My Ántonia
unfaithful husbands out of the newspapers and mailed them to Cutter in
a disguised handwriting. Cutter would come home at noon, find the
mutilated journal in the paper-rack, and triumphantly fit the clipping
into the space from which it had been cut. Those two could quarrel all
morning about whether he ought to put on his heavy or his light
underwear, and all evening about whether he had taken cold or not.
The Cutters had major as well as minor subjects for dispute. The chief
of these was the question of inheritance: Mrs. Cutter told her husband
it was plainly his fault they had no children. He insisted that Mrs.
Cutter had purposely remained childless, with the determination to
outlive him and to share his property with her ‘people,’ whom he
detested. To this she would reply that unless he changed his mode of
life, she would certainly outlive him. After listening to her
insinuations about his physical soundness, Cutter would resume his
dumb-bell practice for a month, or rise daily at the hour when his wife
most liked to sleep, dress noisily, and drive out to the track with his
trotting-horse.
Once when they had quarrelled about household expenses, Mrs. Cutter put
on her brocade and went among their friends soliciting orders for
painted china, saying that Mr. Cutter had compelled her ‘to live by her
brush.’ Cutter wasn’t shamed as she had expected; he was delighted!
Cutter often threatened to chop down the cedar trees which half-buried
the house. His wife declared she would leave him if she were stripped
of the I privacy’ which she felt these trees afforded her. That was his
opportunity, surely; but he never cut down the trees. The Cutters
seemed to find their relations to each other interesting and
stimulating, and certainly the rest of us found them so. Wick Cutter
was different from any other rascal I have ever known, but I have found
Mrs. Cutters all over the world; sometimes founding new religions,
sometimes being forcibly fed—easily recognizable, even when
superficially tamed.
XII
After Ántonia went to live with the Cutters, she seemed to care about
nothing but picnics and parties and having a good time. When she was
not going to a dance, she sewed until midnight. Her new clothes were
the subject of caustic comment. Under Lena’s direction she copied Mrs.
Gardener’s new party dress and Mrs. Smith’s street costume so
ingeniously in cheap materials that those ladies were greatly annoyed,
and Mrs. Cutter, who was jealous of them, was secretly pleased.
Tony wore gloves now, and high-heeled shoes and feathered bonnets, and
she went downtown nearly every afternoon with Tiny and Lena and the
Marshalls’ Norwegian Anna. We high-school boys used to linger on the
playground at the afternoon recess to watch them as they came tripping
down the hill along the board sidewalk, two and two. They were growing
prettier every day, but as they passed us, I used to think with pride
that Ántonia, like Snow-White in the fairy tale, was still ‘fairest of
them all.’
Being a senior now, I got away from school early. Sometimes I overtook
the girls downtown and coaxed them into the ice-cream parlour, where
they would sit chattering and laughing, telling me all the news from
the country.
I remember how angry Tiny Soderball made me one afternoon. She declared
she had heard grandmother was going to make a Baptist preacher of me.
‘I guess you’ll have to stop dancing and wear a white necktie then.
Won’t he look funny, girls?’
Lena laughed. ‘You’ll have to hurry up, Jim. If you’re going to be a
preacher, I want you to marry me. You must promise to marry us all, and
then baptize the babies.’
Norwegian Anna, always dignified, looked at her reprovingly.
‘Baptists don’t believe in christening babies, do they, Jim?’
I told her I didn’t know what they believed, and didn’t care, and that
I certainly wasn’t going to be a preacher.
‘That’s too bad,’ Tiny simpered. She was in a teasing mood. ‘You’d make
such a good one. You’re so studious. Maybe you’d like to be a
professor. You used to teach Tony, didn’t you?’
Ántonia broke in. ‘I’ve set my heart on Jim being a doctor. You’d be
good with sick people, Jim. Your grandmother’s trained you up so nice.
My papa always said you were an awful smart boy.’
I said I was going to be whatever I pleased. ‘Won’t you be surprised,
Miss Tiny, if I turn out to be a regular devil of a fellow?’
They laughed until a glance from Norwegian Anna checked them; the
high-school principal had just come into the front part of the shop to
buy bread for supper. Anna knew the whisper was going about that I was
a sly one. People said there must be something queer about a boy who
showed no interest in girls of his own age, but who could be lively
enough when he was with Tony and Lena or the three Marys.
The enthusiasm for the dance, which the Vannis had kindled, did not at
once die out. After the tent left town, the Euchre Club became the Owl
Club, and gave dances in the Masonic Hall once a week. I was invited to
join, but declined. I was moody and restless that winter, and tired of
the people I saw every day. Charley Harling was already at Annapolis,
while I was still sitting in Black Hawk, answering to my name at
roll-call every morning, rising from my desk at the sound of a bell and
marching out like the grammar-school children. Mrs. Harling was a
little cool toward me, because I continued to champion Ántonia. What
was there for me to do after supper? Usually I had learned next day’s
lessons by the time I left the school building, and I couldn’t sit
still and read forever.
In the evening I used to prowl about, hunting for diversion. There lay
the familiar streets, frozen with snow or liquid with mud. They led to
the houses of good people who were putting the babies to bed, or simply
sitting still before the parlour stove, digesting their supper. Black
Hawk had two saloons. One of them was admitted, even by the church
people, to be as respectable as a saloon could be. Handsome Anton
Jelinek, who had rented his homestead and come to town, was the
proprietor. In his saloon there were long tables where the Bohemian and
German farmers could eat the lunches they brought from home while they
drank their beer. Jelinek kept rye bread on hand and smoked fish and
strong imported cheeses to please the foreign palate. I liked to drop
into his bar-room and listen to the talk. But one day he overtook me on
the street and clapped me on the shoulder.
‘Jim,’ he said, ‘I am good friends with you and I always like to see
you. But you know how the church people think about saloons. Your
grandpa has always treated me fine, and I don’t like to have you come
into my place, because I know he don’t like it, and it puts me in bad
with him.’
So I was shut out of that.
One could hang about the drugstore; and listen to the old men who sat
there every evening, talking politics and telling raw stories. One
could go to the cigar factory and chat with the old German who raised
canaries for sale, and look at his stuffed birds. But whatever you
began with him, the talk went back to taxidermy. There was the depot,
of course; I often went down to see the night train come in, and
afterward sat awhile with the disconsolate telegrapher who was always
hoping to be transferred to Omaha or Denver, ‘where there was some
life.’ He was sure to bring out his pictures of actresses and dancers.
He got them with cigarette coupons, and nearly smoked himself to death
to possess these desired forms and faces. For a change, one could talk
to the station agent; but he was another malcontent; spent all his
spare time writing letters to officials requesting a transfer. He
wanted to get back to Wyoming where he could go trout-fishing on
Sundays. He used to say ‘there was nothing in life for him but trout
streams, ever since he’d lost his twins.’
These were the distractions I had to choose from. There were no other
lights burning downtown after nine o’clock. On starlight nights I used
to pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little,
sleeping houses on either side, with their storm-windows and covered
back porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of
light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the
turning-lathe. Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy
and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on
in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save
cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue
of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a
tyranny. People’s speech, their voices, their very glances, became
furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite,
was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought,
tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to
leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark. The
growing piles of ashes and cinders in the back yards were the only
evidence that the wasteful, consuming process of life went on at all.
On Tuesday nights the Owl Club danced; then there was a little stir in
the streets, and here and there one could see a lighted window until
midnight. But the next night all was dark again.
After I refused to join ‘the Owls,’ as they were called, I made a bold
resolve to go to the Saturday night dances at Firemen’s Hall. I knew it
would be useless to acquaint my elders with any such plan. Grandfather
didn’t approve of dancing, anyway; he would only say that if I wanted
to dance I could go to the Masonic Hall, among ‘the people we knew.’ It
was just my point that I saw altogether too much of the people we knew.
My bedroom was on the ground floor, and as I studied there, I had a
stove in it. I used to retire to my room early on Saturday night,
change my shirt and collar and put on my Sunday coat. I waited until
all was quiet and the old people were asleep, then raised my window,
climbed out, and went softly through the yard. The first time I
deceived my grandparents I felt rather shabby, perhaps even the second
time, but I soon ceased to think about it.
The dance at the Firemen’s Hall was the one thing I looked forward to
all the week. There I met the same people I used to see at the Vannis’
tent. Sometimes there were Bohemians from Wilber, or German boys who
came down on the afternoon freight from Bismarck. Tony and Lena and
Tiny were always there, and the three Bohemian Marys, and the Danish
laundry girls.
The four Danish girls lived with the laundryman and his wife in their
house behind the laundry, with a big garden where the clothes were hung
out to dry. The laundryman was a kind, wise old fellow, who paid his
girls well, looked out for them, and gave them a good home. He told me
once that his own daughter died just as she was getting old enough to
help her mother, and that he had been ‘trying to make up for it ever
since.’ On summer afternoons he used to sit for hours on the sidewalk
in front of his laundry, his newspaper lying on his knee, watching his
girls through the big open window while they ironed and talked in
Danish. The clouds of white dust that blew up the street, the gusts of
hot wind that withered his vegetable garden, never disturbed his calm.
His droll expression seemed to say that he had found the secret of
contentment. Morning and evening he drove about in his spring wagon,
distributing freshly ironed clothes, and collecting bags of linen that
cried out for his suds and sunny drying-lines. His girls never looked
so pretty at the dances as they did standing by the ironing-board, or
over the tubs, washing the fine pieces, their white arms and throats
bare, their cheeks bright as the brightest wild roses, their gold hair