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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
grandmother's 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 Vannis had kindled, did not at once die
out. After the tent left town,
the Euchre 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. Charley
Harling was already at Annapolis, while I was still sitting in Black Hawk,
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 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 parlour stove, digesting their supper.
Black Hawk had two saloons. One of them was admitted, even by the
church people, to be as respectable as a saloon could be.
Handsome Anton Jelinek, 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. Jelinek kept rye bread on hand and smoked fish and strong
imported cheeses to please the foreign palate. I liked 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 afterward sat awhile with the disconsolate
telegrapher who was always hoping to be transferred to 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. For 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 back yards 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 Firemen'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 Firemen'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 Vannis' tent.
Sometimes there were Bohemians from Wilber, 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 laundryman and his wife in their house
behind the laundry, with a big garden where the clothes were hung out to
dry. The laundryman 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 a
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-coloured 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 schottische
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. Gardener'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 colour 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 Cutters' 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
Lingard lets me kiss her,' I retorted, `and I'm not half as fond of 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, 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 Cutters' gate softly behind me.
Her warm, sweet face, her kind arms, and the true heart in 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
Lingard 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.
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