My Ántonia
moist with the steam or the heat and curling in little damp spirals
about their ears. They had not learned much English, and were not so
ambitious as Tony or Lena; but they were kind, simple girls and they
were always happy. When one danced with them, one smelled their clean,
freshly ironed clothes that had been put away with rosemary leaves from
Mr. Jensen’s garden.
There were never girls enough to go round at those dances, but everyone
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-coloured 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 didn’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 dance against
and around the hard-and-fast beat of the music. If, instead of going to
the end of the railroad, old Mr. Shimerda had stayed in New York and
picked up a living with his fiddle, how different Ántonia’s life might
have been!
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 colour 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 Cutters’ 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, 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 that I carried my head
high as I emerged from the dark cedars and shut the Cutters’ gate
softly behind me. Her warm, sweet face, her kind arms, and the true
heart in her; she was, oh, she was still my Ántonia! I looked with
contempt at the dark, silent little houses about me as I walked home,
and thought of the stupid young men who were asleep in some of them. I
knew where the real women were, though I was only a boy; and I would
not be afraid of them, either!
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 me with a soft sigh and said, ‘Now they are all
gone, and I can kiss you as much as I like.’
I used to wish I could have this flattering dream about Ántonia, but I
never did.
XIII
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 didn’t feel
well, and if I couldn’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 wasn’t any other way for
you, it seemed like.’
I put my arms around her. I couldn’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 haven’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, and fell
back on the telegrapher and the cigar-maker and his canaries for
companionship. I remember I took a melancholy pleasure in hanging a
May-basket for Nina Harling that spring. I bought the flowers from an
old German woman who always had more window plants than anyone else,
and spent an afternoon trimming a little workbasket. When dusk came on,
and the new moon hung in the sky, I went quietly to the Harlings’ front
door with my offering, rang the bell, and then ran away as was the
custom. Through the willow hedge I could hear Nina’s cries of delight,
and I felt comforted.
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 knew them in the country, and
you like to take sides. In some ways you’re older than boys of your
age. It will be all right with mama after you pass your college
examinations and she sees you’re in earnest.’
‘If you were a boy,’ I persisted, ‘you wouldn’t belong to the Owl Club,
either. You’d be just like me.’
She shook her head. ‘I would and I wouldn’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 fervour 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 didn’t believe you could do as well as that. You
didn’t get that speech out of books.’ Among my graduation presents
there was a silk umbrella from Mrs. Harling, with my name on the
handle.
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, didn’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 very 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.
XIV
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 ‘Aeneid’ 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