 Book 2, Chapter 6 of Myantinia. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Crystal Layton. Myantinia by Willa Cather. Book 1, Hired Girls, Chapter 6. Winter comes down savagely over little town on the prairie. The wind that sweeps in from the upper country slips away all the leafy screams that hide one yard from another in summer, and the houses seem to draw closer together. The roofs that look so far away across the green tree tops now stare at you in the face, and they're so much uglier than when their angles were softened by vines and shrubs. In the morning, when I was fighting my way to school against the wind, I couldn't see anything but the road in front of me. But in the late afternoon when I was coming home, the town looked bleak and desolate to me. The pale cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify. It was like the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the blue drifts. Then the wind sprang up afresh with a kind of bitter song as if it said, This is reality whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies and this is what was underneath. This is the truth. It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer. If I loitered on the playground after school or went to the post office to the mail and lingered to hear the gossip about the cigar stand, it would be growing dark by the time I came home. The sun was gone, the frozen streets stretched long and blue before me. The lights were shining pale in kitchen windows and I could smell the supper's cooking as I passed. Few people were abroad and each one of them was hurring toward a fire. The glowing stoves in the houses were like magnets. When one passed an old man one could see nothing of his face but a red nose sticking out between a frosted beard and a long flush cap. The young men capered along with their hands in their pockets and sometimes tried to slide on the ice a sidewalk. The children in their bright hoods and comforters never walked but always ran from the moment they left their door, feeding their mittens against their sides. I got as far as a method as church. I was about half way home. I can remember how glad I was when there happened to be a light in the church and the painted glass windows shown out at us as we came along the frozen street. In the winter, blakeness and hunger for color came over people like the latlanders craving for fats and sugar. Without knowing why, we used to linger on the sidewalk outside the church when the lamps were lighted early for choir practice or prayer meeting, shivering and talking until our feet were like lumps of ice. The crude reds and greens and blues of that colored glass held us there. On winter nights, the lights in the harling's window drew me like the painted glass. Inside that warm, roomy house there was color too. After supper, I used to catch up my cap, stick my hands on my pockets and dive through the willow hedge as if witches were after me. Of course, if Mr. Harling was at home, if his shadow stood out in the blind of the west room, I did not go in but turned and walked home by the long way through the street, wondering what book I should read as I sat down with the two old people. Such disappointments only gave greater zest than nights when we accessed your aids or had a costume ball in the back parlor when Sally always dressed like a boy. Frances taught us to dance that winter and she said from the first lesson that Antioch would make the best dancer among us. On Saturday nights, Mrs. Harling used to play the old operas for us, Martha, Norma, Rigoletto, telling us a story while she played. Every Saturday night was like a party. The parlor, the back parlor in the dining room were warm and brightly lighted with comfortable chairs and sofas and gay pictures on the walls. One always felt at ease there. Antonia brought her sewing and sat with us. She was already beginning to make pretty clothes for herself. After the long winter evenings on the prairie, when ambrosious sudden silences in her mother's complaints, the Harling's house seemed as she said like heaven to her. She was never too tired to make taffy or chocolate cookies for us. If Sally whispered in her ear or Charlie gave her three winks, Tony would rush into the kitchen and build a fire on the range in which she had already cooked three meals that day. While we sat in the kitchen waiting for the cookies to bake or the taffy to cool, Nina used to coax Antonia to tell her stories about the calf that broke its leg or how Yulka saved her little turkeys from drowning in the freshet or about old Christmases and weddings in Bohemia. Nina interrupted the stories by the crash fancily and in spite of our derision, she cherished a belief that Christ was born in Bohemia a short time before the Shemurdas left that country. We all liked Tony's stories. Her voice had a peculiarly engaging quality. It was deep, a little husky, and when always heard the breath vibrating behind it, everything she said seemed to come right out of her heart. One evening when we were picking out kernels for Walnut taffy, Tony told us a news story. Mrs. Harling, did you overhear about what happened up in the Norwegian settlement last summer when I was thrashing there? We were at Iversons and I was driving one of the grain wagons. Mrs. Harling came out and sat down among us. Could you throw the wheat into the bin yourself, Tony? She knew what heavy work it was. Yes, ma'am, I did. I could shovel just as fast that fat-annered boy that drove the other wagon. One day it was just awful hot. When we got back to the field from dinner, we took things kind of easy. The men put in the horses and got the machine going, and old Iverson was up on the deck cutting bands. I was sitting against a straw stack trying to get some shade. My wagon wasn't going out first, and somehow I felt the heat awful that day. The sun was so hot like I was going to burn the whole world up. After a while I see a man come across the stubble, and when he got close I see it was a tramp. His toe stuck out of his shoes and he hadn't shaved for a long while, and his eyes were awful red and wild like he had some sickness. He comes right up and begins to talk like he knows me already, he says. The ponds in this country's dun got so low a man couldn't drown himself in one of them. I told him nobody wanted to drown themselves, but if we didn't have rain soon we'd have to pump water for the cattle. Oh, cattle, he says. Y'all take care of your cattle. Ain't you got no beer here? I told me now to go to Bohemian for beer. The Norwegians didn't have none when they thrashed. My god, he says. So it's Norwegians now, is it? I thought this was America. Then he goes up to the machine and yells out to old Iverson. Hello, partner, let me up there. I can cut bands and I'm tired of tramping. I won't go no farther. I try to make signs to old because I thought that man was crazy and might get the machine stopped up. But oh, he was glad to get down out of the sun in shape. It's down your neck and sticks to you something awful when it's hot like that. So old jumped down and called on him when the wagons were shade and the tramp got on the machine. He cut bands all right for a few minutes and then Mrs. Harling, he waved his hand at me and jumped head first right into the thrashed machine after that week. I began to scream and the men ran to stop the horses but the belt had sucked them down and by the time they got her stopped he was all beaten, cut to pieces. He was wedged in so tight it was a hard job to get him out and the machine had never worked right since. Was he clear dead, Tony, we cried? Was he dead? Well, I guess so. There now, Nina's all upset. We won't talk about it. Don't you cry, Nina. No old tramp will get you all, Tony's here. Mrs. Harling spoke up sternly. Stop crying, Nina. Or I'll always send you upstairs when Antonia tells us about the country. Did they never find out where he came from, Antonia? Never, ma'am. He hadn't been seen nowhere except the little town they call Conway. He tried to get beer there but there wasn't any saloon. Maybe he came on a freight but the bright man hadn't seen him. They couldn't find no letters nor nothing on him. Nothing but an old pen knife in his pocket and the wishbone of a chicken wrapped up in a piece of paper and some poetry. Some poetry, we exclaimed. I remember, said Francis. It was the old oak and bucket cut out of a newspaper and nearly worn out. The virus had brought it into the office and showed it to me. I wasn't that strange, Mrs. Francis, Tony asked thoughtfully. What would anybody want to kill themselves in summer for? And thrash in time, too. It's nice everywhere, then. So it is Antonia, said Mrs. Harling heartily. Maybe I'll go home and help you thrash next summer. Isn't that tapping really ready to eat? I haven't smelled it a long while. There's a basic harmony between Antonia and her mistress. They had strong, independent natures, both of them. They knew what they liked and were not always trying to imitate other people. They loved children and animals and music and rough play and digging in the earth. They liked to prepare rich, hearty food and to see people eat it to make a soft, white bed and to see youngsters asleep in them. They ridiculed conceited people and were quick to help unfortunate ones. Deep down in each of them, there's a kind of hearty duality. A relative life, not over-delicate, but very invigorating. I never tried to define it, but I was distinctly conscious of it. I couldn't imagine Antonia living for a week in any other house in Blackhawk than the Harlings is. End of Chapter 6. Recording by Crystal Layton. On the farm, the weather was the great fact, and the men's affairs went on underneath it, as the steams creep under the ice. But in Blackhawk, the scene of human life was spread out, shrunken and pitched, frozen down to the bare stock. Through January and February, I went to the river with the Harlings on clear nights and we skated up to the big island and made bonfires on the frozen sand. But by March, the ice was rough and choppy and the snow on the river bluffs was gray and mournful looking. I was tired of school, tired of winter clothes, of rutted streets, of the dirty drifts and piles of cinders that had lain in the yard so long. There was only one break in the dreary monotony of that month. When blind did I know, the Negro pianist came to town. He gave a concert at the opera house on Monday night, and he and his manager spent Saturday and Sunday at our comfortable hotel. Mrs. Harling had known Diano for years. She told Antonia that she had better go see Tiny that Saturday evening, as there would certainly be music at the boy's home. Saturday night, after supper, I ran downtown to the motel and slipped quietly into the parlor. The chairs and sofas were already occupied and the air snowed pleasantly of cigar smoke. The parlor had once been two rooms and the floor was sway-backed where the partition had been cut away. The wind from without made waves in the long carpet. A coal stove glowed at either end of the room and the grand piano in the middle stood open. There was an atmosphere of unusual freedom about the house that night, for Mrs. Gardner had gone to Omaha for a week. Johnny had been having drinks with the guests until he was rather absent-minded. It was Mrs. Gardner who ran the business and looked after everything. Her husband stood at the desk and welcomed incoming travelers. He was a popular fellow, but no manager. Mrs. Gardner was admittedly the best dressed woman in Blackhawk, drove the best horse, and had a smart trap and a little white and gold sleigh. She seemed indifferent to her possessions, was not half so solicitous about them as her friends were. She was tall, dark, severe, with something Indian-like and the rigid immobility of her face. Her manner was cold and she talked little. Guests felt that they were receiving, not conferring, a favour when they stayed at her house. Even the smartest travelling men were flattered when Mrs. Gardner stopped to chat with them for a moment. The patrons of the hotel were divided into two classes, those who had seen Mrs. Gardner's diamonds and those who had not. When I stole into the parlor, Anson Kirk-Patrick, Marshall Fieldsman, was at the piano, playing airs from a musical comedy then running in Chicago. He was a dapper little Irish man, very vain, homely as a monkey, with friends everywhere and a sweetheart in every port, like a sailor. I did not know all the men who were sitting about, but I recognized a furniture salesman from Kansas City, a drug man, and Willie O'Reilly, who traveled for a jewelry house and sold musical instruments. The talk was all about good and bad hotels, actors and actresses, and musical protégés. I learned that Mrs. Gardner had gone to Omaha to hear Booth and Barrett, who were to play there next week, and that Mary Anderson was having a great success in A Winter's Tale in London. The door from the office opened and Johnny Gardner came in, directing Blind Arnaud. He would never consent to be led. He was a heavy, bulky mulatto, on short legs, and came tapping the floor in front of him with his gold-headed cane. His yellow face was lifted in the light, with a show of white teeth, all grinning, and his shrunken, papery eyelids lay motionless over his blind eyes. Good evening, gentlemen. No ladies here? Good evening, gentlemen. We going to have a little music? Some of you gentlemen going to play for me this evening? It was the soft, amiable Negro voice, like those I remembered from early childhood, with the note of docile subservience in it. He had the Negro head, too, almost no head at all, nothing behind the ears, the folds of neck under closed-clipped wool. He would have been repulsive if his face had not been so kindly and happy. It was the happiest face I had seen since I left Virginia. He felt his weight directly to the piano. The moment he sat down, I noticed the nervous infirmity of which Mrs. Harling had told me. When he was sitting, or standing still, he swayed back and forth incessantly, like a rocking toy. At the piano he swayed in time to the music, and when he was not playing, his body kept up this motion, like an empty mill grinding on. He found the petals and tried them, ran his yellow hands up and down the keys a few times, tinkling off scales, then turned to the company. She seems all right, gentlemen. Nothing happened to her since the last time I was here. Mrs. Gardner, she always has the piano tuned up for me before I come. Now, gentlemen, I expect you've all got grand voices. Seems like we might have some good old plantation songs tonight. The men gathered round him as he began to play my old Kentucky home. They sang one negro melody after another, while the mulatto sat rocking himself, his head thrown back, his yellow face lifted, its shriveled eyelids never fluttering. He was born in the far south, on the Darno plantation, where the spirit, if not the fact, of slavery persisted. When he was three weeks old, he had an illness which left him totally blind. And as soon as he was old enough to sit up alone and tattle about, another affliction, the nervous motion of his body, became apparent. His mother, a Buxom young negro, went she was a laundress for the Darno's, concluded that her blind baby was not right in his head and she was ashamed of him. She loved him devotedly, but he was so ugly with his sunken eyes and his fidgets that she hid him away from people. All the dainties she brought down from the big house were for the blind child, and she beat and cuffed her other children whenever she found them teasing him or trying to get his chicken bone away from him. He began to talk early, remembering everything he heard, and his mammy said he wasn't all wrong. She named him Samson because he was blind, but on the plantation he was known as Yellow Martha's Simple Child. He was docile and obedient, but when he was six years old he began to run away from home, always taking the same direction. He felt his way through the lilacs along the boxwood hedge up to the south wing of the big house where Mrs. Nellie Darno practiced the piano every morning. This angered his mother more than anything else he could have done. She was so ashamed of his ugliness that she couldn't bear to have white folks look at him. Whenever she caught him slipping away from the cabin, she whipped him unmercifully and told him what dreadful things old Mr. Darno would do to him if he ever found him near the big house. But the next time Samson had a chance, he ran away again. If Mrs. Darno stopped practicing for a moment and went towards the window, she saw this hideous little picatinny dressed in an old piece of sacking, standing in the open space between the Holly Hawk Rose. His body rocking automatically, his blind face lifted to the sun and wearing an expression of idiotic rapture. Often she was tempted to tell Martha that the child must be kept at home, but somehow the memory of his foolish happy face deterred her. She remembered that his sense of hearing was all he had, though it did not occur to her that he might have more of it than other children. One day Samson was standing thus while Mrs. Nellie was playing her lesson to her music master. The windows were open. He heard them get up from the piano, talk a little while, and then leave the room. He heard the door close after them. He crept up the front windows and stuck his head in. There was no one there. He could always detect the presence of anyone in a room. He put one foot over the window sill and straddled it. His mother had told him over and over how his master would give him to the big mastiff if he ever found him meddling. Samson had got too near the mastiff's kennel once, and had felt his terrible breath on his face. He thought about that, but he pulled in his other foot. Through the dark he found his way to the thing, to its mouth. He touched it softly, and it answered softly, kindly. He shivered and stood still. Then he began to feel it all over, ran his fingertips along the slippery sides, embraced the carved legs, tried to get some conception of its shape and size, of the space it occupied in primeval night. It was cold and hard, and like nothing else in his black universe. He went back to its mouth, began at one end of the keyboard, and felt his way down into the mellow thunder as far as he could go. He seemed to know that it must be done with the fingers and not with the fists or the feet. He approached this highly artificial instrument through a mere instinct and coupled himself to it, as if he knew it was to piece him out and make a whole creature of him. After he had tried all of the sounds, he began to finger out passages from things Miss Nellie had been practicing, passages that were already his, that lay under the bones of his pinched, conical little skull, definite as animal desires. The door opened. Miss Nellie and her music master stood behind it, but Blind Samson, who was so sensitive to presences, did not know they were there. He was feeling out the pattern that lay already made on the big and little keys. When he paused for a moment, because the sound was wrong and he wanted another, Miss Nellie spoke softly. He whirled about in a spasm of terror, leaped forward in the dark, struck his head on the open window, and fell screaming and bleeding to the floor. He had what his mother called a fit. The doctor came and gave him opium. When Samson was well again, his young mistress led him back to the piano. Several teachers experimented with him. They found he had absolute pitch and a remarkable memory. As a very young child, he could repeat, after a fashion, any composition that was played for him. No matter how many wrong notes he struck, he never lost the intention of the passage. He brought the substance of it across by irregular and astonishing means. He wore his teachers out. He could never learn like other people, never acquired any finish. He was always a negro prodigy who played barbarously and wonderfully. As piano playing, it was perhaps abominable, but as music it was something real, vitalized by a sense of rhythm that was stronger than his other physical senses. That not only filled his dark mind, but worried his body incessantly. To hear him, to watch him, was to see a negro enjoying himself as only a negro can. It was as if all the agreeable sensations possible to creatures of flesh and blood were heaped up on those black and white keys, and he were gloating over them and trickling them through his yellow fingers. In the middle of a crashing waltz, Darno suddenly began to play softly, and, turning to one of the men who stood behind him, whispered, Somebody dance in and there. He jerked his bullet head towards the dining room. I heard little feet. Girls, I suspect. Dancing Kirkpatrick mounted the chair and peeped over the transom. Springing down, he wrenched open the doors and ran out into the dining room. Tiny and Lena, Antonia and Mary Dusak were waltzing in the middle of the floor. They separated and fled towards the kitchen, giggling. Kirkpatrick caught Tiny by the elbows. What's the matter with you girls? Dancing out here by yourselves when there's a room full of lonesome men on the other side of the partition. Introduce me to your friends, Tiny. The girls still laughing. We're trying to escape. Tiny looked alarmed. Mrs. Gardner wouldn't like it. She protested. She'd be awful mad if you was to come out here and dance with us. Mrs. Gardner's an Omaha girl. Now you're Lena, aren't you? And you're Tony and you're Mary. Have I got you all straight? Oh, Riley and the others began to pile the chairs on the tables. Johnny Gardner ran in from the office. Easy boys, easy, he entreated them. You'll wake the cook, and there'll be the devil to pay for me. She won't hear the music, but she'll be down in the minute anything's moved in the dining room. Oh, what do you care, Johnny? Fire the cook and wire Molly to bring another. Come along. Nobody'll tell tales. Johnny shook his head. Saffect boys, he said confidently. If I take a drink in Blackhawk, Molly knows it in Alabama. His guests laughed and slapped him on the shoulders. Oh, we'll make it all right with Molly. Get your back up, Johnny. Molly was Mrs. Gardner's name, of course. Molly Bond was painted in large blue letters in the glossy white side of the hotel bus, and Molly was engraved inside Johnny's ring and on his watch case, doubtless on his heart, too. He was an affectionate little man, and he thought his wife a wonderful woman. He knew that without her he would hardly be more than a clerk in some other man's hotel. At a word from Kirkpatrick, Darno spreaded himself out over the piano and began to draw the dance music out of it, while the perspiration shone on his short wool and on his uplifted face. He looked like some glistening African god of pleasure full of strong, savage blood. Whenever the dancers paused to change partners or to catch breath, he would boom out softly. Who's that going back on me? One of these city gentlemen, I bet. Now you girls, you ain't gonna let that floor get cold. Antonia seemed frightened at first, and kept looking questioningly at Lena and Tiny over Willie O'Reilly's shoulder. Tiny's soda ball was trim and slender, with lively little feet and pretty ankles. She wore her dress very short. She was quicker in speech, lighter in movement and manner than the other girls. Mary Dusek was broad and brown of countenance, slightly marked by smallpox, but handsome for all that. She had beautiful chestnut hair, coils of it, her forehead was low and smooth, and her commanding dark eyes regarded the world indifferently and fearlessly. She looked bold and resourceful and unscrupulous, and she was all of these. They were handsome girls, had the fresh color in their country upbringing, and in their eyes that brilliancy which is called by no metaphor, alas, the light of youth. Darno played until his manager came and shut the piano. Before he left us, he showed us his gold watch, which struck the hours, and a topaz ring, given him by some Russian nobleman who delighted in Negro melodies, and had heard Darno play in New Orleans. At last he tapped his way upstairs, after bowing to everybody in docile and happy. I walked home with Antonia. We were so excited that we dreaded to go to bed. We lingered a long while at the harlings' gate, whispering in the cold, until the restlessness was slowly chilled out of us. My Antonia by Willa Kether Book 2 The Hired Girls Chapter 8 The harling children and I were never happier, never felt more contented and secure than in the weeks of spring which broke that long winter. We were out all day in the thin sunshine, helping Mrs. Harling and Tony break the ground and plant the garden, dig around the orchard trees, tie up the vines and clip the hedges. Every morning before I was up I could hear Tony singing in the garden rows. After the apple and cherry trees broke into bloom, we ran around them, hunting for the new nests the birds were building, throwing clods at each other, and playing hide and seek with Nina. Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even, in the quietest of country towns. And they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting. It must have been June, for Mrs. Harling and Antonia were preserving cherries, and I stopped one morning to tell them that a dancing pavilion had come to town. I had seen two drays harling the canvas and painted poles up from the depot. That afternoon, three cheerful looking Italians strode about Blackhawk, looking at everything, and with them was a dark, stout woman who wore a long, gold-watched chain around her neck and carried a black lace parasol. They seemed especially interested in children and vacant lots. When I ever took them and stopped to say a word, I found them affable and confiding. They told me they worked in Kansas City in the winter and in the summer they went among the farming towns with their tent and taught dancing. When business fell off in one place, they moved to another. The dancing pavilion was put up near the Danish laundry on a vacant lot surrounded by tall, arching cottonwood trees. It was very much like a merry-go-round tent, with open sides and gray flags flying from the poles. Before the week was over, all the ambitious mothers were sending their children to the afternoon dancing class. At three o'clock one met little girls in white dresses and little boys in the round-colored shirts of the time, hurrying along the sidewalk on their way to the tent. Mrs. Vanny received them at the entrance, always dressed in lavender and a great deal of black lace, her important watch chain lying on her bosom. She wore her hair on the top of her head built up in a black tower with red coral combs. When she smiled, she showed two rows of strong, crooked, yellow teeth. She taught the little children herself and her husband, the harpist, taught the older ones. Often the mothers brought their fancy work and sat on the shady side of the tent during the lesson. The popcorn man wheeled his glass wagon under the big cottonwood by the door and lounged in the sun, sure of a good trade when dancing was over. Mr. Jensen, the Danish laundry man, used to bring a chair from his porch and sit out in the grass plot. Some ragged little boys from the depot sold pop and ice lemonade under a white umbrella at the corner and made faces at the spruce youngsters who came to dance. The vacant lot soon became the most cheerful place in town. Even on the hottest afternoons the cottonwoods made a rustling shade and the air smelled of popcorn and melted butter and bouncing bets wilting in the sun. Those hearty flowers had run away from the laundry man's garden and the grass in the middle of the lot was pink with them. The vanes kept exemplary order and closed every evening at the hour suggested by the city council. When Mrs. Vanny gave the signal and the harp struck up home sweet home, all black hawk knew it was ten o'clock. You could set your watch by that tune as confidently as by the roundhouse whistle. At last there was something to do in those long empty summer evenings when the married people sat like images on the front porches and the girls and boys Northward to the edge of the open prairie, south to the depot, then back again to the post office, the ice cream parlor, the butcher shop. Now there was a place where girls could wear their new dresses and where one could laugh aloud without being reproved by the ensuing silence. That silence seemed to ooze out of the ground to hang under the foliage of the black maple trees with the bats and shadows. Now it was broken by the light-herded sounds. First the deep purring of Mr. Vanny's harp came in silvery ripples through the blackness of the dusky smelling night. Then the violins fell in. One of them was almost like a flute. They called so archly, so seductively, that our feet hurried towards the tent of themselves. Why hadn't we had a tent before? Dancing became popular now just as roller skating had been the summer before. The Progressive Euker Club arranged with the Vanny's for the exclusive use of the floor on Tuesday and Friday nights. At other times anyone could dance who paid his money and was orderly. The railroad men, the roundhouse mechanics, the delivery boys, the ace man, the farm hands who lived near enough to ride into town after the day's work was over. I never missed a Saturday night dance. The tent was open until midnight then. The country boys came in from the farms eight and ten miles away and all the country girls were on the floor. Antonia and Lena and Tiny and the Danish laundry girls and their friends. I was not the only boy who found these dances gayer than the others. The young men who belonged to the Progressive Euker Club used to drop in late and risk a tiff with their sweethearts and general condemnation for a waltz with the hired girls. End of Chapter 8, Recording by Nikki Sullivan, Chicago Book 2, Chapter 9 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 9. There was a curious social situation in Blackhawk. All the young men felt the attraction of the fine, well-set-up country girls who had come to town to earn a living and in nearly every case to help the father struggle out of debt or to make it possible for the younger children of the family to go to school. Those girls had grown up in the first bitter hard times and had got little schooling themselves. But the younger brothers and sisters, for whom they had made such sacrifices and who have had advantages, never seemed to me when I meet them now half as interesting or as well-educated. The older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers. They had all, like Antonia, been nearly awakened and made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to anew. I can remember a score of these country girls who were in service in Blackhawk during the few years I lived there and I can remember something unusual and engaging about each of them. Physically they were almost a race apart and out of door work had given them a vigor which, when they got over their first shyness in coming to town, developed into a positive carriage and freedom of movement and made them conspicuous among Blackhawk women. That was before the day of high school athletics. Girls who had to walk more than half a mile to school were pitied. There was not a tennis court in the town. Physical exercise was thought rather inelegant for the daughters of well-to-do families. Some of the high school girls were jolly and pretty, but they stayed indoors in winter because of the cold and in summer because of the heat. When one danced with them their bodies never moved inside their clothes. Their muscles seemed to ask but one thing, not to be disturbed. I remember those girls merely as faces in the school room, gay and rosy or listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders like cherubs by the ink smeared tops of the high desks that were surely put there to make us round-shouldered and hollow-chested. The daughters of Blackhawk merchants had a confident, unenquiring belief that they were refined and that the country girls who worked out were not. The American farmers in our county were quite as hard-pressed as their neighbors from other countries. All alike had come to Nebraska with little capital and no knowledge of the soil they must subdue. All had borrowed money on their land. But no matter in what straits the Pennsylvanian or Virginian found himself, he would not let his daughters go out into service unless his girls could teach at a country school they sat at home in poverty. The Bohemian and Scandinavian girls could not get positions as teachers because they had had no opportunity to learn the language. Determined to help in the struggle to clear the homestead from debt, they had no alternative but to go into service. Some of them, after they came to town, remained as serious and as discreet in behavior as they had been when they had plowed and herded on their father's farm. Others, like the three Bohemian Marys, tried to make up for the years of youth they had lost. But every one of them did what she had set out to do and sent home those hard-earned dollars. The girls I knew were always helping to pay for plows and reapers, brood-sows or steers to fatten. One result of this family solidarity was that the foreign farmers in our county were the first to become prosperous. After the fathers were out of debt, the daughters married the sons of neighbors, usually of like nationality, and the girls who once worked in black-hawk kitchens are today managing big farms and fine families of their own. Their children are better off than the children of the town women they used to serve. I thought the attitude of the town people towards these girls very stupid. If I told my schoolmates that Lena Lindgard's grandfather was a clergyman and much respected in Norway, they looked at me blankly. What did it matter? All foreigners were ignorant people who couldn't speak English. There was not a man in black-hawk who had the intelligence or cultivation much less the personal distinction of Antony as father. Yet people saw no difference between her and the three Marys. They were all Bohemians, all hired girls. I always knew I should live long enough to see my country girls come into their own and I have. Today the best that a harassed black-hawk merchant can hope for is to sell provisions and farm machinery and automobiles to the rich farms where that first crop of stalwart Bohemian and Scandinavian girls are now the mistresses. The black-hawk boys looked forward to marrying black-hawk girls and living in a brand new little house with best chairs that must not be sat upon and hand-painted china that must not be used. But sometimes a young fellow would look up from his ledger or out through the grading of his father's bank and let his eyes follow Lena Lindgard as she passed the window with her slow undulating walk or tiny Soderball tripping by in her short skirt and striped stockings. The country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background. But anxious mothers need have felt no alarm. They mistook the metal of their sons. The respect for respectability was stronger than any desire in black-hawk youth. Our young man of position was like the son of a royal house. The boy who swept out his office or drove his delivery wagon might frolic with the jolly country girls. But he himself must sit all evening in a plush parlor where conversation dragged so perceptibly that the father often came in and made blundering efforts to warm up the atmosphere. On his way home from his dull call he would perhaps meet Tony and Lena coming along the sidewalk whispering to each other or the three Bohemian Mary's in their long plush coats and caps, comporting themselves with a dignity that only made their eventful histories the more piquant. If he went to the hotel to see a travelling man on business there was tiny, arching her shoulders at him like a kitten. If he went into the laundry to get his collars there were the four Danish girls smiling up from their ironing boards with their white throats and their pink cheeks. The three Mary's were the heroines of a cycle of scandalous stories which the old men were fond of relating as they stood about the cigar stand in the drugstore. Mary Dusek had been housekeeper for a bachelor rancher from Boston and after several years in his service she was forced to retire from the world for a short time. Later she came back to town to take the place of her friend Mary's Favota who was similarly embarrassed. The three Mary's were considered as dangerous as high explosives to have about the kitchen. Yet they were such good cooks and such admirable housekeepers that they never had to look for a place. The Vanna's tent brought the town boys and the country girls together on neutral ground. Sylvester Lovett who was cashier in his father's bank always found his way to the tent on Saturday night. He took all the dances Lena Lingard would give him and even grew bold enough to walk home with her. If his sisters or their friends happened to be among the onlookers on popular nights Sylvester stood back in the shadow under the cottonwood trees smoking and watching Lena with a harassed expression. Several times I stumbled upon him there in the dark and I felt rather sorry for him. He reminded me of Ole Benson who used to sit on the draw side and watch Lena hurt her cattle. Later in the summer when Lena went home for a week to visit her mother I heard from Antonia that young Lovett drove all the way out there to see her and took her buggy riding. In my ingenuousness I hoped that Sylvester would marry Lena and thus give all the country girls a better position in the town. Sylvester dallied about Lena until he began to make mistakes in his work. Had to stay at the bank until after dark to make his books balance. He was daft about her and everyone knew it. To escape from his predicament he ran away with a widow six years older than himself who owned a half section. This remedy worked apparently he never looked at Lena again nor lifted his eyes as he ceremoniously tipped his hat when he happened to meet her on the sidewalk. So that was what they were like I thought these white-handed high-collared clerks and bookkeepers. I used to glare at young Lovett from a distance and only wished I had some way of showing my contempt for him. End of Chapter 9 Book 2 Chapter 10 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. Recording by Katie Gibbany, Arkansas, November 2007. My Antonia by Willa Cather Book 2 The Hired Girls Chapter 10 It was at the Venice Tent that Antonia was discovered. Hitherto she had been looked upon more as a ward of the Harlings than as one of the hired girls. She had lived in their house and yard and garden. Her thoughts never seemed to stray outside that little kingdom. But after the tent came to town she began to go about with Tiny and Lena and their friends. The Venice often said that Antonia was the best dancer of them all. I sometimes heard murmurs in the crowd outside the pavilion that Mrs. Harling would soon have her hands full with that girl. The young men began to joke with each other about the Harlings Tony as they did about the marshals Anna or the gardeners Tiny. Antonia talked and thought of nothing but the tent. She hummed the dance tunes all day. When supper was late she hurried with her dishes, dropped and smashed them in her excitement. At the first call of the music she became irresponsible. If she hadn't time to dress she merely flung off her apron and shot out of the kitchen door. Sometimes I went with her the moment the lighted tent came into view she would break into a run like a boy. There were always partners waiting for her. She began to dance before she got her breath. Antonia's success at the tent had its consequences. The icemen lingered too long now when he came into the covered porch to fill the refrigerator. The delivery boys hung about the kitchen when they brought the groceries. Young farmers who were in town for Saturday came tramping through the yard to the back door to engage dances or to invite Tony to parties and picnics. Lena and Norwegian Anna dropped in to help her with her work so that she could get away early. The boys who brought her home after the dances sometimes laughed at the back gate and awakened Mr. Harling from his first sleep. A crisis was inevitable. One Saturday night Mr. Harling had gone down to the cellar for beer. As he came up the stairs in the dark he heard scuffling on the back porch and then the sound of a vigorous slap. He looked out through the side door in time to see a pair of long legs vaulting over the picket fence. Antonia was standing there angry and excited. Young Harry Payne, who was to marry his employer's daughter on Monday, had come to the tent with a crowd of friends and danced all evening. Afterward he begged Antonia to let him walk home with her. She said she supposed he was a nice young man as he was one of Miss Frances' friends and she didn't mind. On the back porch he tried to kiss her and when she protested because he was going to be married on Monday he caught her and kissed her until she got one hand free and slapped him. Mr. Harling put his beer bottles down on the table. This is what I've been expecting Antonia. You've been going with girls who have a reputation for being free and easy and now you've got the same reputation. I won't have this and that fellow tramping about my backyard all the time. This is the end of it, tonight. It stops, short. You can quit going to these dances or you can hunt another place. Think it over. The next morning when Mrs. Harling and Frances tried to reason with Antonia they found her agitated but determined. Stop going to the tent, she panted. I wouldn't think of it for a minute. My own father couldn't make me stop. Mr. Harling ain't my boss outside my work. I won't give up my friends either. The boys I go with are nice fellows. I thought Mr. Payne was all right too because he used to come here. I guess I gave him a red face for his wedding all right. She blazed out indignantly. You'll have to do one thing or the other, Antonia. Mrs. Harling told her decidedly. I can't go back on what Mr. Harling has said. This is his house. Then I'll just leave Mrs. Harling. Lena's been wanting me to get a place closer to her for a long while. Mary Svoboda's going away from the cutters to work at the hotel and I can have her place. Mrs. Harling rose from her chair. Antonia, if you go to the cutters to work you cannot come back to this house again. You know what that man is. It will be the ruin of you. Tony snatched up the tea kettle and began to pour boiling water over the glasses, laughing excitedly. Oh, I can take care of myself. I'm a lot stronger than Cutter is. They pay four dollars there and there's no children. The work's nothing. I can have every evening and be out a lot in the afternoons. I thought you liked children, Tony. What's come over you? I don't know. Something has. Antonia tossed her head and set her jaw. A girl like me has got to take her good times when she can. Maybe there won't be any tent next year. I guess I want to have my fling, like the other girls. Mrs. Harling gave a short harsh laugh. If you go to work for the cutters you're likely to have a fling that you won't get up from in a hurry. Frances said, when she told grandmother and me about this scene, that every pan and plate and cup on the shelves trembled when her mother walked out of the kitchen. Mrs. Harling declared bitterly that she wished she had never let herself get fond of Antonia. WIC CUTTER was the moneylender who had fleeced poor Russian Peter. When a farmer once got into the habit of going to Cutter it was like gambling or the lottery. In an hour of discouragement he went back. Cutter's first name was Wycliffe and he liked to talk about his pious bringing up. He contributed regularly to the Protestant churches for sentiments' sake as he said with the flourish of the hand. He came from a town in Iowa where there were a great many Swedes and could speak a little Swedish which gave him a great advantage with the early Scandinavian settlers. In every frontier settlement there are men who have come there to escape restraint. Cutter was one of the fast set of Blackhawk businessmen. He was an inveterate gambler, though a poor loser. When we saw a light burning in his office late at night we knew that a game of poker was going on. Cutter boasted that he never drank anything stronger than sherry and he said he got his start in life by saving the money that other young men spent for cigars. He was full of moral maxims for boys. When he came to our house on business he quoted poor Richard's almanac to me and told me he was delighted to find a town boy who could milk a cow. He was particularly affable to grandmother and whenever they met he would begin at once to talk about the good old times and simple living. I detested his pink bald head and his yellow whiskers always soft and glistening. It was said he brushed them every night as a woman does her hair. His white teeth looked factory made. His skin was red and rough as if from perpetual sunburn. He often went away to hot springs to take mud baths. He was notoriously dissolute with women. Two Swedish girls who had lived in his house were the worst for the experience. One of them he had taken to Omaha and established in the business for which he had fitted her. He still visited her. Cutter lived in a state of perpetual warfare with his wife and yet apparently they never thought of separating. They dwelt in a fussy scrollwork house painted white and buried in thick evergreens with a fussy white fence and barn. Cutter thought he knew a great deal about horses and usually had a colt he was training for the track. On Sunday mornings one could see him out at the fairgrounds speeding around the race course in his trotting buggy, wearing yellow gloves and a black and white check traveling cap, his whiskers blowing back in the breeze. If there were any boys about Cutter would offer one of them a quarter to hold the stopwatch and then drive off, saying he had no change and would fix it up next time. No one could cut his lawn or wash his buggy to suit him. He was so fastidious and prim about his place that a boy would go to a good deal of trouble to throw a dead cat into his back yard or to dump a sack full of tin cans in his alley. It was a peculiar combination of old mateishness and licentiousness that made Cutter seem so despicable. He had certainly met his match when he married Mrs. Cutter. She was a terrifying-looking person, almost a giantess in height, raw-boned with iron-grey hair, a face always flushed and prominent hysterical eyes. When she meant to be entertaining and agreeable, she nodded her head incessantly and snapped her eyes at one. Her teeth were long and curved, like a horse's. People said babies always cried if she smiled at them. Her face had a kind of fascination for me. It was the very color and shape of anger. There was a gleam of something akin to insanity in her full intense eyes. She was formal in manner and made calls in rustling, steel-grey brocades and a tall bonnet with bristling egrets. Mrs. Cutter painted China so assiduously that even her wash bowls and pitchers and her husband's shaving mug were covered with violets and lilies. Once when Cutter was exhibiting some of his wife's china to a caller, he dropped a piece. Mrs. Cutter put a handkerchief to her lips as if she were going to faint and said grandly, Mr. Cutter, you have broken all the commandments. Spare the finger bowls. They quarreled from the moment Cutter came into the house until they went to bed at night, and their hired girls reported these scenes to the town at large. Mrs. Cutter had several times cut paragraphs about unfaithful husbands out of the newspapers and mailed them to Cutter in a disguised handwriting. Cutter would come home at noon, find the mutilated journal in the paper rack, and triumphantly fit the clipping into the space from which it had been cut. Those two could quarrel all morning about whether he ought to put on his heavy or his light underwear, and all evening about whether he had taken cold or not. The Cutters had major as well as minor subjects for dispute. The chief of these was the question of inheritance. Mrs. Cutter told her husband it was plainly his fault they had no children. He insisted that Mrs. Cutter had purposely remained childless, with the determination to outlive him and to share his property with her people whom he detested. To this she would reply that unless he changed his mode of life she would certainly outlive him. After listening to her insinuation about his physical soundness, Cutter would resume his dumbbell practice for a month, or rise daily at the hour when his wife most liked to sleep, dress noisily, and drive out to the track with his trotting horse. Once when they had quarreled about household expenses Mrs. Cutter put on her brocade and went among their friends soliciting orders for painted china, saying that Mr. Cutter had compelled her to live by her brush. Cutter wasn't shamed as she had expected. He was delighted. Cutter often threatened to chop down the cedar trees which half buried the house. His wife declared she would leave him if she were stripped of the privacy which she felt these trees afforded her. That was his opportunity, surely, but he never cut down the trees. The Cutters seemed to find their relations to each other interesting and stimulating, and certainly the rest of us found them so. Wick Cutter was different from any other rascal I have ever known, but I have found Mrs. Cutter's all over the world, sometimes founding new religions, sometimes being forcibly fed, easily recognizable, even when superficially tamed. End of CHAPTER XI. Book II. CHAPTER XII. After Antonio went to live with the Cutters, she seemed to care about nothing but picnics and parties and having a good time. When she was not going to a dance, she sewed until midnight. Her new clothes were the subject of caustic comment. Under Lena's direction she copied Mrs. Gardner's new party dress and Mrs. Smith's street costume so ingeniously in cheap materials that those ladies were greatly annoyed and Mrs. Cutter, who was jealous of them, was secretly pleased. Tony wore gloves now and high-heeled shoes and feathered bonnets, and she went downtown nearly every afternoon with Tiny and Lena and the Marshalls' Norwegian Anna. We high school boys used to linger on the playground at the afternoon recess to watch them as they came tripping down the hill along the board's sidewalk two and two. They were growing prettier every day, but as they passed us I used to think with pride that Antonia, like Snow White in the fairytale, was still fairest of them all. Being a senior now, I got away from school early. Sometimes I overtook the girls downtown and coaxed them into the ice cream parlor where they would sit chattering and laughing telling me all the news from the country. I remember how angry Tiny Sotterball made me one afternoon. She declared she had heard grandmother was going to make a Baptist preacher of me. I guess you'll have to stop dancing and wear a white necktie then. Won't he look funny girls? Lena laughed. You'll have to hurry up, Jim. If you're going to be a preacher I want you to marry me. You must promise to marry us all and then baptize the babies. Norwegian Anna, always dignified, looked at her reprovingly. Baptists don't believe in christening babies, do they, Jim? I told her I didn't know what they believed and didn't care and that I certainly wasn't going to be a preacher. That's too bad, Tiny Simpered. She was in a teasing mood. You'd make such a good one. You're so studious. Maybe you'd like to be a professor. You used to teach Tony, didn't you? Antonia broke in. I've set my heart on Jim being a doctor. You'd be good with sick people, Jim. Your grandmothers trained you up so nice. My papa always said you were an awful smart boy. I said I was going to be whatever I pleased. Won't you be surprised, Miss Tiny, if I turn out to be a regular devil of a fellow? They laughed until a glance from Norwegian Anna checked them. The high school principal had just come into the front part of the shop to buy bread for supper. Anna knew the whisper was going about that I was a sly one. People said there must be something queer about a boy who showed no interest in girls of his own age, but who could be lively enough when he was with Tony and Lena or the three Marys. The enthusiasm for the dance, which the Venice had kindled, did not at once die out. After the tent left town, the Euker Club became the Owl Club and gave dances in the Masonic Hall once a week. I was invited to join, but declined. I was moody and restless that winter and tired of the people I saw every day. Charlie Harling was already at Annapolis while I was still sitting in Blackhawk answering to my name at roll call every morning, rising from my desk at the sound of a bell and marching out like the grammar school children. Mrs. Harling was a little cool toward me because I continued to champion Antonia. What was there for me to do after supper? Usually I had learned the next day's lessons by the time I left the school building and I couldn't sit still and read forever. In the evening I used to prowl about, hunting for diversion. There lay the familiar streets, frozen with snow or liquid with mud. They led to the houses of good people who were putting the babies to bed or simply sitting still before the parlor stove, digesting their supper. Blackhawk had two saloons. One of them was admitted, even by the church people, to be as respectable as a saloon could be. Handsome Anton Gelenick, who had rented his homestead and come to town, was the proprietor. In his saloon there were long tables where the Bohemian and German farmers could eat the lunches they brought from home while they drank their beer. Gelenick kept rye bread on hand and smoked fish and strong imported cheeses to please the foreign palate. I like to drop into his bar room and listen to the talk, but one day he overtook me on the street and clapped me on the shoulder. Jim, he said, I am good friends with you and I always like to see you, but you know how the church people think about saloons. Your grandpa has always treated me fine and I don't like to have you come into my place because I know he don't like it and it puts me in bad with him. So I was shut out of that. One could hang about the drugstore and listen to the old men who sat there every evening, talking politics and telling raw stories. One could go to the cigar factory and chat with the old German who raised canaries for sale and look at his stuffed birds. But whatever you began with him the talk went back to taxidermy. There was the depot, of course. I often went down to see the night train come in and afterwards sat awhile with the disconsolate telegrapher who was always hoping to be transferred into Omaha or Denver where there was some life. He was sure to bring out his pictures of actresses and dancers. He got them with cigarette coupons and nearly smoked himself to death to possess these desired forms and faces. After a change one could talk to the station agent but he was another malcontent, spent all his spare time writing letters to officials requesting a transfer. He wanted to get back to Wyoming where he could go trout fishing on Sundays. He used to say there was nothing in life for him but trout streams ever since he'd lost his twins. These were the distractions I had to choose from. There were no other lights burning downtown after nine o'clock. On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long cold streets, scowling at the little sleeping houses on either side with their storm windows and covered back porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle porch posts horribly mutilated by the turning lathe. Yet for all their frailness how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain. The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations. Shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens, to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark. The growing piles of ashes and cinders in the backyards were the only evidence that the wasteful, consuming process of life went on at all. On Tuesday nights the owl club danced, then there was a little stir in the streets, and here and there one could see a lighted window until midnight, but the next night all was dark again. After I refused to join the owls, as they were called, I made a bold resolve to go to the Saturday night dances at Fireman's Hall. I knew it would be useless to acquaint my elders with any such plan. Grandfather didn't approve of dancing anyway. He would only say that if I wanted to dance I could go to the Masonic Hall among the people we knew. It was just my point that I saw altogether too much of the people we knew. My bedroom was on the ground floor, and as I studied there I had a stove in it. I used to retire to my room early on Saturday night, change my shirt and collar, and put on my Sunday coat. I waited until all was quiet and the old people were asleep, then raised my window, climbed out, and went softly through the yard. The first time I deceived my grandparents I felt rather shabby, perhaps even the second time, but I soon ceased to think about it. The dance at the Fireman's Hall was the one thing I looked forward to all the week. There I met the same people I used to see at the Venice Tent. Sometimes there were Bohemians from Wilbur, or German boys who came down on the afternoon freight from Bismarck. Tony and Lena and Tiny were always there, and the three Bohemian Marys, and the Danish Laundry girls. The four Danish girls lived with the Laundry men and his wife in their house behind the Laundry, with a big garden where the clothes were hung out to dry. The Laundry men was a kind, wise old fellow who paid his girls well, looked out for them, and gave them a good home. He told me once that his own daughter died just as she was getting old enough to help her mother, and that he had been trying to make up for it ever since. On summer afternoons he used to sit for hours on the sidewalk in front of his Laundry, his newspaper lying on his knee, watching his girls through the big open window while they ironed and talked in Danish. The clouds of white dust that blew up the street, the gusts of hot wind that withered his vegetable garden, never disturbed his calm. His droll expression seemed to say that he had found the secret of contentment. Morning and evening he drove about in his spring wagon, distributing freshly ironed clothes and collecting bags of linen that cried out for his suds and sunny drying lines. His girls never looked so pretty at the dances, as they did standing by the ironing board, or over the tubs, washing the fine pieces, their white arms and throats bare, their cheeks bright as the brightest wild roses, their gold hair moist with the steam or the heat, and curling in little damp spirals about their ears. They had not learned much English, and were not so ambitious as Tony or Lena, but they were kind, simple girls, and they were always happy. When one danced with them, one smelled their clean, freshly ironed clothes that had been put away with rosemary leaves from Mr. Jensen's garden. There were never girls enough to go round at those dances, but everyone wanted to turn with Tony and Lena. Lena moved without exertion, rather indolently, and her hand often accented the rhythm softly on her partner's shoulder. She smiled if one spoke to her, but seldom answered. The music seemed to put her into a soft waking dream, and her violet-colored eyes looked sleepily and confidingly at one from under her long lashes. When she sighed, she exhaled a heavy perfume of sachet powder. To dance, home sweet home, with Lena was like coming in with the tide. She danced every dance like a waltz, and it was always the same waltz. The waltz of coming home to something, of inevitable, fated return. After a while one got restless under it, as one does under the heat of a soft, sultry summer day. When you spun out into the floor with Tony, you didn't return to anything. You set out every time upon a new adventure. I liked to scottish with her. She had so much spring and variety, and was always putting in new steps and slides. She taught me to dance against and around the hard and fast beat of the music. If, instead of going to the end of the railroad, old Mr. Shimerda had stayed in New York and picked up a living with his fiddle, how different Antonia's life might have been. Antonia often went to the dances with Larry Donovan, a passenger conductor who was a kind of professional ladies' man, as we said. I remember how admiringly all the boys looked at her the night she first wore her velveteen dress, made like Mrs. Gardner's black velvet. She was lovely to see, with her eyes shining, and her lips always a little parted when she danced. That constant dark color in her cheeks never changed. One evening when Donovan was out on his run, Antonia came to the hall with Norwegian Anna and her young man, and that night I took her home. When we were in the cutter's yard, sheltered by the Evergreens, I told her she must kiss me good night. Why, sure, Jim, a moment later she drew her face away and whispered indignantly. Why, Jim, you know you ain't right to kiss me like that. I'll tell your grandmother on you. Lena Lindgard lets me kiss her, I retorted, and I'm not half as fond as her as I am of you. Lena does, Tony gasped. If she's up to any of her nonsense with you I'll scratch her eyes out. She took my arm again and we walked out of the gate, and up and down the sidewalk. Now don't you go and be a fool like some of these town boys. You're not going to sit around here and whittle store boxes and tell stories all your life. You are going away to school and make something of yourself. I'm just awful proud of you. You won't go and get mixed up with the Swedes, will you? I don't care anything about any of them but you, I said, and you'll always treat me like a kid, I suppose. She laughed and threw her arms around me. I expect I will, but you're a kid I'm awful fond of anyhow. You can like me all you want to, but if I see you hanging round with Lena much, I'll go to your grandmother as sure as your name's Jim Burden. Lena's all right, only, well, you know yourself, she's soft that way. She can't help it, it's natural to her. If she was proud of me, I was so proud of her that I carried my head high as I emerged from the dark cedars and shut the cutter's gate softly behind me. Her warm, sweet face, her kind arms, and the true hearted her, she was, oh, she was still my Antonia. I looked with contempt at the dark, silent little houses about me as I walked home and thought of the stupid young men who were asleep in some of them. I knew where the real women were, though I was only a boy and I would not be afraid of them either. I hated to enter the still house when I went home from the dances and it was long before I could get to sleep. Toward morning I used to have pleasant dreams. Sometimes Tony and I were out in the country, sliding down straw stacks as we used to do, climbing up the yellow mountains over and over, and slipping down the smooth sides into soft piles of chaff. One dream I dreamed a great many times and it was always the same. I was in a harvest field full of shocks and I was lying against one of them. Lena Lindgard came across the stubble barefoot in a short skirt with a curved, reaping hook in her hand and she was flushed like the dawn with a kind of luminous rosiness all about her. She sat down beside me, turned to me with a soft sigh and said, Now they are all gone and I can kiss you as much as I like. I used to wish I could have this flattering dream about Antonia, but I never did. End of Chapter 12 Book 2, Chapter 13 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. Recording by Katie Gibbany, Arkansas, December 2007 My Antonia by Willa Cather, Book 2, The Hired Girls, Chapter 13 I noticed one afternoon that grandmother had been crying. Her feet seemed to drag as she moved about the house and I got up from the table where I was studying and went to her, asking if she didn't feel well and if I couldn't help her with her work. No, thank you, Jim. I'm troubled, but I guess I'm well enough. Getting a little rusty in the bones, maybe, she added bitterly. I stood hesitating. What are you fretting about, grandmother? Has grandfather lost any money? No, it ain't the money. I wish it was. But I've heard things. You must have known it would come back to me some time. She dropped into a chair and covering her face with her apron began to cry. Jim, she said. I was never one that claimed old folks could bring up their grandchildren, but it came about so. There wasn't any other way for you, it seemed like. I put my arms around her. I couldn't bear to see her cry. What is it, grandmother? Is it the fireman's dances? She nodded. I'm sorry I sneaked off like that, but there's nothing wrong about the dances and I haven't done anything wrong. I like all those country girls and I like to dance with them. That's all there is to it. But it ain't right to deceive us, son, and it brings blame on us. People say you are growing up to be a bad boy, and that ain't just to us. I don't care what they say about me, but if it hurts you, that settles it. I won't go to the fireman's hall again. I kept my promise, of course, but I found the spring months dull enough. I sat at home with the old people in the evenings now, reading Latin that was not in our high school course. I had made up my mind to do a lot of college requirement work in the summer and to enter the freshman class at the university without conditions in the fall. I wanted to get away as soon as possible. Disapprobation hurt me, I found, even that of people whom I did not admire. As the spring came on, I grew more and more lonely and fell back on the telegrapher and the cigar maker and his canaries for companionship. I remember I took a melancholy pleasure in hanging a Maybasket for Nina Harling that spring. I bought the flowers from an old German woman, who always had more window-plants than anyone else, and spent an afternoon trimming a little workbasket. When dusk came on and the new moon hung in the sky, I went quietly to the Harling's front door with my offering, rang the bell, and then ran away as was the custom. Through the willow hedge I could hear Nina's cries of delight and I felt comforted. On those warm, soft spring evenings I often lingered downtown to walk home with Francis and talk to her about my plans and about the reading I was doing. One evening she said she thought Mrs. Harling was not seriously offended with me. Mama is as broad-minded as mothers ever are, I guess, but you know she was heard about Antonia and she can understand why you like to be with Tiny and Lena better than with the girls of your own set. Can you, I asked bluntly? Francis laughed. Yes, I think I can. You knew them in the country and you like to take sides. In some ways you're older than boys of your age. It will be all right with Mama after you pass your college examinations and she sees you're an earnest. If you were a boy I persisted you wouldn't belong to the Owl Club either, you'd be just like me. She shook her head. I would and I wouldn't. I expect I know the country girls better than you do. You always put a kind of glamour over them. The trouble with you, Jim, is that you're romantic. Mama's going to your commencement. She asked me the other day if I knew what your oration is to be about. She wants you to do well. I thought my oration very good. It stated with fervor a great many things I had lately discovered. Mrs. Harling came to the opera house to hear the commencement exercises and I looked at her most of the time while I made my speech. Her keen, intelligent eyes never left my face. Afterwards she came back to the dressing room where we stood, with our diplomas in our hands, walked up to me and said heartily, You surprised me, Jim, I didn't believe you could do as well as that. You didn't get that speech out of books. Among my graduation presents there was a silk umbrella from Mrs. Harling with my name on the handle. I walked home from the opera house alone. As I passed the Methodist Church I saw three white figures ahead of me pacing up and down under the arching maple trees where the moonlight filtered through the lush June foliage. They hurried toward me. They were waiting for me, Lena and Tony and Anna Hanson. Oh, Jim, it was splendid! Tony was breathing hard as she always did when her feelings outran her language. There ain't a lawyer in Black Hawk could make a speech like that. I just stopped your grandpa and said so to him. He won't tell you, but he told us he was awful surprised himself, didn't he girls? Lena sidled up to me and said teasingly, What made you so solemn? I thought you were scared. I was sure you'd forget. Anna spoke wistfully. It must make you happy, Jim, to have fine thoughts like that in your mind all the time and to have words to put them in. I always wanted to go to school, you know. Oh, I just sat there and wished my papa could hear you. Jim, Antonia took hold of my coat lapels. There was something in your speech that made me think so about my papa. I thought about your papa when I wrote my speech, Tony, I said. I dedicated it to him. She threw her arms around me and her dear face was all wet with tears. I stood watching their white dresses glimmer smaller and smaller down the sidewalk as they went away. I have had no other success that pulled at my heartstrings like that one. End of Chapter 13 Book 2, Chapter 14 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. Recording by Nikki Sullivan. My Antonia by Willa Cather. Book 2, The Hired Girls. Chapter 14 The day after commencement I moved my books and desk upstairs to an empty room where I should be undisturbed and I fell to studying in earnest. I worked off a year's trigonometry that summer and began Virgil alone. Morning after morning I used to pace up and down my sunny little room looking off at the distant river bluffs and the roll of the blonde pastures between scanning the Aeneid aloud and committing long passages to memory. Sometimes in the evening Mrs. Harling came to me as I passed her gate and asked me to come in and let her play for me. She was lonely for Charlie, she said, and liked to have a boy about. Whenever my grandparents had misgivings and began to wonder whether I was not too young to go off to college alone, Mrs. Harling took up my cause vigorously. Grandfather had such respect for her judgment that I knew he would not go against her. I had only one holiday that summer. It was in July. I met Antonia downtown on Saturday afternoon and learned that she and Tiny and Lena were going to the river next day with Anna Hansen. The elder was all in bloom now and Anna wanted to make elder blow wine. Anna's to drive us down in the Marshall's delivery wagon and will take a nice lunch and have a picnic. Just us, nobody else. Couldn't you happen a long gem? It would be like old times. I considered a moment. Maybe I can if I won't be in the way. On Sunday morning I rose early and got out of Blackhawk while the dew was still heavy on the long meadow grasses. It was the high season for summer flowers. The pink bee brush stood tall along the sandy road sides, and the cone flowers and rose mallow grew everywhere. Across the wire fence in the long grass I saw a clump of flaming orange colored milkweed, rare in that part of the state. I left the road and went around through a stretch of pasture that was always cropped short in the summer where the Galaria came up year after year and matted over the ground with a deep velvety red that is in Bocara carpets. The country was empty and solitary except for the larks that Sunday morning, and it seemed to lift itself up to me and come very close. The river was running strong for mid-summer. Heavy rains to the west of us had kept it full. I crossed the bridge and went upstream along the wooded shore to a pleasant dressing room I knew among the dogwood bushes all overgrown with wild grapevines. I began to undress for a swim. The girls would not be along yet. For the first time it occurred to me that I would be homesick for that river after I left. The sandbars with their clean white beaches and their little groves of willows and cottonwood seedlings were the sort of no man's land, little newly created worlds that belonged to the Blackhawk boys. Charlie Harling and I hunted through these woods, fished from the fallen logs, until I knew every inch of the river shores and had a friendly feeling for every bar in shallow. After my swim, while I was playing about indolently in the water I heard the sound of hoofs and wheels on the bridge. I struck downstream and shouted as the open spring wagon came into view on the middle span. They stopped the horse and the two girls in the bottom of the cart stood up studying themselves by the shoulders of the two in front so that they could see me better. They were charming up there huddled together in the cart and peering down at me like curious deer when they come out of the thicket to drink. I found bottom near the bridge and stood up, waving to them. How pretty you look! I called. So do you! they shouted altogether and broke into peels of laughter. Anna Hanson shook the reins as they drove on while I zigzagged back to my inlet and clamored up behind the overhanging elm. I dried myself in the sun and dressed slowly, reluctant to leave that green enclosure where the sunlight flickered so bright through the grapevine leaves and the woodpecker hammered away in the crooked elm that trailed out over the water. As I went along the road back to the bridge I kept picking off little pieces of scaly chalk from the dried water gullies and breaking them up in my hands. When I came upon the marshals delivery horse, tied in the shade, the girls had already taken their baskets and gone down the east road which wound through the sand and scrub. I could hear them calling to each other. The elder bushes did not grow back in the shady ravines between the bluffs but in the hot sandy bottoms along the stream where the roots were always in moisture and their tops in the sun. The blossoms were unusually luxuriant and beautiful that summer. I followed a cattle path through the thick underbrush until I came to a slope that fell away abruptly to the water's edge. A great chunk of the shore had been bitten out by some spring freshet and the scar was masked by elder bushes growing down to the water in flowery terraces. I did not touch them. I was overcome by content and drowsiness by the warm silence about me. There was no sound but the high sing-song buzz of wild bees in the sunny gurgle of the water underneath. I peeped over the edge of the bank to see the little stream that made the noise. It flowed along perfectly clear over the sand and gravel cut off from the muddy main current by a long sandbar. Down there on the lower shelf of the bank I saw Antonia seated alone under the pagoda-like elders. She looked up when she heard me and smiled but I saw that she had been crying. I slid down into the soft sand beside her and asked what was the matter. It makes me homesick, Jimmy, this flower, this smell, this smell, she said softly. We had this flower very much at home in the old country. It always grew in our yard and my papa had a green bench and a table under the bushes. In the summer, when they were in bloom, he used to sit there with his friend that played the trombone. When I was little I used to go down there to hear them talk, beautiful talk, like what I never hear in this country. What did they talk about? I asked her. She sighed and shook her head. Oh, I don't know, about music and the woods and about God and when they were young. She turned to me suddenly and looked into my eyes. You think, Jimmy, that maybe my father's spirit can go back to those old places? I told her about the feeling of her father's presence I had on the winter day when my grandparents had gone over to see his dead body and I was left alone in the house. I said I felt sure then that he was on his way back to his own country and that even now when I had passed his grave I always thought of him as being among the woods and fields that were so dear to him. Antonia had the most trusting, responsive eyes in the world. Love and credulousness seemed to look out from them with open faces. Why didn't you ever tell me that before? It makes me feel more sure for him. After a while she said, You know, Jim, my father was different from my mother. He did not have to marry my mother and all his brothers quarreled with him because he did. I used to hear the old people at my home whisper about it. They said he could have paid my mother money and not married her. But he was older than she was and he was too kind to treat her like that. He lived in his mother's house and she was a poor girl come in to do the work. After my father married her my grandmother never let my mother come into her house again. When I went to my grandmother's funeral it was the first and only time I was ever in my grandmother's house. Don't that seem strange? While she talked I laid back in the hot sand and looked up at the blue sky between the flat bouquets of elder. I could hear the bees humming and singing but they stayed up in the sun. Above the flowers and did not come down into the shadow of the leaves. Antonia seemed to me that day exactly like the little girl who used to come to our house with Mr. Shmirda. Some day Tony I am going over to your country and I am going to the little town where you lived. Do you remember all about it? Jim she said earnestly, If I was ever put down there in the middle of the night I could find my way all over that little town and along the river to the next town where my grandmother lived. My feet remember all the little paths through the woods and where the big roots stick out to trip you. I never forgot my own country. There was a crackling in the branches above us and Lena Lingard peered down over the edge of the bank. You lazy things she cried. All this elder and you two lying there. Didn't you hear us calling you? Almost as flushed as she had been in my dream. She leaned over the edge of the bank and began to demolish our flowery pagoda. I had never seen her so energetic. She was panting with zeal and the perspiration stood in drops on her short yielding upper lip. I sprang to my feet and ran up the bank. It was noon now and so hot the dogwoods and scrub oaks began to turn up the silvery underside of their leaves and all the foliage looked soft and wilted. I carried the lunch basket to the top of the chalk bluffs where even on the calmest days there was always a breeze. The flat top twisted little oaks through light shadows on the grass. Below us we could see the windings of the river and Black Hawk, grouped among its trees and beyond, the rolling country swelling gently until it met the sky. We could recognize familiar farmhouses and windmills. Each of the girls pointed out to me the direction in which her father's farm lay and told me how many acres were in wheat that year and how many in corn. My old folks, said tiny solder ball, have put in twenty acres of rye. They get it ground at the mill and it makes nice bread. It seems like my mother ain't been so homesick ever since my father's raised rye flour for her. It must have been trial for our mothers, said Lena, coming out here and having to do everything different. My mother had always lived in town. She says she started behind in farm work and is never caught up. Yes, a new country's hard on the old one sometimes, said Anna thoughtfully. My grandmother's getting feeble now and her mind wanders. She's forgot about this country and she thinks she's home in Norway. She keeps asking mother to take her down to the waterside in the fish market. She craves fish all the time. Whenever I go home, I take her canned salmon and mackerel. Mercy, it's hot! Lena yawned. She was supine under a little oak resting after the fury of her elder hunting and had taken off her high-heeled slippers she had been silly enough to wear. Come here, Jim. You never got the sand out of your hair. She began to draw her fingers slowly through my hair. Antony, I pushed her away. You'll never get it out like that, she said sharply. She gave my head a rough tasseling and finished me off with something like a box in the ear. Lena, you oughtn't try to wear those slippers anymore. They're too small for your feet. You'd better give them to me for Yoka. All right, said Lena good-naturedly, tucking her white stockings under her skirt. You get all Yoka's things, don't you? I wish father didn't have such bad luck with his farm machinery, then I could buy more things for my sisters. I'm going to get Mary a new coat for this fall, if the sulky plows never paid for her. Tiny asked why she didn't wait until after Christmas when coats would be cheaper. What do you think of poor me, she added, with six at home younger than I am. And they all think I'm rich, because when I go back to the country I'm dressed so fine. She shrugged her shoulders. But, you know, my weakness is play things. I like to buy them play things better than what they need. I know how that is, said Anna. When we first came here, and I was little, we were too poor to buy toys. I never got over the loss of a doll somebody gave me before we left Norway. A boy on the boat broke her, and I still hate him for it. I guess after you got here you had plenty of live dolls to nurse, like me, Lena remarked cynically. Yes, the babies came along pretty fast to be sure, but I never minded. I was fond of them all. The youngest one, that we didn't any of us want, is the one we love best now. Lena sighed, oh, the babies come all right. If only they don't come in winter. I was nearly always did. I don't see how mother stood it. I'll tell you what girls, she sat up with sudden energy. I'm going to get my mother out of that old sod house where she's lived so many years. The men will never do it. Johnny, that's my oldest brother. He's wanting to get married now and build a house for his girl instead of his mother. Mrs. Thomas says she thinks I can move to some other town pretty soon, and go into business for myself. If I don't get into business, I'll maybe marry a rich gambler. That would be a poor way to get on, said Anna sarcastically. I wish I could teach school, like Selma Krohn. Just think. She'll be the first Scandinavian girl to get a position in the high school. We ought to be proud of her. Selma was a studious girl who had not much tolerance for giddy things like Tiny and Lena, but they always spoke of her with admiration. Tiny moved about restlessly, fanning herself with her straw hat. If I were smart like her, I'd be at my book's day and night. But she was born smart, and look at how her father's trained her. He was something high up in the old country. So was my mother's father, murmured Lena, but that's all the good it does us. My father's father was smart too, but he was wild. He married a lap. I guess that's what's matter with me. They say in my lap blood will out. A real lap, Lena? I exclaimed. The kind that wears skins? I don't know if she wore skins, but she was a lap all right, and his folks felt dreadful about it. He was sent up north on some government job he had, and fell in love with her. He would marry her. But I thought Lapland women were fat and ugly, and had squint eyes like Chinese. I objected. I don't know, maybe. There must be something mighty taking about the lap girls though. My mother says the Norwegians up north are always afraid their boys will run after them. In the afternoon, when the heat was less oppressive, we had a lively game of Pussy once a corner on the flat bluff top with the little trees for bases. Lena was Pussy so often that she finally said she wouldn't play anymore. We threw ourselves down on the grass out of breath. Jim, Antonia said dreamily. I want you to tell the girls how the Spanish first came here, like you and Charlie Harling used to talk about. I've tried to tell them, but I leave out so much. They sat under a little oak, Tony resting against the trunk, and the other girls leaning against her and each other. And listened to the little I was able to tell them about Coronado in his search for the seven golden cities. At school we were taught that he had not got so far north as Nebraska, but had given up his quest and turned back somewhere in Kansas. But Charlie Harling and I had a strong belief that he had been along this very river, a farmer in the country north of ours. When he was breaking soil had turned up a metal strip of fine workmanship and a sword with a Spanish inscription on the blade. He lent these relics to Mr. Harling, who brought them home with him. Charlie and I scoured them, and they were on exhibition in the Harling office all summer. Father Kelly, the priest, had found the name of the Spanish maker on the sword and an abbreviation that stood for the city of Cordova. And that I saw with my own eyes. Antonia put in triumphantly. So Jim and Charlie were right, and the teachers were wrong. The girls began to wonder among themselves, why had the Spaniards come so far? What must this country have been like then? Why had Coronado never gone back to Spain to his riches in his castles in his king? I couldn't tell them. I only knew that schoolbrook said he died in the wilderness of a broken heart. More than him has done that, said Antonia sadly, and the girl's murmur to sense. We sat looking off across the country, watching the sun go down. The curly grass about us was on fire now. The bark of the oaks turned red as copper. There was a shimmer of gold in the brown river. Out in the stream the sandbars glittered like glass, and the light trembled in the willow thickets as if little flames were leaping among them. The breeze sank to stillness. In the ravine a ring dove mourned plaintively, and somewhere off in the bushes an owl hooted. The girls sat listless, leaning against each other. The long fingers of the sun touched their foreheads. Presently we saw a curious thing. There were no clouds, and the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes towards it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm a plow had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk. The handles, the tongue, the chair, black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture riding on the sun. Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared. The ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plow had sunk back into its own littleness somewhere on the prairie. End of Chapter 14, Recording by Nikki Sullivan, Chicago Book 2, Chapter 15 of My Antenna This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Nikki Sullivan My Antenna by Willa Cather Book 2, The Hired Girls Chapter 15 Late in August the cutters went to Omaha for a few days, leaving Antenna in charge of the house. Since the scandal about the Swedish girl, Wick Cutter could never get his wife to stir out of Blackhawk without him. The day after the cutters left, Antenna came over to see us. Grandmother noticed that she seemed troubled and distracted. You've got something on your mind, Antenna, she said anxiously. Yes, Mrs. Burton, I couldn't sleep much last night. She hesitated, and then told us how strangely Mr. Cutter had behaved before he went away. He put all the silver in a basket and placed it under her bed and with it a box of papers which he told her was valuable. He made her promise that she would not sleep away from the house or be out late in the evening while he was gone. He strictly forbade her to ask any of the girls he knew to stay with her at night. She would be perfectly safe, he said, as he had just put a new yell lock on the front door. Cutter had been so insistent in regard to these details that now she felt uncomfortable about staying there alone. She hadn't liked the way he kept coming into the kitchen to instruct her or the way he looked at her. I feel as if he's up to some of his tricks again and is going to try to scare me somehow. Grandmother was apprehensive at once. I don't think it's right for you to stay there, feeling that way. I suppose it wouldn't be right for you to leave the place alone, either, and after giving your word. Maybe Jim would be willing to go over there and sleep, and you could come here nights. I'd feel safer knowing you were under my own roof. I guess Jim could take care of the silver and old usury notes as well as you could. Antonia turned to me eagerly. Oh, would you, Jim? I'd make up my bed nice and fresh for you. It's a real cool room and the bed's right next to the window. I was afraid to leave the window open last night. I liked my own room and didn't like the Cutter's house under any circumstances. But Tony looked so troubled that I consented to try this arrangement. I found that I slept there as well as anywhere, and when I got home in the morning, Tony had a good breakfast waiting for me. After prayers, she sat down at the table with us, and it was like old times in the country. The third night I spent at the Cutter's, I woke suddenly with the impression that I had heard a door open and shut. Everything was still, however, and I must have gone to sleep again immediately. The next thing I knew, I felt someone sit down on the edge of the bed. I was only half awake, but I decided that he might take the Cutter's silver, whoever he was. Perhaps I did not move. Perhaps if I did not move, he would find it and get out of there without troubling me. I held my breath and lay absolutely still. A hand closed softly on my shoulder, and at the same moment I felt something hairy and clone-sensitive brushing my face. If the room had suddenly been flooded with electric light, I couldn't have seen more clearly the detestable bearded countenance that I knew was bending over me. I caught a hand full of whiskers and polled, shouting something. The hand that held my shoulder was instantly at my throat. The man became insane. He stood over me, choking me with one fist and beating me in the face with the other, hissing and chuckling and letting out a flood of abuse. So this is what she's up to when I'm away, is it? Where is she, you nasty whelp? Where is she? Under the bed? Are you hussy? I know your tricks. Wait till I get at you. I'll fix this rat you've got in here. He's caught all right. So long his cutter had me by the throat there was no chance for me at all. I got hold of his thumb and bent it back until he let go with a yell. In a bound I was on my feet and easily sent him sprawling to the floor. When I made a dive for the open window, struck the wire screen, knocked it out and tumbled after it into the yard. Suddenly I found myself running across the north end of Blackhawk in my night shirt just as someone finds one self-behaving in bad dreams. When I got home I climbed in at the kitchen window. I was covered with blood from my nose and lip, but I was too sick to do anything about it. I found a shawl and an overcoat on the hat rack, laid down on the parlor sofa and in spite of my hurts went to sleep. My grandmother found me there in the morning. Her cry of fright awakened me. Truly I was a battered object. As she helped me to my room I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My lip was cut and stood out like a snout. My nose looked like a big blue plum, and one eye was swollen shut and hideously discoloured. Grandmother said, We must have a doctor at once, but I implored her as I had never bade for anything before not to send for him. I could stand anything, I told her, so long as no one saw me or knew what had happened to me. I entreated her not to let grandfather even come into the room. She seemed to understand, though I was too faint and miserable to go into explanations. When she took off my night shirt she found some bruises on my chest and shoulders and she began to cry. She spent the whole morning bathing and poulticing me and robbing me with Arnica. I heard Antonia sobbing outside my door, but I asked grandmother to send her away. I felt that I never wanted to see her again. I hated her almost as much as I hated Cutter. She had let me in for all this disgustingness. Grandmother kept saying how thankful we ought to be that I had been there instead of Antonia. But I lay with my disfigured face to the wall and felt no particular gratitude. My one concern was that my grandmother should keep everyone away from me. If the story once got abroad I would never hear the last of it. I could well imagine what the old man down at the drugstore would do with such a theme. While grandmother was trying to make me comfortable grandfather went to the depot and learned that Wick Cutter had come home on the night express from the east and had left again on the six o'clock train for Denver that morning. The agent said his face was striped with corp plaster and he carried his left hand in a sling. He looked so used up that the agent asked him what had happened to him since ten o'clock the night before where at Cutter began to swear at him and said he would have him discharged for incivility. That afternoon while I was asleep Antonia took grandmother with her and went over to the Cutters to pack her trunk. They found the place locked up and they had to break the window to get into Antonia's bedroom. There everything was in shocking disorder. Her clothes had been taken out of her closet thrown into the middle of the room and trampled in torn. My own garments had been treated so badly that I never saw them again. Grandmother burned them in the Cutter's kitchen range. While Antonia was packing her trunk and putting her room in order to leave it the front doorbell rang violently. There stood Mrs. Cutter locked out for she had no key to the new lock her head trembling with rage. I advised her to control herself or she would have a stroke, grandmother said afterwards. Grandmother would not let her see Antonia at all but made her sit down in the parlor where she related to her just what had occurred the night before. Antonia was frightened and was going home to stay for a while, she told Mrs. Cutter. It would be useless to air interrogate the girl for she knew nothing of what had happened. Then Mrs. Cutter told her story. She and her husband had started home from Omaha together the morning before. They had to stop over several hours and way more junction to catch the Black Hawk train. During that wait Cutter left her at the depot and went to the way more bank to attend to some business. When he returned he told her that he would have to stay overnight there but she should go on home. He bought her ticket and put her on the train. She saw him slip a twenty dollar bill into her handbag with her ticket. That bill she said should have aroused her suspicions at once but did not. The trains are never called little junction towns everybody knows when they come in. Mr. Cutter showed his wife's ticket to the conductor and settled her in her seat before the train moved off. It was not until nearly nightfall that she discovered that she was on the express down for Kansas City and that her ticket was made out to that point and that Cutter must have planned it so. The conductor told her the Black Hawk train was due at way more twelve minutes after the Kansas City train left. She saw at once that her husband had played this trick in order to get back to Black Hawk without her. She had no choice but to go on to Kansas City and take the first fast train for home. Cutter could have got home a day earlier than his wife by any one of a dozen simpler devices. He could have left her in the Omaha hotel and said he was going to Chicago for a few days. But apparently it was part of his fun to outrage her feelings as much as possible. Mr. Cutter will pay for this Mrs. Burton he will pay. Mrs. Cutter avowed nodding her horse-like head and rolling her eyes. Grandmother said she hadn't a doubt of it. Certainly Cutter liked to have his wife think him a devil. In some way he depended upon the excitement he could arouse in her hysterical nature. Perhaps he got the feeling of being a rake more from his wife's rage and amazement than from any experiences of his own. His zest and debauchery might wane, but never Mrs. Cutter's belief in it. The reckoning with his wife at the end of an escapade was something he counted on, like the last powerful liquor of a long dinner. The one excitement he really couldn't do without was quarreling with Mrs. Cutter. End of Chapter 15, recorded by Nicky Sullivan, Chicago. Chapter 1 At the university I had the good fortune to come immediately under the influence of a brilliant and inspiring young scholar. Gaston Cleric had arrived in Lincoln only a few weeks earlier than I to begin his work as head of the Latin department. He came west at the suggestion of his physicians, his health having been enfeebled by a long illness in Italy. When I took my entrance examinations he was my examiner, and my course was arranged under his supervision. I did not go home for my first summer vacation but stayed in Lincoln, working off a year's Greek, which had been my only condition on entering the freshman class. Cleric's doctor advised against his going back to New England, and except for a few weeks in Colorado, he too was in Lincoln all that summer. We played tennis, red, and took long walks together. I shall always look back on that time of mental awakening as one of the happiest in my life. Gaston Cleric introduced me to the world of ideas, when one first enters that world everything else fades for a time, and all that went before as if it had not been. Yet I found curious survivals, some of the figures of my old life seemed to be waiting for me in the new. In those days there were many serious young men among the students who had come up to the university from the farms in the little towns scattered over the thinly settled state. Some of those boys came straight from the cornfields with only a summer's wages in their pockets, hung on through the four years, shabby and underfed, and completed the course by a really heroic self-sacrifice. Our instructors were oddly assorted, wandering pioneer school teachers, stranded ministers of the gospel, a few enthusiastic young men just out of graduate schools. There was an atmosphere of endeavor, of expectancy and bright hopefulness about the young college that had lifted its head from the prairie only a few years before. Our personal life was as free as that of our instructors. There were no college dormitories, we lived where we could and as we could. I took rooms with an old couple, early settlers in Lincoln, who had married off their children and now lived quietly in their house at the edge of town near the open country. The house was inconveniently situated for students, and on that account I got two rooms for the price of one. My bedroom, originally a linen closet was unheeded and was barely large enough to contain my cot bed, and it enabled me to call the other room my study. The dresser and the great walnut wardrobe which held all my clothes, even my hats and shoes, I had pushed out of the way and I considered them non-existent as children eliminate in Congress objects when they are playing house. I worked at a commodious green topped table placed directly in front of the west window which looked out over the prairie. In the corner at my right were all my books and shelves I had made and painted myself. On the blank wall at my left the dark old fashioned wallpaper was covered by a large map of ancient Rome, the work of some German scholar. Cleck had ordered it for me when he was sending for books from abroad. Over the bookcase hung a photograph of the tragic theater at Pompeii which he had given me from his collection. When I sat at work my half faced a deep upholstered chair which stood at the end of my table its high back against the wall. I had bought it with great care. My instructor sometimes looked in upon me when he was out for an evening tramp and I noticed that he was more likely to linger and become talkative if I had a comfortable chair for him to sit in. And if he found a bottle of Benedictine and plenty of the kind of cigarettes he liked at his elbow. He was I had discovered parsiminius about small expenditures, a trait absolutely inconsistent with his general character. Sometimes when he came he was silent and moody and after a few sarcastic remarks he went away again to tramp the streets of Lincoln which were almost as quiet and oppressively domestic as those of Blackhawk. Again he would sit until nearly midnight talking about Latin and English poetry or telling me about his long stay in Italy. I can give no idea of the peculiar charm and vividness of his talk. In a crowd he was nearly always silent. Even for his classroom he had no platitudes, no stock of professorial anecdotes. When he was tired his lectures were clouded, obscure, elliptical. But when he was interested they were wonderful. I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a great poet and I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imagines of talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squand too much in the heat of personal communication. How often I have seen him draw his dark brows together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the carpet and then flash into the lamp light the very image that was in his brain. He could bring the drama of antique life before one out of the shadows, white figures against blue backgrounds. I shall never forget his face as it looked one night when he told me about the solitary day he spent among the sea temples that passed him, the soft wind blowing through the roofless columns, the birds flying low over the flowering marsh grasses, the changing lights on the silver cloud hung mountains. He had willfully stayed the short summer night there, wrapped in his coat and rug, watching the constellations on their path down the sky until the bride of old Tithonus rose out of the sea and the mountains stood sharp in the dawn. It was there he caught the fever which held him back on the eve of his departure for Greece and of which he lay ill so long in Naples. He was still indeed doing penance for it. I remember vividly another evening when something led us to talk of Dante's veneration of Virgil. Cleric went through canto after canto of the Commedia, repeating the discourse between Dante and his sweet teacher, while his cigarette burned itself out unheated between his long fingers. I can hear him now speaking the lines of the poet Stetius who spoke for Dante. I was famous on earth with the name which endures longest and honors most. The seeds of my ardour were the sparks from that divine flame whereby more than a thousand have kindled. I speak of the Aeneid, mother to me and nurse to me in poetry. Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about myself. I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood up strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plow against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive anywhere else or how.