My Ántonia
about much else. I never shall think about much else while I’m with
you. I’ll never settle down and grind if I stay here. You know that.’
I dropped down beside her and sat looking at the floor. I seemed to
have forgotten all my reasonable explanations.
Lena drew close to me, and the little hesitation in her voice that had
hurt me was not there when she spoke again.
‘I oughtn’t to have begun it, ought I?’ she murmured. ‘I oughtn’t to
have gone to see you that first time. But I did want to. I guess I’ve
always been a little foolish about you. I don’t know what first put it
into my head, unless it was Ántonia, always telling me I mustn’t be up
to any of my nonsense with you. I let you alone for a long while,
though, didn’t I?’
She was a sweet creature to those she loved, that Lena Lingard!
At last she sent me away with her soft, slow, renunciatory kiss.
‘You aren’t sorry I came to see you that time?’ she whispered. ‘It
seemed so natural. I used to think I’d like to be your first
sweetheart. You were such a funny kid!’
She always kissed one as if she were sadly and wisely sending one away
forever.
We said many good-byes before I left Lincoln, but she never tried to
hinder me or hold me back. ‘You are going, but you haven’t gone yet,
have you?’ she used to say.
My Lincoln chapter closed abruptly. I went home to my grandparents for
a few weeks, and afterward visited my relatives in Virginia until I
joined Cleric in Boston. I was then nineteen years old.
BOOK IV. The Pioneer Woman’s Story
I
Two years after I left Lincoln, I completed my academic course at
Harvard. Before I entered the Law School I went home for the summer
vacation. On the night of my arrival, Mrs. Harling and Frances and
Sally came over to greet me. Everything seemed just as it used to be.
My grandparents looked very little older. Frances Harling was married
now, and she and her husband managed the Harling interests in Black
Hawk. When we gathered in grandmother’s parlour, I could hardly believe
that I had been away at all. One subject, however, we avoided all
evening.
When I was walking home with Frances, after we had left Mrs. Harling at
her gate, she said simply, ‘You know, of course, about poor Ántonia.’
Poor Ántonia! Everyone would be saying that now, I thought bitterly. I
replied that grandmother had written me how Ántonia went away to marry
Larry Donovan at some place where he was working; that he had deserted
her, and that there was now a baby. This was all I knew.
‘He never married her,’ Frances said. ‘I haven’t seen her since she
came back. She lives at home, on the farm, and almost never comes to
town. She brought the baby in to show it to mama once. I’m afraid she’s
settled down to be Ambrosch’s drudge for good.’
I tried to shut Ántonia out of my mind. I was bitterly disappointed in
her. I could not forgive her for becoming an object of pity, while Lena
Lingard, for whom people had always foretold trouble, was now the
leading dressmaker of Lincoln, much respected in Black Hawk. Lena gave
her heart away when she felt like it, but she kept her head for her
business and had got on in the world.
Just then it was the fashion to speak indulgently of Lena and severely
of Tiny Soderball, who had quietly gone West to try her fortune the
year before. A Black Hawk boy, just back from Seattle, brought the news
that Tiny had not gone to the coast on a venture, as she had allowed
people to think, but with very definite plans. One of the roving
promoters that used to stop at Mrs. Gardener’s hotel owned idle
property along the waterfront in Seattle, and he had offered to set
Tiny up in business in one of his empty buildings. She was now
conducting a sailors’ lodging-house. This, everyone said, would be the
end of Tiny. Even if she had begun by running a decent place, she
couldn’t keep it up; all sailors’ boarding-houses were alike.
When I thought about it, I discovered that I had never known Tiny as
well as I knew the other girls. I remembered her tripping briskly about
the dining-room on her high heels, carrying a big trayful of dishes,
glancing rather pertly at the spruce travelling men, and contemptuously
at the scrubby ones—who were so afraid of her that they didn’t dare to
ask for two kinds of pie. Now it occurred to me that perhaps the
sailors, too, might be afraid of Tiny. How astonished we should have
been, as we sat talking about her on Frances Harling’s front porch, if
we could have known what her future was really to be! Of all the girls
and boys who grew up together in Black Hawk, Tiny Soderball was to lead
the most adventurous life and to achieve the most solid worldly
success.
This is what actually happened to Tiny: While she was running her
lodging-house in Seattle, gold was discovered in Alaska. Miners and
sailors came back from the North with wonderful stories and pouches of
gold. Tiny saw it and weighed it in her hands. That daring, which
nobody had ever suspected in her, awoke. She sold her business and set
out for Circle City, in company with a carpenter and his wife whom she
had persuaded to go along with her. They reached Skaguay in a
snowstorm, went in dog-sledges over the Chilkoot Pass, and shot the
Yukon in flatboats. They reached Circle City on the very day when some
Siwash Indians came into the settlement with the report that there had
been a rich gold strike farther up the river, on a certain Klondike
Creek. Two days later Tiny and her friends, and nearly everyone else in
Circle City, started for the Klondike fields on the last steamer that
went up the Yukon before it froze for the winter. That boatload of
people founded Dawson City. Within a few weeks there were fifteen
hundred homeless men in camp. Tiny and the carpenter’s wife began to
cook for them, in a tent. The miners gave her a building lot, and the
carpenter put up a log hotel for her. There she sometimes fed a hundred
and fifty men a day. Miners came in on snowshoes from their placer
claims twenty miles away to buy fresh bread from her, and paid for it
in gold.
That winter Tiny kept in her hotel a Swede whose legs had been frozen
one night in a storm when he was trying to find his way back to his
cabin. The poor fellow thought it great good fortune to be cared for by
a woman, and a woman who spoke his own tongue. When he was told that
his feet must be amputated, he said he hoped he would not get well;
what could a working-man do in this hard world without feet? He did, in
fact, die from the operation, but not before he had deeded Tiny
Soderball his claim on Hunker Creek. Tiny sold her hotel, invested half
her money in Dawson building lots, and with the rest she developed her
claim. She went off into the wilds and lived on the claim. She bought
other claims from discouraged miners, traded or sold them on
percentages.
After nearly ten years in the Klondike, Tiny returned, with a
considerable fortune, to live in San Francisco. I met her in Salt Lake
City in 1908. She was a thin, hard-faced woman, very well-dressed, very
reserved in manner. Curiously enough, she reminded me of Mrs. Gardener,
for whom she had worked in Black Hawk so long ago. She told me about
some of the desperate chances she had taken in the gold country, but
the thrill of them was quite gone. She said frankly that nothing
interested her much now but making money. The only two human beings of
whom she spoke with any feeling were the Swede, Johnson, who had given
her his claim, and Lena Lingard. She had persuaded Lena to come to San
Francisco and go into business there.
‘Lincoln was never any place for her,’ Tiny remarked. ‘In a town of
that size Lena would always be gossiped about. Frisco’s the right field
for her. She has a fine class of trade. Oh, she’s just the same as she
always was! She’s careless, but she’s level-headed. She’s the only
person I know who never gets any older. It’s fine for me to have her
there; somebody who enjoys things like that. She keeps an eye on me and
won’t let me be shabby. When she thinks I need a new dress, she makes
it and sends it home with a bill that’s long enough, I can tell you!’
Tiny limped slightly when she walked. The claim on Hunker Creek took
toll from its possessors. Tiny had been caught in a sudden turn of
weather, like poor Johnson. She lost three toes from one of those
pretty little feet that used to trip about Black Hawk in pointed
slippers and striped stockings. Tiny mentioned this mutilation quite
casually—didn’t seem sensitive about it. She was satisfied with her
success, but not elated. She was like someone in whom the faculty of
becoming interested is worn out.
II
Soon after I got home that summer, I persuaded my grandparents to have
their photographs taken, and one morning I went into the photographer’s
shop to arrange for sittings. While I was waiting for him to come out
of his developing-room, I walked about trying to recognize the
likenesses on his walls: girls in Commencement dresses, country brides
and grooms holding hands, family groups of three generations. I
noticed, in a heavy frame, one of those depressing ‘crayon
enlargements’ often seen in farm-house parlours, the subject being a
round-eyed baby in short dresses. The photographer came out and gave a
constrained, apologetic laugh.
‘That’s Tony Shimerda’s baby. You remember her; she used to be the
Harlings’ Tony. Too bad! She seems proud of the baby, though; wouldn’t
hear to a cheap frame for the picture. I expect her brother will be in
for it Saturday.’
I went away feeling that I must see Ántonia again. Another girl would
have kept her baby out of sight, but Tony, of course, must have its
picture on exhibition at the town photographer’s, in a great gilt
frame. How like her! I could forgive her, I told myself, if she hadn’t
thrown herself away on such a cheap sort of fellow.
Larry Donovan was a passenger conductor, one of those train-crew
aristocrats who are always afraid that someone may ask them to put up a
car-window, and who, if requested to perform such a menial service,
silently point to the button that calls the porter. Larry wore this air
of official aloofness even on the street, where there were no
car-windows to compromise his dignity. At the end of his run he stepped
indifferently from the train along with the passengers, his street hat
on his head and his conductor’s cap in an alligator-skin bag, went
directly into the station and changed his clothes. It was a matter of
the utmost importance to him never to be seen in his blue trousers away
from his train. He was usually cold and distant with men, but with all
women he had a silent, grave familiarity, a special handshake,
accompanied by a significant, deliberate look. He took women, married
or single, into his confidence; walked them up and down in the
moonlight, telling them what a mistake he had made by not entering the
office branch of the service, and how much better fitted he was to fill
the post of General Passenger Agent in Denver than the rough-shod man
who then bore that title. His unappreciated worth was the tender secret
Larry shared with his sweethearts, and he was always able to make some
foolish heart ache over it.
As I drew near home that morning, I saw Mrs. Harling out in her yard,
digging round her mountain-ash tree. It was a dry summer, and she had
now no boy to help her. Charley was off in his battleship, cruising
somewhere on the Caribbean sea. I turned in at the gate it was with a
feeling of pleasure that I opened and shut that gate in those days; I
liked the feel of it under my hand. I took the spade away from Mrs.
Harling, and while I loosened the earth around the tree, she sat down
on the steps and talked about the oriole family that had a nest in its
branches.