My Ántonia
trees, tie up vines and clip the hedges. Every morning, before I was
up, I could hear Tony singing in the garden rows. After the apple and
cherry trees broke into bloom, we ran about under them, hunting for the
new nests the birds were building, throwing clods at each other, and
playing hide-and-seek with Nina. Yet the summer which was to change
everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing
up, life can’t stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns;
and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their
elders are always forgetting.
It must have been in June, for Mrs. Harling and Ántonia were preserving
cherries, when I stopped one morning to tell them that a dancing
pavilion had come to town. I had seen two drays hauling the canvas and
painted poles up from the depot.
That afternoon three cheerful-looking Italians strolled about Black
Hawk, looking at everything, and with them was a dark, stout woman who
wore a long gold watch-chain about her neck and carried a black lace
parasol. They seemed especially interested in children and vacant lots.
When I overtook them and stopped to say a word, I found them affable
and confiding. They told me they worked in Kansas City in the winter,
and in summer they went out among the farming towns with their tent and
taught dancing. When business fell off in one place, they moved on to
another.
The dancing pavilion was put up near the Danish laundry, on a vacant
lot surrounded by tall, arched cottonwood trees. It was very much like
a merry-go-round tent, with open sides and gay flags flying from the
poles. Before the week was over, all the ambitious mothers were sending
their children to the afternoon dancing class. At three o’clock one met
little girls in white dresses and little boys in the round-collared
shirts of the time, hurrying along the sidewalk on their way to the
tent. Mrs. Vanni received them at the entrance, always dressed in
lavender with a great deal of black lace, her important watch-chain
lying on her bosom. She wore her hair on the top of her head, built up
in a black tower, with red coral combs. When she smiled, she showed two
rows of strong, crooked yellow teeth. She taught the little children
herself, and her husband, the harpist, taught the older ones.
Often the mothers brought their fancywork and sat on the shady side of
the tent during the lesson. The popcorn man wheeled his glass wagon
under the big cottonwood by the door, and lounged in the sun, sure of a
good trade when the dancing was over. Mr. Jensen, the Danish
laundryman, used to bring a chair from his porch and sit out in the
grass plot. Some ragged little boys from the depot sold pop and iced
lemonade under a white umbrella at the corner, and made faces at the
spruce youngsters who came to dance. That vacant lot soon became the
most cheerful place in town. Even on the hottest afternoons the
cottonwoods made a rustling shade, and the air smelled of popcorn and
melted butter, and Bouncing Bets wilting in the sun. Those hardy
flowers had run away from the laundryman’s garden, and the grass in the
middle of the lot was pink with them.
The Vannis kept exemplary order, and closed every evening at the hour
suggested by the city council. When Mrs. Vanni gave the signal, and the
harp struck up ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ all Black Hawk knew it was ten
o’clock. You could set your watch by that tune as confidently as by the
roundhouse whistle.
At last there was something to do in those long, empty summer evenings,
when the married people sat like images on their front porches, and the
boys and girls tramped and tramped the board sidewalks—northward to the
edge of the open prairie, south to the depot, then back again to the
post-office, the ice-cream parlour, the butcher shop. Now there was a
place where the girls could wear their new dresses, and where one could
laugh aloud without being reproved by the ensuing silence. That silence
seemed to ooze out of the ground, to hang under the foliage of the
black maple trees with the bats and shadows. Now it was broken by
lighthearted sounds. First the deep purring of Mr. Vanni’s harp came in
silvery ripples through the blackness of the dusty-smelling night; then
the violins fell in—one of them was almost like a flute. They called so
archly, so seductively, that our feet hurried toward the tent of
themselves. Why hadn’t we had a tent before?
Dancing became popular now, just as roller skating had been the summer
before. The Progressive Euchre Club arranged with the Vannis for the
exclusive use of the floor on Tuesday and Friday nights. At other times
anyone could dance who paid his money and was orderly; the railroad
men, the roundhouse mechanics, the delivery boys, the iceman, the
farm-hands who lived near enough to ride into town after their day’s
work was over.
I never missed a Saturday night dance. The tent was open until midnight
then. The country boys came in from farms eight and ten miles away, and
all the country girls were on the floor—Ántonia and Lena and Tiny, and
the Danish laundry girls and their friends. I was not the only boy who
found these dances gayer than the others. The young men who belonged to
the Progressive Euchre Club used to drop in late and risk a tiff with
their sweethearts and general condemnation for a waltz with ‘the hired
girls.’
IX
There was a curious social situation in Black Hawk. All the young men
felt the attraction of the fine, well-set-up country girls who had come
to town to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father
struggle out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children
of the family to go to school.
Those girls had grown up in the first bitter-hard times, and had got
little schooling themselves. But the younger brothers and sisters, for
whom they made such sacrifices and who have had ‘advantages,’ never
seem to me, when I meet them now, half as interesting or as well
educated. The older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned
so much from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers;
they had all, like Ántonia, been early awakened and made observant by
coming at a tender age from an old country to a new.
I can remember a score of these country girls who were in service in
Black Hawk during the few years I lived there, and I can remember
something unusual and engaging about each of them. Physically they were
almost a race apart, and out-of-door work had given them a vigour
which, when they got over their first shyness on coming to town,
developed into a positive carriage and freedom of movement, and made
them conspicuous among Black Hawk women.
That was before the day of high-school athletics. Girls who had to walk
more than half a mile to school were pitied. There was not a
tennis-court in the town; physical exercise was thought rather
inelegant for the daughters of well-to-do families. Some of the
high-school girls were jolly and pretty, but they stayed indoors in
winter because of the cold, and in summer because of the heat. When one
danced with them, their bodies never moved inside their clothes; their
muscles seemed to ask but one thing—not to be disturbed. I remember
those girls merely as faces in the schoolroom, gay and rosy, or
listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders, like cherubs, by the
ink-smeared tops of the high desks that were surely put there to make
us round-shouldered and hollow-chested.
The daughters of Black Hawk merchants had a confident, unenquiring
belief that they were ‘refined,’ and that the country girls, who
‘worked out,’ were not. The American farmers in our county were quite
as hard-pressed as their neighbours from other countries. All alike had
come to Nebraska with little capital and no knowledge of the soil they
must subdue. All had borrowed money on their land. But no matter in
what straits the Pennsylvanian or Virginian found himself, he would not
let his daughters go out into service. Unless his girls could teach a
country school, they sat at home in poverty.
The Bohemian and Scandinavian girls could not get positions as
teachers, because they had had no opportunity to learn the language.
Determined to help in the struggle to clear the homestead from debt,
they had no alternative but to go into service. Some of them, after
they came to town, remained as serious and as discreet in behaviour as
they had been when they ploughed and herded on their father’s farm.
Others, like the three Bohemian Marys, tried to make up for the years
of youth they had lost. But every one of them did what she had set out
to do, and sent home those hard-earned dollars. The girls I knew were
always helping to pay for ploughs and reapers, brood-sows, or steers to
fatten.
One result of this family solidarity was that the foreign farmers in
our county were the first to become prosperous. After the fathers were
out of debt, the daughters married the sons of neighbours—usually of
like nationality—and the girls who once worked in Black Hawk kitchens
are to-day managing big farms and fine families of their own; their
children are better off than the children of the town women they used
to serve.
I thought the attitude of the town people toward these girls very
stupid. If I told my schoolmates that Lena Lingard’s grandfather was a
clergyman, and much respected in Norway, they looked at me blankly.
What did it matter? All foreigners were ignorant people who couldn’t
speak English. There was not a man in Black Hawk who had the
intelligence or cultivation, much less the personal distinction, of
Ántonia’s father. Yet people saw no difference between her and the
three Marys; they were all Bohemians, all ‘hired girls.’
I always knew I should live long enough to see my country girls come
into their own, and I have. To-day the best that a harassed Black Hawk
merchant can hope for is to sell provisions and farm machinery and
automobiles to the rich farms where that first crop of stalwart
Bohemian and Scandinavian girls are now the mistresses.
The Black Hawk boys looked forward to marrying Black Hawk girls, and
living in a brand-new little house with best chairs that must not be
sat upon, and hand-painted china that must not be used. But sometimes a
young fellow would look up from his ledger, or out through the grating
of his father’s bank, and let his eyes follow Lena Lingard, as she
passed the window with her slow, undulating walk, or Tiny Soderball,
tripping by in her short skirt and striped stockings.
The country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their
beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background. But
anxious mothers need have felt no alarm. They mistook the mettle of
their sons. The respect for respectability was stronger than any desire
in Black Hawk youth.
Our young man of position was like the son of a royal house; the boy
who swept out his office or drove his delivery wagon might frolic with
the jolly country girls, but he himself must sit all evening in a plush
parlour where conversation dragged so perceptibly that the father often
came in and made blundering efforts to warm up the atmosphere. On his
way home from his dull call, he would perhaps meet Tony and Lena,
coming along the sidewalk whispering to each other, or the three
Bohemian Marys in their long plush coats and caps, comporting
themselves with a dignity that only made their eventful histories the
more piquant. If he went to the hotel to see a travelling man on
business, there was Tiny, arching her shoulders at him like a kitten.
If he went into the laundry to get his collars, there were the four
Danish girls, smiling up from their ironing-boards, with their white
throats and their pink cheeks.