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Optima dies . . . prima fugit
LAST summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa
in a season of intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling
companion James Quayle
Burden—Jim Burden, as we still call him in the West. He and I are
old friends—we grew up together in the same Nebraska town—and
we had much to say to each other. While the train flashed through never-ending miles
of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting
in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch
and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded
us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one's childhood in
little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of
climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant
sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong
weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country
is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up
in a little prairie town
Although Jim Burden and I both live in New York, and are old friends, I do not see much of him there. He is legal counsel for one of the great Western railways, and is sometimes away from his New York office for weeks together. That is one reason why we do not often meet. Another is that I do not like his wife.
When Jim was still an obscure young lawyer, struggling to make his way in New York,
his career was suddenly advanced by a brilliant marriage. Genevieve Whitney was the
only daughter of a distinguished man. Her marriage with young Burden was the subject
of sharp comment at the time. It was said she had been brutally jilted by her
cousin, Rutland Whitney, and that she married this unknown man from the West out of
bravado. She was a restless, headstrong girl, even then, who liked to astonish her
friends. Later, when I knew her, she was always doing something unexpected. She gave
one of her town houses for a Suffrage headquarters, produced one of her own plays at the
Princess Theater, was arrested for
picketing during a garment-makers' strike, etc. I am never able to believe that she
has much feeling for the causes to which she lends her name and her fleeting
interest. She is handsome, energetic,
As for Jim, no disappointments have been severe enough to chill his naturally
romantic and ardent disposition. This disposition, though it often made him seem
very funny when he was a boy, has been one of the strongest elements in his success.
He loves with a personal passion the great country through which his railway runs
and branches. His faith in it and his knowledge of it have played an important part
in its development. He is always able to raise capital for new enterprises in
Wyoming or Montana, and has helped young men out there to do remarkable things in
mines and timber and oil. If a young man with an idea can once get Jim Burden's
attention, can manage to accompany him when he goes off into the wilds hunting for
lost parks or exploring new canyons, then the money which means action is usually
forthcoming. Jim is still able to lose himself in those big Western dreams. Though
he is over forty now, he meets new people and new enterprises
During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had known long ago and whom both of us admired. More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood. To speak her name was to call up pictures of people and places, to set a quiet drama going in one's brain. I had lost sight of her altogether, but Jim had found her again after long years, had renewed a friendship that meant a great deal to him, and out of his busy life had set apart time enough to enjoy that friendship. His mind was full of her that day. He made me see her again, feel her presence, revived all my old affection for her.
"I can't see," he said impetuously, "why you have never written anything about Ántonia."
I told him I had always felt that other people—he himself, for
one—knew her much better than I. I was ready, however, to make an
agreement with him; I would set down on paper all
He rumpled his hair with a quick, excited gesture, which with him often announces a new determination, and I could see that my suggestion took hold of him. "Maybe I will, maybe I will!" he declared. He stared out of the window for a few moments, and when he turned to me again his eyes had the sudden clearness that comes from something the mind itself sees. "Of course," he said, "I should have to do it in a direct way, and say a great deal about myself. It's through myself that I knew and felt her, and I've had no practice in any other form of presentation."
I told him that how he knew her and felt her was exactly what I most wanted to know about Ántonia. He had had opportunities that I, as a little girl who watched her come and go, had not.
Months afterward Jim Burden arrived at my apartment one stormy winter afternoon, with a bulging legal portfolio sheltered under his fur overcoat. He brought it into the sitting-room with him and tapped it with some pride as he stood warming his hands.
"I finished it last night—the thing about Ántonia," he said. "Now, what about yours?"
I had to confess that mine had not gone beyond a few straggling notes.
"Notes? I did n't make any." He drank his tea all at once and put down the cup. "I did n't arrange or rearrange. I simply wrote down what of herself and myself and other people Ántonia's name recalls to me. I suppose it has n't any form. It has n't any title, either." He went into the next room, sat down at my desk and wrote on the pinkish face of the portfolio the word, "Ántonia." He frowned at this a moment, then prefixed another word, making it "My Ántonia." That seemed to satisfy him.
"Read it as soon as you can," he said, rising, "but don't let it influence your own story."
My own story was never written, but the following narrative is Jim's manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me.
I FIRST heard of
Ántonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across
the great midland plain of North America. I was ten years old then;
I had lost both my father and mother
within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who
lived in Nebraska. I traveled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole, one of the "hands" on my father's old
farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going West to work for my grandfather. Jake's
experience of the world was not much wider than mine. He had never been in a railway
train until the morning when we set out together to try our fortunes in a new world.
We went all the way in day-coaches, becoming more sticky and grimy with each stage of the journey. Jake bought everything the newsboys offered him: candy, oranges, brass collar buttons, a watch-charm, and for me a "Life of Jesse James," which I remember as one of the most satisfactory books I have ever read. Beyond Chicago we were under the protection of a friendly passenger conductor, who knew all about the country to which we were going and gave us a great deal of advice in exchange for our confidence. He seemed to us an experienced and worldly man who had been almost everywhere; in his conversation he threw out lightly the names of distant States and cities. He wore the rings and pins and badges of different fraternal orders to which he belonged. Even his cuff-buttons were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he was more inscribed than an Egyptian obelisk. Once when he sat down to chat, he told us that in the immigrant car ahead there was a family from "across the water" whose destination was the same as ours.
"They can't any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she can say
is 'We go Black Hawk, Nebraska.'
She's not
This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled down to "Jesse James." Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you were likely to get diseases from foreigners.
I do not remember crossing the Missouri River, or anything about the long day's journey through Nebraska. Probably by that time I had crossed so many rivers that I was dull to them. The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.
I had been sleeping, curled up in a red plush seat, for a long while when we
reached Black Hawk. Jake roused me and took me by the hand. We stumbled down from
the train to a wooden siding, where men were running about with lanterns. I could
n't see any town, or even distant lights; we were surrounded by utter darkness. The
engine was panting heavily after its long run. In the red glow from the fire-box, a
group of people stood
Another lantern came along. A bantering voice called out: "Hello, are you Mr. Burden's folks? If you are, it's me you're looking for. I'm Otto Fuchs. I'm Mr. Burden's hired man, and I'm to drive you out. Hello, Jimmy, ain't you scared to come so far west?"
I looked up with interest at the new face in the lantern light. He might have
stepped out of the pages of "Jesse James." He wore a sombrero hat, with a wide
leather band and a bright buckle, and the ends of his mustache were twisted up
stiffly, like little horns. He looked lively and ferocious, I thought, and
I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon began to
ache all over. When the straw settled down I had a hard bed. Cautiously I slipped
from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the
wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or
fields. If there was
I DO not remember our arrival at my grandfather's farm sometime before daybreak,
after a drive of nearly twenty miles
with heavy work-horses. When I
awoke, it was afternoon. I was lying in a little room, scarcely larger than the bed
that held me, and the window-shade at my head was flapping softly in a warm wind. A
tall woman, with wrinkled brown skin and black hair, stood looking down at me; I
knew that she must be my grandmother. She had been crying, I could see, but when I
opened my eyes she smiled, peered at me anxiously, and sat down on the foot of my
bed.
"Had a good sleep, Jimmy?" she asked briskly. Then in a very different tone she
said, as if to herself, "My, how you do look like your father!" I remembered that my
father had been her little boy; she must often have come to wake him like this when
he overslept. "Here are your clean clothes," she went on, stroking my coverlid with
her brown hand as she talked. "But first you come down to the kitchen with me, and
have a nice warm bath
"Down to the kitchen" struck me as curious; it was always "out in the kitchen" at home. I picked up my shoes and stockings and followed her through the living-room and down a flight of stairs into a basement. This basement was divided into a dining-room at the right of the stairs and a kitchen at the left. Both rooms were plastered and whitewashed—the plaster laid directly upon the earth walls, as it used to be in dugouts. The floor was of hard cement. Up under the wooden ceiling there were little half-windows with white curtains, and pots of geraniums and wandering Jew in the deep sills. As I entered the kitchen I sniffed a pleasant smell of gingerbread baking. The stove was very large, with bright nickel trimmings, and behind it there was a long wooden bench against the wall, and a tin washtub, into which grandmother poured hot and cold water. When she brought the soap and towels, I told her that I was used to taking my bath without help.
"Can you do your ears, Jimmy? Are you sure? Well, now, I call you a right smart little boy."
It was pleasant there in the kitchen. The sun shone into my bath-water through the west half-window, and a big Maltese cat came up and rubbed himself against the tub, watching me curiously. While I scrubbed, my grandmother busied herself in the dining-room until I called anxiously, "Grandmother, I'm afraid the cakes are burning!" Then she came laughing, waving her apron before her as if she were shooing chickens.
She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to carry her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if she were looking at something, or listening to something, far away. As I grew older, I came to believe that it was only because she was so often thinking of things that were far away. She was quick-footed and energetic in all her movements. Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often spoke with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous that everything should go with due order and decorum. Her laugh, too, was high, and perhaps a little strident, but there was a lively intelligence in it. She was then fifty-five years old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance.
After I was dressed I explored the long cellar
While my grandmother was busy about supper I settled myself on the wooden bench behind the stove and got acquainted with the cat—he caught not only rats and mice, but gophers, I was told. The patch of yellow sunlight on the floor traveled back toward the stairway, and grandmother and I talked about my journey, and about the arrival of the new Bohemian family; she said they were to be our nearest neighbors. We did not talk about the farm in Virginia, which had been her home for so many years. But after the men came in from the fields, and we were all seated at the supper-table, then she asked Jake about the old place and about our friends and neighbors there.
My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed me and spoke kindly to
me, but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once his deliberateness and personal
dignity, and was a little in awe of him. The thing one
Grandfather's eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle. His teeth were white and regular—so sound that he had never been to a dentist in his life. He had a delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and wind. When he was a young man his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still coppery.
As we sat at the table Otto Fuchs and I kept stealing covert glances at each other. Grandmother had told me while she was getting supper that he was an Austrian who came to this country a young boy and had led an adventurous life in the Far West among mining-camps and cow outfits. His iron constitution was somewhat broken by mountain pneumonia, and he had drifted back to live in a milder country for a while. He had relatives in Bismarck, a German settlement to the north of us, but for a year now he had been working for grandfather.
The minute supper was over, Otto took me into the kitchen to whisper to me about a pony down in the barn that had been bought for me at a sale; he had been riding him to find out whether he had any bad tricks, but he was a "perfect gentleman," and his name was Dude. Fuchs told me everything I wanted to know: how he had lost his ear in a Wyoming blizzard when he was a stage-driver, and how to throw a lasso. He promised to rope a steer for me before sundown next day. He got out his "chaps" and silver spurs to show them to Jake and me, and his best cowboy boots, with tops stitched in bold design—roses, and true-lover's knots, and undraped female figures. These, he solemnly explained, were angels.
Before we went to bed Jake and Otto were called up to the living-room for prayers.
Grandfather put on silver-rimmed spectacles and read several Psalms. His voice was
so sympathetic and he read so interestingly that I wished he had chosen one of my
favorite chapters in the Book of Kings. I was awed by his intonation of the word
"Selah."
"He shall choose our inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob
whom He loved. Selah."
I had no idea what the word meant; perhaps he had not.
Early the next morning I ran out of doors to look about me. I had been told that
ours was the only wooden house
west of Black Hawk—until you came to the Norwegian settlement, where
there were several. Our neighbors lived in
sod houses and dugouts— comfortable, but not very
roomy. Our white frame house, with a story and half-story above the basement, stood
at the east end of what I might call the farmyard, with the windmill close by the
kitchen door. From the windmill the ground sloped westward, down to the barns and
granaries and pig-yards. This slope was trampled hard and bare, and washed out in
winding gullies by the rain. Beyond the corncribs, at the bottom of the shallow
draw, was a muddy little pond, with rusty willow bushes growing about it. The road
from the post-office came directly by our door, crossed the farmyard, and curved
round this little pond, beyond which it began to climb the gentle swell of unbroken
prairie to the west. There, along the western sky-line, it skirted a great
cornfield, much larger than any field I had ever seen. This cornfield, and the
North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew a thick-set strip of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning yellow. This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to look very hard to see it at all. The little trees were insignificant against the grass. It seemed as if the grass were about to run over them, and over the plum-patch behind the sod chicken-house.
As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.
I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out, her sunbonnet
on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I did not want to go to the
garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner.
The garden, curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from
I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning. Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping . . .
Alone, I should never have found the garden—except, perhaps, for the
big yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their withering vines —
and I felt very little interest in it when I got there. I wanted to walk straight on
When grandmother was ready to go, I said I would like to stay up there in the garden awhile.
She peered down at me from under her sunbonnet. "Are n't you afraid of snakes?"
"A little," I admitted, "but I'd like to stay anyhow."
"Well, if you see one, don't have anything to do with him. The big yellow and brown
ones won't hurt you; they're bull-snakes and help to keep the
gophers down. Don't be scared if you see anything look out of
that
Grandmother swung the bag of potatoes over her shoulder and went down the path, leaning forward a little. The road followed the windings of the draw; when she came to the first bend she waved at me and disappeared. I was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content.
I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely approach
unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin. There were some
ground-cherry bushes growing along
the furrows, full of fruit. I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that
protected the berries and ate a few. All about me
giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever seen, were
doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines. The gophers scurried up and down the
ploughed ground. There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard,
but I could hear it
ON Sunday morning Otto Fuchs was to drive us over to make
the acquaintance of our new Bohemian neighbors. We were taking them some provisions,
as they had come to live on a wild place where there was no garden or chicken-house,
and very little broken land. Fuchs brought up a sack of potatoes and
a piece of cured pork from the
cellar, and grandmother packed some loaves of Saturday's bread, a jar of butter, and
several pumpkin pies in the straw of the wagon-box. We clambered up to the front
seat and jolted off past the little pond and along the road that climbed to the big
cornfield.
I could hardly wait to see what lay beyond that cornfield; but there was only red
grass like ours, and nothing else, though from the high wagon-seat one could look
off a long way. The road ran about like a wild thing, avoiding the deep draws,
crossing them where they were wide and shallow. And all along it, wherever it looped
or ran, the sunflowers grew; some
of them were as big as little trees, with
The Bohemian family, grandmother told me as we drove along, had bought the
homestead of a fellow-countryman, Peter
Krajiek, and had paid him more than it was worth. Their agreement with him
was made before they left the old country, through a cousin of his, who was also a
relative of Mrs. Shimerda. The Shimerdas were the first Bohemian family to come to
this part of the county. Krajiek was their only interpreter, and could tell them
anything he chose. They could not speak enough English to ask for advice, or even to
make their most pressing wants known. One son, Fuchs said, was well-grown, and
strong enough to work the land; but the father was old and frail and knew nothing
about farming. He was a weaver by trade; had been a skilled workman on tapestries
and upholstery materials. He had brought his fiddle with him, which would n't be of
much
"If they're nice people, I hate to think of them spending the winter in that cave of Krajiek's," said grandmother. "It's no better than a badger hole; no proper dugout at all. And I hear he's made them pay twenty dollars for his old cookstove that ain't worth ten."
"Yes'm," said Otto; "and he's sold 'em his oxen and his two bony old horses for the price of good work-teams. I'd have interfered about the horses—the old man can understand some German—if I'd 'a' thought it would do any good. But Bohemians has a natural distrust of Austrians."
Grandmother looked interested. "Now, why is that, Otto?"
Fuchs wrinkled his brow and nose. "Well, ma'm, it's politics. It would take me a long while to explain."
The land was growing rougher; I was told that we were
approaching Squaw Creek, which cut up the west half
of the Shimerdas' place and made the land of little value for farming. Soon we could
see the broken, grassy clay cliffs which indicated the windings of the
As we approached the Shimerdas' dwelling, I could still see nothing but rough red hillocks, and draws with shelving banks and long roots hanging out where the earth had crumbled away. Presently, against one of those banks, I saw a sort of shed, thatched with the same wine-colored grass that grew everywhere. Near it tilted a shattered windmill-frame, that had no wheel. We drove up to this skeleton to tie our horses, and then I saw a door and window sunk deep in the draw-bank. The door stood open, and a woman and a girl of fourteen ran out and looked up at us hopefully. A little girl trailed along behind them. The woman had on her head the same embroidered shawl with silk fringes that she wore when she had alighted from the train at Black Hawk. She was not old, but she was certainly not young. Her face was alert and lively, with a sharp chin and shrewd little eyes. She shook grandmother's hand energetically.
"Very glad, very glad!" she ejaculated. Immediately she pointed to the bank out of which she had emerged and said, "House no good, house no good!"
Grandmother nodded consolingly. "You'll get fixed up comfortable after while, Mrs. Shimerda; make good house."
My grandmother always spoke in a very loud tone to foreigners, as if they were deaf. She made Mrs. Shimerda understand the friendly intention of our visit, and the Bohemian woman handled the loaves of bread and even smelled them, and examined the pies with lively curiosity, exclaiming, "Much good, much thank!"— and again she wrung grandmother's hand.
The oldest son, Ambroz,—they called it Ambrosch,—came out of the cave and stood beside his mother. He was nineteen years old, short and broad-backed, with a close-cropped, flat head, and a wide, flat face. His hazel eyes were little and shrewd, like his mother's, but more sly and suspicious; they fairly snapped at the food. The family had been living on corncakes and sorghum molasses for three days.
The little girl was pretty, but Án-tonia—
"She wants me to tell you he won't hurt nobody, Mrs. Burden. He was born like that.
The others are smart. Ambrosch, he make
At that moment the father came out of the hole in the bank. He wore no hat, and his
thick, iron-gray hair was brushed straight back from his forehead. It was so long
that it bushed out behind his ears, and made him look like the old portraits I
remembered in Virginia. He was tall and slender, and his thin shoulders stooped. He
looked at us understandingly, then took grandmother's hand and bent over it. I
noticed how white and well-shaped his own hands were. They looked calm, somehow, and
skilled. His eyes were melancholy, and were set back deep under his brow. His face
was ruggedly formed, but it looked like ashes—like something from which
all the warmth and light had died out. Everything about this old man was in keeping
with his dignified manner. He was neatly dressed. Under his coat he wore a knitted
gray vest, and, instead of a collar, a silk scarf of a dark bronze-green, carefully
crossed and held together by a red coral pin. While Krajiek was translating for Mr.
Shimerda, Ántonia came up to me and held out her hand coaxingly. In a
moment we were running up
When we reached the level and could see the gold tree-tops, I pointed toward them, and Ántonia laughed and squeezed my hand as if to tell me how glad she was I had come. We raced off toward Squaw Creek and did not stop until the ground itself stopped—fell away before us so abruptly that the next step would have been out into the tree-tops. We stood panting on the edge of the ravine, looking down at the trees and bushes that grew below us. The wind was so strong that I had to hold my hat on, and the girls' skirts were blown out before them. Ántonia seemed to like it; she held her little sister by the hand and chattered away in that language which seemed to me spoken so much more rapidly than mine. She looked at me, her eyes fairly blazing with things she could not say.
"Name? What name?" she asked, touching me on the shoulder. I told her my name, and she repeated it after me and made Yulka say it. She pointed into the gold cottonwood tree behind whose top we stood and said again, "What name?"
We sat down and made a nest in the
"Oh," I exclaimed, "blue; blue sky."
She clapped her hands and murmured, "Blue sky, blue eyes," as if it amused her.
While we snuggled down there out of the wind she learned a score of words. She was
quick, and very eager. We were so deep in the grass that we could see nothing but
the blue sky over us and the gold tree in front of us. It was wonderfully pleasant.
After Ántonia had said the new words over and over, she wanted to give me a
little chased silver ring she wore on her middle finger. When she coaxed and
insisted, I repulsed her quite sternly. I did n't
While we were disputing about the ring, I heard a mournful voice calling,
"Án-tonia, Án-tonia!" She sprang up like a hare.
"Tatinek,
Tatinek!" she shouted, and we ran to meet the old man who was coming
toward us. Ántonia reached him first, took his hand and kissed it. When I
came up, he touched my shoulder and looked searchingly down into my face for several
seconds. I became somewhat embarrassed, for I was used to being taken for granted by
my elders.
We went with Mr. Shimerda back to the dugout, where grandmother was waiting for me. Before I got into the wagon, he took a book out of his pocket, opened it, and showed me a page with two alphabets, one English and the other Bohemian. He placed this book in my grandmother's hands, looked at her entreatingly, and said with an earnestness which I shall never forget, "Te-e-ach, te-e-ach my Án-tonia!"
ON the afternoon of that same Sunday I took my first long
ride on my pony, under Otto's direction. After that Dude and I went twice a week to
the post-office, six miles east of
us, and I saved the men a good deal of time by riding on errands to our
neighbors. When we had to borrow anything, or to send about word that there would be
preaching at the sod schoolhouse,
I was always the messenger. Formerly Fuchs attended to such things after working
hours.
All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first glorious
autumn. The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and
I could choose my own way over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home
again. Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the
sunflowers were introduced into that country by the
Mormons; that at the time of the persecution, when they left
Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship
I used to love to drift along the pale yellow cornfields, looking for the damp
spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the
smartweed soon turned a rich copper color and the narrow brown
leaves hung curled like cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Sometimes I
went south to visit our German
neighbors and to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the
big elm tree that grew up out of a deep crack in the earth and had a hawk's
nest in its branches. Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such
a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if
they were persons. It must have been the scarcity of
Sometimes I rode north to the big prairie-dog town to watch the brown, earth-owls fly home in the late afternoon and go down to their nests
underground with the dogs. Ántonia Shimerda liked to go with me, and we
used to wonder a great deal about these birds of subterranean habit. We had to be on
our guard there, for rattlesnakes were always lurking about. They came to pick up an
easy living among the dogs and owls, which were quite defenseless against them; took
possession of their comfortable houses and ate the eggs and puppies. We felt sorry
for the owls. It was always mournful to see them come flying home at sunset and
disappear under the earth. But, after all, we felt, winged things who would live
like that must be rather degraded creatures. The dog-town was a long way from any
pond or creek. Otto Fuchs said he had seen populous dog-towns in the desert where
there was no surface water for fifty miles; he insisted that some of the holes must
go down to water—nearly two hundred feet, hereabouts. Ántonia
said she did n't believe it; that the dogs probably
Ántonia had opinions about everything, and she was soon able to make them known. Almost every day she came running across the prairie to have her reading lesson with me. Mrs. Shimerda grumbled, but realized it was important that one member of the family should learn English. When the lesson was over, we used to go up to the watermelon patch behind the garden. I split the melons with an old corn-knife, and we lifted out the hearts and ate them with the juice trickling through our fingers. The white Christmas melons we did not touch, but we watched them with curiosity. They were to be picked late, when the hard frosts had set in, and put away for winter use. After weeks on the ocean, the Shimerdas were famished for fruit. The two girls would wander for miles along the edge of the cornfields, hunting for ground-cherries.
Ántonia loved to help grandmother in the kitchen and to learn about
cooking and housekeeping. She would stand beside her, watching her every movement.
We were willing to believe that Mrs. Shimerda was a good housewife in her own
country, but she managed
I remember how horrified we were at the sour, ashy-gray bread she gave her family to eat. She mixed her dough, we discovered, in an old tin peck-measure that Krajiek had used about the barn. When she took the paste out to bake it, she left smears of dough sticking to the sides of the measure, put the measure on the shelf behind the stove, and let this residue ferment. The next time she made bread, she scraped this sour stuff down into the fresh dough to serve as yeast.
During those first months the Shimerdas never went to town. Krajiek encouraged them in the belief that in Black Hawk they would somehow be mysteriously separated from their money. They hated Krajiek, but they clung to him because he was the only human being with whom they could talk or from whom they could get information. He slept with the old man and the two boys in the dugout barn, along with the oxen. They kept him in their hole and fed him for the same reason that the prairie dogs and the brown owls housed the rattlesnakes—because they did not know how to get rid of him.
WE knew that things were hard for our Bohemian neighbors,
but the two girls were light-hearted and never complained. They were always ready to
forget their troubles at home, and to run away with me over the prairie, scaring
rabbits or starting up flocks of
quail.
I remember Ántonia's excitement when she came into our kitchen one afternoon and announced: "My papa find friends up north, with Russian mans. Last night he take me for see, and I can understand very much talk. Nice mans, Mrs. Burden. One is fat and all the time laugh. Everybody laugh. The first time I see my papa laugh in this kawn-tree. Oh, very nice!"
I asked her if she meant the two Russians who lived up by the big dog-town. I had
often been tempted to go to see them when I was riding in that direction, but one of
them was a wild-looking fellow and I was a little afraid of him. Russia seemed to me
more remote than any other country—farther away than China, almost as
far as the North Pole. Of
Peter, his companion, was a very different sort of fellow; short, bow-legged, and
as fat as butter. He always seemed pleased when he met people on the road, smiled
and took off his cap to every one, men as well as women. At a distance, on his
wagon, he looked like an old man; his hair and beard were of such a pale flaxen
color that they seemed white
The two Russians made good farmhands, and in summer they worked out together. I had heard our neighbors laughing when they told how Peter always had to go home at night to milk his cow. Other bachelor homesteaders used canned milk, to save trouble. Sometimes Peter came to church at the sod schoolhouse. It was there I first saw him, sitting on a low bench by the door, his plush cap in his hands, his bare feet tucked apologetically under the seat.
After Mr. Shimerda discovered the Russians, he went to see them almost every evening, and sometimes took Ántonia with him. She said they came from a part of Russia where the language was not very different from Bohemian, and if I wanted to go to their place, she could talk to them for me. One afternoon, before the heavy frosts began, we rode up there together on my pony.
The Russians had a neat log house built on a grassy slope, with a windlass well
beside the
After he had shown us his garden, Peter trundled a load of watermelons up the hill
in his wheelbarrow. Pavel was not at home. He
Peter put the melons in a row on the oilcloth-covered table and stood over them,
brandishing a butcher knife. Before the blade got fairly into them, they split of
their own ripeness, with a delicious sound. He gave us knives, but no plates, and
the top of the table was soon swimming with juice and seeds. I had never seen any
one eat so many melons as Peter ate. He assured us that they were good for one
—better than medicine; in his country people lived on them at this time
of year. He was very hospitable and jolly.
When we got up to go, Peter looked about in perplexity for something that would entertain us. He ran into the storeroom and brought out a gaudily painted harmonica, sat down on a bench, and spreading his fat legs apart began to play like a whole band. The tunes were either very lively or very doleful, and he sang words to some of them.
Before we left, Peter put ripe cucumbers into a sack for Mrs. Shimerda and gave us a lard-pail full of milk to cook them in. I had never heard of cooking cucumbers, but Ántonia assured me they were very good. We had to walk the pony all the way home to keep from spilling the milk.
ONE afternoon we were having our reading lesson on the
warm, grassy bank where the
badger lived. It was a day of amber sunlight, but there was a shiver of coming
winter in the air. I had seen ice on the little horse-pond that morning, and as we
went through the garden we found the tall asparagus, with its red berries, lying on
the ground, a mass of slimy green.
Tony was barefooted, and she shivered in her cotton dress and was comfortable only
when we were tucked down on the baked earth, in the full blaze of the sun. She could
talk to me about almost anything by this time. That afternoon she was telling me how
highly esteemed our friend the badger was in her part of the world, and how men kept
a special kind of dog, with very short legs, to hunt him. Those dogs, she said, went
down into the hole after the badger and killed him there in a terrific struggle
underground; you could hear the barks and yelps outside. Then the dog dragged
himself back, covered with bites and scratches, to be rewarded and petted by his
master. She
The rabbits were unusually spry that afternoon. They kept starting up all about us,
and dashing off down the draw as if they were playing a game of some kind. But the
little buzzing things that lived in the grass were all dead—all but one.
While we were lying there against the warm bank,
a little insect of the palest, frailest green hopped painfully
out of the buffalo grass and tried to leap into a bunch of bluestem. He missed it,
fell back, and sat with his head sunk between his long legs, his antennæ
quivering, as if he were waiting for something to come and finish him. Tony made a
warm nest for him in her hands; talked to him gayly and indulgently in Bohemian.
Presently he began to sing for us—a thin, rusty little chirp. She held
him close to her ear and laughed, but a moment afterward I saw there were tears in
her eyes. She told me that in her village at home there was an old beggar woman who
went about selling herbs and roots she had dug up in the forest. If you took her in
and gave her a warm place by the fire, she sang old songs to the children in a
cracked voice, like this. Old Hata, she
When the bank on the other side of the draw began to throw a narrow shelf of shadow, we knew we ought to be starting homeward; the chill came on quickly when the sun got low, and Ántonia's dress was thin. What were we to do with the frail little creature we had lured back to life by false pretenses? I offered my pockets, but Tony shook her head and carefully put the green insect in her hair, tying her big handkerchief down loosely over her curls. I said I would go with her until we could see Squaw Creek, and then turn and run home. We drifted along lazily, very happy, through the magical light of the late afternoon.
All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As far as we
could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger
and fiercer than at any other time of the day. The blond cornfields were red gold,
the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like
the bush that burned with fire and
was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of
How many an afternoon Ántonia and I have trailed along the prairie under that magnificence! And always two long black shadows flitted before us or followed after, dark spots on the ruddy grass.
We had been silent a long time, and the edge of the sun sank nearer and nearer the prairie floor, when we saw a figure moving on the edge of the upland, a gun over his shoulder. He was walking slowly, dragging his feet along as if he had no purpose. We broke into a run to overtake him.
"My papa sick all the time," Tony panted as we flew. "He not look good, Jim."
As we neared Mr. Shimerda she shouted, and he lifted his head and peered about. Tony ran up to him, caught his hand and pressed it against her cheek. She was the only one of his family who could rouse the old man from the torpor in which he seemed to live. He took the bag from his belt and showed us three rabbits he had shot, looked at Ántonia with a wintry flicker of a smile and began to tell her something. She turned to me.
"My tatinek make me little hat with the skins, little hat
for win-ter!" she exclaimed joyfully. "Meat for eat, skin for hat,"—she
told off these benefits on her fingers.
Her father put his hand on her hair, but she caught his wrist and lifted it carefully away, talking to him rapidly. I heard the name of old Hata. He untied the handkerchief, separated her hair with his fingers, and stood looking down at the green insect. When it began to chirp faintly, he listened as if it were a beautiful sound.
I picked up the gun he had dropped; a queer piece from the old country, short and heavy, with a stag's head on the cock. When he saw me examining it, he turned to me with his far-away look that always made me feel as if I were down at the bottom of a well. He spoke kindly and gravely, and Ántonia translated:—
"My tatinek say when you are big boy, he give you his gun.
Very fine, from Bohemie. It was belong to a great man, very rich, like what you not
got here; many fields, many forests, many big house. My papa play for his wedding,
and he give my papa fine gun, and my papa give you."
I was glad that this project was one of
MUCH as I liked Ántonia, I hated a superior tone
that she sometimes took with me. She was four years older than I, to be sure, and
had seen more of the world; but I was a boy and she was a girl, and I resented her
protecting manner. Before the autumn was over she began to treat me more like an
equal and to defer to me in other things than reading lessons. This change came
about from an adventure we had together.
One day when I rode over to the Shimerdas' I found Ántonia starting off on foot for Russian Peter's house, to borrow a spade Ambrosch needed. I offered to take her on the pony, and she got up behind me. There had been another black frost the night before, and the air was clear and heady as wine. Within a week all the blooming roads had been despoiled—hundreds of miles of yellow sunflowers had been transformed into brown, rattling, burry stalks.
We found Russian Peter digging his potatoes. We were glad to go in and get warm
The dog-town was spread out over perhaps ten acres. The grass had been nibbled
short and even, so this stretch was not shaggy and red like the surrounding country,
but gray and velvety. The holes were several yards apart, and were disposed with a
good deal of regularity, almost as if the town had been laid out in streets and
avenues. One always felt that an orderly and very sociable kind of life was going on
there. I picketed Dude down in a draw, and we went wandering about, looking for a
hole that would be easy to dig. The dogs were out, as usual, dozens of them, sitting
up on their hind legs over the doors of their houses. As we approached, they barked,
shook their tails at us, and scurried
We were examining a big hole with two entrances. The burrow sloped into the ground
at a gentle angle, so that we could see where the two corridors united, and the
floor was dusty from use, like a little highway over which much travel went. I was
walking backward, in a crouching position, when I heard Ántonia scream. She
was standing opposite me, pointing behind me and shouting something in Bohemian. I
whirled round, and there, on one of those dry gravel beds, was
the biggest snake I had ever seen. He was sunning
himself, after the cold night, and he must have been asleep when Ántonia
screamed. When I turned he was lying in long loose waves, like a letter "W." He
twitched and began to coil slowly. He was not merely a big snake, I thought
—he was a circus monstrosity. His
"What did you jabber Bohunk for? You might have told me there was a snake behind me!" I said petulantly.
"I know I am just awful, Jim, I was so scared." She took my handkerchief from my
pocket and tried to wipe my face with it,
"I never know you was so brave, Jim," she went on comfortingly. "You is just like big mans; you wait for him lift his head and then you go for him. Ain't you feel scared a bit? Now we take that snake home and show everybody. Nobody ain't seen in this kawn-tree so big snake like you kill."
She went on in this strain until I began to think that I had longed for this opportunity, and had hailed it with joy. Cautiously we went back to the snake; he was still groping with his tail, turning up his ugly belly in the light. A faint, fetid smell came from him, and a thread of green liquid oozed from his crushed head.
"Look, Tony, that's his poison," I said.
I took a long piece of string from my pocket, and she lifted his head with the
spade while I tied a noose around it. We pulled him out straight and measured him by
my riding-quirt; he was about five and a half feet long. He had twelve rattles, but
they were broken off before they began to taper, so I insisted that he must once
have had twenty-four. I explained to Ántonia how this meant that he
We decided that Ántonia should ride Dude home, and I would walk. As she rode along slowly, her bare legs swinging against the pony's sides, she kept shouting back to me about how astonished everybody would be. I followed with the spade over my shoulder, dragging my snake. Her exultation was contagious. The great land had never looked to me so big and free. If the red grass were full of rattlers, I was equal to them all. Nevertheless, I stole furtive glances behind me now and then to see that no avenging mate, older and bigger than my quarry, was racing up from the rear.
The sun had set when we reached our garden and went down the draw toward the
"Where did you run onto that beauty, Jim?"
"Up at the dog-town," I answered laconically.
"Kill him yourself? How come you to have a weepon?"
"We'd been up to Russian Peter's, to borrow a spade for Ambrosch."
Otto shook the ashes out of his pipe and squatted down to count the rattles. "It was just luck you had a tool," he said cautiously. "Gosh! I would n't want to do any business with that fellow myself, unless I had a fence-post along. Your grandmother's snake-cane would n't more than tickle him. He could stand right up and talk to you, he could. Did he fight hard?"
Ántonia broke in: "He fight something awful! He is all over Jimmy's boots. I scream for him to run, but he just hit and hit that snake like he was crazy."
Otto winked at me. After Ántonia rode on he said: "Got him in the head first crack, did n't you? That was just as well."
We hung him up to the windmill, and when I went down to the kitchen I found Ántonia standing in the middle of the floor, telling the story with a great deal of color.
Subsequent experiences with rattlesnakes taught me that my first encounter was fortunate in circumstance. My big rattler was old, and had led too easy a life; there was not much fight in him. He had probably lived there for years, with a fat prairie dog for breakfast whenever he felt like it, a sheltered home, even an owl-feather bed, perhaps, and he had forgot that the world does n't owe rattlers a living. A snake of his size, in fighting trim, would be more than any boy could handle. So in reality it was a mock adventure; the game was fixed for me by chance, as it probably was for many a dragon-slayer. I had been adequately armed by Russian Peter; the snake was old and lazy; and I had Ántonia beside me, to appreciate and admire.
That snake hung on our corral fence for several days; some of the neighbors came to
see it and agreed that it was the biggest rattler
WHILE the autumn color was growing pale on the grass
and cornfields, things went badly with our friends the Russians. Peter told his
troubles to Mr. Shimerda: he was unable to meet a note which fell due on the first
of November; had to pay an exorbitant bonus on renewing it, and to give a mortgage
on his pigs and horses and even his milk cow. His creditor was Wick Cutter, the
merciless Black Hawk money-lender, a man of evil name throughout the county, of
whom I shall have more to say later. Peter could give no very clear account of his
transactions with Cutter. He only knew that he had first borrowed two hundred
dollars, then another hundred, then fifty—that each time a bonus was
added to the principal, and the debt grew faster than any crop he planted. Now
everything was plastered with mortgages.
Soon after Peter renewed his note, Pavel strained himself lifting timbers for a
new barn, and fell over among the shavings with such a gush of blood from the
lungs that his fellow-
One afternoon Ántonia and her father came over to our house to get buttermilk, and lingered, as they usually did, until the sun was low. Just as they were leaving, Russian Peter drove up. Pavel was very bad, he said, and wanted to talk to Mr. Shimerda and his daughter; he had come to fetch them. When Ántonia and her father got into the wagon, I entreated grandmother to let me go with them: I would gladly go without my supper, I would sleep in the Shimerdas' barn and run home in the morning. My plan must have seemed very foolish to her, but she was often large-minded about humoring the desires of other people. She asked Peter to wait a moment, and when she came back from the kitchen she brought a bag of sandwiches and doughnuts for us.
Mr. Shimerda and Peter were on the front
The little house on the hillside was so much the color of the night that we could not see it as we came up the draw. The ruddy windows guided us—the light from the kitchen stove, for there was no lamp burning.
We entered softly. The man in the wide bed seemed to be asleep. Tony and I sat
down
"He is scared of the wolves,"
Ántonia whispered to me. "In his country there are very
I could not take my eyes off the man in the bed. His shirt was hanging open, and his emaciated chest, covered with yellow bristle, rose and fell horribly. He began to cough. Peter shuffled to his feet, caught up the tea-kettle and mixed him some hot water and whiskey. The sharp smell of spirits went through the room.
Pavel snatched the cup and drank, then made Peter give him the bottle and slipped it under his pillow, grinning disagreeably, as if he had outwitted some one. His eyes followed Peter about the room with a contemptuous, unfriendly expression. It seemed to me that he despised him for being so simple and docile.
Presently Pavel began to talk to Mr. Shimerda, scarcely above a whisper. He was telling a long story, and as he went on, Ántonia took my hand under the table and held it tight. She leaned forward and strained her ears to hear him. He grew more and more excited, and kept pointing all around his bed, as if there were things there and he wanted Mr. Shimerda to see them.
"It's wolves, Jimmy," Ántonia whispered. "It's awful, what he says!"
The sick man raged and shook his fist. He seemed to be cursing people who had wronged him. Mr. Shimerda caught him by the shoulders, but could hardly hold him in bed. At last he was shut off by a coughing fit which fairly choked him. He pulled a cloth from under his pillow and held it to his mouth. Quickly it was covered with bright red spots —I thought I had never seen any blood so bright. When he lay down and turned his face to the wall, all the rage had gone out of him. He lay patiently fighting for breath, like a child with croup. Ántonia's father uncovered one of his long bony legs and rubbed it rhythmically. From our bench we could see what a hollow case his body was. His spine and shoulder-blades stood out like the bones under the hide of a dead steer left in the fields. That sharp backbone must have hurt him when he lay on it.
Gradually, relief came to all of us. Whatever it was, the worst was over. Mr.
Shimerda signed to us that Pavel was asleep. Without a word Peter got up and lit
his lantern. He was going out to get his team to drive us
On the way home, when we were lying in the straw, under the jolting and rattling Ántonia told me as much of the story as she could. What she did not tell me then, she told later; we talked of nothing else for days afterward.
When Pavel and Peter were young men, living at home in Russia, they were asked to be groomsmen for a friend who was to marry the belle of another village. It was in the dead of winter and the groom's party went over to the wedding in sledges. Peter and Pavel drove in the groom's sledge, and six sledges followed with all his relatives and friends.
After the ceremony at the church, the party went to a dinner given by the parents
of the bride. The dinner lasted all afternoon; then it became a supper and
continued far into the night. There was much dancing and drinking. At midnight the
parents of the bride said good-bye to her and blessed her. The groom took her up
in his arms and carried her out to his sledge and tucked her under the
The wolves were bad that winter, and every one knew it, yet when they heard the first wolf-cry, the drivers were not much alarmed. They had too much good food and drink inside them. The first howls were taken up and echoed and with quickening repetitions. The wolves were coming together. There was no moon, but the starlight was clear on the snow. A black drove came up over the hill behind the wedding party. The wolves ran like streaks of shadow; they looked no bigger than dogs, but there were hundreds of them.
Something happened to the hindmost sledge: the driver lost control, —
he was probably very drunk,—the horses left the road, the sledge was
caught in a clump of trees, and overturned. The occupants rolled out over the
snow, and the fleetest of the wolves sprang upon them. The shrieks that followed
made everybody sober. The drivers stood up and
Another driver lost control. The screams of the horses were more terrible to hear than the cries of the men and women. Nothing seemed to check the wolves. It was hard to tell what was happening in the rear; the people who were falling behind shrieked as piteously as those who were already lost. The little bride hid her face on the groom's shoulder and sobbed. Pavel sat still and watched his horses. The road was clear and white, and the groom's three blacks went like the wind. It was only necessary to be calm and to guide them carefully.
At length, as they breasted a long hill, Peter rose cautiously and looked back. "There are only three sledges left," he whispered.
"And the wolves?" Pavel asked.
"Enough! Enough for all of us."
Pavel reached the brow of the hill, but only two sledges followed him down the
other side. In that moment on the hilltop, they saw behind them a whirling black
group on the snow. Presently the groom screamed. He saw his father's sledge
overturned, with his mother
They were within a few miles of their village now. The only sledge left out of six was not very far behind them, and Pavel's middle horse was failing. Beside a frozen pond something happened to the other sledge; Peter saw it plainly. Three big wolves got abreast of the horses, and the horses went crazy. They tried to jump over each other, got tangled up in the harness, and overturned the sledge.
When the shrieking behind them died away, Pavel realized that he was alone upon the familiar road. "They still come?" he asked Peter.
"Yes."
"How many?"
"Twenty, thirty—enough."
Now his middle horse was being almost dragged by the other two. Pavel gave Peter
the reins and stepped carefully into the back of the sledge. He called to the
groom that
Pavel and Peter drove into the village alone, and they had been alone ever since. They were run out of their village. Pavel's own mother would not look at him. They went away to strange towns, but when people learned where they came from, they were always asked if they knew the two men who had fed the bride to the wolves. Wherever they went, the story followed them. It took them five years to save money enough to come to America. They worked in Chicago, Des Moines, Fort Wayne, but they were always unfortunate. When Pavel's health grew so bad, they decided to try farming.
Pavel died a few days after he unburdened his mind to Mr. Shimerda, and was buried in the Norwegian gaveyard. Peter sold off everything, and left the country—went to be cook in a railway construction camp where gangs of Russians were employed.
At his sale we bought Peter's wheelbarrow and some of his harness. During the auction he went about with his head down, and never lifted his eyes. He seemed not to care about anything. The Black Hawk money-lender who held mortgages on Peter's live-stock was there, and he bought in the sale notes at about fifty cents on the dollar. Every one said Peter kissed the cow before she was led away by her new owner. I did not see him do it, but this I know: after all his furniture and his cook-stove and pots and pans had been hauled off by the purchasers, when his house was stripped and bare, he sat down on the floor with his clasp-knife and ate all the melons that he had put away for winter. When Mr. Shimerda and Krajiek drove up in their wagon to take Peter to the train, they found him with a dripping beard, surrounded by heaps of melon rinds.
The loss of his two friends had a depressing
THE first snowfall came early in December. I remember how
the world looked from our sitting-room window as I dressed behind the stove that
morning: the low sky was like a sheet of metal; the blond cornfields had faded out
into ghostliness at last; the little pond was frozen under its stiff willow bushes.
Big white flakes were whirling over everything and disappearing in the red grass.
Beyond the pond, on the slope that climbed to the cornfield, there was, faintly
marked in the grass, a great circle where the Indians used to ride. Jake and Otto
were sure that when they galloped round that ring the Indians tortured prisoners,
bound to a stake in the center; but grandfather thought they merely ran races or
trained horses there. Whenever one looked at this slope against the setting sun, the
circle showed like a patern in the grass; and this morning, when the first light
spray of snow lay over it, it came out with wonderful distinctness, like strokes of
Chinese white on canvas. The old figure stirred me as it had
As soon as the snow had packed hard I began to drive about the country in a clumsy sleigh that Otto Fuchs made for me by fastening a wooden goods-box on bobs. Fuchs had been apprenticed to a cabinet-maker in the old country and was very handy with tools. He would have done a better job if I had n't hurried him. My first trip was to the post-office, and the next day I went over to take Yulka and Ántonia for a sleigh-ride.
It was a bright, cold day. I piled straw and buffalo robes into the box, and took two hot bricks wrapped in old blankets. When I got to the Shimerdas' I did not go up to the house, but sat in my sleigh at the bottom of the draw and called. Ántonia and Yulka came running out, wearing little rabbit-skin hats their father had made for them. They had heard about my sledge from Ambrosch and knew why I had come. They tumbled in beside me and we set off toward the north, along a road that happened to be broken.
The sky was brilliantly blue, and the sunlight on the glittering white stretches of
prairie was almost blinding. As Ántonia said, the
The girls had on cotton dresses under their shawls; they kept shivering beneath the
buffalo robes and hugging each other for warmth. But they were so glad to get away
from their
All the way to Russian Peter's we were extravagantly happy, but when we turned
back,—it must have been about four o'clock,—the east wind
grew stronger and began to howl; the sun lost its heartening power and the sky
became gray and somber. I took off my long woolen comforter and wound it around
Yulka's throat. She got so cold that we made her hide her head under the buffalo
robe. Ántonia and I sat erect, but I held the reins clumsily, and my eyes
were blinded by the wind a good deal of the time. It was growing dark when we got to
their house, but I refused to go in with them and get warm. I knew my hands would
ache terribly if I went near a fire. Yulka forgot to give me back my comforter, and
I had to drive home directly
The basement kitchen seemed heavenly safe and warm in those days—like a tight little boat in a winter sea. The men were out in the fields all day, husking corn, and when they came in at noon, with long caps pulled down over their ears and their feet in red-lined overshoes, I used to think they were like Arctic explorers.
In the afternoons, when grandmother sat upstairs darning, or making husking-gloves,
I read "The Swiss Family
Robinson" aloud to her, and I felt that the Swiss family had no advantages
over us in the way of an adventurous life. I was convinced that man's strongest
antagonist is the cold. I admired the cheerful zest with which grandmother went
about keeping us warm and comfortable and well-fed. She often reminded me, when she
was preparing for the return of the hungry men, that this country was not like
Virginia, and that here a cook had, as she said, "very little to do with." On
Sundays she gave us as much chicken as we could eat, and on other days we had ham or
bacon or sausage meat.
Next to getting warm and keeping warm, dinner and supper were the most interesting things we had to think about. Our lives centered around warmth and food and the return of the men at nightfall. I used to wonder, when they came in tired from the fields, their feet numb and their hands cracked and sore, how they could do all the chores so conscientiously: feed and water and bed the horses, milk the cows, and look after the pigs. When supper was over, it took them a long while to get the cold out of their bones. While grandmother and I washed the dishes and grandfather read his paper upstairs, Jake and Otto sat on the long bench behind the stove, "easing" their inside boots, or rubbing mutton tallow into their cracked hands.
Every Saturday night we popped corn or made taffy, and Otto Fuchs used to sing, "For I Am a Cowboy and Know I've Done Wrong," or, "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairee." He had a good baritone voice and always led the singing when we went to church services at the sod schoolhouse.
I can still see those two men sitting on the bench; Otto's close-clipped head and Jake's shaggy hair slicked flat in front by a wet comb. I can see the sag of their tired shoulders against the whitewashed wall. What good fellows they were, how much they knew, and how many things they had kept faith with!
Fuchs had been a cowboy, a stage-driver, a bar-tender, a miner; had wandered all
over that great Western country and done hard work everywhere, though, as
grandmother said, he had nothing to show for it. Jake was duller than Otto. He could
scarcely read, wrote even his name with difficulty, and he had a violent temper
which sometimes made him behave like a crazy man—tore him all to pieces
and actually made him ill. But he was so soft-hearted that any one could impose upon
him. If he, as he said, "forgot himself" and swore before grandmother, he went about
depressed and shamefaced all day. They were both of them jovial about the cold in
winter and the heat in summer, always ready to work overtime and to meet
emergencies. It was a matter of pride with them not to spare themselves. Yet they
were the sort
On those bitter, starlit nights, as we sat around the old stove that fed us and warmed us and kept us cheerful, we could hear the coyotes howling down by the corrals, and their hungry, wintry cry used to remind the boys of wonderful animal stories; about gray wolves and bears in the Rockies, wildcats and panthers in the Virginia mountains. Sometimes Fuchs could be persuaded to talk about the outlaws and desperate characters he had known. I remember one funny story about himself that made grandmother, who was working her bread on the bread-board, laugh until she wiped her eyes with her bare arm, her hands being floury. It was like this:—
When Otto left Austria to come to America, he was asked by one of his relatives to
look after a woman who was crossing on the same boat, to join her husband in
Chicago. The woman started off with two children, but it was clear that her family
might grow larger on the journey. Fuchs said he "got on fine with the kids," and
liked the mother, though she played a sorry trick on him. In mid-ocean she proceeded
to have not one baby, but three!
Grandmother told him she was sure the
FOR several weeks after my sleigh-ride, we heard nothing
from the Shimerdas. My sore throat kept me indoors, and grandmother had a cold which
made the housework heavy for her. When Sunday came she was glad to have a day of
rest. One night at supper Fuchs told us he had seen Mr. Shimerda out hunting.
"He's made himself a rabbit-skin cap, Jim, and a rabbit-skin collar that he buttons on outside his coat. They ain't got but one overcoat among 'em over there, and they take turns wearing it. They seem awful scared of cold, and stick in that hole in the bank like badgers."
"All but the crazy boy," Jake put in. "He never wears the coat. Krajiek says he's
turrible strong and can stand anything. I guess rabbits must be getting scarce in
this locality. Ambrosch come along by the cornfield yesterday where I was at work
and showed me three prairie dogs he'd shot. He asked me if they was good to eat. I
spit and made a face and took on, to scare him, but he just looked like
Grandmother looked up in alarm and spoke to grandfather. "Josiah, you don't suppose Krajiek would let them poor creatures eat prairie dogs, do you?"
"You had better go over and see our neighbors to-morrow, Emmaline," he replied gravely.
Fuchs put in a cheerful word and said prairie dogs were clean beasts and ought to be good for food, but their family connections were against them. I asked what he meant, and he grinned and said they belonged to the rat family.
When I went downstairs in the morning, I found grandmother and Jake packing a hamper basket in the kitchen.
"Now, Jake," grandmother was saying, "if you can find that old rooster that got his
comb froze, just give his neck a twist, and we'll take him along. There's no good
reason why Mrs. Shimerda could n't have got hens from her neighbors last fall and
had a henhouse going by now. I reckon she was confused and did n't know where to
begin. I've come strange to a new country myself, but I never forgot hens
"Just as you say, mam," said Jake, "but I hate to think of Krajiek getting a leg of that old rooster." He tramped out through the long cellar and dropped the heavy door behind him.
After breakfast grandmother and Jake and I bundled ourselves up and climbed into the cold front wagon-seat. As we approached the Shimerdas' we heard the frosty whine of the pump and saw Ántonia, her head tied up and her cotton dress blown about her, throwing all her weight on the pump-handle as it went up and down. She heard our wagon, looked back over her shoulder, and catching up her pail of water, started at a run for the hole in the bank.
Jake helped grandmother to the ground, saying he would bring the provisions after he had blanketed his horses. We went slowly up the icy path toward the door sunk in the drawside. Blue puffs of smoke came from the stovepipe that stuck out through the grass and snow, but the wind whisked them roughly away.
Mrs. Shimerda opened the door before we
The old man was sitting on a stump behind the stove, crouching over as if he were trying to hide from us. Yulka was on the floor at his feet, her kitten in her lap. She peeped out at me and smiled, but, glancing up at her mother, hid again. Ántonia was washing pans and dishes in a dark corner. The crazy boy lay under the only window, stretched on a gunnysack stuffed with straw. As soon as we entered he threw a grainsack over the crack at the bottom of the door. The air in the cave was stifling, and it was very dark, too. A lighted lantern, hung over the stove, threw out a feeble yellow glimmer.
Mrs. Shimerda snatched off the covers of two barrels behind the door, and made us
look into them. In one there were some potatoes that had been frozen and were
rotting, in the other was a little pile of flour. Grandmother murmured something in
embarrassment, but the Bohemian woman laughed scornfully, a
Grandmother went on talking in her polite Virginia way, not admitting their stark need or her own remissness, until Jake arrived with the hamper, as if in direct answer to Mrs. Shimerda's reproaches. Then the poor woman broke down. She dropped on the floor beside her crazy son, hid her face on her knees, and sat crying bitterly. Grandmother paid no heed to her, but called Ántonia to come and help empty the basket. Tony left her corner reluctantly. I had never seen her crushed like this before.
"You not mind my poor
The crazy boy, seeing the food, began to make soft, gurgling noises and stroked his stomach. Jake came in again, this time with a sack of potatoes. Grandmother looked about in perplexity.
"Have n't you got any sort of cave or cellar outside, Ántonia? This is no place to keep vegetables. How did your potatoes get frozen?"
"We get from Mr. Bushy, at the post-office,—what he throw out. We got no potatoes, Mrs. Burden," Tony admitted mournfully.
When Jake went out, Marek crawled along the floor and stuffed up the door-crack again. Then, quietly as a shadow, Mr. Shimerda came out from behind the stove. He stood brushing his hand over his smooth gray hair, as if he were trying to clear away a fog about his head. He was clean and neat as usual, with his green neckcloth and his coral pin. He took grandmother's arm and led her behind the stove, to the back of the room. In the rear wall was another little cave; a round hole, not much bigger than an oil barrel, scooped out in the black earth. When I got up on one of the stools and peered into it, I saw some quilts and a pile of straw. The old man held the lantern. "Yulka," he said in a low, despairing voice, "Yulka; my Ántonia!"
Grandmother drew back. "You mean they sleep in there,—your girls?" He bowed his head.
Tony slipped under his arm. "It is very cold on the floor, and this is warm like
the badger hole. I like for sleep there," she insisted eagerly. "My
Grandmother sighed. "Sure enough, where would you sleep,
dear! I don't doubt you're warm there. You'll have a better house after while,
Ántonia, and then you'll forget these hard times."
Mr. Shimerda made grandmother sit down on the only chair and pointed his wife to a
stool beside her. Standing before them with his hand on Ántonia's shoulder,
he talked in a low tone, and his daughter translated. He wanted us to know that they
were not beggars in the old country; he made good wages, and his family were
respected there. He left Bohemia with more than a thousand dollars in savings, after
their passage money was paid. He had in some way lost on exchange in New York, and
the railway fare to Nebraska was more than they had expected. By the time they paid
Krajiek for the land, and bought his horses and oxen and some old farm machinery,
they had very little money left. He wished grandmother to know, however, that he
still had some money. If they
Ántonia explained that her father meant to build a new house for them in the spring; he and Ambrosch had already split the logs for it, but the logs were all buried in the snow, along the creek where they had been felled.
While grandmother encouraged and gave them advice, I sat down on the floor with Yulka and let her show me her kitten. Marek slid cautiously toward us and began to exhibit his webbed fingers. I knew he wanted to make his queer noises for me —to bark like a dog or whinny like a horse,—but he did not dare in the presence of his elders. Marek was always trying to be agreeable, poor fellow, as if he had it on his mind that he must make up for his deficiencies.
Mrs. Shimerda grew more calm and reasonable before our visit was over, and, while
Ántonia translated, put in a word now and then
"For cook," she announced. "Little now; be very much when cook," spreading out her hands as if to indicate that the pint would swell to a gallon. "Very good. You no have in this country. All things for eat better in my country."
"Maybe so, Mrs. Shimerda," grandmother said drily. "I can't say but I prefer our bread to yours, myself."
Ántonia undertook to explain. "This very good, Mrs. Burden," —
she clasped her hands as if she could not express how good,—"it make
very much when you cook, like what
All the way home grandmother and Jake talked about how easily good Christian people could forget they were their brothers' keepers.
"I will say, Jake, some of our brothers and sisters are hard to keep. Where's a body to begin, with these people? They're wanting in everything, and most of all in horse-sense. Nobody can give 'em that, I guess. Jimmy, here, is about as able to take over a homestead as they are. Do you reckon that boy Ambrosch has any real push in him?"
"He's a worker, all right, mam, and he's got some ketch-on about him; but he's a mean one. Folks can be mean enough to get on in this world; and then, ag'in, they can be too mean."
That night, while grandmother was getting supper, we opened the package Mrs. Shimerda had given her. It was full of little brown chips that looked like the shavings of some root. They were as light as feathers, and the most noticeable thing about them was their penetrating, earthy odor. We could not determine whether they were animal or vegetable.
"They might be dried meat from some
She threw the package into the stove, but I bit off a corner of one of the chips I held in my hand, and chewed it tentatively. I never forgot the strange taste; though it was many years before I knew that those little brown shavings, which the Shimerdas had brought so far and treasured so jealously, were dried mushrooms. They had been gathered, probably, in some deep Bohemian forest . . . . . . .
DURING the week before Christmas, Jake was the most
important person of our household, for he was to go to town and do all our Christmas
shopping. But on the 21st of December, the snow began to fall. The flakes came down
so thickly that from the sitting-room windows I could not see beyond the windmill
—its frame looked dim and gray, unsubstantial like a shadow. The snow did
not stop falling all day, or during the night that followed. The cold was not
severe, but the storm was quiet and resistless. The men could not go farther than
the barns and corral. They sat about the house most of the day as if it were Sunday;
greasing their boots, mending their suspenders, plaiting whiplashes.
On the morning of the 22d, grandfather announced at breakfast that it would be
impossible to go to Black Hawk for Christmas purchases. Jake was sure he could get
through on horseback, and bring home our things in saddle-bags; but grandfather told
him the roads would be obliterated, and a newcomer
We decided to have a country Christmas, without any help from town. I had wanted to
get some picture-books for Yulka and Ántonia; even Yulka was able to read a
little now. Grandmother took me into the ice-cold storeroom, where she had some
bolts of gingham and sheeting. She cut squares of cotton cloth and we sewed them
together into a book. We bound it between pasteboards, which I covered with
brilliant calico, representing scenes from a circus. For two days I sat at the
dining-room table, pasting this book full of pictures for Yulka. We had files of
those good old family magazines which used to publish colored lithographs of popular
paintings, and I was allowed to use some of these. I took
"Napoleon Announcing the Divorce to Josephine" for my
frontispiece. On the white pages I grouped Sunday-School cards and advertising cards
which I had brought from my "old country." Fuchs got out the old candle-moulds and
made tallow candles. Grandmother hunted up her fancy cake-cutters and baked
gingerbread men and roosters,
On the day before Christmas, Jake packed the things we were sending to the Shimerdas in his saddle-bags and set off on grandfather's gray gelding. When he mounted his horse at the door, I saw that he had a hatchet slung to his belt, and he gave grandmother a meaning look which told me he was planning a surprise for me. That afternoon I watched long and eagerly from the sitting-room window. At last I saw a dark spot moving on the west hill, beside the half-buried cornfield, where the sky was taking on a coppery flush from the sun that did not quite break through. I put on my cap and ran out to meet Jake. When I got to the pond I could see that he was bringing in a little cedar tree across his pommel. He used to help my father cut Christmas trees for me in Virginia, and he had not forgotten how much I liked them.
By the time we had placed the cold, fresh-smelling little tree in a corner of the
sitting-room, it was already Christmas Eve. After supper we all gathered there, and
even grandfather, reading his paper by the table, looked up with friendly interest
now and then.
I can see them now, exactly as they looked, working about the table in the lamplight: Jake with his heavy features, so rudely moulded that his face seemed, somehow, unfinished; Otto with his half-ear and the savage scar that made his upper lip curl so ferociously under his twisted mustache. As I remember them, what unprotected faces they were; their very roughness and violence made them defenseless. These boys had no practiced manner behind which they could retreat and hold people at a distance. They had only their hard fists to batter at the world with. Otto was already one of those drifting, case-hardened laborers who never marry or have children of their own. Yet he was so fond of children!
ON Christmas morning, when I got down to the kitchen, the
men were just coming in from their morning chores—the horses and pigs
always had their breakfast before we did. Jake and Otto shouted "Merry Christmas"!
to me, and winked at each other when they saw the waffle-irons on the stove.
Grandfather came down, wearing a white shirt and his Sunday coat. Morning prayers
were longer than usual. He read the chapters from St. Matthew about the birth of
Christ, and as we listened it all seemed like something that had happened lately,
and near at hand. In his prayer he thanked the Lord for the first Christmas, and for
all that it had meant to the world ever since. He gave thanks for our food and
comfort, and prayed for the poor and destitute in great cities, where the struggle
for life was harder than it was here with us. Grandfather's prayers were often very
interesting. He had the gift of simple and moving expression. Because he talked so
little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not
After we sat down to our waffles and sausage, Jake told us how pleased the Shimerdas had been with their presents; even Ambrosch was friendly and went to the creek with him to cut the Christmas tree. It was a soft gray day outside, with heavy clouds working across the sky, and occasional squalls of snow. There were always odd jobs to be done about the barn on holidays, and the men were busy until afternoon. Then Jake and I played dominoes, while Otto wrote a long letter home to his mother. He always wrote to her on Christmas Day, he said, no matter where he was, and no matter how long it had been since his last letter. All afternoon he sat in the dining-room. He would write for a while, then sit idle, his clenched fist lying on the table, his eyes following the pattern of the oil-cloth. He spoke and wrote his own language so seldom that it came to him awkwardly. His effort to remember entirely absorbed him.
At about four o'clock a visitor appeared:
As it grew dark, I asked whether I might light the Christmas tree before the lamp was brought. When the candle ends sent up their conical yellow flames, all the colored figures from Austria stood out clear and full of meaning against the green boughs. Mr. Shimerda rose, crossed himself, and quietly knelt down before the tree, his head sunk forward. His long body formed a letter "S." I saw grandmother look apprehensively at grandfather. He was rather narrow in religious matters, and sometimes spoke out and hurt people's feelings. There had been nothing strange about the tree before, but now, with some one kneeling before it,—images, candles, . . . Grandfather merely put his finger-tips to his brow and bowed his venerable head, thus Protestantizing the atmosphere.
We persuaded our guest to stay for supper with us. He needed little urging. As we sat down to the table, it occurred to me that he liked to look at us, and that our faces were open books to him. When his deep-seeing eyes rested on me, I felt as if he were looking far ahead into the future for me, down the road I would have to travel.
At nine o'clock Mr. Shimerda lighted one
THE week following Christmas brought in a thaw, and by
New Year's Day all the world about us was a broth of gray slush, and the guttered
slope between the windmill and the barn was running black water. The soft black
earth stood out in patches along the roadsides. I resumed all my chores, carried in
the cobs and wood and water, and spent the afternoons at the barn, watching Jake
shell corn with a hand-sheller.
One morning, during this interval of fine weather, Ántonia and her mother rode over on one of their shaggy old horses to pay us a visit. It was the first time Mrs. Shimerda had been to our house, and she ran about examining our carpets and curtains and furniture, all the while commenting upon them to her daughter in an envious, complaining tone. In the kitchen she caught up an iron pot that stood on the back of the stove and said: "You got many, Shimerdas no got." I thought it weak-minded of grandmother to give the pot to her.
After dinner, when she was helping to wash the dishes, she said, tossing her head: "You got many things for cook. If I got all things like you, I make much better."
She was a conceited, boastful old thing, and even misfortune could not humble her. I was so annoyed that I felt coldly even toward Ántonia and listened unsympathetically when she told me her father was not well.
"My papa sad for the old country. He not look good. He never make music any more. At home he play violin all the time; for weddings and for dance. Here never. When I beg him for play, he shake his head no. Some days he take his violin out of his box and make with his fingers on the strings, like this, but never he make the music. He don't like this kawn-tree."
"People who don't like this country ought to stay at home," I said severely. "We don't make them come here."
"He not want to come, nev-er!" she burst out. "My
"Your mama," I said angrily, "wants other people's things."
"Your grandfather is rich," she retorted fiercely. "Why he not help my papa? Ambrosch be rich, too, after while, and he pay back. He is very smart boy. For Ambrosch my mama come here."
Ambrosch was considered the important person in the family. Mrs. Shimerda and Ántonia always deferred to him, though he was often surly with them and contemptuous toward his father. Ambrosch and his mother had everything their own way. Though Ántonia loved her father more than she did any one else, she stood in awe of her elder brother.
After I watched Ántonia and her mother go over the hill on their miserable horse, carrying our iron pot with them, I turned to grandmother, who had taken up her darning, and said I hoped that snooping old woman would n't come to see us any more.
Grandmother chuckled and drove her bright
We had three weeks of this mild, open weather. The cattle in the corral ate corn
almost as fast as the men could shell it for them, and we hoped they would be ready
for an early market. One morning the two big bulls,
Gladstone and Brigham Young, thought spring had come, and they
began to tease and butt at each other across the barbed wire that separated them.
Soon they got angry. They bellowed and pawed up the soft earth with their hoofs,
rolling their eyes and tossing their heads. Each withdrew to a far corner of his own
corral, and then they made for each other at a gallop. Thud, thud, we could hear the
impact of their great heads, and their bellowing shook the pans on the kitchen
shelves. Had they not been dehorned, they would have torn each other to pieces.
Pretty
The big storm of the winter began on my eleventh birthday, the 20th of January. When I went down to breakfast that morning, Jake and Otto came in white as snow-men, beating their hands and stamping their feet. They began to laugh boisterously when they saw me, calling:—
"You've got a birthday present this time, Jim, and no mistake. They was a full-grown blizzard ordered for you."
All day the storm went on. The snow did not fall this time, it simply spilled out of heaven, like thousands of feather-beds being emptied. That afternoon the kitchen was a carpenter-shop; the men brought in their tools and made two great wooden shovels with long handles. Neither grandmother nor I could go out in the storm, so Jake fed the chickens and brought in a pitiful contribution of eggs.
Next day our men had to shovel until noon to reach the barn—and the
snow was still
At noon that day the hens had not been heard from. After dinner Jake and Otto,
their damp clothes now dried on them, stretched their stiff arms and plunged again
into the drifts. They made a tunnel under the snow to the henhouse, with walls so
solid that grandmother and I could walk back and forth in it. We found the chickens
asleep; perhaps they thought night had come to stay. One old rooster was stirring
about, pecking at the solid lump of ice in their water-tin. When we flashed the
lantern in their eyes, the hens set up a great cackling and flew about clumsily,
ON the morning of the 22d I wakened with a start. Before
I opened my eyes, I seemed to know that something had happened. I heard excited
voices in the kitchen—grandmother's was so shrill that I knew she must
be almost beside herself. I looked forward to any new crisis with delight. What
could it be, I wondered, as I hurried into my clothes. Perhaps the barn had burned;
perhaps the cattle had frozen to death; perhaps a neighbor was lost in the storm.
Down in the kitchen grandfather was standing before the stove with his hands behind him. Jake and Otto had taken off their boots and were rubbing their woolen socks. Their clothes and boots were steaming, and they both looked exhausted. On the bench behind the stove lay a man, covered up with a blanket. Grandmother motioned me to the dining-room. I obeyed reluctantly. I watched her as she came and went, carrying dishes. Her lips were tightly compressed and she kept whispering to herself: "Oh, dear Saviour!" "Lord, Thou knowest!"
Presently grandfather came in and spoke to me: "Jimmy, we will not have prayers this morning, because we have a great deal to do. Old Mr. Shimerda is dead, and his family are in great distress. Ambrosch came over here in the middle of the night, and Jake and Otto went back with him. The boys have had a hard night, and you must not bother them with questions. That is Ambrosch, asleep on the bench. Come in to breakfast, boys."
After Jake and Otto had swallowed their first cup of coffee, they began to talk excitedly, disregarding grandmother's warning glances. I held my tongue, but I listened with all my ears.
"No, sir," Fuchs said in answer to a question from grandfather, "nobody heard the gun go off. Ambrosch was out with the ox team, trying to break a road, and the women folks was shut up tight in their cave. When Ambrosch come in it was dark and he did n't see nothing, but the oxen acted kind of queer. One of 'em ripped around and got away from him—bolted clean out of the stable. His hands is blistered where the rope run through. He got a lantern and went back and found the old man, just as we seen him."
"Poor soul, poor soul!" grandmother groaned. "I'd like to think he never done it. He was always considerate and un-wishful to give trouble. How could he forget himself and bring this on us!"
"I don't think he was out of his head for a minute, Mrs. Burden," Fuchs declared. "He done everything natural. You know he was always sort of fixy, and fixy he was to the last. He shaved after dinner, and washed hisself all over after the girls was done the dishes. Ántonia heated the water for him. Then he put on a clean shirt and clean socks, and after he was dressed he kissed her and the little one and took his gun and said he was going out to hunt rabbits. He must have gone right down to the barn and done it then. He layed down on that bunk-bed, close to the ox stalls, where he always slept. When we found him, everything was decent except," —Fuchs wrinkled his brow and hesitated,—"except what he could n't nowise foresee. His coat was hung on a peg, and his boots was under the bed. He'd took off that silk neckcloth he always wore, and folded it smooth and stuck his pin through it. He turned back his shirt at the neck and rolled up his sleeves."
"I don't see how he could do it!" grandmother kept saying.
Otto misunderstood her. "Why, mam, it was simple enough; he pulled the trigger with his big toe. He layed over on his side and put the end of the barrel in his mouth, then he drew up one foot and felt for the trigger. He found it all right!"
"Maybe he did," said Jake grimly. "There's something mighty queer about it."
"Now what do you mean, Jake?" grandmother asked sharply.
"Well, mam, I found Krajiek's axe under the manger, and I picks it up and carries it over to the corpse, and I take my oath it just fit the gash in the front of the old man's face. That there Krajiek had been sneakin' round, pale and quiet, and when he seen me examinin' the axe, he begun whimperin', 'My God, man, don't do that!' 'I reckon I'm a-goin' to look into this,' says I. Then he begun to squeal like a rat and run about wringin' his hands. 'They'll hang me!' says he. 'My God, they'll hang me sure!'"
Fuchs spoke up impatiently. "Krajiek's gone silly, Jake, and so have you. The old
man would n't have made all them
"Krajiek could 'a' put it there, could n't he?" Jake demanded.
Grandmother broke in excitedly: "See here, Jake Marpole, don't you go trying to add murder to suicide. We're deep enough in trouble. Otto reads you too many of them detective stories."
"It will be easy to decide all that, Emmaline," said grandfather quietly. "If he shot himself in the way they think, the gash will be torn from the inside outward."
"Just so it is, Mr. Burden," Otto affirmed. "I seen bunches of hair and stuff sticking to the poles and straw along the roof. They was blown up there by gunshot, no question."
Grandmother told grandfather she meant to go over to the Shimerdas with him.
"There is nothing you can do," he said doubtfully. "The body can't be touched until we get the coroner here from Black Hawk, and that will be a matter of several days, this weather."
"Well, I can take them some victuals, anyway, and say a word of comfort to them
poor
Fuchs, although he had been up in the cold nearly all night, was going to make the long ride to Black Hawk to fetch the priest and the coroner. On the gray gelding, our best horse, he would try to pick his way across the country with no roads to guide him.
"Don't you worry about me, Mrs. Burden," he said cheerfully, as he put on a second pair of socks. "I've got a good nose for directions, and I never did need much sleep. It's the gray I'm worried about. I'll save him what I can, but it'll strain him, as sure as I'm telling you!"
"This is no time to be over-considerate of animals, Otto; do the best you can for yourself. Stop at the Widow Steavens's for dinner. She's a good woman, and she'll do well by you."
After Fuchs rode away, I was left with Ambrosch. I saw a side of him I had not seen
before. He was deeply, even slavishly, devout.
No wagon could be got to the Shimerdas' until a road was broken, and that would be a day's job. Grandfather came from the barn on one of our big black horses, and Jake lifted grandmother up behind him. She wore her black hood and was bundled up in shawls. Grandfather tucked his bushy white beard inside his overcoat. They looked very Biblical as they set off, I thought. Jake and Ambrosch followed them, riding the other black and my pony, carrying bundles of clothes that we had got together for Mrs. Shimerda. I watched them go past the pond and over the hill by the drifted cornfield. Then, for the first time, I realized that I was alone in the house.
I felt a considerable extension of power and authority, and was anxious to acquit
myself creditably. I carried in cobs and wood from the long cellar, and filled both
the stoves. I remembered that in the hurry and excitement
I knew it was homesickness that had killed Mr. Shimerda, and I wondered whether his
released spirit would not eventually find its way back to his own country. I thought
of how far it was to Chicago, and then to Virginia, to Baltimore,—and
then the great
I was not frightened, but I made no noise. I did not wish to disturb him. I went
softly down to the kitchen which, tucked away so snugly underground, always seemed
to me the heart and center of the house. There, on the bench behind the stove, I
thought and thought about Mr. Shimerda. Outside I could hear the wind singing over
hundreds of miles of snow. It was as if I had let the old man in out of the
tormenting winter, and were sitting there with him. I went over all that
Ántonia had ever told me about his life before he came to this country; how
he used to play the fiddle at weddings and dances. I thought about the friends he
had mourned to leave, the trombone-player, the great forest full of game,
—belonging, as Ántonia said, to the "nobles,"—from
which she and her mother used to steal wood on moonlight nights. There was a white
hart that lived in that forest, and if any one killed it, he would be hanged, she
said. Such vivid pictures came to me that they might
It had begun to grow dark when my household returned, and grandmother was so tired that she went at once to bed. Jake and I got supper, and while we were washing the dishes he told me in loud whispers about the state of things over at the Shimerdas'. Nobody could touch the body until the coroner came. If any one did, something terrible would happen, apparently. The dead man was frozen through, "just as stiff as a dressed turkey you hang out to freeze," Jake said. The horses and oxen would not go into the barn until he was frozen so hard that there was no longer any smell of blood. They were stabled there now, with the dead man, because there was no other place to keep them. A lighted lantern was kept hanging over Mr. Shimerda's head. Ántonia and Ambrosch and the mother took turns going down to pray beside him. The crazy boy went with them, because he did not feel the cold. I believed he felt cold as much as any one else, but he liked to be thought insensible to it. He was always coveting distinction, poor Marek!
Ambrosch, Jake said, showed more human feeling than he would have supposed him capable of; but he was chiefly concerned about getting a priest, and about his father's soul, which he believed was in a place of torment and would remain there until his family and the priest had prayed a great deal for him. "As I understand it," Jake concluded, "it will be a matter of years to pray his soul out of Purgatory, and right now he's in torment."
"I don't believe it," I said stoutly. "I almost know it is n't true." I did not, of course, say that I believed he had been in that very kitchen all afternoon, on his way back to his own country. Nevertheless, after I went to bed, this idea of punishment and Purgatory came back on me crushingly. I remembered the account of Dives in torment, and shuddered. But Mr. Shimerda had not been rich and selfish; he had only been so unhappy that he could not live any longer.
OTTO Fuchs got back from Black Hawk at noon the next day.
He reported that the coroner would reach the Shimerdas' sometime that afternoon, but
the missionary priest was at the
other end of his parish, a hundred miles away, and the trains were not
running. Fuchs had got a few hours' sleep at the livery barn in town, but he was
afraid the gray gelding had strained himself. Indeed, he was never the same horse
afterward. That long trip through the deep snow had taken all the endurance out of
him.
Fuchs brought home with him a stranger, a young Bohemian who had taken a homestead
near Black Hawk, and who came on his only horse to help his fellow-countrymen in
their trouble. That was the first time I ever saw
Anton Jelinek. He was a strapping young fellow in the early
twenties then, handsome, warm-hearted, and full of life, and he came to us like a
miracle in the midst of that grim business. I remember exactly how he strode into
our kitchen in his felt boots and
long
"I want to thank you very much, Mrs. Burden, for that you are so kind to poor strangers from my kawn-tree."
He did not hesitate like a farmer boy, but looked one eagerly in the eye when he spoke. Everything about him was warm and spontaneous. He said he would have come to see the Shimerdas before, but he had hired out to husk corn all the fall, and since winter began he had been going to the school by the mill, to learn English, along with the little children. He told me he had a nice "lady-teacher" and that he liked to go to school.
At dinner grandfather talked to Jelinek more than he usually did to strangers.
"Will they be much disappointed because we cannot get a priest?" he asked.
Jelinek looked serious. "Yes, sir, that is very bad for them. Their father has done a great sin," he looked straight at grandfather. "Our Lord has said that."
Grandfather seemed to like his frankness. "We believe that, too, Jelinek. But we
The young man shook his head. "I know how you think. My teacher at the school has explain. But I have seen too much. I believe in prayer for the dead. I have seen too much."
We asked him what he meant.
He glanced around the table. "You want I shall tell you? When I was a little boy
like this one, I begin to help the priest at the altar. I make my first communion
very young; what the Church teach seem plain to me. By 'n' by war-times come,
when the Austrians fight us. We have
very many soldiers in camp near my village, and the cholera break out in that camp,
and the men die like flies. All day long our priest go about there to give the
Sacrament to dying men, and I go with him to carry the vessels with the Holy
Sacrament. Everybody that go near that camp catch the sickness but me and the
priest. But we have no sickness, we have no fear, because we carry that blood and
that body of Christ, and it preserve us." He paused, looking at grandfather. "That I
know, Mr. Burden, for it happened to myself. All the soldiers know,
We had listened attentively. It was impossible not to admire his frank, manly faith.
"I am always glad to meet a young man who thinks seriously about these things," said grandfather, "and I would never be the one to say you were not in God's care when you were among the soldiers."
After dinner it was decided that young Jelinek should hook our two strong black farmhorses to the scraper and break a road through to the Shimerdas', so that a wagon could go when it was necessary. Fuchs, who was the only cabinet-maker in the neighborhood, was set to work on a coffin.
Jelinek put on his long wolfskin coat, and when we admired it, he told us that he
had shot and skinned the coyotes, and the young man who "batched" with him, Jan
Bouska,
Our heavy carpenter's bench had to be brought from the barn and carried down into the kitchen. Fuchs selected boards from a pile of planks grandfather had hauled out from town in the fall to make a new floor for the oats bin. When at last the lumber and tools were assembled, and the doors were closed again and the cold drafts shut out, grandfather rode away to meet the coroner at the Shimerdas', and Fuchs took off his coat and settled down to work. I sat on his work-table and watched him. He did not touch his tools at first, but figured for a long while on a piece of paper, and measured the planks and made marks on them. While he was thus engaged, he whistled softly to himself, or teasingly pulled at his half-ear. Grandmother moved about quietly, so as not to disturb him. At last he folded his ruler and turned a cheerful face to us.
"The hardest part of my job's done," he announced. "It's the head end of it that comes hard with me, especially when I'm out of practice. The last time I made one of these, Mrs. Burden," he continued, as he sorted and tried his chisels, "was for a fellow in the Black Tiger mine, up above Silverton, Colorado. The mouth of that mine goes right into the face of the cliff, and they used to put us in a bucket and run us over on a trolley and shoot us into the shaft. The bucket traveled across a box cañon three hundred feet deep, and about a third full of water. Two Swedes had fell out of that bucket once, and hit the water, feet down. If you'll believe it, they went to work the next day. You can't kill a Swede. But in my time a little Eyetalian tried the high dive, and it turned out different with him. We was snowed in then, like we are now, and I happened to be the only man in camp that could make a coffin for him. It's a handy thing to know, when you knock about like I've done."
"We'd be hard put to it now, if you did n't know, Otto," grandmother said.
"Yes, 'm," Fuchs admitted with modest pride. "So few folks does know how to make
All afternoon, wherever one went in the house, one could hear the panting wheeze of the saw or the pleasant purring of the plane. They were such cheerful noises, seeming to promise new things for living people: it was a pity that those freshly planed pine boards were to be put underground so soon. The lumber was hard to work because it was full of frost, and the boards gave off a sweet smell of pine woods, as the heap of yellow shavings grew higher and higher. I wondered why Fuchs had not stuck to cabinet-work, he settled down to it with such ease and content. He handled the tools as if he liked the feel of them; and when he planed, his hands went back and forth over the boards in an eager, beneficent way as if he were blessing them. He broke out now and then into German hymns, as if this occupation brought back old times to him.
At four o'clock Mr. Bushy, with
another neighbor who lived east of us, stopped in to get warm. They were on their
After our visitors rode away in single file over the hill, we returned to the
kitchen. Grandmother began to make the icing for a chocolate cake, and Otto again
filled the house with the exciting, expectant song of the plane.
The postmaster, going home, stopped to say that grandfather would bring the coroner back with him to spend the night. The officers of the Norwegian church, he told us, had held a meeting and decided that the Norwegian graveyard could not extend its hospitality to Mr. Shimerda.
Grandmother was indignant. "If these foreigners are so clannish, Mr. Bushy, we'll
have
Soon grandfather returned, bringing with him Anton Jelinek, and that important person, the coroner. He was a mild, flurried old man, a Civil War veteran, with one sleeve hanging empty. He seemed to find this case very perplexing, and said if it had not been for grandfather he would have sworn out a warrant against Krajiek. "The way he acted, and the way his axe fit the wound, was enough to convict any man."
Although it was perfectly clear that Mr. Shimerda had killed himself, Jake and the coroner thought something ought to be done to Krajiek because he behaved like a guilty man. He was badly frightened, certainly, and perhaps he even felt some stirrings of remorse for his indifference to the old man's misery and loneliness.
At supper the men ate like vikings, and the chocolate cake, which I had hoped would
linger on until to-morrow in a mutilated
Grandfather asked Jelinek whether in the old country there was some superstition to the effect that a suicide must be buried at the cross-roads.
Jelinek said he didn't know; he seemed to remember hearing there had once been such a custom in Bohemia. "Mrs. Shimerda is made up her mind," he added. "I try to persuade her, and say it looks bad for her to all the neighbors; but she say so it must be. 'There I will bury him, if I dig the grave myself,' she say. I have to promise her I help Ambrosch make the grave to-morrow."
Grandfather smoothed his beard and looked judicial. "I don't know whose wish should decide the matter, if not hers. But if she thinks she will live to see the people of this country ride over that old man's head, she is mistaken."
MR. SHIMERDA lay dead in the
barn four days, and on the fifth they buried him. All day Friday Jelinek was off
with Ambrosch digging the grave, chopping out the frozen earth with old axes. On
Saturday we breakfasted before daylight and got into the wagon with the coffin. Jake
and Jelinek went ahead on horseback to cut the body loose from the pool of blood in
which it was frozen fast to the ground.
When grandmother and I went into the Shimerdas' house, we found the women-folk alone; Ambrosch and Marek were at the barn. Mrs. Shimerda sat crouching by the stove, Ántonia was washing dishes. When she saw me she ran out of her dark corner and threw her arms around me. "Oh, Jimmy," she sobbed, "what you tink for my lovely papa!" It seemed to me that I could feel her heart breaking as she clung to me.
Mrs. Shimerda, sitting on the stump by the stove, kept looking over her shoulder
toward the door while the neighbors were arriving. They came on horseback, all
except the
Grandfather and Jelinek came to tell Mrs. Shimerda that it was time to start. After bundling her mother up in clothes the neighbors had brought, Ántonia put on an old cape from our house and the rabbit-skin hat her father had made for her. Four men carried Mr. Shimerda's box up the hill; Krajiek slunk along behind them. The coffin was too wide for the door, so it was put down on the slope outside. I slipped out from the cave and looked at Mr. Shimerda. He was lying on his side, with his knees drawn up. His body was draped in a black shawl, and his head was bandaged in white muslin, like a mummy's; one of his long, shapely hands lay out on the black cloth; that was all one could see of him.
Mrs. Shimerda came out and placed an open
"No, Mrs. Shimerda," she said firmly, "I won't stand by and see that child frightened into spasms. She is too little to understand what you want of her. Let her alone."
At a look from grandfather, Fuchs and Jelinek placed the lid on the box, and began to nail it down over Mr. Shimerda. I was afraid to look at Ántonia. She put her arms round Yulka and held the little girl close to her.
The coffin was put into the wagon. We drove slowly away, against the fine, icy snow
which cut our faces like a sand-blast. When we reached the grave, it looked a very
little spot in that snow-covered waste. The men
"She says, Mr. Burden, she is very glad if you can make some prayer for him here in English, for the neighbors to understand."
Grandmother looked anxiously at grandfather. He took off his hat, and the other men did likewise. I thought his prayer remarkable. I still remember it. He began, "Oh, great and just God, no man among us knows what the sleeper knows, nor is it for us to judge what lies between him and Thee." He prayed that if any man there had been remiss toward the stranger come to a far country, God would forgive him and soften his heart. He recalled the promises to the widow and the fatherless, and asked God to smooth the way before this widow and her children, and to "incline the hearts of men to deal justly with her." In closing, he said we were leaving Mr. Shimerda at "Thy judgment seat, which is also Thy mercy seat."
All the time he was praying, grandmother watched him through the black fingers of her glove, and when he said "Amen," I thought she looked satisfied with him. She turned to Otto and whispered, "Can't you start a hymn, Fuchs? It would seem less heathenish."
Fuchs glanced about to see if there was general approval of her suggestion, then
began, "Jesus, Lover of my Soul,"
and all the men and women took it up after him. Whenever I have heard the hymn
since, it has made me remember that white waste and the little group of people; and
the bluish air, full of fine, eddying snow, like long veils flying:—
Years afterward, when the
open-grazing days were over, and the red grass had been ploughed under and
under until it had almost disappeared from the prairie; when all the fields were
under fence, and the roads no longer ran about like wild things, but followed the
surveyed section-lines, Mr. Shimerda's grave was still there, with a sagging wire
fence around it, and an unpainted wooden cross.
WHEN spring came, after that hard winter, one could not
get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness
that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to
watch in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only —
spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it
everywhere; in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm,
high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like
a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down
blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.
Everywhere now there was the smell of burning grass. Our neighbors burned off their pasture before the new grass made a start, so that the fresh growth would not be mixed with the dead stand of last year. Those light, swift fires, running about the country, seemed a part of the same kindling that was in the air.
The Shimerdas were in their new log house by then. The neighbors had helped them to build it in March. It stood directly in front of their old cave, which they used as a cellar. The family were now fairly equipped to begin their struggle with the soil. They had four comfortable rooms to live in, a new windmill,—bought on credit,—a chicken-house and poultry. Mrs. Shimerda had paid grandfather ten dollars for a milk cow, and was to give him fifteen more as soon as they harvested their first crop.
When I rode up to the Shimerdas' one bright windy afternoon in April, Yulka ran out
to meet me. It was to her, now, that I gave reading lessons; Ántonia was
busy with other things. I tied my pony and went into the kitchen where Mrs. Shimerda
was baking bread, chewing poppy seeds as she worked. By this time she could speak
enough English to ask me a great many questions about what our men were doing in the
fields. She seemed to think that my elders withheld helpful information, and that
from me she might get valuable secrets. On this occasion she asked me very craftily
when grandfather expected to begin planting corn. I told her,
She gave me a shrewd glance. "He not Jesus," she blustered; "he not know about the wet and the dry."
I did not answer her; what was the use? As I sat waiting for the hour when Ambrosch and Ántonia would return from the fields, I watched Mrs. Shimerda at her work. She took from the oven a coffee-cake which she wanted to keep warm for supper, and wrapped it in a quilt stuffed with feathers. I have seen her put even a roast goose in this quilt to keep it hot. When the neighbors were there building the new house they saw her do this, and the story got abroad that the Shimerdas kept their food in their feather beds.
When the sun was dropping low, Ántonia came up the big south draw with her
team. How much older she had grown in eight months! She had come to us a child, and
now she was a tall, strong young girl, although her fifteenth birthday had just
slipped by. I ran out and met her as she brought her horses up to the windmill to
water them. She
She greeted me gayly, and began at once to tell me how much ploughing she had done that day. Ambrosch, she said, was on the north quarter, breaking sod with the oxen.
"Jim, you ask Jake how much he ploughed to-day. I don't want that Jake get more done in one day than me. I want we have very much corn this fall."
While the horses drew in the water, and nosed each other, and then drank again, Ántonia sat down on the windmill step and rested her head on her hand. "You see the big prairie fire from your place last night? I hope your grandpa ain't lose no stacks?"
"No, we did n't. I came to ask you something, Tony. Grandmother wants to know if
you can't go to the term of school that begins
Ántonia stood up, lifting and dropping her shoulders as if they were stiff. "I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now. My mother can't say no more how Ambrosch do all and nobody to help him. I can work as much as him. School is all right for little boys. I help make this land one good farm."
She clucked to her team and started for the barn. I walked beside her, feeling vexed. Was she going to grow up boastful like her mother, I wondered? Before we reached the stable, I felt something tense in her silence, and glancing up I saw that she was crying. She turned her face from me and looked off at the red streak of dying light, over the dark prairie.
I climbed up into the loft and threw down the hay for her, while she unharnessed her team. We walked slowly back toward the house. Ambrosch had come in from the north quarter, and was watering his oxen at the tank.
Ántonia took my hand. "Sometime you will tell me all those nice things you
learn at the
"No," I said, "I will never forget him."
Mrs. Shimerda asked me to stay for supper. After Ambrosch and Ántonia had washed the field dust from their hands and faces at the wash-basin by the kitchen door, we sat down at the oilcloth-covered table. Mrs. Shimerda ladled meal mush out of an iron pot and poured milk on it. After the mush we had fresh bread and sorghum molasses, and coffee with the cake that had been kept warm in the feathers. Ántonia and Ambrosch were talking in Bohemian; disputing about which of them had done more ploughing that day. Mrs. Shimerda egged them on, chuckling while she gobbled her food.
Presently Ambrosch said sullenly in English: "You take them ox to-morrow and try the sod plough. Then you not be so smart."
His sister laughed. "Don't be mad. I know
Mrs. Shimerda turned quickly to me. "That cow not give so much milk like what your grandpa say. If he make talk about fifteen dollars, I send him back the cow."
"He does n't talk about the fifteen dollars," I exclaimed indignantly. "He does n't find fault with people."
"He say I break his saw when we build, and I never," grumbled Ambrosch.
I knew he had broken the saw, and then hid it and lied about it. I began to wish I had not stayed for supper. Everything was disagreeable to me. Ántonia ate so noisily now, like a man, and she yawned often at the table and kept stretching her arms over her head, as if they ached. Grandmother had said, "Heavy field work'll spoil that girl. She'll lose all her nice ways and get rough ones." She had lost them already.
After supper I rode home through the sad, soft spring twilight. Since winter I had
seen very little of Ántonia. She was out in the fields from sun-up until
sun-down. If I rode over to see her where she was ploughing, she stopped at the end
of a row to chat for a
Nowadays Tony could talk of nothing but the prices of things, or how much she could lift and endure. She was too proud of her strength. I knew, too, that Ambrosch put upon her some chores a girl ought not to do, and that the farmhands around the country joked in a nasty way about it. Whenever I saw her come up the furrow, shouting to her beasts, sunburned, sweaty, her dress open at the neck, and her throat and chest dust-plastered, I used to think of the tone in which poor Mr. Shimerda, who could say so little, yet managed to say so much when he exclaimed, "My Án-tonia!"
AFTER I began to go to the country school, I saw less of
the Bohemians. We were sixteen pupils at the sod schoolhouse, and we all came on
horseback and brought our dinner. My schoolmates were none of them very interesting,
but I somehow felt that by making comrades of them I was getting even with
Ántonia for her indifference. Since the father's death, Ambrosch was more
than ever the head of the house and he seemed to direct the feelings as well as the
fortunes of his women-folk. Ántonia often quoted his opinions to me, and
she let me see that she admired him, while she thought of me only as a little boy.
Before the spring was over, there was a distinct coldness between us and the
Shimerdas. It came about in this way.
One Sunday I rode over there with Jake to get a
horse-collar which Ambrosch had borrowed from him and had not
returned. It was a beautiful blue morning. The
We found the Shimerdas working just as if it were a week-day. Marek was cleaning out the stable, and Ántonia and her mother were making garden, off across the pond in the draw-head. Ambrosch was up on the windmill tower, oiling the wheel. He came down, not very cordially. When Jake asked for the collar, he grunted and scratched his head. The collar belonged to grandfather, of course, and Jake, feeling responsible for it, flared up.
"Now, don't you say you have n't got it, Ambrosch, because I know you have, and if you ain't a-going to look for it, I will."
Ambrosch shrugged his shoulders and sauntered down the hill toward the stable. I could see that it was one of his mean days. Presently he returned, carrying a collar that had been badly used—trampled in the dirt and gnawed by rats until the hair was sticking out of it.
"This what you want?" he asked surlily.
Jake jumped off his horse. I saw a wave of red come up under the rough stubble on his face. "That ain't the piece of harness I loaned you, Ambrosch; or if it is, you've used it shameful. I ain't a-going to carry such a looking thing back to Mr. Burden."
Ambrosch dropped the collar on the ground. "All right," he said coolly, took up his oil-can, and began to climb the mill. Jake caught him by the belt of his trousers and yanked him back. Ambrosch's feet had scarcely touched the ground when he lunged out with a vicious kick at Jake's stomach. Fortunately Jake was in such a position that he could dodge it. This was not the sort of thing country boys did when they played at fisticuffs, and Jake was furious. He landed Ambrosch a blow on the head —it sounded like the crack of an axe on a cow-pumpkin. Ambrosch dropped over, stunned.
We heard squeals, and looking up saw Ántonia and her mother coming on the
run. They did not take the path around the pond, but plunged through the muddy
water, without even lifting their skirts. They came on, screaming and clawing the
air. By this time Ambrosch had come to his senses and was
Mrs. Shimerda threw her hands over her head and clutched as if she were going to pull down lightning. "Law, law!" she shrieked after us. "Law for knock my Ambrosch down!"
"I never like you no more, Jake and Jim Burden," Ántonia panted. "No friends any more!"
Jake stopped and turned his horse for a second. "Well, you're a damned ungrateful lot, the whole pack of you," he shouted back. "I guess the Burdens can get along without you. You've been a sight of trouble to them, anyhow!"
We rode away, feeling so outraged that the fine morning was spoiled for us. I had
n't a word to say, and poor Jake was white as paper and trembling all over. It made
him sick to get so angry. "They ain't the same, Jimmy," he kept saying in a hurt
tone. "These foreigners ain't the same. You can't trust 'em to be fair. It's dirty
to kick a feller. You heard how the women turned on you—and after all we
went through on account of 'em last
"I'll never be friends with them again, Jake," I declared hotly. "I believe they are all like Krajiek and Ambrosch underneath."
Grandfather heard our story with a twinkle in his eye. He advised Jake to ride to town to-morrow, go to a justice of the peace, tell him he had knocked young Shimerda down, and pay his fine. Then if Mrs. Shimerda was inclined to make trouble —her son was still under age—she would be forestalled. Jake said he might as well take the wagon and haul to market the pig he had been fattening. On Monday, about an hour after Jake had started, we saw Mrs. Shimerda and her Ambrosch proudly driving by, looking neither to the right nor left. As they rattled out of sight down the Black Hawk road, grandfather chuckled, saying he had rather expected she would follow the matter up.
Jake paid his fine with a ten-dollar bill grandfather had given him for that
purpose. But when the Shimerdas found that Jake sold his pig in town that day,
Ambrosch worked it out in his shrewd head that Jake had to sell his pig to pay his
fine. This theory
"Jake-y Jake-y, sell the pig and pay the slap!"
Otto pretended not to be surprised at Ántonia's behavior. He only lifted his brows and said, "You can't tell me anything new about a Czech; I'm an Austrian."
Grandfather was never a party to what Jake called our feud with the Shimerdas.
Ambrosch and Ántonia always greeted him respectfully, and he asked them
about their affairs and gave them advice as usual. He thought the future looked
hopeful for them. Ambrosch was a far-seeing fellow; he soon realized that his oxen
were too heavy for any work except breaking sod, and he succeeded in selling them to
a newly arrived German. With the money he bought another team of horses, which
grandfather selected for him. Marek was strong, and Ambrosch worked him hard; but he
could never teach him to cultivate corn, I remember. The one idea that had ever got
In June Ambrosch went to work at Mr. Bushy's for a week, and took Marek with him at full wages. Mrs. Shimerda then drove the second cultivator; she and Ántonia worked in the fields all day and did the chores at night. While the two women were running the place alone, one of the new horses got colic and gave them a terrible fright.
Ántonia had gone down to the barn one night to see that all was well
before she went to bed, and she noticed that one of the roans was swollen about the
middle and stood with its head hanging. She mounted another horse, without waiting
to saddle him, and hammered on our door just as we were going to bed. Grandfather
answered her knock. He did not send one of his men, but rode back with her himself,
taking a syringe and an old piece of carpet he kept for hot applications when our
horses were sick. He found Mrs. Shimerda sitting by the horse with her lantern,
groaning and wringing her hands. It took but a few
"If I lose that horse, Mr. Burden," Ántonia exclaimed, "I never stay here till Ambrosch come home! I go drown myself in the pond before morning."
When Ambrosch came back from Mr. Bushy's, we learned that he had given Marek's wages to the priest at Black Hawk, for masses for their father's soul. Grandmother thought Ántonia needed shoes more than Mr. Shimerda needed prayers, but grandfather said tolerantly, "If he can spare six dollars, pinched as he is, it shows he believes what he professes."
It was grandfather who brought about a reconciliation with the Shimerdas. One morning he told us that the small grain was coming on so well, he thought he would begin to cut his wheat on the first of July. He would need more men, and if it were agreeable to every one he would engage Ambrosch for the reaping and thrashing, as the Shimerdas had no small grain of their own.
"I think, Emmaline," he concluded, "I will
After breakfast we set off together. When Mrs. Shimerda saw us coming, she ran from her door down into the draw behind the stable, as if she did not want to meet us. Grandfather smiled to himself while he tied his horse, and we followed her.
Behind the barn we came upon a funny sight. The cow had evidently been grazing somewhere in the draw. Mrs. Shimerda had run to the animal, pulled up the lariat pin, and, when we came upon her, she was trying to hide the cow in an old cave in the bank. As the hole was narrow and dark, the cow held back, and the old woman was slapping and pushing at her hind quarters, trying to spank her into the draw-side.
Grandfather ignored her singular occupation and greeted her politely. "Good-morning, Mrs. Shimerda. Can you tell me where I will find Ambrosch? Which field?"
"He with the sod corn." She pointed toward the north, still standing in front of the cow as if she hoped to conceal it.
"His sod corn will be good for fodder this winter," said grandfather encouragingly. "And where is Ántonia?"
"She go with." Mrs. Shimerda kept wiggling her bare feet about nervously in the dust.
"Very well. I will ride up there. I want them to come over and help me cut my oats and wheat next month. I will pay them wages. Good-morning. By the way, Mrs. Shimerda," he said as he turned up the path, "I think we may as well call it square about the cow."
She started and clutched the rope tighter. Seeing that she did not understand, grandfather turned back. "You need not pay me anything more; no more money. The cow is yours."
"Pay no more, keep cow?" she asked in a bewildered tone, her narrow eyes snapping at us in the sunlight.
"Exactly. Pay no more, keep cow." He nodded.
Mrs. Shimerda dropped the rope, ran after us, and crouching down beside
grandfather,
We rode away laughing, and grandfather said: "I expect she thought we had come to take the cow away for certain, Jim. I wonder if she would n't have scratched a little if we'd laid hold of that lariat rope!"
Our neighbors seemed glad to make peace with us. The next Sunday Mrs. Shimerda came over and brought Jake a pair of socks she had knitted. She presented them with an air of great magnanimity, saying, "Now you not come any more for knock my Ambrosch down?"
Jake laughed sheepishly. "I don't want to have no trouble with Ambrosch. If he'll let me alone, I'll let him alone."
"If he slap you, we ain't got no pig for pay the fine," she said insinuatingly.
Jake was not at all disconcerted. "Have the last word, mam," he said cheerfully. "It's a lady's privilege."
JULY came on with that breathless, brilliant heat which
makes the plains of Kansas and Nebraska the best corn country in the world. It
seemed as if we could hear the corn growing in the night; under the stars one caught
a faint crackling in the dewy, heavy-odored cornfields where the feathered stalks
stood so juicy and green. If all the great plain from the Missouri to the Rocky
Mountains had been under glass, and the heat regulated by a thermometer, it could
not have been better for the yellow
tassels that were ripening and fertilizing each other day by day. The
cornfields were far apart in those times, with miles of wild grazing land between.
It took a clear, meditative eye like my grandfather's to foresee that they would
enlarge and multiply until they would be, not the Shimerdas' cornfields, or Mr.
Bushy's, but the world's cornfields; that their yield would be one of the great
economic facts, like the wheat crop of Russia, which underlie all the activities of
men, in peace or war.
The burning sun of those few weeks, with occasional rains at night, secured the corn. After the milky ears were once formed, we had little to fear from dry weather. The men were working so hard in the wheatfields that they did not notice the heat, —though I was kept busy carrying water for them,—and grandmother and Ántonia had so much to do in the kitchen that they could not have told whether one day was hotter than another. Each morning, while the dew was still on the grass, Ántonia went with me up to the garden to get early vegetables for dinner. Grandmother made her wear a sunbonnet, but as soon as we reached the garden she threw it on the grass and let her hair fly in the breeze. I remember how, as we bent over the pea-vines, beads of perspiration used to gather on her upper lip like a little mustache.
"Oh, better I like to work out of doors than in a house!" she used to sing joyfully. "I not care that your grandmother say it makes me like a man. I like to be like a man." She would toss her head and ask me to feel the muscles swell in her brown arm.
We were glad to have her in the house. She was so gay and responsive that one did
not
All the nights were close and hot during that harvest season. The harvesters slept
in the hayloft because it was cooler there than in the house. I used to lie in my
bed by the open window, watching the heat lightning play softly along the horizon,
or looking up at the gaunt frame of the windmill against the blue night sky. One
night there was a beautiful electric storm, though not enough rain fell to damage
the cut grain. The men went down to the barn immediately after supper, and when the
dishes were washed Ántonia and I climbed up on the slanting roof of the
chicken-house to watch the clouds. The thunder was loud and metallic, like the
rattle of sheet iron, and the lightning broke in great zigzags across the heavens,
making everything stand out and come close to us for a moment. Half the sky was
checkered with black thunderheads, but all the west was luminous and clear: in the
lightning-flashes it looked like deep blue water, with the sheen of moonlight on it;
and the mottled part of the sky was like marble
"In a minute we come," Ántonia called back to her. "I like your grandmother, and all things here," she sighed. "I wish my papa live to see this summer. I wish no winter ever come again."
"It will be summer a long while yet," I reassured her. "Why are n't you always nice like this, Tony?"
"How nice?"
"Why, just like this; like yourself. Why do you all the time try to be like Ambrosch?"
She put her arms under her head and lay back, looking up at the sky. "If I live here, like you, that is different. Things will be easy for you. But they will be hard for us."
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
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 west-bound 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,
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 center of the town there were two rows of new brick "store" buildings, a brick schoolhouse, the courthouse, 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
We saw more of our country neighbors 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 women-folk 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
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 thrashers. 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 neighbors until Christmas, as she had done the year before; but grandmother saved her from this by getting her a place to work with our neighbors, the Harlings.
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
Christiana 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
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,
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
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
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 to-night, Mrs. Burden," she called.
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 a lively
account of Ambrosch's behavior 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
"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 did n'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 color 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
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.
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
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 door-bell 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
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,
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
Mrs. Harling had studied the piano under a good teacher, and somehow she managed to practice 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.
"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 favorite 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 pocketbook 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,
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 did n'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, are n'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,
"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 would n'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 skeptically, 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
Frances drew her chair up nearer to the visitor. "I thought you were going to be married, Lena," she said teasingly. "Did n'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 would n't give Nick any land if he married me, so he's going to marry Annie Iverson. I would n'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
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 naïve 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 did n'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 had n't been a little more cordial to her.
"I did n'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
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
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 neighbor's
barn on fire, and was sent to the
asylum at Lincoln. She was kept
Not long after Mary came back from the asylum, I heard a young Dane, who was
helping us to thrash, 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 draw-side 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 had n't a
dress in the world any less ragged than the one on her back. Then the minister's
wife went
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 did n'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 did n'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
"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."
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 travelers in that territory tried to get into Black Hawk for Sunday. They
used to assemble in the parlor 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 parlor and the dining-room, listening to the music and
giggling at the jokes and stories. Lena often said she hoped I would be a traveling
man when I grew up. They had a gay life of it; nothing to do but ride about on
trains all
One afternoon in the week before Christmas I came upon Lena and her funny, square-headed little brother Chris, standing before the drug-store, 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 neighbor 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 had n'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 color best. He seemed so perplexed that I thought perhaps he had n'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
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 could n'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,
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
On winter nights, the lights in the Harlings' windows drew me like the painted glass. Inside that warm, roomy house there was color, 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 parlor, with
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
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 thrashing 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, mam, I did. I could shovel just as fast as that fat Andern boy that drove the
"I told him nobody wanted to drownd themselves, but if we did n'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 did n't
have none when they thrashed. 'My God!' he says, 'so
"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 thrashing 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,
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, mam. He had n't been seen nowhere except in a little town they call Conway. He tried to get beer there, but there was n't any saloon. Maybe he came in on a freight, but the brakeman had n't seen him. They could n'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, was n't that strange, Miss Frances?" Tony asked thoughtfully. "What would anybody want to kill themselves in summer for? In thrashing time, too! It's nice everywhere then."
"So it is, Ántonia," said Mrs. Harling heartily. "Maybe I'll go home and help you thrash next summer. Is n'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'.
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 gray 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.
Saturday night after supper I ran downtown to the hotel and slipped quietly into the parlor. The chairs and sofas were already occupied, and the air smelled pleasantly of cigar smoke. The parlor had once been two rooms, and the floor was sway-backed 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 travelers. 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
When I stole into the parlor 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 traveled for a jewelry 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
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.
"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 to-night."
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, its shriveled 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
One day Samson was standing thus while Miss Nellie was playing her lesson to her
music-master. The windows were open. He heard them get up from the piano, talk a
little while, and then leave the room. He heard the
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
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
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
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 would n'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 side 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'
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 color of their country up-bringing, 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
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
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
Often the mothers brought their fancy-work 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
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 Round House 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 parlor, 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
light-hearted sounds. First the deep purring of Mr. Vanni's harp came in silvery
ripples through the blackness of the
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 any one could dance who paid his money and was orderly; the railroad men, the Round House mechanics, the delivery boys, the iceman, the farmhands 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."
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
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
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 neighbors,—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 could n'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
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
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 drug-store. 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
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 draw-side 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 every one 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.
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 had n't time to dress, she merely flung off her apron and shot
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
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, to-night. 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 would n't
"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 tea-kettle 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.
"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.
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
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
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-gray 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
Mrs. Cutter painted china so assiduously that even her washbowls 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 quarreled 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
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 quarreled 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
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 "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.
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 parlor, 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 did n't know what they believed, and did n't care, and that I certainly was n'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, did n'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
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
parlor 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
"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 drug-store, 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,
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
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 did n'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
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
There were never girls enough to go round at those dances, but every one 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-colored 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 did n'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
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 color 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 Cutter's 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, I 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
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
I used to wish I could have this flattering dream about Ántonia, but I never did.
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 did n't feel well, and if I
could n'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 was n't any other way for you, it seemed like."
I put my arms around her. I could n'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 have n'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,
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
"If you were a boy," I persisted, "you would n't belong to the Owl Club, either. You'd be just like me."
She shook her head. "I would and I would n'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 fervor 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 did n't believe you could do as well as that.
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, did n'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 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.
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
Æneid 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
"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. Could n'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-colored
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
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 would 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
"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
I followed a cattle path through the thick underbrush 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, sing-song 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,
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
"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! Did n'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 under-side 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 farmhouses 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 ought n'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
Tiny asked her why she did n'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 did n'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
"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 Lapp 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
"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
"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 could n't tell them. I only knew the school books 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
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 disc 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 disc; 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.
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 could n'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 had n'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 would n'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 did n'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
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 some one 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 could n'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
"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 nightshirt, 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 hatrack, lay down on the parlor sofa, and in spite of my hurts, went to sleep.
Grandmother found me there in the
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
While Ántonia was packing her trunk and putting her room in order, to leave it, the front-door bell 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 afterwards.
Grandmother would not let her see Ántonia at all, but made her sit down in the parlor 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
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
"Mr. Cutter will pay for this, Mrs. Burden. He will pay!" Mrs. Cutter avouched, nodding her horselike head and rolling her eyes.
Grandmother said she had n'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 could n't do without was quarreling with Mrs. Cutter!
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
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 endeavor, 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;
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 Bénédictine 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
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 honors most. The seeds of my ardor were the sparks from that divine flame
whereby more than a thousand have kindled; I speak of the Æneid, 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
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 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 neighborhood 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
"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 Æneid
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
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 fervor 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
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 naïve curiosity I remembered so well. "You are quite comfortable here, are n'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. Did n'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 did n'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 is n'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 did n't like Larry, and never would.
Lena's face dimpled. "Some of us could tell her things, but it would n't do any
good. She'd always believe him. That's Ántonia's
"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 odor of violet sachet. "So that's Latin, is it? It looks hard. You do go to the theater 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 theaters."
"Let's go to a show together sometime. You are going to let me come to see you, are n'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.
"You need n'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 did n'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 drug-store. You would n'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 some one 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
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 favorable 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:
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 would n'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 some one 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,
I called at the Raleigh Block for Lena on Saturday evening, and we walked down to the theater. The weather was warm and sultry and put us both in a holiday humor. 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
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 misterioso, misterioso!"—she
maintained her bitter skepticism, 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
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 behavior 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
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 was n't a nerve in me
that had n't been twisted. Nanine alone could have made me cry. I loved Nanine
tenderly; and Gaston, how one clung to that good
When we reached the door of the theater, 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.
HOW well I remember the stiff little parlor 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 colored silk clinging to my clothes after I went
away. Lena's success puzzled me. She was so easy-going; 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."
She evidently 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 could n't help
thinking that the years when Lena literally
"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
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 practice, 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.
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 naiveté. 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 color 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 behavior was now no mystery to me.
"There was never any harm in Ole," she said once. "People need n't have troubled themselves. He just liked to come over and sit on the draw-side 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 was n'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 was n'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
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 had n'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 could n'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
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.
"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 would n'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 neighbors, I must n't hesitate."
One Saturday evening when I was having supper with Lena we heard a knock at her parlor 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
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-colored 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 traveled 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 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 woolen 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 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 was n'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,
"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 theater. 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
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 does n'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. Did n'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 were n'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 to-night her mind seemed to
dwell on those early years. She told me she could n't remember a time when she was
so little that she was n't lugging a heavy baby about, helping to wash for babies,
trying to keep their
"It was n'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 was n'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 nightgown and get into bed with two others, who likely had n'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? Have n'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 ought n't to have begun it, ought I?" she murmured. "I ought n'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 must n't be up to any of my nonsense with you. I let you alone for a long while, though, did n'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 are n't sorry
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 have n'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.
TWO years after I left Lincoln I completed my academic
course at Harvard. Before I entered the Law School I went home for the summer
vacation. On the night of my arrival Mrs. Harling and Frances and Sally came over to
greet me. Everything seemed just as it used to be. My grandparents looked very
little older. Frances Harling was married now, and she and her husband managed the
Harling interests in Black Hawk. When we gathered in grandmother's parlor, I could
hardly believe that I had been away at all. One subject, however, we avoided all
evening.
When I was walking home with Frances, after we had left Mrs. Harling at her gate, she said simply, "You know, of course, about poor Ántonia."
Poor Ántonia! Every one would be saying that now, I thought bitterly. I
replied that
"He never married her," Frances said. "I have n't seen her since she came back. She lives at home, on the farm, and almost never comes to town. She brought the baby in to show it to mama once. I'm afraid she's settled down to be Ambrosch's drudge for good."
I tried to shut Ántonia out of my mind. I was bitterly disappointed in her. I could not forgive her for becoming an object of pity, while Lena Lingard, for whom people had always foretold trouble, was now the leading dressmaker of Lincoln, much respected in Black Hawk. Lena gave her heart away when she felt like it, but she kept her head for her business and had got on in the world.
Just then it was the fashion to speak indulgently of Lena and severely of Tiny
Soderball, who had quietly gone West to try her fortune the year before. A Black
Hawk boy, just back from Seattle, brought the news that Tiny had not gone to the
coast on a venture, as she had allowed people to think, but with
When I thought about it, I discovered that I had never known Tiny as well as I knew
the other girls. I remembered her tripping briskly about the dining-room on her high
heels, carrying a big tray full of dishes, glancing rather pertly at the spruce
traveling men, and contemptuously at the scrubby ones—who were so afraid
of her that they did n't dare to ask for two kinds of pie. Now it occurred to me
that perhaps the sailors, too, might be afraid of Tiny. How astonished we would have
been, as we sat talking about her on Frances Harling's front porch, if we could have
known what her future was really to be! Of all the girls and boys who grew up
together in Black Hawk, Tiny Soderball was
This is what actually happened to
Tiny: While she was running her lodging-house in Seattle,
gold was discovered in Alaska.
Miners and sailors came back from the North with wonderful stories and pouches of
gold. Tiny saw it and weighed it in her hands. That daring which nobody had ever
suspected in her, awoke. She sold her business and set out for Circle City, in
company with a carpenter and his wife whom she had persuaded to go along with her.
They reached Skaguay in a snowstorm, went in dog sledges over the Chilkoot Pass, and
shot the Yukon in flatboats. They reached Circle City on the very day when some
Siwash Indians came into the
settlement with the report that there had been a rich gold strike farther up the
river, on a certain Klondike Creek. Two days later Tiny and her friends, and nearly
every one else in Circle City, started for the Klondike fields on the last steamer
that went up the Yukon before it froze for the winter. That boatload of people
founded Dawson City. Within a few weeks there were fifteen hundred homeless men in
camp. Tiny and the
That winter Tiny kept in her hotel a Swede whose legs had been frozen one night in a storm when he was trying to find his way back to his cabin. The poor fellow thought it great good fortune to be cared for by a woman, and a woman who spoke his own tongue. When he was told that his feet must be amputated, he said he hoped he would not get well; what could a working-man do in this hard world without feet? He did, in fact, die from the operation, but not before he had deeded Tiny Soderball his claim on Hunker Creek. Tiny sold her hotel, invested half her money in Dawson building lots, and with the rest she developed her claim. She went off into the wilds and lived on it. She bought other claims from discouraged miners, traded or sold them on percentages.
After nearly ten years in the Klondike, Tiny returned, with a considerable fortune,
"Lincoln was never any place for her," Tiny remarked. "In a town of that size Lena
would always be gossiped about. Frisco's the right field for her. She has a fine
class of trade. Oh, she's just the same as she always was! She's careless, but she's
level-headed. She's the only person I know who never gets any older. It's fine for
me to have her there; somebody who enjoys things like that. She keeps an eye on me
and won't let me be shabby. When she thinks I need a new dress,
Tiny limped slightly when she walked. The claim on Hunker Creek took toll from its possessors. Tiny had been caught in a sudden turn of weather, like poor Johnson. She lost three toes from one of those pretty little feet that used to trip about Black Hawk in pointed slippers and striped stockings. Tiny mentioned this mutilation quite casually—did n't seem sensitive about it. She was satisfied with her success, but not elated. She was like some one in whom the faculty of becoming interested is worn out.
SOON after I got home that summer I persuaded my
grandparents to have their photographs taken, and one morning I went into the
photographer's shop to arrange for
sittings. While I was waiting for him to come out of his developing-room, I walked
about trying to recognize the likenesses on his walls: girls in Commencement
dresses, country brides and grooms holding hands, family groups of three
generations. I noticed, in a heavy frame, one of those depressing
"crayon enlargements" often seen
in farmhouse parlors, the subject being a round-eyed baby in short dresses. The
photographer came out and gave a constrained, apologetic laugh.
"That's Tony Shimerda's baby. You remember her; she used to be the Harling's Tony. Too bad! She seems proud of the baby, though; would n't hear to a cheap frame for the picture. I expect her brother will be in for it Saturday."
I went away feeling that I must see Ántonia again. Another girl would have
kept
Larry Donovan was a passenger conductor, one of those train-crew aristocrats who
are always afraid that some one may ask them to put up a car-window, and who, if
requested to perform such a menial service, silently point to the button that calls
the porter. Larry wore this air of official aloofness even on the street, where
there were no car-windows to compromise his dignity. At the end of his run he
stepped indifferently from the train along with the passengers, his street hat on
his head and his conductor's cap in an alligator-skin bag, went directly into the
station and changed his clothes. It was a matter of the utmost importance to him
never to be seen in his blue trousers away from his train. He was usually cold and
distant with men, but with all women he had a silent, grave familiarity, a special
handshake accompanied by a significant, deliberate look. He took women, married or
single, into his
As I drew near home that morning, I saw Mrs. Harling out in her yard, digging round her mountain ash tree. It was a dry summer, and she had now no boy to help her. Charley was off in his battleship, cruising somewhere on the Caribbean sea. I turned in at the gate—it was with a feeling of pleasure that I opened and shut that gate in those days; I liked the feel of it under my hand. I took the spade away from Mrs. Harling, and while I loosened the earth around the tree, she sat down on the steps and talked about the oriole family that had a nest in its branches.
"Mrs. Harling," I said presently, "I wish I could find out exactly how Ántonia's marriage fell through."
"Why don't you go out and see your
ON the first or second day of August I got a horse and
cart and set out for the high country, to visit the Widow Steavens. The wheat
harvest was over, and here and there along the horizon I could see black puffs of
smoke from the steam thrashing-machines. The old pasture land was now being broken
up into wheatfields and cornfields, the red grass was disappearing, and the whole
face of the country was changing. There were wooden houses where the old sod
dwellings used to be, and little orchards, and big red barns; all this meant happy
children, contented women, and men who saw their lives coming to a fortunate
issue. The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another, had enriched
and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was
coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and
harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great
idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and
When I drew up to our old windmill, the Widow Steavens came out to meet me. She was brown as an Indian woman, tall, and very strong. When I was little, her massive head had always seemed to me like a Roman senator's. I told her at once why I had come.
"You'll stay the night with us, Jimmy? I'll talk to you after supper. I can take more interest when my work is off my mind. You've no prejudice against hot biscuit for supper? Some have, these days."
While I was putting my horse away I heard a rooster squawking. I looked at my watch and sighed; it was three o'clock, and I knew that I must eat him at six.
After supper Mrs. Steavens and I went upstairs to the old sitting-room, while her
grave, silent brother remained in the basement to read his
farm papers. All the windows were open. The white
summer moon was shining outside, the windmill was pumping lazily in the light
breeze. My hostess put the lamp on a stand in the corner, and turned it low
because of the heat. She sat
"Now, it's about that dear Ántonia you want to know? Well, you've come to the right person. I've watched her like she'd been my own daughter.
"When she came home to do her sewing that summer before she was to be married, she was over here about every day. They've never had a sewing machine at the Shimerdas', and she made all her things here. I taught her hemstitching, and I helped her to cut and fit. She used to sit there at that machine by the window, pedaling the life out of it—she was so strong—and always singing them queer Bohemian songs, like she was the happiest thing in the world.
"'Ántonia,' I used to say, 'don't run that machine so fast. You won't hasten the day none that way.'
"Then she'd laugh and slow down for a little, but she'd soon forget and begin to
pedal and sing again. I never saw a girl
"The first thing that troubled her was when he wrote that his run had been changed, and they would likely have to live in Denver. 'I'm a country girl,' she said, 'and I doubt if I'll be able to manage so well for him in a city. I was counting on keeping chickens, and maybe a cow.' She soon cheered up, though.
"At last she got the letter telling her when to come. She was shaken by it; she broke the seal and read it in this room. I suspected then that she'd begun to get faint-hearted, waiting; though she'd never let me see it.
"Then there was a great time of packing. It
"'T was a cold, raw day he drove her and her three trunks into Black Hawk to take the night train for Denver—the boxes had been shipped before. He stopped the wagon here, and she ran in to tell me good-bye. She threw her arms around me and kissed me, and thanked me for all I'd done for her. She was so happy she was crying and laughing at the same time, and her red cheeks was all wet with rain.
"'You're surely handsome enough for any man,' I said, looking her over.
"She laughed kind of flighty like, and whispered, 'Good-bye, dear house!' and
then
"Well, in a few days we had a letter saying she got to Denver safe, and he was there to meet her. They were to be married in a few days. He was trying to get his promotion before he married, she said. I did n't like that, but I said nothing. The next week Yulka got a postal card, saying she was 'well and happy.' After that we heard nothing. A month went by, and old Mrs. Shimerda began to get fretful. Ambrosch was as sulky with me as if I'd picked out the man and arranged the match.
"One night brother William came in and said that on his way back from the fields he had passed a livery team from town, driving fast out the west road. There was a trunk on the front seat with the driver, and another behind. In the back seat there was a woman all bundled up; but for all her veils, he thought 't was Ántonia Shimerda, or Ántonia Donovan, as her name ought now to be.
"The next morning I got brother to drive me over. I can walk still, but my feet
ain't
"I whispered and asked her to come out of doors with me. I knew she could n't talk free before her mother. She went out with me, bareheaded, and we walked up toward the garden.
"'I'm not married, Mrs. Steavens,' she says to me very quiet and natural-like, 'and I ought to be.'
"'Oh, my child,' says I, 'what's happened to you? Don't be afraid to tell me!'
"She sat down on the draw-side, out of sight of the house. 'He's run away from me,' she said. 'I don't know if he ever meant to marry me.'
"'You mean he's thrown up his job and quit the country?' says I.
"'He did n't have any job. He'd been fired; blacklisted for knocking down fares. I did n't know. I thought he had n't been treated right. He was sick when I got there. He'd just come out of the hospital. He lived with me till my money gave out, and afterwards I found he had n't really been hunting work at all. Then he just did n't come back. One nice fellow at the station told me, when I kept going to look for him, to give it up. He said he was afraid Larry'd gone bad and would n't come back any more. I guess he's gone to Old Mexico. The conductors get rich down there, collecting half-fares off the natives and robbing the company. He was always talking about fellows who had got ahead that way.'
"I asked her, of course, why she did n't insist on a civil marriage at once
—that would
"Jimmy, I sat right down on that bank beside her and made lament. I cried like a
young thing. I could n't help it. I was just about heart-broke. It was one of them
lovely warm May days, and the wind was blowing and the colts jumping around in the
pastures; but I felt bowed with despair. My Ántonia, that had so much
good in her, had come home disgraced. And that Lena Lingard, that was always a bad
one, say what you will, had turned out so well, and was coming home here every
summer in her silks and her satins, and doing so much for her mother. I give
credit where credit is due, but you know well enough, Jim Burden, there is a great
difference in the principles of those two girls. And here it was the good one that
had come to grief! I was poor comfort to her. I marveled at her calm. As we went
back to the house, she stopped to feel of her clothes to see if they was drying
well, and seemed
"The next time I saw Ántonia, she was out in the fields ploughing corn.
All that spring and summer she did the work of a man on the farm; it seemed to be
an understood thing. Ambrosch did n't get any other hand to help him. Poor Marek
had got violent and been sent away to an institution a good while back. We never
even saw any of Tony's pretty dresses. She did n't take them out of her trunks.
She was quiet and steady. Folks respected her industry and tried to treat her as
if nothing had happened. They talked, to be sure; but not like they would if she'd
put on airs. She was so crushed and quiet that nobody seemed to want to humble
her. She never went anywhere. All that summer she never once came to see me. At
first I was hurt, but I got to feel that it was because this house reminded her of
too much. I went over there when I could, but the times when she was in from the
fields were the times when I was busiest here. She talked about the grain and the
weather as if she'd
"Ántonia worked on through harvest and thrashing, though she was too modest to go out thrashing for the neighbors, like when she was young and free. I did n't see much of her until late that fall when she begun to herd Ambrosch's cattle in the open ground north of here, up toward the big dog town. Sometimes she used to bring them over the west hill, there, and I would run to meet her and walk north a piece with her. She had thirty cattle in her bunch; it had been dry, and the pasture was short, or she would n't have brought them so far.
"It was a fine open fall, and she liked to be alone. While the steers grazed, she
used to
"'It does seem like I ought to make lace, or knit like Lena used to,' she said one day, 'but if I start to work, I look around and forget to go on. It seems such a little while ago when Jim Burden and I was playing all over this country. Up here I can pick out the very places where my father used to stand. Sometimes I feel like I'm not going to live very long, so I'm just enjoying every day of this fall.'
"After the winter begun she wore a man's long overcoat and boots, and a man's
felt hat with a wide brim. I used to watch her coming and going, and I could see
that her steps were getting heavier. One day in December, the snow began to fall.
Late in the afternoon I saw Ántonia driving her cattle homeward across
the hill. The snow was flying round her and she bent to face it, looking more
lonesome-like to me than usual. 'Deary me,' I says to myself, 'the girl's stayed
out too late. It'll be dark before she gets them cattle put into the corral.' I
seemed to sense
"That very night, it happened. She got her cattle home, turned them into the corral, and went into the house, into her room behind the kitchen, and shut the door. There, without calling to anybody, without a groan, she lay down on the bed and bore her child.
"I was lifting supper when old Mrs. Shimerda came running down the basement stairs, out of breath and screeching:—
"'Baby come, baby come!' she says, 'Ambrosch much like devil!'
"Brother William is surely a patient man. He was just ready to sit down to a hot supper after a long day in the fields. Without a word he rose and went down to the barn and hooked up his team. He got us over there as quick as it was humanly possible. I went right in, and began to do for Ántonia; but she laid there with her eyes shut and took no account of me. The old woman got a tubful of warm water to wash the baby. I overlooked what she was doing and I said out loud: —
"'Mrs. Shimerda, don't you put that strong yellow soap near that baby. You'll blister its little skin.' I was indignant.
"'Mrs. Steavens,' Ántonia said from the bed, 'if you'll look in the top tray of my trunk, you'll see some fine soap.' That was the first word she spoke.
"After I'd dressed the baby, I took it out to show it to Ambrosch. He was muttering behind the stove and would n't look at it.
"'You'd better put it out in the rain barrel,' he says.
"'Now, see here, Ambrosch,' says I, 'there's a law in this land, don't forget that. I stand here a witness that this baby has come into the world sound and strong, and I intend to keep an eye on what befalls it.' I pride myself I cowed him.
"Well, I expect you're not much interested in babies, but Ántonia's got on fine. She loved it from the first as dearly as if she'd had a ring on her finger, and was never ashamed of it. It's a year and eight months old now, and no baby was ever better cared-for. Ántonia is a natural-born mother. I wish she could marry and raise a family, but I don't know as there's much chance now."
I slept that night in the room I used to have when I was a little boy, with the
THE next afternoon I walked over to the Shimerdas'. Yulka
showed me the baby and told me that Ántonia was shocking wheat on the
southwest quarter. I went down across the fields, and Tony saw me from a long way
off. She stood still by her shocks, leaning on her pitchfork, watching me as I came.
We met like the people in the old
song, in silence, if not in tears. Her warm hand clasped mine.
"I thought you'd come, Jim. I heard you were at Mrs. Steavens's last night. I've been looking for you all day."
She was thinner than I had ever seen her, and looked, as Mrs. Steavens said, "worked down," but there was a new kind of strength in the gravity of her face, and her color still gave her that look of deep-seated health and ardor. Still? Why, it flashed across me that though so much had happened in her life and in mine, she was barely twenty-four years old.
Ántonia stuck her fork in the ground, and instinctively we walked toward
that
"Of course it means you are going away from us for good," she said with a sigh. "But that don't mean I'll lose you. Look at my papa here; he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him."
She asked me whether I had learned to like big cities. "I'd always be miserable in
a
I told her I knew she would. "Do you know, Ántonia, since I've been away, I think of you more often than of any one else in this part of the world. I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister — anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me."
She turned her bright, believing eyes to me, and the tears came up in them slowly.
"How can it be like that, when you know so many people, and when I've disappointed
you so? Ain't it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other? I'm so glad
we had each other when we were little. I can't wait till my little girl's old enough
to
As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cartwheel, pale silver and streaked with rose color, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world. In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.
We reached the edge of the field, where our ways parted. I took her hands and held
them against my breast, feeling once more how strong and warm and good they were,
those
"I'll come back," I said earnestly, through the soft, intrusive darkness.
"Perhaps you will"—I felt rather than saw her smile. "But even if you don't, you're here, like my father. So I won't be lonesome."
As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.
I TOLD Ántonia I would come back, but life
intervened, and it was twenty years before I kept my promise. I heard of her from
time to time; that she married, very soon after I last saw her, a young Bohemian, a
cousin of Anton Jelinek; that they were poor, and had a large family. Once when I
was abroad I went into Bohemia, and from Prague I sent Ántonia some
photographs of her native village. Months afterward came a letter from her, telling
me the names and ages of her many children, but little else; signed, "Your old
friend, Ántonia Cuzak." When I met Tiny Soderball in Salt Lake, she told me
that Ántonia had not "done very well"; that her husband was not a man of
much force, and she had had a hard life. Perhaps it was cowardice that kept me away
so long. My business took me West several times every year, and it was always in the
I owe it to Lena Lingard that I went to see Ántonia at last. I was in San Francisco two summers ago when both Lena and Tiny Soderball were in town. Tiny lives in a house of her own, and Lena's shop is in an apartment house just around the corner. It interested me, after so many years, to see the two women together. Tiny audits Lena's accounts occasionally, and invests her money for her; and Lena, apparently, takes care that Tiny does n't grow too miserly. "If there's anything I can't stand," she said to me in Tiny's presence, "it's a shabby rich woman." Tiny smiled grimly and assured me that Lena would never be either shabby or rich. "And I don't want to be," the other agreed complacently.
Lena gave me a cheerful account of Ántonia and urged me to make her a visit.
"You really ought to go, Jim. It would be such a satisfaction to her. Never mind what Tiny says. There's nothing the matter with Cuzak. You'd like him. He is n't a hustler, but a rough man would never have suited Tony. Tony has nice children —ten or eleven of them by this time, I guess. I should n't care for a family of that size myself, but somehow it's just right for Tony. She'd love to show them to you."
On my way East I broke my journey at
Hastings, in Nebraska, and set off with an open buggy and a fairly good
livery team to find the Cuzak
farm. At a little past midday, I knew I must be nearing my destination. Set
back on a swell of land at my right, I saw a wide farmhouse, with a red barn and an
ash grove, and cattle yards in front that sloped down to the high road. I drew up my
horses and was wondering whether I should drive in here, when I heard low voices.
Ahead of me, in a plum thicket beside the road, I saw two boys bending over a dead
dog. The little one, not more than four or five, was on his knees, his hands folded,
and his close-clipped, bare head drooping forward in deep dejection. The other stood
beside him, a hand on his
"Are you Mrs. Cuzak's boys?" I asked.
The younger one did not look up; he was submerged in his own feelings, but his brother met me with intelligent gray eyes. "Yes, sir."
"Does she live up there on the hill? I am going to see her. Get in and ride up with me."
He glanced at his reluctant little brother. "I guess we'd better walk. But we'll open the gate for you."
I drove along the side-road and they followed slowly behind. When I pulled up at
the windmill, another boy, barefooted and curly-headed, ran out of the barn to tie
my team for me. He was a handsome one, this chap, fair-skinned and freckled, with
red cheeks and a ruddy pelt as thick as a lamb's wool, growing down on his neck in
little tufts. He tied my team with two flourishes of his hands, and nodded when I
asked him if his mother was at home. As he glanced at me, his
Ducks and geese ran quacking across my path. White cats were sunning themselves among yellow pumpkins on the porch steps. I looked through the wire screen into a big, light kitchen with a white floor. I saw a long table, rows of wooden chairs against the wall, and a shining range in one corner. Two girls were washing dishes at the sink, laughing and chattering, and a little one, in a short pinafore, sat on a stool playing with a rag baby. When I asked for their mother, one of the girls dropped her towel, ran across the floor with noiseless bare feet, and disappeared. The older one, who wore shoes and stockings, came to the door to admit me. She was a buxom girl with dark hair and eyes, calm and self-possessed.
"Won't you come in? Mother will be here in a minute."
Before I could sit down in the chair she offered me, the miracle happened; one of
those quiet moments that clutch the heart,
"My husband's not at home, sir. Can I do anything?"
"Don't you remember me, Ántonia? Have I changed so much?"
She frowned into the slanting sunlight that made her brown hair look redder than it was. Suddenly her eyes widened, her whole face seemed to grow broader. She caught her breath and put out two hard-worked hands.
"Why, it's Jim! Anna, Yulka, it's Jim Burden!" She had no sooner caught my hands than she looked alarmed. "What's happened? Is anybody dead?"
I patted her arm. "No. I did n't come to a funeral this time. I got off the train at Hastings and drove down to see you and your family.
She dropped my hand and began rushing about. " Anton, Yulka, Nina, where are you all? Run, Anna, and hunt for the boys. They're off looking for that dog, somewhere. And call Leo. Where is that Leo!" She pulled them out of corners and came bringing them like a mother cat bringing in her kittens. "You don't have to go right off, Jim? My oldest boy's not here. He's gone with papa to the street fair at Wilber. I won't let you go! You've got to stay and see Rudolph and our papa." She looked at me imploringly, panting with excitement.
While I reassured her and told her there would be plenty of time, the barefooted boys from outside were slipping into the kitchen and gathering about her.
"Now, tell me their names, and how old they are."
As she told them off in turn, she made several mistakes about ages, and they roared with laughter. When she came to my light-footed friend of the windmill, she said, "This is Leo, and he's old enough to be better than he is."
He ran up to her and butted her playfully with his curly head, like a little ram, but his voice was quite desperate. "You've forgot! You always forget mine. It's mean! Please tell him, mother!" He clenched his fists in vexation and looked up at her impetuously.
She wound her forefinger in his yellow fleece and pulled it, watching him. "Well, how old are you?"
"I'm twelve," he panted, looking not at me but at her; "I'm twelve years old, and I was born on Easter day!"
She nodded to me. "It's true. He was an Easter baby."
The children all looked at me, as if they expected me to exhibit astonishment or
delight at this information. Clearly, they were proud of each other, and of being so
many. When they had all been introduced, Anna, the eldest daughter, who had met me
at the
"Now, mother, sit down and talk to Mr. Burden. We'll finish the dishes quietly and not disturb you."
Ántonia looked about, quite distracted. "Yes, child, but why don't we take him into the parlor, now that we've got a nice parlor for company?"
The daughter laughed indulgently, and took my hat from me. "Well, you're here, now, mother, and if you talk here, Yulka and I can listen, too. You can show him the parlor after while." She smiled at me, and went back to the dishes, with her sister. The little girl with the rag doll found a place on the bottom step of an enclosed back stairway, and sat with her toes curled up, looking out at us expectantly.
"She's Nina, after Nina Harling," Ántonia explained. "Ain't her eyes like
Nina's? I declare, Jim, I loved you children almost as much as I love my own. These
children know all about you and Charley and Sally, like as if they'd grown up with
you. I can't think of what I want to say, you've got me
"I can't believe it's you, sitting here, in my own kitchen. You would n't have known me, would you, Jim? You've kept so young, yourself. But it's easier for a man. I can't see how my Anton looks any older than the day I married him. His teeth have kept so nice. I have n't got many left. But I feel just as young as I used to, and I can do as much work. Oh, we don't have to work so hard now! We've got plenty to help us, papa and me. And how many have you got, Jim?"
When I told her I had no children she seemed embarrassed. "Oh, ain't that too bad! Maybe you could take one of my bad ones, now? That Leo; he's the worst of all." She leaned toward me with a smile. "And I love him the best," she whispered.
"Mother!" the two girls murmured reproachfully from the dishes.
Ántonia threw up her head and laughed. "I can't help it. You know I do.
Maybe
I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered—about her te