My Ántonia
the third book, which we had read in class that morning. ‘Primus ego in
patriam mecum... deducam Musas’; ‘for I shall be the first, if I live,
to bring the Muse into my country.’ Cleric had explained to us that
‘patria’ here meant, not a nation or even a province, but the little
rural neighbourhood on the Mincio where the poet was born. This was not
a boast, but a hope, at once bold and devoutly humble, that he might
bring the Muse (but lately come to Italy from her cloudy Grecian
mountains), not to the capital, the palatia Romana, but to his own
little I country’; to his father’s fields, ‘sloping down to the river
and to the old beech trees with broken tops.’
Cleric said he thought Virgil, when he was dying at Brindisi, must have
remembered that passage. After he had faced the bitter fact that he was
to leave the ‘Aeneid’ unfinished, and had decreed that the great
canvas, crowded with figures of gods and men, should be burned rather
than survive him unperfected, then his mind must have gone back to the
perfect utterance of the ‘Georgics,’ where the pen was fitted to the
matter as the plough is to the furrow; and he must have said to
himself, with the thankfulness of a good man, ‘I was the first to bring
the Muse into my country.’
We left the classroom quietly, conscious that we had been brushed by
the wing of a great feeling, though perhaps I alone knew Cleric
intimately enough to guess what that feeling was. In the evening, as I
sat staring at my book, the fervour of his voice stirred through the
quantities on the page before me. I was wondering whether that
particular rocky strip of New England coast about which he had so often
told me was Cleric’s patria. Before I had got far with my reading, I
was disturbed by a knock. I hurried to the door and when I opened it
saw a woman standing in the dark hall.
‘I expect you hardly know me, Jim.’
The voice seemed familiar, but I did not recognize her until she
stepped into the light of my doorway and I beheld—Lena Lingard! She was
so quietly conventionalized by city clothes that I might have passed
her on the street without seeing her. Her black suit fitted her figure
smoothly, and a black lace hat, with pale-blue forget-me-nots, sat
demurely on her yellow hair.
I led her toward Cleric’s chair, the only comfortable one I had,
questioning her confusedly.
She was not disconcerted by my embarrassment. She looked about her with
the naive curiosity I remembered so well. ‘You are quite comfortable
here, aren’t you? I live in Lincoln now, too, Jim. I’m in business for
myself. I have a dressmaking shop in the Raleigh Block, out on O
Street. I’ve made a real good start.’
‘But, Lena, when did you come?’
‘Oh, I’ve been here all winter. Didn’t your grandmother ever write you?
I’ve thought about looking you up lots of times. But we’ve all heard
what a studious young man you’ve got to be, and I felt bashful. I
didn’t know whether you’d be glad to see me.’ She laughed her mellow,
easy laugh, that was either very artless or very comprehending, one
never quite knew which. ‘You seem the same, though—except you’re a
young man, now, of course. Do you think I’ve changed?’
‘Maybe you’re prettier—though you were always pretty enough. Perhaps
it’s your clothes that make a difference.’
‘You like my new suit? I have to dress pretty well in my business.’
She took off her jacket and sat more at ease in her blouse, of some
soft, flimsy silk. She was already at home in my place, had slipped
quietly into it, as she did into everything. She told me her business
was going well, and she had saved a little money.
‘This summer I’m going to build the house for mother I’ve talked about
so long. I won’t be able to pay up on it at first, but I want her to
have it before she is too old to enjoy it. Next summer I’ll take her
down new furniture and carpets, so she’ll have something to look
forward to all winter.’
I watched Lena sitting there so smooth and sunny and well-cared-for,
and thought of how she used to run barefoot over the prairie until
after the snow began to fly, and how Crazy Mary chased her round and
round the cornfields. It seemed to me wonderful that she should have
got on so well in the world. Certainly she had no one but herself to
thank for it.
‘You must feel proud of yourself, Lena,’ I said heartily. ‘Look at me;
I’ve never earned a dollar, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be able
to.’
‘Tony says you’re going to be richer than Mr. Harling some day. She’s
always bragging about you, you know.’
‘Tell me, how IS Tony?’
‘She’s fine. She works for Mrs. Gardener at the hotel now. She’s
housekeeper. Mrs. Gardener’s health isn’t what it was, and she can’t
see after everything like she used to. She has great confidence in
Tony. Tony’s made it up with the Harlings, too. Little Nina is so fond
of her that Mrs. Harling kind of overlooked things.’
‘Is she still going with Larry Donovan?’
‘Oh, that’s on, worse than ever! I guess they’re engaged. Tony talks
about him like he was president of the railroad. Everybody laughs about
it, because she was never a girl to be soft. She won’t hear a word
against him. She’s so sort of innocent.’
I said I didn’t like Larry, and never would.
Lena’s face dimpled. ‘Some of us could tell her things, but it wouldn’t
do any good. She’d always believe him. That’s Ántonia’s failing, you
know; if she once likes people, she won’t hear anything against them.’
‘I think I’d better go home and look after Ántonia,’ I said.
‘I think you had.’ Lena looked up at me in frank amusement. ‘It’s a
good thing the Harlings are friendly with her again. Larry’s afraid of
them. They ship so much grain, they have influence with the railroad
people. What are you studying?’ She leaned her elbows on the table and
drew my book toward her. I caught a faint odour of violet sachet. ‘So
that’s Latin, is it? It looks hard. You do go to the theatre sometimes,
though, for I’ve seen you there. Don’t you just love a good play, Jim?
I can’t stay at home in the evening if there’s one in town. I’d be
willing to work like a slave, it seems to me, to live in a place where
there are theatres.’
‘Let’s go to a show together sometime. You are going to let me come to
see you, aren’t you?’
‘Would you like to? I’d be ever so pleased. I’m never busy after six
o’clock, and I let my sewing girls go at half-past five. I board, to
save time, but sometimes I cook a chop for myself, and I’d be glad to
cook one for you. Well’—she began to put on her white gloves—‘it’s been
awful good to see you, Jim.’
‘You needn’t hurry, need you? You’ve hardly told me anything yet.’
‘We can talk when you come to see me. I expect you don’t often have
lady visitors. The old woman downstairs didn’t want to let me come up
very much. I told her I was from your home town, and had promised your
grandmother to come and see you. How surprised Mrs. Burden would be!’
Lena laughed softly as she rose.
When I caught up my hat, she shook her head. ‘No, I don’t want you to
go with me. I’m to meet some Swedes at the drugstore. You wouldn’t care
for them. I wanted to see your room so I could write Tony all about it,
but I must tell her how I left you right here with your books. She’s
always so afraid someone will run off with you!’ Lena slipped her silk
sleeves into the jacket I held for her, smoothed it over her person,
and buttoned it slowly. I walked with her to the door. ‘Come and see me
sometimes when you’re lonesome. But maybe you have all the friends you
want. Have you?’ She turned her soft cheek to me. ‘Have you?’ she
whispered teasingly in my ear. In a moment I watched her fade down the
dusky stairway.
When I turned back to my room the place seemed much pleasanter than
before. Lena had left something warm and friendly in the lamplight. How
I loved to hear her laugh again! It was so soft and unexcited and
appreciative gave a favourable interpretation to everything. When I
closed my eyes I could hear them all laughing—the Danish laundry girls
and the three Bohemian Marys. Lena had brought them all back to me. It
came over me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls
like those and the poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like them
in the world, there would be no poetry. I understood that clearly, for
the first time. This revelation seemed to me inestimably precious. I
clung to it as if it might suddenly vanish.
As I sat down to my book at last, my old dream about Lena coming across
the harvest-field in her short skirt seemed to me like the memory of an
actual experience. It floated before me on the page like a picture, and
underneath it stood the mournful line: ‘Optima dies... prima fugit.’
III
In Lincoln the best part of the theatrical season came late, when the
good companies stopped off there for one-night stands, after their long
runs in New York and Chicago. That spring Lena went with me to see
Joseph Jefferson in ‘Rip Van Winkle,’ and to a war play called
‘Shenandoah.’ She was inflexible about paying for her own seat; said
she was in business now, and she wouldn’t have a schoolboy spending his
money on her. I liked to watch a play with Lena; everything was
wonderful to her, and everything was true. It was like going to revival
meetings with someone who was always being converted. She handed her
feelings over to the actors with a kind of fatalistic resignation.
Accessories of costume and scene meant much more to her than to me. She
sat entranced through ‘Robin Hood’ and hung upon the lips of the
contralto who sang, ‘Oh, Promise Me!’
Toward the end of April, the billboards, which I watched anxiously in
those days, bloomed out one morning with gleaming white posters on
which two names were impressively printed in blue Gothic letters: the
name of an actress of whom I had often heard, and the name ‘Camille.’
I called at the Raleigh Block for Lena on Saturday evening, and we
walked down to the theatre. The weather was warm and sultry and put us
both in a holiday humour. We arrived early, because Lena liked to watch
the people come in. There was a note on the programme, saying that the
‘incidental music’ would be from the opera ‘Traviata,’ which was made
from the same story as the play. We had neither of us read the play,
and we did not know what it was about—though I seemed to remember
having heard it was a piece in which great actresses shone. ‘The Count
of Monte Cristo,’ which I had seen James O’Neill play that winter, was
by the only Alexandre Dumas I knew. This play, I saw, was by his son,
and I expected a family resemblance. A couple of jack-rabbits, run in
off the prairie, could not have been more innocent of what awaited them
than were Lena and I.
Our excitement began with the rise of the curtain, when the moody
Varville, seated before the fire, interrogated Nanine. Decidedly, there
was a new tang about this dialogue. I had never heard in the theatre
lines that were alive, that presupposed and took for granted, like
those which passed between Varville and Marguerite in the brief
encounter before her friends entered. This introduced the most
brilliant, worldly, the most enchantingly gay scene I had ever looked
upon. I had never seen champagne bottles opened on the stage
before—indeed, I had never seen them opened anywhere. The memory of
that supper makes me hungry now; the sight of it then, when I had only
a students’ boarding-house dinner behind me, was delicate torment. I
seem to remember gilded chairs and tables (arranged hurriedly by
footmen in white gloves and stockings), linen of dazzling whiteness,
glittering glass, silver dishes, a great bowl of fruit, and the reddest
of roses. The room was invaded by beautiful women and dashing young
men, laughing and talking together. The men were dressed more or less