 Book three, Lena Lindgard, chapter two of My Antonia. 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 and 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. Optimideus prima fugit. I turned back to the beginning of the third book which we had read in class that morning. Primus ego and patrium mechum deducum musus. 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 neighborhood on the Meniccio 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 country, to his father's fields sloping down to the river and to the old beach-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 plow 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 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 to him. The voice seemed familiar, but I did not recognize her until she stepped into the light of the doorway, and I beheld Lena Lengard. 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 in a black lace hat with pale blue forget-me-nots sat demurely on her yellow hair. I led her towards Cleric's chair, the only comfortable one I had, questioning her confusingly. She was not disconcerted by my embarrassment. She looked about her with the naive curiosity I remembered so well. You're 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 rally block out on O Street. I 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 new witch. 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're 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. It slipped quietly into it as she did into everything. She told me her business was going well and she'd saved a little money. This summer I'm going to build a 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's too old to enjoy it. Next summer I'll take her down new furniture and carpet so she'll have something to look forward to all winter. I watched Laina 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. Well, you must feel proud of yourself, Laina, I said hardly. 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 someday. She's always bragging about you, you know. Tell me, how is Tony? She's fine. She works for Miss Gardner at the hotel now. She's housekeeper. Mrs. Gardner'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's 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 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 odor of violet sachet. So that's Latin, is it? It looks hard. You do go to the theater sometimes, so, 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, if it seems to me, to live in a place where there are theaters. Well, let's go to a show together sometime. You're gonna let me come and 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 borrowed 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. Well, you needn't hurry, needy. 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 hometown 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 lamp light. How I loved to hear her laugh again. It was so soft and unexcited and appreciative. Gave a favorable 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 lion, Optimideus Primafugit. End of Chapter 2. Book 3, Lena Lindgard, Chapter 3 of My Antonia. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Jeff Cowgill. My Antonia by Willa Cather. Book 3, Lena Lindgard, Chapter 3. 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 and 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 O 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 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 program 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 seem to remember having heard it was a piece in which great actress is shown. The Count of Monte Cristo, which I had seen James O'Neill play that winner, was by the only Alexander Dumas I knew. This play I saw was by his son and I expected a family resemblance. A couple of jackrabbits 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 curtain when the moody Varvilles seated before the fire interrogated Nanine. Decidedly there was a new tang about this dialogue. I had never heard in the theater lines that were alive that presupposed and took for granted like those which passed between Varvilles and Marguerite in the brief encounter before her friends entered. This introduced 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 open anywhere. The memory of that supper makes me hungry now. The sight of it then, when I had only students boarding house dinner behind me, was delicate torment. I seemed to remember gilded chairs and tables arranged hurriedly by footmen and 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 to open to one the brilliant world in which they lived. Every sentence made one older and wiser. Every pleasantry enlarged one's horizons. 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 ravaged countenance and a physique 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 armon was disproportionately young and slight, a handsome youth perplexed in the extreme. But what did it matter? I believed devoutly in her power to fascinate him in her dazzling loveliness. I believed her young, ardent, reckless, disillusioned, under-sentence, feverish, avid of pleasure. I wanted to cross the footlights and help the slim-waisted armon in the frilled shirt to convince her that there was still loyalty and devotion in the world. Her sudden illness, when the gaity 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 rung my heart. But not so much as her cynicism in the long dialogue with her lover which followed. Oh, 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 Mysterioso, Mysterioso, she maintained her bitter skepticism and the curtain fell on her dancing recklessly with the others after armon had been sent away with his flower. Between the acts we had no time to forget. The orchestra kept sawing away at the Traviata music so joyous and sad so thin and far away so claptrap and yet so heartbreaking. After the second act I left Lena in 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 Platsmouth. 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 a dillic love, dreading the return of the young man whose ineffable happiness was only to be the measure of his fall. I suppose no woman could have been further 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 consonance. 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. I'm on, she would begin, as if she were summoning him to the bar of judgment. But the lions were enough. She had only to utter them. They created the character in spite of her. The heartless world which Marguerite re-entered with Varville had never been so glittering and reckless as on the night when it gathered at Olymp's Ceylon 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 Duvall had been warned by Prudence, 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 Arman, with the terrible words, Look all of you, I owe this woman nothing, flung the gold and banknotes 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 love Nanine tenderly, and Gaston how one clung to that good fellow. 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 theatre the streets were shining with rain. I had prudently brought along Mrs. Harling's useful 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 blossoms together blew into my face with a sort of bitter sweetness. I tramped through the puddles and under the showery trees, mourning 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 circumstance can frustrate. Wherever and whenever that piece is put on it is April. How well I remember the stiff little parlor where I used to wait for Lena. The hard horsehair furniture bought at some auction sale. The long mirror. The fashion plates on the wall. 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. Laina's success puzzled me. She was so easy-going, had none of the push and self-assertiveness that get people ahead in business. She had come to Lincoln a country girl with no introductions except to some cousin of Miss 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 pouring 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 Laina literally hadn't enough clothes to cover herself might have something to do with her untiring interest in dressing the human figure. Her client said that Laina had style and overlooked her habitual inaccuracies. She never, I discovered, 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 Laina was ushering out a fidgety mother and her awkward overgrown daughter. The woman detained Laina at the door to say apologetically, Well, 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 would be all right, Mrs. Harren. I think we'll manage to get a good effect. Laina replied blandly. I thought her manner with her customer was very good, and wondered where she had learned such self-possession. Sometimes after my morning classes were over I used to encounter Laina downtown in her velvet suit and a little black hat with a veil tied smoothly over her face, looking as fresh as the spring morning. Maybe she would be carrying home a bunch of Johnquills 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 Bay if you can. She was very fond of sweets and was afraid of growing too chump. We had delightful Sunday breakfasts together at Laina's. At the back of her long workroom was a bay window large enough to hold a box couch and a reading-table. We breakfasted it 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. Laina'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. Laina's landlord, old Colonel Raleigh had given her the dog and at first she was not at all pleased. 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 milletry drill at the university and give him a yard measure to hold with his front leg. His gravity made his life immoderately. Laina's talk always amused me. Antonia had never talked like the people about her. Even after she learned to speak English readily there was always something impulsive and foreign in her speech. But Laina had picked up all the conventional expressions she heard at Mrs. Thomas' dressmaking shop. Those formal phrases, the very flower of small-town proprieties and the flat common places, nearly all hypocritical in their origin, became very funny, very engaging when they were uttered in Laina's soft voice with her caressing intonations and arc naivete. Nothing could be more diverting than to hear Laina, who was almost as candid as nature, call a leg a limb or a house a home. We used to linger a long while over our coffee in that sunny corner. Laina 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 opened. I could sit idle all through a Sunday morning and look at her. Oley Benson's behavior was now no mystery to me. There was never any harm in Oley, she once said. People needn't have troubled themselves. He'd just like to come over and sit on the draw-side and forget about his bad luck. I like to have him. Any company's welcome when you're off with cattle all the time. 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 a lot of queer places. He had wonderful tattoos. We used to sit and look at them for hours. There wasn't much to look at there. He was like a picture book. He had a ship and a strawberry girl and one arm, and on the other a girl standing before a little house, with a fence and a gate and all, waiting for her sweetheart. A further 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 Oley liked to look at a pretty girl once in a while with such a fright at home. Well, 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 by the time he hadn't a cent left and his watch and compass were gone. He'd got with some woman and they'd taken everything. He worked his way up to his 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 Oley. Oh, 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 sorryest for. If I happened to spend an evening with Lena and stayed late, the Polish vile integer across the hall used to come out and watch me descend the stairs, muttering so threateningly that it would have been easy to fall into a quarrel with him. Lena had told him once that she lacked to hear him practice, so he always left the 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 satisfied the former tenant. While these repairs were being made, the old gentleman often dropped in to consult Lena's preferences. 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 neighbours 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, coatless, in a dress shirt and collar. Prince dropped on his paws and began to growl like a mastiff, while the visitor apologised, 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 wrapped Prince on his nose while Ordinsky 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. Well, you could never pin that, Mr. Ordinsky. You've kept it folded too long, and the goods has 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 covered with dry, straw-coloured 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 heartily. He's a young woman for whom I have the most utmost utmost utmost respect. 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 understood in a place like this. The noblest qualities are ridiculed. Greening college boys, ignorant and conceited, what do they know of delicacy? I controlled my features and tried to speak seriously. Well, 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 travelled slowly down from the ceiling and rested on me. Am I to understand 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. Thus I have misjudged you and ask 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, no bless 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 have 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 wooden gloves on his bony hands. Lena spoke encouragingly at him, and he went off with such an important professional 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 was some deep understanding 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 Ordinsky in person. He declared that he would 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 intentional, he got a certain satisfaction from believing that the citizens of Lincoln had meekly accepted the epithet coarse barbarians. That 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 1st of June Gaston Cleric was offered an instructorship at Harvard College 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 seriously. You won't do anything here now. You should either quit school and go to work or change your college and begin again in earnest. You won't recover yourself while you're playing about with this handsome Norwegian. Yes, I've seen her with you at the theater. She's very pretty and perfectly irresponsible, I should judge. Cleric wrote my grandfather that he would like to take me east with him. To my astonishment, 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 and a big slipper. An awkward little Russian girl whom she had taken into her workroom 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 her, 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 interrupted her and picked up the flower basket. Well, this old chap will be proposing to you someday 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 him feel important to think they're in love with somebody. The Colonel wouldn't 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. 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 the 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 19 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 a kettle. 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, helping to wash her babies, trying to keep their little chapped hands and faces clean. She remembered home as a place where there were always too many children across 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 Saturday 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 wash tub 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 anything 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 somebody's thumb. What's on your mind, Jim? Are you afraid I'll want you to marry me someday? Then I told her I was going away. What makes you want to go away, Jim? Haven't they been nice to you? You've been just awfully good to me, Lena, I've learned it. 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 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 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 Saria, 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 Lincoln, but she never tried to hinder me or hold me back. You're 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 Clarke and Boston. I was then nineteen years old. End of chapter four. End of book three, Lena Lingard. By Willa Cather Book four The Pioneer Woman's Story Chapter one 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 Blackhawk. When we gathered in Grandmother's Parlor, 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, and that he had deserted her, and that there was now a baby. This was all I knew. He never married her, said Frances. 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 Ambrose's dredge 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. Well, Lena Lindgard, for whom people had always foretold trouble, was now the leading dressmaker of Lincoln, much respected in Blackhawk. Lena gave her heart away when she felt like it, but she kept her head for business, and had got on in the world. Just then it was a fashion to speak indulgently of Lena and severely of Tiny Sotterball, who had gone quietly west to try her fortune a year before. A Blackhawk 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. Gardner'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 sailor's 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 sailor's 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 and her high heels, carrying a big tray full 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 ask for two kinds of pie. Now it occurred 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 Blackhawk, Tiny's solderball 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, and company with a carpenter and his wife, whom she had persuaded to go along with her. They reached Gagway in a snowstorm, went on dog sledges, over the chill-cooked pass, and shot the Yukon in flatboats. They reached Circle City on the very day when some sea-wash 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 1,500 homeless men in camp. Tiny and the 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 the storm when he was trying to find his way back to his cabin. The poor fellow thought it great 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 Sotterball 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, 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. Gardiner, for whom she had worked in Blackhawk 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 Lindgard. She had persuaded Lena to come to San Francisco and to 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. Frisk goes 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 Blackhawk and 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 for becoming interested is worn out. The Pioneer Woman Story Chapter 2 Soon after I got home that summer, I persuaded my grandparents to have their photographs taken, and one morning I went to 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 farmhouse parlors, the subject being a round-eyed baby in short dresses. The photographer came out and gave a constrained apologetic laugh. That's Tony Shamirda's baby. You remember her. She used to be the Harlings Tony. Too bad. She seems proud of the baby, though, wouldn't hear of 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 photographers, in a great guilt 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 trained 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 skinned 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 the 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. Charlie 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 the 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 Stevens? 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 Stevens is a good talker, and she has a remarkable memory. Chapter 3 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 Stevens. 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 wheat fields and cornfields. The red grass was disappearing, and the whole face of the country was changing. There were wooden houses where the old sawed 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 blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat table-land. 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 sand bank and rugged draw. I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modeling of human faces. When I drew up to our old windmill, the widow Stevens 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 the 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. Stevens 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 favorite 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 Shamiridas, and she made all her things here. I taught her him stitching, and I helped her cut and fit. She used to sit here at that machine by the window, peddling 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 peddle and sing again. I never saw a girl work harder to go to housekeeping right and well-prepared. Lovely table-lin in the Harlings had given her, and Lina Lengard had sent her nice things from Lincoln. We hemstitched all the table-claws and pillowcases, and some of the sheets. Old Mrs. Shamirida 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, Ambrose did the right thing. He went to Blackhawk 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'd worked out, and it was but right. I shook him by the hand in this room. You're behaving like a man, Ambrose, like I said, and I'm glad to see it, son. It was a cold, raw day, he drove her and her three trunks into Blackhawk 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 at her. She laughed kind of flighty-like and whispered good-bye, dear house, and then ran out into the wagon. I expect she meant for you and your grandmother as much 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 had 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 Jolka got a postcard saying she was well and happy. But after that we heard nothing. A month went by, and old Mrs. Shamirita began to get fretful. Ambrose 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 delivery 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 it was Antonya Shamirita, or Antonya 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 Shamirita's house was full of washing, though it was the middle of the week. As I 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. Jolka came bringing a dishpan full of rung clothes, but she darted back into the house like she was loathed to see us. When I went in Antonya was standing over the tubs just finishing up a big washing. Mrs. Shamirita 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 arm she drew away. Don't Mrs. Stevens, 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, bare-headed, and we walked up toward the garden. I'm not married, Mrs. Stevens, she said to me, very quiet and natural-like, and I ought to be. Oh, my child, says I, what happened to you? Don't be afraid to tell me. She sat down in 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. Black listed 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 afterwards I found he hadn't really been hunting for work at all. Then he just didn't come back. One nice fellow up at the station told me, when I kept going up 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-fairs off the natives and robbing the company. He was always talking to 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. Stevens. 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 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 cold's jumping around in the westerns, but I felt bowed with despair. My Antonia, that had so much good in her, had come home disgraced. And that Lina Lengard, who was always the 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 Burton, that there is a great difference in the principles of those two girls. And here it was that the good one 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 dry and 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 plowing corn. All that spring and summer she did the work of a man on the farm. It seemed to be an understood thing. Ambrose didn't get any other hand to help him. Poor Merrick had got violent and been sent away to an institution a good while back. I never saw any of Tony's pretty dresses. She didn't take him 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 Blackhawk to a dentist for fear of meeting people she knew. Ambrose had got over his good spell long ago, and was always surly. Once I told him he ought not to let Antonya 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. Antonya 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 had begun to hurt Ambrose'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 of peace 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 Lana used to, she said one day. But if I start to work I look around and forget to go on. It seems like 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. Dear Amy, says I to myself, the girls 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. 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 without calling anybody, without a groan, she lay down on the bed and bore her child. I was lift in supper when Mrs. Shamirita came running down the basement stairs out of breath and screeching, Baby come, baby come, she says, and broach much like devil. Brother William was surely a patient man. He was just ready to sit down to a hot supper 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 tub full of warm water to wash the baby. I overlooked what she was doing and said out loud, Mrs. Shamirita, you don't put that strong yellow soap near the baby. You'll blister its little skin. I was indignant. Mrs. Stevens, 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 Ambrose. He was muttering behind the stove and wouldn't look at it. You'd better put it in the rain barrel, he said. Now, see here, Ambrose, 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 interested 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 summer wind blowing in at the windows, bringing the smell of 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. The next afternoon I walked over to the Chimeras. Joica 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 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. Stevens last night. I have been looking for you all day. She was thinner than I had ever seen her, and looked, as Mrs. Stevens 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 mine, she was barely twenty-four years old. Antonia stuck her pitchfork in the ground, and instinctively we walked toward that unplowed 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. Chimeras' 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 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 go into the law office of one of my mother's relatives 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 anybody 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 city. I 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 I ever 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 anyone else from this part of the world. I'd have liked to have had 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 is old enough to tell her about all the things we used to do. You'll always remember me when you think about the old times, won't you? And I guess everybody thinks about the 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 cartwheel, pale silver and streaked with rose color, thin as a bubble or a ghost moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world, in that singular light every 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 furrows 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 nightfall. I wished that I could be a little boy again, and that my way would end here. We reached the edge of the field where our ways parted. I took our hands and held them against my breast, feeling once more how strong and warm and good they were, those 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 a girl ran alongside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass. CHAPTER 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 Antonia Lenek, 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 Kuzak. 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. Perhaps it was cowardice that kept me away so long. My business took me west several times every year, and it was always in the back of my mind that I would stop in Nebraska 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 won 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 apartment house just around the corner. It interested 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 anything 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 Antonia, and urged me to make her a visit. 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 Cusick. You 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 myself, 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 Cusick 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 shoulder, and was comforting him in a language 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. Cusick'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 grey 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 followed 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 lambswool, growing down on his neck in little tufts. He tied my team with two flourishes at his hands and nodded when I asked him if his mother was at home. As he glanced at me, his face dimpled with a seizure of irrelevant merriment, 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. Books 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 bin of four 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 stockings, came to the door to admit me. She was a buxom girl with dark hair and eyes, calm and self-possessed. Don'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 and take more courage than the noisy, excited 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 identity stronger. She was there, and the full vigor of her personality, battered but not diminished, 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. 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 Hastings 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 kittens. You don't have to go right off, Jim. My oldest boy's not here. He's gone with his papa to the street fair at Wilbur. I won't let you go. You've got to stay and see Rudolph and our papa. She looked at me imploringly, panting with excitement. While I reassured her and told her there would be plenty of time, the bare-footed boys from outside were slipping into the kitchen and gathering about her. Now tell me their names and how old they are. As she told the moth in turn she made several 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 forgot. You always forget mine. It's mean. Please tell him, mother." He clenched his fists in vexation and looked up at her impetuously. 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 delight 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 door, scattered them gently and came bringing 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." Antonio 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 parlor after a 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. Antonio explained, Ain't her eyes like Nina's? I declared, Jim, I loved you children almost as much as I loved my own. These children know all about you and Charlie 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 so stirred up. And then I forgot my English, 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 yourself, but it's easier for a man. I can't see how my auntan looks any older than the day I married 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 reproachfully from the dishes. Antonia threw up her head and laughed. I can't help it. You know I do. Maybe 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—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 Yon came in and sat down on the step beside Nina, under the hood of the stairway. 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 grey 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 and 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 behind her mother's chair. Why don't we show Mr. Bird on 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. Ambrose, the thoughtful-looking one who had directed me down by the plum-bushes, called my attention to the stout brick walls on 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 chopped pickles, and one full of pickled watermelon 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, to 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 Yon, and a little girl named Lucy, kept shyly pointing out to me the shelves of glass jars. They said nothing, but glanced at me, traced on the glass with their fingertips the outline of the cherries, and strawberries, and crab-apples within, trying by a blissful expression 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 collaches, he added. Leo, in a low voice, tossed off some scornful remark in Bohemian. I turned to him. You don't think I know what collaches are, eh? You're a mistaken young man. I've eaten your mother's collaches long before that Easter day when you were born. Always too fresh, Leo, Ambrose remarked 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 together, big and little, toe-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 hollyhocks, 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 Mamosa family. From here one looked down over the 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 current bushes between the rows, and an apple orchard, sheltered by a high hedge from the hot winds. The older children turned back when we reached the hedge, but Jan and Nina and Lucy 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 blue grass, Antonia kept stopping to tell me about one tree and another. I love them as if they were people, she said, rubbing her hands 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 those 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 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 neighbours 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, crawling about and measuring with a string. Yawn wants to bury his dog there, Antonia explained. 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 deepest peace in that orchard. It was surrounded 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 the 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 you remember how you used to want to run away and go for ducks with Charlie 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 ring 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. It only shoots clay pigeons. Then I'm sure she's a good mother. Antonia said warmly. She told me how she and her husband had come out to this new country when the farmland 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 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 downhearted. Anton's a good man, and I loved my children and always believed they would turn out well. I've been long on a farm. I've never learnt some 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 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 learnt 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 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 Ambrose goes along to look after him. I told her I would like to sleep in the haymow 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 Ambrose and Anton, starting off with their milking-pales 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 iron-weed calling, I'm a jack-rabbit, or I'm a big bull snake. I walked between the two older boys, straight, well-made fellows with good heads and clear eyes. They talked about their school and their 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?' Ambrose asked. We've had them framed when 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 together, seemed a little surprised that I should think it necessary to mention this. Everybody 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,' Ambrose 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.' We brought the cows home to the corner nearest the barn, and the boys milked them while the 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 seemed 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 Antonia as she sat at the head of the table, filling the plates and starting the dishes on their way. The children were seated according to a system, a little one next to an older one, who was to watch over his behavior and see that he got his food. Anna and Yulka left their chairs from time to time to bring fresh plates of kolaches and pictures of milk. After supper we went into the parlour, so that Yulka and Leo could play for me. Antonia went first, carrying the lamp. There were not nearly chairs enough to go round, so the younger children sat down on the bare floor. Little Lucy whispered to me that they were going to have a parlour 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 and Bohemian. He frowned and wrinkled up his face. He seemed to be trying to pout, but his attempt only brought out dimples and 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 fawn-like. He hadn't much head behind his ears, and his tawny fleece grew down thick to the back of his neck. His eyes were not frank and wide apart like those of the other boys, but were deep-set, gold-green in colour, and seemed sensitive to the light. His mother said he got hurt oftener than all the others put together. His mother said he got hurt oftener than all the others put together. He was always trying to ride the colts before they were broken, 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 box full of photographs. She and Antonin their wedding-clothes, holding hands, her brother Ambrose 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. Marys Voboda's the best buttermaker in all this country, and a fine manager, her children will have a grand chance. As Antonia turned over the pictures the young Cusick stood behind her chair, looking 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 little boy forgot his shyness, and grinned delightedly 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 photographs with pleased recognition, looked at some admiringly, as if these characters and their mother's girlhood had been remarkable people. The little children, who could not speak English, 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 dimpled ingenuousness still lurking at the corners of her mouth. There was a picture of Frances Harling in a befrogged riding costume that I remembered well. Isn't she fine, the girls murmured. They all assented. One could see that Frances had come down as a heroine in the family legend. Only Leo was unmoved. 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 Master Leo, in a very low tone, which reminded me of the way in which Mrs. Shimmerda had once said that my grandfather wasn't Jesus. His habitual skepticism was like a direct inheritance from that old woman. None of your smart speeches, said Ambrose severely. Leo poked out a supple red tongue at him, but a moment later broke into a giggle at a tin-type of two men, uncomfortably seated, with an awkward-looking boy and baggy clothes standing between them. Jake and Otto and I—we had it taken, I remembered, when we went to Blackhawk on the first Fourth of July I spent in Nebraska. I was glad to see Jake's grin again and Otto's ferocious moustaches. The young Cusicks knew all about them. He made grandfather's coffin, didn't he? Anton asked. Wasn't they good fellows, Jim? Antonia's eyes filled. To this day I'm ashamed because I quarreled with Jake that way. I was saucy and impertinent to him, Leo, just like you are with people sometimes, and I wish somebody 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 Charlie, 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 entertainment 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 Hamo, and I lay down before a big window, left open and warm weather, that looked out into the stars. Ambrose 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 Antonia and her children, about Anna's solicitude for her, Ambrose'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 wood-cuts of one's first primer. Antonia kicking her bare legs against the side 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 evening skyline. She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognized 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.