{{antonc001.png}} || My Antonia ||

My Antonia

by Willa Cather

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my antonia ......... c001
hot contents ......... c002
my antonia, by willa cather ......... f001
notes on this electronic edition ......... f002
— my antonia — ......... f003
copyright notice ......... f004
about the author ......... f005
table of illustrations ......... f006
table of contents ......... f007
dedication ......... f008
introduction ......... f009

My Antonia ......... 1

Book I — The Shimerdas ......... 2
I-I _ I-II _ I-III _ I-IV _ I-V _ I-VI _ I-VII _ I-VIII
I-IX _ I-X _ I-XI _ I-XII _ I-XIII _ I-XIV _ I-XV
I-XVI _ I-XVII _ I-XVIII _ I-XIX

Book II — The Hired Girls ......... 161
II-I _ II-II _ II-III _ II-IV _ II-V _ II-VI _ II-VII _ II-VIII
II-IX _ II-X _ II-XI _ II-XII _ II-XIII _ II-XIV _ II-XV

Book III — Lena Lingard ......... 289
III-I _ III-II _ III-III _ III-IV

Book IV — The Pioneer Woman's Story ......... 333
IV-I _ IV-II _ IV-III _ IV-IV

Book V — Cuzak's Boys ......... 367
V-I _ V-II _ V-III

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notes on this electronic edition

this will contain info on this electronic edition.

this is the version of this page found in the anton.html file.
it will be replaced by the 'about' page relevant to each new version.

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— My Antonia —

by Willa Sibert Cather

Optima dies... prima fugit
— Virgil

Illustrations by W. T. Benda

Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge

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copyright notice

Published October 1818

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about the author

By Willa Sibert Cather

My Antonia, Illustrated.
The Songs Of The Lark.
O Pioneers! With colored frontispiece.
Alexander's Bridge.

Houghton Mifflin Company
Boston and New York

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table of illustrations

Foreign family huddled together ......... 6x1a
Mr. Shimerda walking on the upland prairie ......... 46x2a
Mrs. Shimerda gathering mushrooms ......... 88x3a
Jake bringing home a Christmas tree ......... 98x4a
Antonia ploughing in the field ......... 142x5a
Jim and Antonia in the garden ......... 158x6a
Lena knitting stockings ......... 188x7a
Antonia driving her cattle home ......... 358x8a

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Book I — The Shimerdas ......... 3
I-I _ I-II _ I-III _ I-IV _ I-V _ I-VI _ I-VII _ I-VIII
I-IX _ I-X _ I-XI _ I-XII _ I-XIII _ I-XIV _ I-XV
I-XVI _ I-XVII _ I-XVIII _ I-XIX

Book II — The Hired Girls ......... 163
II-I _ II-II _ II-III _ II-IV _ II-V _ II-VI _ II-VII _ II-VIII
II-IX _ II-X _ II-XI _ II-XII _ II-XIII _ II-XIV _ II-XV

Book III — Lena Lingard ......... 291
III-I _ III-II _ III-III _ III-IV

Book IV — The Pioneer Woman's Story ......... 335
IV-I _ IV-II _ IV-III _ IV-IV

Book V — Cuzak's Boys ......... 369
V-I _ V-II _ V-III

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dedication

To
Carrie and Irene Miner

In memory of affections old and true

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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 Bur-
den, 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 observa-
tion 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 stim-
ulating extremes of climate: burning summers
when the world lies green and billowy beneath
a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vege-
tation, 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

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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 aston-
ish her friends. Later, when I knew her, she was
always doing something unexpected. She gave
one of her town houses for a Suffrage head-
quarters, 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,

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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 ad-
vanced 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 knowl-
edge of it have played an important part in its
development. He is always able to raise capi-
tal for new enterprises in Wyoming or Mon-
tana, 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 accom-
pany him when he goes off into the wilds hunt-
ing for lost parks or exploring new canyons, then
the money which means action is usually forth-
coming. 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

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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 in-
terest in women is as youthful as it is Western
and American.

During that burning day when we were cross-
ing 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 Antonia.”

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 agree-
ment with him; I would set down on paper all

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that I remembered of Antonia 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 sugges-
tion 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
Antonia. 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
Antonia,” he said. “Now, what about yours?”

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I had to confess that mine had not gone be-
yond a few straggling notes.

“Notes? I didn't make any.” He drank his
tea all at once and put down the cup. “I didn't
arrange or rearrange. I simply wrote down
what of herself and myself and other people
Antonia's name recalls to me. I suppose it hasn't
any form. It hasn'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, “Antonia.” He frowned at this a moment,
then prefixed another word, making it “My
Antonia.” 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 fol-
lowing narrative is Jim's manuscript, substan-
tially as he brought it to me.

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Book I — The Shimerdas

I-I

I first heard of Antonia [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 grand-
parents, 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 ex-
perience 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.

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We went all the way in day-coaches, be-
coming 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 con-
versation he threw out lightly the names of dis-
tant 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 des-
tination 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 not

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much older than you, twelve or thirteen,
maybe, and she's as bright as a new dollar.
Don't you want to go ahead and see her,
Jimmy? She's 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 for-
eigners.

I do not remember crossing the Missouri
River, or anything about the long day's jour-
ney through Nebraska. Probably by that
time I had crossed so many rivers that I
was dull to them. The only thing very no-
ticeable 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 couldn'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 hud-

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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. Bur-
den's folks? If you are, it's me you're looking
for. I'm Otto Fuchs. I'm Mr. Burden's
hired man, and I'm 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

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[Foreign family huddled together ......... 6x1a ]
[Foreign family huddled together ......... 421 ]
[table of illustrations ......... f006 ]

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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 In-
dian's. Surely this was the face of a desper-
ado. 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 wagon-
box, covered up with a buffalo hide. The im-
migrants rumbled off into the empty dark-
ness, 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

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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, be-
cause 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 out-
side 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 pas-
tures. I had left even their spirits behind
me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I
knew not whither. I don't think I was home-
sick. 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.

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I-II

I do not remember our arrival at my grand-
father's farm sometime before daybreak, after
a drive of nearly twenty miles with heavy
work-horses. When I awoke, it was after-
noon. 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 grand-
mother. 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

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behind the stove. Bring your things; there's
nobody about.”

“Down to the kitchen” struck me as curi-
ous; 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 gin-
gerbread 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 grand-
mother 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.”

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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, watch-
ing me curiously. While I scrubbed, my grand-
mother busied herself in the dining-room until
I called anxiously, “Grandmother, I'm afraid
the cakes are burning!” Then she came laugh-
ing, 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 for-
ward in an attitude of attention, as if she were
looking at something, or listening to some-
thing, 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 in-
flection, for she was exceedingly desirous that
everything should go with due order and de-
corum. Her laugh, too, was high, and perhaps
a little strident, but there was a lively intelli-
gence in it. She was then fifty-five years old,
a strong woman, of unusual endurance.

After I was dressed I explored the long cellar

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next the kitchen. It was dug out under the
wing of the house, was plastered and ce-
mented, 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 sun-
light 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 neigh-
bors 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 im-

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mediately noticed about him was his beauti-
ful, 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. Grand-
mother had told me while she was getting sup-
per that he was an Austrian who came to this
country a young boy and had led an adven-
turous life in the Far West among mining-
camps and cow outfits. His iron constitution
was somewhat broken by mountain pneu-
monia, 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.

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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 true-
lover'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.

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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 sor-

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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 fire-
breaks, 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 in-
significant against the grass. It seemed as if
the grass were about to run over them, and
over the plum-patch behind the sod chicken-
house.

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 grand-
mother, 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]]

{{antonp017.png}} || 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 gar-
den 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 grand-
mother 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, gal-
loping...

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]]

{{antonp018.png}} || 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 sun-
bonnet. “Aren'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]]

{{antonp019.png}} || 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 disap-
peared. 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]]

{{antonp020.png}} || 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 any-
thing 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 happi-
ness; to be dissolved into something complete
and great. When it comes to one, it comes as
naturally as sleep.

[[20]]

{{antonp021.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

I-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 Satur-
day'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, wher-
ever it looped or ran, the sunflowers grew;
some of them were as big as little trees, with

[[21]]

{{antonp022.png}} || 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 home-
stead 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. Shim-
erda. 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 wouldn't be of much

[[22]]

{{antonp023.png}} || 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 dol-
lars for his old cook-stove 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 under-
stand 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 farm-
ing. Soon we could see the broken, grassy
clay cliffs which indicated the windings of the

[[23]]

{{antonp024.png}} || My Antonia ||

stream, and the glittering tops of the cotton-
woods 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 win-
dow 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 grand-
mother's hand energetically.

[[24]]

{{antonp025.png}} || 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
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 Bohe-
mian 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 grand-
mother's hand.

The oldest son, Ambroz, — 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 An-tonia —

[[25]]

{{antonp026.png}} || My Antonia ||

they accented the name thus, strongly, when
they spoke to her — was still prettier. I re-
membered 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 wild-
looking. The little sister, whom they called
Yulka (Julka), was fair, and seemed mild and
obedient. While I stood awkwardly confront-
ing 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 delight-
edly, “Hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo!” like a rooster.
His mother scowled and said sternly, “Ma-
rek!” then spoke rapidly to Krajiek in Bo-
hemian.

“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]]

{{antonp027.png}} || 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 under-
standingly, then took grandmother's hand and
bent over it. I noticed how white and well-
shaped 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. Every-
thing 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 to-
gether by a red coral pin. While Krajiek
was translating for Mr. Shimerda, Antonia
came up to me and held out her hand coax-
ingly. In a moment we were running up

[[27]]

{{antonp028.png}} || My Antonia ||

the steep draw-side together, Yulka trotting
after us.

When we reached the level and could see the
gold tree-tops, I pointed toward them, and
Antonia 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, look-
ing down at the trees and bushes that grew be-
low us. The wind was so strong that I had to
hold my hat on, and the girls' skirts were
blown out before them. Antonia 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]]

{{antonp029.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

long red grass. Yulka curled up like a baby
rabbit and played with a grasshopper. An-
tonia 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 Antonia 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 didn't

[[29]]

{{antonp030.png}} || 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, “An-tonia,
An-tonia!” She sprang up like a hare. “Tat-
inek, Tatinek!” she shouted, and we ran to
meet the old man who was coming toward us.
Antonia 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 en-
treatingly, and said with an earnestness which
I shall never forget, “Te-e-ach, te-e-ach my
An-tonia!”

[[30]]

{{antonp031.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

I-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 school-
house, 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 up-
lands, 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 wilder-
ness to find a place where they could worship

[[31]]

{{antonp032.png}} || 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 fol-
low. I believe that botanists do not confirm
Jake's [2] story, but insist that the sunflower was
native to those plains. Nevertheless, that
legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-
bordered 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 co-
coons 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]]

{{antonp033.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

detail in that tawny landscape that made de-
tail so precious.

Sometimes I rode north to the big prairie-
dog town to watch the brown earth-owls fly
home in the late afternoon and go down to
their nests underground with the dogs. An-
tonia 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 lurk-
ing about. They came to pick up an easy
living among the dogs and owls, which were
quite defenseless against them; took posses-
sion of their comfortable houses and ate the
eggs and puppies. We felt sorry for the owls.
It was always mournful to see them come fly-
ing home at sunset and disappear under the
earth. But, after all, we felt, winged things
who would live like that must be rather de-
graded 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. Antonia said she
didn't believe it; that the dogs probably

[[33]]

{{antonp034.png}} || My Antonia ||

lapped up the dew in the early morning, like
the rabbits.

Antonia had opinions about everything, and
she was soon able to make them known. Al-
most 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 curios-
ity. 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 corn-
fields, hunting for ground-cherries.

Antonia loved to help grandmother in the
kitchen and to learn about cooking and house-
keeping. She would stand beside her, watch-
ing her every movement. We were willing to
believe that Mrs. Shimerda was a good house-
wife in her own country, but she managed

[[34]]

{{antonp035.png}} || 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.

[[35]]

{{antonp036.png}} || My Antonia ||

I-V

We knew that things were hard for our Bohe-
mian neighbors, but the two girls were light-
hearted 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 Antonia's excitement when she
came into our kitchen one afternoon and an-
nounced: “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]]

{{antonp037.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

all the strange, uprooted people among the
first settlers, those two men were the strang-
est 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 supposi-
tion. 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]]

{{antonp038.png}} || 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 home-
steaders 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 apolo-
getically under the seat.

After Mr. Shimerda discovered the Rus-
sians, he went to see them almost every eve-
ning, and sometimes took Antonia 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]]

{{antonp039.png}} || 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, bend-
ing 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
Antonia 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]]

{{antonp040.png}} || 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 cucum-
bers. 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 oil-
cloth-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]]

{{antonp041.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

Once, while he was looking at Antonia, 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 enter-
tain us. He ran into the storeroom and brought
out a gaudily painted harmonica, sat down on
a bench, and spreading his fat legs apart be-
gan 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 Anto-
nia assured me they were very good. We had
to walk the pony all the way home to keep
from spilling the milk.

[[41]]

{{antonp042.png}} || My Antonia ||

I-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 ber-
ries, 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 ter-
rific 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]]

{{antonp043.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

knew a dog who had a star on his collar for
every badger he had killed.

The rabbits were unusually spry that after-
noon. 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 antennae 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]]

{{antonp044.png}} || 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 Antonia'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]]

{{antonp045.png}} || 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 Antonia and I have
trailed along the prairie under that magnifi-
cence! 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 rab-
bits he had shot, looked at Antonia with a
wintry flicker of a smile and began to tell her
something. She turned to me.

[[45]]

{{antonp046.png}} || 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, sepa-
rated her hair with his fingers, and stood look-
ing 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 far-
away look that always made me feel as if I
were down at the bottom of a well. He spoke
kindly and gravely, and Antonia 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 fu-

[[46]]

{{antonp046x2a.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

[Mr. Shimerda walking on the upland prairie ......... 46x2a ]
[Mr. Shimerda walking on the upland prairie ......... 422 ]
[table of illustrations ......... f006 ]

[[46a]]

{{antonp047.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

turity. There never were such people as the
Shimerdas for wanting to give away every-
thing they had. Even the mother was always
offering me things, though I knew she ex-
pected substantial presents in return. We
stood there in friendly silence, while the feeble
minstrel sheltered in Antonia'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. Antonia and her father went off hand
in hand, and I buttoned up my jacket and
raced my shadow home.

[[47]]

{{antonp048.png}} || My Antonia ||

I-VII

Much as I liked Antonia, 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 protect-
ing 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 les-
sons. This change came about from an ad-
venture we had together.

One day when I rode over to the Shimerdas'
I found Antonia starting off on foot for Rus-
sian Peter's house, to borrow a spade Am-
brosch 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 de-
spoiled — hundreds of miles of yellow sun-
flowers had been transformed into brown,
rattling, burry stalks.

We found Russian Peter digging his pota-
toes. We were glad to go in and get warm

[[48]]

{{antonp049.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

by his kitchen stove and to see his squashes
and Christmas melons, heaped in the store-
room for winter. As we rode away with the
spade, Antonia 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 mole-
holes; whether they had underground connec-
tions; whether the owls had nests down there,
lined with feathers. We might get some pup-
pies, 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 regu-
larity, 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, sit-
ting up on their hind legs over the doors of
their houses. As we approached, they barked,
shook their tails at us, and scurried under-

[[49]]

{{antonp050.png}} || 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 sur-
face. 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 en-
trances. 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 back-
ward, in a crouching position, when I heard
Antonia scream. She was standing opposite
me, pointing behind me and shouting some-
thing 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 Antonia 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]]

{{antonp051.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

abominable muscularity, his loathsome, fluid
motion, somehow made me sick. He was as
thick as my leg, and looked as if millstones
couldn't crush the disgusting vitality out of
him. He lifted his hideous little head, and
rattled. I didn't run because I didn't think
of it — if my back had been against a stone
wall I couldn'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. Antonia, 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 it-
self. I walked away and turned my back. I
felt seasick. Antonia 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]]

{{antonp052.png}} || 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 every-
body. 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 riding-
quirt; 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 Antonia how this meant that he

[[52]]

{{antonp053.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

was twenty-four years old, [3] 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 mem-
ories 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 — wouldn't let us come near him.

We decided that Antonia 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 con-
tagious. 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. Neverthe-
less, 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 gar-
den and went down the draw toward the

[[53]]

{{antonp054.png}} || 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. Antonia
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 laconi-
cally.

“Kill him yourself? How come you to have
a weepon?”

“We'd been up to Russian Peter's, to bor-
row 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 wouldn't want to do any business
with that fellow myself, unless I had a fence-
post along. Your grandmother's snake-cane
wouldn't more than tickle him. He could
stand right up and talk to you, he could. Did
he fight hard?”

Antonia broke in: “He fight something aw-
ful! 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]]

{{antonp055.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

Otto winked at me. After Antonia rode on
he said: “Got him in the head first crack,
didn't you? That was just as well.”

We hung him up to the windmill, and when
I went down to the kitchen I found Antonia
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 fortu-
nate 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 doesn't owe rat-
tlers a living. A snake of his size, in fighting
trim, would be more than any boy could han-
dle. So in reality it was a mock adventure; the
game was fixed for me by chance, as it prob-
ably was for many a dragon-slayer. I had been
adequately armed by Russian Peter; the snake
was old and lazy; and I had Antonia 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]]

{{antonp056.png}} || My Antonia ||

ever killed in those parts. This was enough for
Antonia. 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.

[[56]]

{{antonp057.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

I-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 No-
vember; 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 fellow-

[[57]]

{{antonp058.png}} || 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. Mis-
fortune 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 Rus-
sians had such bad luck that people were
afraid of them and liked to put them out of
mind.

One afternoon Antonia and her father came
over to our house to get buttermilk, and lin-
gered, 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
Antonia 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]]

{{antonp059.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

seat; Antonia 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 sigh-
ing 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 supersti-
tion that those shining groups have their influ-
ence upon what is and what is not to be. Per-
haps 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]]

{{antonp060.png}} || My Antonia ||

on the bench by the wall and leaned our arms
on the table in front of us. The firelight flick-
ered 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 win-
dows impatiently, then swept on again, sing-
ing through the big spaces. Each gust, as it
bore down, rattled the panes, and swelled off
like the others. They made me think of de-
feated 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 whin-
ing 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 coy-
otes 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,” Antonia whis-
pered to me. “In his country there are very

[[60]]

{{antonp061.png}} || 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 tea-
kettle 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 fol-
lowed Peter about the room with a contempt-
uous, unfriendly expression. It seemed to
me that he despised him for being so simple
and docile.

Presently Pavel began to talk to Mr. Shi-
merda, scarcely above a whisper. He was
telling a long story, and as he went on, An-
tonia 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 ex-
cited, and kept pointing all around his bed,
as if there were things there and he wanted
Mr. Shimerda to see them.

[[61]]

{{antonp062.png}} || My Antonia ||

“It's wolves, Jimmy,” Antonia 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 shoul-
ders, 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 pa-
tiently fighting for breath, like a child with
croup. Antonia'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 shoulder-
blades 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. What-
ever 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]]

{{antonp063.png}} || 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 An-
tonia 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
goodbye 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 blan-

[[63]]

{{antonp064.png}} || 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 in-
side 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 prob-
ably 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]]

{{antonp065.png}} || 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 care-
fully.

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 be-
hind them a whirling black group on the snow.
Presently the groom screamed. He saw his
father's sledge overturned, with his mother

[[65]]

{{antonp066.png}} || 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 ground-
shadows 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 some-
thing 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 fa-
miliar 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]]

{{antonp067.png}} || 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 ex-
actly how he did it, or what happened after-
ward. 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 al-
ways 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]]

{{antonp068.png}} || 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 auc-
tion he went about with his head down, and
never lifted his eyes. He seemed not to care
about anything. The Black Hawk money-
lender who held mortgages on Peter's live-
stock 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 furni-
ture 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]]

{{antonp069.png}} || 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 Antonia 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.

[[69]]

{{antonp070.png}} || My Antonia ||

I-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 dis-
appearing 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 tor-
tured prisoners, bound to a stake in the cen-
ter; 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

[[70]]

{{antonp071.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

never done before and seemed a good omen
for the winter.

As soon as the snow had packed hard I be-
gan 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
hadn't hurried him. My first trip was to the
post-office, and the next day I went over to
take Yulka and Antonia 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. Antonia 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 sun-
light on the glittering white stretches of prai-
rie was almost blinding. As Antonia said, the

[[71]]

{{antonp072.png}} || 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 snow-
drifts — 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 when-
ever we stopped he smoked all over. The
cornfields got back a little of their color under
the dazzling light, and stood the palest possi-
ble 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 buf-
falo robes and hugging each other for warmth.
But they were so glad to get away from their

[[72]]

{{antonp073.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

ugly cave and their mother's scolding that
they begged me to go on and on, as far as Rus-
sian 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. Couldn't we settle down and live
in Russian Peter's house, Yulka asked, and
couldn't I go to town and buy things for us to
keep house with?

All the way to Russian Peter's we were ex-
travagantly 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. Antonia 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 grow-
ing dark when we got to their house, but I re-
fused 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

[[73]]

{{antonp074.png}} || 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 over-
shoes, 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 ad-
venturous 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.

[[74]]

{{antonp075.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

She baked either pies or cake for us every day,
unless, for a change, she made my favorite pud-
ding, 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 cen-
tered 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.

[[75]]

{{antonp076.png}} || 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 shoul-
ders 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 emergen-
cies. It was a matter of pride with them not
to spare themselves. Yet they were the sort

[[76]]

{{antonp077.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

of men who never get on, somehow, or do any-
thing 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. Some-
times 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!

[[77]]

{{antonp078.png}} || My Antonia ||

This event made Fuchs the object of unde-
served notoriety, since he was traveling with
her. The steerage stewardess was indignant
with him, the doctor regarded him with sus-
picion. The first-cabin passengers, who made
up a purse for the woman, took an embar-
rassing 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 voy-
age. 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 wo-
man, 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 sta-
tion 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 didn't take his hard feel-
ing 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

[[78]]

{{antonp079.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

Lord had remembered these things to his
credit, and had helped him out of many a
scrape when he didn't realize that he was
being protected by Providence.

[[79]]

{{antonp080.png}} || My Antonia ||

I-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 over-
coat 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 tur-
rible strong and can stand anything. I guess
rabbits must be getting scarce in this locality.
Ambrosch come along by the cornfield yester-
day 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

[[80]]

{{antonp081.png}} || 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 tomorrow, 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 ham-
per 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 couldn't have got hens from her
neighbors last fall and had a henhouse going
by now. I reckon she was confused and didn't
know where to begin. I've come strange to a
new country myself, but I never forgot hens

[[81]]

{{antonp082.png}} || 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 Antonia, 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. 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

[[82]]

{{antonp083.png}} || 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 lan-
guage, 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. Antonia 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

[[83]]

{{antonp084.png}} || 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 Antonia 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.

“Haven't you got any sort of cave or cellar
outside, Antonia? This is no place to keep veg-
etables. How did your potatoes get frozen?”

[[84]]

{{antonp085.png}} || 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 Antonia!”

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 in-
sisted eagerly. “My mamenka have nice bed,

[[85]]

{{antonp086.png}} || 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, Antonia, 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 Antonia's shoulder, he talked in
a low tone, and his daughter translated. He
wanted us to know that they were not beg-
gars 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 Ne-
braska 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, how-
ever, that he still had some money. If they

[[86]]

{{antonp087.png}} || 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. Am-
brosch and Antonia 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.

Antonia 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 reason-
able before our visit was over, and, while An-
tonia translated, put in a word now and then

[[87]]

{{antonp088.png}} || 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 be-
gan 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 cere-
moniously 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.”

Antonia 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

[[88]]

{{antonp088x3a.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

[Mrs. Shimerda gathering mushrooms ......... 88x3a ]
[Mrs. Shimerda gathering mushrooms ......... 423 ]
[table of illustrations ......... f006 ]

[[88a]]

{{antonp089.png}} || 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 Am-
brosch 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 pene-
trating, earthy odor. We could not determine
whether they were animal or vegetable.

“They might be dried meat from some

[[89]]

{{antonp090.png}} || 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 shouldn't want to eat any-
thing 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 for-
got 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, prob-
ably, in some deep Bohemian forest...

[[90]]

{{antonp091.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

I-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 Christ-
mas shopping. But on the 21st of December,
the snow began to fall. The flakes came down
so thickly that from the sitting-room win-
dows 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 Sun-
day; greasing their boots, mending their sus-
penders, plaiting whiplashes.

On the morning of the 22nd, grandfather an-
nounced at breakfast that it would be impos-
sible to go to Black Hawk for Christmas pur-
chases. 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

[[91]]

{{antonp092.png}} || 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 An-
tonia; even Yulka was able to read a little
now. Grandmother took me into the ice-cold
storeroom, where she had some bolts of ging-
ham 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 pub-
lish colored lithographs of popular paintings,
and I was allowed to use some of these. I took
“Napoleon Announcing the Divorce to Jo-
sephine” 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-cut-
ters and baked gingerbread men and roosters,

[[92]]

{{antonp093.png}} || 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, fresh-
smelling little tree in a corner of the sitting-
room, it was already Christmas Eve. After
supper we all gathered there, and even grand-
father, reading his paper by the table, looked
up with friendly interest now and then.

[[93]]

{{antonp094.png}} || 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 sock-
ets. Its real splendors, however, came from
the most unlikely place in the world — from
Otto's cowboy trunk. I had never seen any-
thing in that trunk but old boots and spurs
and pistols, and a fascinating mixture of yel-
low leather thongs, cartridges, and shoemak-
er's wax. From under the lining he now pro-
duced 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 ap-
pareled, and the ox and the ass and the shep-
herds; 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.

[[94]]

{{antonp095.png}} || 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 defense-
less. 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!

[[95]]

{{antonp096.png}} || My Antonia ||

I-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 inter-
esting. He had the gift of simple and moving
expression. Because he talked so little, his
words had a peculiar force; they were not

[[96]]

{{antonp097.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

worn dull from constant use. His prayers re-
flected 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 saus-
age, 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 work-
ing 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 oil-
cloth. 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:

[[97]]

{{antonp098.png}} || 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 af-
ternoon and the atmosphere of comfort and
security in my grandfather's house. This feel-
ing 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 pas-
sive, 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 in-
sisted on his drinking a glass of Virginia apple-
brandy 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]]

{{antonp098x4a.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

[Jake bringing home a Christmas tree ......... 98x4a ]
[Jake bringing home a Christmas tree ......... 424 ]
[table of illustrations ......... f006 ]

[[98a]]

{{antonp099.png}} || 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. Shi-
merda 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 grand-
father. 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, can-
dles... Grandfather merely put his finger-
tips 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

[[99]]

{{antonp100.png}} || 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.

[[100]]

{{antonp101.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

I-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, Antonia 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 exam-
ining 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.

[[101]]

{{antonp102.png}} || My Antonia ||

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
Antonia 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 wed-
dings 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 hus-
band for my girls.' My papa, he cry for leave
his old friends what make music with him. He

[[102]]

{{antonp103.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

love very much the man what play the long
horn like this” — she indicated a slide trom-
bone. “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? Am-
brosch 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
Antonia 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 An-
tonia loved her father more than she did any
one else, she stood in awe of her elder brother.

After I watched Antonia and her mother
go over the hill on their miserable horse, carry-
ing our iron pot with them, I turned to grand-
mother, who had taken up her darning, and
said I hoped that snooping old woman wouldn't
come to see us any more.

Grandmother chuckled and drove her bright

[[103]]

{{antonp104.png}} || 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 wouldn'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

[[104]]

{{antonp105.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

soon the fat steers took it up and began butt-
ing 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 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

[[105]]

{{antonp106.png}} || 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 tomorrow we must feed them and
thaw out their water-tap so that they could
drink. We could not so much as see the cor-
rals, 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 grand-
mother 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]]

{{antonp107.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

scattering down-feathers. The mottled, pin-
headed guinea-hens, always resentful of cap-
tivity, 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, un-
natural sort of day.

[[107]]

{{antonp108.png}} || My Antonia ||

I-XIV

On the morning of the 22nd 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 won-
dered, 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 stand-
ing 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 blan-
ket. Grandmother motioned me to the dining-
room. 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!”

[[108]]

{{antonp109.png}} || 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 ques-
tion from grandfather, “nobody heard the
gun go off. Ambrosch was out with the ox
team, trying to break a road, and the women-
folks was shut up tight in their cave. When
Ambrosch come in it was dark and he didn'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.”

[[109]]

{{antonp110.png}} || 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 his-
self all over after the girls was done the dishes.
Antonia 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, every-
thing was decent except,” — Fuchs wrinkled
his brow and hesitated, — “except what he
couldn'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.”

[[110]]

{{antonp111.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

“I don't see how he could do it!” grand-
mother 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?” grand-
mother 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 wouldn't have made all them prepara-

[[111]]

{{antonp112.png}} || 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, couldn't
he?” Jake demanded.

Grandmother broke in excitedly: “See here,
Jake Marpole, don't you go trying to add mur-
der 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, Emma-
line,” 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' 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, any-
way, and say a word of comfort to them poor

[[112]]

{{antonp113.png}} || 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 Am-
brosch, 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 coun-
try 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 your-
self. 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 Am-
brosch. I saw a side of him I had not seen be-
fore. He was deeply, even slavishly, devout.

[[113]]

{{antonp114.png}} || 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 in-
side 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]]

{{antonp115.png}} || 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 drinking-
pan, 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 “Robin-
son 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 remem-
bered 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 Vir-
ginia, to Baltimore, — and then the great

[[115]]

{{antonp116.png}} || My Antonia ||

wintry ocean. No, he would not at once set
out upon that long journey. Surely, his ex-
hausted 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 Antonia 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 trom-
bone-player, the great forest full of game, —
belonging, as Antonia 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]]

{{antonp117.png}} || 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 house-
hold 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 hap-
pen, 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 lan-
tern was kept hanging over Mr. Shimerda's
head. Antonia 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 covet-
ing distinction, poor Marek!

[[117]]

{{antonp118.png}} || My Antonia ||

Ambrosch, Jake said, showed more human
feeling than he would have supposed him cap-
able 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 al-
most know it isn'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 shud-
dered. But Mr. Shimerda had not been rich
and selfish; he had only been so unhappy that
he could not live any longer.

[[118]]

{{antonp119.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

I-XV

Otto Fuchs got back from Black Hawk at
noon the next day. He reported that the cor-
oner 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 wolf-

[[119]]

{{antonp120.png}} || 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. Bur-
den, 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 spon-
taneous. 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 be-

[[120]]

{{antonp121.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

lieve that Mr. Shimerda's soul will come to its
Creator as well off without a priest. We be-
lieve 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 [4] 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 Sacra-
ment to dying men, and I go with him to carry
the vessels with the Holy Sacrament. Every-
body that go near that camp catch the sick-
ness 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 grand-
father. “That I know, Mr. Burden, for it
happened to myself. All the soldiers know,

[[121]]

{{antonp122.png}} || 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 kawn-tree-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 impos-
sible 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 neighbor-
hood, 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,

[[122]]

{{antonp123.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

who had been a fur-worker in Vienna, made
the coat. From the windmill I watched Jeli-
nek come out of the barn with the blacks, and
work his way up the hillside toward the corn-
field. 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, grand-
father 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.

[[123]]

{{antonp124.png}} || My Antonia ||

“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 trav-
eled across a box canyon 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 Eye-
talian 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 didn't
know, Otto,” grandmother said.

“Yes, 'm,” Fuchs admitted with modest
pride. “So few folks does know how to make

[[124]]

{{antonp125.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

a good tight box that'll turn water. I some-
times wonder if there'll be anybody about to
do it for me. However, I'm not at all particu-
lar 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

[[125]]

{{antonp126.png}} || My Antonia ||

way to the Shimerdas'. The news of what had
happened over there had somehow got abroad
through the snow-blocked country. Grand-
mother 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 dining-
room. They were all eager for any details
about the suicide, and they were greatly con-
cerned 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 burying-
ground 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.

[[126]]

{{antonp127.png}} || 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, today,” or, “I've got a sackful
of mail for ye,” until this afternoon. Grand-
mother always talked, dear woman; to herself
or to the Lord, if there was no one else to
listen; but grandfather was naturally taci-
turn, 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 for-
eigners are so clannish, Mr. Bushy, we'll have

[[127]]

{{antonp128.png}} || 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 per-
plexing, and said if it had not been for grand-
father 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 tomorrow in a mutilated

[[128]]

{{antonp129.png}} || 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 ex-
plained 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 didn'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 per-
suade 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 tomorrow.”

[[129]]

{{antonp130.png}} || My Antonia ||

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.”

[[130]]

{{antonp131.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

I-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 horse-
back 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, Antonia 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 post-

[[131]]

{{antonp132.png}} || 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 begin-
ning 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 neigh-
bors had brought, Antonia 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 mum-
my'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

[[132]]

{{antonp133.png}} || 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 Antonia and
Marek. Yulka hung back. Her mother
pushed her forward, and kept saying some-
thing 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 Jeli-
nek placed the lid on the box, and began to
nail it down over Mr. Shimerda. I was afraid
to look at Antonia. 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

[[133]]

{{antonp134.png}} || My Antonia ||

took the coffin to the edge of the hole and
lowered it with ropes. We stood about watch-
ing them, and the powdery snow lay with-
out 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 grand-
father. 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.”

[[134]]

{{antonp135.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

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 gen-
eral 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.

[[135]]

{{antonp136.png}} || My Antonia ||

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 sen-
tence — 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.

[[136]]

{{antonp137.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

I-XVII

When spring came, after that hard winter,
one could not get enough of the nimble air.
Every morning I wakened with a fresh con-
sciousness 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.

[[137]]

{{antonp138.png}} || 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; Antonia 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 help-
ful information, and that from me she might
get valuable secrets. On this occasion she
asked me very craftily when grandfather ex-
pected to begin planting corn. I told her, add-

[[138]]

{{antonp139.png}} || 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 Antonia 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, Antonia
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, al-
though 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

[[139]]

{{antonp140.png}} || 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
today. 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, An-
tonia 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 didn't. I came to ask you some-
thing, Tony. Grandmother wants to know if
you can't go to the term of school that begins

[[140]]

{{antonp141.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

next week over at the sod schoolhouse. She
says there's a good teacher, and you'd learn
a lot.”

Antonia 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.

Antonia took my hand. “Sometime you will
tell me all those nice things you learn at the

[[141]]

{{antonp142.png}} || 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 vio-
lin, 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 Antonia had washed the
field dust from their hands and faces at the
wash-basin by the kitchen door, we sat down
at the oil-cloth-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. An-
tonia and Ambrosch were talking in Bohe-
mian; disputing about which of them had
done more ploughing that day. Mrs. Shi-
merda egged them on, chuckling while she
gobbled her food.

Presently Ambrosch said sullenly in Eng-
lish: “You take them ox tomorrow and try
the sod plough. Then you not be so smart.”

His sister laughed. “Don't be mad. I know

[[142]]

{{antonp142x5a.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

[Antonia ploughing in the field ......... 142x5a ]
[Antonia ploughing in the field ......... 425 ]
[table of illustrations ......... f006 ]

[[142a]]

{{antonp143.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

it's awful hard work for break sod. I milk the
cow for you tomorrow, 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 doesn't talk about the fifteen dollars,”
I exclaimed indignantly. “He doesn'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 disagree-
able to me. Antonia 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 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 Antonia. 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

[[143]]

{{antonp144.png}} || 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 Sun-
days she helped her mother make garden or
sewed all day. Grandfather was pleased with
Antonia. 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 dust-
plastered, 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 An-tonia!”

[[144]]

{{antonp145.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

I-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 in-
teresting, but I somehow felt that by making
comrades of them I was getting even with
Antonia for her indifference. Since the father's
death, Ambrosch was more than ever the head
of the house and he seemed to direct the feel-
ings as well as the fortunes of his women-folk.
Antonia 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 cold-
ness 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 bor-
rowed 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

[[145]]

{{antonp146.png}} || My Antonia ||

last year's dried sunflower stalks, were sing-
ing 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 Antonia and her mother were
making garden, off across the pond in the
draw-head. Ambrosch was up on the wind-
mill 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 haven'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 saun-
tered 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.

[[146]]

{{antonp147.png}} || 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 An-
tonia 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

[[147]]

{{antonp148.png}} || My Antonia ||

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,” Antonia 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 hadn'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 for-
eigners 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

[[148]]

{{antonp149.png}} || 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
tomorrow, 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 Am-
brosch 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

[[149]]

{{antonp150.png}} || My Antonia ||

afforded the Shimerdas great satisfaction,
apparently. For weeks afterward, whenever
Jake and I met Antonia on her way to the post-
office, or going along the road with her work-
team, 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 An-
tonia'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. Am-
brosch and Antonia always greeted him re-
spectfully, 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

[[150]]

{{antonp151.png}} || 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 Antonia 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.

Antonia 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, groan-
ing and wringing her hands. It took but a few

[[151]]

{{antonp152.png}} || 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,” Antonia
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
Antonia needed shoes more than Mr. Shi-
merda 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 morn-
ing 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

[[152]]

{{antonp153.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

ask Antonia to come over and help you in
the kitchen. She will be glad to earn some-
thing, and it will be a good time to end mis-
understandings. 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 occupa-
tion and greeted her politely. “Good-morning,
Mrs. Shimerda. Can you tell me where I will
find Ambrosch? Which field?”

[[153]]

{{antonp154.png}} || My Antonia ||

“He with the sod corn.” She pointed to-
ward 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 Antonia?”

“She go with.” Mrs. Shimerda kept wig-
gling 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, grand-
father 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,

[[154]]

{{antonp155.png}} || 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 wouldn'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.”

[[155]]

{{antonp156.png}} || My Antonia ||

I-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 corn-
fields where the feathered stalks stood so juicy
and green. If all the great plain from the Mis-
souri to the Rocky Mountains had been under
glass, and the heat regulated by a thermome-
ter, it could not have been better for the yel-
low tassels that were ripening and fertilizing
each other [5] day by day. The cornfields were
far apart in those times, with miles of wild
grazing land between. It took a clear, medi-
tative 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.

[[156]]

{{antonp157.png}} || 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 grand-
mother and Antonia had so much to do in the
kitchen that they could not have told whether
one day was hotter than another. Each morn-
ing, while the dew was still on the grass,
Antonia 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

[[157]]

{{antonp158.png}} || My Antonia ||

mind her heavy, running step, or her clattery
way with pans. Grandmother was in high
spirits during the weeks that Antonia 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 Antonia 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]]

{{antonp158x6a.png}} || The Shimerdas ||

[Jim and Antonia in the garden ......... 158x6a ]
[Jim and Antonia in the garden ......... 426 ]
[table of illustrations ......... f006 ]

[[158a]]

{{antonp159.png}} || 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 unat-
tended, and kept moving westward. All about
us we could hear the felty beat of the rain-
drops on the soft dust of the farmyard. Grand-
mother came to the door and said it was late,
and we would get wet out there.

“In a minute we come,” Antonia 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 re-
assured her. “Why aren'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.”

[[159]]

{{antonp161.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

My Antonia — Book II

The Hired Girls

[[161]]

{{antonp163.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

Book II — The Hired Girls

II-I

I had been living with my grandfather for
nearly three years when he decided to move to
Black Hawk. He and grandmother were get-
ting 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

[[163]]

{{antonp164.png}} || 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 handi-
capped by illiteracy and by his trusting dispo-
sition that he would be an easy prey to sharp-
ers. 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 sil-
ver 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 cup-
boards for grandmother's kitchen, and seemed
loath to leave us. But at last they went, with-
out 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 va-
lises — and I never saw them again. Months
afterward we got a card from Otto, saying
that Jake had been down with mountain fever,

[[164]]

{{antonp165.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

but now they were both working in the Yan-
kee 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 court-
house, 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. Sud-
denly put down among boys of my own age,
I found I had a great deal to learn. Before

[[165]]

{{antonp166.png}} || 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 near-
est 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 shop-
ping. The more our house was like a coun-
try 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 Antonia and Yulka to see our new
house. I wanted to show them our red plush

[[166]]

{{antonp167.png}} || 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 sis-
ters. 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 Antonia 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 get-
ting her a place to work with our neigh-
bors, the Harlings.

[[167]]

{{antonp168.png}} || My Antonia ||

II-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

[[168]]

{{antonp169.png}} || 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 wher-
ever 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 sun-
burned yellow hair, bobbed about her ears,

[[169]]

{{antonp170.png}} || 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 couldn'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 ab-
sences. Because of her unusual business abil-
ity, he was stern and exacting with her. He
paid her a good salary, but she had few holi-
days and never got away from her responsi-
bilities. Even on Sundays she went to the
office to open the mail and read the markets.
With Charley, who was not interested in busi-
ness, 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. Some-
times she came over to see grandfather after
supper, and her visits flattered him. More
than once they put their wits together to

[[170]]

{{antonp171.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

rescue some unfortunate farmer from the
clutches of Wick Cutter, the Black Hawk
money-lender. Grandfather said Frances Har-
ling 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 pres-
ent from Frances Harling.

In August the Harlings' Danish cook had

[[171]]

{{antonp172.png}} || My Antonia ||

to leave them. Grandmother entreated them
to try Antonia. 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. Har-
ling 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, grand-
mother and I took my short cut through the
willow hedge and went over to hear about
the visit to the Shimerdas'.

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 tonight, Mrs. Burden,” she called.

[[172]]

{{antonp173.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

Frances shut the piano and came out to
join us.

They had liked Antonia 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 ex-
pect 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 Am-
brosch about Antonia'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 neces-
sary. When Mrs. Harling told him firmly
that she would keep fifty dollars a year for
Antonia'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 jump-
ing 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

[[173]]

{{antonp174.png}} || My Antonia ||

to pay three dollars a week for Antonia's
services — good wages in those days — and
to keep her in shoes. There had been hot dis-
pute 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. Bur-
den! 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 didn'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. Grand-
mother spoke feelingly. “When she first came
to this country, Frances, and had that gen-

[[174]]

{{antonp175.png}} || 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 Antonia 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 confi-
dently, as we rose to take our leave.

[[175]]

{{antonp176.png}} || My Antonia ||

II-III

On Saturday Ambrosch drove up to the back
gate, and Antonia jumped down from the
wagon and ran into our kitchen just as she
used to do. She was wearing shoes and stock-
ings, 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 come, you must try to do
right and be a credit to us.”

Antonia 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 Antonia 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

[[176]]

{{antonp177.png}} || 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. Antonia 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 prefer-
ences, and was easily offended. At the slight-
est 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

[[177]]

{{antonp178.png}} || My Antonia ||

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 Antonia invariably took her
part. We were never given a chance to ex-
plain. 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' 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 audi-
ence 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,

[[178]]

{{antonp179.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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 al-
ways 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 auto-
cratic 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
Antonia 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

[[179]]

{{antonp180.png}} || My Antonia ||

and Nina and Antonia 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 con-
centration.

[[180]]

{{antonp181.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

II-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 Antonia
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.

Antonia gasped and stepped back. “Why,

[[181]]

{{antonp182.png}} || My Antonia ||

it's Lena! Of course I didn'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!”
Antonia stood ill at ease, and didn'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, aren'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 ex-
amined the visitor with quick, keen eyes.
Lena was not at all disconcerted. She sat
down in the chair Frances pointed out, care-

[[182]]

{{antonp183.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

fully arranging her pocketbook and gray cot-
ton gloves on her lap. We followed with our
popcorn, but Antonia 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 wouldn'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 cro-
cheting again and sent the hook in and out
with nimble fingers.

“No, 'm, I won't,” said Lena blandly. She

[[183]]

{{antonp184.png}} || My Antonia ||

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. “Didn'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
wouldn't give Nick any land if he married
me, so he's going to marry Annie Iverson. I
wouldn'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

[[184]]

{{antonp185.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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. Har-
ling. “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 naive
admiration. Presently she drew on her cotton
gloves. “I guess I must be leaving,” she said
irresolutely.

[[185]]

{{antonp186.png}} || My Antonia ||

Frances told her to come again, whenever
she was lonesome or wanted advice about
anything. Lena replied that she didn't believe
she would ever get lonesome in Black Hawk.

She lingered at the kitchen door and begged
Antonia 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 An-
tonia why she hadn't been a little more cor-
dial to her.

“I didn't know if your mother would like
her coming here,” said Antonia, 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

[[186]]

{{antonp187.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

needn't say anything about that to the chil-
dren. 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 be-
tween his place and the Shimerdas'. When-
ever we rode over in that direction we saw
her out among her cattle, bareheaded and
barefooted, scantily dressed in tattered cloth-
ing, always knitting as she watched her herd.
Before I knew Lena, I thought of her as some-
thing 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 some-
how 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

[[187]]

{{antonp188.png}} || 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

[[188]]

{{antonp189.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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 help-
ing 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 hadn't a
dress in the world any less ragged than the
one on her back. Then the minister's wife went

[[189]]

{{antonp190.png}} || My Antonia ||

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 hitching-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!...”

[[190]]

{{antonp191.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

The Norwegian women didn'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, good-
natured laugh and rode on, gazing back over
her shoulder at Ole's infuriated wife.

The time came, however, when Lena didn'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 corn-
knife. 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
Antonia's feather-bed. Mary was not far be-
hind; 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 Antonia 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

[[191]]

{{antonp192.png}} || My Antonia ||

Antonia 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.”

[[192]]

{{antonp193.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

II-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 com-
mercial travelers in that territory tried to get
into Black Hawk for Sunday. They used to
assemble in the parlor after supper on Satur-
day nights. Marshall Field's man, Anson Kirk-
patrick, played the piano and sang all the lat-
est 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 travel-
ing man when I grew up. They had a gay life of
it; nothing to do but ride about on trains all

[[193]]

{{antonp194.png}} || 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 Christ-
mas I came upon Lena and her funny, square-
headed 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 shop-
ping, 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 Sun-
day morning. A cold job it must have been,
too!

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{{antonp195.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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 hadn'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 seri-
ously, 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 hadn'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

[[195]]

{{antonp196.png}} || My Antonia ||

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.

[[196]]

{{antonp197.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

II-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 couldn't see any-
thing 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, leav-
ing 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,

[[197]]

{{antonp198.png}} || My Antonia ||

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 lin-
gered 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, beat-
ing 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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{{antonp199.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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 out-
side 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. In-
side 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

[[199]]

{{antonp200.png}} || My Antonia ||

Sally always dressed like a boy. Frances
taught us to dance that winter, and she said,
from the first lesson, that Antonia 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. Antonia brought
her sewing and sat with us — she was already
beginning to make pretty clothes for her-
self. 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 Antonia to tell her stories — about the

[[200]]

{{antonp201.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

calf that broke its leg, or how Yulka saved her
little turkeys from drowning in the freshet, or
about old Christmases and weddings in Bo-
hemia. Nina interpreted the stories about
the creche fancifully, and in spite of our deri-
sion she cherished a belief that Christ was
born in Bohemia a short time before the Shi-
merdas 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 ker-
nels for walnut taffy, Tony told us a new
story.

“Mrs. Harling, did you ever hear about
what happened up in the Norwegian settle-
ment last summer, when I was thrashing
there? We were at Iversons', and I was driv-
ing 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

[[201]]

{{antonp202.png}} || My Antonia ||

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 strawstack, trying to
get some shade. My wagon wasn'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 hadn'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 couldn't drownd himself in
one of 'em.'

“I told him nobody wanted to drownd them-
selves, but if we didn'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 didn't have none
when they thrashed. 'My God!' he says, 'so

[[202]]

{{antonp203.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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 tramp-
in'. 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,

[[203]]

{{antonp204.png}} || 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 cry-
ing, Nina, or I'll always send you upstairs
when Antonia tells us about the country. Did
they never find out where he came from,
Antonia?”

“Never, mam. He hadn't been seen no-
where except in a little town they call Conway.
He tried to get beer there, but there wasn't
any saloon. Maybe he came in on a freight,
but the brakeman hadn't seen him. They
couldn'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, wasn't that strange, Miss Frances?”
Tony asked thoughtfully. “What would any-
body want to kill themselves in summer for?
In thrashing time, too! It's nice everywhere
then.”

[[204]]

{{antonp205.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

“So it is, Antonia,” said Mrs. Harling
heartily. “Maybe I'll go home and help you
thrash next summer. Isn't that taffy nearly
ready to eat? I've been smelling it a long
while.”

There was a basic harmony between An-
tonia and her mistress. They had strong, in-
dependent 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 young-
sters 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 con-
scious of it. I could not imagine Antonia's
living for a week in any other house in Black
Hawk than the Harlings'.

[[205]]

{{antonp206.png}} || My Antonia ||

II-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 bon-
fires 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'Ar-
nault, 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.

[[206]]

{{antonp207.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

Harling had known d'Arnault for years. She
told Antonia 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 every-
thing. Her husband stood at the desk and
welcomed incoming travelers. He was a pop-
ular fellow, but no manager.

Mrs. Gardener was admittedly the best-
dressed woman in Black Hawk, drove the best
horse, and had a smart trap and a little white-
and-gold sleigh. She seemed indifferent to her

[[207]]

{{antonp208.png}} || My Antonia ||

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 trav-
eling men were flattered when Mrs. Gar-
dener stopped to chat with them for a mo-
ment. 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 Kirk-
patrick, 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 mon-
key, 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 recog-
nized a furniture salesman from Kansas City,
a drug man, and Willy O'Reilly, who traveled
for a jewelry house and sold musical instru-
ments. The talk was all about good and bad
hotels, actors and actresses and musical prodi-
gies. I learned that Mrs. Gardener had gone
to Omaha to hear Booth and Barrett, who

[[208]]

{{antonp209.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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, 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 hap-
piest 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.

[[209]]

{{antonp210.png}} || My Antonia ||

When he was sitting, or standing still, he
swayed back and forth incessantly, like a rock-
ing 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
tonight.”

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 eye-
lids never fluttering.

He was born in the Far South, on the d'Ar-
nault 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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{{antonp211.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

to sit up alone and toddle about, another
affliction, the nervous motion of his body, be-
came apparent. His mother, a buxom young
negro wench who was laundress for the d'Ar-
naults, 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 “wasn't all wrong.”
She named him Samson, because he was blind,
but on the plantation he was known as “yel-
low 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

[[211]]

{{antonp212.png}} || My Antonia ||

ashamed of his ugliness that she couldn'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 holly-
hock 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 re-
membered 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

[[212]]

{{antonp213.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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 pres-
ence 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 along the slippery sides, em-
braced the carved legs, tried to get some con-
ception 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

[[213]]

{{antonp214.png}} || 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 re-
peat, after a fashion, any composition that

[[214]]

{{antonp215.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

was played for him. No matter how many
wrong notes he struck, he never lost the inten-
tion 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 gloat-
ing 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, whis-
pered, “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

[[215]]

{{antonp216.png}} || My Antonia ||

peeped over the transom. Springing down,
he wrenched open the doors and ran out into
the dining-room. Tiny and Lena, Antonia 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 room-
ful of lonesome men on the other side of the
partition! Introduce me to your friends, Tiny.”

The girls, still laughing, were trying to es-
cape. Tiny looked alarmed. “Mrs. Gardener
wouldn'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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{{antonp217.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

“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 glis-
tening 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'

[[217]]

{{antonp218.png}} || 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?”

Antonia 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 counte-
nance, slightly marked by smallpox, but hand-
some for all that. She had beautiful chestnut
hair, coils of it; her forehead was low and
smooth, and her commanding dark eyes re-
garded the world indifferently and fearlessly.
She looked bold and resourceful and unscru-
pulous, 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

[[218]]

{{antonp219.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

melodies, and had heard d'Arnault play in
New Orleans. At last he tapped his way up-
stairs, after bowing to everybody, docile and
happy. I walked home with Antonia. 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.

[[219]]

{{antonp220.png}} || My Antonia ||

II-VIII

The Harling children and I were never hap-
pier, 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 hide-
and-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 quiet-
est 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 Antonia were preserving cherries, when I
stopped one morning to tell them that a danc-
ing pavilion had come to town. I had seen

[[220]]

{{antonp221.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

two drays hauling the canvas and painted
poles up from the depot.

That afternoon three cheerful-looking Ital-
ians 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 para-
sol. They seemed especially interested in chil-
dren and vacant lots. When I overtook them
and stopped to say a word, I found them affa-
ble 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. Be-
fore 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, hurry-
ing along the sidewalk on their way to the
tent. Mrs. Vanni received them at the en-

[[221]]

{{antonp222.png}} || 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 um-
brella 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 laundry-

[[222]]

{{antonp223.png}} || 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 mar-
ried 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 de-
pot, then back again to the post-office, the ice-
cream 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

[[223]]

{{antonp224.png}} || 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
hadn'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 ice-
man, 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 coun-
try boys came in from farms eight and ten
miles away, and all the country girls were on
the floor, — Antonia 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 sweet-
hearts and general condemnation for a waltz
with “the hired girls.”

[[224]]

{{antonp225.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

II-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 bitter-
hard times, and had got little schooling them-
selves. 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 Antonia,
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]]

{{antonp226.png}} || My Antonia ||

I can remember something unusual and en-
gaging 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 exer-
cise 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 mus-
cles seemed to ask but one thing — not to be
disturbed. I remember those girls merely as
faces in the schoolroom, gay and rosy, or list-
less 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]]

{{antonp227.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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 hard-
pressed as their neighbors from other coun-
tries. 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 him-
self, 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 hard-
earned dollars. The girls I knew were always

[[227]]

{{antonp228.png}} || My Antonia ||

helping to pay for ploughs and reapers, brood-
sows, 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 today 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 Nor-
way, they looked at me blankly. What did it
matter? All foreigners were ignorant people
who couldn't speak English. There was not a
man in Black Hawk who had the intelligence
or cultivation, much less the personal distinc-
tion, of Antonia'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

[[228]]

{{antonp229.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

Hawk merchant can hope for is to sell provi-
sions 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

[[229]]

{{antonp230.png}} || 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 side-
walk whispering to each other, or the three
Bohemian Marys in their long plush coats
and caps, comporting themselves with a dig-
nity 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 kit-
ten. If he went into the laundry to get his
collars, there were the four Danish girls, smil-
ing 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 cigar-
stand in the drug-store. Mary Dusak had been
housekeeper for a bachelor rancher from Bos-
ton, 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

[[230]]

{{antonp231.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

were considered as dangerous as high explo-
sives to have about the kitchen, yet they were
such good cooks and such admirable house-
keepers 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 fath-
er'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 cotton-
wood trees, smoking and watching Lena with
a harassed expression. Several times I stum-
bled 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 sum-
mer, when Lena went home for a week to
visit her mother, I heard from Antonia that
young Lovett drove all the way out there to
see her, and took her buggy-riding. In my in-
genuousness I hoped that Sylvester would
marry Lena, and thus give all the country
girls a better position in the town.

[[231]]

{{antonp232.png}} || 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 cere-
moniously 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.

[[232]]

{{antonp233.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

II-X

It was at the Vannis' tent that Antonia 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 king-
dom. But after the tent came to town she
began to go about with Tiny and Lena and
their friends. The Vannis often said that An-
tonia was the best dancer of them all. I some-
times 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 Mar-
shalls' Anna” or “the Gardeners' Tiny.”

Antonia 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 ex-
citement. At the first call of the music, she
became irresponsible. If she hadn't time to
dress, she merely flung off her apron and shot

[[233]]

{{antonp234.png}} || 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.

Antonia's success at the tent had its conse-
quences. 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 vigor-
ous slap. He looked out through the side door
in time to see a pair of long legs vaulting over

[[234]]

{{antonp235.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

the picket fence. Antonia was standing there,
angry and excited. Young Harry Paine, who
was to marry his employer's daughter on Mon-
day, had come to the tent with a crowd of
friends and danced all evening. Afterward, he
begged Antonia 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 didn't mind. On the back
porch he tried to kiss her, and when she pro-
tested, — 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,
Antonia. 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,
tonight. 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 Antonia, they
found her agitated but determined. “Stop go-
ing to the tent?” she panted. “I wouldn't

[[235]]

{{antonp236.png}} || My Antonia ||

think of it for a minute! My own father
couldn'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,
Antonia,” 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. “Antonia,
if you go to the Cutters' 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, laugh-
ing 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]]

{{antonp237.png}} || 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.” Antonia
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 Antonia.

[[237]]

{{antonp238.png}} || My Antonia ||

II-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. Cut-
ter 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

[[238]]

{{antonp239.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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 busi-
ness, 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 par-
ticularly affable to grandmother, and when-
ever 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 factory-
made. His skin was red and rough, as if from
perpetual sunburn; he often went away to
hot springs to take mud baths. He was no-
toriously 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

[[239]]

{{antonp240.png}} || 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 morn-
ings one could see him out at the fair grounds,
speeding around the race-course in his trot-
ting-buggy, wearing yellow gloves and a black-
and-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 fastidi-
ous 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 combi-
nation 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 terrifying-
looking 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

[[240]]

{{antonp241.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

curved, like a horse's; people said babies al-
ways 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, in-
tense 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 ex-
hibiting some of his wife's china to a caller, he
dropped a piece. Mrs. Cutter put her hand-
kerchief 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 tri-

[[241]]

{{antonp242.png}} || My Antonia ||

umphantly fit the clipping into the space from
which it had been cut. Those two could quar-
rel 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 sub-
jects 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 de-
termination to outlive him and to share his
property with her “people,” whom he de-
tested. To this she would reply that unless he
changed his mode of life, she would certainly
outlive him. After listening to her insinua-
tions 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 house-
hold 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

[[242]]

{{antonp243.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

wasn'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 cer-
tainly 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 found-
ing new religions, sometimes being forcibly
fed — easily recognizable, even when superfi-
cially tamed.

[[243]]

{{antonp244.png}} || My Antonia ||

II-XII

After Antonia 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 un-
til midnight. Her new clothes were the sub-
ject of caustic comment. Under Lena's direc-
tion she copied Mrs. Gardener's new party
dress and Mrs. Smith's street costume so in-
geniously 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 An-
tonia, like Snow-White in the fairy tale, was
still “fairest of them all.”

[[244]]

{{antonp245.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

Being a Senior now, I got away from school
early. Sometimes I overtook the girls down-
town 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 Soder-
ball 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 ba-
bies, do they, Jim?”

I told her I didn't know what they be-
lieved, and didn't care, and that I certainly
wasn'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,
didn't you?”

[[245]]

{{antonp246.png}} || My Antonia ||

Antonia 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 Norwe-
gian 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 some-
thing queer about a boy who showed no in-
terest 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 be-
came 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 Annapo-

[[246]]

{{antonp247.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

lis, while I was still sitting in Black Hawk,
answering to my name at roll-call every morn-
ing, 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 Antonia.
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
couldn't sit still and read forever.

In the evening I used to prowl about, hunt-
ing 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 sit-
ting 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 farm-
ers 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

[[247]]

{{antonp248.png}} || My Antonia ||

palate. I liked to drop into his bar-room
and listen to the talk. But one day he over-
took 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 sto-
ries. 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 what-
ever 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 hop-
ing 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,

[[248]]

{{antonp249.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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-win-
dows 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

[[249]]

{{antonp250.png}} || My Antonia ||

like living under a tyranny. People's speech,
their voices, their very glances, became fur-
tive and repressed. Every individual taste,
every natural appetite, was bridled by cau-
tion. 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 al-
together too much of the people we knew.

My bedroom was on the ground floor, and as

[[250]]

{{antonp251.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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 grand-
parents 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 Bo-
hemians from Wilber, or German boys who
came down on the afternoon freight from Bis-
marck. 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 laun-
dryman 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 daugh-
ter died just as she was getting old enough to

[[251]]

{{antonp252.png}} || My Antonia ||

help her mother, and that he had been “try-
ing to make up for it ever since.” On summer
afternoons he used to sit for hours on the side-
walk 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 dis-
turbed his calm. His droll expression seemed
to say that he had found the secret of content-
ment. 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 drying-
lines. His girls never looked so pretty at the
dances as they did standing by the ironing-
board, 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

[[252]]

{{antonp253.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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 violet-
colored 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 didn'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

[[253]]

{{antonp254.png}} || My Antonia ||

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 Antonia's
life might have been!

Antonia 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, Antonia came to the hall with Norwegian
Anna and her young man, and that night I
took her home. When we were in the Cutters'
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!”

[[254]]

{{antonp255.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

“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 aw-
ful 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

[[255]]

{{antonp256.png}} || My Antonia ||

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 Antonia! 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 straw-
stacks 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 harvest-
field 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 reap-
ing-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

[[256]]

{{antonp257.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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 Antonia, but I never did.

[[257]]

{{antonp258.png}} || My Antonia ||

II-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 didn't feel well, and if I
couldn'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 wasn't any other way for you, it seemed
like.”

I put my arms around her. I couldn't bear
to see her cry.

[[258]]

{{antonp259.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

“What is it, grandmother? Is it the Fire-
men's dances?”

She nodded.

“I'm sorry I sneaked off like that. But
there's nothing wrong about the dances, and
I haven'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, read-
ing 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 sum-
mer, 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,

[[259]]

{{antonp260.png}} || My Antonia ||

and fell back on the telegrapher and the cigar-
maker 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 Ger-
man woman who always had more window
plants than any one else, and spent an after-
noon 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 Fran-
ces, 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 Antonia, 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

[[260]]

{{antonp261.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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 examina-
tions and she sees you're in earnest.”

“If you were a boy,” I persisted, “you
wouldn'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 glam-
our 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
didn't believe you could do as well as that.

[[261]]

{{antonp262.png}} || My Antonia ||

You didn'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, didn'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.”

[[262]]

{{antonp263.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

“Oh, I just sat there and wished my papa
could hear you! Jim,” — Antonia 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 glim-
mer smaller and smaller down the sidewalk
as they went away. I have had no other suc-
cess that pulled at my heartstrings like that
one.

[[263]]

{{antonp264.png}} || My Antonia ||

II-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
Aeneid 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 grand-
parents had misgivings, and began to wonder
whether I was not too young to go off to col-
lege 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 Antonia downtown on

[[264]]

{{antonp265.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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 elder-
blow wine.

“Anna's to drive us down in the Mar-
shalls' delivery wagon, and we'll take a nice
lunch and have a picnic. Just us; nobody
else. Couldn'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

[[265]]

{{antonp266.png}} || 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 midsum-
mer; 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 dress-
ing-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 be-
longed 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

[[266]]

{{antonp267.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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 my-
self in the sun, and dressed slowly, reluctant
to leave that green enclosure where the sun-
light 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 break-
ing 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

[[267]]

{{antonp268.png}} || My Antonia ||

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 lux-
uriant 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 lit-
tle 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 Antonia, 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 be-
side her and asked her what was the matter.

[[268]]

{{antonp269.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

“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.

Antonia had the most trusting, responsive

[[269]]

{{antonp270.png}} || My Antonia ||

eyes in the world; love and credulousness
seemed to look out of them with open faces.
“Why didn'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. An-
tonia seemed to me that day exactly like the

[[270]]

{{antonp271.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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! Didn'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 ener-
getic; she was panting with zeal, and the per-
spiration stood in drops on her short, yielding
upper lip. I sprang to my feet and ran up the
bank.

[[271]]

{{antonp272.png}} || My Antonia ||

It was noon now, and so hot that the dog-
woods 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, swell-
ing gently until it met the sky. We could
recognize familiar farmhouses and windmills.
Each of the girls pointed out to me the di-
rection 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.”

[[272]]

{{antonp273.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

“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 coun-
try, 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.

Antonia 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 oughtn'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

[[273]]

{{antonp274.png}} || My Antonia ||

wish father didn'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 didn'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 didn't
any of us want, is the one we love best now.”

[[274]]

{{antonp275.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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, 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 ad-
miration.

Tiny moved about restlessly, fanning her-
self with her straw hat. “If I was smart like
her, I'd be at my books day and night. But

[[275]]

{{antonp276.png}} || 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 Gov-
ernment 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

[[276]]

{{antonp277.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

the little trees for bases. Lena was Pussy so
often that she finally said she wouldn't play
any more. We threw ourselves down on the
grass, out of breath.

“Jim,” Antonia 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 be-
lief 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 stir-
rup 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 Har-
ling office all summer. Father Kelly, the

[[277]]

{{antonp278.png}} || 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,” An-
tonia put in triumphantly. “So Jim and
Charley were right, and the teachers were
wrong!”

The girls began to wonder among them-
selves. 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
couldn'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 An-
tonia 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

[[278]]

{{antonp279.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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 sud-
denly 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.

[[279]]

{{antonp280.png}} || My Antonia ||

II-XV

Late in August the Cutters went to Omaha
for a few days, leaving Antonia in charge of
the house. Since the scandal about the Swed-
ish girl, Wick Cutter could never get his wife
to stir out of Black Hawk without him.

The day after the Cutters left, Antonia
came over to see us. Grandmother noticed
that she seemed troubled and distracted.
“You've got something on your mind, An-
tonia,” she said anxiously.

“Yes, Mrs. Burden. I couldn'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 eve-
ning, 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.

[[280]]

{{antonp281.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

Cutter had been so insistent in regard to
these details that now she felt uncomfortable
about staying there alone. She hadn'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 wouldn'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, know-
ing you were under my own roof. I guess Jim
could take care of their silver and old usury
notes as well as you could.”

Antonia 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 didn'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

[[281]]

{{antonp282.png}} || My Antonia ||

home in the morning, Tony had a good break-
fast 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 couldn'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

[[282]]

{{antonp283.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

the face with the other, hissing and chuck-
ling 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 morn-

[[283]]

{{antonp284.png}} || 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 Antonia 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 Antonia. But I lay with my

[[284]]

{{antonp285.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

disfigured face to the wall and felt no par-
ticular 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 drug-
store 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, Antonia
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 Antonia'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

[[285]]

{{antonp286.png}} || My Antonia ||

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 Antonia was packing her trunk and
putting her room in order, to leave it, the front-
door 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 Antonia
at all, but made her sit down in the parlor
while she related to her just what had occurred
the night before. Antonia 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 busi-
ness. When he returned, he told her that he

[[286]]

{{antonp287.png}} || The Hired Girls ||

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 Way-
more 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

[[287]]

{{antonp288.png}} || 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 hadn't a doubt of it.

Certainly Cutter liked to have his wife
think him a devil. In some way he depended
upon the excitement he could arouse in her
hysterical nature. Perhaps he got the feeling
of being a rake more from his wife's rage and
amazement than from any experiences of his
own. His zest in debauchery might wane, but
never Mrs. Cutter's belief in it. The reckoning
with his wife at the end of an escapade was
something he counted on — like the last pow-
erful liqueur after a long dinner. The one ex-
citement he really couldn't do without was
quarreling with Mrs. Cutter!

[[288]]

{{antonp291.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

Book III — Lena Lingard

III-I

At the University I had the good fortune to
come immediately under the influence of a
brilliant and inspiring young scholar. Gaston
Cleric had arrived in Lincoln only a few
weeks earlier than I, to begin his work as head
of the Latin Department. He came West at
the suggestion of his physicians, his health
having been enfeebled by a long illness in
Italy. When I took my entrance examinations
he was my examiner, and my course was ar-
ranged under his supervision.

I did not go home for my first summer vaca-
tion, but stayed in Lincoln, working off a
year's Greek, which had been my only condi-
tion on entering the Freshman class. Cleric's
doctor advised against his going back to New
England, and except for a few weeks in Colo-
rado, he, too, was in Lincoln all that summer.
We played tennis, read, and took long walks
together. I shall always look back on that

[[291]]

{{antonp292.png}} || My Antonia ||

time of mental awakening as one of the happi-
est in my life. Gaston Cleric introduced me
to the world of ideas; when one first enters
that world everything else fades for a time,
and all that went before is as if it had not
been. Yet I found curious survivals; some of
the figures of my old life seemed to be waiting
for me in the new.

In those days there were many serious
young men among the students who had come
up to the University from the farms and the
little towns scattered over the thinly settled
State. Some of those boys came straight from
the cornfields with only a summer's wages in
their pockets, hung on through the four years,
shabby and underfed, and completed the
course by really heroic self-sacrifice. Our
instructors were oddly assorted; wandering
pioneer school-teachers, stranded ministers of
the Gospel, a few enthusiastic young men just
out of graduate schools. There was an atmos-
phere of endeavor, of expectancy and bright
hopefulness about the young college that had
lifted its head from the prairie only a few
years before.

Our personal life was as free as that of our
instructors. There were no college dormitories;

[[292]]

{{antonp293.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

we lived where we could and as we could. I
took rooms with an old couple, early settlers
in Lincoln, who had married off their children
and now lived quietly in their house at the
edge of town, near the open country. The
house was inconveniently situated for stu-
dents, and on that account I got two rooms
for the price of one. My bedroom, originally
a linen closet, was unheated and was barely
large enough to contain my cot bed, but it
enabled me to call the other room my study.
The dresser, and the great walnut wardrobe
which held all my clothes, even my hats and
shoes, I had pushed out of the way, and I
considered them non-existent, as children
eliminate incongruous objects when they are
playing house. I worked at a commodious
green-topped table placed directly in front of
the west window which looked out over the
prairie. In the corner at my right were all
my books, in shelves I had made and painted
myself. On the blank wall at my left the
dark, old-fashioned wall-paper was covered
by a large map of ancient Rome, the work
of some German scholar. Cleric had ordered
it for me when he was sending for books from
abroad. Over the bookcase hung a photo-

[[293]]

{{antonp294.png}} || My Antonia ||

graph of the Tragic Theater at Pompeii,
which he had given me from his collection.

When I sat at work I half faced a deep,
upholstered chair which stood at the end of
my table, its high back against the wall. I
had bought it with great care. My instructor
sometimes looked in upon me when he was out
for an evening tramp, and I noticed that he
was more likely to linger and become talka-
tive if I had a comfortable chair for him to
sit in, and if he found a bottle of Benedictine
and plenty of the kind of cigarettes he liked,
at his elbow. He was, I had discovered, parsi-
monious about small expenditures — a trait
absolutely inconsistent with his general char-
acter. Sometimes when he came he was silent
and moody, and after a few sarcastic remarks
went away again, to tramp the streets of Lin-
coln, which were almost as quiet and oppres-
sively domestic as those of Black Hawk.
Again, he would sit until nearly midnight,
talking about Latin and English poetry, or
telling me about his long stay in Italy.

I can give no idea of the peculiar charm
and vividness of his talk. In a crowd he was
nearly always silent. Even for his classroom
he had no platitudes, no stock of professorial

[[294]]

{{antonp295.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

anecdotes. When he was tired his lectures
were clouded, obscure, elliptical; but when he
was interested they were wonderful. I believe
that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a
great poet, and I have sometimes thought that
his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his
poetic gift. He squandered too much in the
heat of personal communication. How often
I have seen him draw his dark brows together,
fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a
figure in the carpet, and then flash into the
lamplight the very image that was in his brain.
He could bring the drama of antique life be-
fore one out of the shadows — white figures
against blue backgrounds. I shall never for-
get his face as it looked one night when he
told me about the solitary day he spent among
the sea temples at Paestum: the soft wind
blowing through the roofless columns, the
birds flying low over the flowering marsh
grasses, the changing lights on the silver,
cloud-hung mountains. He had willfully
stayed the short summer night there, wrapped
in his coat and rug, watching the constella-
tions on their path down the sky until “the
bride of old Tithonus” rose out of the sea, and
the mountains stood sharp in the dawn. It

[[295]]

{{antonp296.png}} || My Antonia ||

was there he caught the fever which held him
back on the eve of his departure for Greece
and of which he lay ill so long in Naples. He
was still, indeed, doing penance for it.

I remember vividly another evening, when
something led us to talk of Dante's veneration
for Virgil. Cleric went through canto after
canto of the “Commedia,” repeating the dis-
course between Dante and his “sweet teacher,”
while his cigarette burned itself out unheeded
between his long fingers. I can hear him now,
speaking the lines of the poet Statius, who
spoke for Dante: “I was famous on earth with
the name which endures longest and honors most.
The seeds of my ardor were the sparks from that
divine flame whereby more than a thousand have
kindled; I speak of the Aeneid, mother to me and
nurse to me in poetry.”

Although I admired scholarship so much in
Cleric, I was not deceived about myself; I
knew that I should never be a scholar. I could
never lose myself for long among impersonal
things. Mental excitement was apt to send
me with a rush back to my own naked land
and the figures scattered upon it. While I was
in the very act of yearning toward the new
forms that Cleric brought up before me, my

[[296]]

{{antonp297.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly
found myself thinking of the places and people
of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out
strengthened and simplified now, like the
image of the plough against the sun. They
were all I had for an answer to the new appeal.
I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and
Russian Peter took up in my memory, which I
wanted to crowd with other things. But when-
ever my consciousness was quickened, all
those early friends were quickened within it,
and in some strange way they accompanied
me through all my new experiences. They
were so much alive in me that I scarcely
stopped to wonder whether they were alive
anywhere else, or how.

[[297]]

{{antonp298.png}} || My Antonia ||

III-II

One March evening in my Sophomore year I
was sitting alone in my room after supper.
There had been a warm thaw all day, with
mushy yards and little streams of dark water
gurgling cheerfully into the streets out of old
snow-banks. My window was open, and the
earthy wind blowing through made me indo-
lent. On the edge of the prairie, where the sun
had gone down, the sky was turquoise blue, like
a lake, with gold light throbbing in it. Higher
up, in the utter clarity of the western slope,
the evening star hung like a lamp suspended
by silver chains — like the lamp engraved
upon the title-page of old Latin texts, which is
always appearing in new heavens, and waking
new desires in men. It reminded me, at any
rate, to shut my window and light my wick
in answer. I did so regretfully, and the dim
objects in the room emerged from the shadows
and took their place about me with the help-
fulness which custom breeds.

I propped my book open and stared list-
lessly at the page of the Georgics where to-

[[298]]

{{antonp299.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

morrow's lesson began. It opened with the
melancholy reflection that, in the lives of mor-
tals, the best days are the first to flee. “Op-
tima dies... prima fugit.” I turned back to
the beginning of the third book, which we had
read in class that morning. “Primus ego in
patriam mecum... deducam Musas”; “for I
shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse
into my country.” Cleric had explained to us
that “patria” here meant, not a nation or
even a province, but the little rural neighbor-
hood on the Mincio where the poet was born.
This was not a boast, but a hope, at once bold
and devoutly humble, that he might bring
the Muse (but lately come to Italy from her
cloudy Grecian mountains), not to the capi-
tal, the palatia Romana, but to his own little
“country”; to his father's fields, “sloping
down to the river and to the old beech trees
with broken tops.”

Cleric said he thought Virgil, when he was
dying at Brindisi, must have remembered that
passage. After he had faced the bitter fact
that he was to leave the Aeneid unfinished, and
had decreed that the great canvas, crowded
with figures of gods and men, should be burned
rather than survive him unperfected, then his

[[299]]

{{antonp300.png}} || My Antonia ||

mind must have gone back to the perfect
utterance of the Georgics, where the pen was
fitted to the matter as the plough is to the
furrow; and he must have said to himself
with the thankfulness of a good man, “I was
the first to bring the Muse into my country.”

We left the classroom quietly, conscious
that we had been brushed by the wing of a
great feeling, though perhaps I alone knew
Cleric intimately enough to guess what that
feeling was. In the evening, as I sat staring
at my book, the fervor of his voice stirred
through the quantities on the page before me.
I was wondering whether that particular rocky
strip of New England coast about which he
had so often told me was Cleric's patria. Be-
fore I had got far with my reading I was dis-
turbed by a knock. I hurried to the door and
when I opened it saw a woman standing in the
dark hall.

“I expect you hardly know me, Jim.”

The voice seemed familiar, but I did not
recognize her until she stepped into the light
of my doorway and I beheld — Lena Lingard!
She was so quietly conventionalized by city
clothes that I might have passed her on the
street without seeing her. Her black suit fitted

[[300]]

{{antonp301.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

her figure smoothly, and a black lace hat, with
pale-blue forget-me-nots, sat demurely on her
yellow hair.

I led her toward Cleric's chair, the only
comfortable one I had, questioning her con-
fusedly.

She was not disconcerted by my embarrass-
ment. She looked about her with the naive
curiosity I remembered so well. “You are
quite comfortable here, aren't you? I live in
Lincoln now, too, Jim. I'm in business for
myself. I have a dressmaking shop in the
Raleigh Block, out on O Street. I've made a
real good start.”

“But, Lena, when did you come?”

“Oh, I've been here all winter. Didn't
your grandmother ever write you? I've
thought about looking you up lots of times.
But we've all heard what a studious young
man you've got to be, and I felt bashful. I
didn't know whether you'd be glad to see
me.” She laughed her mellow, easy laugh,
that was either very artless or very compre-
hending, one never quite knew which. “You
seem the same, though, — except you're a
young man, now, of course. Do you think
I've changed?”

[[301]]

{{antonp302.png}} || My Antonia ||

“Maybe you're prettier — though you were
always pretty enough. Perhaps it's your
clothes that make a difference.”

“You like my new suit? I have to dress
pretty well in my business.” She took off her
jacket and sat more at ease in her blouse, of
some soft, flimsy silk. She was already at
home in my place, had slipped quietly into
it, as she did into everything. She told me
her business was going well, and she had
saved a little money.

“This summer I'm going to build the house
for mother I've talked about so long. I won't
be able to pay up on it at first, but I want her
to have it before she is too old to enjoy it.
Next summer I'll take her down new furni-
ture and carpets, so she'll have something to
look forward to all winter.”

I watched Lena sitting there so smooth
and sunny and well cared-for, and thought of
how she used to run barefoot over the prairie
until after the snow began to fly, and how
Crazy Mary chased her round and round the
cornfields. It seemed to me wonderful that
she should have got on so well in the world.
Certainly she had no one but herself to thank
for it.

[[302]]

{{antonp303.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

“You must feel proud of yourself, Lena,”
I said heartily. “Look at me; I've never
earned a dollar, and I don't know that I'll
ever be able to.”

“Tony says you're going to be richer than
Mr. Harling some day. She's always brag-
ging about you, you know.”

“Tell me, how is Tony?”

“She's fine. She works for Mrs. Gardener
at the hotel now. She's housekeeper. Mrs.
Gardener's health isn't what it was, and she
can't see after everything like she used to.
She has great confidence in Tony. Tony's
made it up with the Harlings, too. Little Nina
is so fond of her that Mrs. Harling kind of
overlooked things.”

“Is she still going with Larry Donovan?”

“Oh, that's on, worse than ever! I guess
they're engaged. Tony talks about him like
he was president of the railroad. Everybody
laughs about it, because she was never a girl
to be soft. She won't hear a word against him.
She's so sort of innocent.”

I said I didn't like Larry, and never would.

Lena's face dimpled. “Some of us could
tell her things, but it wouldn't do any good.
She'd always believe him. That's Antonia's

[[303]]

{{antonp304.png}} || My Antonia ||

failing, you know; if she once likes people, she
won't hear anything against them.”

“I think I'd better go home and look after
Antonia,” I said.

“I think you had.” Lena looked up at me
in frank amusement. “It's a good thing the
Harlings are friendly with her again. Larry's
afraid of them. They ship so much grain,
they have influence with the railroad people.
What are you studying?” She leaned her el-
bows on the table and drew my book toward
her. I caught a faint odor of violet sachet.
“So that's Latin, is it? It looks hard. You
do go to the theater sometimes, though, for
I've seen you there. Don't you just love a
good play, Jim? I can't stay at home in the
evening if there's one in town. I'd be willing
to work like a slave, it seems to me, to live in
a place where there are theaters.”

“Let's go to a show together sometime.
You are going to let me come to see you, are-
n't you?”

“Would you like to? I'd be ever so pleased.
I'm never busy after six o'clock, and I let my
sewing girls go at half-past five. I board, to
save time, but sometimes I cook a chop for
myself, and I'd be glad to cook one for you.

[[304]]

{{antonp305.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

Well,” — she began to put on her white gloves,
— “it's been awful good to see you, Jim.”

“You needn't hurry, need you? You've
hardly told me anything yet.”

“We can talk when you come to see me. I
expect you don't often have lady visitors. The
old woman downstairs didn't want to let me
come up very much. I told her I was from
your home town, and had promised your
grandmother to come and see you. How sur-
prised Mrs. Burden would be!” Lena laughed
softly as she rose.

When I caught up my hat she shook her
head. “No, I don't want you to go with me.
I'm to meet some Swedes at the drug-store.
You wouldn't care for them. I wanted to see
your room so I could write Tony all about it,
but I must tell her how I left you right here
with your books. She's always so afraid
some one will run off with you!” Lena slipped
her silk sleeves into the jacket I held for her,
smoothed it over her person, and buttoned
it slowly. I walked with her to the door.
“Come and see me sometimes when you're
lonesome. But maybe you have all the friends
you want. Have you?” She turned her soft
cheek to me. “Have you?” she whispered

[[305]]

{{antonp306.png}} || My Antonia ||

teasingly in my ear. In a moment I watched
her fade down the dusky stairway.

When I turned back to my room the place
seemed much pleasanter than before. Lena
had left something warm and friendly in the
lamplight. How I loved to hear her laugh again!
It was so soft and unexcited and appreciative
— gave a favorable interpretation to every-
thing. When I closed my eyes I could hear
them all laughing — the Danish laundry girls
and the three Bohemian Marys. Lena had
brought them all back to me. It came over
me, as it had never done before, the relation
between girls like those and the poetry of
Virgil. If there were no girls like them in the
world, there would be no poetry. I under-
stood that clearly, for the first time. This
revelation seemed to me inestimably precious.
I clung to it as if it might suddenly vanish.

As I sat down to my book at last, my old
dream about Lena coming across the harvest
field in her short skirt seemed to me like the
memory of an actual experience. It floated
before me on the page like a picture, and
underneath it stood the mournful line:
Optima dies... prima fugit.

[[306]]

{{antonp307.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

III-III

In Lincoln the best part of the theatrical
season came late, when the good companies
stopped off there for one-night stands, after
their long runs in New York and Chicago.
That spring Lena went with me to see Joseph
Jefferson in “Rip Van Winkle,” and to a
war play called “Shenandoah.” She was in-
flexible about paying for her own seat; said
she was in business now, and she wouldn't
have a schoolboy spending his money on her.
I liked to watch a play with Lena; everything
was wonderful to her, and everything was
true. It was like going to revival meetings
with some one who was always being con-
verted. She handed her feelings over to the
actors with a kind of fatalistic resignation.
Accessories of costume and scene meant much
more to her than to me. She sat entranced
through “Robin Hood” and hung upon the
lips of the contralto who sang, “Oh, Promise
Me!”

Toward the end of April, the billboards,
which I watched anxiously in those days,

[[307]]

{{antonp308.png}} || My Antonia ||

bloomed out one morning with gleaming white
posters on which two names were impressively
printed in blue Gothic letters: the name of an
actress of whom I had often heard, and the
name “Camille.”

I called at the Raleigh Block for Lena on
Saturday evening, and we walked down to
the theater. The weather was warm and
sultry and put us both in a holiday humor. We
arrived early, because Lena liked to watch the
people come in. There was a note on the pro-
gramme, saying that the “incidental music”
would be from the opera “Traviata,” which
was made from the same story as the play.
We had neither of us read the play, and we
did not know what it was about — though
I seemed to remember having heard it was a
piece in which great actresses shone. “The
Count of Monte Cristo,” which I had seen
James O'Neill play that winter, was by the
only Alexandre Dumas I knew. This play,
I saw, was by his son, and I expected a family
resemblance. A couple of jack-rabbits, run
in off the prairie, could not have been more
innocent of what awaited them than were
Lena and I.

Our excitement began with the rise of the

[[308]]

{{antonp309.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

curtain, when the moody Varville, seated
before the fire, interrogated Nanine. De-
cidedly, there was a new tang about this dia-
logue. I had never heard in the theater lines
that were alive, that presupposed and took
for granted, like those which passed between
Varville and Marguerite in the brief encoun-
ter before her friends entered. This intro-
duced the most brilliant, worldly, the most
enchantingly gay scene I had ever looked
upon. I had never seen champagne bottles
opened on the stage before — indeed, I had
never seen them opened anywhere. The
memory of that supper makes me hungry
now; the sight of it then, when I had only a
students' boarding-house dinner behind me,
was delicate torment. I seem to remember
gilded chairs and tables (arranged hurriedly
by footmen in white gloves and stockings),
linen of dazzling whiteness, glittering glass,
silver dishes, a great bowl of fruit, and the
reddest of roses. The room was invaded by
beautiful women and dashing young men,
laughing and talking together. The men were
dressed more or less after the period in which
the play was written; the women were not.
I saw no inconsistency. Their talk seemed

[[309]]

{{antonp310.png}} || My Antonia ||

to open to one the brilliant world in which
they lived; every sentence made one older
and wiser, every pleasantry enlarged one's
horizon. One could experience excess and
satiety without the inconvenience of learning
what to do with one's hands in a drawing-
room! When the characters all spoke at once
and I missed some of the phrases they flashed
at each other, I was in misery. I strained my
ears and eyes to catch every exclamation.

The actress who played Marguerite was
even then old-fashioned, though historic. She
had been a member of Daly's famous New
York company, and afterward a “star” under
his direction. She was a woman who could
not be taught, it is said, though she had a
crude natural force which carried with people
whose feelings were accessible and whose
taste was not squeamish. She was already
old, with a ravaged countenance and a phy-
sique curiously hard and stiff. She moved
with difficulty — I think she was lame — I
seem to remember some story about a malady
of the spine. Her Armand was dispropor-
tionately young and slight, a handsome youth,
perplexed in the extreme. But what did it
matter? I believed devoutly in her power to

[[310]]

{{antonp311.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness. I
believed her young, ardent, reckless, disil-
lusioned, under sentence, feverish, avid of
pleasure. I wanted to cross the footlights and
help the slim-waisted Armand in the frilled
shirt to convince her that there was still loy-
alty and devotion in the world. Her sudden
illness, when the gayety was at its height, her
pallor, the handkerchief she crushed against
her lips, the cough she smothered under the
laughter while Gaston kept playing the piano
lightly — it all wrung my heart. But not so
much as her cynicism in the long dialogue
with her lover which followed. How far was
I from questioning her unbelief! While the
charmingly sincere young man pleaded with
her — accompanied by the orchestra in the
old “Traviata” duet, “misterioso, misteri-
oso!” — she maintained her bitter skepticism,
and the curtain fell on her dancing recklessly
with the others, after Armand had been sent
away with his flower.

Between the acts we had no time to forget.
The orchestra kept sawing away at the “Tra-
viata” music, so joyous and sad, so thin and
far-away, so clap-trap and yet so heart-
breaking. After the second act I left Lena in

[[311]]

{{antonp312.png}} || My Antonia ||

tearful contemplation of the ceiling, and went
out into the lobby to smoke. As I walked
about there I congratulated myself that I had
not brought some Lincoln girl who would
talk during the waits about the Junior dances,
or whether the cadets would camp at Platts-
mouth. Lena was at least a woman, and I was
a man.

Through the scene between Marguerite
and the elder Duval, Lena wept unceasingly,
and I sat helpless to prevent the closing of
that chapter of idyllic love, dreading the re-
turn of the young man whose ineffable happi-
ness was only to be the measure of his fall.

I suppose no woman could have been fur-
ther in person, voice, and temperament from
Dumas' appealing heroine than the veteran
actress who first acquainted me with her. Her
conception of the character was as heavy and
uncompromising as her diction; she bore hard
on the idea and on the consonants. At all
times she was highly tragic, devoured by
remorse. Lightness of stress or behavior was
far from her. Her voice was heavy and deep:
“Ar-r-r-mond!” she would begin, as if she
were summoning him to the bar of Judg-
ment. But the lines were enough. She had

[[312]]

{{antonp313.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

only to utter them. They created the char-
acter in spite of her.

The heartless world which Marguerite re-
entered with Varville had never been so glit-
tering and reckless as on the night when it
gathered in Olympe's salon for the fourth
act. There were chandeliers hung from the
ceiling, I remember, many servants in livery,
gaming-tables where the men played with
piles of gold, and a staircase down which the
guests made their entrance. After all the
others had gathered round the card tables,
and young Duval had been warned by Pru-
dence, Marguerite descended the staircase
with Varville; such a cloak, such a fan, such
jewels — and her face! One knew at a glance
how it was with her. When Armand, with the
terrible words, “Look, all of you, I owe this
woman nothing!” flung the gold and bank-
notes at the half-swooning Marguerite, Lena
cowered beside me and covered her face with
her hands.

The curtain rose on the bedroom scene. By
this time there wasn't a nerve in me that
hadn't been twisted. Nanine alone could
have made me cry. I loved Nanine tenderly;
and Gaston, how one clung to that good fel-

[[313]]

{{antonp314.png}} || My Antonia ||

low! The New Year's presents were not too
much; nothing could be too much now. I
wept unrestrainedly. Even the handkerchief
in my breast-pocket, worn for elegance and
not at all for use, was wet through by the
time that moribund woman sank for the last
time into the arms of her lover.

When we reached the door of the theater,
the streets were shining with rain. I had
prudently brought along Mrs. Harling's use-
ful Commencement present, and I took Lena
home under its shelter. After leaving her, I
walked slowly out into the country part of
the town where I lived. The lilacs were all
blooming in the yards, and the smell of them
after the rain, of the new leaves and the blos-
soms together, blew into my face with a sort
of bitter sweetness. I tramped through the
puddles and under the showery trees, mourn-
ing for Marguerite Gauthier as if she had died
only yesterday, sighing with the spirit of 1840,
which had sighed so much, and which had
reached me only that night, across long years
and several languages, through the person of
an infirm old actress. The idea is one that no
circumstances can frustrate. Wherever and
whenever that piece is put on, it is April.

[[314]]

{{antonp315.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

III-IV

How well I remember the stiff little parlor
where I used to wait for Lena: the hard horse-
hair furniture, bought at some auction sale,
the long mirror, the fashion-plates on the
wall. If I sat down even for a moment I was
sure to find threads and bits of colored silk
clinging to my clothes after I went away.
Lena's success puzzled me. She was so easy-
going; had none of the push and self-asser-
tiveness that get people ahead in business.
She had come to Lincoln, a country girl,
with no introductions except to some cous-
ins of Mrs. Thomas who lived there, and she
was already making clothes for the women
of “the young married set.” She evidently
had great natural aptitude for her work. She
knew, as she said, “what people looked well
in.” She never tired of poring over fashion
books. Sometimes in the evening I would
find her alone in her work-room, draping folds
of satin on a wire figure, with a quite blissful
expression of countenance. I couldn't help
thinking that the years when Lena literally

[[315]]

{{antonp316.png}} || My Antonia ||

hadn't enough clothes to cover herself might
have something to do with her untiring inter-
est in dressing the human figure. Her clients
said that Lena “had style,” and overlooked
her habitual inaccuracies. She never, I dis-
covered, finished anything by the time she
had promised, and she frequently spent more
money on materials than her customer had
authorized. Once, when I arrived at six
o'clock, Lena was ushering out a fidgety
mother and her awkward, overgrown daugh-
ter. The woman detained Lena at the door
to say apologetically: —

“You'll try to keep it under fifty for me,
won't you, Miss Lingard? You see, she's
really too young to come to an expensive
dressmaker, but I knew you could do more
with her than anybody else.”

“Oh, that will be all right, Mrs. Herron.
I think we'll manage to get a good effect,”
Lena replied blandly.

I thought her manner with her customers
very good, and wondered where she had
learned such self-possession.

Sometimes after my morning classes were
over, I used to encounter Lena downtown,
in her velvet suit and a little black hat, with

[[316]]

{{antonp317.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

a veil tied smoothly over her face, looking
as fresh as the spring morning. Maybe she
would be carrying home a bunch of jonquils or
a hyacinth plant. When we passed a candy
store her footsteps would hesitate and linger.
“Don't let me go in,” she would murmur.
“Get me by if you can.” She was very fond
of sweets, and was afraid of growing too
plump.

We had delightful Sunday breakfasts to-
gether at Lena's. At the back of her long
work-room was a bay-window, large enough
to hold a box-couch and a reading-table. We
breakfasted in this recess, after drawing the
curtains that shut out the long room, with
cutting-tables and wire women and sheet-
draped garments on the walls. The sunlight
poured in, making everything on the table
shine and glitter and the flame of the alcohol
lamp disappear altogether. Lena's curly black
water-spaniel, Prince, breakfasted with us.
He sat beside her on the couch and behaved
very well until the Polish violin-teacher across
the hall began to practice, when Prince would
growl and sniff the air with disgust. Lena's
landlord, old Colonel Raleigh, had given her
the dog, and at first she was not at all pleased.

[[317]]

{{antonp318.png}} || My Antonia ||

She had spent too much of her life taking
care of animals to have much sentiment about
them. But Prince was a knowing little beast,
and she grew fond of him. After breakfast
I made him do his lessons; play dead dog,
shake hands, stand up like a soldier. We used
to put my cadet cap on his head — I had to
take military drill at the University — and
give him a yard-measure to hold with his
front leg. His gravity made us laugh im-
moderately.

Lena's talk always amused me. Antonia
had never talked like the people about her.
Even after she learned to speak English read-
ily there was always something impulsive
and foreign in her speech. But Lena had
picked up all the conventional expressions
she heard at Mrs. Thomas's dressmaking
shop. Those formal phrases, the very flower
of small-town proprieties, and the flat com-
monplaces, nearly all hypocritical in their ori-
gin, became very funny, very engaging, when
they were uttered in Lena's soft voice, with
her caressing intonation and arch naivete.
Nothing could be more diverting than to hear
Lena, who was almost as candid as Nature,
call a leg a “limb” or a house a “home.”

[[318]]

{{antonp319.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

We used to linger a long while over our
coffee in that sunny corner. Lena was never
so pretty as in the morning; she wakened
fresh with the world every day, and her eyes
had a deeper color then, like the blue flowers
that are never so blue as when they first open.
I could sit idle all through a Sunday morning
and look at her. Ole Benson's behavior was
now no mystery to me.

“There was never any harm in Ole,” she
said once. “People needn't have troubled
themselves. He just liked to come over and
sit on the draw-side and forget about his bad
luck. I liked to have him. Any company's
welcome when you're off with cattle all the
time.”

“But wasn't he always glum?” I asked.
“People said he never talked at all.”

“Sure he talked, in Norwegian. He'd been
a sailor on an English boat and had seen
lots of queer places. He had wonderful tat-
toos. We used to sit and look at them for
hours; there wasn't much to look at out there.
He was like a picture book. He had a ship
and a strawberry girl on one arm, and on
the other a girl standing before a little house,
with a fence and gate and all, waiting for

[[319]]

{{antonp320.png}} || My Antonia ||

her sweetheart. Farther up his arm, her
sailor had come back and was kissing her.
'The Sailor's Return,' he called it.”

I admitted it was no wonder Ole liked to
look at a pretty girl once in a while, with
such a fright at home.

“You know,” Lena said confidentially,
“he married Mary because he thought she
was strong-minded and would keep him
straight. He never could keep straight on
shore. The last time he landed in Liverpool
he'd been out on a two years' voyage. He
was paid off one morning, and by the next
he hadn't a cent left, and his watch and com-
pass were gone. He'd got with some women,
and they'd taken everything. He worked
his way to this country on a little passenger
boat. Mary was a stewardess, and she tried
to convert him on the way over. He thought
she was just the one to keep him steady. Poor
Ole! He used to bring me candy from town,
hidden in his feed-bag. He couldn't refuse
anything to a girl. He'd have given away
his tattoos long ago, if he could. He's one
of the people I'm sorriest for.”

If I happened to spend an evening with
Lena and stayed late, the Polish violin-teacher

[[320]]

{{antonp321.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

across the hall used to come out and watch
me descend the stairs, muttering so threat-
eningly that it would have been easy to fall
into a quarrel with him. Lena had told him
once that she liked to hear him practice, so
he always left his door open, and watched
who came and went.

There was a coolness between the Pole and
Lena's landlord on her account. Old Colonel
Raleigh had come to Lincoln from Kentucky
and invested an inherited fortune in real
estate, at the time of inflated prices. Now he
sat day after day in his office in the Raleigh
Block, trying to discover where his money
had gone and how he could get some of it
back. He was a widower, and found very
little congenial companionship in this casual
Western city. Lena's good looks and gentle
manners appealed to him. He said her voice
reminded him of Southern voices, and he
found as many opportunities of hearing it as
possible. He painted and papered her rooms
for her that spring, and put in a porcelain
bathtub in place of the tin one that had satis-
fied the former tenant. While these repairs
were being made, the old gentleman often
dropped in to consult Lena's preferences.

[[321]]

{{antonp322.png}} || My Antonia ||

She told me with amusement how Ordinsky,
the Pole, had presented himself at her door
one evening, and said that if the landlord
was annoying her by his attentions, he would
promptly put a stop to it.

“I don't exactly know what to do about
him,” she said, shaking her head, “he's so
sort of wild all the time. I wouldn't like to
have him say anything rough to that nice
old man. The Colonel is long-winded, but
then I expect he's lonesome. I don't think
he cares much for Ordinsky, either. He said
once that if I had any complaints to make of
my neighbors, I mustn't hesitate.”

One Saturday evening when I was having
supper with Lena we heard a knock at her
parlor door, and there stood the Pole, coat-
less, in a dress shirt and collar. Prince dropped
on his paws and began to growl like a mastiff,
while the visitor apologized, saying that he
could not possibly come in thus attired, but
he begged Lena to lend him some safety pins.

“Oh, you'll have to come in, Mr. Ordinsky,
and let me see what's the matter.” She closed
the door behind him. “Jim, won't you make
Prince behave?”

I rapped Prince on the nose, while Ordin-

[[322]]

{{antonp323.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

sky explained that he had not had his dress
clothes on for a long time, and tonight,
when he was going to play for a concert, his
waistcoat had split down the back. He
thought he could pin it together until he got
it to a tailor.

Lena took him by the elbow and turned
him round. She laughed when she saw the
long gap in the satin. “You could never pin
that, Mr. Ordinsky. You've kept it folded
too long, and the goods is all gone along the
crease. Take it off. I can put a new piece of
lining-silk in there for you in ten minutes.”
She disappeared into her work-room with
the vest, leaving me to confront the Pole, who
stood against the door like a wooden figure.
He folded his arms and glared at me with his
excitable, slanting brown eyes. His head was
the shape of a chocolate drop, and was cov-
ered with dry, straw-colored hair that fuzzed
up about his pointed crown. He had never
done more than mutter at me as I passed him,
and I was surprised when he now addressed
me.

“Miss Lingard,” he said haughtily, “is a
young woman for whom I have the utmost,
the utmost respect.”

[[323]]

{{antonp324.png}} || My Antonia ||

“So have I,” I said coldly.

He paid no heed to my remark, but began
to do rapid finger-exercises on his shirt-sleeves,
as he stood with tightly folded arms.

“Kindness of heart,” he went on, staring
at the ceiling, “sentiment, are not under-
stood in a place like this. The noblest quali-
ties are ridiculed. Grinning college boys,
ignorant and conceited, what do they know
of delicacy!”

I controlled my features and tried to speak
seriously.

“If you mean me, Mr. Ordinsky, I have
known Miss Lingard a long time, and I think
I appreciate her kindness. We come from the
same town, and we grew up together.”

His gaze traveled slowly down from the
ceiling and rested on me. “Am I to under-
stand that you have this young woman's
interests at heart? That you do not wish to
compromise her?”

“That's a word we don't use much here,
Mr. Ordinsky. A girl who makes her own
living can ask a college boy to supper without
being talked about. We take some things
for granted.”

“Then I have misjudged you, and I ask

[[324]]

{{antonp325.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

your pardon,” — he bowed gravely. “Miss
Lingard,” he went on, “is an absolutely
trustful heart. She has not learned the hard
lessons of life. As for you and me, noblesse
oblige,” — he watched me narrowly.

Lena returned with the vest. “Come in
and let us look at you as you go out, Mr.
Ordinsky. I've never seen you in your dress
suit,” she said as she opened the door for him.

A few moments later he reappeared with
his violin case — a heavy muffler about his
neck and thick woolen gloves on his bony
hands. Lena spoke encouragingly to him, and
he went off with such an important, profes-
sional air, that we fell to laughing as soon as
we had shut the door. “Poor fellow,” Lena
said indulgently, “he takes everything so
hard.”

After that Ordinsky was friendly to me,
and behaved as if there were some deep un-
derstanding between us. He wrote a furious
article, attacking the musical taste of the
town, and asked me to do him a great service
by taking it to the editor of the morning paper.
If the editor refused to print it, I was to tell
him that he would be answerable to Ordin-
sky “in person.” He declared that he would

[[325]]

{{antonp326.png}} || My Antonia ||

never retract one word, and that he was
quite prepared to lose all his pupils. In spite
of the fact that nobody ever mentioned his
article to him after it appeared — full of
typographical errors which he thought inten-
tional — he got a certain satisfaction from be-
lieving that the citizens of Lincoln had meekly
accepted the epithet “coarse barbarians.”
“You see how it is,” he said to me, “where
there is no chivalry, there is no amour propre.”
When I met him on his rounds now, I thought
he carried his head more disdainfully than
ever, and strode up the steps of front porches
and rang doorbells with more assurance. He
told Lena he would never forget how I had
stood by him when he was “under fire.”

All this time, of course, I was drifting. Lena
had broken up my serious mood. I wasn't
interested in my classes. I played with Lena
and Prince, I played with the Pole, I went
buggy-riding with the old Colonel, who had
taken a fancy to me and used to talk to me
about Lena and the “great beauties” he had
known in his youth. We were all three in
love with Lena.

Before the first of June, Gaston Cleric was
offered an instructorship at Harvard College,

[[326]]

{{antonp327.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

and accepted it. He suggested that I should
follow him in the fall, and complete my course
at Harvard. He had found out about Lena
— not from me — and he talked to me seri-
ously.

“You won't do anything here now. You
should either quit school and go to work, or
change your college and begin again in earn-
est. You won't recover yourself while you
are playing about with this handsome Nor-
wegian. Yes, I've seen her with you at the
theater. She's very pretty, and perfectly irre-
sponsible, I should judge.”

Cleric wrote my grandfather that he would
like to take me East with him. To my aston-
ishment, grandfather replied that I might go
if I wished. I was both glad and sorry on
the day when the letter came. I stayed in
my room all evening and thought things over;
I even tried to persuade myself that I was
standing in Lena's way — it is so necessary
to be a little noble! — and that if she had not
me to play with, she would probably marry
and secure her future.

The next evening I went to call on Lena.
I found her propped up on the couch in her
bay window, with her foot in a big slipper. An

[[327]]

{{antonp328.png}} || My Antonia ||

awkward little Russian girl whom she had
taken into her work-room had dropped a flat-
iron on Lena's toe. On the table beside her
there was a basket of early summer flowers
which the Pole had left after he heard of the
accident. He always managed to know what
went on in Lena's apartment.

Lena was telling me some amusing piece of
gossip about one of her clients, when I inter-
rupted her and picked up the flower basket.

“This old chap will be proposing to you
some day, Lena.”

“Oh, he has — often!” she murmured.

“What! After you've refused him?”

“He doesn't mind that. It seems to cheer
him to mention the subject. Old men are like
that, you know. It makes them feel impor-
tant to think they're in love with somebody.”

“The Colonel would marry you in a minute.
I hope you won't marry some old fellow; not
even a rich one.”

Lena shifted her pillows and looked up
at me in surprise. “Why, I'm not going to
marry anybody. Didn't you know that?”

“Nonsense, Lena. That's what girls say,
but you know better. Every handsome girl
like you marries, of course.”

[[328]]

{{antonp329.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

She shook her head. “Not me.”

“But why not? What makes you say
that?” I persisted.

Lena laughed. “Well, it's mainly because I
don't want a husband. Men are all right for
friends, but as soon as you marry them they
turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild
ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible
and what's foolish, and want you to stick at
home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when
I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.”

“But you'll be lonesome. You'll get tired
of this sort of life, and you'll want a family.”

“Not me. I like to be lonesome. When I
went to work for Mrs. Thomas I was nine-
teen years old, and I had never slept a night
in my life when there weren't three in the
bed. I never had a minute to myself except
when I was off with the cattle.”

Usually, when Lena referred to her life in
the country at all, she dismissed it with a
single remark, humorous or mildly cynical.
But tonight her mind seemed to dwell on
those early years. She told me she couldn't
remember a time when she was so little that
she wasn't lugging a heavy baby about, help-
ing to wash for babies, trying to keep their

[[329]]

{{antonp330.png}} || My Antonia ||

little chapped hands and faces clean. She re-
membered home as a place where there were
always too many children, a cross man, and
work piling up around a sick woman.

“It wasn't mother's fault. She would
have made us comfortable if she could. But
that was no life for a girl! After I began to
herd and milk I could never get the smell
of the cattle off me. The few underclothes
I had I kept in a cracker box. On Satur-
day nights, after everybody was in bed, then
I could take a bath if I wasn't too tired. I
could make two trips to the windmill to carry
water, and heat it in the wash-boiler on the
stove. While the water was heating, I could
bring in a washtub out of the cave, and take
my bath in the kitchen. Then I could put on
a clean nightgown and get into bed with two
others, who likely hadn't had a bath unless
I'd given it to them. You can't tell me any-
thing about family life. I've had plenty to
last me.”

“But it's not all like that,” I objected.

“Near enough. It's all being under some-
body's thumb. What's on your mind, Jim?
Are you afraid I'll want you to marry me
some day?”

[[330]]

{{antonp331.png}} || Lena Lingard ||

Then I told her I was going away.

“What makes you want to go away, Jim?
Haven't I been nice to you?”

“You've been just awfully good to me,
Lena,” I blurted. “I don't think about much
else. I never shall think about much else
while I'm with you. I'll never settle down and
grind if I stay here. You know that.” I
dropped down beside her and sat looking at
the floor. I seemed to have forgotten all my
reasonable explanations.

Lena drew close to me, and the little hesi-
tation in her voice that had hurt me was not
there when she spoke again.

“I oughtn't to have begun it, ought I?”
she murmured. “I oughtn't to have gone
to see you that first time. But I did want to.
I guess I've always been a little foolish about
you. I don't know what first put it into my
head, unless it was Antonia, always telling
me I mustn't be up to any of my nonsense
with you. I let you alone for a long while,
though, didn't I?”

She was a sweet creature to those she loved,
that Lena Lingard!

At last she sent me away with her soft,
slow, renunciatory kiss. “You aren't sorry

[[331]]

{{antonp332.png}} || My Antonia ||

I came to see you that time?” she whispered.
“It seemed so natural. I used to think I'd
like to be your first sweetheart. You were
such a funny kid!” She always kissed one as
if she were sadly and wisely sending one
away forever.

We said many goodbyes before I left Lin-
coln, but she never tried to hinder me or hold
me back. “You are going, but you haven't
gone yet, have you?” she used to say.

My Lincoln chapter closed abruptly. I went
home to my grandparents for a few weeks,
and afterward visited my relatives in Virginia
until I joined Cleric in Boston. I was then
nineteen years old.

[[332]]

{{antonp333.png}} || The Pioneer Woman's Story ||

My Antonia — Book IV

The Pioneer Woman's Story

[[333]]

{{antonp335.png}} || The Pioneer Woman's Story ||

Book IV — The Pioneer Woman's Story

IV-I

Two years after I left Lincoln I completed
my academic course at Harvard. Before I en-
tered the Law School I went home for the
summer vacation. On the night of my arrival
Mrs. Harling and Frances and Sally came
over to greet me. Everything seemed just
as it used to be. My grandparents looked
very little older. Frances Harling was mar-
ried now, and she and her husband managed
the Harling interests in Black Hawk. When
we gathered in grandmother's parlor, I could
hardly believe that I had been away at all.
One subject, however, we avoided all eve-
ning.

When I was walking home with Frances,
after we had left Mrs. Harling at her gate,
she said simply, “You know, of course, about
poor Antonia.”

Poor Antonia! Every one would be saying
that now, I thought bitterly. I replied that

[[335]]

{{antonp336.png}} || My Antonia ||

grandmother had written me how Antonia
went away to marry Larry Donovan at some
place where he was working; that he had
deserted her, and that there was now a baby.
This was all I knew.

“He never married her,” Frances said. “I
haven't seen her since she came back. She
lives at home, on the farm, and almost never
comes to town. She brought the baby in to
show it to mama once. I'm afraid she's set-
tled down to be Ambrosch's drudge for good.”

I tried to shut Antonia out of my mind. I
was bitterly disappointed in her. I could not
forgive her for becoming an object of pity,
while Lena Lingard, for whom people had
always foretold trouble, was now the leading
dressmaker of Lincoln, much respected in
Black Hawk. Lena gave her heart away
when she felt like it, but she kept her head for
her business and had got on in the world.

Just then it was the fashion to speak in-
dulgently of Lena and severely of Tiny Soder-
ball, who had quietly gone West to try her
fortune the year before. A Black Hawk boy,
just back from Seattle, brought the news that
Tiny had not gone to the coast on a venture,
as she had allowed people to think, but with

[[336]]

{{antonp337.png}} || The Pioneer Woman's Story ||

very definite plans. One of the roving pro-
moters that used to stop at Mrs. Gardener's
hotel owned idle property along the water-
front in Seattle, and he had offered to set
Tiny up in business in one of his empty
buildings. She was now conducting a sailors'
lodging-house. This, every one said, would
be the end of Tiny. Even if she had begun
by running a decent place, she couldn't
keep it up; all sailors' boarding-houses were
alike.

When I thought about it, I discovered that
I had never known Tiny as well as I knew
the other girls. I remembered her tripping
briskly about the dining-room on her high
heels, carrying a big tray full of dishes, glanc-
ing rather pertly at the spruce traveling men,
and contemptuously at the scrubby ones —
who were so afraid of her that they didn't
dare to ask for two kinds of pie. Now it oc-
curred to me that perhaps the sailors, too,
might be afraid of Tiny. How astonished
we would have been, as we sat talking about
her on Frances Harling's front porch, if we
could have known what her future was really
to be! Of all the girls and boys who grew up
together in Black Hawk, Tiny Soderball was

[[337]]

{{antonp338.png}} || My Antonia ||

to lead the most adventurous life and to
achieve the most solid worldly success.

This is what actually happened to Tiny:
While she was running her lodging-house in
Seattle, gold was discovered in Alaska. Miners
and sailors came back from the North with
wonderful stories and pouches of gold. Tiny
saw it and weighed it in her hands. That
daring which nobody had ever suspected in
her, awoke. She sold her business and set
out for Circle City, in company with a car-
penter and his wife whom she had persuaded
to go along with her. They reached Skaguay
in a snowstorm, went in dog sledges over the
Chilkoot Pass, and shot the Yukon in flat-
boats. They reached Circle City on the very
day when some Siwash Indians came into the
settlement with the report that there had
been a rich gold strike farther up the river,
on a certain Klondike Creek. Two days later
Tiny and her friends, and nearly every one
else in Circle City, started for the Klondike
fields on the last steamer that went up the
Yukon before it froze for the winter. That
boatload of people founded Dawson City.
Within a few weeks there were fifteen hun-
dred homeless men in camp. Tiny and the

[[338]]

{{antonp339.png}} || The Pioneer Woman's Story ||

carpenter's wife began to cook for them, in
a tent. The miners gave her a lot, and the
carpenter put up a log hotel for her. There
she sometimes fed a hundred and fifty men
a day. Miners came in on snowshoes from
their placer claims twenty miles away to buy
fresh bread from her, and paid for it in gold.

That winter Tiny kept in her hotel a Swede
whose legs had been frozen one night in a
storm when he was trying to find his way back
to his cabin. The poor fellow thought it great
good fortune to be cared for by a woman, and
a woman who spoke his own tongue. When
he was told that his feet must be amputated,
he said he hoped he would not get well; what
could a working-man do in this hard world
without feet? He did, in fact, die from the
operation, but not before he had deeded Tiny
Soderball his claim on Hunker Creek. Tiny
sold her hotel, invested half her money in
Dawson building lots, and with the rest she
developed her claim. She went off into the
wilds and lived on it. She bought other claims
from discouraged miners, traded or sold them
on percentages.

After nearly ten years in the Klondike,
Tiny returned, with a considerable fortune,

[[339]]

{{antonp340.png}} || My Antonia ||

to live in San Francisco. I met her in Salt
Lake City in 1908. She was a thin, hard-
faced woman, very well-dressed, very re-
served in manner. Curiously enough, she re-
minded me of Mrs. Gardener, for whom she
had worked in Black Hawk so long ago. She
told me about some of the desperate chances
she had taken in the gold country, but the
thrill of them was quite gone. She said frankly
that nothing interested her much now but
making money. The only two human beings
of whom she spoke with any feeling were the
Swede, Johnson, who had given her his claim,
and Lena Lingard. She had persuaded Lena
to come to San Francisco and go into busi-
ness there.

“Lincoln was never any place for her,”
Tiny remarked. “In a town of that size Lena
would always be gossiped about. Frisco's
the right field for her. She has a fine class of
trade. Oh, she's just the same as she always
was! She's careless, but she's level-headed.
She's the only person I know who never gets
any older. It's fine for me to have her there;
somebody who enjoys things like that. She
keeps an eye on me and won't let me be
shabby. When she thinks I need a new dress,

[[340]]

{{antonp341.png}} || The Pioneer Woman's Story ||

she makes it and sends it home — with a bill
that's long enough, I can tell you!”

Tiny limped slightly when she walked.
The claim on Hunker Creek took toll from
its possessors. Tiny had been caught in a
sudden turn of weather, like poor Johnson.
She lost three toes from one of those pretty
little feet that used to trip about Black Hawk
in pointed slippers and striped stockings.
Tiny mentioned this mutilation quite casu-
ally — didn't seem sensitive about it. She
was satisfied with her success, but not elated.
She was like some one in whom the faculty
of becoming interested is worn out.

[[341]]

{{antonp342.png}} || My Antonia ||

IV-II

Soon after I got home that summer I per-
suaded my grandparents to have their photo-
graphs taken, and one morning I went into
the photographer's shop to arrange for sit-
tings. While I was waiting for him to come
out of his developing-room, I walked about
trying to recognize the likenesses on his
walls: girls in Commencement dresses, coun-
try brides and grooms holding hands, family
groups of three generations. I noticed, in a
heavy frame, one of those depressing “crayon
enlargements” often seen in farmhouse par-
lors, the subject being a round-eyed baby in
short dresses. The photographer came out
and gave a constrained, apologetic laugh.

“That's Tony Shimerda's baby. You re-
member her; she used to be the Harlings'
Tony. Too bad! She seems proud of the baby,
though; wouldn't hear to a cheap frame for
the picture. I expect her brother will be in
for it Saturday.”

I went away feeling that I must see An-
tonia again. Another girl would have kept

[[342]]

{{antonp343.png}} || The Pioneer Woman's Story ||

her baby out of sight, but Tony, of course,
must have its picture on exhibition at the
town photographer's, in a great gilt frame.
How like her! I could forgive her, I told my-
self, if she hadn't thrown herself away on
such a cheap sort of fellow.

Larry Donovan was a passenger conduc-
tor, one of those train-crew aristocrats who
are always afraid that some one may ask
them to put up a car-window, and who, if
requested to perform such a menial service,
silently point to the button that calls the
porter. Larry wore this air of official aloof-
ness even on the street, where there were no
car-windows to compromise his dignity. At
the end of his run he stepped indifferently
from the train along with the passengers, his
street hat on his head and his conductor's
cap in an alligator-skin bag, went directly
into the station and changed his clothes. It
was a matter of the utmost importance to
him never to be seen in his blue trousers away
from his train. He was usually cold and dis-
tant with men, but with all women he had a
silent, grave familiarity, a special handshake,
accompanied by a significant, deliberate look.
He took women, married or single, into his

[[343]]

{{antonp344.png}} || My Antonia ||

confidence; walked them up and down in the
moonlight, telling them what a mistake he
had made by not entering the office branch
of the service, and how much better fitted he
was to fill the post of General Passenger
Agent in Denver than the roughshod man
who then bore that title. His unappreciated
worth was the tender secret Larry shared
with his sweethearts, and he was always able
to make some foolish heart ache over it.

As I drew near home that morning, I saw
Mrs. Harling out in her yard, digging round
her mountain-ash tree. It was a dry summer,
and she had now no boy to help her. Charley
was off in his battleship, cruising somewhere
on the Caribbean sea. I turned in at the gate
— it was with a feeling of pleasure that I
opened and shut that gate in those days; I
liked the feel of it under my hand. I took
the spade away from Mrs. Harling, and while
I loosened the earth around the tree, she sat
down on the steps and talked about the oriole
family that had a nest in its branches.

“Mrs. Harling,” I said presently, “I wish
I could find out exactly how Antonia's mar-
riage fell through.”

“Why don't you go out and see your grand-

[[344]]

{{antonp345.png}} || The Pioneer Woman's Story ||

father's tenant, the Widow Steavens? She
knows more about it than anybody else. She
helped Antonia get ready to be married, and
she was there when Antonia came back. She
took care of her when the baby was born.
She could tell you everything. Besides, the
Widow Steavens is a good talker, and she has
a remarkable memory.”

[[345]]

{{antonp346.png}} || My Antonia ||

IV-III

On the first or second day of August I got a
horse and cart and set out for the high coun-
try, to visit the Widow Steavens. The wheat
harvest was over, and here and there along
the horizon I could see black puffs of smoke
from the steam thrashing-machines. The
old pasture land was now being broken up
into wheatfields and cornfields, the red grass
was disappearing, and the whole face of the
country was changing. There were wooden
houses where the old sod dwellings used to
be, and little orchards, and big red barns; all
this meant happy children, contented women,
and men who saw their lives coming to a
fortunate issue. The windy springs and the
blazing summers, one after another, had en-
riched and mellowed that flat tableland; all
the human effort that had gone into it was
coming back in long, sweeping lines of fer-
tility. The changes seemed beautiful and
harmonious to me; it was like watching the
growth of a great man or of a great idea. I
recognized every tree and sandbank and

[[346]]

{{antonp347.png}} || The Pioneer Woman's Story ||

rugged draw. I found that I remembered
the conformation of the land as one remem-
bers the modeling of human faces.

When I drew up to our old windmill, the
Widow Steavens came out to meet me. She
was brown as an Indian woman, tall, and very
strong. When I was little, her massive head
had always seemed to me like a Roman sena-
tor's. I told her at once why I had come.

“You'll stay the night with us, Jimmy?
I'll talk to you after supper. I can take more
interest when my work is off my mind.
You've no prejudice against hot biscuit for
supper? Some have, these days.”

While I was putting my horse away I heard
a rooster squawking. I looked at my watch
and sighed; it was three o'clock, and I knew
that I must eat him at six.

After supper Mrs. Steavens and I went
upstairs to the old sitting-room, while her
grave, silent brother remained in the base-
ment to read his farm papers. All the win-
dows were open. The white summer moon
was shining outside, the windmill was pump-
ing lazily in the light breeze. My hostess
put the lamp on a stand in the corner, and
turned it low because of the heat. She sat

[[347]]

{{antonp348.png}} || My Antonia ||

down in her favorite rocking-chair and set-
tled a little stool comfortably under her tired
feet. “I'm troubled with callouses, Jim; get-
ting old,” she sighed cheerfully. She crossed
her hands in her lap and sat as if she were at
a meeting of some kind.

“Now, it's about that dear Antonia you
want to know? Well, you've come to the
right person. I've watched her like she'd
been my own daughter.

“When she came home to do her sewing
that summer before she was to be married,
she was over here about every day. They've
never had a sewing machine at the Shimer-
das', and she made all her things here. I
taught her hemstitching, and I helped her
to cut and fit. She used to sit there at that
machine by the window, pedaling the life
out of it — she was so strong — and always
singing them queer Bohemian songs, like she
was the happiest thing in the world.

“'Antonia,' I used to say, 'don't run that
machine so fast. You won't hasten the day
none that way.'

“Then she'd laugh and slow down for a
little, but she'd soon forget and begin to
pedal and sing again. I never saw a girl

[[348]]

{{antonp349.png}} || The Pioneer Woman's Story ||

work harder to go to housekeeping right and
well-prepared. Lovely table linen the Har-
lings had given her, and Lena Lingard had
sent her nice things from Lincoln. We hem-
stitched all the tablecloths and pillow-cases,
and some of the sheets. Old Mrs. Shimerda
knit yards and yards of lace for her under-
clothes. Tony told me just how she meant
to have everything in her house. She'd even
bought silver spoons and forks, and kept
them in her trunk. She was always coaxing
brother to go to the post-office. Her young
man did write her real often, from the differ-
ent towns along his run.

“The first thing that troubled her was when
he wrote that his run had been changed, and
they would likely have to live in Denver. 'I'm
a country girl,' she said, 'and I doubt if I'll
be able to manage so well for him in a city.
I was counting on keeping chickens, and
maybe a cow.' She soon cheered up, though.

“At last she got the letter telling her when
to come. She was shaken by it; she broke
the seal and read it in this room. I suspected
then that she'd begun to get faint-hearted,
waiting; though she'd never let me see it.

“Then there was a great time of packing. It

[[349]]

{{antonp350.png}} || My Antonia ||

was in March, if I remember rightly, and a
terrible muddy, raw spell, with the roads bad
for hauling her things to town. And here
let me say, Ambrosch did the right thing.
He went to Black Hawk and bought her a
set of plated silver in a purple velvet box,
good enough for her station. He gave her
three hundred dollars in money; I saw the
check. He'd collected her wages all those
first years she worked out, and it was but
right. I shook him by the hand in this room.
'You're behaving like a man, Ambrosch,'
I said, 'and I'm glad to see it, son.'

“'T was a cold, raw day he drove her and
her three trunks into Black Hawk to take
the night train for Denver — the boxes had
been shipped before. He stopped the wagon
here, and she ran in to tell me goodbye. She
threw her arms around me and kissed me,
and thanked me for all I'd done for her. She
was so happy she was crying and laughing
at the same time, and her red cheeks was all
wet with rain.

“'You're surely handsome enough for any
man,' I said, looking her over.

“She laughed kind of flighty like, and
whispered, 'goodbye, dear house!' and then

[[350]]

{{antonp351.png}} || The Pioneer Woman's Story ||

ran out to the wagon. I expect she meant
that for you and your grandmother, as much
as for me, so I'm particular to tell you. This
house had always been a refuge to her.

“Well, in a few days we had a letter say-
ing she got to Denver safe, and he was there
to meet her. They were to be married in a
few days. He was trying to get his promotion
before he married, she said. I didn't like
that, but I said nothing. The next week Yulka
got a postal card, saying she was 'well and
happy.' After that we heard nothing. A
month went by, and old Mrs. Shimerda be-
gan to get fretful. Ambrosch was as sulky
with me as if I'd picked out the man and
arranged the match.

“One night brother William came in and
said that on his way back from the fields he
had passed a livery team from town, driving
fast out the west road. There was a trunk
on the front seat with the driver, and an-
other behind. In the back seat there was a
woman all bundled up; but for all her veils,
he thought 't was Antonia Shimerda, or An-
tonia Donovan, as her name ought now to be.

“The next morning I got brother to drive
me over. I can walk still, but my feet ain't

[[351]]

{{antonp352.png}} || My Antonia ||

what they used to be, and I try to save my-
self. The lines outside the Shimerdas' house
was full of washing, though it was the mid-
dle of the week. As we got nearer I saw a
sight that made my heart sink — all those
underclothes we'd put so much work on, out
there swinging in the wind. Yulka came
bringing a dishpanful of wrung clothes, but
she darted back into the house like she was
loath to see us. When I went in, Antonia
was standing over the tubs, just finishing
up a big washing. Mrs. Shimerda was going
about her work, talking and scolding to her-
self. She didn't so much as raise her eyes.
Tony wiped her hand on her apron and held
it out to me, looking at me steady but mourn-
ful. When I took her in my arms she drew
away. 'Don't, Mrs. Steavens,' she says,
'you'll make me cry, and I don't want to.'

“I whispered and asked her to come out
of doors with me. I knew she couldn't talk
free before her mother. She went out with
me, bareheaded, and we walked up toward
the garden.

“'I'm not married, Mrs. Steavens,' she
says to me very quiet and natural-like, 'and
I ought to be.'

[[352]]

{{antonp353.png}} || The Pioneer Woman's Story ||

“'Oh, my child,' says I, 'what's happened
to you? Don't be afraid to tell me!'

“She sat down on the draw-side, out of
sight of the house. 'He's run away from me,'
she said. 'I don't know if he ever meant to
marry me.'

“'You mean he's thrown up his job and
quit the country?' says I.

“'He didn't have any job. He'd been
fired; blacklisted for knocking down fares. I
didn't know. I thought he hadn't been
treated right. He was sick when I got there.
He'd just come out of the hospital. He lived
with me till my money gave out, and after-
wards I found he hadn't really been hunting
work at all. Then he just didn't come back.
One nice fellow at the station told me, when
I kept going to look for him, to give it up.
He said he was afraid Larry'd gone bad and
wouldn't come back any more. I guess he's
gone to Old Mexico. The conductors get rich
down there, collecting half-fares off the na-
tives and robbing the company. He was al-
ways talking about fellows who had got ahead
that way.'

“I asked her, of course, why she didn't
insist on a civil marriage at once — that would

[[353]]

{{antonp354.png}} || My Antonia ||

have given her some hold on him. She leaned
her head on her hands, poor child, and said,
'I just don't know, Mrs. Steavens. I guess
my patience was wore out, waiting so long.
I thought if he saw how well I could do for
him, he'd want to stay with me.'

“Jimmy, I sat right down on that bank
beside her and made lament. I cried like a
young thing. I couldn't help it. I was just
about heart-broke. It was one of them lovely
warm May days, and the wind was blowing
and the colts jumping around in the pas-
tures; but I felt bowed with despair. My
Antonia, that had so much good in her, had
come home disgraced. And that Lena Lin-
gard, that was always a bad one, say what
you will, had turned out so well, and was
coming home here every summer in her silks
and her satins, and doing so much for her
mother. I give credit where credit is due,
but you know well enough, Jim Burden, there
is a great difference in the principles of those
two girls. And here it was the good one that
had come to grief! I was poor comfort to her.
I marveled at her calm. As we went back
to the house, she stopped to feel of her clothes
to see if they was drying well, and seemed

[[354]]

{{antonp355.png}} || The Pioneer Woman's Story ||

to take pride in their whiteness — she said
she'd been living in a brick block, where she
didn't have proper conveniences to wash
them.

“The next time I saw Antonia, she was out
in the fields ploughing corn. All that spring
and summer she did the work of a man on
the farm; it seemed to be an understood
thing. Ambrosch didn't get any other hand
to help him. Poor Marek had got violent and
been sent away to an institution a good while
back. We never even saw any of Tony's
pretty dresses. She didn't take them out
of her trunks. She was quiet and steady.
Folks respected her industry and tried to
treat her as if nothing had happened. They
talked, to be sure; but not like they would
if she'd put on airs. She was so crushed and
quiet that nobody seemed to want to humble
her. She never went anywhere. All that sum-
mer she never once came to see me. At first
I was hurt, but I got to feel that it was be-
cause this house reminded her of too much.
I went over there when I could, but the times
when she was in from the fields were the
times when I was busiest here. She talked
about the grain and the weather as if she'd

[[355]]

{{antonp356.png}} || My Antonia ||

never had another interest, and if I went over
at night she always looked dead weary. She
was afflicted with toothache; one tooth after
another ulcerated, and she went about with
her face swollen half the time. She wouldn't
go to Black Hawk to a dentist for fear of
meeting people she knew. Ambrosch had got
over his good spell long ago, and was always
surly. Once I told him he ought not to let
Antonia work so hard and pull herself down.
He said, 'If you put that in her head, you
better stay home.' And after that I did.

“Antonia worked on through harvest and
thrashing, though she was too modest to go
out thrashing for the neighbors, like when
she was young and free. I didn't see much
of her until late that fall when she begun to
herd Ambrosch's cattle in the open ground
north of here, up toward the big dog-town.
Sometimes she used to bring them over the
west hill, there, and I would run to meet her
and walk north a piece with her. She had
thirty cattle in her bunch; it had been dry,
and the pasture was short, or she wouldn't
have brought them so far.

“It was a fine open fall, and she liked to be
alone. While the steers grazed, she used to

[[356]]

{{antonp357.png}} || The Pioneer Woman's Story ||

sit on them grassy banks along the draws
and sun herself for hours. Sometimes I slipped
up to visit with her, when she hadn't gone
too far.

“'It does seem like I ought to make lace,
or knit like Lena used to,' she said one day,
'but if I start to work, I look around and for-
get to go on. It seems such a little while ago
when Jim Burden and I was playing all over
this country. Up here I can pick out the very
places where my father used to stand. Some-
times I feel like I'm not going to live very
long, so I'm just enjoying every day of this
fall.'

“After the winter begun she wore a man's
long overcoat and boots, and a man's felt hat
with a wide brim. I used to watch her com-
ing and going, and I could see that her steps
were getting heavier. One day in December,
the snow began to fall. Late in the afternoon
I saw Antonia driving her cattle homeward
across the hill. The snow was flying round
her and she bent to face it, looking more
lonesome-like to me than usual. 'Deary me,'
I says to myself, 'the girl's stayed out too
late. It'll be dark before she gets them cat-
tle put into the corral.' I seemed to sense

[[357]]

{{antonp358.png}} || My Antonia ||

she'd been feeling too miserable to get up
and drive them.

“That very night, it happened. She got
her cattle home, turned them into the corral,
and went into the house, into her room behind
the kitchen, and shut the door. There, with-
out calling to anybody, without a groan, she
lay down on the bed and bore her child.

“I was lifting supper when old Mrs. Shi-
merda came running down the basement stairs,
out of breath and screeching: —

“'Baby come, baby come!' she says. 'Am-
brosch much like devil!'

“Brother William is surely a patient man.
He was just ready to sit down to a hot sup-
per after a long day in the fields. Without a
word he rose and went down to the barn and
hooked up his team. He got us over there
as quick as it was humanly possible. I went
right in, and began to do for Antonia; but
she laid there with her eyes shut and took no
account of me. The old woman got a tubful of
warm water to wash the baby. I overlooked
what she was doing and I said out loud: —

“'Mrs. Shimerda, don't you put that
strong yellow soap near that baby. You'll
blister its little skin.' I was indignant.

[[358]]

{{antonp358x8a.png}} || The Pioneer Woman's Story ||

[Antonia driving her cattle home ......... 358x8a ]
[Antonia driving her cattle home ......... 428 ]
[table of illustrations ......... f006 ]

[[358a]]

{{antonp359.png}} || The Pioneer Woman's Story ||

“'Mrs. Steavens,' Antonia said from the
bed, 'if you'll look in the top tray of my
trunk, you'll see some fine soap.' That was
the first word she spoke.

“After I'd dressed the baby, I took it out
to show it to Ambrosch. He was muttering
behind the stove and wouldn't look at it.

“'You'd better put it out in the rain bar-
rel,' he says.

“'Now, see here, Ambrosch,' says I,
'there's a law in this land, don't forget that.
I stand here a witness that this baby has
come into the world sound and strong, and
I intend to keep an eye on what befalls it.'
I pride myself I cowed him.

“Well, I expect you're not much inter-
ested in babies, but Antonia's got on fine.
She loved it from the first as dearly as if
she'd had a ring on her finger, and was never
ashamed of it. It's a year and eight months
old now, and no baby was ever better cared-
for. Antonia is a natural-born mother. I
wish she could marry and raise a family, but
I don't know as there's much chance now.”

I slept that night in the room I used to
have when I was a little boy, with the sum-

[[359]]

{{antonp360.png}} || My Antonia ||

mer wind blowing in at the windows, bringing
the smell of the ripe fields. I lay awake and
watched the moonlight shining over the barn
and the stacks and the pond, and the wind-
mill making its old dark shadow against the
blue sky.

[[360]]

{{antonp361.png}} || The Pioneer Woman's Story ||

IV-IV

The next afternoon I walked over to the
Shimerdas'. Yulka showed me the baby and
told me that Antonia was shocking wheat on
the southwest quarter. I went down across
the fields, and Tony saw me from a long way
off. She stood still by her shocks, leaning on
her pitchfork, watching me as I came. We
met like the people in the old song, in silence,
if not in tears. Her warm hand clasped mine.

“I thought you'd come, Jim. I heard you
were at Mrs. Steavens's last night. I've been
looking for you all day.”

She was thinner than I had ever seen her,
and looked, as Mrs. Steavens said, “worked
down,” but there was a new kind of strength
in the gravity of her face, and her color still
gave her that look of deep-seated health and
ardor. Still? Why, it flashed across me that
though so much had happened in her life and
in mine, she was barely twenty-four years
old.

Antonia stuck her fork in the ground,
and instinctively we walked toward that un-

[[361]]

{{antonp362.png}} || My Antonia ||

ploughed patch at the crossing of the roads
as the fittest place to talk to each other. We
sat down outside the sagging wire fence that
shut Mr. Shimerda's plot off from the rest
of the world. The tall red grass had never
been cut there. It had died down in winter
and come up again in the spring until it was
as thick and shrubby as some tropical garden-
grass. I found myself telling her everything:
why I had decided to study law and to go
into the law office of one of my mother's rela-
tives in New York City; about Gaston Cleric's
death from pneumonia last winter, and the
difference it had made in my life. She wanted
to know about my friends and my way of
living, and my dearest hopes.

“Of course it means you are going away
from us for good,” she said with a sigh. “But
that don't mean I'll lose you. Look at my
papa here; he's been dead all these years, and
yet he is more real to me than almost any-
body else. He never goes out of my life. I
talk to him and consult him all the time. The
older I grow, the better I know him and the
more I understand him.”

She asked me whether I had learned to like
big cities. “I'd always be miserable in a

[[362]]

{{antonp363.png}} || The Pioneer Woman's Story ||

city. I'd die of lonesomeness. I like to be
where I know every stack and tree, and where
all the ground is friendly. I want to live and
die here. Father Kelly says everybody's put
into this world for something, and I know
what I've got to do. I'm going to see that
my little girl has a better chance than ever
I had. I'm going to take care of that girl,
Jim.”

I told her I knew she would. “Do you
know, Antonia, since I've been away, I think
of you more often than of any one else in this
part of the world. I'd have liked to have
you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother
or my sister — anything that a woman can
be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my
mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all
my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't
realize it. You really are a part of me.”

She turned her bright, believing eyes to
me, and the tears came up in them slowly.
“How can it be like that, when you know so
many people, and when I've disappointed
you so? Ain't it wonderful, Jim, how much
people can mean to each other? I'm so glad
we had each other when we were little. I
can't wait till my little girl's old enough to

[[363]]

{{antonp364.png}} || My Antonia ||

tell her about all the things we used to do.
You'll always remember me when you think
about old times, won't you? And I guess
everybody thinks about old times, even the
happiest people.”

As we walked homeward across the fields,
the sun dropped and lay like a great golden
globe in the low west. While it hung there,
the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-
wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose
color, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon.
For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two lumi-
naries confronted each other across the level
land, resting on opposite edges of the world.
In that singular light every little tree and
shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and
clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself
up high and pointed; the very clods and fur-
rows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply.
I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn
magic that comes out of those fields at night-
fall. I wished I could be a little boy again,
and that my way could end there.

We reached the edge of the field, where our
ways parted. I took her hands and held them
against my breast, feeling once more how
strong and warm and good they were, those

[[364]]

{{antonp365.png}} || The Pioneer Woman's Story ||

brown hands, and remembering how many
kind things they had done for me. I held them
now a long while, over my heart. About us
it was growing darker and darker, and I had
to look hard to see her face, which I meant
always to carry with me; the closest, realest
face, under all the shadows of women's faces,
at the very bottom of my memory.

“I'll come back,” I said earnestly, through
the soft, intrusive darkness.

“Perhaps you will” — I felt rather than
saw her smile. “But even if you don't, you're
here, like my father. So I won't be lonesome.”

As I went back alone over that familiar
road, I could almost believe that a boy and
girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used
to do, laughing and whispering to each other
in the grass.

[[365]]

{{antonp369.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

Book V — Cuzak's Boys

V-I

I told Antonia I would come back, but life
intervened, and it was twenty years before
I kept my promise. I heard of her from
time to time; that she married, very soon
after I last saw her, a young Bohemian,
a cousin of Anton Jelinek; that they were
poor, and had a large family. Once when I
was abroad I went into Bohemia, and from
Prague I sent Antonia some photographs of
her native village. Months afterward came
a letter from her, telling me the names and
ages of her many children, but little else;
signed, “Your old friend, Antonia Cuzak.”
When I met Tiny Soderball in Salt Lake, she
told me that Antonia had not “done very
well”; that her husband was not a man of
much force, and she had had a hard life. Per-
haps it was cowardice that kept me away so
long. My business took me West several
times every year, and it was always in the

[[369]]

{{antonp370.png}} || My Antonia ||

back of my mind that I would stop in Ne-
braska some day and go to see Antonia. But
I kept putting it off until the next trip. I
did not want to find her aged and broken;
I really dreaded it. In the course of twenty
crowded years one parts with many illusions.
I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some
memories are realities, and are better than
anything that can ever happen to one again.

I owe it to Lena Lingard that I went to
see Antonia at last. I was in San Francisco
two summers ago when both Lena and Tiny
Soderball were in town. Tiny lives in a house
of her own, and Lena's shop is in an apart-
ment house just around the corner. It inter-
ested me, after so many years, to see the two
women together. Tiny audits Lena's accounts
occasionally, and invests her money for her;
and Lena, apparently, takes care that Tiny
doesn't grow too miserly. “If there's any-
thing I can't stand,” she said to me in Tiny's
presence, “it's a shabby rich woman.” Tiny
smiled grimly and assured me that Lena would
never be either shabby or rich. “And I don't
want to be,” the other agreed complacently.

Lena gave me a cheerful account of An-
tonia and urged me to make her a visit.

[[370]]

{{antonp371.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

“You really ought to go, Jim. It would
be such a satisfaction to her. Never mind
what Tiny says. There's nothing the matter
with Cuzak. You'd like him. He isn't a
hustler, but a rough man would never have
suited Tony. Tony has nice children — ten
or eleven of them by this time, I guess. I
shouldn't care for a family of that size my-
self, but somehow it's just right for Tony.
She'd love to show them to you.”

On my way East I broke my journey at
Hastings, in Nebraska, and set off with an
open buggy and a fairly good livery team to
find the Cuzak farm. At a little past midday,
I knew I must be nearing my destination.
Set back on a swell of land at my right, I
saw a wide farmhouse, with a red barn and
an ash grove, and cattle yards in front that
sloped down to the high road. I drew up my
horses and was wondering whether I should
drive in here, when I heard low voices. Ahead
of me, in a plum thicket beside the road, I saw
two boys bending over a dead dog. The little
one, not more than four or five, was on his
knees, his hands folded, and his close-clipped,
bare head drooping forward in deep dejection.
The other stood beside him, a hand on his

[[371]]

{{antonp372.png}} || My Antonia ||

shoulder, and was comforting him in a lan-
guage I had not heard for a long while. When
I stopped my horses opposite them, the older
boy took his brother by the hand and came
toward me. He, too, looked grave. This was
evidently a sad afternoon for them.

“Are you Mrs. Cuzak's boys?” I asked.

The younger one did not look up; he was
submerged in his own feelings, but his brother
met me with intelligent gray eyes. “Yes,
sir.”

“Does she live up there on the hill? I am
going to see her. Get in and ride up with me.”

He glanced at his reluctant little brother.
“I guess we'd better walk. But we'll open
the gate for you.”

I drove along the side-road and they fol-
lowed slowly behind. When I pulled up at
the windmill, another boy, barefooted and
curly-headed, ran out of the barn to tie my
team for me. He was a handsome one, this
chap, fair-skinned and freckled, with red
cheeks and a ruddy pelt as thick as a lamb's
wool, growing down on his neck in little tufts.
He tied my team with two flourishes of his
hands, and nodded when I asked him if his
mother was at home. As he glanced at me, his

[[372]]

{{antonp373.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

face dimpled with a seizure of irrelevant merri-
ment, and he shot up the windmill tower with
a lightness that struck me as disdainful. I
knew he was peering down at me as I walked
toward the house.

Ducks and geese ran quacking across my
path. White cats were sunning themselves
among yellow pumpkins on the porch steps.
I looked through the wire screen into a big,
light kitchen with a white floor. I saw a long
table, rows of wooden chairs against the wall,
and a shining range in one corner. Two girls
were washing dishes at the sink, laughing and
chattering, and a little one, in a short pina-
fore, sat on a stool playing with a rag baby.
When I asked for their mother, one of the
girls dropped her towel, ran across the floor
with noiseless bare feet, and disappeared.
The older one, who wore shoes and stock-
ings, came to the door to admit me. She was
a buxom girl with dark hair and eyes, calm
and self-possessed.

“Won't you come in? Mother will be here
in a minute.”

Before I could sit down in the chair she
offered me, the miracle happened; one of
those quiet moments that clutch the heart,

[[373]]

{{antonp374.png}} || My Antonia ||

and take more courage than the noisy, ex-
cited passages in life. Antonia came in and
stood before me; a stalwart, brown woman,
flat-chested, her curly brown hair a little
grizzled. It was a shock, of course. It always
is, to meet people after long years, especially
if they have lived as much and as hard as this
woman had. We stood looking at each other.
The eyes that peered anxiously at me were
— simply Antonia's eyes. I had seen no
others like them since I looked into them last,
though I had looked at so many thousands
of human faces. As I confronted her, the
changes grew less apparent to me, her iden-
tity stronger. She was there, in the full vigor
of her personality, battered but not dimin-
ished, looking at me, speaking to me in the
husky, breathy voice I remembered so well.

“My husband's not at home, sir. Can I
do anything?”

“Don't you remember me, Antonia? Have
I changed so much?”

She frowned into the slanting sunlight that
made her brown hair look redder than it was.
Suddenly her eyes widened, her whole face
seemed to grow broader. She caught her
breath and put out two hard-worked hands.

[[374]]

{{antonp375.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

“Why, it's Jim! Anna, Yulka, it's Jim
Burden!” She had no sooner caught my
hands than she looked alarmed. “What's
happened? Is anybody dead?”

I patted her arm. “No. I didn't come to
a funeral this time. I got off the train at Hast-
ings and drove down to see you and your
family.”

She dropped my hand and began rushing
about. “Anton, Yulka, Nina, where are you
all? Run, Anna, and hunt for the boys.
They're off looking for that dog, somewhere.
And call Leo. Where is that Leo!” She
pulled them out of corners and came bringing
them like a mother cat bringing in her kit-
tens. “You don't have to go right off, Jim?
My oldest boy's not here. He's gone with
papa to the street fair at Wilber. I won't let
you go! You've got to stay and see Rudolph
and our papa.” She looked at me implor-
ingly, panting with excitement.

While I reassured her and told her there
would be plenty of time, the barefooted boys
from outside were slipping into the kitchen
and gathering about her.

“Now, tell me their names, and how old
they are.”

[[375]]

{{antonp376.png}} || My Antonia ||

As she told them off in turn, she made sev-
eral mistakes about ages, and they roared
with laughter. When she came to my light-
footed friend of the windmill, she said, “This
is Leo, and he's old enough to be better than
he is.”

He ran up to her and butted her playfully
with his curly head, like a little ram, but his
voice was quite desperate. “You've forgot!
You always forget mine. It's mean! Please
tell him, mother!” He clenched his fists
in vexation and looked up at her impetu-
ously.

She wound her forefinger in his yellow fleece
and pulled it, watching him. “Well, how old
are you?”

“I'm twelve,” he panted, looking not at
me but at her; “I'm twelve years old, and I
was born on Easter day!”

She nodded to me. “It's true. He was an
Easter baby.”

The children all looked at me, as if they
expected me to exhibit astonishment or de-
light at this information. Clearly, they were
proud of each other, and of being so many.
When they had all been introduced, Anna,
the eldest daughter, who had met me at the

[[376]]

{{antonp377.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

door, scattered them gently, and came bring-
ing a white apron which she tied round her
mother's waist.

“Now, mother, sit down and talk to Mr.
Burden. We'll finish the dishes quietly and
not disturb you.”

Antonia looked about, quite distracted.
“Yes, child, but why don't we take him into
the parlor, now that we've got a nice parlor
for company?”

The daughter laughed indulgently, and
took my hat from me. “Well, you're here,
now, mother, and if you talk here, Yulka and
I can listen, too. You can show him the par-
lor after while.” She smiled at me, and went
back to the dishes, with her sister. The little
girl with the rag doll found a place on the
bottom step of an enclosed back stairway, and
sat with her toes curled up, looking out at
us expectantly.

“She's Nina, after Nina Harling,” An-
tonia explained. “Ain't her eyes like Nina's?
I declare, Jim, I loved you children almost
as much as I love my own. These children
know all about you and Charley and Sally,
like as if they'd grown up with you. I can't
think of what I want to say, you've got me

[[377]]

{{antonp378.png}} || My Antonia ||

so stirred up. And then, I've forgot my Eng-
lish so. I don't often talk it any more. I tell
the children I used to speak real well.” She
said they always spoke Bohemian at home.
The little ones could not speak English at all
— didn't learn it until they went to school.

“I can't believe it's you, sitting here, in my
own kitchen. You wouldn't have known me,
would you, Jim? You've kept so young, your-
self. But it's easier for a man. I can't see how
my Anton looks any older than the day I mar-
ried him. His teeth have kept so nice. I
haven't got many left. But I feel just as
young as I used to, and I can do as much work.
Oh, we don't have to work so hard now!
We've got plenty to help us, papa and me.
And how many have you got, Jim?”

When I told her I had no children she
seemed embarrassed. “Oh, ain't that too bad!
Maybe you could take one of my bad ones,
now? That Leo; he's the worst of all.” She
leaned toward me with a smile. “And I love
him the best,” she whispered.

“Mother!” the two girls murmured re-
proachfully from the dishes.

Antonia threw up her head and laughed.
“I can't help it. You know I do. Maybe

[[378]]

{{antonp379.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

it's because he came on Easter day, I don't
know. And he's never out of mischief one
minute!”

I was thinking, as I watched her, how little
it mattered — about her teeth, for instance.
I know so many women who have kept all the
things that she had lost, but whose inner glow
has faded. Whatever else was gone, Antonia
had not lost the fire of life. Her skin, so brown
and hardened, had not that look of flabbiness,
as if the sap beneath it had been secretly
drawn away.

While we were talking, the little boy whom
they called Jan came in and sat down on the
step beside Nina, under the hood of the stair-
way. He wore a funny long gingham apron,
like a smock, over his trousers, and his hair
was clipped so short that his head looked
white and naked. He watched us out of his
big, sorrowful gray eyes.

“He wants to tell you about the dog,
mother. They found it dead,” Anna said, as
she passed us on her way to the cupboard.

Antonia beckoned the boy to her. He stood
by her chair, leaning his elbows on her knees
and twisting her apron strings in his slender
fingers, while he told her his story softly in

[[379]]

{{antonp380.png}} || My Antonia ||

Bohemian, and the tears brimmed over and
hung on his long lashes. His mother listened,
spoke soothingly to him, and in a whisper
promised him something that made him give
her a quick, teary smile. He slipped away and
whispered his secret to Nina, sitting close to
her and talking behind his hand.

When Anna finished her work and had
washed her hands, she came and stood be-
hind her mother's chair. “Why don't we
show Mr. Burden our new fruit cave?” she
asked.

We started off across the yard with the
children at our heels. The boys were standing
by the windmill, talking about the dog; some
of them ran ahead to open the cellar door.
When we descended, they all came down after
us, and seemed quite as proud of the cave as
the girls were. Ambrosch, the thoughtful-look-
ing one who had directed me down by the plum
bushes, called my attention to the stout brick
walls and the cement floor. “Yes, it is a good
way from the house,” he admitted. “But, you
see, in winter there are nearly always some of
us around to come out and get things.”

Anna and Yulka showed me three small
barrels; one full of dill pickles, one full of

[[380]]

{{antonp381.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

chopped pickles, and one full of pickled water-
melon rinds.

“You wouldn't believe, Jim, what it takes
to feed them all!” their mother exclaimed.
“You ought to see the bread we bake on
Wednesdays and Saturdays! It's no wonder
their poor papa can't get rich, he has to buy so
much sugar for us to preserve with. We have
our own wheat ground for flour, — but then
there's that much less to sell.”

Nina and Jan, and a little girl named Lucie,
kept shyly pointing out to me the shelves of
glass jars. They said nothing, but glancing at
me, traced on the glass with their finger-tips
the outline of the cherries and strawberries and
crab-apples within, trying by a blissful expres-
sion of countenance to give me some idea of
their deliciousness.

“Show him the spiced plums, mother.
Americans don't have those,” said one of the
older boys. “Mother uses them to make
kolaches,” he added.

Leo, in a low voice, tossed off some scorn-
ful remark in Bohemian.

I turned to him. “You think I don't
know what kolaches are, eh? You're mistaken,
young man. I've eaten your mother's kol-

[[381]]

{{antonp382.png}} || My Antonia ||

aches long before that Easter day when you
were born.”

“Always too fresh, Leo,” Ambrosch re-
marked with a shrug.

Leo dived behind his mother and grinned
out at me.

We turned to leave the cave; Antonia and
I went up the stairs first, and the children
waited. We were standing outside talking,
when they all came running up the steps to-
gether, big and little, tow heads and gold
heads and brown, and flashing little naked
legs; a veritable explosion of life out of the
dark cave into the sunlight. It made me dizzy
for a moment.

The boys escorted us to the front of the
house, which I hadn't yet seen; in farmhouses,
somehow, life comes and goes by the back
door. The roof was so steep that the eaves
were not much above the forest of tall holly-
hocks, now brown and in seed. Through July,
Antonia said, the house was buried in them;
the Bohemians, I remembered, always planted
hollyhocks. The front yard was enclosed by
a thorny locust hedge, and at the gate grew
two silvery, moth-like trees of the mimosa
family. From here one looked down over the

[[382]]

{{antonp383.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

cattle yards, with their two long ponds, and
over a wide stretch of stubble which they
told me was a rye-field in summer.

At some distance behind the house were an
ash grove and two orchards; a cherry orchard,
with gooseberry and currant bushes between
the rows, and an apple orchard, sheltered by a
high hedge from the hot winds. The older chil-
dren turned back when we reached the hedge,
but Jan and Nina and Lucie crept through
it by a hole known only to themselves and
hid under the low-branching mulberry bushes.

As we walked through the apple orchard,
grown up in tall bluegrass, Antonia kept stop-
ping to tell me about one tree and another. “I
love them as if they were people,” she said, rub-
bing her hand over the bark. “There wasn't
a tree here when we first came. We planted
every one, and used to carry water for them,
too — after we'd been working in the fields all
day. Anton, he was a city man, and he used to
get discouraged. But I couldn't feel so tired
that I wouldn't fret about these trees when
there was a dry time. They were on my mind
like children. Many a night after he was
asleep I've got up and come out and carried
water to the poor things. And now, you see,

[[383]]

{{antonp384.png}} || My Antonia ||

we have the good of them. My man worked
in the orange groves in Florida, and he knows
all about grafting. There ain't one of our
neighbors has an orchard that bears like
ours.”

In the middle of the orchard we came upon
a grape-arbor, with seats built along the sides
and a warped plank table. The three children
were waiting for us there. They looked up at
me bashfully and made some request of their
mother.

“They want me to tell you how the teacher
has the school picnic here every year. These
don't go to school yet, so they think it's all
like the picnic.”

After I had admired the arbor sufficiently,
the youngsters ran away to an open place
where there was a rough jungle of French
pinks, and squatted down among them, crawl-
ing about and measuring with a string. “Jan
wants to bury his dog there,” Antonia ex-
plained. “I had to tell him he could. He's
kind of like Nina Harling; you remember how
hard she used to take little things? He has
funny notions, like her.”

We sat down and watched them. Antonia
leaned her elbows on the table. There was the

[[384]]

{{antonp385.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

deepest peace in that orchard. It was sur-
rounded by a triple enclosure; the wire fence,
then the hedge of thorny locusts, then the
mulberry hedge which kept out the hot winds
of summer and held fast to the protecting
snows of winter. The hedges were so tall that
we could see nothing but the blue sky above
them, neither the barn roof nor the windmill.
The afternoon sun poured down on us through
the drying grape leaves. The orchard seemed
full of sun, like a cup, and we could smell the
ripe apples on the trees. The crabs hung on the
branches as thick as beads on a string, purple-
red, with a thin silvery glaze over them. Some
hens and ducks had crept through the hedge
and were pecking at the fallen apples. The
drakes were handsome fellows, with pinkish
gray bodies, their heads and necks covered
with iridescent green feathers which grew close
and full, changing to blue like a peacock's
neck. Antonia said they always reminded her
of soldiers — some uniform she had seen in
the old country, when she was a child.

“Are there any quail left now?” I asked.
I reminded her how she used to go hunting
with me the last summer before we moved to
town. “You weren't a bad shot, Tony. Do

[[385]]

{{antonp386.png}} || My Antonia ||

you remember how you used to want to run
away and go for ducks with Charley Harling
and me?”

“I know, but I'm afraid to look at a
gun now.” She picked up one of the drakes
and ruffled his green capote with her fingers.
“Ever since I've had children, I don't like
to kill anything. It makes me kind of faint to
wring an old goose's neck. Ain't that strange,
Jim?”

“I don't know. The young Queen of Italy
said the same thing once, to a friend of mine.
She used to be a great huntswoman, but now
she feels as you do, and only shoots clay pi-
geons.”

“Then I'm sure she's a good mother,” An-
tonia said warmly.

She told me how she and her husband had
come out to this new country when the farm
land was cheap and could be had on easy
payments. The first ten years were a hard
struggle. Her husband knew very little about
farming and often grew discouraged. “We'd
never have got through if I hadn't been so
strong. I've always had good health, thank
God, and I was able to help him in the fields
until right up to the time before my babies

[[386]]

{{antonp387.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

came. Our children were good about taking
care of each other. Martha, the one you saw
when she was a baby, was such a help to me,
and she trained Anna to be just like her. My
Martha's married now, and has a baby of her
own. Think of that, Jim!

“No, I never got down-hearted. Anton's
a good man, and I loved my children and
always believed they would turn out well. I
belong on a farm. I'm never lonesome here
like I used to be in town. You remember what
sad spells I used to have, when I didn't know
what was the matter with me? I've never had
them out here. And I don't mind work a bit,
if I don't have to put up with sadness.” She
leaned her chin on her hand and looked down
through the orchard, where the sunlight was
growing more and more golden.

“You ought never to have gone to town,
Tony,” I said, wondering at her.

She turned to me eagerly. “Oh, I'm glad I
went! I'd never have known anything about
cooking or housekeeping if I hadn't. I learned
nice ways at the Harlings', and I've been
able to bring my children up so much better.
Don't you think they are pretty well-behaved
for country children? If it hadn't been for

[[387]]

{{antonp388.png}} || My Antonia ||

what Mrs. Harling taught me, I expect I'd
have brought them up like wild rabbits. No,
I'm glad I had a chance to learn; but I'm
thankful none of my daughters will ever have
to work out. The trouble with me was, Jim,
I never could believe harm of anybody I
loved.”

While we were talking, Antonia assured me
that she could keep me for the night. “We've
plenty of room. Two of the boys sleep in the
haymow till cold weather comes, but there's
no need for it. Leo always begs to sleep there,
and Ambrosch goes along to look after him.”

I told her I would like to sleep in the hay-
mow, with the boys.

“You can do just as you want to. The chest
is full of clean blankets, put away for winter.
Now I must go, or my girls will be doing all
the work, and I want to cook your supper
myself.”

As we went toward the house, we met Am-
brosch and Anton, starting off with their milk-
ing-pails to hunt the cows. I joined them, and
Leo accompanied us at some distance, running
ahead and starting up at us out of clumps of
ironweed, calling, “I'm a jack rabbit,” or,
“I'm a big bull-snake.”

[[388]]

{{antonp389.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

I walked between the two older boys —
straight, well-made fellows, with good heads
and clear eyes. They talked about their school
and the new teacher, told me about the crops
and the harvest, and how many steers they
would feed that winter. They were easy and
confidential with me, as if I were an old friend
of the family — and not too old. I felt like
a boy in their company, and all manner of
forgotten interests revived in me. It seemed,
after all, so natural to be walking along a
barbed-wire fence beside the sunset, toward
a red pond, and to see my shadow moving
along at my right, over the close-cropped
grass.

“Has mother shown you the pictures you
sent her from the old country?” Ambrosch
asked. “We've had them framed and they're
hung up in the parlor. She was so glad to get
them. I don't believe I ever saw her so pleased
about anything.” There was a note of simple
gratitude in his voice that made me wish I had
given more occasion for it.

I put my hand on his shoulder. “Your
mother, you know, was very much loved by
all of us. She was a beautiful girl.”

“Oh, we know!” They both spoke to-

[[389]]

{{antonp390.png}} || My Antonia ||

gether; seemed a little surprised that I should
think it necessary to mention this. “Every-
body liked her, didn't they? The Harlings and
your grandmother, and all the town people.”

“Sometimes,” I ventured, “it doesn't
occur to boys that their mother was ever
young and pretty.”

“Oh, we know!” they said again, warmly.
“She's not very old now,” Ambrosch added.
“Not much older than you.”

“Well,” I said, “if you weren't nice to her,
I think I'd take a club and go for the whole
lot of you. I couldn't stand it if you boys
were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if
she were just somebody who looked after you.
You see I was very much in love with your
mother once, and I know there's nobody like
her.”

The boys laughed and seemed pleased and
embarrassed. “She never told us that,” said
Anton. “But she's always talked lots about
you, and about what good times you used to
have. She has a picture of you that she cut
out of the Chicago paper once, and Leo says
he recognized you when you drove up to the
windmill. You can't tell about Leo, though;
sometimes he likes to be smart.”

[[390]]

{{antonp391.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

We brought the cows home to the corner
nearest the barn, and the boys milked them
while night came on. Everything was as it
should be: the strong smell of sunflowers and
ironweed in the dew, the clear blue and gold
of the sky, the evening star, the purr of the
milk into the pails, the grunts and squeals
of the pigs fighting over their supper. I began
to feel the loneliness of the farm-boy at
evening, when the chores seem everlastingly
the same, and the world so far away.

What a tableful we were at supper; two
long rows of restless heads in the lamplight,
and so many eyes fastened excitedly upon An-
tonia as she sat at the head of the table, fill-
ing the plates and starting the dishes on their
way. The children were seated according to
a system; a little one next an older one, who
was to watch over his behavior and to see
that he got his food. Anna and Yulka left
their chairs from time to time to bring fresh
plates of kolaches and pitchers of milk.

After supper we went into the parlor, so
that Yulka and Leo could play for me. An-
tonia went first, carrying the lamp. There
were not nearly chairs enough to go round,
so the younger children sat down on the bare

[[391]]

{{antonp392.png}} || My Antonia ||

floor. Little Lucie whispered to me that they
were going to have a parlor carpet if they got
ninety cents for their wheat. Leo, with a
good deal of fussing, got out his violin. It
was old Mr. Shimerda's instrument, which
Antonia had always kept, and it was too big
for him. But he played very well for a self-
taught boy. Poor Yulka's efforts were not so
successful. While they were playing, little
Nina got up from her corner, came out into
the middle of the floor, and began to do a
pretty little dance on the boards with her
bare feet. No one paid the least attention to
her, and when she was through she stole back
and sat down by her brother.

Antonia spoke to Leo in Bohemian. He
frowned and wrinkled up his face. He seemed
to be trying to pout, but his attempt only
brought out dimples in unusual places. After
twisting and screwing the keys, he played
some Bohemian airs, without the organ to hold
him back, and that went better. The boy was
so restless that I had not had a chance to
look at his face before. My first impression
was right; he really was faun-like. He hadn't
much head behind his ears, and his tawny
fleece grew down thick to the back of his

[[392]]

{{antonp393.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

neck. His eyes were not frank and wide apart
like those of the other boys, but were deep-set,
gold-green in color, and seemed sensitive to the
light. His mother said he got hurt oftener than
all the others put together. He was always
trying to ride the colts before they were bro-
ken, teasing the turkey gobbler, seeing just
how much red the bull would stand for, or
how sharp the new axe was.

After the concert was over Antonia brought
out a big boxful of photographs; she and An-
ton in their wedding clothes, holding hands;
her brother Ambrosch and his very fat wife,
who had a farm of her own, and who bossed
her husband, I was delighted to hear; the three
Bohemian Marys and their large families.

“You wouldn't believe how steady those
girls have turned out,” Antonia remarked.
“Mary Svoboda's the best butter-maker in all
this country, and a fine manager. Her children
will have a grand chance.”

As Antonia turned over the pictures the
young Cuzaks stood behind her chair, look-
ing over her shoulder with interested faces.
Nina and Jan, after trying to see round the
taller ones, quietly brought a chair, climbed
up on it, and stood close together, looking. The

[[393]]

{{antonp394.png}} || My Antonia ||

little boy forgot his shyness and grinned de-
lightedly when familiar faces came into view.
In the group about Antonia I was conscious
of a kind of physical harmony. They leaned
this way and that, and were not afraid to
touch each other. They contemplated the pho-
tographs with pleased recognition; looked at
some admiringly, as if these characters in their
mother's girlhood had been remarkable people.
The little children, who could not speak Eng-
lish, murmured comments to each other in their
rich old language.

Antonia held out a photograph of Lena that
had come from San Francisco last Christmas.
“Does she still look like that? She hasn't
been home for six years now.” Yes, it was
exactly like Lena, I told her; a comely woman,
a trifle too plump, in a hat a trifle too large,
but with the old lazy eyes, and the old dim-
pled ingenuousness still lurking at the corners
of her mouth.

There was a picture of Frances Harling in
a be-frogged riding costume that I remem-
bered well. “Isn't she fine!” the girls mur-
mured. They all assented. One could see that
Frances had come down as a heroine in the
family legend. Only Leo was unmoved.

[[394]]

{{antonp395.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

“And there's Mr. Harling, in his grand
fur coat. He was awfully rich, wasn't he,
mother?”

“He wasn't any Rockefeller,” put in Mas-
ter Leo, in a very low tone, which reminded
me of the way in which Mrs. Shimerda had
once said that my grandfather “wasn't Jesus.”
His habitual skepticism was like a direct in-
heritance from that old woman.

“None of your smart speeches,” said Am-
brosch severely.

Leo poked out a supple red tongue at him,
but a moment later broke into a giggle at a
tintype of two men, uncomfortably seated,
with an awkward-looking boy in baggy clothes
standing between them; Jake and Otto and I!
We had it taken, I remembered, when we went
to Black Hawk on the first Fourth of July I
spent in Nebraska. I was glad to see Jake's
grin again, and Otto's ferocious mustaches.
The young Cuzaks knew all about them.

“He made grandfather's coffin, didn't he?”
Anton asked.

“Wasn't they good fellows, Jim?” An-
tonia's eyes filled. “To this day I'm ashamed
because I quarreled with Jake that way. I was
saucy and impertinent to him, Leo, like you

[[395]]

{{antonp396.png}} || My Antonia ||

are with people sometimes, and I wish some-
body had made me behave.”

“We aren't through with you, yet,” they
warned me. They produced a photograph
taken just before I went away to college; a
tall youth in striped trousers and a straw hat,
trying to look easy and jaunty.

“Tell us, Mr. Burden,” said Charley,
“about the rattler you killed at the dog-town.
How long was he? Sometimes mother says
six feet and sometimes she says five.”

These children seemed to be upon very
much the same terms with Antonia as the
Harling children had been so many years
before. They seemed to feel the same pride in
her, and to look to her for stories and enter-
tainment as we used to do.

It was eleven o'clock when I at last took
my bag and some blankets and started for the
barn with the boys. Their mother came to
the door with us, and we tarried for a moment
to look out at the white slope of the corral and
the two ponds asleep in the moonlight, and the
long sweep of the pasture under the star-
sprinkled sky.

The boys told me to choose my own place
in the haymow, and I lay down before a big

[[396]]

{{antonp397.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

window, left open in warm weather, that
looked out into the stars. Ambrosch and Leo
cuddled up in a hay-cave, back under the
eaves, and lay giggling and whispering. They
tickled each other and tossed and tumbled
in the hay; and then, all at once, as if they had
been shot, they were still. There was hardly
a minute between giggles and bland slumber.

I lay awake for a long while, until the slow-
moving moon passed my window on its way
up the heavens. I was thinking about Anto-
nia and her children; about Anna's solicitude
for her, Ambrosch's grave affection, Leo's
jealous, animal little love. That moment,
when they all came tumbling out of the cave
into the light, was a sight any man might
have come far to see. Antonia had always been
one to leave images in the mind that did not
fade — that grew stronger with time. In my
memory there was a succession of such pictures,
fixed there like the old woodcuts of one's
first primer: Antonia kicking her bare legs
against the sides of my pony when we came
home in triumph with our snake; Antonia in
her black shawl and fur cap, as she stood by
her father's grave in the snowstorm; Antonia
coming in with her work-team along the eve-

[[397]]

{{antonp398.png}} || My Antonia ||

ning sky-line. She lent herself to immemorial
human attitudes which we recognize by instinct
as universal and true. I had not been mistaken.
She was a battered woman now, not a lovely
girl; but she still had that something which
fires the imagination, could still stop one's
breath for a moment by a look or gesture that
somehow revealed the meaning in common
things. She had only to stand in the orchard,
to put her hand on a little crab tree and look
up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness
of planting and tending and harvesting at
last. All the strong things of her heart came
out in her body, that had been so tireless in
serving generous emotions.

It was no wonder that her sons stood tall
and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like
the founders of early races.

[[398]]

{{antonp399.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

V-II

When I awoke in the morning long bands of
sunshine were coming in at the window and
reaching back under the eaves where the two
boys lay. Leo was wide awake and was tickling
his brother's leg with a dried cone-flower he
had pulled out of the hay. Ambrosch kicked
at him and turned over. I closed my eyes and
pretended to be asleep. Leo lay on his back,
elevated one foot, and began exercising his
toes. He picked up dried flowers with his toes
and brandished them in the belt of sunlight.
After he had amused himself thus for some
time, he rose on one elbow and began to look
at me, cautiously, then critically, blinking his
eyes in the light. His expression was droll; it
dismissed me lightly. “This old fellow is no
different from other people. He doesn't know
my secret.” He seemed conscious of possess-
ing a keener power of enjoyment than other
people; his quick recognitions made him
frantically impatient of deliberate judgments.
He always knew what he wanted without
thinking.

[[399]]

{{antonp400.png}} || My Antonia ||

After dressing in the hay, I washed my face
in cold water at the windmill. Breakfast was
ready when I entered the kitchen, and Yulka
was baking griddle-cakes. The three older boys
set off for the fields early. Leo and Yulka were
to drive to town to meet their father, who
would return from Wilber on the noon train.

“We'll only have a lunch at noon,” An-
tonia said, “and cook the geese for supper,
when our papa will be here. I wish my Martha
could come down to see you. They have a Ford
car now, and she don't seem so far away from
me as she used to. But her husband's crazy
about his farm and about having everything
just right, and they almost never get away
except on Sundays. He's a handsome boy, and
he'll be rich some day. Everything he takes
hold of turns out well. When they bring that
baby in here, and unwrap him, he looks like
a little prince; Martha takes care of him so
beautiful. I'm reconciled to her being away
from me now, but at first I cried like I was
putting her into her coffin.”

We were alone in the kitchen, except for
Anna, who was pouring cream into the churn.
She looked up at me. “Yes, she did. We were
just ashamed of mother. She went round cry-

[[400]]

{{antonp401.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

ing, when Martha was so happy, and the rest
of us were all glad. Joe certainly was patient
with you, mother.”

Antonia nodded and smiled at herself. “I
know it was silly, but I couldn't help it. I
wanted her right here. She'd never been away
from me a night since she was born. If Anton
had made trouble about her when she was a
baby, or wanted me to leave her with my
mother, I wouldn't have married him. I
couldn't. But he always loved her like she
was his own.”

“I didn't even know Martha wasn't my
full sister until after she was engaged to Joe,”
Anna told me.

Toward the middle of the afternoon the
wagon drove in, with the father and the eldest
son. I was smoking in the orchard, and as I
went out to meet them, Antonia came run-
ning down from the house and hugged the two
men as if they had been away for months.

“Papa” interested me, from my first glimpse
of him. He was shorter than his older sons; a
crumpled little man, with run-over boot heels,
and he carried one shoulder higher than the
other. But he moved very quickly, and there
was an air of jaunty liveliness about him. He

[[401]]

{{antonp402.png}} || My Antonia ||

had a strong, ruddy color, thick black hair,
a little grizzled, a curly mustache, and red
lips. His smile showed the strong teeth of
which his wife was so proud, and as he saw
me his lively, quizzical eyes told me that he
knew all about me. He looked like a humor-
ous philosopher who had hitched up one
shoulder under the burdens of life, and gone
on his way having a good time when he could.
He advanced to meet me and gave me a hard
hand, burned red on the back and heavily
coated with hair. He wore his Sunday clothes,
very thick and hot for the weather, an un-
starched white shirt, and a blue necktie with
big white dots, like a little boy's, tied in a
flowing bow. Cuzak began at once to talk
about his holiday — from politeness he spoke
in English.

“Mama, I wish you had see the lady dance
on the slack-wire in the street at night. They
throw a bright light on her and she float
through the air something beautiful, like a
bird! They have a dancing bear, like in the old
country, and two three merry-go-round, and
people in balloons, and what you call the big
wheel, Rudolph?”

“A Ferris wheel,” Rudolph entered the con-

[[402]]

{{antonp403.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

versation in a deep baritone voice. He was six
foot two, and had a chest like a young black-
smith. “We went to the big dance in the hall
behind the saloon last night, mother, and I
danced with all the girls, and so did father. I
never saw so many pretty girls. It was a Bo-
hunk crowd, for sure. We didn't hear a word
of English on the street, except from the show
people, did we, papa?”

Cuzak nodded. “And very many send
word to you, Antonia. You will excuse” —
turning to me — “if I tell her.” While we
walked toward the house he related incidents
and delivered messages in the tongue he spoke
fluently, and I dropped a little behind, curious
to know what their relations had become —
or remained. The two seemed to be on terms
of easy friendliness, touched with humor.
Clearly, she was the impulse, and he the cor-
rective. As they went up the hill he kept
glancing at her sidewise, to see whether she
got his point, or how she received it. I no-
ticed later that he always looked at people
sidewise, as a work-horse does at its yoke-mate.
Even when he sat opposite me in the kitchen,
talking, he would turn his head a little toward
the clock or the stove and look at me from

[[403]]

{{antonp404.png}} || My Antonia ||

the side, but with frankness and good nature.
This trick did not suggest duplicity or secre-
tiveness, but merely long habit, as with the
horse.

He had brought a tintype of himself and
Rudolph for Antonia's collection, and sev-
eral paper bags of candy for the children. He
looked a little disappointed when his wife
showed him a big box of candy I had got in
Denver — she hadn't let the children touch
it the night before. He put his candy away
in the cupboard, “for when she rains,” and
glanced at the box, chuckling. “I guess you
must have hear about how my family ain't
so small,” he said.

Cuzak sat down behind the stove and
watched his women-folk and the little chil-
dren with equal amusement. He thought they
were nice, and he thought they were funny,
evidently. He had been off dancing with the
girls and forgetting that he was an old fellow,
and now his family rather surprised him; he
seemed to think it a joke that all these chil-
dren should belong to him. As the younger
ones slipped up to him in his retreat, he kept
taking things out of his pockets; penny dolls,
a wooden clown, a balloon pig that was in-

[[404]]

{{antonp405.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

flated by a whistle. He beckoned to the little
boy they called Jan, whispered to him, and
presented him with a paper snake, gently,
so as not to startle him. Looking over the
boy's head he said to me, “This one is bashful.
He gets left.”

Cuzak had brought home with him a roll
of illustrated Bohemian papers. He opened
them and began to tell his wife the news,
much of which seemed to relate to one
person. I heard the name Vasakova, Vasa-
kova, repeated several times with lively in-
terest, and presently I asked him whether
he were talking about the singer, Maria
Vasak.

“You know? You have heard, maybe?”
he asked incredulously. When I assured him
that I had heard her, he pointed out her pic-
ture and told me that Vasak had broken her
leg, climbing in the Austrian Alps, and would
not be able to fill her engagements. He seemed
delighted to find that I had heard her sing
in London and in Vienna; got out his pipe and
lit it to enjoy our talk the better. She came
from his part of Prague. His father used to
mend her shoes for her when she was a stu-
dent. Cuzak questioned me about her looks,

[[405]]

{{antonp406.png}} || My Antonia ||

her popularity, her voice; but he particularly
wanted to know whether I had noticed her
tiny feet, and whether I thought she had saved
much money. She was extravagant, of course,
but he hoped she wouldn't squander every-
thing, and have nothing left when she was
old. As a young man, working in Wienn, he
had seen a good many artists who were old
and poor, making one glass of beer last all
evening, and “it was not very nice, that.”

When the boys came in from milking and
feeding, the long table was laid, and two brown
geese, stuffed with apples, were put down siz-
zling before Antonia. She began to carve, and
Rudolph, who sat next his mother, started the
plates on their way. When everybody was
served, he looked across the table at me.

“Have you been to Black Hawk lately, Mr.
Burden? Then I wonder if you've heard about
the Cutters?”

No, I had heard nothing at all about them.

“Then you must tell him, son, though it's a
terrible thing to talk about at supper. Now,
all you children be quiet, Rudolph is going to
tell about the murder.”

“Hurrah! The murder!” the children mur-
mured, looking pleased and interested.

[[406]]

{{antonp407.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

Rudolph told his story in great detail, with
occasional promptings from his mother or father.

Wick Cutter and his wife had gone on liv-
ing in the house that Antonia and I knew so
well, and in the way we knew so well. They
grew to be very old people. He shriveled up,
Antonia said, until he looked like a little old
yellow monkey, for his beard and his fringe
of hair never changed color. Mrs. Cutter
remained flushed and wild-eyed as we had
known her, but as the years passed she became
afflicted with a shaking palsy which made her
nervous nod continuous instead of occasional.
Her hands were so uncertain that she could
no longer disfigure china, poor woman! As
the couple grew older, they quarreled more and
more about the ultimate disposition of their
“property.” A new law was passed in the
State, securing the surviving wife a third of
her husband's estate under all conditions.
Cutter was tormented by the fear that Mrs.
Cutter would live longer than he, and that
eventually her “people,” whom he had always
hated so violently, would inherit. Their quar-
rels on this subject passed the boundary of the
close-growing cedars, and were heard in the
street by whoever wished to loiter and listen.

[[407]]

{{antonp408.png}} || My Antonia ||

One morning, two years ago, Cutter went
into the hardware store and bought a pistol,
saying he was going to shoot a dog, and add-
ing that he “thought he would take a shot at
an old cat while he was about it.” (Here the
children interrupted Rudolph's narrative by
smothered giggles.)

Cutter went out behind the hardware store,
put up a target, practiced for an hour or so,
and then went home. At six o'clock that
evening, when several men were passing the
Cutter house on their way home to supper,
they heard a pistol shot. They paused and
were looking doubtfully at one another, when
another shot came crashing through an up-
stairs window. They ran into the house and
found Wick Cutter lying on a sofa in his up-
stairs bedroom, with his throat torn open,
bleeding on a roll of sheets he had placed be-
side his head.

“Walk in, gentlemen,” he said weakly. “I
am alive, you see, and competent. You are
witnesses that I have survived my wife. You
will find her in her own room. Please make
your examination at once, so that there will be
no mistake.”

One of the neighbors telephoned for a doc-

[[408]]

{{antonp409.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

tor, while the others went into Mrs. Cutter's
room. She was lying on her bed, in her night-
gown and wrapper, shot through the heart.
Her husband must have come in while she
was taking her afternoon nap and shot her,
holding the revolver near her breast. Her
nightgown was burned from the powder.

The horrified neighbors rushed back to Cut-
ter. He opened his eyes and said distinctly,
“Mrs. Cutter is quite dead, gentlemen, and I
am conscious. My affairs are in order.” Then,
Rudolph said, “he let go and died.”

On his desk the coroner found a letter, dated
at five o'clock that afternoon. It stated that
he had just shot his wife; that any will she
might secretly have made would be invalid, as
he survived her. He meant to shoot himself
at six o'clock and would, if he had strength,
fire a shot through the window in the hope
that passers-by might come in and see him
“before life was extinct,” as he wrote.

“Now, would you have thought that man
had such a cruel heart?” Antonia turned to
me after the story was told. “To go and do
that poor woman out of any comfort she might
have from his money after he was gone!”

“Did you ever hear of anybody else that

[[409]]

{{antonp410.png}} || My Antonia ||

killed himself for spite, Mr. Burden?” asked
Rudolph.

I admitted that I hadn't. Every lawyer
learns over and over how strong a motive
hate can be, but in my collection of legal
anecdotes I had nothing to match this one.
When I asked how much the estate amounted
to, Rudolph said it was a little over a hundred
thousand dollars.

Cuzak gave me a twinkling, sidelong glance.
“The lawyers, they got a good deal of it, sure,”
he said merrily.

A hundred thousand dollars; so that was the
fortune that had been scraped together by
such hard dealing, and that Cutter himself
had died for in the end!

After supper Cuzak and I took a stroll in
the orchard and sat down by the windmill to
smoke. He told me his story as if it were
my business to know it.

His father was a shoemaker, his uncle a
furrier, and he, being a younger son, was ap-
prenticed to the latter's trade. You never got
anywhere working for your relatives, he said,
so when he was a journeyman he went to
Vienna and worked in a big fur shop, earning
good money. But a young fellow who liked a

[[410]]

{{antonp411.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

good time didn't save anything in Vienna;
there were too many pleasant ways of spending
every night what he'd made in the day. After
three years there, he came to New York. He
was badly advised and went to work on furs
during a strike, when the factories were offer-
ing big wages. The strikers won, and Cuzak
was blacklisted. As he had a few hundred dol-
lars ahead, he decided to go to Florida and
raise oranges. He had always thought he would
like to raise oranges! The second year a hard
frost killed his young grove, and he fell ill
with malaria. He came to Nebraska to visit
his cousin, Anton Jelinek, and to look about.
When he began to look about, he saw Antonia,
and she was exactly the kind of girl he had
always been hunting for. They were married
at once, though he had to borrow money from
his cousin to buy the wedding-ring.

“It was a pretty hard job, breaking up
this place and making the first crops grow,”
he said, pushing back his hat and scratching
his grizzled hair. “Sometimes I git awful sore
on this place and want to quit, but my wife
she always say we better stick it out. The
babies come along pretty fast, so it look like
it be hard to move, anyhow. I guess she was

[[411]]

{{antonp412.png}} || My Antonia ||

right, all right. We got this place clear now.
We pay only twenty dollars an acre then, and
I been offered a hundred. We bought another
quarter ten years ago, and we got it most paid
for. We got plenty boys; we can work a lot
of land. Yes, she is a good wife for a poor
man. She ain't always so strict with me,
neither. Sometimes maybe I drink a little too
much beer in town, and when I come home she
don't say nothing. She don't ask me no ques-
tions. We always get along fine, her and me,
like at first. The children don't make trouble
between us, like sometimes happens.” He lit
another pipe and pulled on it contentedly.

I found Cuzak a most companionable fel-
low. He asked me a great many questions
about my trip through Bohemia, about Vienna
and the Ringstrasse and the theaters.

“Gee! I like to go back there once, when the
boys is big enough to farm the place. Some-
times when I read the papers from the old
country, I pretty near run away,” he con-
fessed with a little laugh. “I never did think
how I would be a settled man like this.”

He was still, as Antonia said, a city man.
He liked theaters and lighted streets and mu-
sic and a game of dominoes after the day's

[[412]]

{{antonp413.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

work was over. His sociability was stronger
than his acquisitive instinct. He liked to live
day by day and night by night, sharing in the
excitement of the crowd. — Yet his wife had
managed to hold him here on a farm, in one
of the loneliest countries in the world.

I could see the little chap, sitting here every
evening by the windmill, nursing his pipe and
listening to the silence; the wheeze of the
pump, the grunting of the pigs, an occasional
squawking when the hens were disturbed by
a rat. It did rather seem to me that Cuzak
had been made the instrument of Antonia's
special mission. This was a fine life, certainly,
but it wasn't the kind of life he had wanted
to live. I wondered whether the life that was
right for one was ever right for two!

I asked Cuzak if he didn't find it hard to do
without the gay company he had always been
used to. He knocked out his pipe against an
upright, sighed, and dropped it into his pocket.

“At first I near go crazy with lonesomeness,”
he said frankly, “but my woman is got such
a warm heart. She always make it as good
for me as she could. Now it ain't so bad; I can
begin to have some fun with my boys, al-
ready!”

[[413]]

{{antonp414.png}} || My Antonia ||

As we walked toward the house, Cuzak
cocked his hat jauntily over one ear and
looked up at the moon. “Gee!” he said in a
hushed voice, as if he had just wakened up,
“it don't seem like I am away from there
twenty-six year!”

[[414]]

{{antonp415.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

V-III

After dinner the next day I said goodbye
and drove back to Hastings to take the train
for Black Hawk. Antonia and her children
gathered round my buggy before I started,
and even the little ones looked up at me with
friendly faces. Leo and Ambrosch ran ahead
to open the lane gate. When I reached the
bottom of the hill, I glanced back. The group
was still there by the windmill. Antonia was
waving her apron.

At the gate Ambrosch lingered beside my
buggy, resting his arm on the wheel-rim. Leo
slipped through the fence and ran off into the
pasture.

“That's like him,” his brother said with a
shrug. “He's a crazy kid. Maybe he's sorry
to have you go, and maybe he's jealous. He's
jealous of anybody mother makes a fuss over,
even the priest.”

I found I hated to leave this boy, with his
pleasant voice and his fine head and eyes. He
looked very manly as he stood there without

[[415]]

{{antonp416.png}} || My Antonia ||

a hat, the wind rippling his shirt about his
brown neck and shoulders.

“Don't forget that you and Rudolph are
going hunting with me up on the Niobrara
next summer,” I said. “Your father's agreed
to let you off after harvest.”

He smiled. “I won't likely forget. I've
never had such a nice thing offered to me
before. I don't know what makes you so nice
to us boys,” he added, blushing.

“Oh, yes you do!” I said, gathering up my
reins.

He made no answer to this, except to smile
at me with unabashed pleasure and affection
as I drove away.

My day in Black Hawk was disappointing.
Most of my old friends were dead or had
moved away. Strange children, who meant
nothing to me, were playing in the Harlings'
big yard when I passed; the mountain ash had
been cut down, and only a sprouting stump was
left of the tall Lombardy poplar that used to
guard the gate. I hurried on. The rest of the
morning I spent with Anton Jelinek, under a
shady cottonwood tree in the yard behind his
saloon. While I was having my mid-day din-

[[416]]

{{antonp417.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

ner at the hotel, I met one of the old lawyers
who was still in practice, and he took me up to
his office and talked over the Cutter case with
me. After that, I scarcely knew how to put
in the time until the night express was due.

I took a long walk north of the town, out
into the pastures where the land was so rough
that it had never been ploughed up, and the
long red grass of early times still grew shaggy
over the draws and hillocks. Out there I felt
at home again. Overhead the sky was that
indescribable blue of autumn; bright and
shadowless, hard as enamel. To the south I
could see the dun-shaded river bluffs that
used to look so big to me, and all about
stretched drying cornfields, of the pale-gold
color I remembered so well. Russian thistles
were blowing across the uplands and piling
against the wire fences like barricades. Along
the cattle paths the plumes of golden-rod were
already fading into sun-warmed velvet, gray
with gold threads in it. I had escaped from
the curious depression that hangs over little
towns, and my mind was full of pleasant things;
trips I meant to take with the Cuzak boys, in
the Bad Lands and up on the Stinking Water.
There were enough Cuzaks to play with for

[[417]]

{{antonp418.png}} || My Antonia ||

a long while yet. Even after the boys grew
up, there would always be Cuzak himself! I
meant to tramp along a few miles of lighted
streets with Cuzak.

As I wandered over those rough pastures,
I had the good luck to stumble upon a bit of
the first road that went from Black Hawk out
to the north country; to my grandfather's
farm, then on to the Shimerdas' and to the
Norwegian settlement. Everywhere else it
had been ploughed under when the highways
were surveyed; this half-mile or so within the
pasture fence was all that was left of that old
road which used to run like a wild thing across
the open prairie, clinging to the high places
and circling and doubling like a rabbit be-
fore the hounds. On the level land the tracks
had almost disappeared — were mere shad-
ings in the grass, and a stranger would not
have noticed them. But wherever the road
had crossed a draw, it was easy to find. The
rains had made channels of the wheel-ruts
and washed them so deep that the sod had
never healed over them. They looked like
gashes torn by a grizzly's claws, on the slopes
where the farm wagons used to lurch up out
of the hollows with a pull that brought curling

[[418]]

{{antonp419.png}} || Cuzak's Boys ||

muscles on the smooth hips of the horses. I
sat down and watched the haystacks turn
rosy in the slanting sunlight.

This was the road over which Antonia and
I came on that night when we got off the train
at Black Hawk and were bedded down in
the straw, wondering children, being taken we
knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes
to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the
dark, and to be again overcome by that oblit-
erating strangeness. The feelings of that night
were so near that I could reach out and touch
them with my hand. I had the sense of coming
home to myself, and of having found out what
a little circle man's experience is. For Antonia
and for me, this had been the road of Destiny;
had taken us to those early accidents of for-
tune which predetermined for us all that we
can ever be. Now I understood that the same
road was to bring us together again. What-
ever we had missed, we possessed together the
precious, the incommunicable past.

— the end —

[[419]]

{{antonp420.png}} || My Antonia ||

End-Notes

[1] The Bohemian name Antonia 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.

[2] Actually, it was Otto's story, not Jake's. The sunflower
story is introduced with “Fuchs told me that...”

[3] It was a common but mistaken belief that a rattlesnake's
age is equal to the number of rattles. In reality, rattlesnakes
may shed their skins several times a year, adding a new
rattle each time.

[4] Bohemia had already been part of the Austrian empire
long before the time of which Jelinek was speaking. But
Bohemia was invaded by the Prussians in 1866 during
the Austro-Prussian War (also known as the Seven
Weeks' War).

[5] Corn tassels don't fertilize each other. Corn plants have
separate male and female flowers. The pollen-producing
male flowers are in the tassels. The potential kernels
(ovules) in the ear shoots and their attached silks make up
the female flowers. Pollination occurs when pollen from
the tassels lands on the silks. Pollen tubes then grow down
inside the silks and fertilize the ovules.

[[420]]

{{antonp422.png}} || My Antonia ||

[Mr. Shimerda walking on the upland prairie ......... 46x2a ]
[Mr. Shimerda walking on the upland prairie ......... 422 ]
[table of illustrations ......... f006 ]

[[422]]

{{antonp423.png}} || My Antonia ||

[Mrs. Shimerda gathering mushrooms ......... 88x3a ]
[Mrs. Shimerda gathering mushrooms ......... 423 ]
[table of illustrations ......... f006 ]

[[423]]

{{antonp424.png}} || My Antonia ||

[Jake bringing home a Christmas tree ......... 98x4a ]
[Jake bringing home a Christmas tree ......... 424 ]
[table of illustrations ......... f006 ]

[[424]]