Research paper on My Antonia by Willa Cather

Research paper on My Antonia by Willa Cather

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Book: My Ántonia
Author: Willa Sibert Cather, 1873–1947
Artist: Wladyslaw Theodor (W. T.) Benda, 1873–1948
First published: 1918
The text and illustrations of the original book are in
the public domain in the United States. However, since
Cather died in 1947 and Benda in 1948, they may still be
under copyright in many other countries, for example,
those that use the life of the author + 60 years or life + 70
years for the duration of copyright. Readers outside the
United States should check their own countries’ copyright
laws to be certain they can legally download this ebook.
The Online Books Page has an FAQ which gives a
summary of copyright durations for many other countries,
as well as links to more official sources.
This PDF ebook was
created by José Menéndez.
NOTE ON THE TEXT
The text and illustrations used in this ebook are from
the 1918 first edition. (Thanks to Jon Noring for making
his page scans available online.) A number of typographical
errors in the original book have been corrected, but to
preserve all of the first edition, the original misprints are
included in footnotes. The line breaks and pagination of
the original book have also been reproduced.
In addition, a few endnotes (signed “J.M.”) have
been added to point out some non-typographical mistakes
in the text.
MY ÁNTONIA
BY
WILLA SIBERT CATHER
Optima dies . . . prima fugit
VIRGIL
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
W. T. BENDA
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY WILLA SIBERT CATHER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published October 1918
TO
CARRIE AND IRENE MINER
In memory of affections old and true

CONTENTS
BOOK I
THE SHIMERDAS . . . . . . . . 3
BOOK II
THE HIRED GIRLS . . . . . . . . 163
BOOK III
LENA LINGARD . . . . . . . . 291
BOOK IV
THE PIONEER WOMAN’S STORY . . . . 335
BOOK V
CUZAK’S BOYS . . . . . . . . 369

INTRODUCTION
LAST summer I happened to be crossing the
plains of Iowa in a season of intense heat, and it
was my good fortune to have for a traveling
companion James Quayle Burden — Jim Burden,
as we still call him in the West. He and I are
old friends — we grew up together in the same
Nebraska town — and we had much to say to
each other. While the train flashed through
never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country
towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak
groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation
car, where the woodwork was hot to the
touch and red dust lay deep over everything.
The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded
us of many things. We were talking about what
it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns
like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating
extremes of climate: burning summers
when the world lies green and billowy beneath
a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation,
in the color and smell of strong weeds
and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little
snow, when the whole country is stripped bare
and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one
who had not grown up in a little prairie town
ix
MY ANTONIA
could know anything about it. It was a kind of
freemasonry, we said.
Although Jim Burden and I both live in New
York, and are old friends, I do not see much of
him there. He is legal counsel for one of the
great Western railways, and is sometimes away
from his New York office for weeks together.
That is one reason why we do not often meet.
Another is that I do not like his wife.
When Jim was still an obscure young lawyer,
struggling to make his way in New York, his
career was suddenly advanced by a brilliant
marriage. Genevieve Whitney was the only
daughter of a distinguished man. Her marriage
with young Burden was the subject of sharp
comment at the time. It was said she had been
brutally jilted by her cousin, Rutland Whitney,
and that she married this unknown man from
the West out of bravado. She was a restless,
headstrong girl, even then, who liked to astonish
her friends. Later, when I knew her, she was
always doing something unexpected. She gave
one of her town houses for a Suffrage headquarters,
produced one of her own plays at the
Princess Theater, was arrested for picketing
during a garment-makers’ strike, etc. I am
never able to believe that she has much feeling
for the causes to which she lends her name and
her fleeting interest. She is handsome, energetic,
x
MY ANTONIA
executive, but to me she seems unimpressionable
and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm.
Her husband’s quiet tastes irritate her, I think,
and she finds it worth while to play the patroness
to a group of young poets and painters of advanced
ideas and mediocre ability. She has
her own fortune and lives her own life. For some
reason, she wishes to remain Mrs. James Burden.
As for Jim, no disappointments have been
severe enough to chill his naturally romantic
and ardent disposition. This disposition, though
it often made him seem very funny when he was
a boy, has been one of the strongest elements in
his success. He loves with a personal passion
the great country through which his railway
runs and branches. His faith in it and his knowledge
of it have played an important part in its
development. He is always able to raise capital
for new enterprises in Wyoming or Montana,
and has helped young men out there to
do remarkable things in mines and timber and
oil. If a young man with an idea can once get
Jim Burden’s attention, can manage to accompany
him when he goes off into the wilds hunting
for lost parks or exploring new canyons, then
the money which means action is usually forthcoming.
Jim is still able to lose himself in those
big Western dreams. Though he is over forty
now, he meets new people and new enterprises
xi
MY ANTONIA
with the impulsiveness by which his boyhood
friends remember him. He never seems to me
to grow older. His fresh color and sandy hair
and quick-changing blue eyes are those of a
young man, and his sympathetic, solicitous interest
in women is as youthful as it is Western
and American.
During that burning day when we were crossing
Iowa, our talk kept returning to a central
figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had known long
ago and whom both of us admired. More than
any other person we remembered, this girl seemed
to mean to us the country, the conditions, the
whole adventure of our childhood. To speak her
name was to call up pictures of people and
places, to set a quiet drama going in one’s brain.
I had lost sight of her altogether, but Jim had
found her again after long years, had renewed a
friendship that meant a great deal to him, and
out of his busy life had set apart time enough to
enjoy that friendship. His mind was full of her
that day. He made me see her again, feel her
presence, revived all my old affection for her.
“I can’t see,” he said impetuously, “why you
have never written anything about Ántonia.”
I told him I had always felt that other people
— he himself, for one — knew her much better
than I. I was ready, however, to make an agreement
with him; I would set down on paper all
xii
MY ANTONIA
that I remembered of Ántonia if he would do
the same. We might, in this way, get a picture
of her.
He rumpled his hair with a quick, excited
gesture, which with him often announces a new
determination, and I could see that my suggestion
took hold of him. “Maybe I will, maybe I
will!” he declared. He stared out of the window
for a few moments, and when he turned to me
again his eyes had the sudden clearness that
comes from something the mind itself sees. “Of
course,” he said, “I should have to do it in a
direct way, and say a great deal about myself.
It’s through myself that I knew and felt her,
and I’ve had no practice in any other form of
presentation.”
I told him that how he knew her and felt her
was exactly what I most wanted to know about
Ántonia. He had had opportunities that I, as a
little girl who watched her come and go, had not.
Months afterward Jim Burden arrived at my
apartment one stormy winter afternoon, with a
bulging legal portfolio sheltered under his fur
overcoat. He brought it into the sitting-room
with him and tapped it with some pride as he
stood warming his hands.
“I finished it last night — the thing about
Ántonia,” he said. “Now, what about yours?”
xiii
MY ANTONIA
I had to confess that mine had not gone beyond
a few straggling notes.
“Notes? I did n’t make any.” He drank his
tea all at once and put down the cup. “I did n’t
arrange or rearrange. I simply wrote down
what of herself and myself and other people
Ántonia’s name recalls to me. I suppose it has n’t
any form. It has n’t any title, either.” He went
into the next room, sat down at my desk and
wrote on the pinkish face of the portfolio the
word, “Ántonia.” He frowned at this a moment,
then prefixed another word, making it “My
Ántonia.” That seemed to satisfy him.
“Read it as soon as you can,” he said, rising,
“but don’t let it influence your own story.”
My own story was never written, but the following
narrative is Jim’s manuscript, substantially
as he brought it to me.

MY ÁNTONIA
BOOK I
THE SHIMERDAS
I
I FIRST heard of Ántonia
1
on what seemed
to me an interminable journey across the
great midland plain of North America. I was
ten years old then; I had lost both my father
and mother within a year, and my Virginia
relatives were sending me out to my grandparents,
who lived in Nebraska. I traveled
in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole,
one of the “hands” on my father’s old farm
under the Blue Ridge, who was now going
West to work for my grandfather. Jake’s experience
of the world was not much wider than
mine. He had never been in a railway train
until the morning when we set out together
to try our fortunes in a new world.
¹ The Bohemian name Ántonia is strongly accented on
the first syllable, like the English name Anthony, and the
i is, of course, given the sound of long e. The name is
pronounced An´-ton-ee-ah.
3
MY ANTONIA
We went all the way in day-coaches, becoming
more sticky and grimy with each stage
of the journey. Jake bought everything the
newsboys offered him: candy, oranges, brass
collar buttons, a watch-charm, and for me a
“Life of Jesse James,” which I remember as
one of the most satisfactory books I have
ever read. Beyond Chicago we were under the
protection of a friendly passenger conductor,
who knew all about the country to which
we were going and gave us a great deal of
advice in exchange for our confidence. He
seemed to us an experienced and worldly man
who had been almost everywhere; in his conversation
he threw out lightly the names of distant
States and cities. He wore the rings and
pins and badges of different fraternal orders
to which he belonged. Even his cuff-buttons
were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he was
more inscribed than an Egyptian obelisk.
Once when he sat down to chat, he told us
that in the immigrant car ahead there was a
family from “across the water” whose destination
was the same as ours.
“They can’t any of them speak English,
except one little girl, and all she can say is
‘We go Black Hawk, Nebraska.’ She’s
a
not
4

a
She ’s
THE SHIMERDAS
much older than you, twelve or thirteen,
maybe, and she’s
a
as bright as a new dollar.
Don’t you want to go ahead and see her,
Jimmy? She’s
b
got the pretty brown eyes,
too!”
This last remark made me bashful, and I
shook my head and settled down to “Jesse
James.” Jake nodded at me approvingly and
said you were likely to get diseases from foreigners.

I do not remember crossing the Missouri
River, or anything about the long day’s journey
through Nebraska. Probably by that
time I had crossed so many rivers that I
was dull to them. The only thing very noticeable
about Nebraska was that it was still,
all day long, Nebraska.
I had been sleeping, curled up in a red plush
seat, for a long while when we reached Black
Hawk. Jake roused me and took me by the
hand. We stumbled down from the train to
a wooden siding, where men were running
about with lanterns. I could n’t see any town,
or even distant lights; we were surrounded
by utter darkness. The engine was panting
heavily after its long run. In the red glow
from the fire-box, a group of people stood hud5

a
she ’s b
She ’s
MY ANTONIA
dled together on the platform, encumbered by
bundles and boxes. I knew this must be the
immigrant family the conductor had told us
about. The woman wore a fringed shawl tied
over her head, and she carried a little tin
trunk in her arms, hugging it as if it were a
baby. There was an old man, tall and stooped.
Two half-grown boys and a girl stood holding
oilcloth
a
bundles, and a little girl clung to
her mother’s skirts. Presently a man with a
lantern approached them and began to talk,
shouting and exclaiming. I pricked up my
ears, for it was positively the first time I had
ever heard a foreign tongue.
Another lantern came along. A bantering
voice called out: “Hello, are you Mr. Burden’s
folks? If you are, it’s
b me you’re
c
looking
for. I’m
d Otto Fuchs. I’m
e Mr. Burden’s
hired man, and I’m
f
to drive you out. Hello,
Jimmy, ain’t you scared to come so far west?”
I looked up with interest at the new face
in the lantern light. He might have stepped
out of the pages of “Jesse James.” He wore
a sombrero hat, with a wide leather band and
a bright buckle, and the ends of his mustache
were twisted up stiffly, like little horns. He
looked lively and ferocious, I thought, and
6

a
oil-cloth b
it ’s c
you ’re d
I ’m e
I ’m f
I ’m

THE SHIMERDAS
as if he had a history. A long scar ran across
one cheek and drew the corner of his mouth
up in a sinister curl. The top of his left ear
was gone, and his skin was brown as an Indian’s.
Surely this was the face of a desperado.
As he walked about the platform in his
high-heeled boots, looking for our trunks, I
saw that he was a rather slight man, quick
and wiry, and light on his feet. He told us
we had a long night drive ahead of us, and
had better be on the hike. He led us to a
hitching-bar where two farm wagons were
tied, and I saw the foreign family crowding
into one of them. The other was for us. Jake
got on the front seat with Otto Fuchs, and I
rode on the straw in the bottom of the wagonbox,
covered up with a buffalo hide. The immigrants
rumbled off into the empty darkness,
and we followed them.
I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made
me bite my tongue, and I soon began to ache
all over. When the straw settled down I had
a hard bed. Cautiously I slipped from under
the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and
peered over the side of the wagon. There
seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no
creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was
7
MY ANTONIA
a road, I could not make it out in the faint
starlight. There was nothing but land: not a
country at all, but the material out of which
countries are made. No, there was nothing
but land — slightly undulating, I knew, because
often our wheels ground against the
brake as we went down into a hollow and
lurched up again on the other side. I had the
feeling that the world was left behind, that
we had got over the edge of it, and were outside
man’s jurisdiction. I had never before
looked up at the sky when there was not a
familiar mountain ridge against it. But this
was the complete dome of heaven, all there
was of it. I did not believe that my dead
father and mother were watching me from
up there; they would still be looking for me
at the sheep-fold down by the creek, or along
the white road that led to the mountain pastures.
I had left even their spirits behind
me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I
knew not whither. I don’t think I was homesick.
If we never arrived anywhere, it did not
matter. Between that earth and that sky I
felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my
prayers that night: here, I felt, what would
be would be.
II
I DO not remember our arrival at my grandfather’s
farm sometime before daybreak, after
a drive of nearly twenty miles with heavy
work-horses. When I awoke, it was afternoon.
I was lying in a little room, scarcely
larger than the bed that held me, and the
window-shade at my head was flapping softly
in a warm wind. A tall woman, with wrinkled
brown skin and black hair, stood looking down
at me; I knew that she must be my grandmother.
She had been crying, I could see, but
when I opened my eyes she smiled, peered at me
anxiously, and sat down on the foot of my bed.
“Had a good sleep, Jimmy?” she asked
briskly. Then in a very different tone she said,
as if to herself, “My, how you do look like
your father!” I remembered that my father
had been her little boy; she must often have
come to wake him like this when he overslept.
“Here are your clean clothes,” she went on,
stroking my coverlid with her brown hand as
she talked. “But first you come down to the
kitchen with me, and have a nice warm bath
9
MY ANTONIA
behind the stove. Bring your things; there’s
a
nobody about.”
“Down to the kitchen” struck me as curious;
it was always “out in the kitchen” at
home. I picked up my shoes and stockings
and followed her through the living-room and
down a flight of stairs into a basement. This
basement was divided into a dining-room at
the right of the stairs and a kitchen at the left.
Both rooms were plastered and whitewashed
— the plaster laid directly upon the earth
walls, as it used to be in dugouts. The floor
was of hard cement. Up under the wooden
ceiling there were little half-windows with
white curtains, and pots of geraniums and
wandering Jew in the deep sills. As I entered
the kitchen I sniffed a pleasant smell of gingerbread
baking. The stove was very large,
with bright nickel trimmings, and behind it
there was a long wooden bench against the
wall, and a tin washtub, into which grandmother
poured hot and cold water. When she
brought the soap and towels, I told her that
I was used to taking my bath without help.
“Can you do your ears, Jimmy? Are you
sure? Well, now, I call you a right smart little
boy.”
10

a
there ’s
THE SHIMERDAS
It was pleasant there in the kitchen. The
sun shone into my bath-water through the
west half-window, and a big Maltese cat came
up and rubbed himself against the tub, watching
me curiously. While I scrubbed, my grandmother
busied herself in the dining-room until
I called anxiously, “Grandmother, I’m afraid
the cakes are burning!” Then she came laughing,
waving her apron before her as if she were
shooing chickens.
She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped,
and she was apt to carry her head thrust forward
in an attitude of attention, as if she were
looking at something, or listening to something,
far away. As I grew older, I came to
believe that it was only because she was so
often thinking of things that were far away.
She was quick-footed and energetic in all her
movements. Her voice was high and rather
shrill, and she often spoke with an anxious inflection,
for she was exceedingly desirous that
everything should go with due order and decorum.
Her laugh, too, was high, and perhaps
a little strident, but there was a lively intelligence
in it. She was then fifty-five years old,
a strong woman, of unusual endurance.
After I was dressed I explored the long cellar
11
MY ANTONIA
next the kitchen. It was dug out under the
wing of the house, was plastered and cemented,
with a stairway and an outside door
by which the men came and went. Under one
of the windows there was a place for them to
wash when they came in from work.
While my grandmother was busy about
supper I settled myself on the wooden bench
behind the stove and got acquainted with the
cat — he caught not only rats and mice, but
gophers, I was told. The patch of yellow sunlight
on the floor traveled back toward the
stairway, and grandmother and I talked about
my journey, and about the arrival of the new
Bohemian family; she said they were to be
our nearest neighbors. We did not talk about
the farm in Virginia, which had been her home
for so many years. But after the men came
in from the fields, and we were all seated at
the supper-table, then she asked Jake about
the old place and about our friends and neighbors
there.
My grandfather said little. When he first
came in he kissed me and spoke kindly to me,
but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once
his deliberateness and personal dignity, and
was a little in awe of him. The thing one im12
THE SHIMERDAS
mediately noticed about him was his beautiful,
crinkly, snow-white beard. I once heard a
missionary say it was like the beard of an
Arabian sheik. His bald crown only made it
more impressive.
Grandfather’s eyes were not at all like those
of an old man; they were bright blue, and
had a fresh, frosty sparkle. His teeth were
white and regular — so sound that he had
never been to a dentist in his life. He had
a delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and
wind. When he was a young man his hair
and beard were red; his eyebrows were still
coppery.
As we sat at the table Otto Fuchs and I kept
stealing covert glances at each other. Grandmother
had told me while she was getting supper
that he was an Austrian who came to this
country a young boy and had led an adventurous
life in the Far West among miningcamps
and cow outfits. His iron constitution
was somewhat broken by mountain pneumonia,
and he had drifted back to live in a
milder country for a while. He had relatives
in Bismarck, a German settlement to the
north of us, but for a year now he had been
working for grandfather.
13
MY ANTONIA
The minute supper was over, Otto took me
into the kitchen to whisper to me about a
pony down in the barn that had been bought
for me at a sale; he had been riding him to find
out whether he had any bad tricks, but he was
a “perfect gentleman,” and his name was
Dude. Fuchs told me everything I wanted
to know: how he had lost his ear in a Wyoming
blizzard when he was a stage-driver, and how
to throw a lasso. He promised to rope a steer
for me before sundown next day. He got out
his “chaps” and silver spurs to show them to
Jake and me, and his best cowboy boots, with
tops stitched in bold design — roses, and truelover’s
knots, and undraped female figures.
These, he solemnly explained, were angels.
Before we went to bed Jake and Otto were
called up to the living-room for prayers.
Grandfather put on silver-rimmed spectacles
and read several Psalms. His voice was so
sympathetic and he read so interestingly that
I wished he had chosen one of my favorite
chapters in the Book of Kings. I was awed
by his intonation of the word “Selah.” “He
shall choose our inheritance for us, the excellency
of Jacob whom He loved. Selah.” I had no idea
what the word meant; perhaps he had not.
14
THE SHIMERDAS
But, as he uttered it, it became oracular, the
most sacred of words.
Early the next morning I ran out of doors
to look about me. I had been told that ours
was the only wooden house west of Black
Hawk — until you came to the Norwegian
settlement, where there were several. Our
neighbors lived in sod houses and dugouts —
comfortable, but not very roomy. Our white
frame house, with a story and half-story above
the basement, stood at the east end of what I
might call the farmyard, with the windmill
close by the kitchen door. From the windmill
the ground sloped westward, down to the
barns and granaries and pig-yards. This slope
was trampled hard and bare, and washed out
in winding gullies by the rain. Beyond the
corncribs, at the bottom of the shallow draw,
was a muddy little pond, with rusty willow
bushes growing about it. The road from the
post-office came directly by our door, crossed
the farmyard, and curved round this little
pond, beyond which it began to climb the
gentle swell of unbroken prairie to the west.
There, along the western sky-line, it skirted a
great cornfield, much larger than any field I
had ever seen. This cornfield, and the sor15
MY ANTONIA
ghum patch behind the barn, were the only
broken land in sight. Everywhere, as far as
the eye could reach, there was nothing but
rough, shaggy, red grass, most of it as tall as I.
North of the house, inside the ploughed firebreaks,
grew a thick-set strip of box-elder
trees, low and bushy, their leaves already
turning yellow. This hedge was nearly a
quarter of a mile long, but I had to look very
hard to see it at all. The little trees were insignificant
against the grass. It seemed as if
the grass were about to run over them, and
over the plum-patch behind the sod chickenhouse.

As I looked about me I felt that the grass
was the country, as the water is the sea. The
red of the grass made all the great prairie the
color of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds
when they are first washed up. And there was
so much motion in it; the whole country
seemed, somehow, to be running.
I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother,
when she came out, her sunbonnet on
her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked
me if I did not want to go to the garden with
her to dig potatoes for dinner. The garden,
curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from
16
THE SHIMERDAS
the house, and the way to it led up a shallow
draw past the cattle corral. Grandmother
called my attention to a stout hickory cane,
tipped with copper, which hung by a leather
thong from her belt. This, she said, was her
rattlesnake cane. I must never go to the garden
without a heavy stick or a corn-knife; she
had killed a good many rattlers on her way
back and forth. A little girl who lived on the
Black Hawk road was bitten on the ankle
and had been sick all summer.
I can remember exactly how the country
looked to me as I walked beside my grandmother
along the faint wagon-tracks on that
early September morning. Perhaps the glide
of long railway travel was still with me, for
more than anything else I felt motion in the
landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning
wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy
grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath
it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping
. . .
Alone, I should never have found the garden
— except, perhaps, for the big yellow pumpkins
that lay about unprotected by their withering
vines — and I felt very little interest in it when
I got there. I wanted to walk straight on
17
MY ANTONIA
through the red grass and over the edge of
the world, which could not be very far away.
The light air about me told me that the
world ended here: only the ground and sun
and sky were left, and if one went a little
farther there would be only sun and sky, and
one would float off into them, like the tawny
hawks which sailed over our heads making
slow shadows on the grass. While grandmother
took the pitchfork we found standing in one
of the rows and dug potatoes, while I picked
them up out of the soft brown earth and put
them into the bag, I kept looking up at the
hawks that were doing what I might so easily
do.
When grandmother was ready to go, I said
I would like to stay up there in the garden
awhile.
She peered down at me from under her sunbonnet.
“Are n’t you afraid of snakes?”
“A little,” I admitted, “but I’d like to stay
anyhow.”
“Well, if you see one, don’t have anything
to do with him. The big yellow and brown
ones won’t hurt you; they’re bull-snakes and
help to keep the gophers down. Don’t be
scared if you see anything look out of that
18
THE SHIMERDAS
hole in the bank over there. That’s a badger
hole. He’s about as big as a big ’possum, and
his face is striped, black and white. He takes
a chicken once in a while, but I won’t let the
men harm him. In a new country a body feels
friendly to the animals. I like to have him
come out and watch me when I’m at work.”
Grandmother swung the bag of potatoes
over her shoulder and went down the path,
leaning forward a little. The road followed
the windings of the draw; when she came to
the first bend she waved at me and disappeared.
I was left alone with this new feeling
of lightness and content.
I sat down in the middle of the garden,
where snakes could scarcely approach unseen,
and leaned my back against a warm yellow
pumpkin. There were some ground-cherry
bushes growing along the furrows, full of fruit.
I turned back the papery triangular sheaths
that protected the berries and ate a few. All
about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as
any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic
feats among the dried vines. The gophers
scurried up and down the ploughed ground.
There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind
did not blow very hard, but I could hear it
19
MY ANTONIA
singing its humming tune up on the level, and
I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth
was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled
it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs
came out and moved in slow squadrons around
me. Their backs were polished vermilion,
with black spots. I kept as still as I could.
Nothing happened. I did not expect anything
to happen. I was something that lay
under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins,
and I did not want to be anything more. I
was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that
when we die and become a part of something
entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness
and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness;
to be dissolved into something complete
and great. When it comes to one, it comes as
naturally as sleep.
III
ON Sunday morning Otto Fuchs was to drive
us over to make the acquaintance of our new
Bohemian neighbors. We were taking them
some provisions, as they had come to live on
a wild place where there was no garden or
chicken-house, and very little broken land.
Fuchs brought up a sack of potatoes and a
piece of cured pork from the cellar, and
grandmother packed some loaves of Saturday’s
bread, a jar of butter, and several
pumpkin pies in the straw of the wagon-box.
We clambered up to the front seat and jolted
off past the little pond and along the road
that climbed to the big cornfield.
I could hardly wait to see what lay beyond
that cornfield; but there was only red grass
like ours, and nothing else, though from the
high wagon-seat one could look off a long way.
The road ran about like a wild thing, avoiding
the deep draws, crossing them where they
were wide and shallow. And all along it, wherever
it looped or ran, the sunflowers grew;
some of them were as big as little trees, with
21
MY ANTONIA
great rough leaves and many branches which
bore dozens of blossoms. They made a gold
ribbon across the prairie. Occasionally one of
the horses would tear off with his teeth a plant
full of blossoms, and walk along munching it,
the flowers nodding in time to his bites as he
ate down toward them.
The Bohemian family, grandmother told
me as we drove along, had bought the homestead
of a fellow-countryman, Peter Krajiek,
and had paid him more than it was worth.
Their agreement with him was made before
they left the old country, through a cousin
of his, who was also a relative of Mrs. Shimerda.
The Shimerdas were the first Bohemian
family to come to this part of the county.
Krajiek was their only interpreter, and could
tell them anything he chose. They could not
speak enough English to ask for advice, or
even to make their most pressing wants
known. One son, Fuchs said, was well-grown,
and strong enough to work the land; but the
father was old and frail and knew nothing
about farming. He was a weaver by trade;
had been a skilled workman on tapestries and
upholstery materials. He had brought his
fiddle with him, which would n’t be of much
22
THE SHIMERDAS
use here, though he used to pick up money
by it at home.
“If they’re nice people, I hate to think
of them spending the winter in that cave of
Krajiek’s,” said grandmother. “It’s no better
than a badger hole; no proper dugout at all.
And I hear he’s made them pay twenty dollars
for his old cookstove that ain’t worth
ten.”
“Yes’m,” said Otto; “and he’s sold ’em his
oxen and his two bony old horses for the
price of good work-teams. I’d have interfered
about the horses — the old man can understand
some German — if I’d ’a’ thought it
would do any good. But Bohemians has a
natural distrust of Austrians.”
Grandmother looked interested. “Now,
why is that, Otto?”
Fuchs wrinkled his brow and nose. “Well,
ma’m, it’s politics. It would take me a long
while to explain.”
The land was growing rougher; I was told
that we were approaching Squaw Creek, which
cut up the west half of the Shimerdas’ place
and made the land of little value for farming.
Soon we could see the broken, grassy
clay cliffs which indicated the windings of the
23
MY ANTONIA
stream, and the glittering tops of the cottonwoods
and ash trees that grew down in the
ravine. Some of the cottonwoods had already
turned, and the yellow leaves and shining
white bark made them look like the gold and
silver trees in fairy tales.
As we approached the Shimerdas’ dwelling,
I could still see nothing but rough red hillocks,
and draws with shelving banks and long roots
hanging out where the earth had crumbled
away. Presently, against one of those banks,
I saw a sort of shed, thatched with the same
wine-colored grass that grew everywhere.
Near it tilted a shattered windmill-frame, that
had no wheel. We drove up to this skeleton to
tie our horses, and then I saw a door and window
sunk deep in the draw-bank. The door
stood open, and a woman and a girl of fourteen
ran out and looked up at us hopefully. A little
girl trailed along behind them. The woman
had on her head the same embroidered shawl
with silk fringes that she wore when she had
alighted from the train at Black Hawk. She
was not old, but she was certainly not young.
Her face was alert and lively, with a sharp
chin and shrewd little eyes. She shook grandmother’s
hand energetically.
24
THE SHIMERDAS
“Very glad, very glad!” she ejaculated.
Immediately she pointed to the bank out of
which she had emerged and said, “House no
good, house no good!”
Grandmother nodded consolingly. “You’ll a
get fixed up comfortable after while, Mrs.
Shimerda; make good house.”
My grandmother always spoke in a very
loud tone to foreigners, as if they were deaf.
She made Mrs. Shimerda understand the
friendly intention of our visit, and the Bohemian
woman handled the loaves of bread and
even smelled them, and examined the pies
with lively curiosity, exclaiming, “Much good,
much thank!” — and again she wrung grandmother’s
hand.
7KH ROGHVWVRQ $PEURå — they called it
Ambrosch, — came out of the cave and stood
beside his mother. He was nineteen years old,
short and broad-backed, with a close-cropped,
flat head, and a wide, flat face. His hazel eyes
were little and shrewd, like his mother’s, but
more sly and suspicious; they fairly snapped
at the food. The family had been living on
corncakes and sorghum molasses for three
days.
The little girl was pretty, but Án-tonia —
25

a You ’ll
MY ANTONIA
they accented the name thus, strongly, when
they spoke to her — was still prettier. I remembered
what the conductor had said about
her eyes. They were big and warm and full
of light, like the sun shining on brown pools
in the wood. Her skin was brown, too, and
in her cheeks she had a glow of rich, dark
color. Her brown hair was curly and wildlooking.
The little sister, whom they called
Yulka (Julka), was fair, and seemed mild and
obedient. While I stood awkwardly confronting
the two girls, Krajiek came up from the
barn to see what was going on. With him was
another Shimerda son. Even from a distance
one could see that there was something strange
about this boy. As he approached us, he began
to make uncouth noises, and held up his hands
to show us his fingers, which were webbed to
the first knuckle, like a duck’s foot. When he
saw me draw back, he began to crow delightedly,
“Hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo!” like a rooster.
His mother scowled and said sternly, “Marek!”
then spoke rapidly to Krajiek in Bohemian.

“She wants me to tell you he won’t hurt
nobody, Mrs. Burden. He was born like that.
The others are smart. Ambrosch, he make
26
THE SHIMERDAS
good farmer.” He struck Ambrosch on the
back, and the boy smiled knowingly.
At that moment the father came out of the
hole in the bank. He wore no hat, and his
thick, iron-gray hair was brushed straight
back from his forehead. It was so long that it
bushed out behind his ears, and made him
look like the old portraits I remembered in
Virginia. He was tall and slender, and his thin
shoulders stooped. He looked at us understandingly,
then took grandmother’s hand and
bent over it. I noticed how white and wellshaped
his own hands were. They looked
calm, somehow, and skilled. His eyes were
melancholy, and were set back deep under his
brow. His face was ruggedly formed, but it
looked like ashes — like something from which
all the warmth and light had died out. Everything
about this old man was in keeping with
his dignified manner. He was neatly dressed.
Under his coat he wore a knitted gray vest,
and, instead of a collar, a silk scarf of a dark
bronze-green, carefully crossed and held together
by a red coral pin. While Krajiek
was translating for Mr. Shimerda, Ántonia
came up to me and held out her hand coaxingly.
In a moment we were running up
27
MY ANTONIA
the steep draw-side
a
together, Yulka trotting
after us.
When we reached the level and could see the
gold tree-tops, I pointed toward them, and
Ántonia laughed and squeezed my hand as if
to tell me how glad she was I had come. We
raced off toward Squaw Creek and did not
stop until the ground itself stopped — fell
away before us so abruptly that the next step
would have been out into the tree-tops. We
stood panting on the edge of the ravine, looking
down at the trees and bushes that grew below
us. The wind was so strong that I had to
hold my hat on, and the girls’ skirts were
blown out before them. Ántonia seemed to
like it; she held her little sister by the hand
and chattered away in that language which
seemed to me spoken so much more rapidly
than mine. She looked at me, her eyes fairly
blazing with things she could not say.
“Name? What name?” she asked, touching
me on the shoulder. I told her my name, and
she repeated it after me and made Yulka say
it. She pointed into the gold cottonwood tree
behind whose top we stood and said again,
“What name?”
We sat down and made a nest in the
28

a
drawside
THE SHIMERDAS
long red grass. Yulka curled up like a baby
rabbit and played with a grasshopper. Ántonia
pointed up to the sky and questioned
me with her glance. I gave her the word, but
she was not satisfied and pointed to my eyes.
I told her, and she repeated the word, making
it sound like “ice.” She pointed up to the
sky, then to my eyes, then back to the sky,
with movements so quick and impulsive that
she distracted me, and I had no idea what she
wanted. She got up on her knees and wrung
her hands. She pointed to her own eyes and
shook her head, then to mine and to the sky,
nodding violently.
“Oh,” I exclaimed, “blue; blue sky.”
She clapped her hands and murmured,
“Blue sky, blue eyes,” as if it amused her.
While we snuggled down there out of the
wind she learned a score of words. She was
quick, and very eager. We were so deep in the
grass that we could see nothing but the blue
sky over us and the gold tree in front of us. It
was wonderfully pleasant. After Ántonia had
said the new words over and over, she wanted
to give me a little chased silver ring she wore
on her middle finger. When she coaxed and
insisted, I repulsed her quite sternly. I did n’t
29
MY ANTONIA
want her ring, and I felt there was something
reckless and extravagant about her wishing
to give it away to a boy she had never seen
before. No wonder Krajiek got the better of
these people, if this was how they behaved.
While we were disputing about the ring, I
heard a mournful voice calling, “Án-tonia,
Án-tonia!” She sprang up like a hare. “Tatinek,
Tatinek!” she shouted, and we ran to
meet the old man who was coming toward us.
Ántonia reached him first, took his hand and
kissed it. When I came up, he touched my
shoulder and looked searchingly down into my
face for several seconds. I became somewhat
embarrassed, for I was used to being taken
for granted by my elders.
We went with Mr. Shimerda back to the
dugout, where grandmother was waiting for
me. Before I got into the wagon, he took a
book out of his pocket, opened it, and showed
me a page with two alphabets, one English and
the other Bohemian. He placed this book in
my grandmother’s hands, looked at her entreatingly,
and said with an earnestness which
I shall never forget, “Te-e-ach, te-e-ach my
Án-tonia!”
IV
ON the afternoon of that same Sunday I took
my first long ride on my pony, under Otto’s
direction. After that Dude and I went twice a
week to the post-office, six miles east of us, and
I saved the men a good deal of time by riding
on errands to our neighbors. When we had to
borrow anything, or to send about word that
there would be preaching at the sod schoolhouse,
I was always the messenger. Formerly
Fuchs attended to such things after working
hours.
All the years that have passed have not
dimmed my memory of that first glorious
autumn. The new country lay open before
me: there were no fences in those days, and I
could choose my own way over the grass uplands,
trusting the pony to get me home again.
Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered
roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were
introduced into that country by the Mormons;
that at the time of the persecution, when they
left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness
to find a place where they could worship
31
MY ANTONIA
God in their own way, the members of the
first exploring party, crossing the plains to
Utah, scattered sunflower seed as they went.
The next summer, when the long trains of
wagons came through with all the women and
children, they had the sunflower trail to follow.
I believe that botanists do not confirm
Jake’s
1
story, but insist that the sunflower was
native to those plains. Nevertheless, that
legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflowerbordered
roads always seem to me the roads
to freedom.
I used to love to drift along the pale yellow
cornfields, looking for the damp spots one
sometimes found at their edges, where the
smartweed soon turned a rich copper color and
the narrow brown leaves hung curled like cocoons
about the swollen joints of the stem.
Sometimes I went south to visit our German
neighbors and to admire their catalpa grove,
or to see the big elm tree that grew up out of a
deep crack in the earth and had a hawk’s nest
in its branches. Trees were so rare in that
country, and they had to make such a hard
fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious
about them, and visit them as if they were
persons. It must have been the scarcity of
32
THE SHIMERDAS
detail in that tawny landscape that made detail
so precious.
Sometimes I rode north to the big prairiedog
town to watch the brown
a
earth-owls fly
home in the late afternoon and go down to
their nests underground with the dogs. Ántonia
Shimerda liked to go with me, and we
used to wonder a great deal about these birds
of subterranean habit. We had to be on our
guard there, for rattlesnakes were always lurking
about. They came to pick up an easy
living among the dogs and owls, which were
quite defenseless against them; took possession
of their comfortable houses and ate the
eggs and puppies. We felt sorry for the owls.
It was always mournful to see them come flying
home at sunset and disappear under the
earth. But, after all, we felt, winged things
who would live like that must be rather degraded
creatures. The dog-town was a long
way from any pond or creek. Otto Fuchs
said he had seen populous dog-towns in the
desert where there was no surface water
for fifty miles; he insisted that some of the
holes must go down to water — nearly two
hundred feet, hereabouts. Ántonia said she
did n’t believe it; that the dogs probably
33

a
brown,
MY ANTONIA
lapped up the dew in the early morning, like
the rabbits.
Ántonia had opinions about everything, and
she was soon able to make them known. Almost
every day she came running across the
prairie to have her reading lesson with me.
Mrs. Shimerda grumbled, but realized it was
important that one member of the family
should learn English. When the lesson was
over, we used to go up to the watermelon patch
behind the garden. I split the melons with an
old corn-knife, and we lifted out the hearts and
ate them with the juice trickling through our
fingers. The white Christmas melons we did
not touch, but we watched them with curiosity.
They were to be picked late, when the
hard frosts had set in, and put away for winter
use. After weeks on the ocean, the Shimerdas
were famished for fruit. The two girls would
wander for miles along the edge of the cornfields,
hunting for ground-cherries.
Ántonia loved to help grandmother in the
kitchen and to learn about cooking and housekeeping.
She would stand beside her, watching
her every movement. We were willing to
believe that Mrs. Shimerda was a good housewife
in her own country, but she managed
34
THE SHIMERDAS
poorly under new conditions: the conditions
were bad enough, certainly!
I remember how horrified we were at the
sour, ashy-gray bread she gave her family to
eat. She mixed her dough, we discovered, in
an old tin peck-measure that Krajiek had used
about the barn. When she took the paste out
to bake it, she left smears of dough sticking to
the sides of the measure, put the measure on
the shelf behind the stove, and let this residue
ferment. The next time she made bread, she
scraped this sour stuff down into the fresh
dough to serve as yeast.
During those first months the Shimerdas
never went to town. Krajiek encouraged them
in the belief that in Black Hawk they would
somehow be mysteriously separated from their
money. They hated Krajiek, but they clung to
him because he was the only human being
with whom they could talk or from whom they
could get information. He slept with the old
man and the two boys in the dugout barn,
along with the oxen. They kept him in their
hole and fed him for the same reason that the
prairie dogs and the brown owls housed the
rattlesnakes — because they did not know
how to get rid of him.
V
WE knew that things were hard for our Bohemian
neighbors, but the two girls were lighthearted
and never complained. They were
always ready to forget their troubles at home,
and to run away with me over the prairie,
scaring rabbits or starting up flocks of quail.
I remember Ántonia’s excitement when she
came into our kitchen one afternoon and announced:
“My papa find friends up north,
with Russian mans. Last night he take me for
see, and I can understand very much talk.
Nice mans, Mrs. Burden. One is fat and all
the time laugh. Everybody laugh. The first
time I see my papa laugh in this kawn-tree.
Oh, very nice!”
I asked her if she meant the two Russians
who lived up by the big dog-town. I had often
been tempted to go to see them when I was
riding in that direction, but one of them was a
wild-looking fellow and I was a little afraid
of him. Russia seemed to me more remote
than any other country — farther away than
China, almost as far as the North Pole. Of
36
THE SHIMERDAS
all the strange, uprooted people among the
first settlers, those two men were the strangest
and the most aloof. Their last names
were unpronounceable, so they were called
Pavel and Peter. They went about making
signs to people, and until the Shimerdas came
they had no friends. Krajiek could understand
them a little, but he had cheated them in a
trade, so they avoided him. Pavel, the tall
one, was said to be an anarchist; since he had
no means of imparting his opinions, probably
his wild gesticulations and his generally excited
and rebellious manner gave rise to this supposition.
He must once have been a very strong
man, but now his great frame, with big, knotty
joints, had a wasted look, and the skin was
drawn tight over his high cheek-bones. His
breathing was hoarse, and he always had a
cough.
Peter, his companion, was a very different
sort of fellow; short, bow-legged, and as fat as
butter. He always seemed pleased when he
met people on the road, smiled and took off
his cap to every one, men as well as women.
At a distance, on his wagon, he looked like an
old man; his hair and beard were of such a
pale flaxen color that they seemed white in
37
MY ANTONIA
the sun. They were as thick and curly as
carded wool. His rosy face, with its snub
nose, set in this fleece, was like a melon among
its leaves. He was usually called “Curly
Peter,” or “Rooshian Peter.”
The two Russians made good farmhands,
and in summer they worked out together. I
had heard our neighbors laughing when they
told how Peter always had to go home at
night to milk his cow. Other bachelor homesteaders
used canned milk, to save trouble.
Sometimes Peter came to church at the sod
schoolhouse. It was there I first saw him,
sitting on a low bench by the door, his plush
cap in his hands, his bare feet tucked apologetically
under the seat.
After Mr. Shimerda discovered the Russians,
he went to see them almost every evening,
and sometimes took Ántonia with him.
She said they came from a part of Russia
where the language was not very different
from Bohemian, and if I wanted to go to their
place, she could talk to them for me. One
afternoon, before the heavy frosts began, we
rode up there together on my pony.
The Russians had a neat log house built on
a grassy slope, with a windlass well beside the
38
THE SHIMERDAS
door. As we rode up the draw we skirted a big
melon patch, and a garden where squashes
and yellow cucumbers lay about on the sod.
We found Peter out behind his kitchen, bending
over a washtub. He was working so hard
that he did not hear us coming. His whole
body moved up and down as he rubbed, and
he was a funny sight from the rear, with
his shaggy head and bandy legs. When he
straightened himself up to greet us, drops of
perspiration were rolling from his thick nose
down on to his curly beard. Peter dried his
hands and seemed glad to leave his washing.
He took us down to see his chickens, and his
cow that was grazing on the hillside. He told
Ántonia that in his country only rich people
had cows, but here any man could have one
who would take care of her. The milk was
good for Pavel, who was often sick, and he
could make butter by beating sour cream with
a wooden spoon. Peter was very fond of his
cow. He patted her flanks and talked to her
in Russian while he pulled up her lariat pin
and set it in a new place.
After he had shown us his garden, Peter
trundled a load of watermelons up the hill in
his wheelbarrow. Pavel was not at home. He
39
MY ANTONIA
was off somewhere helping to dig a well. The
house I thought very comfortable for two men
who were “batching.” Besides the kitchen,
there was a living-room, with a wide double
bed built against the wall, properly made up
with blue gingham sheets and pillows. There
was a little storeroom, too, with a window,
where they kept guns and saddles and tools,
and old coats and boots. That day the floor
was covered with garden things, drying for
winter; corn and beans and fat yellow cucumbers.
There were no screens or window-blinds
in the house, and all the doors and windows
stood wide open, letting in flies and sunshine
alike.
Peter put the melons in a row on the oilcloth-covered
table and stood over them,
brandishing a butcher knife. Before the blade
got fairly into them, they split of their own
ripeness, with a delicious sound. He gave us
knives, but no plates, and the top of the table
was soon swimming with juice and seeds. I
had never seen any one eat so many melons
as Peter ate. He assured us that they were
good for one — better than medicine; in his
country people lived on them at this time of
year. He was very hospitable and jolly.
40
THE SHIMERDAS
Once, while he was looking at Ántonia, he
sighed and told us that if he had stayed at
home in Russia perhaps by this time he would
have had a pretty daughter of his own to cook
and keep house for him. He said he had left
his country because of a “great trouble.”
When we got up to go, Peter looked about
in perplexity for something that would entertain
us. He ran into the storeroom and brought
out a gaudily painted harmonica, sat down on
a bench, and spreading his fat legs apart began
to play like a whole band. The tunes were
either very lively or very doleful, and he sang
words to some of them.
Before we left, Peter put ripe cucumbers
into a sack for Mrs. Shimerda and gave us a
lard-pail full of milk to cook them in. I had
never heard of cooking cucumbers, but Ántonia
assured me they were very good. We had
to walk the pony all the way home to keep
from spilling the milk.
VI
ONE afternoon we were having our reading
lesson on the warm, grassy bank where the
badger lived. It was a day of amber sunlight,
but there was a shiver of coming winter in the
air. I had seen ice on the little horse-pond that
morning, and as we went through the garden
we found the tall asparagus, with its red berries,
lying on the ground, a mass of slimy green.
Tony was barefooted, and she shivered in
her cotton dress and was comfortable only
when we were tucked down on the baked
earth, in the full blaze of the sun. She could
talk to me about almost anything by this time.
That afternoon she was telling me how highly
esteemed our friend the badger was in her part
of the world, and how men kept a special kind
of dog, with very short legs, to hunt him.
Those dogs, she said, went down into the hole
after the badger and killed him there in a terrific
struggle underground; you could hear the
barks and yelps outside. Then the dog dragged
himself back, covered with bites and scratches,
to be rewarded and petted by his master. She
42
THE SHIMERDAS
knew a dog who had a star on his collar for
every badger he had killed.
The rabbits were unusually spry that afternoon.
They kept starting up all about us, and
dashing off down the draw as if they were
playing a game of some kind. But the little
buzzing things that lived in the grass were all
dead — all but one. While we were lying there
against the warm bank, a little insect of the
palest, frailest green hopped painfully out of
the buffalo grass and tried to leap into a bunch
of bluestem. He missed it, fell back, and sat
with his head sunk between his long legs,
his antennæ quivering, as if he were waiting
for something to come and finish him. Tony
made a warm nest for him in her hands; talked
to him gayly and indulgently in Bohemian.
Presently he began to sing for us — a thin,
rusty little chirp. She held him close to her
ear and laughed, but a moment afterward
I saw there were tears in her eyes. She
told me that in her village at home there was
an old beggar woman who went about selling
herbs and roots she had dug up in the forest.
If you took her in and gave her a warm place
by the fire, she sang old songs to the children
in a cracked voice, like this. Old Hata, she
43
MY ANTONIA
was called, and the children loved to see her
coming and saved their cakes and sweets for
her.
When the bank on the other side of the draw
began to throw a narrow shelf of shadow, we
knew we ought to be starting homeward; the
chill came on quickly when the sun got low,
and Ántonia’s dress was thin. What were we
to do with the frail little creature we had
lured back to life by false pretenses? I offered
my pockets, but Tony shook her head and
carefully put the green insect in her hair, tying
her big handkerchief down loosely over her
curls. I said I would go with her until we could
see Squaw Creek, and then turn and run home.
We drifted along lazily, very happy, through
the magical light of the late afternoon.
All those fall afternoons were the same,
but I never got used to them. As far as we
could see, the miles of copper-red grass were
drenched in sunlight that was stronger and
fiercer than at any other time of the day. The
blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks
turned rosy and threw long shadows. The
whole prairie was like the bush that burned
with fire and was not consumed. That hour
always had the exultation of victory, of
44
THE SHIMERDAS
triumphant ending, like a hero’s death —
heroes who died young and gloriously. It was
a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.
How many an afternoon Ántonia and I have
trailed along the prairie under that magnificence!
And always two long black shadows
flitted before us or followed after, dark spots
on the ruddy grass.
We had been silent a long time, and the edge
of the sun sank nearer and nearer the prairie
floor, when we saw a figure moving on the edge
of the upland, a gun over his shoulder. He was
walking slowly, dragging his feet along as if
he had no purpose. We broke into a run to
overtake him.
“My papa sick all the time,” Tony panted
as we flew. “He not look good, Jim.”
As we neared Mr. Shimerda she shouted,
and he lifted his head and peered about. Tony
ran up to him, caught his hand and pressed
it against her cheek. She was the only one of
his family who could rouse the old man from
the torpor in which he seemed to live. He took
the bag from his belt and showed us three rabbits
he had shot, looked at Ántonia with a
wintry flicker of a smile and began to tell her
something. She turned to me.
45
MY ANTONIA
“My tatinek make me little hat with the
skins, little hat for win-ter!” she exclaimed
joyfully. “Meat for eat, skin for hat,” — she
told off these benefits on her fingers.
Her father put his hand on her hair, but she
caught his wrist and lifted it carefully away,
talking to him rapidly. I heard the name of
old Hata. He untied the handkerchief, separated
her hair with his fingers, and stood looking
down at the green insect. When it began
to chirp faintly, he listened as if it were a
beautiful sound.
I picked up the gun he had dropped; a queer
piece from the old country, short and heavy,
with a stag’s head on the cock. When he saw
me examining it, he turned to me with his faraway
look that always made me feel as if I
were down at the bottom of a well. He spoke
kindly and gravely, and Ántonia translated:—
“My tatinek say when you are big boy, he
give you his gun. Very fine, from Bohemie.
It was belong to a great man, very rich, like
what you not got here; many fields, many
forests, many big house. My papa play for
his wedding, and he give my papa fine gun,
and my papa give you.”
I was glad that this project was one of fu46

THE SHIMERDAS
turity. There never were such people as the
Shimerdas for wanting to give away everything
they had. Even the mother was always
offering me things, though I knew she expected
substantial presents in return. We
stood there in friendly silence, while the feeble
minstrel sheltered in Ántonia’s hair went on
with its scratchy chirp. The old man’s smile,
as he listened, was so full of sadness, of pity
for things, that I never afterward forgot it.
As the sun sank there came a sudden coolness
and the strong smell of earth and drying
grass. Ántonia and her father went off hand
in hand, and I buttoned up my jacket and
raced my shadow home.
VII
MUCH as I liked Ántonia, I hated a superior
tone that she sometimes took with me. She
was four years older than I, to be sure, and
had seen more of the world; but I was a boy
and she was a girl, and I resented her protecting
manner. Before the autumn was over she
began to treat me more like an equal and to
defer to me in other things than reading lessons.
This change came about from an adventure
we had together.
One day when I rode over to the Shimerdas’
I found Ántonia starting off on foot for Russian
Peter’s house, to borrow a spade Ambrosch
needed. I offered to take her on the
pony, and she got up behind me. There had
been another black frost the night before, and
the air was clear and heady as wine. Within a
week all the blooming roads had been despoiled
— hundreds of miles of yellow sunflowers
had been transformed into brown,
rattling, burry stalks.
We found Russian Peter digging his potatoes.
We were glad to go in and get warm
48
THE SHIMERDAS
by his kitchen stove and to see his squashes
and Christmas melons, heaped in the storeroom
for winter. As we rode away with the
spade, Ántonia suggested that we stop at
the prairie-dog town and dig into one of the
holes. We could find out whether they ran
straight down, or were horizontal, like moleholes;
whether they had underground connections;
whether the owls had nests down there,
lined with feathers. We might get some puppies,
or owl eggs, or snake-skins.
The dog-town was spread out over perhaps
ten acres. The grass had been nibbled short
and even, so this stretch was not shaggy and
red like the surrounding country, but gray and
velvety. The holes were several yards apart,
and were disposed with a good deal of regularity,
almost as if the town had been laid out
in streets and avenues. One always felt that
an orderly and very sociable kind of life was
going on there. I picketed Dude down in a
draw, and we went wandering about, looking
for a hole that would be easy to dig. The
dogs were out, as usual, dozens of them, sitting
up on their hind legs over the doors of
their houses. As we approached, they barked,
shook their tails at us, and scurried under49
MY ANTONIA
ground. Before the mouths of the holes were
little patches of sand and gravel, scratched up,
we supposed, from a long way below the surface.
Here and there, in the town, we came
on larger gravel patches, several yards away
from any hole. If the dogs had scratched the
sand up in excavating, how had they carried
it so far? It was on one of these gravel beds
that I met my adventure.
We were examining a big hole with two entrances.
The burrow sloped into the ground
at a gentle angle, so that we could see where
the two corridors united, and the floor was
dusty from use, like a little highway over
which much travel went. I was walking backward,
in a crouching position, when I heard
Ántonia scream. She was standing opposite
me, pointing behind me and shouting something
in Bohemian. I whirled round, and
there, on one of those dry gravel beds, was the
biggest snake I had ever seen. He was sunning
himself, after the cold night, and he must have
been asleep when Ántonia screamed. When I
turned he was lying in long loose waves, like a
letter “W.” He twitched and began to coil
slowly. He was not merely a big snake, I
thought — he was a circus monstrosity. His
50
THE SHIMERDAS
abominable muscularity, his loathsome, fluid
motion, somehow made me sick. He was as
thick as my leg, and looked as if millstones
could n’t crush the disgusting vitality out of
him. He lifted his hideous little head, and
rattled. I did n’t run because I did n’t think
of it — if my back had been against a stone
wall I could n’t have felt more cornered. I
saw his coils tighten — now he would spring,
spring his length, I remembered. I ran up and
drove at his head with my spade, struck him
fairly across the neck, and in a minute he was
all about my feet in wavy loops. I struck now
from hate. Ántonia, barefooted as she was,
ran up behind me. Even after I had pounded
his ugly head flat, his body kept on coiling
and winding, doubling and falling back on itself.
I walked away and turned my back. I
felt seasick. Ántonia came after me, crying,
“O Jimmy, he not bite you? You sure? Why
you not run when I say?”
“What did you jabber Bohunk for? You
might have told me there was a snake behind
me!” I said petulantly.
“I know I am just awful, Jim, I was so
scared.” She took my handkerchief from my
pocket and tried to wipe my face with it, but
51
MY ANTONIA
I snatched it away from her. I suppose I
looked as sick as I felt.
“I never know you was so brave, Jim,” she
went on comfortingly. “You is just like big
mans; you wait for him lift his head and then
you go for him. Ain’t you feel scared a bit?
Now we take that snake home and show everybody.
Nobody ain’t seen in this kawn-tree so
big snake like you kill.”
She went on in this strain until I began to
think that I had longed for this opportunity,
and had hailed it with joy. Cautiously we
went back to the snake; he was still groping
with his tail, turning up his ugly belly in the
light. A faint, fetid smell came from him, and
a thread of green liquid oozed from his crushed
head.
“Look, Tony, that’s his poison,” I said.
I took a long piece of string from my pocket,
and she lifted his head with the spade while I
tied a noose around it. We pulled him out
straight and measured him by my ridingquirt;
he was about five and a half feet long.
He had twelve rattles, but they were broken
off before they began to taper, so I insisted
that he must once have had twenty-four. I
explained to Ántonia how this meant that he
52
THE SHIMERDAS
was twenty-four years old,
2
that he must have
been there when white men first came, left on
from buffalo and Indian times. As I turned
him over I began to feel proud of him, to have
a kind of respect for his age and size. He
seemed like the ancient, eldest Evil. Certainly
his kind have left horrible unconscious memories
in all warm-blooded life. When we
dragged him down into the draw, Dude sprang
off to the end of his tether and shivered all
over — would n’t let us come near him.
We decided that Ántonia should ride Dude
home, and I would walk. As she rode along
slowly, her bare legs swinging against the
pony’s sides, she kept shouting back to me
about how astonished everybody would be. I
followed with the spade over my shoulder,
dragging my snake. Her exultation was contagious.
The great land had never looked to
me so big and free. If the red grass were full
of rattlers, I was equal to them all. Nevertheless,
I stole furtive glances behind me now and
then to see that no avenging mate, older and
bigger than my quarry, was racing up from the
rear.
The sun had set when we reached our garden
and went down the draw toward the
53
MY ANTONIA
house. Otto Fuchs was the first one we met.
He was sitting on the edge of the cattle-pond,
having a quiet pipe before supper. Ántonia
called him to come quick and look. He did not
say anything for a minute, but scratched his
head and turned the snake over with his boot.
“Where did you run onto that beauty,
Jim?”
“Up at the dog-town,” I answered laconically.

“Kill him yourself? How come you to have
a weepon?”
“We’d been up to Russian Peter’s, to borrow
a spade for Ambrosch.”
Otto shook the ashes out of his pipe and
squatted down to count the rattles. “It was
just luck you had a tool,” he said cautiously.
“Gosh! I would n’t want to do any business
with that fellow myself, unless I had a fencepost
along. Your grandmother’s snake-cane
would n’t more than tickle him. He could
stand right up and talk to you, he could. Did
he fight hard?”
Ántonia broke in: “He fight something awful!
He is all over Jimmy’s boots. I scream
for him to run, but he just hit and hit that
snake like he was crazy.”
54
THE SHIMERDAS
Otto winked at me. After Ántonia rode on
he said: “Got him in the head first crack,
did n’t you? That was just as well.”
We hung him up to the windmill, and when
I went down to the kitchen I found Ántonia
standing in the middle of the floor, telling the
story with a great deal of color.
Subsequent experiences with rattlesnakes
taught me that my first encounter was fortunate
in circumstance. My big rattler was
old, and had led too easy a life; there was not
much fight in him. He had probably lived
there for years, with a fat prairie dog for
breakfast whenever he felt like it, a sheltered
home, even an owl-feather bed, perhaps, and
he had forgot that the world does n’t owe rattlers
a living. A snake of his size, in fighting
trim, would be more than any boy could handle.
So in reality it was a mock adventure; the
game was fixed for me by chance, as it probably
was for many a dragon-slayer. I had been
adequately armed by Russian Peter; the snake
was old and lazy; and I had Ántonia beside
me, to appreciate and admire.
That snake hung on our corral fence for
several days; some of the neighbors came to
see it and agreed that it was the biggest rattler
55
MY ANTONIA
ever killed in those parts. This was enough for
Ántonia. She liked me better from that time
on, and she never took a supercilious air with
me again. I had killed a big snake — I was
now a big fellow.
VIII
WHILE the autumn color was growing pale on
the grass and cornfields, things went badly
with our friends the Russians. Peter told his
troubles to Mr. Shimerda: he was unable to
meet a note which fell due on the first of November;
had to pay an exorbitant bonus on
renewing it, and to give a mortgage on his
pigs and horses and even his milk cow. His
creditor was Wick Cutter, the merciless Black
Hawk money-lender, a man of evil name
throughout the county, of whom I shall have
more to say later. Peter could give no very
clear account of his transactions with Cutter.
He only knew that he had first borrowed two
hundred dollars, then another hundred, then
fifty — that each time a bonus was added to
the principal, and the debt grew faster than
any crop he planted. Now everything was
plastered with mortgages.
Soon after Peter renewed his note, Pavel
strained himself lifting timbers for a new barn,
and fell over among the shavings with such a
gush of blood from the lungs that his fellow57
MY ANTONIA
workmen thought he would die on the spot.
They hauled him home and put him into his
bed, and there he lay, very ill indeed. Misfortune
seemed to settle like an evil bird on
the roof of the log house, and to flap its wings
there, warning human beings away. The Russians
had such bad luck that people were
afraid of them and liked to put them out of
mind.
One afternoon Ántonia and her father came
over to our house to get buttermilk, and lingered,
as they usually did, until the sun was
low. Just as they were leaving, Russian Peter
drove up. Pavel was very bad, he said, and
wanted to talk to Mr. Shimerda and his
daughter; he had come to fetch them. When
Ántonia and her father got into the wagon, I
entreated grandmother to let me go with them:
I would gladly go without my supper, I would
sleep in the Shimerdas’ barn and run home in
the morning. My plan must have seemed very
foolish to her, but she was often large-minded
about humoring the desires of other people.
She asked Peter to wait a moment, and when
she came back from the kitchen she brought a
bag of sandwiches and doughnuts for us.
Mr. Shimerda and Peter were on the front
58
THE SHIMERDAS
seat; Ántonia and I sat in the straw behind
and ate our lunch as we bumped along. After
the sun sank, a cold wind sprang up and
moaned over the prairie. If this turn in the
weather had come sooner, I should not have
got away. We burrowed down in the straw and
curled up close together, watching the angry
red die out of the west and the stars begin to
shine in the clear, windy sky. Peter kept sighing
and groaning. Tony whispered to me that
he was afraid Pavel would never get well. We
lay still and did not talk. Up there the stars
grew magnificently bright. Though we had
come from such different parts of the world,
in both of us there was some dusky superstition
that those shining groups have their influence
upon what is and what is not to be. Perhaps
Russian Peter, come from farther away
than any of us, had brought from his land,
too, some such belief.
The little house on the hillside was so much
the color of the night that we could not see it
as we came up the draw. The ruddy windows
guided us — the light from the kitchen stove,
for there was no lamp burning.
We entered softly. The man in the wide
bed seemed to be asleep. Tony and I sat down
59
MY ANTONIA
on the bench by the wall and leaned our arms
on the table in front of us. The firelight flickered
on the hewn logs that supported the
thatch overhead. Pavel made a rasping sound
when he breathed, and he kept moaning. We
waited. The wind shook the doors and windows
impatiently, then swept on again, singing
through the big spaces. Each gust, as it
bore down, rattled the panes, and swelled off
like the others. They made me think of defeated
armies, retreating; or of ghosts who
were trying desperately to get in for shelter,
and then went moaning on. Presently, in
one of those sobbing intervals between the
blasts, the coyotes tuned up with their whining
howl; one, two, three, then all together —
to tell us that winter was coming. This sound
brought an answer from the bed, — a long
complaining cry, — as if Pavel were having
bad dreams or were waking to some old misery.
Peter listened, but did not stir. He was sitting
on the floor by the kitchen stove. The coyotes
broke out again; yap, yap, yap — then
the high whine. Pavel called for something
and struggled up on his elbow.
“He is scared of the wolves,” Ántonia whispered
to me. “In his country there are very
60
THE SHIMERDAS
many, and they eat men and women.” We
slid closer together along the bench.
I could not take my eyes off the man in the
bed. His shirt was hanging open, and his
emaciated chest, covered with yellow bristle,
rose and fell horribly. He began to cough.
Peter shuffled to his feet, caught up the teakettle
and mixed him some hot water and
whiskey. The sharp smell of spirits went
through the room.
Pavel snatched the cup and drank, then
made Peter give him the bottle and slipped
it under his pillow, grinning disagreeably,
as if he had outwitted some one. His eyes followed
Peter about the room with a contemptuous,
unfriendly expression. It seemed to
me that he despised him for being so simple
and docile.
Presently Pavel began to talk to Mr. Shimerda,
scarcely above a whisper. He was
telling a long story, and as he went on, Ántonia
took my hand under the table and held
it tight. She leaned forward and strained her
ears to hear him. He grew more and more excited,
and kept pointing all around his bed,
as if there were things there and he wanted
Mr. Shimerda to see them.
61
MY ANTONIA
“It’s wolves, Jimmy,” Ántonia whispered.
“It’s awful, what he says!”
The sick man raged and shook his fist. He
seemed to be cursing people who had wronged
him. Mr. Shimerda caught him by the shoulders,
but could hardly hold him in bed. At last
he was shut off by a coughing fit which fairly
choked him. He pulled a cloth from under his
pillow and held it to his mouth. Quickly it
was covered with bright red spots — I thought
I had never seen any blood so bright. When
he lay down and turned his face to the wall,
all the rage had gone out of him. He lay patiently
fighting for breath, like a child with
croup. Ántonia’s father uncovered one of his
long bony legs and rubbed it rhythmically.
From our bench we could see what a hollow
case his body was. His spine and shoulderblades
stood out like the bones under the hide
of a dead steer left in the fields. That sharp
backbone must have hurt him when he lay
on it.
Gradually, relief came to all of us. Whatever
it was, the worst was over. Mr. Shimerda
signed to us that Pavel was asleep. Without
a word Peter got up and lit his lantern. He
was going out to get his team to drive us
62
THE SHIMERDAS
home. Mr. Shimerda went with him. We sat
and watched the long bowed back under the
blue sheet, scarcely daring to breathe.
On the way home, when we were lying in
the straw, under the jolting and rattling Ántonia
told me as much of the story as she
could. What she did not tell me then, she
told later; we talked of nothing else for days
afterward.
When Pavel and Peter were young men,
living at home in Russia, they were asked to
be groomsmen for a friend who was to marry
the belle of another village. It was in the dead
of winter and the groom’s party went over to
the wedding in sledges. Peter and Pavel drove
in the groom’s sledge, and six sledges followed
with all his relatives and friends.
After the ceremony at the church, the party
went to a dinner given by the parents of the
bride. The dinner lasted all afternoon; then
it became a supper and continued far into the
night. There was much dancing and drinking.
At midnight the parents of the bride said
good-bye to her and blessed her. The groom
took her up in his arms and carried her out
to his sledge and tucked her under the blan63
MY ANTONIA
kets. He sprang in beside her, and Pavel
and Peter (our Pavel and Peter!) took the
front seat. Pavel drove. The party set out
with singing and the jingle of sleigh-bells,
the groom’s sledge going first. All the drivers
were more or less the worse for merry-making,
and the groom was absorbed in his bride.
The wolves were bad that winter, and every
one knew it, yet when they heard the first
wolf-cry, the drivers were not much alarmed.
They had too much good food and drink inside
them. The first howls were taken up and
echoed and with quickening repetitions. The
wolves were coming together. There was no
moon, but the starlight was clear on the snow.
A black drove came up over the hill behind
the wedding party. The wolves ran like
streaks of shadow; they looked no bigger
than dogs, but there were hundreds of them.
Something happened to the hindmost
sledge: the driver lost control, — he was probably
very drunk, — the horses left the road,
the sledge was caught in a clump of trees, and
overturned. The occupants rolled out over
the snow, and the fleetest of the wolves sprang
upon them. The shrieks that followed made
everybody sober. The drivers stood up and
64
THE SHIMERDAS
lashed their horses. The groom had the best
team and his sledge was lightest — all the
others carried from six to a dozen people.
Another driver lost control. The screams
of the horses were more terrible to hear than
the cries of the men and women. Nothing
seemed to check the wolves. It was hard to
tell what was happening in the rear; the people
who were falling behind shrieked as piteously
as those who were already lost. The little
bride hid her face on the groom’s shoulder and
sobbed. Pavel sat still and watched his horses.
The road was clear and white, and the groom’s
three blacks went like the wind. It was only
necessary to be calm and to guide them carefully.

At length, as they breasted a long hill, Peter
rose cautiously and looked back. “There are
only three sledges left,” he whispered.
“And the wolves?” Pavel asked.
“Enough! Enough for all of us.”
Pavel reached the brow of the hill, but only
two sledges followed him down the other side.
In that moment on the hilltop, they saw behind
them a whirling black group on the snow.
Presently the groom screamed. He saw his
father’s sledge overturned, with his mother
65
MY ANTONIA
and sisters. He sprang up as if he meant to
jump, but the girl shrieked and held him back.
It was even then too late. The black groundshadows
were already crowding over the heap
in the road, and one horse ran out across the
fields, his harness hanging to him, wolves at
his heels. But the groom’s movement had
given Pavel an idea.
They were within a few miles of their village
now. The only sledge left out of six was not
very far behind them, and Pavel’s middle
horse was failing. Beside a frozen pond something
happened to the other sledge; Peter saw
it plainly. Three big wolves got abreast of the
horses, and the horses went crazy. They tried
to jump over each other, got tangled up in the
harness, and overturned the sledge.
When the shrieking behind them died away,
Pavel realized that he was alone upon the familiar
road. “They still come?” he asked Peter.
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“Twenty, thirty — enough.”
Now his middle horse was being almost
dragged by the other two. Pavel gave Peter
the reins and stepped carefully into the back
of the sledge. He called to the groom that
66
THE SHIMERDAS
they must lighten — and pointed to the bride.
The young man cursed him and held her
tighter. Pavel tried to drag her away. In the
struggle, the groom rose. Pavel knocked him
over the side of the sledge and threw the girl
after him. He said he never remembered exactly
how he did it, or what happened afterward.
Peter, crouching in the front seat, saw
nothing. The first thing either of them noticed
was a new sound that broke into the clear air,
louder than they had ever heard it before —
the bell of the monastery of their own village,
ringing for early prayers.
Pavel and Peter drove into the village alone,
and they had been alone ever since. They
were run out of their village. Pavel’s own
mother would not look at him. They went
away to strange towns, but when people
learned where they came from, they were always
asked if they knew the two men who had
fed the bride to the wolves. Wherever they
went, the story followed them. It took them
five years to save money enough to come to
America. They worked in Chicago, Des
Moines, Fort Wayne, but they were always
unfortunate. When Pavel’s health grew so
bad, they decided to try farming.
67
MY ANTONIA
Pavel died a few days after he unburdened
his mind to Mr. Shimerda, and was buried
in the Norwegian graveyard. Peter sold off
everything, and left the country — went to
be cook in a railway construction camp where
gangs of Russians were employed.
At his sale we bought Peter’s wheelbarrow
and some of his harness. During the auction
he went about with his head down, and
never lifted his eyes. He seemed not to care
about anything. The Black Hawk moneylender
who held mortgages on Peter’s livestock
was there, and he bought in the sale
notes at about fifty cents on the dollar. Every
one said Peter kissed the cow before she was
led away by her new owner. I did not see
him do it, but this I know: after all his furniture
and his cook-stove and pots and pans
had been hauled off by the purchasers, when
his house was stripped and bare, he sat down
on the floor with his clasp-knife and ate all
the melons that he had put away for winter.
When Mr. Shimerda and Krajiek drove up in
their wagon to take Peter to the train, they
found him with a dripping beard, surrounded
by heaps of melon rinds.
The loss of his two friends had a depressing
68
THE SHIMERDAS
effect upon old Mr. Shimerda. When he was
out hunting, he used to go into the empty log
house and sit there, brooding. This cabin was
his hermitage until the winter snows penned
him in his cave. For Ántonia and me, the
story of the wedding party was never at an
end. We did not tell Pavel’s secret to any one,
but guarded it jealously — as if the wolves of
the Ukraine had gathered that night long ago,
and the wedding party been sacrificed, to give
us a painful and peculiar pleasure. At night,
before I went to sleep, I often found myself
in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing
through a country that looked something like
Nebraska and something like Virginia.
IX
THE first snowfall came early in December.
I remember how the world looked from our
sitting-room window as I dressed behind the
stove that morning: the low sky was like a
sheet of metal; the blond cornfields had faded
out into ghostliness at last; the little pond was
frozen under its stiff willow bushes. Big white
flakes were whirling over everything and disappearing
in the red grass.
Beyond the pond, on the slope that climbed
to the cornfield, there was, faintly marked in
the grass, a great circle where the Indians used
to ride. Jake and Otto were sure that when
they galloped round that ring the Indians tortured
prisoners, bound to a stake in the center;
but grandfather thought they merely ran
races or trained horses there. Whenever one
looked at this slope against the setting sun,
the circle showed like a pattern in the grass;
and this morning, when the first light spray of
snow lay over it, it came out with wonderful
distinctness, like strokes of Chinese white on
canvas. The old figure stirred me as it had
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THE SHIMERDAS
never done before and seemed a good omen
for the winter.
As soon as the snow had packed hard I began
to drive about the country in a clumsy
sleigh that Otto Fuchs made for me by
fastening a wooden goods-box on bobs. Fuchs
had been apprenticed to a cabinet-maker in
the old country and was very handy with
tools. He would have done a better job if I
had n’t hurried him. My first trip was to the
post-office, and the next day I went over to
take Yulka and Ántonia for a sleigh-ride.
It was a bright, cold day. I piled straw and
buffalo robes into the box, and took two hot
bricks wrapped in old blankets. When I got
to the Shimerdas’ I did not go up to the house,
but sat in my sleigh at the bottom of the draw
and called. Ántonia and Yulka came running
out, wearing little rabbit-skin hats their father
had made for them. They had heard about
my sledge from Ambrosch and knew why I
had come. They tumbled in beside me and we
set off toward the north, along a road that
happened to be broken.
The sky was brilliantly blue, and the sunlight
on the glittering white stretches of prairie
was almost blinding. As Ántonia said, the
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MY ANTONIA
whole world was changed by the snow; we
kept looking in vain for familiar landmarks.
The deep arroyo through which Squaw Creek
wound was now only a cleft between snowdrifts
— very blue when one looked down into
it. The tree-tops that had been gold all the
autumn were dwarfed and twisted, as if they
would never have any life in them again. The
few little cedars, which were so dull and dingy
before, now stood out a strong, dusky green.
The wind had the burning taste of fresh snow;
my throat and nostrils smarted as if some
one had opened a hartshorn bottle. The cold
stung, and at the same time delighted one.
My horse’s breath rose like steam, and whenever
we stopped he smoked all over. The
cornfields got back a little of their color under
the dazzling light, and stood the palest possible
gold in the sun and snow. All about us
the snow was crusted in shallow terraces, with
tracings like ripple-marks at the edges, curly
waves that were the actual impression of the
stinging lash in the wind.
The girls had on cotton dresses under their
shawls; they kept shivering beneath the buffalo
robes and hugging each other for warmth.
But they were so glad to get away from their
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THE SHIMERDAS
ugly cave and their mother’s scolding that
they begged me to go on and on, as far as Russian
Peter’s house. The great fresh open, after
the stupefying warmth indoors, made them
behave like wild things. They laughed and
shouted, and said they never wanted to go
home again. Could n’t we settle down and live
in Russian Peter’s house, Yulka asked, and
could n’t I go to town and buy things for us to
keep house with?
All the way to Russian Peter’s we were extravagantly
happy, but when we turned back,
— it must have been about four o’clock, —
the east wind grew stronger and began to
howl; the sun lost its heartening power and
the sky became gray and somber. I took off
my long woolen comforter and wound it
around Yulka’s throat. She got so cold that
we made her hide her head under the buffalo
robe. Ántonia and I sat erect, but I held the
reins clumsily, and my eyes were blinded by
the wind a good deal of the time. It was growing
dark when we got to their house, but I refused
to go in with them and get warm. I
knew my hands would ache terribly if I went
near a fire. Yulka forgot to give me back my
comforter, and I had to drive home directly
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MY ANTONIA
against the wind. The next day I came down
with an attack of quinsy, which kept me in
the house for nearly two weeks.
The basement kitchen seemed heavenly safe
and warm in those days — like a tight little
boat in a winter sea. The men were out in
the fields all day, husking corn, and when they
came in at noon, with long caps pulled down
over their ears and their feet in red-lined overshoes,
I used to think they were like Arctic
explorers.
In the afternoons, when grandmother sat
upstairs darning, or making husking-gloves,
I read “The Swiss Family Robinson” aloud
to her, and I felt that the Swiss family had
no advantages over us in the way of an adventurous
life. I was convinced that man’s
strongest antagonist is the cold. I admired the
cheerful zest with which grandmother went
about keeping us warm and comfortable and
well-fed. She often reminded me, when she
was preparing for the return of the hungry
men, that this country was not like Virginia,
and that here a cook had, as she said, “very
little to do with.” On Sundays she gave us
as much chicken as we could eat, and on other
days we had ham or bacon or sausage meat.
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She baked either pies or cake for us every day,
unless, for a change, she made my favorite pudding,
striped with currants and boiled in a bag.
Next to getting warm and keeping warm,
dinner and supper were the most interesting
things we had to think about. Our lives centered
around warmth and food and the return
of the men at nightfall. I used to wonder, when
they came in tired from the fields, their feet
numb and their hands cracked and sore, how
they could do all the chores so conscientiously:
feed and water and bed the horses, milk the
cows, and look after the pigs. When supper
was over, it took them a long while to get the
cold out of their bones. While grandmother
and I washed the dishes and grandfather
read his paper upstairs, Jake and Otto sat on
the long bench behind the stove, “easing”
their inside boots, or rubbing mutton tallow
into their cracked hands.
Every Saturday night we popped corn or
made taffy, and Otto Fuchs used to sing, “For
I Am a Cowboy and Know I’ve Done Wrong,”
or, “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairee.” He
had a good baritone voice and always led the
singing when we went to church services at
the sod schoolhouse.
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MY ANTONIA
I can still see those two men sitting on the
bench; Otto’s close-clipped head and Jake’s
shaggy hair slicked flat in front by a wet
comb. I can see the sag of their tired shoulders
against the whitewashed wall. What
good fellows they were, how much they knew,
and how many things they had kept faith
with!
Fuchs had been a cowboy, a stage-driver, a
bar-tender, a miner; had wandered all over
that great Western country and done hard
work everywhere, though, as grandmother
said, he had nothing to show for it. Jake was
duller than Otto. He could scarcely read,
wrote even his name with difficulty, and
he had a violent temper which sometimes
made him behave like a crazy man — tore
him all to pieces and actually made him ill.
But he was so soft-hearted that any one could
impose upon him. If he, as he said, “forgot
himself” and swore before grandmother, he
went about depressed and shamefaced all day.
They were both of them jovial about the cold
in winter and the heat in summer, always
ready to work overtime and to meet emergencies.
It was a matter of pride with them not
to spare themselves. Yet they were the sort
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THE SHIMERDAS
of men who never get on, somehow, or do anything
but work hard for a dollar or two a day.
On those bitter, starlit nights, as we sat
around the old stove that fed us and warmed
us and kept us cheerful, we could hear the
coyotes howling down by the corrals, and their
hungry, wintry cry used to remind the boys
of wonderful animal stories; about gray
wolves and bears in the Rockies, wildcats and
panthers in the Virginia mountains. Sometimes
Fuchs could be persuaded to talk about
the outlaws and desperate characters he had
known. I remember one funny story about
himself that made grandmother, who was
working her bread on the bread-board, laugh
until she wiped her eyes with her bare arm,
her hands being floury. It was like this:—
When Otto left Austria to come to America,
he was asked by one of his relatives to look
after a woman who was crossing on the same
boat, to join her husband in Chicago. The
woman started off with two children, but it
was clear that her family might grow larger
on the journey. Fuchs said he “got on fine
with the kids,” and liked the mother, though
she played a sorry trick on him. In mid-ocean
she proceeded to have not one baby, but three!
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MY ANTONIA
This event made Fuchs the object of undeserved
notoriety, since he was traveling with
her. The steerage stewardess was indignant
with him, the doctor regarded him with suspicion.
The first-cabin passengers, who made
up a purse for the woman, took an embarrassing
interest in Otto, and often inquired
of him about his charge. When the triplets
were taken ashore at New York, he had, as he
said, “to carry some of them.” The trip to
Chicago was even worse than the ocean voyage.
On the train it was very difficult to get
milk for the babies and to keep their bottles
clean. The mother did her best, but no woman,
out of her natural resources, could feed
three babies. The husband, in Chicago, was
working in a furniture factory for modest
wages, and when he met his family at the station
he was rather crushed by the size of it.
He, too, seemed to consider Fuchs in some
fashion to blame. “I was sure glad,” Otto
concluded, “that he did n’t take his hard feeling
out on that poor woman; but he had a
sullen eye for me, all right! Now, did you ever
hear of a young feller’s having such hard luck,
Mrs. Burden?”
Grandmother told him she was sure the
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Lord had remembered these things to his
credit, and had helped him out of many a
scrape when he did n’t realize that he was
being protected by Providence.
X
FOR several weeks after my sleigh-ride, we
heard nothing from the Shimerdas. My sore
throat kept me indoors, and grandmother had
a cold which made the housework heavy for
her. When Sunday came she was glad to have
a day of rest. One night at supper Fuchs told
us he had seen Mr. Shimerda out hunting.
“He’s made himself a rabbit-skin cap, Jim,
and a rabbit-skin collar that he buttons on
outside his coat. They ain’t got but one overcoat
among ’em over there, and they take
turns wearing it. They seem awful scared of
cold, and stick in that hole in the bank like
badgers.”
“All but the crazy boy,” Jake put in. “He
never wears the coat. Krajiek says he’s turrible
strong and can stand anything. I guess
rabbits must be getting scarce in this locality.
Ambrosch come along by the cornfield yesterday
where I was at work and showed me three
prairie dogs he’d shot. He asked me if they
was good to eat. I spit and made a face and
took on, to scare him, but he just looked like
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THE SHIMERDAS
he was smarter’n me and put ’em back in his
sack and walked off.”
Grandmother looked up in alarm and spoke
to grandfather. “Josiah, you don’t suppose
Krajiek would let them poor creatures eat
prairie dogs, do you?”
“You had better go over and see our
neighbors to-morrow, Emmaline,” he replied
gravely.
Fuchs put in a cheerful word and said prairie
dogs were clean beasts and ought to be good
for food, but their family connections were
against them. I asked what he meant, and he
grinned and said they belonged to the rat
family.
When I went downstairs in the morning, I
found grandmother and Jake packing a hamper
basket in the kitchen.
“Now, Jake,” grandmother was saying, “if
you can find that old rooster that got his comb
froze, just give his neck a twist, and we’ll take
him along. There’s no good reason why Mrs.
Shimerda could n’t have got hens from her
neighbors last fall and had a henhouse going
by now. I reckon she was confused and did n’t
know where to begin. I’ve come strange to a
new country myself, but I never forgot hens
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MY ANTONIA
are a good thing to have, no matter what you
don’t have.”
“Just as you say, mam,” said Jake, “but I
hate to think of Krajiek getting a leg of that
old rooster.” He tramped out through the
long cellar and dropped the heavy door behind
him.
After breakfast grandmother and Jake and
I bundled ourselves up and climbed into the
cold front wagon-seat. As we approached the
Shimerdas’ we heard the frosty whine of the
pump and saw Ántonia, her head tied up and
her cotton dress blown about her, throwing
all her weight on the pump-handle as it went
up and down. She heard our wagon, looked
back over her shoulder, and catching up her
pail of water, started at a run for the hole in
the bank.
Jake helped grandmother to the ground,
saying he would bring the provisions after he
had blanketed his horses. We went slowly up
the icy path toward the door sunk in the
draw-side.
a Blue puffs of smoke came from the
stovepipe that stuck out through the grass
and snow, but the wind whisked them roughly
away.
Mrs. Shimerda opened the door before we
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a
drawside
THE SHIMERDAS
knocked and seized grandmother’s hand. She
did not say “How do!” as usual, but at once
began to cry, talking very fast in her own language,
pointing to her feet which were tied
up in rags, and looking about accusingly at
every one.
The old man was sitting on a stump behind
the stove, crouching over as if he were trying
to hide from us. Yulka was on the floor at his
feet, her kitten in her lap. She peeped out
at me and smiled, but, glancing up at her
mother, hid again. Ántonia was washing pans
and dishes in a dark corner. The crazy boy
lay under the only window, stretched on a
gunnysack stuffed with straw. As soon as we
entered he threw a grainsack over the crack at
the bottom of the door. The air in the cave
was stifling, and it was very dark, too. A
lighted lantern, hung over the stove, threw
out a feeble yellow glimmer.
Mrs. Shimerda snatched off the covers of
two barrels behind the door, and made us look
into them. In one there were some potatoes
that had been frozen and were rotting, in the
other was a little pile of flour. Grandmother
murmured something in embarrassment, but
the Bohemian woman laughed scornfully, a
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MY ANTONIA
kind of whinny-laugh, and catching up an
empty coffee-pot from the shelf, shook it at us
with a look positively vindictive.
Grandmother went on talking in her polite
Virginia way, not admitting their stark need
or her own remissness, until Jake arrived with
the hamper, as if in direct answer to Mrs.
Shimerda’s reproaches. Then the poor woman
broke down. She dropped on the floor beside
her crazy son, hid her face on her knees, and
sat crying bitterly. Grandmother paid no
heed to her, but called Ántonia to come and
help empty the basket. Tony left her corner
reluctantly. I had never seen her crushed like
this before.
“You not mind my poor mamenka, Mrs.
Burden. She is so sad,” she whispered, as she
wiped her wet hands on her skirt and took the
things grandmother handed her.
The crazy boy, seeing the food, began to
make soft, gurgling noises and stroked his
stomach. Jake came in again, this time with a
sack of potatoes. Grandmother looked about
in perplexity.
“Have n’t you got any sort of cave or cellar
outside, Ántonia? This is no place to keep vegetables.
How did your potatoes get frozen?”
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THE SHIMERDAS
“We get from Mr. Bushy, at the post-office,
— what he throw out. We got no potatoes,
Mrs. Burden,” Tony admitted mournfully.
When Jake went out, Marek crawled along
the floor and stuffed up the door-crack again.
Then, quietly as a shadow, Mr. Shimerda
came out from behind the stove. He stood
brushing his hand over his smooth gray hair,
as if he were trying to clear away a fog about
his head. He was clean and neat as usual, with
his green neckcloth and his coral pin. He took
grandmother’s arm and led her behind the
stove, to the back of the room. In the rear
wall was another little cave; a round hole, not
much bigger than an oil barrel, scooped out in
the black earth. When I got up on one of the
stools and peered into it, I saw some quilts and
a pile of straw. The old man held the lantern.
“Yulka,” he said in a low, despairing voice,
“Yulka; my Ántonia!”
Grandmother drew back. “You mean they
sleep in there, — your girls?” He bowed his
head.
Tony slipped under his arm. “It is very
cold on the floor, and this is warm like the
badger hole. I like for sleep there,” she insisted
eagerly. “My mamenka have nice bed,
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MY ANTONIA
with pillows from our own geese in Bohemie.
See, Jim?” She pointed to the narrow bunk
which Krajiek had built against the wall for
himself before the Shimerdas came.
Grandmother sighed. “Sure enough, where
would you sleep, dear! I don’t doubt you’re
warm there. You’ll have a better house after
while, Ántonia, and then you’ll forget these
hard times.”
Mr. Shimerda made grandmother sit down
on the only chair and pointed his wife to a
stool beside her. Standing before them with
his hand on Ántonia’s shoulder, he talked in
a low tone, and his daughter translated. He
wanted us to know that they were not beggars
in the old country; he made good wages,
and his family were respected there. He left
Bohemia with more than a thousand dollars
in savings, after their passage money was
paid. He had in some way lost on exchange
in New York, and the railway fare to Nebraska
was more than they had expected.
By the time they paid Krajiek for the land,
and bought his horses and oxen and some old
farm machinery, they had very little money
left. He wished grandmother to know, however,
that he still had some money. If they
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THE SHIMERDAS
could get through until spring came, they
would buy a cow and chickens and plant a
garden, and would then do very well. Ambrosch
and Ántonia were both old enough to
work in the fields, and they were willing to
work. But the snow and the bitter weather
had disheartened them all.
Ántonia explained that her father meant
to build a new house for them in the spring;
he and Ambrosch had already split the logs
for it, but the logs were all buried in the
snow, along the creek where they had been
felled.
While grandmother encouraged and gave
them advice, I sat down on the floor with
Yulka and let her show me her kitten. Marek
slid cautiously toward us and began to exhibit
his webbed fingers. I knew he wanted to
make his queer noises for me — to bark like a
dog or whinny like a horse, — but he did not
dare in the presence of his elders. Marek was
always trying to be agreeable, poor fellow, as
if he had it on his mind that he must make up
for his deficiencies.
Mrs. Shimerda grew more calm and reasonable
before our visit was over, and, while Ántonia
translated, put in a word now and then
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MY ANTONIA
on her own account. The woman had a quick
ear, and caught up phrases whenever she
heard English spoken. As we rose to go, she
opened her wooden chest and brought out a
bag made of bed-ticking, about as long as a
flour sack and half as wide, stuffed full of
something. At sight of it, the crazy boy began
to smack his lips. When Mrs. Shimerda
opened the bag and stirred the contents with
her hand, it gave out a salty, earthy smell,
very pungent, even among the other odors of
that cave. She measured a teacup full, tied
it up in a bit of sacking, and presented it ceremoniously
to grandmother.
“For cook,” she announced. “Little now;
be very much when cook,” spreading out her
hands as if to indicate that the pint would
swell to a gallon. “Very good. You no have
in this country. All things for eat better in
my country.”
“Maybe so, Mrs. Shimerda,” grandmother
said drily. “I can’t say but I prefer our bread
to yours, myself.”
Ántonia undertook to explain. “This very
good, Mrs. Burden,” — she clasped her hands
as if she could not express how good, — “it
make very much when you cook, like what
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THE SHIMERDAS
my mama say. Cook with rabbit, cook with
chicken, in the gravy, — oh, so good!”
All the way home grandmother and Jake
talked about how easily good Christian people
could forget they were their brothers’ keepers.
“I will say, Jake, some of our brothers and
sisters are hard to keep. Where’s a body to
begin, with these people? They’re wanting
in everything, and most of all in horse-sense.
Nobody can give ’em that, I guess. Jimmy,
here, is about as able to take over a homestead
as they are. Do you reckon that boy Ambrosch
has any real push in him?”
“He’s a worker, all right, mam, and he’s
got some ketch-on about him; but he’s a mean
one. Folks can be mean enough to get on in
this world; and then, ag’in, they can be too
mean.”
That night, while grandmother was getting
supper, we opened the package Mrs. Shimerda
had given her. It was full of little brown chips
that looked like the shavings of some root.
They were as light as feathers, and the most
noticeable thing about them was their penetrating,
earthy odor. We could not determine
whether they were animal or vegetable.
“They might be dried meat from some
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MY ANTONIA
queer beast, Jim. They ain’t dried fish, and
they never grew on stalk or vine. I’m afraid
of ’em. Anyhow, I should n’t want to eat anything
that had been shut up for months with
old clothes and goose pillows.”
She threw the package into the stove, but I
bit off a corner of one of the chips I held in my
hand, and chewed it tentatively. I never forgot
the strange taste; though it was many
years before I knew that those little brown
shavings, which the Shimerdas had brought
so far and treasured so jealously, were dried
mushrooms. They had been gathered, probably,
in some deep Bohemian forest . . . . . . .
XI
DURING the week before Christmas, Jake was
the most important person of our household,
for he was to go to town and do all our Christmas
shopping. But on the 21st of December,
the snow began to fall. The flakes came down
so thickly that from the sitting-room windows
I could not see beyond the windmill —
its frame looked dim and gray, unsubstantial
like a shadow. The snow did not stop falling
all day, or during the night that followed. The
cold was not severe, but the storm was quiet
and resistless. The men could not go farther
than the barns and corral. They sat about
the house most of the day as if it were Sunday;
greasing their boots, mending their suspenders,
plaiting whiplashes.
On the morning of the 22d, grandfather announced
at breakfast that it would be impossible
to go to Black Hawk for Christmas purchases.
Jake was sure he could get through
on horseback, and bring home our things in
saddle-bags; but grandfather told him the
roads would be obliterated, and a newcomer
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MY ANTONIA
in the country would be lost ten times over.
Anyway, he would never allow one of his
horses to be put to such a strain.
We decided to have a country Christmas,
without any help from town. I had wanted
to get some picture-books for Yulka and Ántonia;
even Yulka was able to read a little
now. Grandmother took me into the ice-cold
storeroom, where she had some bolts of gingham
and sheeting. She cut squares of cotton
cloth and we sewed them together into a book.
We bound it between pasteboards, which I
covered with brilliant calico, representing
scenes from a circus. For two days I sat at
the dining-room table, pasting this book full
of pictures for Yulka. We had files of those
good old family magazines which used to publish
colored lithographs of popular paintings,
and I was allowed to use some of these. I took
“Napoleon Announcing the Divorce to Josephine”
for my frontispiece. On the white
pages I grouped Sunday-School cards and
advertising cards which I had brought from
my “old country.” Fuchs got out the old
candle-moulds and made tallow candles.
Grandmother hunted up her fancy cake-cutters
and baked gingerbread men and roosters,
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THE SHIMERDAS
which we decorated with burnt sugar and red
cinnamon drops.
On the day before Christmas, Jake packed
the things we were sending to the Shimerdas
in his saddle-bags and set off on grandfather’s
gray gelding. When he mounted his horse at
the door, I saw that he had a hatchet slung to
his belt, and he gave grandmother a meaning
look which told me he was planning a surprise
for me. That afternoon I watched long and
eagerly from the sitting-room window. At last
I saw a dark spot moving on the west hill,
beside the half-buried cornfield, where the sky
was taking on a coppery flush from the sun
that did not quite break through. I put on my
cap and ran out to meet Jake. When I got to
the pond I could see that he was bringing in a
little cedar tree across his pommel. He used
to help my father cut Christmas trees for me
in Virginia, and he had not forgotten how
much I liked them.
By the time we had placed the cold, freshsmelling
little tree in a corner of the sittingroom,
it was already Christmas Eve. After
supper we all gathered there, and even grandfather,
reading his paper by the table, looked
up with friendly interest now and then.
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MY ANTONIA
The cedar was about five feet high and very
shapely. We hung it with the gingerbread
animals, strings of popcorn, and bits of candle
which Fuchs had fitted into pasteboard sockets.
Its real splendors, however, came from
the most unlikely place in the world — from
Otto’s cowboy trunk. I had never seen anything
in that trunk but old boots and spurs
and pistols, and a fascinating mixture of yellow
leather thongs, cartridges, and shoemaker’s
wax. From under the lining he now produced
a collection of brilliantly colored paper
figures, several inches high and stiff enough
to stand alone. They had been sent to him
year after year, by his old mother in Austria.
There was a bleeding heart, in tufts of paper
lace; there were the three kings, gorgeously appareled,
and the ox and the ass and the shepherds;
there was the Baby in the manger, and a
group of angels, singing; there were camels and
leopards, held by the black slaves of the three
kings. Our tree became the talking tree of the
fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds
in its branches. Grandmother said it reminded
her of the Tree of Knowledge. We put sheets
of cotton wool under it for a snow-field, and
Jake’s pocket-mirror for a frozen lake.
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THE SHIMERDAS
I can see them now, exactly as they looked,
working about the table in the lamplight: Jake
with his heavy features, so rudely moulded
that his face seemed, somehow, unfinished;
Otto with his half-ear and the savage scar that
made his upper lip curl so ferociously under
his twisted mustache. As I remember them,
what unprotected faces they were; their very
roughness and violence made them defenseless.
These boys had no practiced manner
behind which they could retreat and hold
people at a distance. They had only their hard
fists to batter at the world with. Otto was
already one of those drifting, case-hardened
laborers who never marry or have children of
their own. Yet he was so fond of children!
XII
ON Christmas morning, when I got down to
the kitchen, the men were just coming in from
their morning chores — the horses and pigs
always had their breakfast before we did.
Jake and Otto shouted “Merry Christmas!”
a
to me, and winked at each other when they
saw the waffle-irons on the stove. Grandfather
came down, wearing a white shirt and his
Sunday coat. Morning prayers were longer
than usual. He read the chapters from St.
Matthew about the birth of Christ, and as
we listened it all seemed like something that
had happened lately, and near at hand. In his
prayer he thanked the Lord for the first
Christmas, and for all that it had meant to the
world ever since. He gave thanks for our food
and comfort, and prayed for the poor and
destitute in great cities, where the struggle
for life was harder than it was here with us.
Grandfather’s prayers were often very interesting.
He had the gift of simple and moving
expression. Because he talked so little, his
words had a peculiar force; they were not
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a Christmas”!
THE SHIMERDAS
worn dull from constant use. His prayers reflected
what he was thinking about at the
time, and it was chiefly through them that
we got to know his feelings and his views
about things.
After we sat down to our waffles and sausage,
Jake told us how pleased the Shimerdas
had been with their presents; even Ambrosch
was friendly and went to the creek with
him to cut the Christmas tree. It was a soft
gray day outside, with heavy clouds working
across the sky, and occasional squalls of
snow. There were always odd jobs to be done
about the barn on holidays, and the men were
busy until afternoon. Then Jake and I played
dominoes, while Otto wrote a long letter home
to his mother. He always wrote to her on
Christmas Day, he said, no matter where he
was, and no matter how long it had been
since his last letter. All afternoon he sat in
the dining-room. He would write for a while,
then sit idle, his clenched fist lying on the
table, his eyes following the pattern of the oilcloth.
He spoke and wrote his own language
so seldom that it came to him awkwardly.
His effort to remember entirely absorbed him.
At about four o’clock a visitor appeared:
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MY ANTONIA
Mr. Shimerda, wearing his rabbit-skin cap
and collar, and new mittens his wife had
knitted. He had come to thank us for the
presents, and for all grandmother’s kindness
to his family. Jake and Otto joined us from
the basement and we sat about the stove,
enjoying the deepening gray of the winter afternoon
and the atmosphere of comfort and
security in my grandfather’s house. This feeling
seemed completely to take possession of
Mr. Shimerda. I suppose, in the crowded
clutter of their cave, the old man had come to
believe that peace and order had vanished
from the earth, or existed only in the old world
he had left so far behind. He sat still and passive,
his head resting against the back of the
wooden rocking-chair, his hands relaxed upon
the arms. His face had a look of weariness
and pleasure, like that of sick people when
they feel relief from pain. Grandmother insisted
on his drinking a glass of Virginia applebrandy
after his long walk in the cold, and
when a faint flush came up in his cheeks, his
features might have been cut out of a shell,
they were so transparent. He said almost
nothing, and smiled rarely; but as he rested
there we all had a sense of his utter content.
98

THE SHIMERDAS
As it grew dark, I asked whether I might
light the Christmas tree before the lamp was
brought. When the candle ends sent up their
conical yellow flames, all the colored figures
from Austria stood out clear and full of
meaning against the green boughs. Mr. Shimerda
rose, crossed himself, and quietly knelt
down before the tree, his head sunk forward.
His long body formed a letter “S.” I saw
grandmother look apprehensively at grandfather.
He was rather narrow in religious
matters, and sometimes spoke out and hurt
people’s feelings. There had been nothing
strange about the tree before, but now, with
some one kneeling before it, — images, candles,
. . . Grandfather merely put his fingertips
to his brow and bowed his venerable
head, thus Protestantizing the atmosphere.
We persuaded our guest to stay for supper
with us. He needed little urging. As we sat
down to the table, it occurred to me that he
liked to look at us, and that our faces were
open books to him. When his deep-seeing
eyes rested on me, I felt as if he were looking
far ahead into the future for me, down the
road I would have to travel.
At nine o’clock Mr. Shimerda lighted one
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MY ANTONIA
of our lanterns and put on his overcoat and
fur collar. He stood in the little entry hall, the
lantern and his fur cap under his arm, shaking
hands with us. When he took grandmother’s
hand, he bent over it as he always did, and
said slowly, “Good wo-man!” He made the
sign of the cross over me, put on his cap and
went off in the dark. As we turned back to
the sitting-room, grandfather looked at me
searchingly. “The prayers of all good people
are good,” he said quietly.
XIII
THE week following Christmas brought in a
thaw, and by New Year’s Day all the world
about us was a broth of gray slush, and the
guttered slope between the windmill and the
barn was running black water. The soft black
earth stood out in patches along the roadsides.
I resumed all my chores, carried in the cobs
and wood and water, and spent the afternoons
at the barn, watching Jake shell corn with a
hand-sheller.
One morning, during this interval of fine
weather, Ántonia and her mother rode over
on one of their shaggy old horses to pay us a
visit. It was the first time Mrs. Shimerda had
been to our house, and she ran about examining
our carpets and curtains and furniture,
all the while commenting upon them to her
daughter in an envious, complaining tone. In
the kitchen she caught up an iron pot that
stood on the back of the stove and said: “You
got many, Shimerdas no got.” I thought it
weak-minded of grandmother to give the pot
to her.
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After dinner, when she was helping to wash
the dishes, she said, tossing her head: “You
got many things for cook. If I got all things
like you, I make much better.”
She was a conceited, boastful old thing, and
even misfortune could not humble her. I was
so annoyed that I felt coldly even toward
Ántonia and listened unsympathetically when
she told me her father was not well.
“My papa sad for the old country. He not
look good. He never make music any more.
At home he play violin all the time; for weddings
and for dance. Here never. When I
beg him for play, he shake his head no. Some
days he take his violin out of his box and make
with his fingers on the strings, like this, but
never he make the music. He don’t like this
kawn-tree.”
“People who don’t like this country ought
to stay at home,” I said severely. “We don’t
make them come here.”
“He not want to come, nev-er!” she burst
out. “My mamenka make him come. All the
time she say: ‘America big country; much
money, much land for my boys, much husband
for my girls.’ My papa, he cry for leave
his old friends what make music with him. He
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THE SHIMERDAS
love very much the man what play the long
horn like this” — she indicated a slide trombone.
“They go to school together and are
friends from boys. But my mama, she want
Ambrosch for be rich, with many cattle.”
“Your mama,” I said angrily, “wants other
people’s things.”
“Your grandfather is rich,” she retorted
fiercely. “Why he not help my papa? Ambrosch
be rich, too, after while, and he pay
back. He is very smart boy. For Ambrosch
my mama come here.”
Ambrosch was considered the important
person in the family. Mrs. Shimerda and
Ántonia always deferred to him, though he
was often surly with them and contemptuous
toward his father. Ambrosch and his mother
had everything their own way. Though Ántonia
loved her father more than she did any
one else, she stood in awe of her elder brother.
After I watched Ántonia and her mother
go over the hill on their miserable horse, carrying
our iron pot with them, I turned to grandmother,
who had taken up her darning, and
said I hoped that snooping old woman would
n’t come to see us any more.
Grandmother chuckled and drove her bright
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MY ANTONIA
needle across a hole in Otto’s sock. “She’s
not old, Jim, though I expect she seems old to
you. No, I would n’t mourn if she never came
again. But, you see, a body never knows what
traits poverty might bring out in ’em. It
makes a woman grasping to see her children
want for things. Now read me a chapter in
‘The Prince of the House of David.’ Let’s
forget the Bohemians.”
We had three weeks of this mild, open
weather. The cattle in the corral ate corn
almost as fast as the men could shell it for
them, and we hoped they would be ready for
an early market. One morning the two big
bulls, Gladstone and Brigham Young, thought
spring had come, and they began to tease and
butt at each other across the barbed wire that
separated them. Soon they got angry. They
bellowed and pawed up the soft earth with
their hoofs, rolling their eyes and tossing their
heads. Each withdrew to a far corner of his
own corral, and then they made for each
other at a gallop. Thud, thud, we could hear
the impact of their great heads, and their
bellowing shook the pans on the kitchen
shelves. Had they not been dehorned, they
would have torn each other to pieces. Pretty
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THE SHIMERDAS
soon the fat steers took it up and began butting
and horning each other. Clearly, the
affair had to be stopped. We all stood by and
watched admiringly while Fuchs rode into the
corral with a pitchfork and prodded the bulls
again and again, finally driving them apart.
The big storm of the winter began on my
eleventh birthday, the 20th of January. When
I went down to breakfast that morning, Jake
and Otto came in white as snow-men, beating
their hands and stamping their feet. They
began to laugh boisterously when they saw
me, calling:—
“You’ve
a
got a birthday present this time,
Jim, and no mistake. They was a full-grown
blizzard ordered for you.”
All day the storm went on. The snow did
not fall this time, it simply spilled out of
heaven, like thousands of feather-beds being
emptied. That afternoon the kitchen was a
carpenter-shop; the men brought in their tools
and made two great wooden shovels with long
handles. Neither grandmother nor I could go
out in the storm, so Jake fed the chickens and
brought in a pitiful contribution of eggs.
Next day our men had to shovel until noon
to reach the barn — and the snow was still
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a You ’ve
MY ANTONIA
falling! There had not been such a storm in
the ten years my grandfather had lived in
Nebraska. He said at dinner that we would
not try to reach the cattle — they were fat
enough to go without their corn for a day or
two; but to-morrow we must feed them and
thaw out their water-tap so that they could
drink. We could not so much as see the corrals,
but we knew the steers were over there,
huddled together under the north bank. Our
ferocious bulls, subdued enough by this time,
were probably warming each other’s backs.
“This’ll take the bile out of ’em!” Fuchs
remarked gleefully.
At noon that day the hens had not been
heard from. After dinner Jake and Otto, their
damp clothes now dried on them, stretched
their stiff arms and plunged again into the
drifts. They made a tunnel under the snow to
the henhouse, with walls so solid that grandmother
and I could walk back and forth in it.
We found the chickens asleep; perhaps they
thought night had come to stay. One old
rooster was stirring about, pecking at the
solid lump of ice in their water-tin. When we
flashed the lantern in their eyes, the hens set
up a great cackling and flew about clumsily,
106
THE SHIMERDAS
scattering down-feathers. The mottled, pinheaded
guinea-hens, always resentful of captivity,
ran screeching out into the tunnel and
tried to poke their ugly, painted faces through
the snow walls. By five o’clock the chores
were done — just when it was time to begin
them all over again! That was a strange, unnatural
sort of day.
XIV
ON the morning of the 22d I wakened with a
start. Before I opened my eyes, I seemed to
know that something had happened. I heard
excited voices in the kitchen — grandmother’s
was so shrill that I knew she must be almost
beside herself. I looked forward to any new
crisis with delight. What could it be, I wondered,
as I hurried into my clothes. Perhaps
the barn had burned; perhaps the cattle had
frozen to death; perhaps a neighbor was lost
in the storm.
Down in the kitchen grandfather was standing
before the stove with his hands behind
him. Jake and Otto had taken off their boots
and were rubbing their woolen socks. Their
clothes and boots were steaming, and they
both looked exhausted. On the bench behind
the stove lay a man, covered up with a blanket.
Grandmother motioned me to the diningroom.
I obeyed reluctantly. I watched her
as she came and went, carrying dishes. Her
lips were tightly compressed and she kept
whispering to herself: “Oh, dear Saviour!”
“Lord, Thou knowest!”
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THE SHIMERDAS
Presently grandfather came in and spoke to
me: “Jimmy, we will not have prayers this
morning, because we have a great deal to do.
Old Mr. Shimerda is dead, and his family are
in great distress. Ambrosch came over here in
the middle of the night, and Jake and Otto
went back with him. The boys have had a
hard night, and you must not bother them
with questions. That is Ambrosch, asleep on
the bench. Come in to breakfast, boys.”
After Jake and Otto had swallowed their
first cup of coffee, they began to talk excitedly,
disregarding grandmother’s warning glances.
I held my tongue, but I listened with all my
ears.
“No, sir,” Fuchs said in answer to a question
from grandfather, “nobody heard the
gun go off. Ambrosch was out with the ox
team, trying to break a road, and the womena
folks was shut up tight in their cave. When
Ambrosch come in it was dark and he did n’t
see nothing, but the oxen acted kind of queer.
One of ’em ripped around and got away from
him — bolted clean out of the stable. His
hands is blistered where the rope run through.
He got a lantern and went back and found
the old man, just as we seen him.”
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a women
MY ANTONIA
“Poor soul, poor soul!” grandmother
groaned. “I’d like to think he never done it.
He was always considerate and un-wishful to
give trouble. How could he forget himself and
bring this on us!”
“I don’t think he was out of his head for a
minute, Mrs. Burden,” Fuchs declared. “He
done everything natural. You know he was
always sort of fixy, and fixy he was to the
last. He shaved after dinner, and washed hisself
all over after the girls was done the dishes.
Ántonia heated the water for him. Then he
put on a clean shirt and clean socks, and after
he was dressed he kissed her and the little one
and took his gun and said he was going out to
hunt rabbits. He must have gone right down
to the barn and done it then. He layed down
on that bunk-bed, close to the ox stalls, where
he always slept. When we found him, everything
was decent except,” — Fuchs wrinkled
his brow and hesitated, — “except what he
could n’t nowise foresee. His coat was hung
on a peg, and his boots was under the bed.
He’d took off that silk neckcloth he always
wore, and folded it smooth and stuck his pin
through it. He turned back his shirt at the
neck and rolled up his sleeves.”
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THE SHIMERDAS
“I don’t see how he could do it!” grandmother
kept saying.
Otto misunderstood her. “Why, mam, it
was simple enough; he pulled the trigger with
his big toe. He layed over on his side and put
the end of the barrel in his mouth, then he
drew up one foot and felt for the trigger. He
found it all right!”
“Maybe he did,” said Jake grimly.
“There’s something mighty queer about it.”
“Now what do you mean, Jake?” grandmother
asked sharply.
“Well, mam, I found Krajiek’s axe under
the manger, and I picks it up and carries it
over to the corpse, and I take my oath it just
fit the gash in the front of the old man’s face.
That there Krajiek had been sneakin’ round,
pale and quiet, and when he seen me examinin’
the axe, he begun whimperin’, ‘My God, man,
don’t do that!’ ‘I reckon I’m a-goin’ to look
into this,’ says I. Then he begun to squeal like
a rat and run about wringin’ his hands.
‘They’ll hang me!’ says he. ‘My God, they’ll
hang me sure!’”
Fuchs spoke up impatiently. “Krajiek’s
gone silly, Jake, and so have you. The old
man would n’t have made all them prepara111
MY ANTONIA
tions for Krajiek to murder him, would he?
It don’t hang together. The gun was right
beside him when Ambrosch found him.”
“Krajiek could ’a’ put it there, could n’t
he?” Jake demanded.
Grandmother broke in excitedly: “See here,
Jake Marpole, don’t you go trying to add murder
to suicide. We’re deep enough in trouble.
Otto reads you too many of them detective
stories.”
“It will be easy to decide all that, Emmaline,”
said grandfather quietly. “If he shot
himself in the way they think, the gash will be
torn from the inside outward.”
“Just so it is, Mr. Burden,” Otto affirmed.
“I seen bunches of hair and stuff sticking to
the poles and straw along the roof. They was
blown up there by gunshot, no question.”
Grandmother told grandfather she meant
to go over to the Shimerdas’
a with him.
“There is nothing you can do,” he said
doubtfully. “The body can’t be touched until
we get the coroner here from Black Hawk, and
that will be a matter of several days, this
weather.”
“Well, I can take them some victuals, anyway,
and say a word of comfort to them poor
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a
Shimerdas
THE SHIMERDAS
little girls. The oldest one was his darling, and
was like a right hand to him. He might have
thought of her. He’s left her alone in a hard
world.” She glanced distrustfully at Ambrosch,
who was now eating his breakfast at
the kitchen table.
Fuchs, although he had been up in the cold
nearly all night, was going to make the long
ride to Black Hawk to fetch the priest and the
coroner. On the gray gelding, our best horse,
he would try to pick his way across the country
with no roads to guide him.
“Don’t you worry about me, Mrs. Burden,”
he said cheerfully, as he put on a second pair
of socks. “I’ve got a good nose for directions,
and I never did need much sleep. It’s the gray
I’m worried about. I’ll save him what I can,
but it’ll strain him, as sure as I’m telling
you!”
“This is no time to be over-considerate of
animals, Otto; do the best you can for yourself.
Stop at the Widow Steavens’s for dinner.
She’s a good woman, and she’ll do well by
you.”
After Fuchs rode away, I was left with Ambrosch.
I saw a side of him I had not seen before.
He was deeply, even slavishly, devout.
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MY ANTONIA
He did not say a word all morning, but sat
with his rosary in his hands, praying, now
silently, now aloud. He never looked away
from his beads, nor lifted his hands except
to cross himself. Several times the poor boy
fell asleep where he sat, wakened with a start,
and began to pray again.
No wagon could be got to the Shimerdas’
until a road was broken, and that would be a
day’s job. Grandfather came from the barn
on one of our big black horses, and Jake lifted
grandmother up behind him. She wore her
black hood and was bundled up in shawls.
Grandfather tucked his bushy white beard inside
his overcoat. They looked very Biblical
as they set off, I thought. Jake and Ambrosch
followed them, riding the other black and my
pony, carrying bundles of clothes that we had
got together for Mrs. Shimerda. I watched
them go past the pond and over the hill by
the drifted cornfield. Then, for the first time,
I realized that I was alone in the house.
I felt a considerable extension of power and
authority, and was anxious to acquit myself
creditably. I carried in cobs and wood from
the long cellar, and filled both the stoves. I
remembered that in the hurry and excitement
114
THE SHIMERDAS
of the morning nobody had thought of the
chickens, and the eggs had not been gathered.
Going out through the tunnel, I gave the hens
their corn, emptied the ice from their drinkingpan,
and filled it with water. After the cat
had had his milk, I could think of nothing else
to do, and I sat down to get warm. The quiet
was delightful, and the ticking clock was the
most pleasant of companions. I got “Robinson
Crusoe” and tried to read, but his life on
the island seemed dull compared with ours.
Presently, as I looked with satisfaction about
our comfortable sitting-room, it flashed upon
me that if Mr. Shimerda’s soul were lingering
about in this world at all, it would be here, in
our house, which had been more to his liking
than any other in the neighborhood. I remembered
his contented face when he was with us
on Christmas Day. If he could have lived
with us, this terrible thing would never have
happened.
I knew it was homesickness that had killed
Mr. Shimerda, and I wondered whether his
released spirit would not eventually find its
way back to his own country. I thought of
how far it was to Chicago, and then to Virginia,
to Baltimore, — and then the great
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MY ANTONIA
wintry ocean. No, he would not at once set
out upon that long journey. Surely, his exhausted
spirit, so tired of cold and crowding
and the struggle with the ever-falling snow,
was resting now in this quiet house.
I was not frightened, but I made no noise.
I did not wish to disturb him. I went softly
down to the kitchen which, tucked away so
snugly underground, always seemed to me the
heart and center of the house. There, on the
bench behind the stove, I thought and thought
about Mr. Shimerda. Outside I could hear the
wind singing over hundreds of miles of snow.
It was as if I had let the old man in out of the
tormenting winter, and were sitting there with
him. I went over all that Ántonia had ever
told me about his life before he came to
this country; how he used to play the fiddle
at weddings and dances. I thought about the
friends he had mourned to leave, the trombone-player,
the great forest full of game, —
belonging, as Ántonia said, to the “nobles,” —
from which she and her mother used to steal
wood on moonlight nights. There was a white
hart that lived in that forest, and if any one
killed it, he would be hanged, she said. Such
vivid pictures came to me that they might
116
THE SHIMERDAS
have been Mr. Shimerda’s memories, not yet
faded out from the air in which they had
haunted him.
It had begun to grow dark when my household
returned, and grandmother was so tired
that she went at once to bed. Jake and I got
supper, and while we were washing the dishes
he told me in loud whispers about the state of
things over at the Shimerdas’. Nobody could
touch the body until the coroner came. If
any one did, something terrible would happen,
apparently. The dead man was frozen
through, “just as stiff as a dressed turkey
you hang out to freeze,” Jake said. The horses
and oxen would not go into the barn until he
was frozen so hard that there was no longer
any smell of blood. They were stabled there
now, with the dead man, because there was
no other place to keep them. A lighted lantern
was kept hanging over Mr. Shimerda’s
head. Ántonia and Ambrosch and the mother
took turns going down to pray beside him.
The crazy boy went with them, because he did
not feel the cold. I believed he felt cold as
much as any one else, but he liked to be
thought insensible to it. He was always coveting
distinction, poor Marek!
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MY ANTONIA
Ambrosch, Jake said, showed more human
feeling than he would have supposed him capable
of; but he was chiefly concerned about
getting a priest, and about his father’s soul,
which he believed was in a place of torment
and would remain there until his family and
the priest had prayed a great deal for him.
“As I understand it,” Jake concluded, “it will
be a matter of years to pray his soul out of
Purgatory, and right now he’s in torment.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said stoutly. “I almost
know it is n’t true.” I did not, of course,
say that I believed he had been in that very
kitchen all afternoon, on his way back to his
own country. Nevertheless, after I went to
bed, this idea of punishment and Purgatory
came back on me crushingly. I remembered
the account of Dives in torment, and shuddered.
But Mr. Shimerda had not been rich
and selfish; he had only been so unhappy that
he could not live any longer.
XV
OTTO FUCHS got back from Black Hawk at
noon the next day. He reported that the coroner
would reach the Shimerdas’ sometime
that afternoon, but the missionary priest was
at the other end of his parish, a hundred miles
away, and the trains were not running. Fuchs
had got a few hours’ sleep at the livery barn in
town, but he was afraid the gray gelding had
strained himself. Indeed, he was never the
same horse afterward. That long trip through
the deep snow had taken all the endurance
out of him.
Fuchs brought home with him a stranger, a
young Bohemian who had taken a homestead
near Black Hawk, and who came on his only
horse to help his fellow-countrymen in their
trouble. That was the first time I ever saw
Anton Jelinek. He was a strapping young
fellow in the early twenties then, handsome,
warm-hearted, and full of life, and he came to
us like a miracle in the midst of that grim
business. I remember exactly how he strode
into our kitchen in his felt boots and long wolf119
MY ANTONIA
skin coat, his eyes and cheeks bright with the
cold. At sight of grandmother, he snatched
off his fur cap, greeting her in a deep, rolling
voice which seemed older than he.
“I want to thank you very much, Mrs. Burden,
for that you are so kind to poor strangers
from my kawn-tree.”
He did not hesitate like a farmer boy, but
looked one eagerly in the eye when he spoke.
Everything about him was warm and spontaneous.
He said he would have come to see
the Shimerdas before, but he had hired out to
husk corn all the fall, and since winter began
he had been going to the school by the mill,
to learn English, along with the little children.
He told me he had a nice “lady-teacher” and
that he liked to go to school.
At dinner grandfather talked to Jelinek
more than he usually did to strangers.
“Will they be much disappointed because
we cannot get a priest?” he asked.
Jelinek looked serious. “Yes, sir, that is very
bad for them. Their father has done a great
sin,” he looked straight at grandfather. “Our
Lord has said that.”
Grandfather seemed to like his frankness.
“We believe that, too, Jelinek. But we be120
THE SHIMERDAS
lieve that Mr. Shimerda’s soul will come to its
Creator as well off without a priest. We believe
that Christ is our only intercessor.”
The young man shook his head. “I know
how you think. My teacher at the school has
explain. But I have seen too much. I believe
in prayer for the dead. I have seen too much.”
We asked him what he meant.
He glanced around the table. “You want
I shall tell you? When I was a little boy like
this one, I begin to help the priest at the altar.
I make my first communion very young; what
the Church teach seem plain to me. By ’n’ by
war-times come, when the Austrians
3
fight us.
We have very many soldiers in camp near
my village, and the cholera break out in that
camp, and the men die like flies. All day long
our priest go about there to give the Sacrament
to dying men, and I go with him to carry
the vessels with the Holy Sacrament. Everybody
that go near that camp catch the sickness
but me and the priest. But we have no
sickness, we have no fear, because we carry
that blood and that body of Christ, and it
preserve us.” He paused, looking at grandfather.
“That I know, Mr. Burden, for it
happened to myself. All the soldiers know,
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MY ANTONIA
too. When we walk along the road, the old
priest and me, we meet all the time soldiers
marching and officers on horse. All those
officers, when they see what I carry under the
cloth, pull up their horses and kneel down on
the ground in the road until we pass. So I feel
very bad for my kawntree-man to die without
the Sacrament, and to die in a bad way for his
soul, and I feel sad for his family.”
We had listened attentively. It was impossible
not to admire his frank, manly faith.
“I am always glad to meet a young man
who thinks seriously about these things,” said
grandfather, “and I would never be the one
to say you were not in God’s care when you
were among the soldiers.”
After dinner it was decided that young
Jelinek should hook our two strong black
farmhorses to the scraper and break a road
through to the Shimerdas’, so that a wagon
could go when it was necessary. Fuchs, who
was the only cabinet-maker in the neighborhood,
was set to work on a coffin.
Jelinek put on his long wolfskin coat, and
when we admired it, he told us that he had
shot and skinned the coyotes, and the young
man who “batched” with him, Jan Bouska,
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THE SHIMERDAS
who had been a fur-worker in Vienna, made
the coat. From the windmill I watched Jelinek
come out of the barn with the blacks, and
work his way up the hillside toward the cornfield.
Sometimes he was completely hidden
by the clouds of snow that rose about him;
then he and the horses would emerge black
and shining.
Our heavy carpenter’s bench had to be
brought from the barn and carried down into
the kitchen. Fuchs selected boards from a
pile of planks grandfather had hauled out from
town in the fall to make a new floor for the
oats bin. When at last the lumber and tools
were assembled, and the doors were closed
again and the cold drafts shut out, grandfather
rode away to meet the coroner at the
Shimerdas’, and Fuchs took off his coat and
settled down to work. I sat on his work-table
and watched him. He did not touch his tools
at first, but figured for a long while on a piece
of paper, and measured the planks and made
marks on them. While he was thus engaged, he
whistled softly to himself, or teasingly pulled
at his half-ear. Grandmother moved about
quietly, so as not to disturb him. At last he
folded his ruler and turned a cheerful face to us.
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“The hardest part of my job’s done,” he
announced. “It’s the head end of it that
comes hard with me, especially when I’m out
of practice. The last time I made one of
these, Mrs. Burden,” he continued, as he
sorted and tried his chisels, “was for a fellow
in the Black Tiger mine, up above Silverton,
Colorado. The mouth of that mine goes right
into the face of the cliff, and they used to put
us in a bucket and run us over on a trolley
and shoot us into the shaft. The bucket traveled
across a box cañon three hundred feet
deep, and about a third full of water. Two
Swedes had fell out of that bucket once, and
hit the water, feet down. If you’ll believe it,
they went to work the next day. You can’t
kill a Swede. But in my time a little Eyetalian
tried the high dive, and it turned out
different with him. We was snowed in then,
like we are now, and I happened to be the only
man in camp that could make a coffin for him.
It’s a handy thing to know, when you knock
about like I’ve done.”
“We’d be hard put to it now, if you did n’t
know, Otto,” grandmother said.
“Yes, ’m,” Fuchs admitted with modest
pride. “So few folks does know how to make
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THE SHIMERDAS
a good tight box that’ll turn water. I sometimes
wonder if there’ll be anybody about to
do it for me. However, I’m not at all particular
that way.”
All afternoon, wherever one went in the
house, one could hear the panting wheeze of
the saw or the pleasant purring of the plane.
They were such cheerful noises, seeming to
promise new things for living people: it was a
pity that those freshly planed pine boards
were to be put underground so soon. The
lumber was hard to work because it was full
of frost, and the boards gave off a sweet
smell of pine woods, as the heap of yellow
shavings grew higher and higher. I wondered
why Fuchs had not stuck to cabinet-work, he
settled down to it with such ease and content.
He handled the tools as if he liked the feel
of them; and when he planed, his hands went
back and forth over the boards in an eager,
beneficent way as if he were blessing them.
He broke out now and then into German
hymns, as if this occupation brought back
old times to him.
At four o’clock Mr. Bushy, the postmaster,
with another neighbor who lived east of us,
stopped in to get warm. They were on their
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MY ANTONIA
way to the Shimerdas’. The news of what had
happened over there had somehow got abroad
through the snow-blocked country. Grandmother
gave the visitors sugar-cakes and hot
coffee. Before these callers were gone, the
brother of the Widow Steavens, who lived on
the Black Hawk road, drew up at our door,
and after him came the father of the German
family, our nearest neighbors on the south.
They dismounted and joined us in the diningroom.
They were all eager for any details
about the suicide, and they were greatly concerned
as to where Mr. Shimerda would be
buried. The nearest Catholic cemetery was
at Black Hawk, and it might be weeks before a
wagon could get so far. Besides, Mr. Bushy
and grandmother were sure that a man who
had killed himself could not be buried in a
Catholic graveyard. There was a buryingground
over by the Norwegian church, west
of Squaw Creek; perhaps the Norwegians
would take Mr. Shimerda in.
After our visitors rode away in single file
over the hill, we returned to the kitchen.
Grandmother began to make the icing for a
chocolate cake, and Otto again filled the house
with the exciting, expectant song of the plane.
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THE SHIMERDAS
One pleasant thing about this time was that
everybody talked more than usual. I had
never heard the postmaster say anything but
“Only papers, to-day,” or, “I’ve got a sackful
of mail for ye,” until this afternoon. Grandmother
always talked, dear woman; to herself
or to the Lord, if there was no one else to
listen; but grandfather was naturally taciturn,
and Jake and Otto were often so tired
after supper that I used to feel as if I were
surrounded by a wall of silence. Now every
one seemed eager to talk. That afternoon
Fuchs told me story after story; about the
Black Tiger mine, and about violent deaths
and casual buryings, and the queer fancies of
dying men. You never really knew a man, he
said, until you saw him die. Most men were
game, and went without a grudge.
The postmaster, going home, stopped to
say that grandfather would bring the coroner
back with him to spend the night. The officers
of the Norwegian church, he told us, had held
a meeting and decided that the Norwegian
graveyard could not extend its hospitality to
Mr. Shimerda.
Grandmother was indignant. “If these foreigners
are so clannish, Mr. Bushy, we’ll have
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MY ANTONIA
to have an American graveyard that will be
more liberal-minded. I’ll get right after Josiah
to start one in the spring. If anything was to
happen to me, I don’t want the Norwegians
holding inquisitions over me to see whether
I’m good enough to be laid amongst ’em.”
Soon grandfather returned, bringing with
him Anton Jelinek, and that important person,
the coroner. He was a mild, flurried old man,
a Civil War veteran, with one sleeve hanging
empty. He seemed to find this case very perplexing,
and said if it had not been for grandfather
he would have sworn out a warrant
against Krajiek. “The way he acted, and the
way his axe fit the wound, was enough to
convict any man.”
Although it was perfectly clear that Mr.
Shimerda had killed himself, Jake and the
coroner thought something ought to be done
to Krajiek because he behaved like a guilty
man. He was badly frightened, certainly, and
perhaps he even felt some stirrings of remorse
for his indifference to the old man’s misery
and loneliness.
At supper the men ate like vikings, and the
chocolate cake, which I had hoped would
linger on until to-morrow in a mutilated
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THE SHIMERDAS
condition, disappeared on the second round.
They talked excitedly about where they
should bury Mr. Shimerda; I gathered that
the neighbors were all disturbed and shocked
about something. It developed that Mrs.
Shimerda and Ambrosch wanted the old man
buried on the southwest corner of their own
land; indeed, under the very stake that
marked the corner. Grandfather had explained
to Ambrosch that some day, when the
country was put under fence and the roads
were confined to section lines, two roads would
cross exactly on that corner. But Ambrosch
only said, “It makes no matter.”
Grandfather asked Jelinek whether in the
old country there was some superstition to the
effect that a suicide must be buried at the
cross-roads.
Jelinek said he did n’t know; he seemed to
remember hearing there had once been such
a custom in Bohemia. “Mrs. Shimerda is
made up her mind,” he added. “I try to persuade
her, and say it looks bad for her to
all the neighbors; but she say so it must be.
‘There I will bury him, if I dig the grave
myself,’ she say. I have to promise her I help
Ambrosch make the grave to-morrow.”
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Grandfather smoothed his beard and looked
judicial. “I don’t know whose wish should
decide the matter, if not hers. But if she
thinks she will live to see the people of this
country ride over that old man’s head, she is
mistaken.”
XVI
MR. SHIMERDA lay dead in the barn four days,
and on the fifth they buried him. All day
Friday Jelinek was off with Ambrosch digging
the grave, chopping out the frozen earth with
old axes. On Saturday we breakfasted before
daylight and got into the wagon with the
coffin. Jake and Jelinek went ahead on horseback
to cut the body loose from the pool of
blood in which it was frozen fast to the ground.
When grandmother and I went into the
Shimerdas’ house, we found the women-folk
alone; Ambrosch and Marek were at the
barn. Mrs. Shimerda sat crouching by the
stove, Ántonia was washing dishes. When
she saw me she ran out of her dark corner and
threw her arms around me. “Oh, Jimmy,” she
sobbed, “what you tink for my lovely papa!”
It seemed to me that I could feel her heart
breaking as she clung to me.
Mrs. Shimerda, sitting on the stump by the
stove, kept looking over her shoulder toward
the door while the neighbors were arriving.
They came on horseback, all except the post131
MY ANTONIA
master, who brought his family in a wagon
over the only broken wagon-trail. The Widow
Steavens rode up from her farm eight miles
down the Black Hawk road. The cold drove
the women into the cave-house, and it was
soon crowded. A fine, sleety snow was beginning
to fall, and every one was afraid of
another storm and anxious to have the burial
over with.
Grandfather and Jelinek came to tell Mrs.
Shimerda that it was time to start. After
bundling her mother up in clothes the neighbors
had brought, Ántonia put on an old cape
from our house and the rabbit-skin hat her
father had made for her. Four men carried
Mr. Shimerda’s box up the hill; Krajiek slunk
along behind them. The coffin was too wide
for the door, so it was put down on the slope
outside. I slipped out from the cave and
looked at Mr. Shimerda. He was lying on
his side, with his knees drawn up. His body
was draped in a black shawl, and his head
was bandaged in white muslin, like a mummy’s;
one of his long, shapely hands lay out
on the black cloth; that was all one could see
of him.
Mrs. Shimerda came out and placed an open
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THE SHIMERDAS
prayer-book against the body, making the sign
of the cross on the bandaged head with her
fingers. Ambrosch knelt down and made the
same gesture, and after him Ántonia and
Marek. Yulka hung back. Her mother
pushed her forward, and kept saying something
to her over and over. Yulka knelt
down, shut her eyes, and put out her hand
a little way, but she drew it back and began
to cry wildly. She was afraid to touch the
bandage. Mrs. Shimerda caught her by the
shoulders and pushed her toward the coffin,
but grandmother interfered.
“No, Mrs. Shimerda,” she said firmly, “I
won’t stand by and see that child frightened
into spasms. She is too little to understand
what you want of her. Let her alone.”
At a look from grandfather, Fuchs and Jelinek
placed the lid on the box, and began to
nail it down over Mr. Shimerda. I was afraid
to look at Ántonia. She put her arms round
Yulka and held the little girl close to her.
The coffin was put into the wagon. We
drove slowly away, against the fine, icy snow
which cut our faces like a sand-blast. When
we reached the grave, it looked a very little
spot in that snow-covered waste. The men
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took the coffin to the edge of the hole and
lowered it with ropes. We stood about watching
them, and the powdery snow lay without
melting on the caps and shoulders of the
men and the shawls of the women. Jelinek
spoke in a persuasive tone to Mrs. Shimerda,
and then turned to grandfather.
“She says, Mr. Burden, she is very glad if
you can make some prayer for him here in
English, for the neighbors to understand.”
Grandmother looked anxiously at grandfather.
He took off his hat, and the other men
did likewise. I thought his prayer remarkable.
I still remember it. He began, “Oh, great and
just God, no man among us knows what the
sleeper knows, nor is it for us to judge what
lies between him and Thee.” He prayed that
if any man there had been remiss toward the
stranger come to a far country, God would
forgive him and soften his heart. He recalled
the promises to the widow and the fatherless,
and asked God to smooth the way before this
widow and her children, and to “incline the
hearts of men to deal justly with her.” In
closing, he said we were leaving Mr. Shimerda
at “Thy judgment seat, which is also Thy
mercy seat.”
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All the time he was praying, grandmother
watched him through the black fingers of her
glove, and when he said “Amen,” I thought
she looked satisfied with him. She turned
to Otto and whispered, “Can’t you start a
hymn, Fuchs? It would seem less heathenish.”
Fuchs glanced about to see if there was general
approval of her suggestion, then began,
“Jesus, Lover of my Soul,” and all the men
and women took it up after him. Whenever I
have heard the hymn since, it has made me
remember that white waste and the little
group of people; and the bluish air, full of fine,
eddying snow, like long veils flying:—
“While the nearer waters roll,
While the tempest still is high.”
. . .
Years afterward, when the open-grazing
days were over, and the red grass had been
ploughed under and under until it had almost
disappeared from the prairie; when all the
fields were under fence, and the roads no
longer ran about like wild things, but followed
the surveyed section-lines, Mr. Shimerda’s
grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence
around it, and an unpainted wooden cross.
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As grandfather had predicted, Mrs. Shimerda
never saw the roads going over his head. The
road from the north curved a little to the east
just there, and the road from the west swung
out a little to the south; so that the grave,
with its tall red grass that was never mowed,
was like a little island; and at twilight, under
a new moon or the clear evening star, the
dusty roads used to look like soft gray rivers
flowing past it. I never came upon the place
without emotion, and in all that country it
was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim
superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had
put the grave there; and still more I loved
the spirit that could not carry out the sentence
— the error from the surveyed lines, the
clemency of the soft earth roads along which
the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset.
Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross,
I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.
XVII
WHEN spring came, after that hard winter,
one could not get enough of the nimble air.
Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness
that winter was over. There were
none of the signs of spring for which I used
to watch in Virginia, no budding woods or
blooming gardens. There was only — spring
itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness,
the vital essence of it everywhere; in the sky,
in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and
in the warm, high wind — rising suddenly,
sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like
a big puppy that pawed you and then lay
down to be petted. If I had been tossed down
blindfold on that red prairie, I should have
known that it was spring.
Everywhere now there was the smell of
burning grass. Our neighbors burned off their
pasture before the new grass made a start,
so that the fresh growth would not be mixed
with the dead stand of last year. Those light,
swift fires, running about the country, seemed
a part of the same kindling that was in the air.
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MY ANTONIA
The Shimerdas were in their new log house
by then. The neighbors had helped them to
build it in March. It stood directly in front
of their old cave, which they used as a cellar.
The family were now fairly equipped to begin
their struggle with the soil. They had four
comfortable rooms to live in, a new windmill,
— bought on credit, — a chicken-house and
poultry. Mrs. Shimerda had paid grandfather
ten dollars for a milk cow, and was to give him
fifteen more as soon as they harvested their
first crop.
When I rode up to the Shimerdas’ one
bright windy afternoon in April, Yulka ran
out to meet me. It was to her, now, that I
gave reading lessons; Ántonia was busy with
other things. I tied my pony and went into
the kitchen where Mrs. Shimerda was baking
bread, chewing poppy seeds as she worked.
By this time she could speak enough English
to ask me a great many questions about
what our men were doing in the fields. She
seemed to think that my elders withheld helpful
information, and that from me she might
get valuable secrets. On this occasion she
asked me very craftily when grandfather expected
to begin planting corn. I told her, add138
THE SHIMERDAS
ing that he thought we should have a dry
spring and that the corn would not be held
back by too much rain, as it had been last
year.
She gave me a shrewd glance. “He not
Jesus,” she blustered; “he not know about
the wet and the dry.”
I did not answer her; what was the use? As
I sat waiting for the hour when Ambrosch
and Ántonia would return from the fields,
I watched Mrs. Shimerda at her work. She
took from the oven a coffee-cake which she
wanted to keep warm for supper, and wrapped
it in a quilt stuffed with feathers. I have
seen her put even a roast goose in this quilt to
keep it hot. When the neighbors were there
building the new house they saw her do this,
and the story got abroad that the Shimerdas
kept their food in their feather beds.
When the sun was dropping low, Ántonia
came up the big south draw with her team.
How much older she had grown in eight
months! She had come to us a child, and
now she was a tall, strong young girl, although
her fifteenth birthday had just slipped
by. I ran out and met her as she brought her
horses up to the windmill to water them. She
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MY ANTONIA
wore the boots her father had so thoughtfully
taken off before he shot himself, and his old
fur cap. Her outgrown cotton dress switched
about her calves, over the boot-tops. She
kept her sleeves rolled up all day, and her
arms and throat were burned as brown as a
sailor’s. Her neck came up strongly out of
her shoulders, like the bole of a tree out of the
turf. One sees that draft-horse neck among
the peasant women in all old countries.
She greeted me gayly, and began at once to
tell me how much ploughing she had done
that day. Ambrosch, she said, was on the
north quarter, breaking sod with the oxen.
“Jim, you ask Jake how much he ploughed
to-day. I don’t want that Jake get more done
in one day than me. I want we have very
much corn this fall.”
While the horses drew in the water, and
nosed each other, and then drank again, Ántonia
sat down on the windmill step and
rested her head on her hand. “You see the
big prairie fire from your place last night? I
hope your grandpa ain’t lose no stacks?”
“No, we did n’t. I came to ask you something,
Tony. Grandmother wants to know if
you can’t go to the term of school that begins
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THE SHIMERDAS
next week over at the sod schoolhouse. She
says there’s a good teacher, and you’d
a
learn
a lot.”
Ántonia stood up, lifting and dropping her
shoulders as if they were stiff. “I ain’t got
time to learn. I can work like mans now.
My mother can’t say no more how Ambrosch
do all and nobody to help him. I can work as
much as him. School is all right for little boys.
I help make this land one good farm.”
She clucked to her team and started for
the barn. I walked beside her, feeling vexed.
Was she going to grow up boastful like her
mother, I wondered? Before we reached the
stable, I felt something tense in her silence,
and glancing up I saw that she was crying.
She turned her face from me and looked off
at the red streak of dying light, over the dark
prairie.
I climbed up into the loft and threw down
the hay for her, while she unharnessed her
team. We walked slowly back toward the
house. Ambrosch had come in from the north
quarter, and was watering his oxen at the
tank.
Ántonia took my hand. “Sometime you will
tell me all those nice things you learn at the
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a
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MY ANTONIA
school, won’t you, Jimmy?” she asked with
a sudden rush of feeling in her voice. “My
father, he went much to school. He know a
great deal; how to make the fine cloth like
what you not got here. He play horn and violin,
and he read so many books that the priests
in Bohemie come to talk to him. You won’t
forget my father, Jim?”
“No,” I said, “I will never forget him.”
Mrs. Shimerda asked me to stay for supper.
After Ambrosch and Ántonia had washed the
field dust from their hands and faces at the
wash-basin by the kitchen door, we sat down
at the oilcloth-covered table. Mrs. Shimerda
ladled meal mush out of an iron pot and poured
milk on it. After the mush we had fresh bread
and sorghum molasses, and coffee with the cake
that had been kept warm in the feathers. Ántonia
and Ambrosch were talking in Bohemian;
disputing about which of them had
done more ploughing that day. Mrs. Shimerda
egged them on, chuckling while she
gobbled her food.
Presently Ambrosch said sullenly in English:
“You take them ox to-morrow and try
the sod plough. Then you not be so smart.”
His sister laughed. “Don’t be mad. I know
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THE SHIMERDAS
it’s awful hard work for break sod. I milk the
cow for you to-morrow, if you want.”
Mrs. Shimerda turned quickly to me.
“That cow not give so much milk like what
your grandpa say. If he make talk about
fifteen dollars, I send him back the cow.”
“He does n’t talk about the fifteen dollars,”
I exclaimed indignantly. “He does n’t find
fault with people.”
“He say I break his saw when we build, and
I never,” grumbled Ambrosch.
I knew he had broken the saw, and then hid
it and lied about it. I began to wish I had not
stayed for supper. Everything was disagreeable
to me. Ántonia ate so noisily now, like
a man, and she yawned often at the table and
kept stretching her arms over her head, as if
they ached. Grandmother had said, “Heavy
field work’ll a
spoil that girl. She’ll lose all her
nice ways and get rough ones.” She had lost
them already.
After supper I rode home through the sad,
soft spring twilight. Since winter I had seen
very little of Ántonia. She was out in the
fields from sun-up until sun-down. If I rode
over to see her where she was ploughing, she
stopped at the end of a row to chat for a
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a work ’ll
MY ANTONIA
moment, then gripped her plough-handles,
clucked to her team, and waded on down the
furrow, making me feel that she was now
grown up and had no time for me. On Sundays
she helped her mother make garden or
sewed all day. Grandfather was pleased with
Ántonia. When we complained of her, he only
smiled and said, “She will help some fellow
get ahead in the world.”
Nowadays Tony could talk of nothing but
the prices of things, or how much she could
lift and endure. She was too proud of her
strength. I knew, too, that Ambrosch put
upon her some chores a girl ought not to do,
and that the farmhands around the country
joked in a nasty way about it. Whenever I
saw her come up the furrow, shouting to her
beasts, sunburned, sweaty, her dress open at
the neck, and her throat and chest dustplastered,
I used to think of the tone in
which poor Mr. Shimerda, who could say so
little, yet managed to say so much when he
exclaimed, “My Án-tonia!”
XVIII
AFTER I began to go to the country school, I
saw less of the Bohemians. We were sixteen
pupils at the sod schoolhouse, and we all
came on horseback and brought our dinner.
My schoolmates were none of them very interesting,
but I somehow felt that by making
comrades of them I was getting even with
Ántonia for her indifference. Since the father’s
death, Ambrosch was more than ever the head
of the house and he seemed to direct the feelings
as well as the fortunes of his women-folk.
Ántonia often quoted his opinions to me, and
she let me see that she admired him, while
she thought of me only as a little boy. Before
the spring was over, there was a distinct coldness
between us and the Shimerdas. It came
about in this way.
One Sunday I rode over there with Jake to
get a horse-collar which Ambrosch had borrowed
from him and had not returned. It was
a beautiful blue morning. The buffalo-peas
were blooming in pink and purple masses
along the roadside, and the larks, perched on
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MY ANTONIA
last year’s dried sunflower stalks, were singing
straight at the sun, their heads thrown
back and their yellow breasts a-quiver. The
wind blew about us in warm, sweet gusts. We
rode slowly, with a pleasant sense of Sunday
indolence.
We found the Shimerdas working just as if
it were a week-day. Marek was cleaning out
the stable, and Ántonia and her mother were
making garden, off across the pond in the
draw-head. Ambrosch was up on the windmill
tower, oiling the wheel. He came down,
not very cordially. When Jake asked for the
collar, he grunted and scratched his head.
The collar belonged to grandfather, of course,
and Jake, feeling responsible for it, flared up.
“Now, don’t you say you have n’t got it,
Ambrosch, because I know you have, and if
you ain’t a-going to look for it, I will.”
Ambrosch shrugged his shoulders and sauntered
down the hill toward the stable. I
could see that it was one of his mean days.
Presently he returned, carrying a collar that
had been badly used — trampled in the dirt
and gnawed by rats until the hair was sticking
out of it.
“This what you want?” he asked surlily.
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THE SHIMERDAS
Jake jumped off his horse. I saw a wave of
red come up under the rough stubble on his
face. “That ain’t the piece of harness I loaned
you, Ambrosch; or if it is, you’ve used it
shameful. I ain’t a-going to carry such a
looking thing back to Mr. Burden.”
Ambrosch dropped the collar on the ground.
“All right,” he said coolly, took up his oil-can,
and began to climb the mill. Jake caught him
by the belt of his trousers and yanked him
back. Ambrosch’s feet had scarcely touched
the ground when he lunged out with a vicious
kick at Jake’s stomach. Fortunately Jake
was in such a position that he could dodge it.
This was not the sort of thing country boys
did when they played at fisticuffs, and Jake
was furious. He landed Ambrosch a blow on
the head — it sounded like the crack of an
axe on a cow-pumpkin. Ambrosch dropped
over, stunned.
We heard squeals, and looking up saw Ántonia
and her mother coming on the run. They
did not take the path around the pond, but
plunged through the muddy water, without
even lifting their skirts. They came on,
screaming and clawing the air. By this time
Ambrosch had come to his senses and was
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sputtering with nose-bleed. Jake sprang into
his saddle. “Let’s get out of this, Jim,” he
called.
Mrs. Shimerda threw her hands over her
head and clutched as if she were going to pull
down lightning. “Law, law!” she shrieked
after us. “Law for knock my Ambrosch
down!”
“I never like you no more, Jake and Jim
Burden,” Ántonia panted. “No friends any
more!”
Jake stopped and turned his horse for a
second. “Well, you’re a damned ungrateful
lot, the whole pack of you,” he shouted back.
“I guess the Burdens can get along without
you. You’ve been a sight of trouble to them,
anyhow!”
We rode away, feeling so outraged that the
fine morning was spoiled for us. I had n’t a
word to say, and poor Jake was white as paper
and trembling all over. It made him sick to
get so angry. “They ain’t the same, Jimmy,”
he kept saying in a hurt tone. “These foreigners
ain’t the same. You can’t trust ’em to
be fair. It’s dirty to kick a feller. You heard
how the women turned on you — and after
all we went through on account of ’em last
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THE SHIMERDAS
winter! They ain’t to be trusted. I don’t
want to see you get too thick with any of ’em.”
“I’ll never be friends with them again,
Jake,” I declared hotly. “I believe they are
all like Krajiek and Ambrosch underneath.”
Grandfather heard our story with a twinkle
in his eye. He advised Jake to ride to town
to-morrow, go to a justice of the peace, tell
him he had knocked young Shimerda down,
and pay his fine. Then if Mrs. Shimerda was
inclined to make trouble — her son was still
under age — she would be forestalled. Jake
said he might as well take the wagon and
haul to market the pig he had been fattening.
On Monday, about an hour after Jake had
started, we saw Mrs. Shimerda and her Ambrosch
proudly driving by, looking neither to
the right nor left. As they rattled out of sight
down the Black Hawk road, grandfather
chuckled, saying he had rather expected she
would follow the matter up.
Jake paid his fine with a ten-dollar bill
grandfather had given him for that purpose.
But when the Shimerdas found that Jake
sold his pig in town that day, Ambrosch
worked it out in his shrewd head that Jake
had to sell his pig to pay his fine. This theory
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MY ANTONIA
afforded the Shimerdas great satisfaction,
apparently. For weeks afterward, whenever
Jake and I met Ántonia on her way to the postoffice,
or going along the road with her workteam,
she would clap her hands and call to us
in a spiteful, crowing voice:—
“Jake-y, Jake-y, sell the pig and pay the
slap!”
Otto pretended not to be surprised at Ántonia’s
behavior. He only lifted his brows and
said, “You can’t tell me anything new about
a Czech; I’m an Austrian.”
Grandfather was never a party to what Jake
called our feud with the Shimerdas. Ambrosch
and Ántonia always greeted him respectfully,
and he asked them about their
affairs and gave them advice as usual. He
thought the future looked hopeful for them.
Ambrosch was a far-seeing fellow; he soon
realized that his oxen were too heavy for any
work except breaking sod, and he succeeded in
selling them to a newly arrived German. With
the money he bought another team of horses,
which grandfather selected for him. Marek was
strong, and Ambrosch worked him hard; but
he could never teach him to cultivate corn,
I remember. The one idea that had ever got
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THE SHIMERDAS
through poor Marek’s thick head was that all
exertion was meritorious. He always bore
down on the handles of the cultivator and
drove the blades so deep into the earth that
the horses were soon exhausted.
In June Ambrosch went to work at Mr.
Bushy’s for a week, and took Marek with him
at full wages. Mrs. Shimerda then drove the
second cultivator; she and Ántonia worked in
the fields all day and did the chores at night.
While the two women were running the place
alone, one of the new horses got colic and gave
them a terrible fright.
Ántonia had gone down to the barn one
night to see that all was well before she went
to bed, and she noticed that one of the roans
was swollen about the middle and stood with
its head hanging. She mounted another horse,
without waiting to saddle him, and hammered
on our door just as we were going to bed.
Grandfather answered her knock. He did not
send one of his men, but rode back with her
himself, taking a syringe and an old piece of
carpet he kept for hot applications when our
horses were sick. He found Mrs. Shimerda
sitting by the horse with her lantern, groaning
and wringing her hands. It took but a few
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MY ANTONIA
moments to release the gases pent up in the
poor beast, and the two women heard the
rush of wind and saw the roan visibly diminish
in girth.
“If I lose that horse, Mr. Burden,” Ántonia
exclaimed, “I never stay here till Ambrosch
come home! I go drown myself in the pond
before morning.”
When Ambrosch came back from Mr.
Bushy’s, we learned that he had given Marek’s
wages to the priest at Black Hawk, for masses
for their father’s soul. Grandmother thought
Ántonia needed shoes more than Mr. Shimerda
needed prayers, but grandfather said
tolerantly, “If he can spare six dollars,
pinched as he is, it shows he believes what
he professes.”
It was grandfather who brought about a
reconciliation with the Shimerdas. One morning
he told us that the small grain was coming
on so well, he thought he would begin to cut
his wheat on the first of July. He would need
more men, and if it were agreeable to every
one he would engage Ambrosch for the reaping
and thrashing, as the Shimerdas had no small
grain of their own.
“I think, Emmaline,” he concluded, “I will
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THE SHIMERDAS
ask Ántonia to come over and help you in
the kitchen. She will be glad to earn something,
and it will be a good time to end misunderstandings.
I may as well ride over this
morning and make arrangements. Do you
want to go with me, Jim?” His tone told me
that he had already decided for me.
After breakfast we set off together. When
Mrs. Shimerda saw us coming, she ran from
her door down into the draw behind the stable,
as if she did not want to meet us. Grandfather
smiled to himself while he tied his horse, and
we followed her.
Behind the barn we came upon a funny
sight. The cow had evidently been grazing
somewhere in the draw. Mrs. Shimerda had
run to the animal, pulled up the lariat pin,
and, when we came upon her, she was trying
to hide the cow in an old cave in the bank. As
the hole was narrow and dark, the cow held
back, and the old woman was slapping and
pushing at her hind quarters, trying to spank
her into the draw-side.
Grandfather ignored her singular occupation
and greeted her politely. “Good-morning,
Mrs. Shimerda. Can you tell me where I will
find Ambrosch? Which field?”
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MY ANTONIA
“He with the sod corn.” She pointed toward
the north, still standing in front of the
cow as if she hoped to conceal it.
“His sod corn will be good for fodder
this winter,” said grandfather encouragingly.
“And where is Ántonia?”
“She go with.” Mrs. Shimerda kept wiggling
her bare feet about nervously in the dust.
“Very well. I will ride up there. I want
them to come over and help me cut my oats
and wheat next month. I will pay them
wages. Good-morning. By the way, Mrs.
Shimerda,” he said as he turned up the path,
“I think we may as well call it square about
the cow.”
She started and clutched the rope tighter.
Seeing that she did not understand, grandfather
turned back. “You need not pay me
anything more; no more money. The cow is
yours.”
“Pay no more, keep cow?” she asked in a
bewildered tone, her narrow eyes snapping at
us in the sunlight.
“Exactly. Pay no more, keep cow.” He
nodded.
Mrs. Shimerda dropped the rope, ran after
us, and crouching down beside grandfather,
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THE SHIMERDAS
she took his hand and kissed it. I doubt if he
had ever been so much embarrassed before.
I was a little startled, too. Somehow, that
seemed to bring the Old World very close.
We rode away laughing, and grandfather
said: “I expect she thought we had come to
take the cow away for certain, Jim. I wonder
if she would n’t have scratched a little if we’d
laid hold of that lariat rope!”
Our neighbors seemed glad to make peace
with us. The next Sunday Mrs. Shimerda
came over and brought Jake a pair of socks
she had knitted. She presented them with an
air of great magnanimity, saying, “Now you
not come any more for knock my Ambrosch
down?”
Jake laughed sheepishly. “I don’t want to
have no trouble with Ambrosch. If he’ll let
me alone, I’ll let him alone.”
“If he slap you, we ain’t got no pig for pay
the fine,” she said insinuatingly.
Jake was not at all disconcerted. “Have
the last word, mam,” he said cheerfully.
“It’s a lady’s privilege.”
XIX
JULY came on with that breathless, brilliant
heat which makes the plains of Kansas and
Nebraska the best corn country in the world.
It seemed as if we could hear the corn growing
in the night; under the stars one caught a faint
crackling in the dewy, heavy-odored cornfields
where the feathered stalks stood so juicy
and green. If all the great plain from the Missouri
to the Rocky Mountains had been under
glass, and the heat regulated by a thermometer,
it could not have been better for the yellow
tassels that were ripening and fertilizing
each other
4
day by day. The cornfields were
far apart in those times, with miles of wild
grazing land between. It took a clear, meditative
eye like my grandfather’s to foresee
that they would enlarge and multiply until
they would be, not the Shimerdas’ cornfields,
or Mr. Bushy’s, but the world’s cornfields;
that their yield would be one of the great
economic facts, like the wheat crop of Russia,
which underlie all the activities of men, in
peace or war.
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THE SHIMERDAS
The burning sun of those few weeks, with
occasional rains at night, secured the corn.
After the milky ears were once formed, we had
little to fear from dry weather. The men were
working so hard in the wheatfields that they
did not notice the heat, — though I was kept
busy carrying water for them, — and grandmother
and Ántonia had so much to do in the
kitchen that they could not have told whether
one day was hotter than another. Each morning,
while the dew was still on the grass,
Ántonia went with me up to the garden to
get early vegetables for dinner. Grandmother
made her wear a sunbonnet, but as soon as we
reached the garden she threw it on the grass
and let her hair fly in the breeze. I remember
how, as we bent over the pea-vines, beads of
perspiration used to gather on her upper lip
like a little mustache.
“Oh, better I like to work out of doors than
in a house!” she used to sing joyfully. “I not
care that your grandmother say it makes me
like a man. I like to be like a man.” She
would toss her head and ask me to feel the
muscles swell in her brown arm.
We were glad to have her in the house. She
was so gay and responsive that one did not
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MY ANTONIA
mind her heavy, running step, or her clattery
way with pans. Grandmother was in high
spirits during the weeks that Ántonia worked
for us.
All the nights were close and hot during
that harvest season. The harvesters slept in
the hayloft because it was cooler there than
in the house. I used to lie in my bed by the
open window, watching the heat lightning play
softly along the horizon, or looking up at the
gaunt frame of the windmill against the blue
night sky. One night there was a beautiful
electric storm, though not enough rain fell to
damage the cut grain. The men went down to
the barn immediately after supper, and when
the dishes were washed Ántonia and I climbed
up on the slanting roof of the chicken-house
to watch the clouds. The thunder was loud
and metallic, like the rattle of sheet iron, and
the lightning broke in great zigzags across the
heavens, making everything stand out and
come close to us for a moment. Half the
sky was checkered with black thunderheads,
but all the west was luminous and clear: in
the lightning-flashes it looked like deep blue
water, with the sheen of moonlight on it; and
the mottled part of the sky was like marble
158

THE SHIMERDAS
pavement, like the quay of some splendid
sea-coast city, doomed to destruction. Great
warm splashes of rain fell on our upturned
faces. One black cloud, no bigger than a little
boat, drifted out into the clear space unattended,
and kept moving westward. All about
us we could hear the felty beat of the raindrops
on the soft dust of the farmyard. Grandmother
came to the door and said it was late,
and we would get wet out there.
“In a minute we come,” Ántonia called
back to her. “I like your grandmother, and
all things here,” she sighed. “I wish my papa
live to see this summer. I wish no winter ever
come again.”
“It will be summer a long while yet,” I reassured
her. “Why are n’t you always nice
like this, Tony?”
“How nice?”
“Why, just like this; like yourself. Why
do you all the time try to be like Ambrosch?”
She put her arms under her head and lay
back, looking up at the sky. “If I live here,
like you, that is different. Things will be easy
for you. But they will be hard for us.”

BOOK II
THE HIRED GIRLS

BOOK II
THE HIRED GIRLS
I
I HAD been living with my grandfather for
nearly three years when he decided to move to
Black Hawk. He and grandmother were getting
old for the heavy work of a farm, and as
I was now thirteen they thought I ought to
be going to school. Accordingly our homestead
was rented to “that good woman, the Widow
Steavens,” and her bachelor brother, and we
bought Preacher White’s house, at the north
end of Black Hawk. This was the first town
house one passed driving in from the farm, a
landmark which told country people their long
ride was over.
We were to move to Black Hawk in
March, and as soon as grandfather had fixed
the date he let Jake and Otto know of his
intention. Otto said he would not be likely to
find another place that suited him so well;
that he was tired of farming and thought he
would go back to what he called the “wild
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MY ANTONIA
West.” Jake Marpole, lured by Otto’s stories
of adventure, decided to go with him. We did
our best to dissuade Jake. He was so handicapped
by illiteracy and by his trusting disposition
that he would be an easy prey to sharpers.
Grandmother begged him to stay among
kindly, Christian people, where he was known;
but there was no reasoning with him. He
wanted to be a prospector. He thought a silver
mine was waiting for him in Colorado.
Jake and Otto served us to the last. They
moved us into town, put down the carpets
in our new house, made shelves and cupboards
for grandmother’s kitchen, and seemed
loath to leave us. But at last they went, without
warning. Those two fellows had been
faithful to us through sun and storm, had
given us things that cannot be bought in
any market in the world. With me they had
been like older brothers; had restrained their
speech and manners out of care for me, and
given me so much good comradeship. Now
they got on the west-bound train one morning,
in their Sunday clothes, with their oilcloth valises
— and I never saw them again. Months
afterward we got a card from Otto, saying
that Jake had been down with mountain fever,
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THE HIRED GIRLS
but now they were both working in the Yankee
Girl mine, and were doing well. I wrote
to them at that address, but my letter was
returned to me, “unclaimed.” After that we
never heard from them.
Black Hawk, the new world in which we had
come to live, was a clean, well-planted little
prairie town, with white fences and good green
yards about the dwellings, wide, dusty streets,
and shapely little trees growing along the
wooden sidewalks. In the center of the town
there were two rows of new brick “store”
buildings, a brick schoolhouse, the courthouse,
and four white churches. Our own
house looked down over the town, and from
our upstairs windows we could see the winding
line of the river bluffs, two miles south of us.
That river was to be my compensation for
the lost freedom of the farming country.
We came to Black Hawk in March, and by
the end of April we felt like town people.
Grandfather was a deacon in the new Baptist
Church, grandmother was busy with church
suppers and missionary societies, and I was
quite another boy, or thought I was. Suddenly
put down among boys of my own age,
I found I had a great deal to learn. Before
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MY ANTONIA
the spring term of school was over I could
fight, play “keeps,” tease the little girls, and
use forbidden words as well as any boy in my
class. I was restrained from utter savagery
only by the fact that Mrs. Harling, our nearest
neighbor, kept an eye on me, and if my
behavior went beyond certain bounds I was
not permitted to come into her yard or to
play with her jolly children.
We saw more of our country neighbors now
than when we lived on the farm. Our house
was a convenient stopping-place for them.
We had a big barn where the farmers could
put up their teams, and their women-folk
more often accompanied them, now that they
could stay with us for dinner, and rest and
set their bonnets right before they went shopping.
The more our house was like a country
hotel, the better I liked it. I was glad,
when I came home from school at noon, to
see a farm wagon standing in the back yard,
and I was always ready to run downtown to
get beefsteak or baker’s bread for unexpected
company. All through that first spring and
summer I kept hoping that Ambrosch would
bring Ántonia and Yulka to see our new
house. I wanted to show them our red plush
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THE HIRED GIRLS
furniture, and the trumpet-blowing cherubs
the German paper-hanger had put on our
parlor ceiling.
When Ambrosch came to town, however,
he came alone, and though he put his horses
in our barn, he would never stay for dinner,
or tell us anything about his mother and sisters.
If we ran out and questioned him as
he was slipping through the yard, he would
merely work his shoulders about in his coat
and say, “They all right, I guess.”
Mrs. Steavens, who now lived on our farm,
grew as fond of Ántonia as we had been, and
always brought us news of her. All through
the wheat season, she told us, Ambrosch hired
his sister out like a man, and she went from
farm to farm, binding sheaves or working with
the thrashers. The farmers liked her and were
kind to her; said they would rather have her
for a hand than Ambrosch. When fall came
she was to husk corn for the neighbors until
Christmas, as she had done the year before;
but grandmother saved her from this by getting
her a place to work with our neighbors,
the Harlings.
II
GRANDMOTHER often said that if she had to
live in town, she thanked God she lived next
the Harlings. They had been farming people,
like ourselves, and their place was like a little
farm, with a big barn and a garden, and an
orchard and grazing lots, — even a windmill.
The Harlings were Norwegians, and Mrs.
Harling had lived in Christiania until she
was ten years old. Her husband was born in
Minnesota. He was a grain merchant and
cattle buyer, and was generally considered
the most enterprising business man in our
county. He controlled a line of grain elevators
in the little towns along the railroad to the
west of us, and was away from home a great
deal. In his absence his wife was the head of
the household.
Mrs. Harling was short and square and
sturdy-looking, like her house. Every inch of
her was charged with an energy that made
itself felt the moment she entered a room.
Her face was rosy and solid, with bright,
twinkling eyes and a stubborn little chin. She
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THE HIRED GIRLS
was quick to anger, quick to laughter, and
jolly from the depths of her soul. How well I
remember her laugh; it had in it the same
sudden recognition that flashed into her eyes,
was a burst of humor, short and intelligent.
Her rapid footsteps shook her own floors, and
she routed lassitude and indifference wherever
she came. She could not be negative or
perfunctory about anything. Her enthusiasm,
and her violent likes and dislikes, asserted
themselves in all the every-day occupations
of life. Wash-day was interesting, never
dreary, at the Harlings’. Preserving-time was
a prolonged festival, and house-cleaning was
like a revolution. When Mrs. Harling made
garden that spring, we could feel the stir of
her undertaking through the willow hedge
that separated our place from hers.
Three of the Harling children were near me
in age. Charley, the only son, — they had
lost an older boy, — was sixteen; Julia, who
was known as the musical one, was fourteen
when I was; and Sally, the tomboy with short
hair, was a year younger. She was nearly as
strong as I, and uncannily clever at all boys’
sports. Sally was a wild thing, with sunburned
yellow hair, bobbed about her ears,
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MY ANTONIA
and a brown skin, for she never wore a hat.
She raced all over town on one roller skate,
often cheated at “keeps,” but was such a
quick shot one could n’t catch her at it.
The grown-up daughter, Frances, was a
very important person in our world. She was
her father’s chief clerk, and virtually managed
his Black Hawk office during his frequent absences.
Because of her unusual business ability,
he was stern and exacting with her. He
paid her a good salary, but she had few holidays
and never got away from her responsibilities.
Even on Sundays she went to the
office to open the mail and read the markets.
With Charley, who was not interested in business,
but was already preparing for Annapolis,
Mr. Harling was very indulgent; bought him
guns and tools and electric batteries, and
never asked what he did with them.
Frances was dark, like her father, and quite
as tall. In winter she wore a sealskin coat
and cap, and she and Mr. Harling used to walk
home together in the evening, talking about
grain-cars and cattle, like two men. Sometimes
she came over to see grandfather after
supper, and her visits flattered him. More
than once they put their wits together to
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THE HIRED GIRLS
rescue some unfortunate farmer from the
clutches of Wick Cutter, the Black Hawk
money-lender. Grandfather said Frances Harling
was as good a judge of credits as any
banker in the county. The two or three men
who had tried to take advantage of her in a
deal acquired celebrity by their defeat. She
knew every farmer for miles about; how much
land he had under cultivation, how many
cattle he was feeding, what his liabilities
were. Her interest in these people was more
than a business interest. She carried them all
in her mind as if they were characters in a
book or a play.
When Frances drove out into the country
on business, she would go miles out of her
way to call on some of the old people, or to
see the women who seldom got to town. She
was quick at understanding the grandmothers
who spoke no English, and the most reticent
and distrustful of them would tell her their
story without realizing they were doing so.
She went to country funerals and weddings
in all weathers. A farmer’s daughter who was
to be married could count on a wedding present
from Frances Harling.
In August the Harlings’ Danish cook had
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MY ANTONIA
to leave them. Grandmother entreated them
to try Ántonia. She cornered Ambrosch the
next time he came to town, and pointed out
to him that any connection with Christian
Harling would strengthen his credit and be
of advantage to him. One Sunday Mrs. Harling
took the long ride out to the Shimerdas’
with Frances. She said she wanted to see
“what the girl came from” and to have a
clear understanding with her mother. I was
in our yard when they came driving home,
just before sunset. They laughed and waved
to me as they passed, and I could see they
were in great good humor. After supper,
when grandfather set off to church, grandmother
and I took my short cut through the
willow hedge and went over to hear about
the visit to the Shimerdas’.
a
We found Mrs. Harling with Charley and
Sally on the front porch, resting after her hard
drive. Julia was in the hammock — she was
fond of repose — and Frances was at the
piano, playing without a light and talking to
her mother through the open window.
Mrs. Harling laughed when she saw us
coming. “I expect you left your dishes on
the table to-night, Mrs. Burden,” she called.
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a
Shimerdas
THE HIRED GIRLS
Frances shut the piano and came out to
join us.
They had liked Ántonia from their first
glimpse of her; felt they knew exactly what
kind of girl she was. As for Mrs. Shimerda,
they found her very amusing. Mrs. Harling
chuckled whenever she spoke of her. “I expect
I am more at home with that sort of bird
than you are, Mrs. Burden. They’re a pair,
Ambrosch and that old woman!”
They had had a long argument with Ambrosch
about Ántonia’s allowance for clothes
and pocket-money. It was his plan that every
cent of his sister’s wages should be paid over
to him each month, and he would provide
her with such clothing as he thought necessary.
When Mrs. Harling told him firmly
that she would keep fifty dollars a year for
Ántonia’s own use, he declared they wanted
to take his sister to town and dress her up
and make a fool of her. Mrs. Harling gave
us a lively account of Ambrosch’s behavior
throughout the interview; how he kept jumping
up and putting on his cap as if he were
through with the whole business, and how his
mother tweaked his coat-tail and prompted
him in Bohemian. Mrs. Harling finally agreed
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MY ANTONIA
to pay three dollars a week for Ántonia’s
services — good wages in those days — and
to keep her in shoes. There had been hot dispute
about the shoes, Mrs. Shimerda finally
saying persuasively that she would send Mrs.
Harling three fat geese every year to “make
even.” Ambrosch was to bring his sister to
town next Saturday.
“She’ll be awkward and rough at first, like
enough,” grandmother said anxiously, “but
unless she’s been spoiled by the hard life she’s
led, she has it in her to be a real helpful girl.”
Mrs. Harling laughed her quick, decided
laugh. “Oh, I’m not worrying, Mrs. Burden!
I can bring something out of that girl.
She’s barely seventeen, not too old to learn
new ways. She’s good-looking, too!” she
added warmly.
Frances turned to grandmother. “Oh, yes,
Mrs. Burden, you did n’t tell us that! She
was working in the garden when we got there,
barefoot and ragged. But she has such fine
brown legs and arms, and splendid color in
her cheeks — like those big dark red plums.”
We were pleased at this praise. Grandmother
spoke feelingly. “When she first came
to this country, Frances, and had that gen174
THE HIRED GIRLS
teel old man to watch over her, she was as
pretty a girl as ever I saw. But, dear me, what
a life she’s led, out in the fields with those
rough thrashers! Things would have been
very different with poor Ántonia if her father
had lived.”
The Harlings begged us to tell them about
Mr. Shimerda’s death and the big snowstorm.
By the time we saw grandfather coming home
from church we had told them pretty much
all we knew of the Shimerdas.
“The girl will be happy here, and she’ll
forget those things,” said Mrs. Harling confidently,
as we rose to take our leave.
III
ON Saturday Ambrosch drove up to the back
gate, and Ántonia jumped down from the
wagon and ran into our kitchen just as she
used to do. She was wearing shoes and stockings,
and was breathless and excited. She
gave me a playful shake by the shoulders.
“You ain’t forget about me, Jim?”
Grandmother kissed her. “God bless you,
child! Now you’ve
a
come, you must try to do
right and be a credit to us.”
Ántonia looked eagerly about the house and
admired everything. “Maybe I be the kind of
girl you like better, now I come to town,” she
suggested hopefully.
How good it was to have Ántonia near us
again; to see her every day and almost every
night! Her greatest fault, Mrs. Harling
found, was that she so often stopped her work
and fell to playing with the children. She
would race about the orchard with us, or take
sides in our hay-fights in the barn, or be the
old bear that came down from the mountain
and carried off Nina. Tony learned English
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you ’ve
THE HIRED GIRLS
so quickly that by the time school began she
could speak as well as any of us.
I was jealous of Tony’s admiration for
Charley Harling. Because he was always first
in his classes at school, and could mend the
water-pipes or the door-bell and take the clock
to pieces, she seemed to think him a sort of
prince. Nothing that Charley wanted was too
much trouble for her. She loved to put up
lunches for him when he went hunting, to
mend his ball-gloves and sew buttons on his
shooting-coat, baked the kind of nut-cake he
liked, and fed his setter dog when he was away
on trips with his father. Ántonia had made
herself cloth working-slippers out of Mr.
Harling’s old coats, and in these she went
padding about after Charley, fairly panting
with eagerness to please him.
Next to Charley, I think she loved Nina
best. Nina was only six, and she was rather
more complex than the other children. She
was fanciful, had all sorts of unspoken preferences,
and was easily offended. At the slightest
disappointment or displeasure her velvety
brown eyes filled with tears, and she would
lift her chin and walk silently away. If
we ran after her and tried to appease her, it
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did no good. She walked on unmollified. I
used to think that no eyes in the world could
grow so large or hold so many tears as Nina’s.
Mrs. Harling and Ántonia invariably took her
part. We were never given a chance to explain.
The charge was simply: “You have
made Nina cry. Now, Jimmy can go home,
and Sally must get her arithmetic.” I liked
Nina, too; she was so quaint and unexpected,
and her eyes were lovely; but I often wanted
to shake her.
We had jolly evenings at the Harlings’
a when
the father was away. If he was at home, the
children had to go to bed early, or they came
over to my house to play. Mr. Harling not
only demanded a quiet house, he demanded all
his wife’s attention. He used to take her away
to their room in the west ell, and talk over his
business with her all evening. Though we did
not realize it then, Mrs. Harling was our audience
when we played, and we always looked
to her for suggestions. Nothing flattered one
like her quick laugh.
Mr. Harling had a desk in his bedroom, and
his own easy-chair by the window, in which no
one else ever sat. On the nights when he was
at home, I could see his shadow on the blind,
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and it seemed to me an arrogant shadow.
Mrs. Harling paid no heed to any one else if
he was there. Before he went to bed she always
got him a lunch of smoked salmon or
anchovies and beer. He kept an alcohol lamp
in his room, and a French coffee-pot, and his
wife made coffee for him at any hour of the
night he happened to want it.
Most Black Hawk fathers had no personal
habits outside their domestic ones; they paid
the bills, pushed the baby carriage after office
hours, moved the sprinkler about over the
lawn, and took the family driving on Sunday.
Mr. Harling, therefore, seemed to me autocratic
and imperial in his ways. He walked,
talked, put on his gloves, shook hands, like a
man who felt that he had power. He was not
tall, but he carried his head so haughtily that
he looked a commanding figure, and there was
something daring and challenging in his eyes.
I used to imagine that the “nobles” of whom
Ántonia was always talking probably looked
very much like Christian Harling, wore caped
overcoats like his, and just such a glittering
diamond upon the little finger.
Except when the father was at home, the
Harling house was never quiet. Mrs. Harling
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and Nina and Ántonia made as much noise
as a houseful of children, and there was usually
somebody at the piano. Julia was the only
one who was held down to regular hours of
practicing, but they all played. When Frances
came home at noon, she played until dinner
was ready. When Sally got back from school,
she sat down in her hat and coat and drummed
the plantation melodies that negro minstrel
troupes brought to town. Even Nina played
the Swedish Wedding March.
Mrs. Harling had studied the piano under a
good teacher, and somehow she managed to
practice every day. I soon learned that if I
were sent over on an errand and found Mrs.
Harling at the piano, I must sit down and
wait quietly until she turned to me. I can see
her at this moment; her short, square person
planted firmly on the stool, her little fat hands
moving quickly and neatly over the keys, her
eyes fixed on the music with intelligent concentration.

IV
“I won’t have none of your weevily wheat, and I won’t have
none of your barley,
But I’ll take a measure of fine white flour, to make a cake for
Charley.”
WE were singing rhymes to tease Ántonia
while she was beating up one of Charley’s
favorite cakes in her big mixing-bowl. It was
a crisp autumn evening, just cold enough to
make one glad to quit playing tag in the yard,
and retreat into the kitchen. We had begun
to roll popcorn balls with syrup when we
heard a knock at the back door, and Tony
dropped her spoon and went to open it. A
plump, fair-skinned girl was standing in the
doorway. She looked demure and pretty, and
made a graceful picture in her blue cashmere
dress and little blue hat, with a plaid shawl
drawn neatly about her shoulders and a
clumsy pocketbook in her hand.
“Hello, Tony. Don’t you know me?” she
asked in a smooth, low voice, looking in at
us archly.
Ántonia gasped and stepped back. “Why,
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it’s Lena! Of course I did n’t know you, so
dressed up!”
Lena Lingard laughed, as if this pleased her.
I had not recognized her for a moment, either.
I had never seen her before with a hat on her
head — or with shoes and stockings on her
feet, for that matter. And here she was,
brushed and smoothed and dressed like a town
girl, smiling at us with perfect composure.
“Hello, Jim,” she said carelessly as she
walked into the kitchen and looked about her.
“I’ve come to town to work, too, Tony.”
“Have you, now? Well, ain’t that funny!”
Ántonia stood ill at ease, and did n’t seem to
know just what to do with her visitor.
The door was open into the dining-room,
where Mrs. Harling sat crocheting and Frances
was reading. Frances asked Lena to come in
and join them.
“You are Lena Lingard, are n’t you? I’ve
been to see your mother, but you were off
herding cattle that day. Mama, this is Chris
Lingard’s oldest girl.”
Mrs. Harling dropped her worsted and examined
the visitor with quick, keen eyes.
Lena was not at all disconcerted. She sat
down in the chair Frances pointed out, care182
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fully arranging her pocketbook and gray cotton
gloves on her lap. We followed with our
popcorn, but Ántonia hung back — said she
had to get her cake into the oven.
“So you have come to town,” said Mrs.
Harling, her eyes still fixed on Lena. “Where
are you working?”
“For Mrs. Thomas, the dressmaker. She
is going to teach me to sew. She says I have
quite a knack. I’m through with the farm.
There ain’t any end to the work on a farm, and
always so much trouble happens. I’m going
to be a dressmaker.”
“Well, there have to be dressmakers. It’s
a good trade. But I would n’t run down the
farm, if I were you,” said Mrs. Harling rather
severely. “How is your mother?”
“Oh, mother’s never very well; she has too
much to do. She’d get away from the farm,
too, if she could. She was willing for me to
come. After I learn to do sewing, I can make
money and help her.”
“See that you don’t forget to,” said Mrs.
Harling skeptically, as she took up her crocheting
again and sent the hook in and out
with nimble fingers.
“No, ’m, I won’t,” said Lena blandly. She
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took a few grains of the popcorn we pressed
upon her, eating them discreetly and taking
care not to get her fingers sticky.
Frances drew her chair up nearer to the
visitor. “I thought you were going to be
married, Lena,” she said teasingly. “Did n’t
I hear that Nick Svendsen was rushing you
pretty hard?”
Lena looked up with her curiously innocent
smile. “He did go with me quite a while. But
his father made a fuss about it and said he
would n’t give Nick any land if he married
me, so he’s going to marry Annie Iverson. I
would n’t like to be her; Nick’s awful sullen,
and he’ll take it out on her. He ain’t spoke to
his father since he promised.”
Frances laughed. “And how do you feel
about it?”
“I don’t want to marry Nick, or any other
man,” Lena murmured. “I’ve seen a good
deal of married life, and I don’t care for it. I
want to be so I can help my mother and the
children at home, and not have to ask lief of
anybody.”
“That’s right,” said Frances. “And Mrs.
Thomas thinks you can learn dressmaking?”
“Yes, ’m. I’ve always liked to sew, but I
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never had much to do with. Mrs. Thomas
makes lovely things for all the town ladies.
Did you know Mrs. Gardener is having a
purple velvet made? The velvet came from
Omaha. My, but it’s lovely!” Lena sighed
softly and stroked her cashmere folds. “Tony
knows I never did like out-of-door work,” she
added.
Mrs. Harling glanced at her. “I expect
you’ll learn to sew all right, Lena, if you’ll
only keep your head and not go gadding about
to dances all the time and neglect your work,
the way some country girls do.”
“Yes, ’m. Tiny Soderball is coming to town,
too. She’s going to work at the Boys’ Home
Hotel. She’ll see lots of strangers,” Lena
added wistfully.
“Too many, like enough,” said Mrs. Harling.
“I don’t think a hotel is a good place for
a girl; though I guess Mrs. Gardener keeps
an eye on her waitresses.”
Lena’s candid eyes, that always looked a
little sleepy under their long lashes, kept
straying about the cheerful rooms with naïve
admiration. Presently she drew on her cotton
gloves. “I guess I must be leaving,” she said
irresolutely.
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MY ANTONIA
Frances told her to come again, whenever
she was lonesome or wanted advice about
anything. Lena replied that she did n’t believe
she would ever get lonesome in Black Hawk.
She lingered at the kitchen door and begged
Ántonia to come and see her often. “I’ve got
a room of my own at Mrs. Thomas’s, with a
carpet.”
Tony shuffled uneasily in her cloth slippers.
“I’ll come sometime, but Mrs. Harling don’t
like to have me run much,” she said evasively.
“You can do what you please when you go
out, can’t you?” Lena asked in a guarded
whisper. “Ain’t you crazy about town, Tony?
I don’t care what anybody says, I’m done
with the farm!” She glanced back over her
shoulder toward the dining-room, where Mrs.
Harling sat.
When Lena was gone, Frances asked Ántonia
why she had n’t been a little more cordial
to her.
“I did n’t know if your mother would like
her coming here,” said Ántonia, looking
troubled. “She was kind of talked about, out
there.”
“Yes, I know. But mother won’t hold it
against her if she behaves well here. You
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need n’t say anything about that to the children.
I guess Jim has heard all that gossip?”
When I nodded, she pulled my hair and told
me I knew too much, anyhow. We were good
friends, Frances and I.
I ran home to tell grandmother that Lena
Lingard had come to town. We were glad of
it, for she had a hard life on the farm.
Lena lived in the Norwegian settlement
west of Squaw Creek, and she used to herd
her father’s cattle in the open country between
his place and the Shimerdas’. Whenever
we rode over in that direction we saw
her out among her cattle, bareheaded and
barefooted, scantily dressed in tattered clothing,
always knitting as she watched her herd.
Before I knew Lena, I thought of her as something
wild, that always lived on the prairie,
because I had never seen her under a roof.
Her yellow hair was burned to a ruddy thatch
on her head; but her legs and arms, curiously
enough, in spite of constant exposure to the
sun, kept a miraculous whiteness which somehow
made her seem more undressed than other
girls who went scantily clad. The first time I
stopped to talk to her, I was astonished at her
soft voice and easy, gentle ways. The girls out
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MY ANTONIA
there usually got rough and mannish after
they went to herding. But Lena asked Jake
and me to get off our horses and stay awhile,
and behaved exactly as if she were in a house
and were accustomed to having visitors. She
was not embarrassed by her ragged clothes,
and treated us as if we were old acquaintances.
Even then I noticed the unusual color of her
eyes — a shade of deep violet — and their soft,
confiding expression.
Chris Lingard was not a very successful
farmer, and he had a large family. Lena was
always knitting stockings for little brothers
and sisters, and even the Norwegian women,
who disapproved of her, admitted that she
was a good daughter to her mother. As
Tony said, she had been talked about. She
was accused of making Ole Benson lose the
little sense he had — and that at an age
when she should still have been in pinafores.
Ole lived in a leaky dugout somewhere at the
edge of the settlement. He was fat and lazy
and discouraged, and bad luck had become a
habit with him. After he had had every other
kind of misfortune, his wife, “Crazy Mary,”
tried to set a neighbor’s barn on fire, and was
sent to the asylum at Lincoln. She was kept
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there for a few months, then escaped and
walked all the way home, nearly two hundred
miles, traveling by night and hiding in barns
and haystacks by day. When she got back to
the Norwegian settlement, her poor feet were
as hard as hoofs. She promised to be good, and
was allowed to stay at home — though every
one realized she was as crazy as ever, and she
still ran about barefooted through the snow,
telling her domestic troubles to her neighbors.
Not long after Mary came back from the
asylum, I heard a young Dane, who was helping
us to thrash, tell Jake and Otto that
Chris Lingard’s oldest girl had put Ole Benson
out of his head, until he had no more sense
than his crazy wife. When Ole was cultivating
his corn that summer, he used to get discouraged
in the field, tie up his team, and wander off to
wherever Lena Lingard was herding. There
he would sit down on the draw-side and help
her watch her cattle. All the settlement was
talking about it. The Norwegian preacher’s
wife went to Lena and told her she ought not
to allow this; she begged Lena to come to
church on Sundays. Lena said she had n’t a
dress in the world any less ragged than the
one on her back. Then the minister’s wife went
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through her old trunks and found some things
she had worn before her marriage.
The next Sunday Lena appeared at church,
a little late, with her hair done up neatly on
her head, like a young woman, wearing shoes
and stockings, and the new dress, which she
had made over for herself very becomingly.
The congregation stared at her. Until that
morning no one — unless it were Ole — had
realized how pretty she was, or that she was
growing up. The swelling lines of her figure
had been hidden under the shapeless rags she
wore in the fields. After the last hymn had been
sung, and the congregation was dismissed, Ole
slipped out to the hitch-bar and lifted Lena
on her horse. That, in itself, was shocking;
a married man was not expected to do such
things. But it was nothing to the scene that
followed. Crazy Mary darted out from the
group of women at the church door, and ran
down the road after Lena, shouting horrible
threats.
“Look out, you Lena Lingard, look out!
I’ll come over with a corn-knife one day and
trim some of that shape off you. Then you
won’t sail round so fine, making eyes at the
men! . . .”
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The Norwegian women did n’t know where
to look. They were formal housewives, most
of them, with a severe sense of decorum. But
Lena Lingard only laughed her lazy, goodnatured
laugh and rode on, gazing back over
her shoulder at Ole’s infuriated wife.
The time came, however, when Lena did n’t
laugh. More than once Crazy Mary chased
her across the prairie and round and round
the Shimerdas’ cornfield. Lena never told her
father; perhaps she was ashamed; perhaps she
was more afraid of his anger than of the cornknife.
I was at the Shimerdas’ one afternoon
when Lena came bounding through the red
grass as fast as her white legs could carry her.
She ran straight into the house and hid in
Ántonia’s feather-bed. Mary was not far behind;
she came right up to the door and made
us feel how sharp her blade was, showing us
very graphically just what she meant to do to
Lena. Mrs. Shimerda, leaning out of the
window, enjoyed the situation keenly, and
was sorry when Ántonia sent Mary away,
mollified by an apronful of bottle-tomatoes.
Lena came out from Tony’s room behind the
kitchen, very pink from the heat of the
feathers, but otherwise calm. She begged
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Ántonia and me to go with her, and help get
her cattle together; they were scattered and
might be gorging themselves in somebody’s
cornfield.
“Maybe you lose a steer and learn not to
make somethings with your eyes at married
men,” Mrs. Shimerda told her hectoringly.
Lena only smiled her sleepy smile. “I never
made anything to him with my eyes. I can’t
help it if he hangs around, and I can’t order
him off. It ain’t my prairie.”
V
AFTER Lena came to Black Hawk I often met
her downtown, where she would be matching
sewing silk or buying “findings” for Mrs.
Thomas. If I happened to walk home with
her, she told me all about the dresses she was
helping to make, or about what she saw and
heard when she was with Tiny Soderball at
the hotel on Saturday nights.
The Boys’ Home was the best hotel on our
branch of the Burlington, and all the commercial
travelers in that territory tried to get
into Black Hawk for Sunday. They used to
assemble in the parlor after supper on Saturday
nights. Marshall Field’s man, Anson Kirkpatrick,
played the piano and sang all the latest
sentimental songs. After Tiny had helped
the cook wash the dishes, she and Lena sat on
the other side of the double doors between the
parlor and the dining-room, listening to the
music and giggling at the jokes and stories.
Lena often said she hoped I would be a traveling
man when I grew up. They had a gay life of
it; nothing to do but ride about on trains all
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MY ANTONIA
day and go to theaters when they were in big
cities. Behind the hotel there was an old store
building, where the salesmen opened their big
trunks and spread out their samples on the
counters. The Black Hawk merchants went
to look at these things and order goods, and
Mrs. Thomas, though she was “retail trade,”
was permitted to see them and to “get ideas.”
They were all generous, these traveling men;
they gave Tiny Soderball handkerchiefs and
gloves and ribbons and striped stockings, and
so many bottles of perfume and cakes of
scented soap that she bestowed some of them
on Lena.
One afternoon in the week before Christmas
I came upon Lena and her funny, squareheaded
little brother Chris, standing before
the drug-store, gazing in at the wax dolls and
blocks and Noah’s arks arranged in the frosty
show window. The boy had come to town
with a neighbor to do his Christmas shopping,
for he had money of his own this year.
He was only twelve, but that winter he had
got the job of sweeping out the Norwegian
church and making the fire in it every Sunday
morning. A cold job it must have been,
too!
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We went into Duckford’s dry-goods store,
and Chris unwrapped all his presents and
showed them to me — something for each of
the six younger than himself, even a rubber
pig for the baby. Lena had given him one of
Tiny Soderball’s bottles of perfume for his
mother, and he thought he would get some
handkerchiefs to go with it. They were cheap,
and he had n’t much money left. We found a
tableful of handkerchiefs spread out for view
at Duckford’s. Chris wanted those with
initial letters in the corner, because he had
never seen any before. He studied them seriously,
while Lena looked over his shoulder,
telling him she thought the red letters would
hold their color best. He seemed so perplexed
that I thought perhaps he had n’t enough
money, after all. Presently he said gravely, —
“Sister, you know mother’s name is Berthe.
I don’t know if I ought to get B for Berthe, or
M for Mother.”
Lena patted his bristly head. “I’d get the
B, Chrissy. It will please her for you to think
about her name. Nobody ever calls her by it
now.”
That satisfied him. His face cleared at once,
and he took three reds and three blues. When
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the neighbor came in to say that it was time to
start, Lena wound Chris’s comforter about
his neck and turned up his jacket collar — he
had no overcoat — and we watched him climb
into the wagon and start on his long, cold drive.
As we walked together up the windy street,
Lena wiped her eyes with the back of her
woolen glove. “I get awful homesick for them,
all the same,” she murmured, as if she were
answering some remembered reproach.
VI
WINTER comes down savagely over a little
town on the prairie. The wind that sweeps in
from the open country strips away all the leafy
screens that hide one yard from another in
summer, and the houses seem to draw closer
together. The roofs, that looked so far away
across the green tree-tops, now stare you in the
face, and they are so much uglier than when
their angles were softened by vines and shrubs.
In the morning, when I was fighting my way
to school against the wind, I could n’t see anything
but the road in front of me; but in the
late afternoon, when I was coming home, the
town looked bleak and desolate to me. The
pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not
beautify — it was like the light of truth itself.
When the smoky clouds hung low in the west
and the red sun went down behind them, leaving
a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the
blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh,
with a kind of bitter song, as if it said: “This
is reality, whether you like it or not. All those
frivolities of summer, the light and shadow,
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the living mask of green that trembled over
everything, they were lies, and this is what
was underneath. This is the truth.” It was
as if we were being punished for loving the
loveliness of summer.
If I loitered on the playground after school,
or went to the post-office for the mail and lingered
to hear the gossip about the cigar-stand,
it would be growing dark by the time I came
home. The sun was gone; the frozen streets
stretched long and blue before me; the lights
were shining pale in kitchen windows, and I
could smell the suppers cooking as I passed.
Few people were abroad, and each one of them
was hurrying toward a fire. The glowing stoves
in the houses were like magnets. When one
passed an old man, one could see nothing of
his face but a red nose sticking out between a
frosted beard and a long plush cap. The young
men capered along with their hands in their
pockets, and sometimes tried a slide on the icy
sidewalk. The children, in their bright hoods
and comforters, never walked, but always ran
from the moment they left their door, beating
their mittens against their sides. When I
got as far as the Methodist Church, I was
about halfway home. I can remember how
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glad I was when there happened to be a light
in the church, and the painted glass window
shone out at us as we came along the frozen
street. In the winter bleakness a hunger for
color came over people, like the Laplander’s
craving for fats and sugar. Without knowing
why, we used to linger on the sidewalk outside
the church when the lamps were lighted
early for choir practice or prayer-meeting,
shivering and talking until our feet were like
lumps of ice. The crude reds and greens and
blues of that colored glass held us there.
On winter nights, the lights in the Harlings’
windows drew me like the painted glass. Inside
that warm, roomy house there was color,
too. After supper I used to catch up my
cap, stick my hands in my pockets, and dive
through the willow hedge as if witches were
after me. Of course, if Mr. Harling was at
home, if his shadow stood out on the blind
of the west room, I did not go in, but turned
and walked home by the long way, through the
street, wondering what book I should read as
I sat down with the two old people.
Such disappointments only gave greater
zest to the nights when we acted charades, or
had a costume ball in the back parlor, with
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Sally always dressed like a boy. Frances
taught us to dance that winter, and she said,
from the first lesson, that Ántonia would make
the best dancer among us. On Saturday nights,
Mrs. Harling used to play the old operas for
us, — “Martha,” “Norma,” “Rigoletto,” —
telling us the story while she played. Every
Saturday night was like a party. The parlor,
the back parlor, and the dining-room were
warm and brightly lighted, with comfortable
chairs and sofas, and gay pictures on the walls.
One always felt at ease there. Ántonia brought
her sewing and sat with us — she was already
beginning to make pretty clothes for herself.
After the long winter evenings on the
prairie, with Ambrosch’s sullen silences and
her mother’s complaints, the Harlings’ house
seemed, as she said, “like Heaven” to her. She
was never too tired to make taffy or chocolate
cookies for us. If Sally whispered in her ear,
or Charley gave her three winks, Tony would
rush into the kitchen and build a fire in the
range on which she had already cooked three
meals that day.
While we sat in the kitchen waiting for the
cookies to bake or the taffy to cool, Nina used
to coax Ántonia to tell her stories — about the
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calf that broke its leg, or how Yulka saved her
little turkeys from drowning in the freshet, or
about old Christmases and weddings in Bohemia.
Nina interpreted the stories about
the crêche fancifully, and in spite of our derision
she cherished a belief that Christ was
born in Bohemia a short time before the Shimerdas
left that country. We all liked Tony’s
stories. Her voice had a peculiarly engaging
quality; it was deep, a little husky, and one
always heard the breath vibrating behind it.
Everything she said seemed to come right out
of her heart.
One evening when we were picking out kernels
for walnut taffy, Tony told us a new
story.
“Mrs. Harling, did you ever hear about
what happened up in the Norwegian settlement
last summer, when I was thrashing
there? We were at Iversons’, and I was driving
one of the grain wagons.”
Mrs. Harling came out and sat down among
us. “Could you throw the wheat into the bin
yourself, Tony?” She knew what heavy work
it was.
“Yes, mam, I did. I could shovel just as fast
as that fat Andern boy that drove the other
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wagon. One day it was just awful hot. When
we got back to the field from dinner, we
took things kind of easy. The men put in the
horses and got the machine going, and Ole
Iverson was up on the deck, cutting bands. I
was sitting against a straw stack, trying to
get some shade. My wagon was n’t going out
first, and somehow I felt the heat awful that
day. The sun was so hot like it was going to
burn the world up. After a while I see a man
coming across the stubble, and when he got
close I see it was a tramp. His toes stuck out
of his shoes, and he had n’t shaved for a long
while, and his eyes was awful red and wild,
like he had some sickness. He comes right up
and begins to talk like he knows me already.
He says: ‘The ponds in this country is done
got so low a man could n’t drownd himself in
one of ’em.’
“I told him nobody wanted to drownd themselves,
but if we did n’t have rain soon we’d
have to pump water for the cattle.
“ ‘Oh, cattle,’ he says, ‘you’ll all take care
of your cattle! Ain’t you got no beer here?’
I told him he’d have to go to the Bohemians
for beer; the Norwegians did n’t have none
when they thrashed. ‘My God!’ he says, ‘so
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it’s Norwegians now, is it? I thought this was
Americy.’
“Then he goes up to the machine and yells
out to Ole Iverson, ‘Hello, partner, let me up
there. I can cut bands, and I’m tired of trampin’.
I won’t go no farther.’
“I tried to make signs to Ole, ’cause I
thought that man was crazy and might get the
machine stopped up. But Ole, he was glad to
get down out of the sun and chaff — it gets
down your neck and sticks to you something
awful when it’s hot like that. So Ole jumped
down and crawled under one of the wagons for
shade, and the tramp got on the machine.
He cut bands all right for a few minutes, and
then, Mrs. Harling, he waved his hand to me
and jumped head-first right into the thrashing
machine after the wheat.
“I begun to scream, and the men run to stop
the horses, but the belt had sucked him down,
and by the time they got her stopped he was
all beat and cut to pieces. He was wedged
in so tight it was a hard job to get him out,
and the machine ain’t never worked right
since.”
“Was he clear dead, Tony?” we cried.
“Was he dead? Well, I guess so! There,
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MY ANTONIA
now, Nina’s all upset. We won’t talk about it.
Don’t you cry, Nina. No old tramp won’t get
you while Tony’s here.”
Mrs. Harling spoke up sternly. “Stop crying,
Nina, or I’ll always send you upstairs
when Ántonia tells us about the country. Did
they never find out where he came from,
Ántonia?”
“Never, mam. He had n’t been seen nowhere
except in a little town they call Conway.
He tried to get beer there, but there was n’t
any saloon. Maybe he came in on a freight,
but the brakeman had n’t seen him. They
could n’t find no letters nor nothing on him;
nothing but an old penknife in his pocket and
the wishbone of a chicken wrapped up in a
piece of paper, and some poetry.”
“Some poetry?” we exclaimed.
“I remember,” said Frances. “It was ‘The
Old Oaken Bucket,’ cut out of a newspaper
and nearly worn out. Ole Iverson brought it
into the office and showed it to me.”
“Now, was n’t that strange, Miss Frances?”
Tony asked thoughtfully. “What would anybody
want to kill themselves in summer for?
In thrashing time, too! It’s nice everywhere
then.”
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“So it is, Ántonia,” said Mrs. Harling
heartily. “Maybe I’ll go home and help you
thrash next summer. Is n’t that taffy nearly
ready to eat? I’ve been smelling it a long
while.”
There was a basic harmony between Ántonia
and her mistress. They had strong, independent
natures, both of them. They knew
what they liked, and were not always trying
to imitate other people. They loved children
and animals and music, and rough play and
digging in the earth. They liked to prepare
rich, hearty food and to see people eat it; to
make up soft white beds and to see youngsters
asleep in them. They ridiculed conceited
people and were quick to help unfortunate
ones. Deep down in each of them there was
a kind of hearty joviality, a relish of life, not
over-delicate, but very invigorating. I never
tried to define it, but I was distinctly conscious
of it. I could not imagine Ántonia’s
living for a week in any other house in Black
Hawk than the Harlings’.
VII
WINTER lies too long in country towns; hangs
on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
On the farm the weather was the great fact,
and men’s affairs went on underneath it, as the
streams creep under the ice. But in Black
Hawk the scene of human life was spread out
shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare
stalk.
Through January and February I went to
the river with the Harlings on clear nights, and
we skated up to the big island and made bonfires
on the frozen sand. But by March the
ice was rough and choppy, and the snow on the
river bluffs was gray and mournful-looking.
I was tired of school, tired of winter clothes,
of the rutted streets, of the dirty drifts and the
piles of cinders that had lain in the yards so
long. There was only one break in the dreary
monotony of that month; when Blind d’Arnault,
the negro pianist, came to town. He
gave a concert at the Opera House on Monday
night, and he and his manager spent Saturday
and Sunday at our comfortable hotel. Mrs.
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Harling had known d’Arnault for years. She
told Ántonia she had better go to see Tiny that
Saturday evening, as there would certainly be
music at the Boys’ Home.
Saturday night after supper I ran downtown
to the hotel and slipped quietly into the parlor.
The chairs and sofas were already occupied,
and the air smelled pleasantly of cigar smoke.
The parlor had once been two rooms, and the
floor was sway-backed where the partition
had been cut away. The wind from without
made waves in the long carpet. A coal stove
glowed at either end of the room, and the
grand piano in the middle stood open.
There was an atmosphere of unusual freedom
about the house that night, for Mrs. Gardener
had gone to Omaha for a week. Johnnie had
been having drinks with the guests until he was
rather absent-minded. It was Mrs. Gardener
who ran the business and looked after everything.
Her husband stood at the desk and
welcomed incoming travelers. He was a popular
fellow, but no manager.
Mrs. Gardener was admittedly the bestdressed
woman in Black Hawk, drove the best
horse, and had a smart trap and a little whiteand-gold
sleigh. She seemed indifferent to her
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possessions, was not half so solicitous about
them as her friends were. She was tall, dark,
severe, with something Indian-like in the rigid
immobility of her face. Her manner was cold,
and she talked little. Guests felt that they were
receiving, not conferring, a favor when they
stayed at her house. Even the smartest traveling
men were flattered when Mrs. Gardener
stopped to chat with them for a moment.
The patrons of the hotel were divided
into two classes; those who had seen Mrs.
Gardener’s diamonds, and those who had not.
When I stole into the parlor Anson Kirkpatrick,
Marshall Field’s man, was at the
piano, playing airs from a musical comedy
then running in Chicago. He was a dapper
little Irishman, very vain, homely as a monkey,
with friends everywhere, and a sweetheart
in every port, like a sailor. I did not know
all the men who were sitting about, but I recognized
a furniture salesman from Kansas City,
a drug man, and Willy O’Reilly, who traveled
for a jewelry house and sold musical instruments.
The talk was all about good and bad
hotels, actors and actresses and musical prodigies.
I learned that Mrs. Gardener had gone
to Omaha to hear Booth and Barrett, who
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were to play there next week, and that Mary
Anderson was having a great success in “A
Winter’s Tale,” in London.
The door from the office opened, and
Johnnie Gardener came in, directing Blind
d’Arnault, — he would never consent to be
led. He was a heavy, bulky mulatto, on short
legs, and he came tapping the floor in front of
him with his gold-headed cane. His yellow face
was lifted in the light, with a show of white
teeth, all grinning, and his shrunken, papery
eyelids lay motionless over his blind eyes.
“Good-evening,
a
gentlemen. No ladies here?
Good-evening, gentlemen. We going to have
a little music? Some of you gentlemen going to
play for me this evening?” It was the soft,
amiable negro voice, like those I remembered
from early childhood, with the note of docile
subservience in it. He had the negro head,
too; almost no head at all; nothing behind the
ears but folds of neck under close-clipped wool.
He would have been repulsive if his face had
not been so kindly and happy. It was the happiest
face I had seen since I left Virginia.
He felt his way directly to the piano. The
moment he sat down, I noticed the nervous
infirmity of which Mrs. Harling had told me.
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a Good evening
MY ANTONIA
When he was sitting, or standing still, he
swayed back and forth incessantly, like a rocking
toy. At the piano, he swayed in time to
the music, and when he was not playing, his
body kept up this motion, like an empty mill
grinding on. He found the pedals and tried
them, ran his yellow hands up and down the
keys a few times, tinkling off scales, then
turned to the company.
“She seems all right, gentlemen. Nothing
happened to her since the last time I was here.
Mrs. Gardener, she always has this piano
tuned up before I come. Now, gentlemen, I
expect you’ve all got grand voices. Seems like
we might have some good old plantation songs
to-night.”
The men gathered round him, as he began
to play “My Old Kentucky Home.” They
sang one negro melody after another, while the
mulatto sat rocking himself, his head thrown
back, his yellow face lifted, its shriveled eyelids
never fluttering.
He was born in the Far South, on the d’Arnault
plantation, where the spirit if not the
fact of slavery persisted. When he was three
weeks old he had an illness which left him
totally blind. As soon as he was old enough
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to sit up alone and toddle about, another
affliction, the nervous motion of his body, became
apparent. His mother, a buxom young
negro wench who was laundress for the d’Arnaults,
concluded that her blind baby was
“not right” in his head, and she was ashamed
of him. She loved him devotedly, but he was
so ugly, with his sunken eyes and his “fidgets,”
that she hid him away from people. All the
dainties she brought down from the “Big
House” were for the blind child, and she beat
and cuffed her other children whenever she
found them teasing him or trying to get his
chicken-bone away from him. He began to
talk early, remembered everything he heard,
and his mammy said he “was n’t all wrong.”
She named him Samson, because he was blind,
but on the plantation he was known as “yellow
Martha’s simple child.” He was docile and
obedient, but when he was six years old he
began to run away from home, always taking
the same direction. He felt his way through
the lilacs, along the boxwood hedge, up to the
south wing of the “Big House,” where Miss
Nellie d’Arnault practiced the piano every
morning. This angered his mother more than
anything else he could have done; she was so
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MY ANTONIA
ashamed of his ugliness that she could n’t
bear to have white folks see him. Whenever
she caught him slipping away from the cabin,
she whipped him unmercifully, and told him
what dreadful things old Mr. d’Arnault would
do to him if he ever found him near the “Big
House.” But the next time Samson had a
chance, he ran away again. If Miss d’Arnault
stopped practicing for a moment and went
toward the window, she saw this hideous little
pickaninny, dressed in an old piece of sacking,
standing in the open space between the hollyhock
rows, his body rocking automatically, his
blind face lifted to the sun and wearing an
expression of idiotic rapture. Often she was
tempted to tell Martha that the child must be
kept at home, but somehow the memory of
his foolish, happy face deterred her. She remembered
that his sense of hearing was nearly
all he had, — though it did not occur to her
that he might have more of it than other
children.
One day Samson was standing thus while
Miss Nellie was playing her lesson to her
music-master. The windows were open. He
heard them get up from the piano, talk a little
while, and then leave the room. He heard the
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door close after them. He crept up to the front
windows and stuck his head in: there was no
one there. He could always detect the presence
of any one in a room. He put one foot
over the window sill and straddled it. His
mother had told him over and over how his
master would give him to the big mastiff if
he ever found him “meddling.” Samson had
got too near the mastiff’s kennel once, and
had felt his terrible breath in his face. He
thought about that, but he pulled in his other
foot.
Through the dark he found his way to the
Thing, to its mouth. He touched it softly, and
it answered softly, kindly. He shivered and
stood still. Then he began to feel it all over,
ran his finger-tips
a
along the slippery sides, embraced
the carved legs, tried to get some conception
of its shape and size, of the space it
occupied in primeval night. It was cold and
hard, and like nothing else in his black universe.
He went back to its mouth, began at one end of
the keyboard and felt his way down into the
mellow thunder, as far as he could go. He
seemed to know that it must be done with
the fingers, not with the fists or the feet. He
approached this highly artificial instrument
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a
finger tips
MY ANTONIA
through a mere instinct, and coupled himself
to it, as if he knew it was to piece him out and
make a whole creature of him. After he had
tried over all the sounds, he began to finger
out passages from things Miss Nellie had been
practicing, passages that were already his, that
lay under the bones of his pinched, conical
little skull, definite as animal desires. The door
opened; Miss Nellie and her music-master
stood behind it, but blind Samson, who was
so sensitive to presences, did not know they
were there. He was feeling out the pattern
that lay all ready-made on the big and little
keys. When he paused for a moment, because
the sound was wrong and he wanted another,
Miss Nellie spoke softly. He whirled about in
a spasm of terror, leaped forward in the dark,
struck his head on the open window, and fell
screaming and bleeding to the floor. He had
what his mother called a fit. The doctor came
and gave him opium.
When Samson was well again, his young
mistress led him back to the piano. Several
teachers experimented with him. They found
he had absolute pitch, and a remarkable
memory. As a very young child he could repeat,
after a fashion, any composition that
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was played for him. No matter how many
wrong notes he struck, he never lost the intention
of a passage, he brought the substance
of it across by irregular and astonishing
means. He wore his teachers out. He could
never learn like other people, never acquired
any finish. He was always a negro prodigy who
played barbarously and wonderfully. As piano
playing, it was perhaps abominable, but as
music it was something real, vitalized by a
sense of rhythm that was stronger than his
other physical senses, — that not only filled his
dark mind, but worried his body incessantly.
To hear him, to watch him, was to see a negro
enjoying himself as only a negro can. It was
as if all the agreeable sensations possible to
creatures of flesh and blood were heaped up on
those black and white keys, and he were gloating
over them and trickling them through his
yellow fingers.
In the middle of a crashing waltz d’Arnault
suddenly began to play softly, and, turning to
one of the men who stood behind him, whispered,
“Somebody dancing in there.” He
jerked his bullet head toward the dining-room.
“I hear little feet, — girls, I ’spect.”
Anson Kirkpatrick mounted a chair and
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MY ANTONIA
peeped over the transom. Springing down,
he wrenched open the doors and ran out into
the dining-room. Tiny and Lena, Ántonia and
Mary Dusak, were waltzing in the middle of
the floor. They separated and fled toward
the kitchen, giggling.
Kirkpatrick caught Tiny by the elbows.
“What’s the matter with you girls? Dancing
out here by yourselves, when there’s a roomful
of lonesome men on the other side of the
partition! Introduce me to your friends, Tiny.”
The girls, still laughing, were trying to escape.
Tiny looked alarmed. “Mrs. Gardener
would n’t like it,” she protested. “She’d be
awful mad if you was to come out here and
dance with us.”
“Mrs. Gardener’s in Omaha, girl. Now,
you’re Lena, are you? — and you’re Tony and
you’re Mary. Have I got you all straight?”
O’Reilly and the others began to pile the
chairs on the tables. Johnnie Gardener ran in
from the office.
“Easy, boys, easy!” he entreated them.
“You’ll wake the cook, and there’ll be the
devil to pay for me. She won’t hear the music,
but she’ll be down the minute anything’s
moved in the dining-room.”
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“Oh, what do you care, Johnnie? Fire the
cook and wire Molly to bring another. Come
along, nobody’ll tell tales.”
Johnnie shook his head. “ ’S a fact, boys,”
he said confidentially. “If I take a drink in
Black Hawk, Molly knows it in Omaha!”
His guests laughed and slapped him on the
shoulder. “Oh, we’ll make it all right with
Molly. Get your back up, Johnnie.”
Molly was Mrs. Gardener’s name, of course.
“Molly Bawn” was painted in large blue
letters on the glossy white side of the hotel bus,
and “Molly” was engraved inside Johnnie’s
ring and on his watch-case — doubtless on his
heart, too. He was an affectionate little man,
and he thought his wife a wonderful woman;
he knew that without her he would hardly be
more than a clerk in some other man’s hotel.
At a word from Kirkpatrick, d’Arnault
spread himself out over the piano, and began
to draw the dance music out of it, while the
perspiration shone on his short wool and on
his uplifted face. He looked like some glistening
African god of pleasure, full of strong,
savage blood. Whenever the dancers paused
to change partners or to catch breath, he
would boom out softly, “Who’s that goin’
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MY ANTONIA
back on me? One of these city gentlemen, I
bet! Now, you girls, you ain’t goin’ to let
that floor get cold?”
Ántonia seemed frightened at first, and kept
looking questioningly at Lena and Tiny over
Willy O’Reilly’s shoulder. Tiny Soderball was
trim and slender, with lively little feet and
pretty ankles — she wore her dresses very
short. She was quicker in speech, lighter in
movement and manner than the other girls.
Mary Dusak was broad and brown of countenance,
slightly marked by smallpox, but handsome
for all that. She had beautiful chestnut
hair, coils of it; her forehead was low and
smooth, and her commanding dark eyes regarded
the world indifferently and fearlessly.
She looked bold and resourceful and unscrupulous,
and she was all of these. They were
handsome girls, had the fresh color of their
country up-bringing, and in their eyes that
brilliancy which is called, — by no metaphor,
alas! — “the light of youth.”
D’Arnault played until his manager came
and shut the piano. Before he left us, he
showed us his gold watch which struck the
hours, and a topaz ring, given him by some
Russian nobleman who delighted in negro
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THE HIRED GIRLS
melodies, and had heard d’Arnault play in
New Orleans. At last he tapped his way upstairs,
after bowing to everybody, docile and
happy. I walked home with Ántonia. We were
so excited that we dreaded to go to bed. We
lingered a long while at the Harlings’ gate,
whispering in the cold until the restlessness
was slowly chilled out of us.
VIII
THE Harling children and I were never happier,
never felt more contented and secure,
than in the weeks of spring which broke that
long winter. We were out all day in the thin
sunshine, helping Mrs. Harling and Tony
break the ground and plant the garden, dig
around the orchard trees, tie up vines and
clip the hedges. Every morning, before I was
up, I could hear Tony singing in the garden
rows. After the apple and cherry trees broke
into bloom, we ran about under them, hunting
for the new nests the birds were building,
throwing clods at each other, and playing hideand-seek
with Nina. Yet the summer which
was to change everything was coming nearer
every day. When boys and girls are growing
up, life can’t stand still, not even in the quietest
of country towns; and they have to grow
up, whether they will or no. That is what
their elders are always forgetting.
It must have been in June, for Mrs. Harling
and Ántonia were preserving cherries, when I
stopped one morning to tell them that a dancing
pavilion had come to town. I had seen
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two drays hauling the canvas and painted
poles up from the depot.
That afternoon three cheerful-looking Italians
strolled about Black Hawk, looking at
everything, and with them was a dark, stout
woman who wore a long gold watch chain
about her neck and carried a black lace parasol.
They seemed especially interested in children
and vacant lots. When I overtook them
and stopped to say a word, I found them affable
and confiding. They told me they worked
in Kansas City in the winter, and in summer
they went out among the farming towns with
their tent and taught dancing. When business
fell off in one place, they moved on to another.
The dancing pavilion was put up near the
Danish laundry, on a vacant lot surrounded
by tall, arched cottonwood trees. It was very
much like a merry-go-round tent, with open
sides and gay flags flying from the poles. Before
the week was over, all the ambitious
mothers were sending their children to the
afternoon dancing class. At three o’clock one
met little girls in white dresses and little boys
in the round-collared shirts of the time, hurrying
along the sidewalk on their way to the
tent. Mrs. Vanni received them at the en221
MY ANTONIA
trance, always dressed in lavender with a great
deal of black lace, her important watch chain
lying on her bosom. She wore her hair on
the top of her head, built up in a black tower,
with red coral combs. When she smiled, she
showed two rows of strong, crooked yellow
teeth. She taught the little children herself,
and her husband, the harpist, taught the older
ones.
Often the mothers brought their fancy-work
and sat on the shady side of the tent during
the lesson. The popcorn man wheeled his glass
wagon under the big cottonwood by the door,
and lounged in the sun, sure of a good trade
when the dancing was over. Mr. Jensen, the
Danish laundryman, used to bring a chair
from his porch and sit out in the grass plot.
Some ragged little boys from the depot sold
pop and iced lemonade under a white umbrella
at the corner, and made faces at the
spruce youngsters who came to dance. That
vacant lot soon became the most cheerful
place in town. Even on the hottest afternoons
the cottonwoods made a rustling shade, and
the air smelled of popcorn and melted butter,
and Bouncing Bets wilting in the sun. Those
hardy flowers had run away from the laundry222
THE HIRED GIRLS
man’s garden, and the grass in the middle of
the lot was pink with them.
The Vannis kept exemplary order, and
closed every evening at the hour suggested by
the City Council. When Mrs. Vanni gave
the signal, and the harp struck up “Home,
Sweet Home,” all Black Hawk knew it was
ten o’clock. You could set your watch by that
tune as confidently as by the Round House
whistle.
At last there was something to do in those
long, empty summer evenings, when the married
people sat like images on their front
porches, and the boys and girls tramped and
tramped the board sidewalks — northward to
the edge of the open prairie, south to the depot,
then back again to the post-office, the icecream
parlor, the butcher shop. Now there
was a place where the girls could wear their
new dresses, and where one could laugh aloud
without being reproved by the ensuing silence.
That silence seemed to ooze out of the ground,
to hang under the foliage of the black maple
trees with the bats and shadows. Now it
was broken by light-hearted sounds. First the
deep purring of Mr. Vanni’s harp came in
silvery ripples through the blackness of the
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MY ANTONIA
dusty-smelling night; then the violins fell in
— one of them was almost like a flute. They
called so archly, so seductively, that our feet
hurried toward the tent of themselves. Why
had n’t we had a tent before?
Dancing became popular now, just as roller
skating had been the summer before. The
Progressive Euchre Club arranged with the
Vannis for the exclusive use of the floor on
Tuesday and Friday nights. At other times
any one could dance who paid his money and
was orderly; the railroad men, the Round
House mechanics, the delivery boys, the iceman,
the farmhands who lived near enough to
ride into town after their day’s work was over.
I never missed a Saturday night dance. The
tent was open until midnight then. The country
boys came in from farms eight and ten
miles away, and all the country girls were on
the floor, — Ántonia and Lena and Tiny, and
the Danish laundry girls and their friends. I
was not the only boy who found these dances
gayer than the others. The young men who
belonged to the Progressive Euchre Club used
to drop in late and risk a tiff with their sweethearts
and general condemnation for a waltz
with “the hired girls.”
IX
THERE was a curious social situation in Black
Hawk. All the young men felt the attraction
of the fine, well-set-up country girls who had
come to town to earn a living, and, in nearly
every case, to help the father struggle out of
debt, or to make it possible for the younger
children of the family to go to school.
Those girls had grown up in the first bitterhard
times, and had got little schooling themselves.
But the younger brothers and sisters,
for whom they made such sacrifices and who
have had “advantages,” never seem to me,
when I meet them now, half as interesting or
as well educated. The older girls, who helped
to break up the wild sod, learned so much
from life, from poverty, from their mothers
and grandmothers; they had all, like Ántonia,
been early awakened and made observant by
coming at a tender age from an old country
to a new. I can remember a score of these
country girls who were in service in Black
Hawk during the few years I lived there, and
225
MY ANTONIA
I can remember something unusual and engaging
about each of them. Physically they
were almost a race apart, and out-of-door
work had given them a vigor which, when they
got over their first shyness on coming to town,
developed into a positive carriage and freedom
of movement, and made them conspicuous
among Black Hawk women.
That was before the day of High-School
athletics. Girls who had to walk more than
half a mile to school were pitied. There was
not a tennis court in the town; physical exercise
was thought rather inelegant for the
daughters of well-to-do families. Some of the
High-School girls were jolly and pretty, but
they stayed indoors in winter because of the
cold, and in summer because of the heat.
When one danced with them their bodies
never moved inside their clothes; their muscles
seemed to ask but one thing — not to be
disturbed. I remember those girls merely as
faces in the schoolroom, gay and rosy, or listless
and dull, cut off below the shoulders, like
cherubs, by the ink-smeared tops of the high
desks that were surely put there to make us
round-shouldered and hollow-chested.
The daughters of Black Hawk merchants
226
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had a confident, uninquiring belief that they
were “refined,” and that the country girls,
who “worked out,” were not. The American
farmers in our county were quite as hardpressed
as their neighbors from other countries.
All alike had come to Nebraska with
little capital and no knowledge of the soil
they must subdue. All had borrowed money
on their land. But no matter in what straits
the Pennsylvanian or Virginian found himself,
he would not let his daughters go out
into service. Unless his girls could teach a
country school, they sat at home in poverty.
The Bohemian and Scandinavian girls could
not get positions as teachers, because they had
had no opportunity to learn the language.
Determined to help in the struggle to clear the
homestead from debt, they had no alternative
but to go into service. Some of them, after
they came to town, remained as serious and
as discreet in behavior as they had been when
they ploughed and herded on their father’s
farm. Others, like the three Bohemian Marys,
tried to make up for the years of youth they
had lost. But every one of them did what she
had set out to do, and sent home those hardearned
dollars. The girls I knew were always
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helping to pay for ploughs and reapers, broodsows,
or steers to fatten.
One result of this family solidarity was that
the foreign farmers in our county were the first
to become prosperous. After the fathers were
out of debt, the daughters married the sons of
neighbors, — usually of like nationality, — and
the girls who once worked in Black Hawk
kitchens are to-day managing big farms and
fine families of their own; their children are
better off than the children of the town women
they used to serve.
I thought the attitude of the town people
toward these girls very stupid. If I told my
schoolmates that Lena Lingard’s grandfather
was a clergyman, and much respected in Norway,
they looked at me blankly. What did it
matter? All foreigners were ignorant people
who could n’t speak English. There was not a
man in Black Hawk who had the intelligence
or cultivation, much less the personal distinction,
of Ántonia’s father. Yet people saw no
difference between her and the three Marys;
they were all Bohemians, all “hired girls.”
I always knew I should live long enough to
see my country girls come into their own, and
I have. To-day the best that a harassed Black
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Hawk merchant can hope for is to sell provisions
and farm machinery and automobiles to
the rich farms where that first crop of stalwart
Bohemian and Scandinavian girls are now the
mistresses.
The Black Hawk boys looked forward to
marrying Black Hawk girls, and living in a
brand-new little house with best chairs that
must not be sat upon, and hand-painted china
that must not be used. But sometimes a
young fellow would look up from his ledger, or
out through the grating of his father’s bank,
and let his eyes follow Lena Lingard, as she
passed the window with her slow, undulating
walk, or Tiny Soderball, tripping by in her
short skirt and striped stockings.
The country girls were considered a menace
to the social order. Their beauty shone out too
boldly against a conventional background.
But anxious mothers need have felt no alarm.
They mistook the mettle of their sons. The
respect for respectability was stronger than
any desire in Black Hawk youth.
Our young man of position was like the son
of a royal house; the boy who swept out his
office or drove his delivery wagon might frolic
with the jolly country girls, but he himself
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MY ANTONIA
must sit all evening in a plush parlor where
conversation dragged so perceptibly that the
father often came in and made blundering
efforts to warm up the atmosphere. On his
way home from his dull call, he would perhaps
meet Tony and Lena, coming along the sidewalk
whispering to each other, or the three
Bohemian Marys in their long plush coats
and caps, comporting themselves with a dignity
that only made their eventful histories
the more piquant. If he went to the hotel to
see a traveling man on business, there was
Tiny, arching her shoulders at him like a kitten.
If he went into the laundry to get his
collars, there were the four Danish girls, smiling
up from their ironing-boards, with their
white throats and their pink cheeks.
The three Marys were the heroines of a cycle
of scandalous stories, which the old men were
fond of relating as they sat about the cigarstand
in the drug-store. Mary Dusak had been
housekeeper for a bachelor rancher from Boston,
and after several years in his service she
was forced to retire from the world for a short
time. Later she came back to town to take
the place of her friend, Mary Svoboda, who
was similarly embarrassed. The three Marys
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were considered as dangerous as high explosives
to have about the kitchen, yet they were
such good cooks and such admirable housekeepers
that they never had to look for a place.
The Vannis’ tent brought the town boys and
the country girls together on neutral ground.
Sylvester Lovett, who was cashier in his father’s
bank, always found his way to the tent on
Saturday night. He took all the dances Lena
Lingard would give him, and even grew bold
enough to walk home with her. If his sisters
or their friends happened to be among the
onlookers on “popular nights,” Sylvester
stood back in the shadow under the cottonwood
trees, smoking and watching Lena with
a harassed expression. Several times I stumbled
upon him there in the dark, and I felt
rather sorry for him. He reminded me of Ole
Benson, who used to sit on the draw-side and
watch Lena herd her cattle. Later in the summer,
when Lena went home for a week to
visit her mother, I heard from Ántonia that
young Lovett drove all the way out there to
see her, and took her buggy-riding. In my ingenuousness
I hoped that Sylvester would
marry Lena, and thus give all the country
girls a better position in the town.
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MY ANTONIA
Sylvester dallied about Lena until he began
to make mistakes in his work; had to stay at
the bank until after dark to make his books
balance. He was daft about her, and every
one knew it. To escape from his predicament
he ran away with a widow six years older
than himself, who owned a half-section. This
remedy worked, apparently. He never looked
at Lena again, nor lifted his eyes as he ceremoniously
tipped his hat when he happened
to meet her on the sidewalk.
So that was what they were like, I thought,
these white-handed, high-collared clerks and
bookkeepers! I used to glare at young Lovett
from a distance and only wished I had some
way of showing my contempt for him.
X
IT was at the Vannis’ tent that Ántonia was
discovered. Hitherto she had been looked
upon more as a ward of the Harlings than as
one of the “hired girls.” She had lived in their
house and yard and garden; her thoughts
never seemed to stray outside that little kingdom.
But after the tent came to town she
began to go about with Tiny and Lena and
their friends. The Vannis often said that Ántonia
was the best dancer of them all. I sometimes
heard murmurs in the crowd outside the
pavilion that Mrs. Harling would soon have
her hands full with that girl. The young men
began to joke with each other about “the
Harlings’ Tony” as they did about “the Marshalls’
Anna” or “the Gardeners’ Tiny.”
Ántonia talked and thought of nothing but
the tent. She hummed the dance tunes all day.
When supper was late, she hurried with her
dishes, dropped and smashed them in her excitement.
At the first call of the music, she
became irresponsible. If she had n’t time to
dress, she merely flung off her apron and shot
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MY ANTONIA
out of the kitchen door. Sometimes I went
with her; the moment the lighted tent came
into view she would break into a run, like a
boy. There were always partners waiting for
her; she began to dance before she got her
breath.
Ántonia’s success at the tent had its consequences.
The iceman lingered too long now,
when he came into the covered porch to fill the
refrigerator. The delivery boys hung about
the kitchen when they brought the groceries.
Young farmers who were in town for Saturday
came tramping through the yard to the back
door to engage dances, or to invite Tony to
parties and picnics. Lena and Norwegian
Anna dropped in to help her with her work, so
that she could get away early. The boys who
brought her home after the dances sometimes
laughed at the back gate and wakened Mr.
Harling from his first sleep. A crisis was
inevitable.
One Saturday night Mr. Harling had gone
down to the cellar for beer. As he came up the
stairs in the dark, he heard scuffling on the
back porch, and then the sound of a vigorous
slap. He looked out through the side door
in time to see a pair of long legs vaulting over
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the picket fence. Ántonia was standing there,
angry and excited. Young Harry Paine, who
was to marry his employer’s daughter on Monday,
had come to the tent with a crowd of
friends and danced all evening. Afterward, he
begged Ántonia to let him walk home with
her. She said she supposed he was a nice
young man, as he was one of Miss Frances’s
friends, and she did n’t mind. On the back
porch he tried to kiss her, and when she protested,
— because he was going to be married
on Monday, — he caught her and kissed her
until she got one hand free and slapped him.
Mr. Harling put his beer bottles down on
the table. “This is what I’ve been expecting,
Ántonia. You’ve been going with girls who
have a reputation for being free and easy, and
now you’ve got the same reputation. I won’t
have this and that fellow tramping about my
back yard all the time. This is the end of it,
to-night. It stops, short. You can quit going
to these dances, or you can hunt another
place. Think it over.”
The next morning when Mrs. Harling and
Frances tried to reason with Ántonia, they
found her agitated but determined. “Stop going
to the tent?” she panted. “I would n’t
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MY ANTONIA
think of it for a minute! My own father
could n’t make me stop! Mr. Harling ain’t my
boss outside my work. I won’t give up my
friends, either. The boys I go with are nice
fellows. I thought Mr. Paine was all right,
too, because he used to come here. I guess
I gave him a red face for his wedding, all
right!” she blazed out indignantly.
“You’ll have to do one thing or the other,
Ántonia,” Mrs. Harling told her decidedly.
“I can’t go back on what Mr. Harling has
said. This is his house.”
“Then I’ll just leave, Mrs. Harling. Lena’s
been wanting me to get a place closer to her
for a long while. Mary Svoboda’s going away
from the Cutters’ to work at the hotel, and I
can have her place.”
Mrs. Harling rose from her chair. “Ántonia,
if you go to the Cutters’
a
to work, you cannot
come back to this house again. You know
what that man is. It will be the ruin of
you.”
Tony snatched up the tea-kettle and began
to pour boiling water over the glasses, laughing
excitedly. “Oh, I can take care of myself!
I’m a lot stronger than Cutter is. They pay
four dollars there, and there’s no children.
236

a Cutters
THE HIRED GIRLS
The work’s nothing; I can have every evening,
and be out a lot in the afternoons.”
“I thought you liked children. Tony,
what’s come over you?”
“I don’t know, something has.” Ántonia
tossed her head and set her jaw. “A girl like
me has got to take her good times when she
can. Maybe there won’t be any tent next
year. I guess I want to have my fling, like the
other girls.”
Mrs. Harling gave a short, harsh laugh. “If
you go to work for the Cutters, you’re likely
to have a fling that you won’t get up from in a
hurry.”
Frances said, when she told grandmother
and me about this scene, that every pan and
plate and cup on the shelves trembled when
her mother walked out of the kitchen. Mrs.
Harling declared bitterly that she wished she
had never let herself get fond of Ántonia.
XI
WICK CUTTER was the money-lender who had
fleeced poor Russian Peter. When a farmer
once got into the habit of going to Cutter, it
was like gambling or the lottery; in an hour of
discouragement he went back.
Cutter’s first name was Wycliffe, and he
liked to talk about his pious bringing-up.
He contributed regularly to the Protestant
churches, “for sentiment’s sake,” as he said
with a flourish of the hand. He came from a
town in Iowa where there were a great many
Swedes, and could speak a little Swedish,
which gave him a great advantage with the
early Scandinavian settlers.
In every frontier settlement there are men
who have come there to escape restraint. Cutter
was one of the “fast set” of Black Hawk
business men. He was an inveterate gambler,
though a poor loser. When we saw a light
burning in his office late at night, we knew
that a game of poker was going on. Cutter
boasted that he never drank anything stronger
than sherry, and he said he got his start in life
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by saving the money that other young men
spent for cigars. He was full of moral maxims
for boys. When he came to our house on business,
he quoted “Poor Richard’s Almanack”
to me, and told me he was delighted to find a
town boy who could milk a cow. He was particularly
affable to grandmother, and whenever
they met he would begin at once to talk
about “the good old times” and simple living.
I detested his pink, bald head, and his yellow
whiskers, always soft and glistening. It was
said he brushed them every night, as a woman
does her hair. His white teeth looked factorymade.
His skin was red and rough, as if from
perpetual sunburn; he often went away to
hot springs to take mud baths. He was notoriously
dissolute with women. Two Swedish
girls who had lived in his house were the worse
for the experience. One of them he had taken
to Omaha and established in the business
for which he had fitted her. He still visited
her.
Cutter lived in a state of perpetual warfare
with his wife, and yet, apparently, they never
thought of separating. They dwelt in a fussy,
scroll-work house, painted white and buried in
thick evergreens, with a fussy white fence and
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MY ANTONIA
barn. Cutter thought he knew a great deal
about horses, and usually had a colt which he
was training for the track. On Sunday mornings
one could see him out at the fair grounds,
speeding around the race-course in his trotting-buggy,
wearing yellow gloves and a blackand-white-check
traveling cap, his whiskers
blowing back in the breeze. If there were any
boys about, Cutter would offer one of them a
quarter to hold the stop-watch, and then drive
off, saying he had no change and would “fix it
up next time.” No one could cut his lawn or
wash his buggy to suit him. He was so fastidious
and prim about his place that a boy would
go to a good deal of trouble to throw a dead
cat into his back yard, or to dump a sackful of
tin cans in his alley. It was a peculiar combination
of old-maidishness and licentiousness
that made Cutter seem so despicable.
He had certainly met his match when he
married Mrs. Cutter. She was a terrifyinglooking
person; almost a giantess in height,
raw-boned, with iron-gray hair, a face always
flushed, and prominent, hysterical eyes. When
she meant to be entertaining and agreeable,
she nodded her head incessantly and snapped
her eyes at one. Her teeth were long and
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curved, like a horse’s; people said babies always
cried if she smiled at them. Her face had
a kind of fascination for me; it was the very
color and shape of anger. There was a gleam
of something akin to insanity in her full, intense
eyes. She was formal in manner, and
made calls in rustling, steel-gray brocades and
a tall bonnet with bristling aigrettes.
Mrs. Cutter painted china so assiduously
that even her washbowls and pitchers, and her
husband’s shaving-mug, were covered with
violets and lilies. Once when Cutter was exhibiting
some of his wife’s china to a caller, he
dropped a piece. Mrs. Cutter put her handkerchief
to her lips as if she were going to faint
and said grandly: “Mr. Cutter, you have
broken all the Commandments — spare the
finger-bowls!”
They quarreled from the moment Cutter
came into the house until they went to bed at
night, and their hired girls reported these
scenes to the town at large. Mrs. Cutter had
several times cut paragraphs about unfaithful
husbands out of the newspapers and mailed
them to Cutter in a disguised handwriting.
Cutter would come home at noon, find the
mutilated journal in the paper-rack, and tri241
MY ANTONIA
umphantly fit the clipping into the space from
which it had been cut. Those two could quarrel
all morning about whether he ought to put
on his heavy or his light underwear, and all
evening about whether he had taken cold or
not.
The Cutters had major as well as minor subjects
for dispute. The chief of these was the
question of inheritance: Mrs. Cutter told her
husband it was plainly his fault they had no
children. He insisted that Mrs. Cutter had
purposely remained childless, with the determination
to outlive him and to share his
property with her “people,” whom he detested.
To this she would reply that unless he
changed his mode of life, she would certainly
outlive him. After listening to her insinuations
about his physical soundness, Cutter
would resume his dumb-bell practice for a
month, or rise daily at the hour when his wife
most liked to sleep, dress noisily, and drive out
to the track with his trotting-horse.
Once when they had quarreled about household
expenses, Mrs. Cutter put on her brocade
and went among their friends soliciting orders
for painted china, saying that Mr. Cutter had
compelled her “to live by her brush.” Cutter
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was n’t shamed as she had expected; he was
delighted!
Cutter often threatened to chop down the
cedar trees which half-buried the house. His
wife declared she would leave him if she were
stripped of the “privacy” which she felt these
trees afforded her. That was his opportunity,
surely; but he never cut down the trees. The
Cutters seemed to find their relations to each
other interesting and stimulating, and certainly
the rest of us found them so. Wick
Cutter was different from any other rascal I
have ever known, but I have found Mrs.
Cutters all over the world; sometimes founding
new religions, sometimes being forcibly
fed — easily recognizable, even when superficially
tamed.
XII
AFTER Ántonia went to live with the Cutters,
she seemed to care about nothing but picnics
and parties and having a good time. When
she was not going to a dance, she sewed until
midnight. Her new clothes were the subject
of caustic comment. Under Lena’s direction
she copied Mrs. Gardener’s new party
dress and Mrs. Smith’s street costume so ingeniously
in cheap materials that those ladies
were greatly annoyed, and Mrs. Cutter, who
was jealous of them, was secretly pleased.
Tony wore gloves now, and high-heeled
shoes and feathered bonnets, and she went
downtown nearly every afternoon with Tiny
and Lena and the Marshalls’ Norwegian Anna.
We High-School boys used to linger on the
playground at the afternoon recess to watch
them as they came tripping down the hill
along the board sidewalk, two and two. They
were growing prettier every day, but as they
passed us, I used to think with pride that Ántonia,
like Snow-White in the fairy tale, was
still “fairest of them all.”
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Being a Senior now, I got away from school
early. Sometimes I overtook the girls downtown
and coaxed them into the ice-cream
parlor, where they would sit chattering and
laughing, telling me all the news from the
country. I remember how angry Tiny Soderball
made me one afternoon. She declared
she had heard grandmother was going to make
a Baptist preacher of me. “I guess you’ll
have to stop dancing and wear a white necktie
then. Won’t he look funny, girls?”
Lena laughed. “You’ll have to hurry up,
Jim. If you’re going to be a preacher, I want
you to marry me. You must promise to marry
us all, and then baptize the babies.”
Norwegian Anna, always dignified, looked
at her reprovingly.
“Baptists don’t believe in christening babies,
do they, Jim?”
I told her I did n’t know what they believed,
and did n’t care, and that I certainly
was n’t going to be a preacher.
“That’s too bad,” Tiny simpered. She was
in a teasing mood. “You’d make such a good
one. You’re so studious. Maybe you’d like
to be a professor. You used to teach Tony,
did n’t you?”
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MY ANTONIA
Ántonia broke in. “I’ve set my heart on
Jim being a doctor. You’d be good with sick
people, Jim. Your grandmother’s trained you
up so nice. My papa always said you were an
awful smart boy.”
I said I was going to be whatever I pleased.
“Won’t you be surprised, Miss Tiny, if I turn
out to be a regular devil of a fellow?”
They laughed until a glance from Norwegian
Anna checked them; the High-School
Principal had just come into the front part
of the shop to buy bread for supper. Anna
knew the whisper was going about that I was
a sly one. People said there must be something
queer about a boy who showed no interest
in girls of his own age, but who could
be lively enough when he was with Tony and
Lena or the three Marys.
The enthusiasm for the dance, which the
Vannis had kindled, did not at once die out.
After the tent left town, the Euchre Club became
the Owl Club, and gave dances in the
Masonic Hall once a week. I was invited to
join, but declined. I was moody and restless
that winter, and tired of the people I saw every
day. Charley Harling was already at Annapo246
THE HIRED GIRLS
lis, while I was still sitting in Black Hawk,
answering to my name at roll-call every morning,
rising from my desk at the sound of a bell
and marching out like the grammar-school
children. Mrs. Harling was a little cool toward
me, because I continued to champion Ántonia.
What was there for me to do after supper?
Usually I had learned next day’s lessons by
the time I left the school building, and I
could n’t sit still and read forever.
In the evening I used to prowl about, hunting
for diversion. There lay the familiar
streets, frozen with snow or liquid with mud.
They led to the houses of good people who
were putting the babies to bed, or simply sitting
still before the parlor stove, digesting
their supper. Black Hawk had two saloons.
One of them was admitted, even by the
church people, to be as respectable as a saloon
could be. Handsome Anton Jelinek, who had
rented his homestead and come to town, was
the proprietor. In his saloon there were long
tables where the Bohemian and German farmers
could eat the lunches they brought from
home while they drank their beer. Jelinek
kept rye bread on hand, and smoked fish and
strong imported cheeses to please the foreign
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MY ANTONIA
palate. I liked to drop into his bar-room
and listen to the talk. But one day he overtook
me on the street and clapped me on the
shoulder.
“Jim,” he said, “I am good friends with
you and I always like to see you. But you
know how the church people think about
saloons. Your grandpa has always treated me
fine, and I don’t like to have you come into
my place, because I know he don’t like it, and
it puts me in bad with him.”
So I was shut out of that.
One could hang about the drug-store, and
listen to the old men who sat there every
evening, talking politics and telling raw stories.
One could go to the cigar factory and chat
with the old German who raised canaries for
sale, and look at his stuffed birds. But whatever
you began with him, the talk went back
to taxidermy. There was the depot, of course;
I often went down to see the night train
come in, and afterward sat awhile with the
disconsolate telegrapher who was always hoping
to be transferred to Omaha or Denver,
“where there was some life.” He was sure
to bring out his pictures of actresses and
dancers. He got them with cigarette coupons,
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and nearly smoked himself to death to possess
these desired forms and faces. For a change,
one could talk to the station agent; but he
was another malcontent; spent all his spare
time writing letters to officials requesting a
transfer. He wanted to get back to Wyoming
where he could go trout-fishing on Sundays.
He used to say “there was nothing in life for
him but trout streams, ever since he’d lost his
twins.”
These were the distractions I had to choose
from. There were no other lights burning
downtown after nine o’clock. On starlight
nights I used to pace up and down those long,
cold streets, scowling at the little, sleeping
houses on either side, with their storm-windows
and covered back porches. They were
flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of
light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly
mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all
their frailness, how much jealousy and envy
and unhappiness some of them managed to
contain! The life that went on in them seemed
to me made up of evasions and negations;
shifts to save cooking, to save washing and
cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of
gossip. This guarded mode of existence was
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MY ANTONIA
like living under a tyranny. People’s speech,
their voices, their very glances, became furtive
and repressed. Every individual taste,
every natural appetite, was bridled by caution.
The people asleep in those houses, I
thought, tried to live like the mice in their
own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no
trace, to slip over the surface of things in the
dark. The growing piles of ashes and cinders
in the back yards were the only evidence that
the wasteful, consuming process of life went
on at all. On Tuesday nights the Owl Club
danced; then there was a little stir in the
streets, and here and there one could see a
lighted window until midnight. But the next
night all was dark again.
After I refused to join “the Owls,” as they
were called, I made a bold resolve to go to
the Saturday night dances at Firemen’s Hall.
I knew it would be useless to acquaint my
elders with any such plan. Grandfather did
n’t approve of dancing anyway; he would
only say that if I wanted to dance I could go
to the Masonic Hall, among “the people we
knew.” It was just my point that I saw altogether
too much of the people we knew.
My bedroom was on the ground floor, and as
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I studied there, I had a stove in it. I used to
retire to my room early on Saturday night,
change my shirt and collar and put on my
Sunday coat. I waited until all was quiet and
the old people were asleep, then raised my
window, climbed out, and went softly through
the yard. The first time I deceived my grandparents
I felt rather shabby, perhaps even
the second time, but I soon ceased to think
about it.
The dance at the Firemen’s Hall was the
one thing I looked forward to all the week.
There I met the same people I used to see at
the Vannis’ tent. Sometimes there were Bohemians
from Wilber, or German boys who
came down on the afternoon freight from Bismarck.
Tony and Lena and Tiny were always
there, and the three Bohemian Marys, and the
Danish laundry girls.
The four Danish girls lived with the laundryman
and his wife in their house behind the
laundry, with a big garden where the clothes
were hung out to dry. The laundryman was a
kind, wise old fellow, who paid his girls well,
looked out for them, and gave them a good
home. He told me once that his own daughter
died just as she was getting old enough to
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MY ANTONIA
help her mother, and that he had been “trying
to make up for it ever since.” On summer
afternoons he used to sit for hours on the sidewalk
in front of his laundry, his newspaper
lying on his knee, watching his girls through
the big open window while they ironed and
talked in Danish. The clouds of white dust
that blew up the street, the gusts of hot wind
that withered his vegetable garden, never disturbed
his calm. His droll expression seemed
to say that he had found the secret of contentment.
Morning and evening he drove about
in his spring wagon, distributing freshly
ironed clothes, and collecting bags of linen
that cried out for his suds and sunny dryinglines.
His girls never looked so pretty at the
dances as they did standing by the ironingboard,
or over the tubs, washing the fine pieces,
their white arms and throats bare, their cheeks
bright as the brightest wild roses, their gold
hair 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
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had been put away with rosemary leaves from
Mr. Jensen’s garden.
There were never girls enough to go round
at those dances, but every one 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 violetcolored
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 did n’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
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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
color 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’
a
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!”
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“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, I 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
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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 strawstacks
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 harvestfield
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
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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 did n’t feel well, and if I
could n’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 was n’t any other way for you, it seemed
like.”
I put my arms around her. I could n’t bear
to see her cry.
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“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 have n’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,
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and fell back on the telegrapher and the cigarmaker
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 any one else, and spent an afternoon
trimming a little work-basket. 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
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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
would n’t belong to the Owl Club, either.
You’d be just like me.”
She shook her head. “I would and I would
n’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 fervor 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
did n’t believe you could do as well as that.
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You did n’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, did n’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
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.”
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“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
Æneid 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 downtown on
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Saturday afternoon, and learned that she and
Tiny and Lena were going to the river next
day with Anna Hansen — the elder was all in
bloom now, and Anna wanted to make elderblow
wine.
“Anna’s to drive us down in the Marshalls’
delivery wagon, and we’ll take a nice
lunch and have a picnic. Just us; nobody
else. Could n’t you happen along, Jim? It
would be like old times.”
I considered a moment. “Maybe I can, if
I won’t be in the way.”
On Sunday morning I rose early and got out
of Black Hawk while the dew was still heavy
on the long meadow grasses. It was the high
season for summer flowers. The pink bee-bush
stood tall along the sandy roadsides, and the
cone-flowers and rose mallow grew everywhere.
Across the wire fence, in the long grass, I saw
a clump of flaming orange-colored milkweed,
rare in that part of the State. I left the road
and went around through a stretch of pasture
that was always cropped short in summer,
where the gaillardia came up year after year
and matted over the ground with the deep,
velvety red that is in Bokhara carpets. The
country was empty and solitary except for the
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MY ANTONIA
larks that Sunday morning, and it seemed to
lift itself up to me and to come very close.
The river was running strong for midsummer;
heavy rains to the west of us had kept it
full. I crossed the bridge and went upstream
along the wooded shore to a pleasant dressing-room
I knew among the dogwood bushes,
all overgrown with wild grapevines. I began
to undress for a swim. The girls would not be
along yet. For the first time it occurred to me
that I would be homesick for that river after I
left it. The sandbars, with their clean white
beaches and their little groves of willows and
cottonwood seedlings, were a sort of No Man’s
Land, little newly-created worlds that belonged
to the Black Hawk boys. Charley
Harling and I had hunted through these
woods, fished from the fallen logs, until I knew
every inch of the river shores and had a
friendly feeling for every bar and shallow.
After my swim, while I was playing about
indolently in the water, I heard the sound
of hoofs and wheels on the bridge. I struck
downstream and shouted, as the open spring
wagon came into view on the middle span.
They stopped the horse, and the two girls in
the bottom of the cart stood up, steadying
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themselves by the shoulders of the two in
front, so that they could see me better. They
were charming up there, huddled together in
the cart and peering down at me like curious
deer when they come out of the thicket to
drink. I found bottom near the bridge and
stood up, waving to them.
“How pretty you look!” I called.
“So do you!” they shouted altogether, and
broke into peals of laughter. Anna Hansen
shook the reins and they drove on, while I
zigzagged back to my inlet and clambered
up behind an overhanging elm. I dried myself
in the sun, and dressed slowly, reluctant
to leave that green enclosure where the sunlight
flickered so bright through the grapevine
leaves and the woodpecker hammered away
in the crooked elm that trailed out over the
water. As I went along the road back to the
bridge I kept picking off little pieces of scaly
chalk from the dried water gullies, and breaking
them up in my hands.
When I came upon the Marshalls’ delivery
horse, tied in the shade, the girls had already
taken their baskets and gone down the east
road which wound through the sand and scrub.
I could hear them calling to each other. The
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elder bushes did not grow back in the shady
ravines between the bluffs, but in the hot,
sandy bottoms along the stream, where their
roots were always in moisture and their tops
in the sun. The blossoms were unusually luxuriant
and beautiful that summer.
I followed a cattle path through the thick
underbrush until I came to a slope that fell
away abruptly to the water’s edge. A great
chunk of the shore had been bitten out by
some spring freshet, and the scar was masked
by elder bushes, growing down to the water in
flowery terraces. I did not touch them. I was
overcome by content and drowsiness and by the
warm silence about me. There was no sound
but the high, sing-song buzz of wild bees and
the sunny gurgle of the water underneath. I
peeped over the edge of the bank to see the little
stream that made the noise; it flowed along
perfectly clear over the sand and gravel, cut
off from the muddy main current by a long
sandbar. Down there, on the lower shelf of the
bank, I saw Ántonia, seated alone under the
pagoda-like elders. She looked up when she
heard me, and smiled, but I saw that she had
been crying. I slid down into the soft sand beside
her and asked her what was the matter.
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“It makes me homesick, Jimmy, this flower,
this smell,” she said softly. “We have this
flower very much at home, in the old country.
It always grew in our yard and my papa had
a green bench and a table under the bushes.
In summer, when they were in bloom, he used
to sit there with his friend that played the
trombone. When I was little I used to go
down there to hear them talk — beautiful
talk, like what I never hear in this country.”
“What did they talk about?” I asked her.
She sighed and shook her head. “Oh, I
don’t know! About music, and the woods,
and about God, and when they were young.”
She turned to me suddenly and looked into
my eyes. “You think, Jimmy, that maybe my
father’s spirit can go back to those old places?”
I told her about the feeling of her father’s
presence I had on that winter day when my
grandparents had gone over to see his dead
body and I was left alone in the house. I said
I felt sure then that he was on his way back
to his own country, and that even now, when
I passed his grave, I always thought of him
as being among the woods and fields that were
so dear to him.
Ántonia had the most trusting, responsive
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eyes in the world; love and credulousness
seemed to look out of them with open faces.
“Why did n’t you ever tell me that before? It
makes me feel more sure for him.” After
a while she said: “You know, Jim, my father
was different from my mother. He did not
have to marry my mother, and all his brothers
quarreled with him because he did. I used to
hear the old people at home whisper about it.
They said he could have paid my mother
money, and not married her. But he was older
than she was, and he was too kind to treat her
like that. He lived in his mother’s house, and
she was a poor girl come in to do the work.
After my father married her, my grandmother
never let my mother come into her house
again. When I went to my grandmother’s
funeral was the only time I was ever in
my grandmother’s house. Don’t that seem
strange?”
While she talked, I lay back in the hot
sand and looked up at the blue sky between
the flat bouquets of elder. I could hear the
bees humming and singing, but they stayed
up in the sun above the flowers and did not
come down into the shadow of the leaves. Ántonia
seemed to me that day exactly like the
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little girl who used to come to our house with
Mr. Shimerda.
“Some day, Tony, I am going over to your
country, and I am going to the little town
where you lived. Do you remember all about
it?”
“Jim,” she said earnestly, “if I was put
down there in the middle of the night, I could
find my way all over that little town; and
along the river to the next town, where my
grandmother lived. My feet remember all the
little paths through the woods, and where the
big roots stick out to trip you. I ain’t never
forgot my own country.”
There was a crackling in the branches above
us, and Lena Lingard peered down over the
edge of the bank.
“You lazy things!” she cried. “All this
elder, and you two lying there! Did n’t you
hear us calling you?” Almost as flushed as
she had been in my dream, she leaned over the
edge of the bank and began to demolish our
flowery pagoda. I had never seen her so energetic;
she was panting with zeal, and the perspiration
stood in drops on her short, yielding
upper lip. I sprang to my feet and ran up the
bank.
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It was noon now, and so hot that the dogwoods
and scrub-oaks began to turn up the
silvery under-side of their leaves, and all the
foliage looked soft and wilted. I carried the
lunch-basket to the top of one of the chalk
bluffs, where even on the calmest days there
was always a breeze. The flat-topped, twisted
little oaks threw light shadows on the grass.
Below us we could see the windings of the
river, and Black Hawk, grouped among its
trees, and, beyond, the rolling country, swelling
gently until it met the sky. We could
recognize familiar farmhouses and windmills.
Each of the girls pointed out to me the direction
in which her father’s farm lay, and
told me how many acres were in wheat that
year and how many in corn.
“My old folks,” said Tiny Soderball, “have
put in twenty acres of rye. They get it ground
at the mill, and it makes nice bread. It seems
like my mother ain’t been so homesick, ever
since father’s raised rye flour for her.”
“It must have been a trial for our mothers,”
said Lena, “coming out here and having to do
everything different. My mother had always
lived in town. She says she started behind in
farm-work, and never has caught up.”
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“Yes, a new country’s hard on the old ones,
sometimes,” said Anna thoughtfully. “My
grandmother’s getting feeble now, and her
mind wanders. She’s forgot about this country,
and thinks she’s at home in Norway. She
keeps asking mother to take her down to the
waterside and the fish market. She craves fish
all the time. Whenever I go home I take her
canned salmon and mackerel.”
“Mercy, it’s hot!” Lena yawned. She was
supine under a little oak, resting after the fury
of her elder-hunting, and had taken off the
high-heeled slippers she had been silly enough
to wear. “Come here, Jim. You never got the
sand out of your hair.” She began to draw her
fingers slowly through my hair.
Ántonia pushed her away. “You’ll never
get it out like that,” she said sharply. She
gave my head a rough touzling and finished
me off with something like a box on the ear.
“Lena, you ought n’t to try to wear those
slippers any more. They’re too small for
your feet. You’d better give them to me for
Yulka.”
“All right,” said Lena good-naturedly,
tucking her white stockings under her skirt.
“You get all Yulka’s things, don’t you? I
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MY ANTONIA
wish father did n’t have such bad luck with
his farm machinery; then I could buy more
things for my sisters. I’m going to get Mary
a new coat this fall, if the sulky plough’s
never paid for!”
Tiny asked her why she did n’t wait until
after Christmas, when coats would be cheaper.
“What do you think of poor me?” she added;
“with six at home, younger than I am? And
they all think I’m rich, because when I go
back to the country I’m dressed so fine!” She
shrugged her shoulders. “But, you know, my
weakness is playthings. I like to buy them
playthings better than what they need.”
“I know how that is,” said Anna. “When
we first came here, and I was little, we were
too poor to buy toys. I never got over the
loss of a doll somebody gave me before we
left Norway. A boy on the boat broke her,
and I still hate him for it.”
“I guess after you got here you had plenty
of live dolls to nurse, like me!” Lena remarked
cynically.
“Yes, the babies came along pretty fast, to
be sure. But I never minded. I was fond of
them all. The youngest one, that we did n’t
any of us want, is the one we love best now.”
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Lena sighed. “Oh, the babies are all right;
if only they don’t come in winter. Ours nearly
always did. I don’t see how mother stood it.
I tell you what,
a
girls,” she sat up with sudden
energy; “I’m going to get my mother out of
that old sod house where she’s lived so many
years. The men will never do it. Johnnie,
that’s my oldest brother, he’s wanting to get
married now, and build a house for his girl
instead of his mother. Mrs. Thomas says she
thinks I can move to some other town pretty
soon, and go into business for myself. If I
don’t get into business, I’ll maybe marry a
rich gambler.”
“That would be a poor way to get on,” said
Anna sarcastically. “I wish I could teach
school, like Selma Kronn. Just think! She’ll
be the first Scandinavian girl to get a position
in the High School. We ought to be proud of
her.”
Selma was a studious girl, who had not
much tolerance for giddy things like Tiny and
Lena; but they always spoke of her with admiration.

Tiny moved about restlessly, fanning herself
with her straw hat. “If I was smart like
her, I’d be at my books day and night. But
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MY ANTONIA
she was born smart — and look how her
father’s trained her! He was something high
up in the old country.”
“So was my mother’s father,” murmured
Lena, “but that’s all the good it does us! My
father’s father was smart, too, but he was
wild. He married a Lapp. I guess that’s
what’s the matter with me; they say Lapp
blood will out.”
“A real Lapp, Lena?” I exclaimed. “The
kind that wear skins?”
“I don’t know if she wore skins, but she was
a Lapp all right, and his folks felt dreadful
about it. He was sent up north on some Government
job he had, and fell in with her. He
would marry her.”
“But I thought Lapland women were fat
and ugly, and had squint eyes, like Chinese?”
I objected.
“I don’t know, maybe. There must be
something mighty taking about the Lapp
girls, though; mother says the Norwegians up
north are always afraid their boys will run
after them.”
In the afternoon, when the heat was less
oppressive, we had a lively game of “Pussy
Wants a Corner,” on the flat bluff-top, with
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the little trees for bases. Lena was Pussy so
often that she finally said she would n’t play
any more. We threw ourselves down on the
grass, out of breath.
“Jim,” Ántonia said dreamily, “I want you
to tell the girls about how the Spanish first
came here, like you and Charley Harling used
to talk about. I’ve tried to tell them, but I
leave out so much.”
They sat under a little oak, Tony resting
against the trunk and the other girls leaning
against her and each other, and listened to the
little I was able to tell them about Coronado
and his search for the Seven Golden Cities.
At school we were taught that he had not got
so far north as Nebraska, but had given up his
quest and turned back somewhere in Kansas.
But Charley Harling and I had a strong belief
that he had been along this very river. A
farmer in the county north of ours, when he
was breaking sod, had turned up a metal stirrup
of fine workmanship, and a sword with a
Spanish inscription on the blade. He lent
these relics to Mr. Harling, who brought
them home with him. Charley and I scoured
them, and they were on exhibition in the Harling
office all summer. Father Kelly, the
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MY ANTONIA
priest, had found the name of the Spanish
maker on the sword, and an abbreviation that
stood for the city of Cordova.
“And that I saw with my own eyes,” Ántonia
put in triumphantly. “So Jim and
Charley were right, and the teachers were
wrong!”
The girls began to wonder among themselves.
Why had the Spaniards come so far?
What must this country have been like, then?
Why had Coronado never gone back to Spain,
to his riches and his castles and his king? I
could n’t tell them. I only knew the school
books said he “died in the wilderness, of a
broken heart.”
“More than him has done that,” said Ántonia
sadly, and the girls murmured assent.
We sat looking off across the country,
watching the sun go down. The curly grass
about us was on fire now. The bark of the
oaks turned red as copper. There was a
shimmer of gold on the brown river. Out in
the stream the sandbars glittered like glass,
and the light trembled in the willow thickets
as if little flames were leaping among them.
The breeze sank to stillness. In the ravine a
ringdove mourned plaintively, and somewhere
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off in the bushes an owl hooted. The girls
sat listless, leaning against each other. The
long fingers of the sun touched their foreheads.
Presently we saw a curious thing: There
were no clouds, the sun was going down in a
limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower
edge of the red disc rested on the high fields
against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly
appeared on the face of the sun. We
sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward
it. In a moment we realized what it was. On
some upland farm, a plough had been left
standing in the field. The sun was sinking just
behind it. Magnified across the distance by
the horizontal light, it stood out against the
sun, was exactly contained within the circle of
the disc; the handles, the tongue, the share —
black against the molten red. There it was,
heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.
Even while we whispered about it, our
vision disappeared; the ball dropped and
dropped until the red tip went beneath the
earth. The fields below us were dark, the sky
was growing pale, and that forgotten plough
had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere
on the prairie.
XV
LATE in August the Cutters went to Omaha
for a few days, leaving Ántonia in charge of
the house. Since the scandal about the Swedish
girl, Wick Cutter could never get his wife
to stir out of Black Hawk without him.
The day after the Cutters left, Ántonia
came over to see us. Grandmother noticed
that she seemed troubled and distracted.
“You’ve got something on your mind, Ántonia,”
she said anxiously.
“Yes, Mrs. Burden. I could n’t sleep much
last night.” She hesitated, and then told us
how strangely Mr. Cutter had behaved before
he went away. He put all the silver in a basket
and placed it under her bed, and with it a box
of papers which he told her were valuable. He
made her promise that she would not sleep
away from the house, or be out late in the evening,
while he was gone. He strictly forbade
her to ask any of the girls she knew to stay
with her at night. She would be perfectly safe,
he said, as he had just put a new Yale lock on
the front door.
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Cutter had been so insistent in regard to
these details that now she felt uncomfortable
about staying there alone. She had n’t liked
the way he kept coming into the kitchen to
instruct her, or the way he looked at her. “I
feel as if he is up to some of his tricks again,
and is going to try to scare me, somehow.”
Grandmother was apprehensive at once.
“I don’t think it’s right for you to stay there,
feeling that way. I suppose it would n’t be
right for you to leave the place alone, either,
after giving your word. Maybe Jim would be
willing to go over there and sleep, and you
could come here nights. I’d feel safer, knowing
you were under my own roof. I guess Jim
could take care of their silver and old usury
notes as well as you could.”
Ántonia turned to me eagerly. “Oh, would
you, Jim? I’d make up my bed nice and fresh
for you. It’s a real cool room, and the bed’s
right next the window. I was afraid to leave
the window open last night.”
I liked my own room, and I did n’t like the
Cutters’ house under any circumstances; but
Tony looked so troubled that I consented to
try this arrangement. I found that I slept
there as well as anywhere, and when I got
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home in the morning, Tony had a good breakfast
waiting for me. After prayers she sat
down at the table with us, and it was like old
times in the country.
The third night I spent at the Cutters’, I
awoke suddenly with the impression that I
had heard a door open and shut. Everything
was still, however, and I must have gone to
sleep again immediately.
The next thing I knew, I felt some one sit
down on the edge of the bed. I was only half
awake, but I decided that he might take the
Cutters’ silver, whoever he was. Perhaps if I
did not move, he would find it and get out
without troubling me. I held my breath and
lay absolutely still. A hand closed softly on
my shoulder, and at the same moment I felt
something hairy and cologne-scented brushing
my face. If the room had suddenly been
flooded with electric light, I could n’t have
seen more clearly the detestable bearded
countenance that I knew was bending over
me. I caught a handful of whiskers and
pulled, shouting something. The hand that
held my shoulder was instantly at my throat.
The man became insane; he stood over me,
choking me with one fist and beating me in
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the face with the other, hissing and chuckling
and letting out a flood of abuse.
“So this is what she’s up to when I’m away,
is it? Where is she, you nasty whelp, where is
she? Under the bed, are you, hussy? I know
your tricks! Wait till I get at you! I’ll fix this
rat you’ve got in here. He’s caught, all
right!”
So long as Cutter had me by the throat,
there was no chance for me at all. I got hold
of his thumb and bent it back, until he let go
with a yell. In a bound, I was on my feet,
and easily sent him sprawling to the floor.
Then I made a dive for the open window,
struck the wire screen, knocked it out, and
tumbled after it into the yard.
Suddenly I found myself running across the
north end of Black Hawk in my nightshirt,
just as one sometimes finds one’s self behaving
in bad dreams. When I got home I climbed in
at the kitchen window. I was covered with
blood from my nose and lip, but I was too sick
to do anything about it. I found a shawl and
an overcoat on the hatrack, lay down on the
parlor sofa, and in spite of my hurts, went
to sleep.
Grandmother found me there in the morn283
MY ANTONIA
ing. Her cry of fright awakened me. Truly,
I was a battered object. As she helped me to
my room, I caught a glimpse of myself in the
mirror. My lip was cut and stood out like a
snout. My nose looked like a big blue plum,
and one eye was swollen shut and hideously
discolored. Grandmother said we must have
the doctor at once, but I implored her, as I
had never begged for anything before, not to
send for him. I could stand anything, I told
her, so long as nobody saw me or knew what
had happened to me. I entreated her not to
let grandfather, even, come into my room.
She seemed to understand, though I was too
faint and miserable to go into explanations.
When she took off my nightshirt, she found
such bruises on my chest and shoulders that
she began to cry. She spent the whole morning
bathing and poulticing me, and rubbing me
with arnica. I heard Ántonia sobbing outside
my door, but I asked grandmother to send her
away. I felt that I never wanted to see her
again. I hated her almost as much as I
hated Cutter. She had let me in for all this
disgustingness. Grandmother kept saying
how thankful we ought to be that I had been
there instead of Ántonia. But I lay with my
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disfigured face to the wall and felt no particular
gratitude. My one concern was that
grandmother should keep every one away
from me. If the story once got abroad, I
would never hear the last of it. I could well
imagine what the old men down at the drugstore
would do with such a theme.
While grandmother was trying to make me
comfortable, grandfather went to the depot
and learned that Wick Cutter had come home
on the night express from the east, and had
left again on the six o’clock train for Denver
that morning. The agent said his face was
striped with court-plaster, and he carried his
left hand in a sling. He looked so used up, that
the agent asked him what had happened to
him since ten o’clock the night before; whereat
Cutter began to swear at him and said he
would have him discharged for incivility.
That afternoon, while I was asleep, Ántonia
took grandmother with her, and went over to
the Cutters’ to pack her trunk. They found
the place locked up, and they had to break the
window to get into Ántonia’s bedroom. There
everything was in shocking disorder. Her
clothes had been taken out of her closet,
thrown into the middle of the room, and
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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 frontdoor
bell 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 afterwards.
Grandmother would not let her see Ántonia
at all, but made her sit down in the parlor
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
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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
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MY ANTONIA
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 horselike head and rolling her eyes.
Grandmother said she had n’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 could n’t do without was
quarreling with Mrs. Cutter!
BOOK III
LENA LINGARD