My Antonia

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Suddenly I found myself running across the north end of Black Hawk in my
night-shirt, 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 hat-rack, lay down on the parlour sofa,
and in spite of my hurts, went to sleep.

Grandmother found me there in the morning. 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 discoloured.
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 night-shirt, 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 disfigured face to the wall and felt no particular gratitude.
My one concern was that grandmother should keep everyone away from me.
If the story once got abroad, I would never hear the last of it.
I could well imagine what the old men down at the drugstore would
do with such a theme.

While grandmother was trying to make me comfortable,
grandfather went to the depot and learned that Wick Cutter
had come home on the night express from the east, and had left
again on the six o'clock train for Denver that morning.
The agent said his face was striped with court-plaster, and
he carried his left hand in a sling. He looked so used up,
that the agent asked him what had happened to him since ten
o'clock the night before; whereat Cutter began to swear at him
and said he would have him discharged for incivility.

That afternoon, while I was asleep, 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 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 doorbell 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 afterward.

Grandmother would not let her see Antonia at all, but made her sit down in
the parlour 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 business.
When he returned, he told her that he would have to stay overnight there,
but she could go on home. He bought her ticket and put her on the train.
She saw him slip a twenty-dollar bill into her handbag with her ticket.
That bill, she said, should have aroused her suspicions at once--but did not.

The trains are never called at little junction towns;
everybody knows when they come in. Mr. Cutter showed his
wife's ticket to the conductor, and settled her in her seat
before the train moved off. It was not until nearly nightfall
that she discovered she was on the express bound for Kansas City,
that her ticket was made out to that point, and that Cutter
must have planned it so. The conductor told her the Black
Hawk train was due at Waymore twelve minutes after the Kansas
City train left. She saw at once that her husband had played
this trick in order to get back to Black Hawk without her.
She had no choice but to go on to Kansas City and take the first
fast train for home.

Cutter could have got home a day earlier than his wife by any
one of a dozen simpler devices; he could have left her in the
Omaha hotel, and said he was going on to Chicago for 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 horse-like 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 powerful liqueur after a long dinner.
The one excitement he really couldn't do without was quarrelling
with Mrs. Cutter!

BOOK III

Lena Lingard

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 arranged under his supervision.

I did not go home for my first summer vacation, but stayed
in Lincoln, working off a year's Greek, which had been my only
condition on entering the freshman class. Cleric's doctor advised
against his going back to New England, and, except for a few
weeks in Colorado, he, too, was in Lincoln all that summer.
We played tennis, read, and took long walks together.
I shall always look back on that time of mental awakening
as one of the happiest 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 atmosphere of endeavour, 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; 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 students,
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 photograph of the Tragic Theatre 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 talkative 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, parsimonious about small expenditures--
a trait absolutely inconsistent with his general character.
Sometimes when he came he was silent and moody, and after a few
sarcastic remarks went away again, to tramp the streets of Lincoln,
which were almost as quiet and oppressively 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 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 before one out
of the shadows--white figures against blue backgrounds.
I shall never forget 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 wilfully stayed the short summer
night there, wrapped in his coat and rug, watching the constellations
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 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 discourse 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 honours most. The seeds of my ardour 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 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 whenever 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.

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 indolent.
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 helpfulness which custom breeds.

I propped my book open and stared listlessly at the page
of the `Georgics' where tomorrow's lesson began.
It opened with the melancholy reflection that, in the lives
of mortals the best days are the first to flee.
'Optima 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 neighbourhood 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 capital, the palatia Romana, but to his own little
I 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 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 fervour 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.
Before I had got far with my reading, I was disturbed 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 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 confusedly.

She was not disconcerted by my embarrassment.
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 comprehending, 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?'

`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 furniture 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.

`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 bragging 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 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 elbows on the table and drew my book toward her.
I caught a faint odour of violet sachet. `So that's Latin, is it?
It looks hard. You do go to the theatre 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 theatres.'

`Let's go to a show together sometime. You are going to let
me come to see you, aren'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. 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 surprised 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 drugstore. 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 someone 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 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 favourable interpretation to everything.
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 understood 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.'

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 inflexible
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 someone who was always being converted. 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, 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 theatre. The weather was
warm and sultry and put us both in a holiday humour.
We arrived early, because Lena liked to watch the people come in.
There was a note on the programme, 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.

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