters: the

name of an actress of whom I had often heard, and the name ‘Camille.’

I called at the Raleigh Block for Lena on Saturday evening, and we

walked down to the theatre. The weather was warm and sultry and put us

both in a holiday humour. We arrived early, because Lena liked to watch

the people come in. There was a note on the programme, saying that the

‘incidental music’ would be from the opera ‘Traviata,’ which was made

from the same story as the play. We had neither of us read the play,

and we did not know what it was about—though I seemed to remember

having heard it was a piece in which great actresses shone. ‘The Count

of Monte Cristo,’ which I had seen James O’Neill play that winter, was

by the only Alexandre Dumas I knew. This play, I saw, was by his son,

and I expected a family resemblance. A couple of jack-rabbits, run in

off the prairie, could not have been more innocent of what awaited them

than were Lena and I.

Our excitement began with the rise of the curtain, when the moody

Varville, seated before the fire, interrogated Nanine. Decidedly, there

was a new tang about this dialogue. I had never heard in the theatre

lines that were alive, that presupposed and took for granted, like

those which passed between Varville and Marguerite in the brief

encounter before her friends entered. This introduced the most

brilliant, worldly, the most enchantingly gay scene I had ever looked

upon. I had never seen champagne bottles opened on the stage

before—indeed, I had never seen them opened anywhere. The memory of

that supper makes me hungry now; the sight of it then, when I had only

a students’ boarding-house dinner behind me, was delicate torment. I

seem to remember gilded chairs and tables (arranged hurriedly by

footmen in white gloves and stockings), linen of dazzling whiteness,

glittering glass, silver dishes, a great bowl of fruit, and the reddest

of roses. The room was invaded by beautiful women and dashing young

men, laughing and talking together. The men were dressed more or less

after the period in which the play was written; the women were not. I

saw no inconsistency. Their talk seemed to open to one the brilliant

world in which they lived; every sentence made one older and wiser,

every pleasantry enlarged one’s horizon. One could experience excess

and satiety without the inconvenience of learning what to do with one’s

hands in a drawing-room! When the characters all spoke at once and I

missed some of the phrases they flashed at each other, I was in misery.

I strained my ears and eyes to catch every exclamation.

The actress who played Marguerite was even then old-fashioned, though

historic. She had been a member of Daly’s famous New York company, and

afterward a ‘star’ under his direction. She was a woman who could not

be taught, it is said, though she had a crude natural force which

carried with people whose feelings were accessible and whose taste was

not squeamish. She was already old, with a ravaged countenance and a

physique curiously hard and stiff. She moved with difficulty—I think

she was lame—I seem to remember some story about a malady of the spine.

Her Armand was disproportionately young and slight, a handsome youth,

perplexed in the extreme. But what did it matter? I believed devoutly

in her power to fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness. I believed

her young, ardent, reckless, disillusioned, under sentence, feverish,

avid of pleasure. I wanted to cross the footlights and help the

slim-waisted Armand in the frilled shirt to convince her that there was

still loyalty and devotion in the world. Her sudden illness, when the

gaiety was at its height, her pallor, the handkerchief she crushed

against her lips, the cough she smothered under the laughter while

Gaston kept playing the piano lightly—it all wrung my heart. But not so

much as her cynicism in the long dialogue with her lover which

followed. How far was I from questioning her unbelief! While the

charmingly sincere young man pleaded with her—accompanied by the

orchestra in the old ‘Traviata’ duet, ‘misterioso, misterios’

altero!’—she maintained her bitter scepticism, and the curtain fell on

her dancing recklessly with the others, after Armand had been sent away

with his flower.

Between the acts we had no time to forget. The orchestra kept sawing

away at the ‘Traviata’ music, so joyous and sad, so thin and far-away,

so clap-trap and yet so heart-breaking. After the second act I left

Lena in tearful contemplation of the ceiling, and went out into the

lobby to smoke. As I walked about there I congratulated myself that I

had not brought some Lincoln girl who would talk during the waits about

the junior dances, or whether the cadets would camp at Plattsmouth.

Lena was at least a woman, and I was a man.

Through the scene between Marguerite and the elder Duval, Lena wept

unceasingly, and I sat helpless to prevent the closing of that chapter

of idyllic love, dreading the return of the young man whose ineffable

happiness was only to be the measure of his fall.

I suppose no woman could have been further in person, voice, and

temperament from Dumas’ appealing heroine than the veteran actress who

first acquainted me with her. Her conception of the character was as

heavy and uncompromising as her diction; she bore hard on the idea and

on the consonants. At all times she was highly tragic, devoured by

remorse. Lightness of stress or behaviour was far from her. Her voice

was heavy and deep: ‘Ar-r-r-mond!’ she would begin, as if she were

summoning him to the bar of Judgment. But the lines were enough. She

had only to utter them. They created the character in spite of her.

The heartless world which Marguerite re-entered with Varville had never

been so glittering and reckless as on the night when it gathered in

Olympe’s salon for the fourth act. There were chandeliers hung from the

ceiling, I remember, many servants in livery, gaming-tables where the

men played with piles of gold, and a staircase down which the guests

made their entrance. After all the others had gathered round the

card-tables and young Duval had been warned by Prudence, Marguerite

descended the staircase with Varville; such a cloak, such a fan, such

jewels—and her face! One knew at a glance how it was with her. When

Armand, with the terrible words, ‘Look, all of you, I owe this woman

nothing!’ flung the gold and bank-notes at the half-swooning

Marguerite, Lena cowered beside me and covered her face with her hands.

The curtain rose on the bedroom scene. By this time there wasn’t a

nerve in me that hadn’t been twisted. Nanine alone could have made me

cry. I loved Nanine tenderly; and Gaston, how one clung to that good

fellow! The New Year’s presents were not too much; nothing could be too

much now. I wept unrestrainedly. Even the handkerchief in my

breast-pocket, worn for elegance and not at all for use, was wet

through by the time that moribund woman sank for the last time into the

arms of her lover.

When we reached the door of the theatre, the streets were shining with

rain. I had prudently brought along Mrs. Harling’s useful Commencement

present, and I took Lena home under its shelter. After leaving her, I

walked slowly out into the country part of the town where I lived. The

lilacs were all blooming in the yards, and the smell of them after the

rain, of the new leaves and the blossoms together, blew into my face

with a sort of bitter sweetness. I tramped through the puddles and

under the showery trees, mourning for Marguerite Gauthier as if she had

died only yesterday, sighing with the spirit of 1840, which had sighed

so much, and which had reached me only that night, across long years

and several languages, through the person of an infirm old actress. The

idea is one that no circumstances can frustrate. Wherever and whenever

that piece is put on, it is April.

IV

How well I remember the stiff little parlour where I used to wait for

Lena: the hard horsehair furniture, bought at some auction sale, the

long mirror, the fashion-plates on the wall. If I sat down even for a

moment, I was sure to find threads and bits of coloured silk clinging

to my clothes after I went away. Lena’s success puzzled me. She was so

easygoing; had none of the push and self-assertiveness that get people

ahead in business. She had come to Lincoln, a country girl, with no

introductions except to some cousins of Mrs. Thomas who lived there,

and she was already making clothes for the women of ‘the young married

set.’ Evidently she had great natural aptitude for her work. She knew,

as she said, ‘what people looked well in.’ She never tired of poring

over fashion-books. Sometimes in the evening I would find her alone in

her work-room, draping folds of satin on a wire figure, with a quite

blissful expression of countenance. I couldn’t help thinking that the

years when Lena literally hadn’t enough clothes to cover herself might

have something to do with her untiring interest in dressing the human

figure. Her clients said that Lena ‘had style,’ and overlooked her

habitual inaccuracies. She never, I discovered, finished anything by

the time she had promised, and she frequently spent more money on

materials than her customer had authorized. Once, when I arrived at six

o’clock, Lena was ushering out a fidgety mother and her awkward,

overgrown daughter. The woman detained Lena at the door to say

apologetically:

‘You’ll try to keep it under fifty for me, won’t you, Miss Lingard? You

see, she’s really too young to come to an expensive dressmaker, but I

knew you could do more with her than anybody else.’

‘Oh, that will be all right, Mrs. Herron. I think we’ll manage to get a

good effect,’ Lena replied blandly.

I thought her manner with her customers very good, and wondered where

she had learned such self-possession.

Sometimes after my morning classes were over, I used to encounter Lena

downtown, in her velvet suit and a little black hat, with a veil tied

smoothly over her face, looking as fresh as the spring morning. Maybe

she would be carrying home a bunch of jonquils or a hyacinth plant.

When we passed a candy store her footsteps would hesitate and linger.

‘Don’t let me go in,’ she would murmur. ‘Get me by if you can.’ She was

very fond of sweets, and was afraid of growing too plump.

We had delightful Sunday breakfasts together at Lena’s. At the back of

her long work-room was a bay-window, large enough to hold a box-couch

and a reading-table. We breakfasted in this recess, after drawing the

curtains that shut out the long room, with cutting-tables and wire

women and sheet-draped garments on the walls. The sunlight poured in,

making everything on the table shine and glitter and the flame of the

alcohol lamp disappear altogether. Lena’s curly black water-spaniel,

Prince, breakfasted with us. He sat beside her on the couch and behaved

very well until the Polish violin-teacher across the hall began to

practise, when Prince would growl and sniff the air with disgust.

Lena’s landlord, old Colonel Raleigh, had given her the dog, and at

first she was not at all pleased. She had spent too much of her life

taking care of animals to have much sentiment about them. But Prince

was a knowing little beast, and she grew fond of him. After breakfast I

made him do his lessons; play dead dog, shake hands, stand up like a

soldier. We used to put my cadet cap on his head—I had to take military

drill at the university—and give him a yard-measure to hold with his

front leg. His gravity made us laugh immoderately.

Lena’s talk always amused me. Ántonia had never talked like the people

about her. Even after she learned to speak English readily, there was

always something impulsive and foreign in her speech. But Lena had

picked up all the conventional expressions she heard at Mrs. Thomas’s

dressmaking shop. Those formal phrases, the very flower of small-town

proprieties, and the flat commonplaces, nearly all hypocritical in

their origin, became very funny, very engaging, when they were uttered

in Lena’s soft voice, with her caressing intonation and arch naivete.

Nothing could be more diverting than to hear Lena, who was almost as

candid as Nature, call a leg a ‘limb’ or a house a ‘home.’

We used to linger a long while over our coffee in that sunny corner.

Lena was never so pretty as in the morning; she wakened fresh with the

world every day, and her eyes had a deeper colour then, like the blue

flowers that are never so blue as when they first open. I could sit

idle all through a Sunday morning and look at her. Ole Benson’s

behaviour was now no mystery to me.

‘There was never any harm in Ole,’ she said once. ‘People needn’t have

troubled themselves. He just liked to come over and sit on the drawside

and forget about his bad luck. I liked to have him. Any company’s

welcome when you’re off with cattle all the time.’

‘But wasn’t he always glum?’ I asked. ‘People said he never talked at

all.’

‘Sure he talked, in Norwegian. He’d been a sailor on an English boat

and had seen lots of queer places. He had wonderful tattoos. We used to

sit and look at them for hours; there wasn’t much to look at out there.

He was like a picture book. He had a ship and a strawberry girl on one

arm, and on the other a girl standing before a little house, with a

fence and gate and all, waiting for her sweetheart. Farther up his arm,

her sailor had come back and was kissing her. “The Sailor’s Return,” he

called it.’

I admitted it was no wonder Ole liked to look at a pretty girl once in

a while, with such a fright at home.

‘You know,’ Lena said confidentially, ‘he married Mary because he

thought she was strong-minded and would keep him straight. He never

could keep straight on shore. The last time he landed in Liverpool he’d

been out on a two years’ voyage. He was paid off one morning, and by

the next he hadn’t a cent left, and his watch and compass were gone.

He’d got with some women, and they’d taken everything. He worked his

way to this country on a little passenger boat. Mary was a stewardess,

and she tried to convert him on the way over. He thought she was just

the one to keep him steady. Poor Ole! He used to bring me candy from

town, hidden in his feed-bag. He couldn’t refuse anything to a girl.

He’d have given away his tattoos long ago, if he could. He’s one of the

people I’m sorriest for.’

If I happened to spend an evening with Lena and stayed late, the Polish

violin-teacher across the hall used to come out and watch me descend

the stairs, muttering so threateningly that it would have been easy to

fall into a quarrel with him. Lena had told him once that she liked to

hear him practise, so he always left his door open, and watched who

came and went.

There was a coolness between the Pole and Lena’s landlord on her

account. Old Colonel Raleigh had come to Lincoln from Kentucky and

invested an inherited fortune in real estate, at the time of inflated

prices. Now he sat day after day in his office in the Raleigh Block,

trying to discover where his money had gone and how he could get some

of it back. He was a widower, and found very little congenial

companionship in this casual Western city. Lena’s good looks and gentle

manners appealed to him. He said her voice reminded him of Southern

voices, and he found as many opportunities of hearing it as possible.

He painted and papered her rooms for her that spring, and put in a

porcelain bathtub in place of the tin one that had satisfied the former

tenant. While these repairs were being made, the old gentleman often

dropped in to consult Lena’s preferences. She told me with amusement

how Ordinsky, the Pole, had presented himself at her door one evening,

and said that if the landlord was annoying her by his attentions, he

would promptly put a stop to it.

‘I don’t exactly know what to do about him,’ she said, shaking her

head, ‘he’s so sort of wild all the time. I wouldn’t like to have him

say anything rough to that nice old man. The colonel is long-winded,

but then I expect he’s lonesome. I don’t think he cares much for

Ordinsky, either. He said once that if I had any complaints to make of

my neighbours, I mustn’t hesitate.’

One Saturday evening when I was having supper with Lena, we heard a

knock at her parlour door, and there stood the Pole, coatless, in a

dress shirt and collar. Prince dropped on his paws and began to growl

like a mastiff, while the visitor apologized, saying that he could not

possibly come in thus attired, but he begged Lena to lend him some

safety pins.

‘Oh, you’ll have to come in, Mr. Ordinsky, and let me see what’s the

matter.’ She closed the door behind him. ‘Jim, won’t you make Prince

behave?’

I rapped Prince on the nose, while Ordinsky explained that he had not

had his dress clothes on for a long time, and tonight, when he was

going to play for a concert, his waistcoat had split down the back. He

thought he could pin it together until he got it to a tailor.

Lena took him by the elbow and turned him round. She laughed when she

saw the long gap in the satin. ‘You could never pin that, Mr. Ordinsky.

You’ve kept it folded too long, and the goods is all gone along the

crease. Take it off. I can put a new piece of lining-silk in there for

you in ten minutes.’ She disappeared into her work-room with the vest,

leaving me to confront the Pole, who stood against the door like a

wooden figure. He folded his arms and glared at me with his excitable,

slanting brown eyes. His head was the shape of a chocolate drop, and

was covered with dry, straw-coloured hair that fuzzed up about his

pointed crown. He had never done more than mutter at me as I passed

him, and I was surprised when he now addressed me. ‘Miss Lingard,’ he

said haughtily, ‘is a young woman for whom I have the utmost, the

utmost respect.’

‘So have I,’ I said coldly.

He paid no heed to my remark, but began to do rapid finger-exercises on

his shirt-sleeves, as he stood with tightly folded arms.

‘Kindness of heart,’ he went on, staring at the ceiling, ‘sentiment,

are not understood in a place like this. The noblest qualities are

ridiculed. Grinning college boys, ignorant and conceited, what do they

know of delicacy!’

I controlled my features and tried to speak seriously.

‘If you mean me, Mr. Ordinsky, I have known Miss Lingard a long time,

and I think I appreciate her kindness. We come from the same town, and

we grew up together.’

His gaze travelled slowly down from the ceiling and rested on me. ‘Am I

to understand that you have this young woman’s interests at heart? That

you do not wish to compromise her?’

‘That’s a word we don’t use much here, Mr. Ordinsky. A girl who makes

her own living can ask a college boy to supper without being talked

about. We take some things for granted.’

‘Then I have misjudged you, and I ask your pardon’—he bowed gravely.

‘Miss Lingard,’ he went on, ‘is an absolutely trustful heart. She has

not learned the hard lessons of life. As for you and me, noblesse

oblige’—he watched me narrowly.

Lena returned with the vest. ‘Come in and let us look at you as you go

out, Mr. Ordinsky. I’ve never seen you in your dress suit,’ she said as

she opened the door for him.

A few moments later he reappeared with his violin-case a heavy muffler

about his neck and thick woollen gloves on his bony hands. Lena spoke

encouragingly to him, and he went off with such an important

professional air that we fell to laughing as soon as we had shut the

door. ‘Poor fellow,’ Lena said indulgently, ‘he takes everything so

hard.’

After that Ordinsky was friendly to me, and behaved as if there were

some deep understanding between us. He wrote a furious article,

attacking the musical taste of the town, and asked me to do him a great

service by taking it to the editor of the morning paper. If the editor

refused to print it, I was to tell him that he would be answerable to

Ordinsky ‘in person.’ He declared that he would never retract one word,

and that he was quite prepared to lose all his pupils. In spite of the

fact that nobody ever mentioned his article to him after it

appeared—full of typographical errors which he thought intentional—he

got a certain satisfaction from believing that the citizens of Lincoln

had meekly accepted the epithet ‘coarse barbarians.’ ‘You see how it

is,’ he said to me, ‘where there is no chivalry, there is no

amour-propre.’ When I met him on his rounds now, I thought he carried

his head more disdainfully than ever, and strode up the steps of front

porches and rang doorbells with more assurance. He told Lena he would

never forget how I had stood by him when he was ‘under fire.’

All this time, of course, I was drifting. Lena had broken up my serious

mood. I wasn’t interested in my classes. I played with Lena and Prince,

I played with the Pole, I went buggy-riding with the old colonel, who

had taken a fancy to me and used to talk to me about Lena and the

‘great beauties’ he had known in his youth. We were all three in love

with Lena.

Before the first of June, Gaston Cleric was offered an instructorship

at Harvard College, and accepted it. He suggested that I should follow

him in the fall, and complete my course at Harvard. He had found out

about Lena—not from me—and he talked to me seriously.

‘You won’t do anything here now. You should either quit school and go

to work, or change your college and begin again in earnest. You won’t

recover yourself while you are playing about with this handsome

Norwegian. Yes, I’ve seen her with you at the theatre. She’s very

pretty, and perfectly irresponsible, I should judge.’

Cleric wrote my grandfather that he would like to take me East with

him. To my astonishment, grandfather replied that I might go if I

wished. I was both glad and sorry on the day when the letter came. I

stayed in my room all evening and thought things over. I even tried to

persuade myself that I was standing in Lena’s way—it is so necessary to

be a little noble!—and that if she had not me to play with, she would

probably marry and secure her future.

The next evening I went to call on Lena. I found her propped up on the

couch in her bay-window, with her foot in a big slipper. An awkward

little Russian girl whom she had taken into her work-room had dropped a

flat-iron on Lena’s toe. On the table beside her there was a basket of

early summer flowers which the Pole had left after he heard of the

accident. He always managed to know what went on in Lena’s apartment.

Lena was telling me some amusing piece of gossip about one of her

clients, when I interrupted her and picked up the flower basket.

‘This old chap will be proposing to you some day, Lena.’

‘Oh, he has—often!’ she murmured.

‘What! After you’ve refused him?’

‘He doesn’t mind that. It seems to cheer him to mention the subject.

Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think

they’re in love with somebody.’

‘The colonel would marry you in a minute. I hope you won’t marry some

old fellow; not even a rich one.’ Lena shifted her pillows and looked

up at me in surprise.

‘Why, I’m not going to marry anybody. Didn’t you know that?’

‘Nonsense, Lena. That’s what girls say, but you know better. Every

handsome girl like you marries, of course.’

She shook her head. ‘Not me.’

‘But why not? What makes you say that?’ I persisted.

Lena laughed.

‘Well, it’s mainly because I don’t want a husband. Men are all right

for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old

fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what’s sensible and

what’s foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to

be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.’

‘But you’ll be lonesome. You’ll get tired of this sort of life, and

you’ll want a family.’

‘Not me. I like to be lonesome. When I went to work for Mrs. Thomas I

was nineteen years old, and I had never slept a night in my life when

there weren’t three in the bed. I never had a minute to myself except

when I was off with the cattle.’

Usually, when Lena referred to her life in the country at all, she

dismissed it with a single remark, humorous or mildly cynical. But

tonight her mind seemed to dwell on those early years. She told me she

couldn’t remember a time when she was so little that she wasn’t lugging

a heavy baby about, helping to wash for babies, trying to keep their

little chapped hands and faces clean. She remembered home as a place

where there were always too many children, a cross man and work piling

up around a sick woman.

‘It wasn’t mother’s fault. She would have made us comfortable if she

could. But that was no life for a girl! After I began to herd and milk,

I could never get the smell of the cattle off me. The few underclothes

I had I kept in a cracker-box. On Saturday nights, after everybody was

in bed, then I could take a bath if I wasn’t too tired. I could make

two trips to the windmill to carry water, and heat it in the

wash-boiler on the stove. While the water was heating, I could bring in

a washtub out of the cave, and take my bath in the kitchen. Then I

could put on a clean night-gown and get into bed with two others, who

likely hadn’t had a bath unless I’d given it to them. You can’t tell me

anything about family life. I’ve had plenty to last me.’

‘But it’s not all like that,’ I objected.

‘Near enough. It’s all being under somebody’s thumb. What’s on your

mind, Jim? Are you afraid I’ll want you to marry me some day?’

Then I told her I was going away.

‘What makes you want to go away, Jim? Haven’t I been nice to you?’

‘You’ve been just awfully good to me, Lena,’ I blurted. ‘I don’t think

about much else. I never shall think about much else while I’m with

you. I’ll never settle down and grind if I stay here. You know that.’

I dropped down beside her and sat looking at the floor. I seemed to

have forgotten all my reasonable explanations.

Lena drew close to me, and the little hesitation in her voice that had

hurt me was not there when she spoke again.

‘I oughtn’t to have begun it, ought I?’ she murmured. ‘I oughtn’t to

have gone to see you that first time. But I did want to. I guess I’ve

always been a little foolish about you. I don’t know what first put it

into my head, unless it was Ántonia, always telling me I mustn’t be up

to any of my nonsense with you. I let you alone for a long while,

though, didn’t I?’

She was a sweet creature to those she loved, that Lena Lingard!

At last she sent me away with her soft, slow, renunciatory kiss.

‘You aren’t sorry I came to see you that time?’ she whispered. ‘It

seemed so natural. I used to think I’d like to be your first

sweetheart. You were such a funny kid!’

She always kissed one as if she were sadly and wisely sending one away

forever.

We said many good-byes before I left Lincoln, but she never tried to

hinder me or hold me back. ‘You are going, but you haven’t gone yet,

have you?’ she used to say.

My Lincoln chapter closed abruptly. I went home to my grandparents for

a few weeks, and afterward visited my relatives in Virginia until I

joined Cleric in Boston. I was then nineteen years old.