My Ántonia
The three Marys were the heroines of a cycle of scandalous stories,
which the old men were fond of relating as they sat about the
cigar-stand in the drugstore. Mary Dusak had been housekeeper for a
bachelor rancher from Boston, and after several years in his service
she was forced to retire from the world for a short time. Later she
came back to town to take the place of her friend, Mary Svoboda, who
was similarly embarrassed. The three Marys were considered as dangerous
as high explosives to have about the kitchen, yet they were such good
cooks and such admirable housekeepers that they never had to look for a
place.
The Vannis’ tent brought the town boys and the country girls together
on neutral ground. Sylvester Lovett, who was cashier in his father’s
bank, always found his way to the tent on Saturday night. He took all
the dances Lena Lingard would give him, and even grew bold enough to
walk home with her. If his sisters or their friends happened to be
among the onlookers on ‘popular nights,’ Sylvester stood back in the
shadow under the cottonwood trees, smoking and watching Lena with a
harassed expression. Several times I stumbled upon him there in the
dark, and I felt rather sorry for him. He reminded me of Ole Benson,
who used to sit on the drawside and watch Lena herd her cattle. Later
in the summer, when Lena went home for a week to visit her mother, I
heard from Ántonia that young Lovett drove all the way out there to see
her, and took her buggy-riding. In my ingenuousness I hoped that
Sylvester would marry Lena, and thus give all the country girls a
better position in the town.
Sylvester dallied about Lena until he began to make mistakes in his
work; had to stay at the bank until after dark to make his books
balance. He was daft about her, and everyone knew it. To escape from
his predicament he ran away with a widow six years older than himself,
who owned a half-section. This remedy worked, apparently. He never
looked at Lena again, nor lifted his eyes as he ceremoniously tipped
his hat when he happened to meet her on the sidewalk.
So that was what they were like, I thought, these white-handed,
high-collared clerks and bookkeepers! I used to glare at young Lovett
from a distance and only wished I had some way of showing my contempt
for him.
X
It was at the Vannis’ tent that Ántonia was discovered. Hitherto she
had been looked upon more as a ward of the Harlings than as one of the
‘hired girls.’ She had lived in their house and yard and garden; her
thoughts never seemed to stray outside that little kingdom. But after
the tent came to town she began to go about with Tiny and Lena and
their friends. The Vannis often said that Ántonia was the best dancer
of them all. I sometimes heard murmurs in the crowd outside the
pavilion that Mrs. Harling would soon have her hands full with that
girl. The young men began to joke with each other about ‘the Harlings’
Tony’ as they did about ‘the Marshalls’ Anna’ or ‘the Gardeners’ Tiny.’
Ántonia talked and thought of nothing but the tent. She hummed the
dance tunes all day. When supper was late, she hurried with her dishes,
dropped and smashed them in her excitement. At the first call of the
music, she became irresponsible. If she hadn’t time to dress, she
merely flung off her apron and shot out of the kitchen door. Sometimes
I went with her; the moment the lighted tent came into view she would
break into a run, like a boy. There were always partners waiting for
her; she began to dance before she got her breath.
Ántonia’s success at the tent had its consequences. The iceman lingered
too long now, when he came into the covered porch to fill the
refrigerator. The delivery boys hung about the kitchen when they
brought the groceries. Young farmers who were in town for Saturday came
tramping through the yard to the back door to engage dances, or to
invite Tony to parties and picnics. Lena and Norwegian Anna dropped in
to help her with her work, so that she could get away early. The boys
who brought her home after the dances sometimes laughed at the back
gate and wakened Mr. Harling from his first sleep. A crisis was
inevitable.
One Saturday night Mr. Harling had gone down to the cellar for beer. As
he came up the stairs in the dark, he heard scuffling on the back
porch, and then the sound of a vigorous slap. He looked out through the
side door in time to see a pair of long legs vaulting over the picket
fence. Ántonia was standing there, angry and excited. Young Harry
Paine, who was to marry his employer’s daughter on Monday, had come to
the tent with a crowd of friends and danced all evening. Afterward, he
begged Ántonia to let him walk home with her. She said she supposed he
was a nice young man, as he was one of Miss Frances’s friends, and she
didn’t mind. On the back porch he tried to kiss her, and when she
protested—because he was going to be married on Monday—he caught her
and kissed her until she got one hand free and slapped him.
Mr. Harling put his beer-bottles down on the table. ‘This is what I’ve
been expecting, Ántonia. You’ve been going with girls who have a
reputation for being free and easy, and now you’ve got the same
reputation. I won’t have this and that fellow tramping about my back
yard all the time. This is the end of it, tonight. It stops, short. You
can quit going to these dances, or you can hunt another place. Think it
over.’
The next morning when Mrs. Harling and Frances tried to reason with
Ántonia, they found her agitated but determined. ‘Stop going to the
tent?’ she panted. ‘I wouldn’t think of it for a minute! My own father
couldn’t make me stop! Mr. Harling ain’t my boss outside my work. I
won’t give up my friends, either. The boys I go with are nice fellows.
I thought Mr. Paine was all right, too, because he used to come here. I
guess I gave him a red face for his wedding, all right!’ she blazed out
indignantly.
‘You’ll have to do one thing or the other, Ántonia,’ Mrs. Harling told
her decidedly. ‘I can’t go back on what Mr. Harling has said. This is
his house.’
‘Then I’ll just leave, Mrs. Harling. Lena’s been wanting me to get a
place closer to her for a long while. Mary Svoboda’s going away from
the Cutters’ to work at the hotel, and I can have her place.’
Mrs. Harling rose from her chair. ‘Ántonia, if you go to the Cutters’
to work, you cannot come back to this house again. You know what that
man is. It will be the ruin of you.’
Tony snatched up the teakettle and began to pour boiling water over the
glasses, laughing excitedly. ‘Oh, I can take care of myself! I’m a lot
stronger than Cutter is. They pay four dollars there, and there’s no
children. The work’s nothing; I can have every evening, and be out a
lot in the afternoons.’
‘I thought you liked children. Tony, what’s come over you?’
‘I don’t know, something has.’ Ántonia tossed her head and set her jaw.
‘A girl like me has got to take her good times when she can. Maybe
there won’t be any tent next year. I guess I want to have my fling,
like the other girls.’
Mrs. Harling gave a short, harsh laugh. ‘If you go to work for the
Cutters, you’re likely to have a fling that you won’t get up from in a
hurry.’
Frances said, when she told grandmother and me about this scene, that
every pan and plate and cup on the shelves trembled when her mother
walked out of the kitchen. Mrs. Harling declared bitterly that she
wished she had never let herself get fond of Ántonia.
XI
Wick Cutter was the money-lender who had fleeced poor Russian Peter.
When a farmer once got into the habit of going to Cutter, it was like
gambling or the lottery; in an hour of discouragement he went back.
Cutter’s first name was Wycliffe, and he liked to talk about his pious
bringing-up. He contributed regularly to the Protestant churches, ‘for
sentiment’s sake,’ as he said with a flourish of the hand. He came from
a town in Iowa where there were a great many Swedes, and could speak a
little Swedish, which gave him a great advantage with the early
Scandinavian settlers.
In every frontier settlement there are men who have come there to
escape restraint. Cutter was one of the ‘fast set’ of Black Hawk
business men. He was an inveterate gambler, though a poor loser. When
we saw a light burning in his office late at night, we knew that a game
of poker was going on. Cutter boasted that he never drank anything
stronger than sherry, and he said he got his start in life by saving
the money that other young men spent for cigars. He was full of moral
maxims for boys. When he came to our house on business, he quoted ‘Poor
Richard’s Almanack’ to me, and told me he was delighted to find a town
boy who could milk a cow. He was particularly affable to grandmother,
and whenever they met he would begin at once to talk about ‘the good
old times’ and simple living. I detested his pink, bald head, and his
yellow whiskers, always soft and glistening. It was said he brushed
them every night, as a woman does her hair. His white teeth looked
factory-made. His skin was red and rough, as if from perpetual sunburn;
he often went away to hot springs to take mud baths. He was notoriously
dissolute with women. Two Swedish girls who had lived in his house were
the worse for the experience. One of them he had taken to Omaha and
established in the business for which he had fitted her. He still
visited her.
Cutter lived in a state of perpetual warfare with his wife, and yet,
apparently, they never thought of separating. They dwelt in a fussy,
scroll-work house, painted white and buried in thick evergreens, with a
fussy white fence and barn. Cutter thought he knew a great deal about
horses, and usually had a colt which he was training for the track. On
Sunday mornings one could see him out at the fair grounds, speeding
around the race-course in his trotting-buggy, wearing yellow gloves and
a black-and-white-check travelling cap, his whiskers blowing back in
the breeze. If there were any boys about, Cutter would offer one of
them a quarter to hold the stop-watch, and then drive off, saying he
had no change and would ‘fix it up next time.’ No one could cut his
lawn or wash his buggy to suit him. He was so fastidious and prim about
his place that a boy would go to a good deal of trouble to throw a dead
cat into his back yard, or to dump a sackful of tin cans in his alley.
It was a peculiar combination of old-maidishness and licentiousness
that made Cutter seem so despicable.
He had certainly met his match when he married Mrs. Cutter. She was a
terrifying-looking person; almost a giantess in height, raw-boned, with
iron-grey hair, a face always flushed, and prominent, hysterical eyes.
When she meant to be entertaining and agreeable, she nodded her head
incessantly and snapped her eyes at one. Her teeth were long and
curved, like a horse’s; people said babies always cried if she smiled
at them. Her face had a kind of fascination for me: it was the very
colour and shape of anger. There was a gleam of something akin to
insanity in her full, intense eyes. She was formal in manner, and made
calls in rustling, steel-grey brocades and a tall bonnet with bristling
aigrettes.
Mrs. Cutter painted china so assiduously that even her wash-bowls and
pitchers, and her husband’s shaving-mug, were covered with violets and
lilies. Once, when Cutter was exhibiting some of his wife’s china to a
caller, he dropped a piece. Mrs. Cutter put her handkerchief to her
lips as if she were going to faint and said grandly: ‘Mr. Cutter, you
have broken all the Commandments—spare the finger-bowls!’
They quarrelled from the moment Cutter came into the house until they
went to bed at night, and their hired girls reported these scenes to
the town at large. Mrs. Cutter had several times cut paragraphs about