My Ántonia
trampled and torn. My own garments had been treated so badly that I
never saw them again; grandmother burned them in the Cutters’ kitchen
range.
While Ántonia was packing her trunk and putting her room in order, to
leave it, the front doorbell 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 afterward.
Grandmother would not let her see Ántonia at all, but made her sit down
in the parlour 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 would
have to stay overnight there, but she could go on home. He bought her
ticket and put her on the train. She saw him slip a twenty-dollar bill
into her handbag with her ticket. That bill, she said, should have
aroused her suspicions at once—but did not.
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 a few days. But apparently it was
part of his fun to outrage her feelings as much as possible.
‘Mr. Cutter will pay for this, Mrs. Burden. He will pay!’ Mrs. Cutter
avouched, nodding her horse-like head and rolling her eyes.
Grandmother said she hadn’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 couldn’t do without was quarrelling with Mrs.
Cutter!
BOOK III. Lena Lingard
I
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 time of mental
awakening as one of the happiest in my life. Gaston Cleric introduced
me to the world of ideas; when one first enters that world everything
else fades for a time, and all that went before is as if it had not
been. Yet I found curious survivals; some of the figures of my old life
seemed to be waiting for me in the new.
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 endeavour, 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; we lived where we could and as we could. I took
rooms with an old couple, early settlers in Lincoln, who had married
off their children and now lived quietly in their house at the edge of
town, near the open country. The house was inconveniently situated for
students, and on that account I got two rooms for the price of one. My
bedroom, originally a linen-closet, was unheated and was barely large
enough to contain my cot-bed, but it enabled me to call the other room
my study. The dresser, and the great walnut wardrobe which held all my
clothes, even my hats and shoes, I had pushed out of the way, and I
considered them non-existent, as children eliminate incongruous objects
when they are playing house. I worked at a commodious green-topped
table placed directly in front of the west window which looked out over
the prairie. In the corner at my right were all my books, in shelves I
had made and painted myself. On the blank wall at my left the dark,
old-fashioned wall-paper was covered by a large map of ancient Rome,
the work of some German scholar. Cleric had ordered it for me when he
was sending for books from abroad. Over the bookcase hung a photograph
of the Tragic Theatre at Pompeii, which he had given me from his
collection.
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 Benedictine 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 anecdotes. When he was tired, his
lectures were clouded, obscure, elliptical; but when he was interested
they were wonderful. I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being
a great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his bursts of
imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much
in the heat of personal communication. How often I have seen him draw
his dark brows together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a
figure in the carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image
that was in his brain. He could bring the drama of antique life before
one out of the shadows—white figures against blue backgrounds. I shall
never forget his face as it looked one night when he told me about the
solitary day he spent among the sea temples at Paestum: the soft wind
blowing through the roofless columns, the birds flying low over the
flowering marsh grasses, the changing lights on the silver, cloud-hung
mountains. He had wilfully stayed the short summer night there, wrapped
in his coat and rug, watching the constellations on their path down the
sky until ‘the bride of old Tithonus’ rose out of the sea, and the
mountains stood sharp in the dawn. It was there he caught the fever
which held him back on the eve of his departure for Greece and of which
he lay ill so long in Naples. He was still, indeed, doing penance for
it.
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 honours most. The seeds of my ardour were the
sparks from that divine flame whereby more than a thousand have
kindled; I speak of the “Aeneid,” 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 mind plunged away from
me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my
own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now,
like the image of the plough against the sun. They were all I had for
an answer to the new appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto
and Russian Peter took up in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with
other things. But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those
early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they
accompanied me through all my new experiences. They were so much alive
in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive
anywhere else, or how.
II
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 tomorrow’s lesson began. It opened with the melancholy
reflection that, in the lives of mortals the best days are the first to
flee. ‘Optima dies... prima fugit.’ I turned back to the beginning of