My Ántonia
the next he hadn’t a cent left, and his watch and compass were gone.
He’d got with some women, and they’d taken everything. He worked his
way to this country on a little passenger boat. Mary was a stewardess,
and she tried to convert him on the way over. He thought she was just
the one to keep him steady. Poor Ole! He used to bring me candy from
town, hidden in his feed-bag. He couldn’t refuse anything to a girl.
He’d have given away his tattoos long ago, if he could. He’s one of the
people I’m sorriest for.’
If I happened to spend an evening with Lena and stayed late, the Polish
violin-teacher across the hall used to come out and watch me descend
the stairs, muttering so threateningly that it would have been easy to
fall into a quarrel with him. Lena had told him once that she liked to
hear him practise, so he always left his door open, and watched who
came and went.
There was a coolness between the Pole and Lena’s landlord on her
account. Old Colonel Raleigh had come to Lincoln from Kentucky and
invested an inherited fortune in real estate, at the time of inflated
prices. Now he sat day after day in his office in the Raleigh Block,
trying to discover where his money had gone and how he could get some
of it back. He was a widower, and found very little congenial
companionship in this casual Western city. Lena’s good looks and gentle
manners appealed to him. He said her voice reminded him of Southern
voices, and he found as many opportunities of hearing it as possible.
He painted and papered her rooms for her that spring, and put in a
porcelain bathtub in place of the tin one that had satisfied the former
tenant. While these repairs were being made, the old gentleman often
dropped in to consult Lena’s preferences. She told me with amusement
how Ordinsky, the Pole, had presented himself at her door one evening,
and said that if the landlord was annoying her by his attentions, he
would promptly put a stop to it.
‘I don’t exactly know what to do about him,’ she said, shaking her
head, ‘he’s so sort of wild all the time. I wouldn’t like to have him
say anything rough to that nice old man. The colonel is long-winded,
but then I expect he’s lonesome. I don’t think he cares much for
Ordinsky, either. He said once that if I had any complaints to make of
my neighbours, I mustn’t hesitate.’
One Saturday evening when I was having supper with Lena, we heard a
knock at her parlour door, and there stood the Pole, coatless, in a
dress shirt and collar. Prince dropped on his paws and began to growl
like a mastiff, while the visitor apologized, saying that he could not
possibly come in thus attired, but he begged Lena to lend him some
safety pins.
‘Oh, you’ll have to come in, Mr. Ordinsky, and let me see what’s the
matter.’ She closed the door behind him. ‘Jim, won’t you make Prince
behave?’
I rapped Prince on the nose, while Ordinsky explained that he had not
had his dress clothes on for a long time, and tonight, when he was
going to play for a concert, his waistcoat had split down the back. He
thought he could pin it together until he got it to a tailor.
Lena took him by the elbow and turned him round. She laughed when she
saw the long gap in the satin. ‘You could never pin that, Mr. Ordinsky.
You’ve kept it folded too long, and the goods is all gone along the
crease. Take it off. I can put a new piece of lining-silk in there for
you in ten minutes.’ She disappeared into her work-room with the vest,
leaving me to confront the Pole, who stood against the door like a
wooden figure. He folded his arms and glared at me with his excitable,
slanting brown eyes. His head was the shape of a chocolate drop, and
was covered with dry, straw-coloured hair that fuzzed up about his
pointed crown. He had never done more than mutter at me as I passed
him, and I was surprised when he now addressed me. ‘Miss Lingard,’ he
said haughtily, ‘is a young woman for whom I have the utmost, the
utmost respect.’
‘So have I,’ I said coldly.
He paid no heed to my remark, but began to do rapid finger-exercises on
his shirt-sleeves, as he stood with tightly folded arms.
‘Kindness of heart,’ he went on, staring at the ceiling, ‘sentiment,
are not understood in a place like this. The noblest qualities are
ridiculed. Grinning college boys, ignorant and conceited, what do they
know of delicacy!’
I controlled my features and tried to speak seriously.
‘If you mean me, Mr. Ordinsky, I have known Miss Lingard a long time,
and I think I appreciate her kindness. We come from the same town, and
we grew up together.’
His gaze travelled slowly down from the ceiling and rested on me. ‘Am I
to understand that you have this young woman’s interests at heart? That
you do not wish to compromise her?’
‘That’s a word we don’t use much here, Mr. Ordinsky. A girl who makes
her own living can ask a college boy to supper without being talked
about. We take some things for granted.’
‘Then I have misjudged you, and I ask your pardon’—he bowed gravely.
‘Miss Lingard,’ he went on, ‘is an absolutely trustful heart. She has
not learned the hard lessons of life. As for you and me, noblesse
oblige’—he watched me narrowly.
Lena returned with the vest. ‘Come in and let us look at you as you go
out, Mr. Ordinsky. I’ve never seen you in your dress suit,’ she said as
she opened the door for him.
A few moments later he reappeared with his violin-case a heavy muffler
about his neck and thick woollen gloves on his bony hands. Lena spoke
encouragingly to him, and he went off with such an important
professional air that we fell to laughing as soon as we had shut the
door. ‘Poor fellow,’ Lena said indulgently, ‘he takes everything so
hard.’
After that Ordinsky was friendly to me, and behaved as if there were
some deep understanding between us. He wrote a furious article,
attacking the musical taste of the town, and asked me to do him a great
service by taking it to the editor of the morning paper. If the editor
refused to print it, I was to tell him that he would be answerable to
Ordinsky ‘in person.’ He declared that he would never retract one word,
and that he was quite prepared to lose all his pupils. In spite of the
fact that nobody ever mentioned his article to him after it
appeared—full of typographical errors which he thought intentional—he
got a certain satisfaction from believing that the citizens of Lincoln
had meekly accepted the epithet ‘coarse barbarians.’ ‘You see how it
is,’ he said to me, ‘where there is no chivalry, there is no
amour-propre.’ When I met him on his rounds now, I thought he carried
his head more disdainfully than ever, and strode up the steps of front
porches and rang doorbells with more assurance. He told Lena he would
never forget how I had stood by him when he was ‘under fire.’
All this time, of course, I was drifting. Lena had broken up my serious
mood. I wasn’t interested in my classes. I played with Lena and Prince,
I played with the Pole, I went buggy-riding with the old colonel, who
had taken a fancy to me and used to talk to me about Lena and the
‘great beauties’ he had known in his youth. We were all three in love
with Lena.
Before the first of June, Gaston Cleric was offered an instructorship
at Harvard College, and accepted it. He suggested that I should follow
him in the fall, and complete my course at Harvard. He had found out
about Lena—not from me—and he talked to me seriously.
‘You won’t do anything here now. You should either quit school and go
to work, or change your college and begin again in earnest. You won’t
recover yourself while you are playing about with this handsome
Norwegian. Yes, I’ve seen her with you at the theatre. She’s very
pretty, and perfectly irresponsible, I should judge.’
Cleric wrote my grandfather that he would like to take me East with
him. To my astonishment, grandfather replied that I might go if I
wished. I was both glad and sorry on the day when the letter came. I
stayed in my room all evening and thought things over. I even tried to
persuade myself that I was standing in Lena’s way—it is so necessary to
be a little noble!—and that if she had not me to play with, she would
probably marry and secure her future.
The next evening I went to call on Lena. I found her propped up on the
couch in her bay-window, with her foot in a big slipper. An awkward
little Russian girl whom she had taken into her work-room had dropped a
flat-iron on Lena’s toe. On the table beside her there was a basket of
early summer flowers which the Pole had left after he heard of the
accident. He always managed to know what went on in Lena’s apartment.
Lena was telling me some amusing piece of gossip about one of her
clients, when I interrupted her and picked up the flower basket.
‘This old chap will be proposing to you some day, Lena.’
‘Oh, he has—often!’ she murmured.
‘What! After you’ve refused him?’
‘He doesn’t mind that. It seems to cheer him to mention the subject.
Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think
they’re in love with somebody.’
‘The colonel would marry you in a minute. I hope you won’t marry some
old fellow; not even a rich one.’ Lena shifted her pillows and looked
up at me in surprise.
‘Why, I’m not going to marry anybody. Didn’t you know that?’
‘Nonsense, Lena. That’s what girls say, but you know better. Every
handsome girl like you marries, of course.’
She shook her head. ‘Not me.’
‘But why not? What makes you say that?’ I persisted.
Lena laughed.
‘Well, it’s mainly because I don’t want a husband. Men are all right
for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old
fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what’s sensible and
what’s foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to
be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.’
‘But you’ll be lonesome. You’ll get tired of this sort of life, and
you’ll want a family.’
‘Not me. I like to be lonesome. When I went to work for Mrs. Thomas I
was nineteen years old, and I had never slept a night in my life when
there weren’t three in the bed. I never had a minute to myself except
when I was off with the cattle.’
Usually, when Lena referred to her life in the country at all, she
dismissed it with a single remark, humorous or mildly cynical. But
tonight her mind seemed to dwell on those early years. She told me she
couldn’t remember a time when she was so little that she wasn’t lugging
a heavy baby about, helping to wash for babies, trying to keep their
little chapped hands and faces clean. She remembered home as a place
where there were always too many children, a cross man and work piling
up around a sick woman.
‘It wasn’t mother’s fault. She would have made us comfortable if she
could. But that was no life for a girl! After I began to herd and milk,
I could never get the smell of the cattle off me. The few underclothes
I had I kept in a cracker-box. On Saturday nights, after everybody was
in bed, then I could take a bath if I wasn’t too tired. I could make
two trips to the windmill to carry water, and heat it in the
wash-boiler on the stove. While the water was heating, I could bring in
a washtub out of the cave, and take my bath in the kitchen. Then I
could put on a clean night-gown and get into bed with two others, who
likely hadn’t had a bath unless I’d given it to them. You can’t tell me
anything about family life. I’ve had plenty to last me.’
‘But it’s not all like that,’ I objected.
‘Near enough. It’s all being under somebody’s thumb. What’s on your
mind, Jim? Are you afraid I’ll want you to marry me some day?’
Then I told her I was going away.
‘What makes you want to go away, Jim? Haven’t I been nice to you?’
‘You’ve been just awfully good to me, Lena,’ I blurted. ‘I don’t think