My Antonia

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One day Samson was standing thus while Miss Nellie was playing
her lesson to her music-teacher. The windows were open.
He heard them get up from the piano, talk a little while,
and then leave the room. He heard the door close after them.
He crept up to the front windows and stuck his head in:
there was no one there. He could always detect the presence
of anyone 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, embraced the carved legs, tried to get some conception
of its shape and size, of the space it occupied in primeval night.
It was cold and hard, and like nothing else in his black universe.
He went back to its mouth, began at one end of the keyboard and felt his way
down into the mellow thunder, as far as he could go. He seemed to know
that it must be done with the fingers, not with the fists or the feet.
He approached this highly artificial instrument 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 practising,
passages that were already his, that lay under the bone of his pinched,
conical little skull, definite as animal desires.

The door opened; Miss Nellie and her music-master stood
behind it, but blind Samson, who was so sensitive to presences,
did not know they were there. He was feeling out the pattern
that lay all ready-made on the big and little keys.
When he paused for a moment, because the sound was wrong
and he wanted another, Miss Nellie spoke softly.
He whirled about in a spasm of terror, leaped forward in the dark,
struck his head on the open window, and fell screaming and
bleeding to the floor. He had what his mother called a fit.
The doctor came and gave him opium.

When Samson was well again, his young mistress led him back to the piano.
Several teachers experimented with him. They found he had absolute pitch,
and a remarkable memory. As a very young child he could repeat,
after a fashion, any composition that was played for him.
No matter how many wrong notes he struck, he never lost
the intention of a passage, he brought the substance of it across
by irregular and astonishing means. He wore his teachers out.
He could never learn like other people, never acquired any finish.
He was always a Negro prodigy who played barbarously and wonderfully.
As piano-playing, it was perhaps abominable, but as music it was
something real, vitalized by a sense of rhythm that was stronger
than his other physical senses--that not only filled his dark mind,
but worried his body incessantly. To hear him, to watch him,
was to see a Negro enjoying himself as only a Negro can.
It was as if all the agreeable sensations possible to creatures
of flesh and blood were heaped up on those black-and-white keys,
and he were gloating over them and trickling them through
his yellow fingers.

In the middle of a crashing waltz, d'Arnault suddenly began
to play softly, and, turning to one of the men who stood
behind him, whispered, `Somebody dancing in there.'
He jerked his bullet-head toward the dining-room. `I hear
little feet--girls, I spect.'

Anson Kirkpatrick mounted a chair and 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 roomful of lonesome men on the other side of the partition!
Introduce me to your friends, Tiny.'

The girls, still laughing, were trying to escape. Tiny looked alarmed.
`Mrs. Gardener 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.'

`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 sides of the hotel bus,
and `Molly' was engraved inside Johnnie's ring and on his watch-case--
doubtless on his heart, too. He was an affectionate little man,
and he thought his wife a wonderful woman; he knew that without
her he would hardly be more than a clerk in some other man's hotel.

At a word from Kirkpatrick, d'Arnault spread himself out over the piano,
and began to draw the dance music out of it, while the perspiration
shone on his short wool and on his uplifted face. He looked like some
glistening African god of pleasure, full of strong, savage blood.
Whenever the dancers paused to change partners or to catch breath,
he would boom out softly, `Who's that goin' 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 countenance,
slightly marked by smallpox, but handsome for all that.
She had beautiful chestnut hair, coils of it; her forehead
was low and smooth, and her commanding dark eyes regarded
the world indifferently and fearlessly. She looked bold
and resourceful and unscrupulous, and she was all of these.
They were handsome girls, had the fresh colour of their country
upbringing, 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 melodies, and had heard d'Arnault play in New Orleans. At last
he tapped his way upstairs, after bowing to everybody, docile and happy.
I walked home with 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.

VIII

THE HARLING CHILDREN and I were never happier, never felt more contented
and secure, than in the weeks of spring which broke that long winter.
We were out all day in the thin sunshine, helping Mrs. Harling and Tony
break the ground and plant the garden, dig around the orchard trees,
tie up vines and clip the hedges. Every morning, before I was up, I could
hear Tony singing in the garden rows. After the apple and cherry trees broke
into bloom, we ran about under them, hunting for the new nests the birds were
building, throwing clods at each other, and playing 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
quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no.
That is what their elders are always forgetting.

It must have been in June, for Mrs. Harling and Antonia
were preserving cherries, when I stopped one morning
to tell them that a dancing pavilion had come to town.
I had seen two drays hauling the canvas and painted poles up
from the depot.

That afternoon three cheerful-looking Italians strolled about Black Hawk,
looking at everything, and with them was a dark, stout woman who wore
a long gold watch-chain about her neck and carried a black lace parasol.
They seemed especially interested in children and vacant lots. When I
overtook them and stopped to say a word, I found them affable and confiding.
They told me they worked in Kansas City in the winter, and in summer they
went out among the farming towns with their tent and taught dancing.
When business fell off in one place, they moved on to another.

The dancing pavilion was put up near the Danish laundry,
on a vacant lot surrounded by tall, arched cottonwood trees.
It was very much like a merry-go-round tent,
with open sides and gay flags flying from the poles.
Before the week was over, all the ambitious mothers were
sending their children to the afternoon dancing class.
At three o'clock one met little girls in white dresses
and little boys in the round-collared shirts of the time,
hurrying along the sidewalk on their way to the tent.
Mrs. Vanni received them at the entrance, 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 fancywork and sat on the shady side
of the tent during the lesson. The popcorn man wheeled his glass
wagon under the big cottonwood by the door, and lounged in the sun,
sure of a good trade when the dancing was over. Mr. Jensen,
the Danish laundryman, used to bring a chair from his porch and sit
out in the grass plot. Some ragged little boys from the depot
sold pop and iced lemonade under a white umbrella at the corner,
and made faces at the spruce youngsters who came to dance.
That vacant lot soon became the most cheerful place in town.
Even on the hottest afternoons the cottonwoods made a rustling shade,
and the air smelled of popcorn and melted butter, and Bouncing
Bets wilting in the sun. Those hardy flowers had run away from
the laundryman'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 roundhouse whistle.

At last there was something to do in those long, empty summer evenings,
when the married people sat like images on their front porches,
and the boys and girls tramped and tramped the board sidewalks--
northward to the edge of the open prairie, south to the depot, then back
again to the post-office, the ice-cream parlour, 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 lighthearted sounds.
First the deep purring of Mr. Vanni's harp came in silvery ripples
through the blackness of the 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 anyone could dance who paid his money and was orderly;
the railroad men, the roundhouse mechanics, the delivery boys,
the iceman, the farm-hands who lived near enough to ride into town
after their day's work was over.

I never missed a Saturday night dance. The tent was open until
midnight then. The country boys came in from farms eight and ten
miles away, and all the country girls were on the floor--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 sweethearts and general
condemnation for a waltz with `the hired girls.'

IX

THERE WAS A CURIOUS social situation in Black Hawk. All the young
men felt the attraction of the fine, well-set-up country girls
who had come to town to earn a living, and, in nearly every case,
to help the father struggle out of debt, or to make it possible
for the younger children of the family to go to school.

Those girls had grown up in the first bitter-hard times, and had got
little schooling themselves. But the younger brothers and sisters,
for whom they made such sacrifices and who have had `advantages,' never seem
to me, when I meet them now, half as interesting or as well educated.
The older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much
from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all,
like 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 I can
remember something unusual and engaging about each of them.
Physically they were almost a race apart, and out-of-door
work had given them a vigour which, when they got over their
first shyness on coming to town, developed into a positive
carriage and freedom of movement, and made them conspicuous
among Black Hawk women.

That was before the day of high-school athletics.
Girls who had to walk more than half a mile to school were pitied.
There was not a tennis-court in the town; physical exercise was
thought rather inelegant for the daughters of well-to-do families.
Some of the high-school girls were jolly and pretty, but they stayed
indoors in winter because of the cold, and in summer because of the heat.
When one danced with them, their bodies never moved inside their clothes;
their muscles seemed to ask but one thing--not to be disturbed.
I remember those girls merely as faces in the schoolroom, gay and rosy,
or listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders, like cherubs,
by the ink-smeared tops of the high desks that were surely put
there to make us round-shouldered and hollow-chested.

The daughters of Black Hawk merchants had a confident, unenquiring
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 neighbours from other countries.
All alike had come to Nebraska with little capital and no knowledge
of the soil they must subdue. All had borrowed money on their land.
But no matter in what straits the Pennsylvanian or Virginian
found himself, he would not let his daughters go out into service.
Unless his girls could teach a country school, they sat at
home in poverty.

The Bohemian and Scandinavian girls could not get positions as teachers,
because they had had no opportunity to learn the language.
Determined to help in the struggle to clear the homestead from debt,
they had no alternative but to go into service. Some of them,
after they came to town, remained as serious and as discreet in
behaviour 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 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 neighbours--usually of like nationality--
and the girls who once worked in Black Hawk kitchens are
to-day managing big farms and fine families of their own;
their children are better off than the children of the town
women they used to serve.

I thought the attitude of the town people toward these girls very stupid.
If I told my schoolmates that Lena Lingard's grandfather was a clergyman,
and much respected in Norway, they looked at me blankly. What did it matter?
All foreigners were ignorant people who couldn't speak English.
There was not a man in Black Hawk who had the intelligence or cultivation,
much less the personal distinction, 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 Hawk merchant can hope for is to sell provisions and farm
machinery and automobiles to the rich farms where that first crop
of stalwart Bohemian and Scandinavian girls are now the mistresses.

The Black Hawk boys looked forward to marrying Black Hawk girls,
and living in a brand-new little house with best chairs that must
not be sat upon, and hand-painted china that must not be used.
But sometimes a young fellow would look up from his ledger,
or out through the grating of his father's bank, and let his eyes
follow Lena Lingard, as she passed the window with her slow,
undulating walk, or Tiny Soderball, tripping by in her short skirt
and striped stockings.

The country girls were considered a menace to the social order.
Their beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background.
But anxious mothers need have felt no alarm. They mistook the mettle
of their sons. The respect for respectability was stronger than
any desire in Black Hawk youth.

Our young man of position was like the son of a royal house;
the boy who swept out his office or drove his delivery wagon
might frolic with the jolly country girls, but he himself
must sit all evening in a plush parlour where conversation
dragged so perceptibly that the father often came in
and made blundering efforts to warm up the atmosphere.
On his way home from his dull call, he would perhaps
meet Tony and Lena, coming along the sidewalk whispering
to each other, or the three Bohemian Marys in their long
plush coats and caps, comporting themselves with a dignity
that only made their eventful histories the more piquant.
If he went to the hotel to see a travelling man on business,
there was Tiny, arching her shoulders at him like a kitten.
If he went into the laundry to get his collars, there were
the four Danish girls, smiling up from their ironing-boards,
with their white throats and their pink cheeks.

The three Marys were the heroines of a cycle of scandalous stories,
which the old men were fond of relating as they sat about
the cigar-stand in the drugstore. Mary Dusak had been housekeeper
for a bachelor rancher from Boston, and after several years in his
service she was forced to retire from the world for a short time.
Later she came back to town to take the place of her friend,
Mary Svoboda, who was similarly embarrassed. The three Marys were
considered as dangerous as high explosives to have about the kitchen,
yet they were such good cooks and such admirable housekeepers
that they never had to look for a place.

The Vannis' tent brought the town boys and the country girls together
on neutral ground. Sylvester Lovett, who was cashier in his
father's bank, always found his way to the tent on Saturday night.
He took all the dances Lena Lingard would give him, and even grew
bold enough to walk home with her. If his sisters or their
friends happened to be among the onlookers on `popular nights,'
Sylvester stood back in the shadow under the cottonwood trees,
smoking and watching Lena with a harassed expression.
Several times I stumbled upon him there in the dark, and I
felt rather sorry for him. He reminded me of Ole Benson,
who used to sit on the drawside and watch Lena herd her cattle.
Later in the summer, 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 ingenuousness I hoped that Sylvester would marry Lena,
and thus give all the country girls a better position in the town.

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 everyone knew it. To escape from his
predicament he ran away with a widow six years older than himself,
who owned a half-section. This remedy worked, apparently. He never looked
at Lena again, nor lifted his eyes as he ceremoniously tipped his hat
when he happened to meet her on the sidewalk.

So that was what they were like, I thought, these white-handed,
high-collared clerks and bookkeepers! I used to glare at young
Lovett from a distance and only wished I had some way of showing
my contempt for him.

X

IT WAS AT THE Vannis' tent that 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 kingdom. But after the tent came
to town she began to go about with Tiny and Lena and their friends.
The Vannis often said that Antonia was the best dancer of them all.
I sometimes heard murmurs in the crowd outside the pavilion
that Mrs. Harling would soon have her hands full with that girl.
The young men began to joke with each other about `the Harlings' Tony' as they
did about `the Marshalls' Anna' or `the Gardeners' Tiny.'

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 excitement.
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 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 consequences.
The iceman lingered too long now, when he came into the
covered porch to fill the refrigerator. The delivery boys
hung about the kitchen when they brought the groceries.
Young farmers who were in town for Saturday came tramping
through the yard to the back door to engage dances, or to invite
Tony to parties and picnics. Lena and Norwegian Anna dropped
in to help her with her work, so that she could get away early.
The boys who brought her home after the dances sometimes laughed
at the back gate and wakened Mr. Harling from his first sleep.
A crisis was inevitable.

One Saturday night Mr. Harling had gone down to the cellar for beer.
As he came up the stairs in the dark, he heard scuffling
on the back porch, and then the sound of a vigorous slap.
He looked out through the side door in time to see
a pair of long legs vaulting over the picket fence.
Antonia was standing there, angry and excited. Young Harry Paine,
who was to marry his employer's daughter on Monday, had come
to the tent with a crowd of friends and danced all evening.
Afterward, he begged 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 protested--
because he was going to be married on Monday--he caught her
and kissed her until she got one hand free and slapped him.

Mr. Harling put his beer-bottles down on the table.
`This is what I've been expecting, 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 going to the tent?' she panted. `I wouldn't 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.

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