My Antonia

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18

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

`I oughtn't to have begun it, ought I?' she murmured.
`I oughtn't to have gone to see you that first time. But I did
want to. I guess I've always been a little foolish about you.
I don't know what first put it into my head, unless it was 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 I came to see you that time?' she whispered.
`It seemed so natural. I used to think I'd like to be your first sweetheart.
You were such a funny kid!'

She always kissed one as if she were sadly and wisely sending
one away forever.

We said many good-byes before I left Lincoln, but she never tried to hinder
me or hold me back. `You are going, but you haven't gone yet, have you?'
she used to say.

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

BOOK IV

The Pioneer Woman's Story

I

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

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

Poor Antonia! Everyone would be saying that now, I thought bitterly.
I replied that 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 settled 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 indulgently of Lena and severely of
Tiny Soderball, who had quietly gone West to try her fortune the year before.
A Black Hawk boy, just back from Seattle, brought the news that Tiny had
not gone to the coast on a venture, as she had allowed people to think,
but with very definite plans. One of the roving promoters that used to stop
at Mrs. Gardener's hotel owned idle property along the waterfront in Seattle,
and he had offered to set Tiny up in business in one of his empty buildings.
She was now conducting a sailors' lodging-house. This, everyone said,
would be the end of Tiny. Even if she had begun by running a decent place,
she couldn't keep it up; all sailors' boarding-houses were alike.

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

This is what actually happened to Tiny: While she was running
her lodging-house in Seattle, gold was discovered in Alaska.
Miners and sailors came back from the North with wonderful stories
and pouches of gold. Tiny saw it and weighed it in her hands.
That daring, which nobody had ever suspected in her, awoke.
She sold her business and set out for Circle City, in company with a
carpenter and his wife whom she had persuaded to go along with her.
They reached Skaguay in a snowstorm, went in dog-sledges
over the Chilkoot Pass, and shot the Yukon in flatboats.
They reached Circle City on the very day when some Siwash Indians
came into the settlement with the report that there had been a rich
gold strike farther up the river, on a certain Klondike Creek.
Two days later Tiny and her friends, and nearly everyone else
in Circle City, started for the Klondike fields on the last
steamer that went up the Yukon before it froze for the winter.
That boatload of people founded Dawson City. Within a few
weeks there were fifteen hundred homeless men in camp.
Tiny and the carpenter's wife began to cook for them, in a tent.
The miners gave her a building lot, and the carpenter put up a log
hotel for her. There she sometimes fed a hundred and fifty men a day.
Miners came in on snowshoes from their placer claims twenty miles
away to buy fresh bread from her, and paid for it in gold.

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

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

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

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

II

SOON AFTER I GOT home that summer, I persuaded my grandparents
to have their photographs taken, and one morning I went
into the photographer's shop to arrange for sittings.
While I was waiting for him to come out of his developing-room,
I walked about trying to recognize the likenesses on his walls:
girls in Commencement dresses, country brides and grooms
holding hands, family groups of three generations.
I noticed, in a heavy frame, one of those depressing
`crayon enlargements' often seen in farm-house parlours,
the subject being a round-eyed baby in short dresses.
The photographer came out and gave a constrained, apologetic laugh.

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

I went away feeling that I must see Antonia again.
Another girl would have kept her baby out of sight, but Tony,
of course, must have its picture on exhibition at the town
photographer's, in a great gilt frame. How like her!
I could forgive her, I told myself, if she hadn't thrown
herself away on such a cheap sort of fellow.

Larry Donovan was a passenger conductor, one of those train-crew
aristocrats who are always afraid that someone may ask them
to put up a car-window, and who, if requested to perform such a
menial service, silently point to the button that calls the porter.
Larry wore this air of official aloofness even on the street,
where there were no car-windows to compromise his dignity.
At the end of his run he stepped indifferently from
the train along with the passengers, his street hat on his
head and his conductor's cap in an alligator-skin bag,
went directly into the station and changed his clothes.
It was a matter of the utmost importance to him never
to be seen in his blue trousers away from his train.
He was usually cold and distant with men, but with all women
he had a silent, grave familiarity, a special handshake,
accompanied by a significant, deliberate look. He took women,
married or single, into his confidence; walked them up and down
in the moonlight, telling them what a mistake he had made
by not entering the office branch of the service, and how much
better fitted he was to fill the post of General Passenger Agent
in Denver than the rough-shod man who then bore that title.
His unappreciated worth was the tender secret Larry shared
with his sweethearts, and he was always able to make some
foolish heart ache over it.

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

`Mrs. Harling,' I said presently, `I wish I could find out exactly
how Antonia's marriage fell through.'

`Why don't you go out and see your grandfather'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.'

III

ON THE FIRST OR second day of August I got a horse and cart
and set out for the high country, 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 threshing-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 enriched and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort
that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines
of fertility. 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 rugged draw.
I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one
remembers the modelling 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 senator'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 basement to read his
farm papers. All the windows were open. The white summer moon was
shining outside, the windmill was pumping 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 down in her favourite rocking-chair
and settled a little stool comfortably under her tired feet.
`I'm troubled with calluses, Jim; getting 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 Shimerdas', 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, pedalling 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 work harder to go
to housekeeping right and well-prepared. Lovely table-linen the Harlings
had given her, and Lena Lingard had sent her nice things from Lincoln.
We hemstitched all the tablecloths and pillow-cases, and some of the sheets.
Old Mrs. Shimerda knit yards and yards of lace for her underclothes.
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 different 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 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 cheque.
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."

`'Twas 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 good-bye. 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, "Good-bye, dear house!"
and then 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 saying 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 began 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 another behind.
In the back seat there was a woman all bundled up; but for all her veils,
he thought `twas Antonia Shimerda, or Antonia 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 what they used to be, and I try to save myself.
The lines outside the Shimerdas' house was full of washing,
though it was the middle 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 herself.
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 mournful.
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."

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

`She sat down on the drawside, 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 afterward 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 natives and robbing the company.
He was always 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 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 pastures; but I felt bowed with despair.
My Antonia, that had so much good in her, had come home disgraced.
And that Lena Lingard, 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 marvelled 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 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 summer she never once came to see me.
At first I was hurt, but I got to feel that it was because 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 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 threshing, though she was too modest
to go out threshing for the neighbours, 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 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 forget 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.
Sometimes 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 coming 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 cattle put into the corral."
I seemed to sense she'd been feeling too miserable to get up
and drive them.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18