<h1>here is some literal result to make the included file large</h1>
<h1>MY ANTONIA</h1>
<h2>
by
Willa Sibert Cather
</h2>
<span>



 CONTENTS
 Introduction
 BOOK I.   The Shimerdas
 BOOK II.  The Hired Girls
 BOOK III. Lena Lingard
 BOOK IV.  The Pioneer Woman's Story
 BOOK V.   Cuzak's Boys


TO CARRIE AND IRENE MINER
In memory of affections old and true


Optima dies ... prima fugit
 VIRGIL





INTRODUCTION

LAST summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season
of intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling
companion James Quayle Burden--Jim Burden, as we still call him
in the West.  He and I are old friends--we grew up together
in the same Nebraska town--and we had much to say to each other.
While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat,
by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting
in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork
was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything.
The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things.
We were talking about what it is like to spend one's childhood in little
towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes
of climate:  burning summers when the world lies green and billowy
beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation,
in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests;
blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped
bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not
grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it.
It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.

Although Jim Burden and I both live in New York,
and are old friends, I do not see much of him there.
He is legal counsel for one of the great Western railways,
and is sometimes away from his New York office for weeks together.
That is one reason why we do not often meet.  Another is that I
do not like his wife.

When Jim was still an obscure young lawyer, struggling to make his way
in New York, his career was suddenly advanced by a brilliant marriage.
Genevieve Whitney was the only daughter of a distinguished man.
Her marriage with young Burden was the subject of sharp comment at the time.
It was said she had been brutally jilted by her cousin, Rutland Whitney,
and that she married this unknown man from the West out of bravado.  She was
a restless, headstrong girl, even then, who liked to astonish her friends.
Later, when I knew her, she was always doing something unexpected.
She gave one of her town houses for a Suffrage headquarters, produced one
of her own plays at the Princess Theater, was arrested for picketing during
a garment-makers' strike, etc.  I am never able to believe that she has much
feeling for the causes to which she lends her name and her fleeting interest.
She is handsome, energetic, executive, but to me she seems unimpressionable
and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm.  Her husband's quiet tastes
irritate her, I think, and she finds it worth while to play the patroness to
a group of young poets and painters of advanced ideas and mediocre ability.
She has her own fortune and lives her own life.  For some reason, she wishes
to remain Mrs. James Burden.

As for Jim, no disappointments have been severe enough to chill
his naturally romantic and ardent disposition.  This disposition,
though it often made him seem very funny when he was a boy,
has been one of the strongest elements in his success.
He loves with a personal passion the great country through
which his railway runs and branches.  His faith in it and his
knowledge of it have played an important part in its development.
He is always able to raise capital for new enterprises
in Wyoming or Montana, and has helped young men out there
to do remarkable things in mines and timber and oil.
If a young man with an idea can once get Jim Burden's attention,
can manage to accompany him when he goes off into
the wilds hunting for lost parks or exploring new canyons,
then the money which means action is usually forthcoming.
Jim is still able to lose himself in those big Western dreams.
Though he is over forty now, he meets new people and new enterprises
with the impulsiveness by which his boyhood friends remember him.
He never seems to me to grow older.  His fresh color and sandy
hair and quick-changing blue eyes are those of a young man,
and his sympathetic, solicitous interest in women is as youthful
as it is Western and American.

During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa,
our talk kept returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl
whom we had known long ago and whom both of us admired.
More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed
to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure
of our childhood.  To speak her name was to call up pictures
of people and places, to set a quiet drama going in one's brain.
I had lost sight of her altogether, but Jim had found her again
after long years, had renewed a friendship that meant a great
deal to him, and out of his busy life had set apart time enough
to enjoy that friendship.  His mind was full of her that day.
He made me see her again, feel her presence, revived all my old
affection for her.

"I can't see," he said impetuously, "why you have never written
anything about Antonia."

I told him I had always felt that other people--he himself,
for one knew her much better than I. I was ready, however,
to make an agreement with him; I would set down on paper
all that I remembered of Antonia if he would do the same.
We might, in this way, get a picture of her.

He rumpled his hair with a quick, excited gesture, which with him
often announces a new determination, and I could see that my
suggestion took hold of him.  "Maybe I will, maybe I will!"
he declared.  He stared out of the window for a few moments,
and when he turned to me again his eyes had the sudden
clearness that comes from something the mind itself sees.
"Of course," he said, "I should have to do it in a direct way,
and say a great deal about myself.  It's through myself that I
knew and felt her, and I've had no practice in any other
form of presentation."

I told him that how he knew her and felt her was exactly what I
most wanted to know about Antonia.  He had had opportunities that I,
as a little girl who watched her come and go, had not.

Months afterward Jim Burden arrived at my apartment one stormy winter
afternoon, with a bulging legal portfolio sheltered under his fur overcoat.
He brought it into the sitting-room with him and tapped it with some pride
as he stood warming his hands.

"I finished it last night--the thing about Antonia," he said.
"Now, what about yours?"

I had to confess that mine had not gone beyond a few straggling notes.

"Notes?  I didn't make any."  He drank his tea all at once
and put down the cup.  "I didn't arrange or rearrange.
I simply wrote down what of herself and myself and other people
Antonia's name recalls to me.  I suppose it hasn't any form.
It hasn't any title, either."  He went into the next room,
sat down at my desk and wrote on the pinkish face of the
portfolio the word, "Antonia."  He frowned at this a moment,
then prefixed another word, making it "My Antonia."
That seemed to satisfy him.

"Read it as soon as you can," he said, rising, "but don't let it
influence your own story."

My own story was never written, but the following narrative
is Jim's manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me.




NOTES:  [1] The Bohemian name Antonia is strongly accented
on the first syllable, like the English name Anthony,
and the `i' is, of course, given the sound of long `e'. The
name is pronounced An'-ton-ee-ah.





BOOK I

The Shimerdas



I

I FIRST HEARD OF Antonia on what seemed to me an interminable
journey across the great midland plain of North America.
I was ten years old then; I had lost both my father
and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were
sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska.
I travelled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole,
one of the `hands' on my father's old farm under the Blue Ridge,
who was now going West to work for my grandfather.
Jake's experience of the world was not much wider than mine.
He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we
set out together to try our fortunes in a new world.

We went all the way in day-coaches, becoming more sticky and
grimy with each stage of the journey.  Jake bought everything
the newsboys offered him:  candy, oranges, brass collar buttons,
a watch-charm, and for me a `Life of Jesse James,' which I
remember as one of the most satisfactory books I have ever read.
Beyond Chicago we were under the protection of a friendly passenger
conductor, who knew all about the country to which we were going
and gave us a great deal of advice in exchange for our confidence.
He seemed to us an experienced and worldly man who had been
almost everywhere; in his conversation he threw out lightly
the names of distant states and cities.  He wore the rings and pins
and badges of different fraternal orders to which he belonged.
Even his cuff-buttons were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he was
more inscribed than an Egyptian obelisk.

Once when he sat down to chat, he told us that in the immigrant
car ahead there was a family from `across the water'
whose destination was the same as ours.

`They can't any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she
can say is "We go Black Hawk, Nebraska."  She's not much older than you,
twelve or thirteen, maybe, and she's as bright as a new dollar.
Don't you want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy?  She's got the pretty
brown eyes, too!'

This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled
down to `Jesse James.'  Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you
were likely to get diseases from foreigners.

I do not remember crossing the Missouri River, or anything
about the long day's journey through Nebraska.  Probably by that
time I had crossed so many rivers that I was dull to them.
The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it
was still, all day long, Nebraska.

I had been sleeping, curled up in a red plush seat, for a long while
when we reached Black Hawk.  Jake roused me and took me by the hand.
We stumbled down from the train to a wooden siding, where men were running
about with lanterns.  I couldn't see any town, or even distant lights;
we were surrounded by utter darkness.  The engine was panting heavily
after its long run.  In the red glow from the fire-box, a group of people
stood huddled together on the platform, encumbered by bundles and boxes.
I knew this must be the immigrant family the conductor had told us about.
The woman wore a fringed shawl tied over her head, and she carried
a little tin trunk in her arms, hugging it as if it were a baby.
There was an old man, tall and stooped.  Two half-grown boys and a girl stood
holding oilcloth bundles, and a little girl clung to her mother's skirts.
Presently a man with a lantern approached them and began to talk,
shouting and exclaiming.  I pricked up my ears, for it was positively
the first time I had ever heard a foreign tongue.

Another lantern came along.  A bantering voice called out:
`Hello, are you Mr. Burden's folks?  If you are, it's me you're looking for.
I'm Otto Fuchs.  I'm Mr. Burden's hired man, and I'm to drive you out.
Hello, Jimmy, ain't you scared to come so far west?'

I looked up with interest at the new face in the lantern-light.
He might have stepped out of the pages of `Jesse James.'
He wore a sombrero hat, with a wide leather band and a bright buckle,
and the ends of his moustache were twisted up stiffly,
like little horns.  He looked lively and ferocious, I thought,
and as if he had a history.  A long scar ran across one cheek
and drew the corner of his mouth up in a sinister curl.
The top of his left ear was gone, and his skin was brown
as an Indian's. Surely this was the face of a desperado.
As he walked about the platform in his high-heeled boots,
looking for our trunks, I saw that he was a rather slight man,
quick and wiry, and light on his feet.  He told us we had a long
night drive ahead of us, and had better be on the hike.
He led us to a hitching-bar where two farm-wagons were tied,
and I saw the foreign family crowding into one of them.
The other was for us.  Jake got on the front seat with Otto Fuchs,
and I rode on the straw in the bottom of the wagon-box,
covered up with a buffalo hide.  The immigrants rumbled off
into the empty darkness, and we followed them.

I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue,
and I soon began to ache all over.  When the straw settled down,
I had a hard bed.  Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide,
got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon.
There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees,
no hills or fields.  If there was a road, I could not make
it out in the faint starlight.  There was nothing but land:
not a country at all, but the material out of which countries
are made.  No, there was nothing but land--slightly undulating,
I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we
went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side.
I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had
got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction.
I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a
familiar mountain ridge against it.  But this was the complete
dome of heaven, all there was of it.  I did not believe that my
dead father and mother were watching me from up there; they would
still be looking for me at the sheep-fold down by the creek,
or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures.
I had left even their spirits behind me.  The wagon jolted on,
carrying me I knew not whither.  I don't think I was homesick.
If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter.
Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out.
I did not say my prayers that night:  here, I felt, what would
be would be.



II


I DO NOT REMEMBER our arrival at my grandfather's farm sometime
before daybreak, after a drive of nearly twenty miles with heavy
work-horses. When I awoke, it was afternoon.  I was lying
in a little room, scarcely larger than the bed that held me,
and the window-shade at my head was flapping softly in a warm wind.
A tall woman, with wrinkled brown skin and black hair,
stood looking down at me; I knew that she must be my grandmother.
She had been crying, I could see, but when I opened my eyes
she smiled, peered at me anxiously, and sat down on the foot
of my bed.

`Had a good sleep, Jimmy?' she asked briskly.  Then in a very different
tone she said, as if to herself, `My, how you do look like your father!'
I remembered that my father had been her little boy; she must often have come
to wake him like this when he overslept.  `Here are your clean clothes,'
she went on, stroking my coverlid with her brown hand as she talked.
`But first you come down to the kitchen with me, and have a nice warm
bath behind the stove.  Bring your things; there's nobody about.'

`Down to the kitchen' struck me as curious; it was always `out
in the kitchen' at home.  I picked up my shoes and stockings
and followed her through the living-room and down a flight
of stairs into a basement.  This basement was divided into a
dining-room at the right of the stairs and a kitchen at the left.
Both rooms were plastered and whitewashed--the plaster laid
directly upon the earth walls, as it used to be in dugouts.
The floor was of hard cement.  Up under the wooden ceiling
there were little half-windows with white curtains, and pots
of geraniums and wandering Jew in the deep sills.  As I entered
the kitchen, I sniffed a pleasant smell of gingerbread baking.
The stove was very large, with bright nickel trimmings,
and behind it there was a long wooden bench against the wall,
and a tin washtub, into which grandmother poured hot and cold water.
When she brought the soap and towels, I told her that I was used
to taking my bath without help.  `Can you do your ears, Jimmy?
Are you sure?  Well, now, I call you a right smart little boy.'

It was pleasant there in the kitchen.  The sun shone into my
bath-water through the west half-window, and a big Maltese cat came
up and rubbed himself against the tub, watching me curiously.
While I scrubbed, my grandmother busied herself in the dining-room until
I called anxiously, `Grandmother, I'm afraid the cakes are burning!'
Then she came laughing, waving her apron before her as if she
were shooing chickens.

She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt
to carry her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention,
as if she were looking at something, or listening to something,
far away.  As I grew older, I came to believe that it was only
because she was so often thinking of things that were far away.
She was quick-footed and energetic in all her movements.
Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often spoke
with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous
that everything should go with due order and decorum.
Her laugh, too, was high, and perhaps a little strident,
but there was a lively intelligence in it.  She was then
fifty-five years old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance.

After I was dressed, I explored the long cellar next the kitchen.
It was dug out under the wing of the house, was plastered and cemented,
with a stairway and an outside door by which the men came and went.
Under one of the windows there was a place for them to wash when they
came in from work.

While my grandmother was busy about supper, I settled myself on
the wooden bench behind the stove and got acquainted with the cat--
he caught not only rats and mice, but gophers, I was told.
The patch of yellow sunlight on the floor travelled back toward
the stairway, and grandmother and I talked about my journey,
and about the arrival of the new Bohemian family; she said
they were to be our nearest neighbours.  We did not talk about
the farm in Virginia, which had been her home for so many years.
But after the men came in from the fields, and we were all
seated at the supper table, then she asked Jake about the old
place and about our friends and neighbours there.

My grandfather said little.  When he first came in he kissed
me and spoke kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative.
I felt at once his deliberateness and personal dignity,
and was a little in awe of him.  The thing one immediately
noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly, snow-white beard.
I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard of an
Arabian sheik.  His bald crown only made it more impressive.

Grandfather's eyes were not at all like those of an old man;
they were bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle.
His teeth were white and regular--so sound that he had never
been to a dentist in his life.  He had a delicate skin,
easily roughened by sun and wind.  When he was a young man
his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still coppery.

As we sat at the table, Otto Fuchs and I kept stealing covert glances
at each other.  Grandmother had told me while she was getting supper
that he was an Austrian who came to this country a young boy and had led
an adventurous life in the Far West among mining-camps and cow outfits.
His iron constitution was somewhat broken by mountain pneumonia,
and he had drifted back to live in a milder country for a while.
He had relatives in Bismarck, a German settlement to the north of us,
but for a year now he had been working for grandfather.

The minute supper was over, Otto took me into the kitchen to whisper to me
about a pony down in the barn that had been bought for me at a sale;
he had been riding him to find out whether he had any bad tricks,
but he was a `perfect gentleman,' and his name was Dude.  Fuchs told
me everything I wanted to know:  how he had lost his ear in a Wyoming
blizzard when he was a stage-driver, and how to throw a lasso.
He promised to rope a steer for me before sundown next day.
He got out his `chaps' and silver spurs to show them to Jake and me,
and his best cowboy boots, with tops stitched in bold design--
roses, and true-lover's knots, and undraped female figures.
These, he solemnly explained, were angels.

Before we went to bed, Jake and Otto were called up to the
living-room for prayers.  Grandfather put on silver-rimmed
spectacles and read several Psalms.  His voice was so
sympathetic and he read so interestingly that I wished he had
chosen one of my favourite chapters in the Book of Kings.
I was awed by his intonation of the word `Selah.' `He shall
choose our inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom
He loved.  Selah.'  I had no idea what the word meant;
perhaps he had not.  But, as he uttered it, it became oracular,
the most sacred of words.

Early the next morning I ran out-of-doors to look about me.
I had been told that ours was the only wooden house west
of Black Hawk--until you came to the Norwegian settlement,
where there were several.  Our neighbours lived in sod
houses and dugouts--comfortable, but not very roomy.
Our white frame house, with a storey and half-storey above
the basement, stood at the east end of what I might call
the farmyard, with the windmill close by the kitchen door.
From the windmill the ground sloped westward, down to the barns
and granaries and pig-yards. This slope was trampled hard
and bare, and washed out in winding gullies by the rain.
Beyond the corncribs, at the bottom of the shallow draw,
was a muddy little pond, with rusty willow bushes growing about it.
The road from the post-office came directly by our door,
crossed the farmyard, and curved round this little pond,
beyond which it began to climb the gentle swell of unbroken
prairie to the west.  There, along the western sky-line it skirted
a great cornfield, much larger than any field I had ever seen.
This cornfield, and the sorghum patch behind the barn,
were the only broken land in sight.  Everywhere, as far as the eye
could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red grass,
most of it as tall as I.

North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew a thick-set strip
of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning yellow.
This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to look very hard
to see it at all.  The little trees were insignificant against the grass.
It seemed as if the grass were about to run over them, and over the plum-patch
behind the sod chicken-house.

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water
is the sea.  The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour
of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up.
And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow,
to be running.

I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out,
her sunbonnet on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I
did not want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner.

The garden, curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from the house,
and the way to it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral.
Grandmother called my attention to a stout hickory cane,
tipped with copper, which hung by a leather thong from
her belt.  This, she said, was her rattlesnake cane.
I must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife;
she had killed a good many rattlers on her way back and forth.
A little girl who lived on the Black Hawk road was bitten
on the ankle and had been sick all summer.

I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my
grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning.
Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more
than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh,
easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy
grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo
were galloping, galloping ...

Alone, I should never have found the garden--except, perhaps,
for the big yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their
withering vines--and I felt very little interest in it when I
got there.  I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass
and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away.
The light air about me told me that the world ended here:
only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one
went a little farther there would be only sun and sky,
and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks
which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.
While grandmother took the pitchfork we found standing
in one of the rows and dug potatoes, while I picked them
up out of the soft brown earth and put them into the bag,
I kept looking up at the hawks that were doing what I might
so easily do.

When grandmother was ready to go, I said I would like to stay up there
in the garden awhile.

She peered down at me from under her sunbonnet.
`Aren't you afraid of snakes?'

`A little,' I admitted, `but I'd like to stay, anyhow.'

`Well, if you see one, don't have anything to do with him.
The big yellow and brown ones won't hurt you; they're bull-snakes
and help to keep the gophers down.  Don't be scared if you
see anything look out of that hole in the bank over there.
That's a badger hole.  He's about as big as a big 'possum,
and his face is striped, black and white.  He takes a
chicken once in a while, but I won't let the men harm him.
In a new country a body feels friendly to the animals.
I like to have him come out and watch me when I'm at work.'

Grandmother swung the bag of potatoes over her shoulder
and went down the path, leaning forward a little.
The road followed the windings of the draw; when she came
to the first bend, she waved at me and disappeared.
I was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content.

I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely
approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin.
There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows,
full of fruit.  I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected
the berries and ate a few.  All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big
as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines.
The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground.  There in the sheltered
draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing
its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave.
The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers.
Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me.
Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots.  I kept as still
as I could.  Nothing happened.  I did not expect anything to happen.
I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins,
and I did not want to be anything more.  I was entirely happy.
Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire,
whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge.  At any rate,
that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.
When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.



III

ON SUNDAY MORNING Otto Fuchs was to drive us over to make the
acquaintance of our new Bohemian neighbours.  We were taking them
some provisions, as they had come to live on a wild place where there
was no garden or chicken-house, and very little broken land.
Fuchs brought up a sack of potatoes and a piece of cured pork from
the cellar, and grandmother packed some loaves of Saturday's bread,
a jar of butter, and several pumpkin pies in the straw of the wagon-box.
We clambered up to the front seat and jolted off past the little
pond and along the road that climbed to the big cornfield.

I could hardly wait to see what lay beyond that cornfield;
but there was only red grass like ours, and nothing else,
though from the high wagon-seat one could look off a long way.
The road ran about like a wild thing, avoiding the deep draws,
crossing them where they were wide and shallow.
And all along it, wherever it looped or ran, the sunflowers grew;
some of them were as big as little trees, with great rough
leaves and many branches which bore dozens of blossoms.
They made a gold ribbon across the prairie.  Occasionally one
of the horses would tear off with his teeth a plant full
of blossoms, and walk along munching it, the flowers nodding
in time to his bites as he ate down toward them.

The Bohemian family, grandmother told me as we drove along,
had bought the homestead of a fellow countryman, Peter Krajiek,
and had paid him more than it was worth.  Their agreement with him
was made before they left the old country, through a cousin of his,
who was also a relative of Mrs. Shimerda.  The Shimerdas were
the first Bohemian family to come to this part of the county.
Krajiek was their only interpreter, and could tell them anything
he chose.  They could not speak enough English to ask for advice,
or even to make their most pressing wants known.  One son,
Fuchs said, was well-grown, and strong enough to work the land;
but the father was old and frail and knew nothing about farming.
He was a weaver by trade; had been a skilled workman on tapestries
and upholstery materials.  He had brought his fiddle with him,
which wouldn't be of much use here, though he used to pick up money
by it at home.

`If they're nice people, I hate to think of them spending
the winter in that cave of Krajiek's,' said grandmother.
`It's no better than a badger hole; no proper dugout at all.
And I hear he's made them pay twenty dollars for his old
cookstove that ain't worth ten.'

`Yes'm,' said Otto; `and he's sold 'em his oxen and his
two bony old horses for the price of good workteams.
I'd have interfered about the horses--the old man can understand
some German--if I'd I a' thought it would do any good.
But Bohemians has a natural distrust of Austrians.'

Grandmother looked interested.  `Now, why is that, Otto?'

Fuchs wrinkled his brow and nose.  `Well, ma'm, it's politics.
It would take me a long while to explain.'

The land was growing rougher; I was told that we were approaching
Squaw Creek, which cut up the west half of the Shimerdas'
place and made the land of little value for farming.
Soon we could see the broken, grassy clay cliffs which
indicated the windings of the stream, and the glittering tops
of the cottonwoods and ash trees that grew down in the ravine.
Some of the cottonwoods had already turned, and the yellow
leaves and shining white bark made them look like the gold
and silver trees in fairy tales.

As we approached the Shimerdas' dwelling, I could still see
nothing but rough red hillocks, and draws with shelving banks
and long roots hanging out where the earth had crumbled away.
Presently, against one of those banks, I saw a sort of shed,
thatched with the same wine-coloured grass that grew everywhere.
Near it tilted a shattered windmill frame, that had no wheel.
We drove up to this skeleton to tie our horses, and then I saw
a door and window sunk deep in the drawbank.  The door stood open,
and a woman and a girl of fourteen ran out and looked up
at us hopefully.  A little girl trailed along behind them.
The woman had on her head the same embroidered shawl with silk fringes
that she wore when she had alighted from the train at Black Hawk.
She was not old, but she was certainly not young.  Her face
was alert and lively, with a sharp chin and shrewd little eyes.
She shook grandmother's hand energetically.

`Very glad, very glad!' she ejaculated.  Immediately she pointed
to the bank out of which she had emerged and said, `House no good,
house no good!'

Grandmother nodded consolingly.  `You'll get fixed up comfortable after while,
Mrs. Shimerda; make good house.'

My grandmother always spoke in a very loud tone to foreigners,
as if they were deaf.  She made Mrs. Shimerda understand
the friendly intention of our visit, and the Bohemian woman
handled the loaves of bread and even smelled them, and examined
the pies with lively curiosity, exclaiming, `Much good,
much thank!'--and again she wrung grandmother's hand.

The oldest son, Ambroz--they called it Ambrosch--
came out of the cave and stood beside his mother.
He was nineteen years old, short and broad-backed,
with a close-cropped, flat head, and a wide, flat face.
His hazel eyes were little and shrewd, like his mother's,
but more sly and suspicious; they fairly snapped at the food.
The family had been living on corncakes and sorghum molasses
for three days.

The little girl was pretty, but Antonia--they accented the
name thus, strongly, when they spoke to her--was still prettier.
I remembered what the conductor had said about her eyes.
They were big and warm and full of light, like the sun
shining on brown pools in the wood.  Her skin was brown,
too, and in her cheeks she had a glow of rich, dark colour.
Her brown hair was curly and wild-looking. The little sister,
whom they called Yulka (Julka), was fair, and seemed mild
and obedient.  While I stood awkwardly confronting the two girls,
Krajiek came up from the barn to see what was going on.
With him was another Shimerda son.  Even from a distance one
could see that there was something strange about this boy.
As he approached us, he began to make uncouth noises,
and held up his hands to show us his fingers, which were webbed
to the first knuckle, like a duck's foot.  When he saw me
draw back, he began to crow delightedly, `Hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo!'
like a rooster.  His mother scowled and said sternly,
`Marek!' then spoke rapidly to Krajiek in Bohemian.

`She wants me to tell you he won't hurt nobody, Mrs. Burden.  He was born
like that.  The others are smart.  Ambrosch, he make good farmer.'
He struck Ambrosch on the back, and the boy smiled knowingly.

At that moment the father came out of the hole in the bank.
He wore no hat, and his thick, iron-grey hair was brushed straight back
from his forehead.  It was so long that it bushed out behind his ears,
and made him look like the old portraits I remembered in Virginia.
He was tall and slender, and his thin shoulders stooped.
He looked at us understandingly, then took grandmother's hand and bent
over it.  I noticed how white and well-shaped his own hands were.
They looked calm, somehow, and skilled.  His eyes were melancholy,
and were set back deep under his brow.  His face was ruggedly formed,
but it looked like ashes--like something from which all the warmth
and light had died out.  Everything about this old man was
in keeping with his dignified manner.  He was neatly dressed.
Under his coat he wore a knitted grey vest, and, instead of a collar,
a silk scarf of a dark bronze-green, carefully crossed and held
together by a red coral pin.  While Krajiek was translating for
Mr. Shimerda, Antonia came up to me and held out her hand coaxingly.
In a moment we were running up the steep drawside together,
Yulka trotting after us.

When we reached the level and could see the gold tree-tops, I
pointed toward them, and Antonia laughed and squeezed my hand
as if to tell me how glad she was I had come.  We raced off toward
Squaw Creek and did not stop until the ground itself stopped--
fell away before us so abruptly that the next step would have been
out into the tree-tops. We stood panting on the edge of the ravine,
looking down at the trees and bushes that grew below us.
The wind was so strong that I had to hold my hat on, and the girls'
skirts were blown out before them.  Antonia seemed to like it;
she held her little sister by the hand and chattered away in that
language which seemed to me spoken so much more rapidly than mine.
She looked at me, her eyes fairly blazing with things she could not say.

`Name? What name?' she asked, touching me on the shoulder.
I told her my name, and she repeated it after me and made Yulka say it.
She pointed into the gold cottonwood tree behind whose top we stood
and said again, `What name?'

We sat down and made a nest in the long red grass.
Yulka curled up like a baby rabbit and played with a grasshopper.
Antonia pointed up to the sky and questioned me with her glance.
I gave her the word, but she was not satisfied and pointed to my eyes.
I told her, and she repeated the word, making it sound like `ice.'
She pointed up to the sky, then to my eyes, then back to the sky,
with movements so quick and impulsive that she distracted me,
and I had no idea what she wanted.  She got up on her knees and
wrung her hands.  She pointed to her own eyes and shook her head,
then to mine and to the sky, nodding violently.

`Oh,' I exclaimed, `blue; blue sky.'

She clapped her hands and murmured, `Blue sky, blue eyes,'
as if it amused her.  While we snuggled down there out of the wind,
she learned a score of words.  She was alive, and very eager.
We were so deep in the grass that we could see nothing but the blue sky
over us and the gold tree in front of us.  It was wonderfully pleasant.
After Antonia had said the new words over and over, she wanted to give
me a little chased silver ring she wore on her middle finger.
When she coaxed and insisted, I repulsed her quite sternly.
I didn't want her ring, and I felt there was something reckless
and extravagant about her wishing to give it away to a boy she had
never seen before.  No wonder Krajiek got the better of these people,
if this was how they behaved.

While we were disputing `about the ring, I heard
a mournful voice calling, `Antonia, Antonia!'
She sprang up like a hare.  'Tatinek!  Tatinek!' she shouted,
and we ran to meet the old man who was coming toward us.
Antonia reached him first, took his hand and kissed it.
When I came up, he touched my shoulder and looked searchingly down
into my face for several seconds.  I became somewhat embarrassed,
for I was used to being taken for granted by my elders.

We went with Mr. Shimerda back to the dugout, where grandmother
was waiting for me.  Before I got into the wagon, he took
a book out of his pocket, opened it, and showed me a page
with two alphabets, one English and the other Bohemian.
He placed this book in my grandmother's hands, looked at
her entreatingly, and said, with an earnestness which I shall
never forget, `Te-e-ach, te-e-ach my Antonia!'



IV

ON THE AFTERNOON of that same Sunday I took my first long ride
on my pony, under Otto's direction.  After that Dude and I went
twice a week to the post-office, six miles east of us, and I saved
the men a good deal of time by riding on errands to our neighbours.
When we had to borrow anything, or to send about word that there would
be preaching at the sod schoolhouse, I was always the messenger.
Formerly Fuchs attended to such things after working hours.

All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that
first glorious autumn.  The new country lay open before me:
there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way
over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again.
Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads.  Fuchs told me
that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons;
that at the time of the persecution, when they left Missouri and struck
out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship
God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party,
crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seed as they went.
The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all
the women and children, they had the sunflower trail to follow.
I believe that botanists do not confirm Fuchs's story, but insist that
the sunflower was native to those plains.  Nevertheless, that legend
has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem
to me the roads to freedom.

I used to love to drift along the pale-yellow cornfields,
looking for the damp spots one sometimes found at their edges,
where the smartweed soon turned a rich copper colour and the narrow brown
leaves hung curled like cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem.
Sometimes I went south to visit our German neighbours and to admire
their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew up out
of a deep crack in the earth and had a hawk's nest in its branches.
Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard
fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit
them as if they were persons.  It must have been the scarcity
of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.

Sometimes I rode north to the big prairie-dog town to watch
the brown earth-owls fly home in the late afternoon
and go down to their nests underground with the dogs.
Antonia Shimerda liked to go with me, and we used to wonder
a great deal about these birds of subterranean habit.
We had to be on our guard there, for rattlesnakes were always
lurking about.  They came to pick up an easy living among
the dogs and owls, which were quite defenceless against them;
took possession of their comfortable houses and ate the eggs
and puppies.  We felt sorry for the owls.  It was always
mournful to see them come flying home at sunset and disappear
under the earth.  But, after all, we felt, winged things
who would live like that must be rather degraded creatures.
The dog-town was a long way from any pond or creek.
Otto Fuchs said he had seen populous dog-towns in the desert
where there was no surface water for fifty miles; he insisted
that some of the holes must go down to water--nearly two
hundred feet, hereabouts.  Antonia said she didn't believe it;
that the dogs probably lapped up the dew in the early morning,
like the rabbits.

Antonia had opinions about everything, and she was soon
able to make them known.  Almost every day she came running
across the prairie to have her reading lesson with me.
Mrs. Shimerda grumbled, but realized it was important that one member
of the family should learn English.  When the lesson was over,
we used to go up to the watermelon patch behind the garden.
I split the melons with an old corn-knife, and we lifted
out the hearts and ate them with the juice trickling through
our fingers.  The white Christmas melons we did not touch,
but we watched them with curiosity.  They were to be picked late,
when the hard frosts had set in, and put away for winter use.
After weeks on the ocean, the Shimerdas were famished for fruit.
The two girls would wander for miles along the edge of the cornfields,
hunting for ground-cherries.

Antonia loved to help grandmother in the kitchen and to learn about cooking
and housekeeping.  She would stand beside her, watching her every movement.
We were willing to believe that Mrs. Shimerda was a good housewife
in her own country, but she managed poorly under new conditions:
the conditions were bad enough, certainly!

I remember how horrified we were at the sour, ashy-grey bread
she gave her family to eat.  She mixed her dough, we discovered,
in an old tin peck-measure that Krajiek had used about the barn.
When she took the paste out to bake it, she left smears
of dough sticking to the sides of the measure, put the measure
on the shelf behind the stove, and let this residue ferment.
The next time she made bread, she scraped this sour stuff
down into the fresh dough to serve as yeast.

During those first months the Shimerdas never went to town.
Krajiek encouraged them in the belief that in Black Hawk they
would somehow be mysteriously separated from their money.
They hated Krajiek, but they clung to him because he was
the only human being with whom they could talk or from whom
they could get information.  He slept with the old man
and the two boys in the dugout barn, along with the oxen.
They kept him in their hole and fed him for the same reason
that the prairie-dogs and the brown owls house the rattlesnakes--
because they did not know how to get rid of him.



V

WE KNEW THAT THINGS were hard for our Bohemian neighbours,
but the two girls were lighthearted and never complained.
They were always ready to forget their troubles at home,
and to run away with me over the prairie, scaring rabbits
or starting up flocks of quail.

I remember Antonia's excitement when she came into our kitchen one afternoon
and announced:  `My papa find friends up north, with Russian mans.
Last night he take me for see, and I can understand very much talk.
Nice mans, Mrs. Burden.  One is fat and all the time laugh.
Everybody laugh.  The first time I see my papa laugh in this kawntree.
Oh, very nice!'

I asked her if she meant the two Russians who lived up
by the big dog-town. I had often been tempted to go to see
them when I was riding in that direction, but one of them
was a wild-looking fellow and I was a little afraid of him.
Russia seemed to me more remote than any other country--
farther away than China, almost as far as the North Pole.
Of all the strange, uprooted people among the first settlers,
those two men were the strangest and the most aloof.
Their last names were unpronounceable, so they were called
Pavel and Peter.  They went about making signs to people,
and until the Shimerdas came they had no friends.
Krajiek could understand them a little, but he had cheated
them in a trade, so they avoided him.  Pavel, the tall one,
was said to be an anarchist; since he had no means of imparting
his opinions, probably his wild gesticulations and his generally
excited and rebellious manner gave rise to this supposition.
He must once have been a very strong man, but now his
great frame, with big, knotty joints, had a wasted look,
and the skin was drawn tight over his high cheekbones.
His breathing was hoarse, and he always had a cough.

Peter, his companion, was a very different sort of fellow; short, bow-legged,
and as fat as butter.  He always seemed pleased when he met people on
the road, smiled and took off his cap to everyone, men as well as women.
At a distance, on his wagon, he looked like an old man; his hair and beard
were of such a pale flaxen colour that they seemed white in the sun.
They were as thick and curly as carded wool.  His rosy face, with its
snub nose, set in this fleece, was like a melon among its leaves.
He was usually called `Curly Peter,' or `Rooshian Peter.'

The two Russians made good farm-hands, and in summer they worked
out together.  I had heard our neighbours laughing when they
told how Peter always had to go home at night to milk his cow.
Other bachelor homesteaders used canned milk, to save trouble.
Sometimes Peter came to church at the sod schoolhouse.
It was there I first saw him, sitting on a low bench by the door,
his plush cap in his hands, his bare feet tucked apologetically
under the seat.

After Mr. Shimerda discovered the Russians, he went to see them
almost every evening, and sometimes took Antonia with him.
She said they came from a part of Russia where the language
was not very different from Bohemian, and if I wanted
to go to their place, she could talk to them for me.
One afternoon, before the heavy frosts began, we rode up there
together on my pony.

The Russians had a neat log house built on a grassy slope,
with a windlass well beside the door.  As we rode up
the draw, we skirted a big melon patch, and a garden
where squashes and yellow cucumbers lay about on the sod.
We found Peter out behind his kitchen, bending over a washtub.
He was working so hard that he did not hear us coming.
His whole body moved up and down as he rubbed, and he was a funny
sight from the rear, with his shaggy head and bandy legs.
When he straightened himself up to greet us, drops of perspiration
were rolling from his thick nose down onto his curly beard.
Peter dried his hands and seemed glad to leave his washing.
He took us down to see his chickens, and his cow that was
grazing on the hillside.  He told Antonia that in his country
only rich people had cows, but here any man could have one
who would take care of her.  The milk was good for Pavel,
who was often sick, and he could make butter by beating sour
cream with a wooden spoon.  Peter was very fond of his cow.
He patted her flanks and talked to her in Russian while he pulled
up her lariat pin and set it in a new place.

After he had shown us his garden, Peter trundled a load of
watermelons up the hill in his wheelbarrow.  Pavel was not at home.
He was off somewhere helping to dig a well.  The house I thought
very comfortable for two men who were `batching.' Besides the kitchen,
there was a living-room, with a wide double bed built against
the wall, properly made up with blue gingham sheets and pillows.
There was a little storeroom, too, with a window, where they
kept guns and saddles and tools, and old coats and boots.
That day the floor was covered with garden things, drying for winter;
corn and beans and fat yellow cucumbers.  There were no screens
or window-blinds in the house, and all the doors and windows stood
wide open, letting in flies and sunshine alike.

Peter put the melons in a row on the oilcloth-covered table
and stood over them, brandishing a butcher knife.  Before the
blade got fairly into them, they split of their own ripeness,
with a delicious sound.  He gave us knives, but no plates,
and the top of the table was soon swimming with juice and seeds.
I had never seen anyone eat so many melons as Peter ate.
He assured us that they were good for one--better than medicine;
in his country people lived on them at this time of year.
He was very hospitable and jolly.  Once, while he was looking
at Antonia, he sighed and told us that if he had stayed
at home in Russia perhaps by this time he would have had
a pretty daughter of his own to cook and keep house for him.
He said he had left his country because of a `great trouble.'

When we got up to go, Peter looked about in perplexity for
something that would entertain us.  He ran into the storeroom
and brought out a gaudily painted harmonica, sat down on a bench,
and spreading his fat legs apart began to play like a whole band.
The tunes were either very lively or very doleful, and he sang
words to some of them.

Before we left, Peter put ripe cucumbers into a sack for Mrs. Shimerda
and gave us a lard-pail full of milk to cook them in.  I had never heard
of cooking cucumbers, but Antonia assured me they were very good.
We had to walk the pony all the way home to keep from spilling the milk.


MY ANTONIA

by
Willa Sibert Cather





 CONTENTS
 Introduction
 BOOK I.   The Shimerdas
 BOOK II.  The Hired Girls
 BOOK III. Lena Lingard
 BOOK IV.  The Pioneer Woman's Story
 BOOK V.   Cuzak's Boys


TO CARRIE AND IRENE MINER
In memory of affections old and true


Optima dies ... prima fugit
 VIRGIL





INTRODUCTION

LAST summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season
of intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling
companion James Quayle Burden--Jim Burden, as we still call him
in the West.  He and I are old friends--we grew up together
in the same Nebraska town--and we had much to say to each other.
While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat,
by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting
in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork
was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything.
The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things.
We were talking about what it is like to spend one's childhood in little
towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes
of climate:  burning summers when the world lies green and billowy
beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation,
in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests;
blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped
bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not
grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it.
It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.

Although Jim Burden and I both live in New York,
and are old friends, I do not see much of him there.
He is legal counsel for one of the great Western railways,
and is sometimes away from his New York office for weeks together.
That is one reason why we do not often meet.  Another is that I
do not like his wife.

When Jim was still an obscure young lawyer, struggling to make his way
in New York, his career was suddenly advanced by a brilliant marriage.
Genevieve Whitney was the only daughter of a distinguished man.
Her marriage with young Burden was the subject of sharp comment at the time.
It was said she had been brutally jilted by her cousin, Rutland Whitney,
and that she married this unknown man from the West out of bravado.  She was
a restless, headstrong girl, even then, who liked to astonish her friends.
Later, when I knew her, she was always doing something unexpected.
She gave one of her town houses for a Suffrage headquarters, produced one
of her own plays at the Princess Theater, was arrested for picketing during
a garment-makers' strike, etc.  I am never able to believe that she has much
feeling for the causes to which she lends her name and her fleeting interest.
She is handsome, energetic, executive, but to me she seems unimpressionable
and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm.  Her husband's quiet tastes
irritate her, I think, and she finds it worth while to play the patroness to
a group of young poets and painters of advanced ideas and mediocre ability.
She has her own fortune and lives her own life.  For some reason, she wishes
to remain Mrs. James Burden.

As for Jim, no disappointments have been severe enough to chill
his naturally romantic and ardent disposition.  This disposition,
though it often made him seem very funny when he was a boy,
has been one of the strongest elements in his success.
He loves with a personal passion the great country through
which his railway runs and branches.  His faith in it and his
knowledge of it have played an important part in its development.
He is always able to raise capital for new enterprises
in Wyoming or Montana, and has helped young men out there
to do remarkable things in mines and timber and oil.
If a young man with an idea can once get Jim Burden's attention,
can manage to accompany him when he goes off into
the wilds hunting for lost parks or exploring new canyons,
then the money which means action is usually forthcoming.
Jim is still able to lose himself in those big Western dreams.
Though he is over forty now, he meets new people and new enterprises
with the impulsiveness by which his boyhood friends remember him.
He never seems to me to grow older.  His fresh color and sandy
hair and quick-changing blue eyes are those of a young man,
and his sympathetic, solicitous interest in women is as youthful
as it is Western and American.

During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa,
our talk kept returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl
whom we had known long ago and whom both of us admired.
More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed
to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure
of our childhood.  To speak her name was to call up pictures
of people and places, to set a quiet drama going in one's brain.
I had lost sight of her altogether, but Jim had found her again
after long years, had renewed a friendship that meant a great
deal to him, and out of his busy life had set apart time enough
to enjoy that friendship.  His mind was full of her that day.
He made me see her again, feel her presence, revived all my old
affection for her.

"I can't see," he said impetuously, "why you have never written
anything about Antonia."

I told him I had always felt that other people--he himself,
for one knew her much better than I. I was ready, however,
to make an agreement with him; I would set down on paper
all that I remembered of Antonia if he would do the same.
We might, in this way, get a picture of her.

He rumpled his hair with a quick, excited gesture, which with him
often announces a new determination, and I could see that my
suggestion took hold of him.  "Maybe I will, maybe I will!"
he declared.  He stared out of the window for a few moments,
and when he turned to me again his eyes had the sudden
clearness that comes from something the mind itself sees.
"Of course," he said, "I should have to do it in a direct way,
and say a great deal about myself.  It's through myself that I
knew and felt her, and I've had no practice in any other
form of presentation."

I told him that how he knew her and felt her was exactly what I
most wanted to know about Antonia.  He had had opportunities that I,
as a little girl who watched her come and go, had not.

Months afterward Jim Burden arrived at my apartment one stormy winter
afternoon, with a bulging legal portfolio sheltered under his fur overcoat.
He brought it into the sitting-room with him and tapped it with some pride
as he stood warming his hands.

"I finished it last night--the thing about Antonia," he said.
"Now, what about yours?"

I had to confess that mine had not gone beyond a few straggling notes.

"Notes?  I didn't make any."  He drank his tea all at once
and put down the cup.  "I didn't arrange or rearrange.
I simply wrote down what of herself and myself and other people
Antonia's name recalls to me.  I suppose it hasn't any form.
It hasn't any title, either."  He went into the next room,
sat down at my desk and wrote on the pinkish face of the
portfolio the word, "Antonia."  He frowned at this a moment,
then prefixed another word, making it "My Antonia."
That seemed to satisfy him.

"Read it as soon as you can," he said, rising, "but don't let it
influence your own story."

My own story was never written, but the following narrative
is Jim's manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me.




NOTES:  [1] The Bohemian name Antonia is strongly accented
on the first syllable, like the English name Anthony,
and the `i' is, of course, given the sound of long `e'. The
name is pronounced An'-ton-ee-ah.





BOOK I

The Shimerdas



I

I FIRST HEARD OF Antonia on what seemed to me an interminable
journey across the great midland plain of North America.
I was ten years old then; I had lost both my father
and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were
sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska.
I travelled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole,
one of the `hands' on my father's old farm under the Blue Ridge,
who was now going West to work for my grandfather.
Jake's experience of the world was not much wider than mine.
He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we
set out together to try our fortunes in a new world.

We went all the way in day-coaches, becoming more sticky and
grimy with each stage of the journey.  Jake bought everything
the newsboys offered him:  candy, oranges, brass collar buttons,
a watch-charm, and for me a `Life of Jesse James,' which I
remember as one of the most satisfactory books I have ever read.
Beyond Chicago we were under the protection of a friendly passenger
conductor, who knew all about the country to which we were going
and gave us a great deal of advice in exchange for our confidence.
He seemed to us an experienced and worldly man who had been
almost everywhere; in his conversation he threw out lightly
the names of distant states and cities.  He wore the rings and pins
and badges of different fraternal orders to which he belonged.
Even his cuff-buttons were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he was
more inscribed than an Egyptian obelisk.

Once when he sat down to chat, he told us that in the immigrant
car ahead there was a family from `across the water'
whose destination was the same as ours.

`They can't any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she
can say is "We go Black Hawk, Nebraska."  She's not much older than you,
twelve or thirteen, maybe, and she's as bright as a new dollar.
Don't you want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy?  She's got the pretty
brown eyes, too!'

This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled
down to `Jesse James.'  Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you
were likely to get diseases from foreigners.

I do not remember crossing the Missouri River, or anything
about the long day's journey through Nebraska.  Probably by that
time I had crossed so many rivers that I was dull to them.
The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it
was still, all day long, Nebraska.

I had been sleeping, curled up in a red plush seat, for a long while
when we reached Black Hawk.  Jake roused me and took me by the hand.
We stumbled down from the train to a wooden siding, where men were running
about with lanterns.  I couldn't see any town, or even distant lights;
we were surrounded by utter darkness.  The engine was panting heavily
after its long run.  In the red glow from the fire-box, a group of people
stood huddled together on the platform, encumbered by bundles and boxes.
I knew this must be the immigrant family the conductor had told us about.
The woman wore a fringed shawl tied over her head, and she carried
a little tin trunk in her arms, hugging it as if it were a baby.
There was an old man, tall and stooped.  Two half-grown boys and a girl stood
holding oilcloth bundles, and a little girl clung to her mother's skirts.
Presently a man with a lantern approached them and began to talk,
shouting and exclaiming.  I pricked up my ears, for it was positively
the first time I had ever heard a foreign tongue.

Another lantern came along.  A bantering voice called out:
`Hello, are you Mr. Burden's folks?  If you are, it's me you're looking for.
I'm Otto Fuchs.  I'm Mr. Burden's hired man, and I'm to drive you out.
Hello, Jimmy, ain't you scared to come so far west?'

I looked up with interest at the new face in the lantern-light.
He might have stepped out of the pages of `Jesse James.'
He wore a sombrero hat, with a wide leather band and a bright buckle,
and the ends of his moustache were twisted up stiffly,
like little horns.  He looked lively and ferocious, I thought,
and as if he had a history.  A long scar ran across one cheek
and drew the corner of his mouth up in a sinister curl.
The top of his left ear was gone, and his skin was brown
as an Indian's. Surely this was the face of a desperado.
As he walked about the platform in his high-heeled boots,
looking for our trunks, I saw that he was a rather slight man,
quick and wiry, and light on his feet.  He told us we had a long
night drive ahead of us, and had better be on the hike.
He led us to a hitching-bar where two farm-wagons were tied,
and I saw the foreign family crowding into one of them.
The other was for us.  Jake got on the front seat with Otto Fuchs,
and I rode on the straw in the bottom of the wagon-box,
covered up with a buffalo hide.  The immigrants rumbled off
into the empty darkness, and we followed them.

I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue,
and I soon began to ache all over.  When the straw settled down,
I had a hard bed.  Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide,
got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon.
There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees,
no hills or fields.  If there was a road, I could not make
it out in the faint starlight.  There was nothing but land:
not a country at all, but the material out of which countries
are made.  No, there was nothing but land--slightly undulating,
I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we
went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side.
I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had
got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction.
I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a
familiar mountain ridge against it.  But this was the complete
dome of heaven, all there was of it.  I did not believe that my
dead father and mother were watching me from up there; they would
still be looking for me at the sheep-fold down by the creek,
or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures.
I had left even their spirits behind me.  The wagon jolted on,
carrying me I knew not whither.  I don't think I was homesick.
If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter.
Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out.
I did not say my prayers that night:  here, I felt, what would
be would be.



II


I DO NOT REMEMBER our arrival at my grandfather's farm sometime
before daybreak, after a drive of nearly twenty miles with heavy
work-horses. When I awoke, it was afternoon.  I was lying
in a little room, scarcely larger than the bed that held me,
and the window-shade at my head was flapping softly in a warm wind.
A tall woman, with wrinkled brown skin and black hair,
stood looking down at me; I knew that she must be my grandmother.
She had been crying, I could see, but when I opened my eyes
she smiled, peered at me anxiously, and sat down on the foot
of my bed.

`Had a good sleep, Jimmy?' she asked briskly.  Then in a very different
tone she said, as if to herself, `My, how you do look like your father!'
I remembered that my father had been her little boy; she must often have come
to wake him like this when he overslept.  `Here are your clean clothes,'
she went on, stroking my coverlid with her brown hand as she talked.
`But first you come down to the kitchen with me, and have a nice warm
bath behind the stove.  Bring your things; there's nobody about.'

`Down to the kitchen' struck me as curious; it was always `out
in the kitchen' at home.  I picked up my shoes and stockings
and followed her through the living-room and down a flight
of stairs into a basement.  This basement was divided into a
dining-room at the right of the stairs and a kitchen at the left.
Both rooms were plastered and whitewashed--the plaster laid
directly upon the earth walls, as it used to be in dugouts.
The floor was of hard cement.  Up under the wooden ceiling
there were little half-windows with white curtains, and pots
of geraniums and wandering Jew in the deep sills.  As I entered
the kitchen, I sniffed a pleasant smell of gingerbread baking.
The stove was very large, with bright nickel trimmings,
and behind it there was a long wooden bench against the wall,
and a tin washtub, into which grandmother poured hot and cold water.
When she brought the soap and towels, I told her that I was used
to taking my bath without help.  `Can you do your ears, Jimmy?
Are you sure?  Well, now, I call you a right smart little boy.'

It was pleasant there in the kitchen.  The sun shone into my
bath-water through the west half-window, and a big Maltese cat came
up and rubbed himself against the tub, watching me curiously.
While I scrubbed, my grandmother busied herself in the dining-room until
I called anxiously, `Grandmother, I'm afraid the cakes are burning!'
Then she came laughing, waving her apron before her as if she
were shooing chickens.

She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt
to carry her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention,
as if she were looking at something, or listening to something,
far away.  As I grew older, I came to believe that it was only
because she was so often thinking of things that were far away.
She was quick-footed and energetic in all her movements.
Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often spoke
with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous
that everything should go with due order and decorum.
Her laugh, too, was high, and perhaps a little strident,
but there was a lively intelligence in it.  She was then
fifty-five years old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance.

After I was dressed, I explored the long cellar next the kitchen.
It was dug out under the wing of the house, was plastered and cemented,
with a stairway and an outside door by which the men came and went.
Under one of the windows there was a place for them to wash when they
came in from work.

While my grandmother was busy about supper, I settled myself on
the wooden bench behind the stove and got acquainted with the cat--
he caught not only rats and mice, but gophers, I was told.
The patch of yellow sunlight on the floor travelled back toward
the stairway, and grandmother and I talked about my journey,
and about the arrival of the new Bohemian family; she said
they were to be our nearest neighbours.  We did not talk about
the farm in Virginia, which had been her home for so many years.
But after the men came in from the fields, and we were all
seated at the supper table, then she asked Jake about the old
place and about our friends and neighbours there.

My grandfather said little.  When he first came in he kissed
me and spoke kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative.
I felt at once his deliberateness and personal dignity,
and was a little in awe of him.  The thing one immediately
noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly, snow-white beard.
I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard of an
Arabian sheik.  His bald crown only made it more impressive.

Grandfather's eyes were not at all like those of an old man;
they were bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle.
His teeth were white and regular--so sound that he had never
been to a dentist in his life.  He had a delicate skin,
easily roughened by sun and wind.  When he was a young man
his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still coppery.

As we sat at the table, Otto Fuchs and I kept stealing covert glances
at each other.  Grandmother had told me while she was getting supper
that he was an Austrian who came to this country a young boy and had led
an adventurous life in the Far West among mining-camps and cow outfits.
His iron constitution was somewhat broken by mountain pneumonia,
and he had drifted back to live in a milder country for a while.
He had relatives in Bismarck, a German settlement to the north of us,
but for a year now he had been working for grandfather.

The minute supper was over, Otto took me into the kitchen to whisper to me
about a pony down in the barn that had been bought for me at a sale;
he had been riding him to find out whether he had any bad tricks,
but he was a `perfect gentleman,' and his name was Dude.  Fuchs told
me everything I wanted to know:  how he had lost his ear in a Wyoming
blizzard when he was a stage-driver, and how to throw a lasso.
He promised to rope a steer for me before sundown next day.
He got out his `chaps' and silver spurs to show them to Jake and me,
and his best cowboy boots, with tops stitched in bold design--
roses, and true-lover's knots, and undraped female figures.
These, he solemnly explained, were angels.

Before we went to bed, Jake and Otto were called up to the
living-room for prayers.  Grandfather put on silver-rimmed
spectacles and read several Psalms.  His voice was so
sympathetic and he read so interestingly that I wished he had
chosen one of my favourite chapters in the Book of Kings.
I was awed by his intonation of the word `Selah.' `He shall
choose our inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom
He loved.  Selah.'  I had no idea what the word meant;
perhaps he had not.  But, as he uttered it, it became oracular,
the most sacred of words.

Early the next morning I ran out-of-doors to look about me.
I had been told that ours was the only wooden house west
of Black Hawk--until you came to the Norwegian settlement,
where there were several.  Our neighbours lived in sod
houses and dugouts--comfortable, but not very roomy.
Our white frame house, with a storey and half-storey above
the basement, stood at the east end of what I might call
the farmyard, with the windmill close by the kitchen door.
From the windmill the ground sloped westward, down to the barns
and granaries and pig-yards. This slope was trampled hard
and bare, and washed out in winding gullies by the rain.
Beyond the corncribs, at the bottom of the shallow draw,
was a muddy little pond, with rusty willow bushes growing about it.
The road from the post-office came directly by our door,
crossed the farmyard, and curved round this little pond,
beyond which it began to climb the gentle swell of unbroken
prairie to the west.  There, along the western sky-line it skirted
a great cornfield, much larger than any field I had ever seen.
This cornfield, and the sorghum patch behind the barn,
were the only broken land in sight.  Everywhere, as far as the eye
could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red grass,
most of it as tall as I.

North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew a thick-set strip
of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning yellow.
This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to look very hard
to see it at all.  The little trees were insignificant against the grass.
It seemed as if the grass were about to run over them, and over the plum-patch
behind the sod chicken-house.

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water
is the sea.  The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour
of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up.
And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow,
to be running.

I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out,
her sunbonnet on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I
did not want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner.

The garden, curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from the house,
and the way to it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral.
Grandmother called my attention to a stout hickory cane,
tipped with copper, which hung by a leather thong from
her belt.  This, she said, was her rattlesnake cane.
I must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife;
she had killed a good many rattlers on her way back and forth.
A little girl who lived on the Black Hawk road was bitten
on the ankle and had been sick all summer.

I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my
grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning.
Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more
than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh,
easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy
grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo
were galloping, galloping ...

Alone, I should never have found the garden--except, perhaps,
for the big yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their
withering vines--and I felt very little interest in it when I
got there.  I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass
and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away.
The light air about me told me that the world ended here:
only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one
went a little farther there would be only sun and sky,
and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks
which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.
While grandmother took the pitchfork we found standing
in one of the rows and dug potatoes, while I picked them
up out of the soft brown earth and put them into the bag,
I kept looking up at the hawks that were doing what I might
so easily do.

When grandmother was ready to go, I said I would like to stay up there
in the garden awhile.

She peered down at me from under her sunbonnet.
`Aren't you afraid of snakes?'

`A little,' I admitted, `but I'd like to stay, anyhow.'

`Well, if you see one, don't have anything to do with him.
The big yellow and brown ones won't hurt you; they're bull-snakes
and help to keep the gophers down.  Don't be scared if you
see anything look out of that hole in the bank over there.
That's a badger hole.  He's about as big as a big 'possum,
and his face is striped, black and white.  He takes a
chicken once in a while, but I won't let the men harm him.
In a new country a body feels friendly to the animals.
I like to have him come out and watch me when I'm at work.'

Grandmother swung the bag of potatoes over her shoulder
and went down the path, leaning forward a little.
The road followed the windings of the draw; when she came
to the first bend, she waved at me and disappeared.
I was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content.

I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely
approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin.
There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows,
full of fruit.  I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected
the berries and ate a few.  All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big
as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines.
The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground.  There in the sheltered
draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing
its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave.
The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers.
Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me.
Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots.  I kept as still
as I could.  Nothing happened.  I did not expect anything to happen.
I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins,
and I did not want to be anything more.  I was entirely happy.
Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire,
whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge.  At any rate,
that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.
When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.



III

ON SUNDAY MORNING Otto Fuchs was to drive us over to make the
acquaintance of our new Bohemian neighbours.  We were taking them
some provisions, as they had come to live on a wild place where there
was no garden or chicken-house, and very little broken land.
Fuchs brought up a sack of potatoes and a piece of cured pork from
the cellar, and grandmother packed some loaves of Saturday's bread,
a jar of butter, and several pumpkin pies in the straw of the wagon-box.
We clambered up to the front seat and jolted off past the little
pond and along the road that climbed to the big cornfield.

I could hardly wait to see what lay beyond that cornfield;
but there was only red grass like ours, and nothing else,
though from the high wagon-seat one could look off a long way.
The road ran about like a wild thing, avoiding the deep draws,
crossing them where they were wide and shallow.
And all along it, wherever it looped or ran, the sunflowers grew;
some of them were as big as little trees, with great rough
leaves and many branches which bore dozens of blossoms.
They made a gold ribbon across the prairie.  Occasionally one
of the horses would tear off with his teeth a plant full
of blossoms, and walk along munching it, the flowers nodding
in time to his bites as he ate down toward them.

The Bohemian family, grandmother told me as we drove along,
had bought the homestead of a fellow countryman, Peter Krajiek,
and had paid him more than it was worth.  Their agreement with him
was made before they left the old country, through a cousin of his,
who was also a relative of Mrs. Shimerda.  The Shimerdas were
the first Bohemian family to come to this part of the county.
Krajiek was their only interpreter, and could tell them anything
he chose.  They could not speak enough English to ask for advice,
or even to make their most pressing wants known.  One son,
Fuchs said, was well-grown, and strong enough to work the land;
but the father was old and frail and knew nothing about farming.
He was a weaver by trade; had been a skilled workman on tapestries
and upholstery materials.  He had brought his fiddle with him,
which wouldn't be of much use here, though he used to pick up money
by it at home.

`If they're nice people, I hate to think of them spending
the winter in that cave of Krajiek's,' said grandmother.
`It's no better than a badger hole; no proper dugout at all.
And I hear he's made them pay twenty dollars for his old
cookstove that ain't worth ten.'

`Yes'm,' said Otto; `and he's sold 'em his oxen and his
two bony old horses for the price of good workteams.
I'd have interfered about the horses--the old man can understand
some German--if I'd I a' thought it would do any good.
But Bohemians has a natural distrust of Austrians.'

Grandmother looked interested.  `Now, why is that, Otto?'

Fuchs wrinkled his brow and nose.  `Well, ma'm, it's politics.
It would take me a long while to explain.'

The land was growing rougher; I was told that we were approaching
Squaw Creek, which cut up the west half of the Shimerdas'
place and made the land of little value for farming.
Soon we could see the broken, grassy clay cliffs which
indicated the windings of the stream, and the glittering tops
of the cottonwoods and ash trees that grew down in the ravine.
Some of the cottonwoods had already turned, and the yellow
leaves and shining white bark made them look like the gold
and silver trees in fairy tales.

As we approached the Shimerdas' dwelling, I could still see
nothing but rough red hillocks, and draws with shelving banks
and long roots hanging out where the earth had crumbled away.
Presently, against one of those banks, I saw a sort of shed,
thatched with the same wine-coloured grass that grew everywhere.
Near it tilted a shattered windmill frame, that had no wheel.
We drove up to this skeleton to tie our horses, and then I saw
a door and window sunk deep in the drawbank.  The door stood open,
and a woman and a girl of fourteen ran out and looked up
at us hopefully.  A little girl trailed along behind them.
The woman had on her head the same embroidered shawl with silk fringes
that she wore when she had alighted from the train at Black Hawk.
She was not old, but she was certainly not young.  Her face
was alert and lively, with a sharp chin and shrewd little eyes.
She shook grandmother's hand energetically.

`Very glad, very glad!' she ejaculated.  Immediately she pointed
to the bank out of which she had emerged and said, `House no good,
house no good!'

Grandmother nodded consolingly.  `You'll get fixed up comfortable after while,
Mrs. Shimerda; make good house.'

My grandmother always spoke in a very loud tone to foreigners,
as if they were deaf.  She made Mrs. Shimerda understand
the friendly intention of our visit, and the Bohemian woman
handled the loaves of bread and even smelled them, and examined
the pies with lively curiosity, exclaiming, `Much good,
much thank!'--and again she wrung grandmother's hand.

The oldest son, Ambroz--they called it Ambrosch--
came out of the cave and stood beside his mother.
He was nineteen years old, short and broad-backed,
with a close-cropped, flat head, and a wide, flat face.
His hazel eyes were little and shrewd, like his mother's,
but more sly and suspicious; they fairly snapped at the food.
The family had been living on corncakes and sorghum molasses
for three days.

The little girl was pretty, but Antonia--they accented the
name thus, strongly, when they spoke to her--was still prettier.
I remembered what the conductor had said about her eyes.
They were big and warm and full of light, like the sun
shining on brown pools in the wood.  Her skin was brown,
too, and in her cheeks she had a glow of rich, dark colour.
Her brown hair was curly and wild-looking. The little sister,
whom they called Yulka (Julka), was fair, and seemed mild
and obedient.  While I stood awkwardly confronting the two girls,
Krajiek came up from the barn to see what was going on.
With him was another Shimerda son.  Even from a distance one
could see that there was something strange about this boy.
As he approached us, he began to make uncouth noises,
and held up his hands to show us his fingers, which were webbed
to the first knuckle, like a duck's foot.  When he saw me
draw back, he began to crow delightedly, `Hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo!'
like a rooster.  His mother scowled and said sternly,
`Marek!' then spoke rapidly to Krajiek in Bohemian.

`She wants me to tell you he won't hurt nobody, Mrs. Burden.  He was born
like that.  The others are smart.  Ambrosch, he make good farmer.'
He struck Ambrosch on the back, and the boy smiled knowingly.

At that moment the father came out of the hole in the bank.
He wore no hat, and his thick, iron-grey hair was brushed straight back
from his forehead.  It was so long that it bushed out behind his ears,
and made him look like the old portraits I remembered in Virginia.
He was tall and slender, and his thin shoulders stooped.
He looked at us understandingly, then took grandmother's hand and bent
over it.  I noticed how white and well-shaped his own hands were.
They looked calm, somehow, and skilled.  His eyes were melancholy,
and were set back deep under his brow.  His face was ruggedly formed,
but it looked like ashes--like something from which all the warmth
and light had died out.  Everything about this old man was
in keeping with his dignified manner.  He was neatly dressed.
Under his coat he wore a knitted grey vest, and, instead of a collar,
a silk scarf of a dark bronze-green, carefully crossed and held
together by a red coral pin.  While Krajiek was translating for
Mr. Shimerda, Antonia came up to me and held out her hand coaxingly.
In a moment we were running up the steep drawside together,
Yulka trotting after us.

When we reached the level and could see the gold tree-tops, I
pointed toward them, and Antonia laughed and squeezed my hand
as if to tell me how glad she was I had come.  We raced off toward
Squaw Creek and did not stop until the ground itself stopped--
fell away before us so abruptly that the next step would have been
out into the tree-tops. We stood panting on the edge of the ravine,
looking down at the trees and bushes that grew below us.
The wind was so strong that I had to hold my hat on, and the girls'
skirts were blown out before them.  Antonia seemed to like it;
she held her little sister by the hand and chattered away in that
language which seemed to me spoken so much more rapidly than mine.
She looked at me, her eyes fairly blazing with things she could not say.

`Name? What name?' she asked, touching me on the shoulder.
I told her my name, and she repeated it after me and made Yulka say it.
She pointed into the gold cottonwood tree behind whose top we stood
and said again, `What name?'

We sat down and made a nest in the long red grass.
Yulka curled up like a baby rabbit and played with a grasshopper.
Antonia pointed up to the sky and questioned me with her glance.
I gave her the word, but she was not satisfied and pointed to my eyes.
I told her, and she repeated the word, making it sound like `ice.'
She pointed up to the sky, then to my eyes, then back to the sky,
with movements so quick and impulsive that she distracted me,
and I had no idea what she wanted.  She got up on her knees and
wrung her hands.  She pointed to her own eyes and shook her head,
then to mine and to the sky, nodding violently.

`Oh,' I exclaimed, `blue; blue sky.'

She clapped her hands and murmured, `Blue sky, blue eyes,'
as if it amused her.  While we snuggled down there out of the wind,
she learned a score of words.  She was alive, and very eager.
We were so deep in the grass that we could see nothing but the blue sky
over us and the gold tree in front of us.  It was wonderfully pleasant.
After Antonia had said the new words over and over, she wanted to give
me a little chased silver ring she wore on her middle finger.
When she coaxed and insisted, I repulsed her quite sternly.
I didn't want her ring, and I felt there was something reckless
and extravagant about her wishing to give it away to a boy she had
never seen before.  No wonder Krajiek got the better of these people,
if this was how they behaved.

While we were disputing `about the ring, I heard
a mournful voice calling, `Antonia, Antonia!'
She sprang up like a hare.  'Tatinek!  Tatinek!' she shouted,
and we ran to meet the old man who was coming toward us.
Antonia reached him first, took his hand and kissed it.
When I came up, he touched my shoulder and looked searchingly down
into my face for several seconds.  I became somewhat embarrassed,
for I was used to being taken for granted by my elders.

We went with Mr. Shimerda back to the dugout, where grandmother
was waiting for me.  Before I got into the wagon, he took
a book out of his pocket, opened it, and showed me a page
with two alphabets, one English and the other Bohemian.
He placed this book in my grandmother's hands, looked at
her entreatingly, and said, with an earnestness which I shall
never forget, `Te-e-ach, te-e-ach my Antonia!'



IV

ON THE AFTERNOON of that same Sunday I took my first long ride
on my pony, under Otto's direction.  After that Dude and I went
twice a week to the post-office, six miles east of us, and I saved
the men a good deal of time by riding on errands to our neighbours.
When we had to borrow anything, or to send about word that there would
be preaching at the sod schoolhouse, I was always the messenger.
Formerly Fuchs attended to such things after working hours.

All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that
first glorious autumn.  The new country lay open before me:
there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way
over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again.
Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads.  Fuchs told me
that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons;
that at the time of the persecution, when they left Missouri and struck
out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship
God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party,
crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seed as they went.
The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all
the women and children, they had the sunflower trail to follow.
I believe that botanists do not confirm Fuchs's story, but insist that
the sunflower was native to those plains.  Nevertheless, that legend
has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem
to me the roads to freedom.

I used to love to drift along the pale-yellow cornfields,
looking for the damp spots one sometimes found at their edges,
where the smartweed soon turned a rich copper colour and the narrow brown
leaves hung curled like cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem.
Sometimes I went south to visit our German neighbours and to admire
their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew up out
of a deep crack in the earth and had a hawk's nest in its branches.
Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard
fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit
them as if they were persons.  It must have been the scarcity
of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.

Sometimes I rode north to the big prairie-dog town to watch
the brown earth-owls fly home in the late afternoon
and go down to their nests underground with the dogs.
Antonia Shimerda liked to go with me, and we used to wonder
a great deal about these birds of subterranean habit.
We had to be on our guard there, for rattlesnakes were always
lurking about.  They came to pick up an easy living among
the dogs and owls, which were quite defenceless against them;
took possession of their comfortable houses and ate the eggs
and puppies.  We felt sorry for the owls.  It was always
mournful to see them come flying home at sunset and disappear
under the earth.  But, after all, we felt, winged things
who would live like that must be rather degraded creatures.
The dog-town was a long way from any pond or creek.
Otto Fuchs said he had seen populous dog-towns in the desert
where there was no surface water for fifty miles; he insisted
that some of the holes must go down to water--nearly two
hundred feet, hereabouts.  Antonia said she didn't believe it;
that the dogs probably lapped up the dew in the early morning,
like the rabbits.

Antonia had opinions about everything, and she was soon
able to make them known.  Almost every day she came running
across the prairie to have her reading lesson with me.
Mrs. Shimerda grumbled, but realized it was important that one member
of the family should learn English.  When the lesson was over,
we used to go up to the watermelon patch behind the garden.
I split the melons with an old corn-knife, and we lifted
out the hearts and ate them with the juice trickling through
our fingers.  The white Christmas melons we did not touch,
but we watched them with curiosity.  They were to be picked late,
when the hard frosts had set in, and put away for winter use.
After weeks on the ocean, the Shimerdas were famished for fruit.
The two girls would wander for miles along the edge of the cornfields,
hunting for ground-cherries.

Antonia loved to help grandmother in the kitchen and to learn about cooking
and housekeeping.  She would stand beside her, watching her every movement.
We were willing to believe that Mrs. Shimerda was a good housewife
in her own country, but she managed poorly under new conditions:
the conditions were bad enough, certainly!

I remember how horrified we were at the sour, ashy-grey bread
she gave her family to eat.  She mixed her dough, we discovered,
in an old tin peck-measure that Krajiek had used about the barn.
When she took the paste out to bake it, she left smears
of dough sticking to the sides of the measure, put the measure
on the shelf behind the stove, and let this residue ferment.
The next time she made bread, she scraped this sour stuff
down into the fresh dough to serve as yeast.

During those first months the Shimerdas never went to town.
Krajiek encouraged them in the belief that in Black Hawk they
would somehow be mysteriously separated from their money.
They hated Krajiek, but they clung to him because he was
the only human being with whom they could talk or from whom
they could get information.  He slept with the old man
and the two boys in the dugout barn, along with the oxen.
They kept him in their hole and fed him for the same reason
that the prairie-dogs and the brown owls house the rattlesnakes--
because they did not know how to get rid of him.



V

WE KNEW THAT THINGS were hard for our Bohemian neighbours,
but the two girls were lighthearted and never complained.
They were always ready to forget their troubles at home,
and to run away with me over the prairie, scaring rabbits
or starting up flocks of quail.

I remember Antonia's excitement when she came into our kitchen one afternoon
and announced:  `My papa find friends up north, with Russian mans.
Last night he take me for see, and I can understand very much talk.
Nice mans, Mrs. Burden.  One is fat and all the time laugh.
Everybody laugh.  The first time I see my papa laugh in this kawntree.
Oh, very nice!'

I asked her if she meant the two Russians who lived up
by the big dog-town. I had often been tempted to go to see
them when I was riding in that direction, but one of them
was a wild-looking fellow and I was a little afraid of him.
Russia seemed to me more remote than any other country--
farther away than China, almost as far as the North Pole.
Of all the strange, uprooted people among the first settlers,
those two men were the strangest and the most aloof.
Their last names were unpronounceable, so they were called
Pavel and Peter.  They went about making signs to people,
and until the Shimerdas came they had no friends.
Krajiek could understand them a little, but he had cheated
them in a trade, so they avoided him.  Pavel, the tall one,
was said to be an anarchist; since he had no means of imparting
his opinions, probably his wild gesticulations and his generally
excited and rebellious manner gave rise to this supposition.
He must once have been a very strong man, but now his
great frame, with big, knotty joints, had a wasted look,
and the skin was drawn tight over his high cheekbones.
His breathing was hoarse, and he always had a cough.

Peter, his companion, was a very different sort of fellow; short, bow-legged,
and as fat as butter.  He always seemed pleased when he met people on
the road, smiled and took off his cap to everyone, men as well as women.
At a distance, on his wagon, he looked like an old man; his hair and beard
were of such a pale flaxen colour that they seemed white in the sun.
They were as thick and curly as carded wool.  His rosy face, with its
snub nose, set in this fleece, was like a melon among its leaves.
He was usually called `Curly Peter,' or `Rooshian Peter.'

The two Russians made good farm-hands, and in summer they worked
out together.  I had heard our neighbours laughing when they
told how Peter always had to go home at night to milk his cow.
Other bachelor homesteaders used canned milk, to save trouble.
Sometimes Peter came to church at the sod schoolhouse.
It was there I first saw him, sitting on a low bench by the door,
his plush cap in his hands, his bare feet tucked apologetically
under the seat.

After Mr. Shimerda discovered the Russians, he went to see them
almost every evening, and sometimes took Antonia with him.
She said they came from a part of Russia where the language
was not very different from Bohemian, and if I wanted
to go to their place, she could talk to them for me.
One afternoon, before the heavy frosts began, we rode up there
together on my pony.

The Russians had a neat log house built on a grassy slope,
with a windlass well beside the door.  As we rode up
the draw, we skirted a big melon patch, and a garden
where squashes and yellow cucumbers lay about on the sod.
We found Peter out behind his kitchen, bending over a washtub.
He was working so hard that he did not hear us coming.
His whole body moved up and down as he rubbed, and he was a funny
sight from the rear, with his shaggy head and bandy legs.
When he straightened himself up to greet us, drops of perspiration
were rolling from his thick nose down onto his curly beard.
Peter dried his hands and seemed glad to leave his washing.
He took us down to see his chickens, and his cow that was
grazing on the hillside.  He told Antonia that in his country
only rich people had cows, but here any man could have one
who would take care of her.  The milk was good for Pavel,
who was often sick, and he could make butter by beating sour
cream with a wooden spoon.  Peter was very fond of his cow.
He patted her flanks and talked to her in Russian while he pulled
up her lariat pin and set it in a new place.

After he had shown us his garden, Peter trundled a load of
watermelons up the hill in his wheelbarrow.  Pavel was not at home.
He was off somewhere helping to dig a well.  The house I thought
very comfortable for two men who were `batching.' Besides the kitchen,
there was a living-room, with a wide double bed built against
the wall, properly made up with blue gingham sheets and pillows.
There was a little storeroom, too, with a window, where they
kept guns and saddles and tools, and old coats and boots.
That day the floor was covered with garden things, drying for winter;
corn and beans and fat yellow cucumbers.  There were no screens
or window-blinds in the house, and all the doors and windows stood
wide open, letting in flies and sunshine alike.

Peter put the melons in a row on the oilcloth-covered table
and stood over them, brandishing a butcher knife.  Before the
blade got fairly into them, they split of their own ripeness,
with a delicious sound.  He gave us knives, but no plates,
and the top of the table was soon swimming with juice and seeds.
I had never seen anyone eat so many melons as Peter ate.
He assured us that they were good for one--better than medicine;
in his country people lived on them at this time of year.
He was very hospitable and jolly.  Once, while he was looking
at Antonia, he sighed and told us that if he had stayed
at home in Russia perhaps by this time he would have had
a pretty daughter of his own to cook and keep house for him.
He said he had left his country because of a `great trouble.'

When we got up to go, Peter looked about in perplexity for
something that would entertain us.  He ran into the storeroom
and brought out a gaudily painted harmonica, sat down on a bench,
and spreading his fat legs apart began to play like a whole band.
The tunes were either very lively or very doleful, and he sang
words to some of them.

Before we left, Peter put ripe cucumbers into a sack for Mrs. Shimerda
and gave us a lard-pail full of milk to cook them in.  I had never heard
of cooking cucumbers, but Antonia assured me they were very good.
We had to walk the pony all the way home to keep from spilling the milk.



VI

ONE AFTERNOON WE WERE having our reading lesson on the warm,
grassy bank where the badger lived.  It was a day of amber sunlight,
but there was a shiver of coming winter in the air.
I had seen ice on the little horsepond that morning,
and as we went through the garden we found the tall asparagus,
with its red berries, lying on the ground, a mass of slimy green.

Tony was barefooted, and she shivered in her cotton
dress and was comfortable only when we were tucked
down on the baked earth, in the full blaze of the sun.
She could talk to me about almost anything by this time.
That afternoon she was telling me how highly esteemed our friend
the badger was in her part of the world, and how men kept
a special kind of dog, with very short legs, to hunt him.
Those dogs, she said, went down into the hole after the badger
and killed him there in a terrific struggle underground;
you could hear the barks and yelps outside.  Then the dog
dragged himself back, covered with bites and scratches,
to be rewarded and petted by his master.  She knew a dog
who had a star on his collar for every badger he had killed.

The rabbits were unusually spry that afternoon.  They kept
starting up all about us, and dashing off down the draw as if
they were playing a game of some kind.  But the little buzzing
things that lived in the grass were all dead--all but one.
While we were lying there against the warm bank, a little
insect of the palest, frailest green hopped painfully out of
the buffalo grass and tried to leap into a bunch of bluestem.
He missed it, fell back, and sat with his head sunk between his
long legs, his antennae quivering, as if he were waiting for
something to come and finish him.  Tony made a warm nest for him
in her hands; talked to him gaily and indulgently in Bohemian.
Presently he began to sing for us--a thin, rusty little chirp.
She held him close to her ear and laughed, but a moment
afterward I saw there were tears in her eyes.  She told me that
in her village at home there was an old beggar woman who went
about selling herbs and roots she had dug up in the forest.
If you took her in and gave her a warm place by the fire,
she sang old songs to the children in a cracked voice, like this.
Old Hata, she was called, and the children loved to see her
coming and saved their cakes and sweets for her.

When the bank on the other side of the draw began to throw a narrow
shelf of shadow, we knew we ought to be starting homeward; the chill
came on quickly when the sun got low, and Antonia's dress was thin.
What were we to do with the frail little creature we had lured
back to life by false pretences?  I offered my pockets, but Tony
shook her head and carefully put the green insect in her hair,
tying her big handkerchief down loosely over her curls.
I said I would go with her until we could see Squaw Creek,
and then turn and run home.  We drifted along lazily, very happy,
through the magical light of the late afternoon.

All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them.
As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were
drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any
other time of the day.  The blond cornfields were red gold,
the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows.  The whole prairie
was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed.
That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending,
like a hero's death--heroes who died young and gloriously.
It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.

How many an afternoon Antonia and I have trailed along the prairie
under that magnificence!  And always two long black shadows flitted
before us or followed after, dark spots on the ruddy grass.

We had been silent a long time, and the edge of the sun sank
nearer and nearer the prairie floor, when we saw a figure
moving on the edge of the upland, a gun over his shoulder.
He was walking slowly, dragging his feet along as if he had no purpose.
We broke into a run to overtake him.

`My papa sick all the time,' Tony panted as we flew.
`He not look good, Jim.'

As we neared Mr. Shimerda she shouted, and he lifted his head
and peered about.  Tony ran up to him, caught his hand and pressed
it against her cheek.  She was the only one of his family who could
rouse the old man from the torpor in which he seemed to live.
He took the bag from his belt and showed us three rabbits he had shot,
looked at Antonia with a wintry flicker of a smile and began to tell
her something.  She turned to me.

`My tatinek make me little hat with the skins, little hat for winter!'
she exclaimed joyfully.  `Meat for eat, skin for hat'--she told off
these benefits on her fingers.

Her father put his hand on her hair, but she caught his wrist
and lifted it carefully away, talking to him rapidly.
I heard the name of old Hata.  He untied the handkerchief,
separated her hair with his fingers, and stood looking
down at the green insect.  When it began to chirp faintly,
he listened as if it were a beautiful sound.

I picked up the gun he had dropped; a queer piece from the
old country, short and heavy, with a stag's head on the cock.
When he saw me examining it, he turned to me with his far-away look
that always made me feel as if I were down at the bottom of a well.
He spoke kindly and gravely, and Antonia translated:

`My tatinek say when you are big boy, he give you his gun.
Very fine, from Bohemie.  It was belong to a great man, very rich,
like what you not got here; many fields, many forests, many big house.
My papa play for his wedding, and he give my papa fine gun,
and my papa give you.'

I was glad that this project was one of futurity.  There never
were such people as the Shimerdas for wanting to give away
everything they had.  Even the mother was always offering me things,
though I knew she expected substantial presents in return.
We stood there in friendly silence, while the feeble minstrel
sheltered in Antonia's hair went on with its scratchy chirp.
The old man's smile, as he listened, was so full of sadness,
of pity for things, that I never afterward forgot it.
As the sun sank there came a sudden coolness and the strong
smell of earth and drying grass.  Antonia and her father
went off hand in hand, and I buttoned up my jacket and raced
my shadow home.



VII

MUCH AS I LIKED Antonia, I hated a superior tone that she
sometimes took with me.  She was four years older than I,
to be sure, and had seen more of the world; but I was a boy
and she was a girl, and I resented her protecting manner.
Before the autumn was over, she began to treat me more like an
equal and to defer to me in other things than reading lessons.
This change came about from an adventure we had together.

One day when I rode over to the Shimerdas' I found Antonia starting off
on foot for Russian Peter's house, to borrow a spade Ambrosch needed.
I offered to take her on the pony, and she got up behind me.
There had been another black frost the night before, and the air
was clear and heady as wine.  Within a week all the blooming roads
had been despoiled, hundreds of miles of yellow sunflowers had been
transformed into brown, rattling, burry stalks.

We found Russian Peter digging his potatoes.  We were glad to go
in and get warm by his kitchen stove and to see his squashes
and Christmas melons, heaped in the storeroom for winter.
As we rode away with the spade, Antonia suggested that we
stop at the prairie-dog-town and dig into one of the holes.
We could find out whether they ran straight down, or were horizontal,
like mole-holes; whether they had underground connections;
whether the owls had nests down there, lined with feathers.
We might get some puppies, or owl eggs, or snakeskins.

The dog-town was spread out over perhaps ten acres.
The grass had been nibbled short and even, so this stretch
was not shaggy and red like the surrounding country,
but grey and velvety.  The holes were several yards apart,
and were disposed with a good deal of regularity, almost as
if the town had been laid out in streets and avenues.
One always felt that an orderly and very sociable kind of life
was going on there.  I picketed Dude down in a draw, and we went
wandering about, looking for a hole that would be easy to dig.
The dogs were out, as usual, dozens of them, sitting up on their
hind legs over the doors of their houses.  As we approached,
they barked, shook their tails at us, and scurried underground.
Before the mouths of the holes were little patches of sand and gravel,
scratched up, we supposed, from a long way below the surface.
Here and there, in the town, we came on larger gravel patches,
several yards away from any hole.  If the dogs had scratched
the sand up in excavating, how had they carried it so far?
It was on one of these gravel beds that I met my adventure.

We were examining a big hole with two entrances.  The burrow
sloped into the ground at a gentle angle, so that we could
see where the two corridors united, and the floor was dusty
from use, like a little highway over which much travel went.
I was walking backward, in a crouching position, when I heard
Antonia scream.  She was standing opposite me, pointing behind
me and shouting something in Bohemian.  I whirled round,
and there, on one of those dry gravel beds, was the biggest snake
I had ever seen.  He was sunning himself, after the cold night,
and he must have been asleep when Antonia screamed.
When I turned, he was lying in long loose waves, like a letter
`W.' He twitched and began to coil slowly.  He was not merely
a big snake, I thought--he was a circus monstrosity.
His abominable muscularity, his loathsome, fluid motion,
somehow made me sick.  He was as thick as my leg, and looked
as if millstones couldn't crush the disgusting vitality out
of him.  He lifted his hideous little head, and rattled.
I didn't run because I didn't think of it--if my back had been
against a stone wall I couldn't have felt more cornered.
I saw his coils tighten--now he would spring, spring his length,
I remembered.  I ran up and drove at his head with my spade,
struck him fairly across the neck, and in a minute he was
all about my feet in wavy loops.  I struck now from hate.
Antonia, barefooted as she was, ran up behind me.
Even after I had pounded his ugly head flat, his body kept
on coiling and winding, doubling and falling back on itself.
I walked away and turned my back.  I felt seasick.

Antonia came after me, crying, `O Jimmy, he not bite you?  You sure?
Why you not run when I say?'

`What did you jabber Bohunk for?  You might have told me there was a snake
behind me!'  I said petulantly.

`I know I am just awful, Jim, I was so scared.'  She took my handkerchief from
my pocket and tried to wipe my face with it, but I snatched it away from her.
I suppose I looked as sick as I felt.

`I never know you was so brave, Jim,' she went on comfortingly.  `You is
just like big mans; you wait for him lift his head and then you go for him.
Ain't you feel scared a bit?  Now we take that snake home and show everybody.
Nobody ain't seen in this kawntree so big snake like you kill.'

She went on in this strain until I began to think that I
had longed for this opportunity, and had hailed it with joy.
Cautiously we went back to the snake; he was still groping
with his tail, turning up his ugly belly in the light.
A faint, fetid smell came from him, and a thread of green
liquid oozed from his crushed head.

`Look, Tony, that's his poison,' I said.

I took a long piece of string from my pocket, and she lifted
his head with the spade while I tied a noose around it.
We pulled him out straight and measured him by my riding-quirt;
he was about five and a half feet long.  He had twelve rattles,
but they were broken off before they began to taper, so I
insisted that he must once have had twenty-four. I explained
to Antonia how this meant that he was twenty-four years old,
that he must have been there when white men first came,
left on from buffalo and Indian times.  As I turned him over,
I began to feel proud of him, to have a kind of respect for
his age and size.  He seemed like the ancient, eldest Evil.
Certainly his kind have left horrible unconscious memories in
all warm-blooded life.  When we dragged him down into the draw,
Dude sprang off to the end of his tether and shivered all over--
wouldn't let us come near him.

We decided that Antonia should ride Dude home, and I would walk.
As she rode along slowly, her bare legs swinging against the pony's sides,
she kept shouting back to me about how astonished everybody would be.
I followed with the spade over my shoulder, dragging my snake.  Her exultation
was contagious.  The great land had never looked to me so big and free.
If the red grass were full of rattlers, I was equal to them all.
Nevertheless, I stole furtive glances behind me now and then to see
that no avenging mate, older and bigger than my quarry, was racing up
from the rear.

The sun had set when we reached our garden and went down the draw
toward the house.  Otto Fuchs was the first one we met.
He was sitting on the edge of the cattle-pond, having a quiet
pipe before supper.  Antonia called him to come quick and look.
He did not say anything for a minute, but scratched his head
and turned the snake over with his boot.

`Where did you run onto that beauty, Jim?'

`Up at the dog-town,' I answered laconically.

`Kill him yourself?  How come you to have a weepon?'

`We'd been up to Russian Peter's, to borrow a spade for Ambrosch.'

Otto shook the ashes out of his pipe and squatted down
to count the rattles.  `It was just luck you had a tool,'
he said cautiously.  `Gosh! I wouldn't want to do any business
with that fellow myself, unless I had a fence-post along.
Your grandmother's snake-cane wouldn't more than tickle him.
He could stand right up and talk to you, he could.
Did he fight hard?'

Antonia broke in:  `He fight something awful!  He is all over Jimmy's boots.
I scream for him to run, but he just hit and hit that snake like
he was crazy.'

Otto winked at me.  After Antonia rode on he said:
`Got him in the head first crack, didn't you?  That was
just as well.'

We hung him up to the windmill, and when I went down to the kitchen,
I found Antonia standing in the middle of the floor, telling the story
with a great deal of colour.

Subsequent experiences with rattlesnakes taught me that my first
encounter was fortunate in circumstance.  My big rattler was old,
and had led too easy a life; there was not much fight in him.
He had probably lived there for years, with a fat prairie-dog
for breakfast whenever he felt like it, a sheltered home,
even an owl-feather bed, perhaps, and he had forgot that
the world doesn't owe rattlers a living.  A snake of his size,
in fighting trim, would be more than any boy could handle.
So in reality it was a mock adventure; the game was fixed for me
by chance, as it probably was for many a dragon-slayer. I had been
adequately armed by Russian Peter; the snake was old and lazy;
and I had Antonia beside me, to appreciate and admire.

That snake hung on our corral fence for several days;
some of the neighbours came to see it and agreed that it
was the biggest rattler ever killed in those parts.
This was enough for Antonia.  She liked me better from that
time on, and she never took a supercilious air with me again.
I had killed a big snake--I was now a big fellow.



VIII

WHILE THE AUTUMN COLOUR was growing pale on the grass and cornfields,
things went badly with our friends the Russians.  Peter told his
troubles to Mr. Shimerda:  he was unable to meet a note which fell due
on the first of November; had to pay an exorbitant bonus on renewing it,
and to give a mortgage on his pigs and horses and even his milk cow.
His creditor was Wick Cutter, the merciless Black Hawk money-lender, a man
of evil name throughout the county, of whom I shall have more to say later.
Peter could give no very clear account of his transactions with Cutter.
He only knew that he had first borrowed two hundred dollars,
then another hundred, then fifty--that each time a bonus was added
to the principal, and the debt grew faster than any crop he planted.
Now everything was plastered with mortgages.

Soon after Peter renewed his note, Pavel strained himself lifting timbers
for a new barn, and fell over among the shavings with such a gush of blood
from the lungs that his fellow workmen thought he would die on the spot.
They hauled him home and put him into his bed, and there he lay,
very ill indeed.  Misfortune seemed to settle like an evil bird on the roof
of the log house, and to flap its wings there, warning human beings away.
The Russians had such bad luck that people were afraid of them and liked
to put them out of mind.

One afternoon Antonia and her father came over to our house to
get buttermilk, and lingered, as they usually did, until the sun
was low.  just as they were leaving, Russian Peter drove up.
Pavel was very bad, he said, and wanted to talk to Mr. Shimerda
and his daughter; he had come to fetch them.  When Antonia
and her father got into the wagon, I entreated grandmother
to let me go with them:  I would gladly go without my supper,
I would sleep in the Shimerdas' barn and run home in the morning.
My plan must have seemed very foolish to her, but she was often
large-minded about humouring the desires of other people.
She asked Peter to wait a moment, and when she came back from
the kitchen she brought a bag of sandwiches and doughnuts for us.

Mr. Shimerda and Peter were on the front seat; Antonia and I
sat in the straw behind and ate our lunch as we bumped along.
After the sun sank, a cold wind sprang up and moaned over the prairie.
If this turn in the weather had come sooner, I should not have got away.
We burrowed down in the straw and curled up close together,
watching the angry red die out of the west and the stars begin
to shine in the clear, windy sky.  Peter kept sighing and groaning.
Tony whispered to me that he was afraid Pavel would never get well.  We lay
still and did not talk.  Up there the stars grew magnificently bright.
Though we had come from such different parts of the world,
in both of us there was some dusky superstition that those shining
groups have their influence upon what is and what is not to be.
Perhaps Russian Peter, come from farther away than any of us,
had brought from his land, too, some such belief.

The little house on the hillside was so much the colour
of the night that we could not see it as we came up the draw.
The ruddy windows guided us--the light from the kitchen stove,
for there was no lamp burning.

We entered softly.  The man in the wide bed seemed to be asleep.
Tony and I sat down on the bench by the wall and leaned our
arms on the table in front of us.  The firelight flickered
on the hewn logs that supported the thatch overhead.
Pavel made a rasping sound when he breathed, and he kept moaning.
We waited.  The wind shook the doors and windows impatiently,
then swept on again, singing through the big spaces.  Each gust,
as it bore down, rattled the panes, and swelled off like the others.
They made me think of defeated armies, retreating; or of
ghosts who were trying desperately to get in for shelter,
and then went moaning on.  Presently, in one of those sobbing
intervals between the blasts, the coyotes tuned up with their
whining howl; one, two, three, then all together--to tell us
that winter was coming.  This sound brought an answer from the bed--
a long complaining cry--as if Pavel were having bad dreams or were
waking to some old misery.  Peter listened, but did not stir.
He was sitting on the floor by the kitchen stove.
The coyotes broke out again; yap, yap, yap--then the high whine.
Pavel called for something and struggled up on his elbow.

`He is scared of the wolves,' Antonia whispered to me.
`In his country there are very many, and they eat men and women.'
We slid closer together along the bench.

I could not take my eyes off the man in the bed.
His shirt was hanging open, and his emaciated chest,
covered with yellow bristle, rose and fell horribly.
He began to cough.  Peter shuffled to his feet, caught up
the teakettle and mixed him some hot water and whiskey.
The sharp smell of spirits went through the room.

Pavel snatched the cup and drank, then made Peter give him
the bottle and slipped it under his pillow, grinning disagreeably,
as if he had outwitted someone.  His eyes followed Peter
about the room with a contemptuous, unfriendly expression.
It seemed to me that he despised him for being so simple and docile.

Presently Pavel began to talk to Mr. Shimerda, scarcely above
a whisper.  He was telling a long story, and as he went on,
Antonia took my hand under the table and held it tight.
She leaned forward and strained her ears to hear him.
He grew more and more excited, and kept pointing all around
his bed, as if there were things there and he wanted Mr. Shimerda
to see them.

`It's wolves, Jimmy,' Antonia whispered.  `It's awful,
what he says!'

The sick man raged and shook his fist.  He seemed to be
cursing people who had wronged him.  Mr. Shimerda caught
him by the shoulders, but could hardly hold him in bed.
At last he was shut off by a coughing fit which fairly choked him.
He pulled a cloth from under his pillow and held it to his mouth.
Quickly it was covered with bright red spots--I thought I had
never seen any blood so bright.  When he lay down and turned
his face to the wall, all the rage had gone out of him.
He lay patiently fighting for breath, like a child with croup.
Antonia's father uncovered one of his long bony legs and rubbed
it rhythmically.  From our bench we could see what a hollow case
his body was.  His spine and shoulder-blades stood out like
the bones under the hide of a dead steer left in the fields.
That sharp backbone must have hurt him when he lay on it.

Gradually, relief came to all of us.  Whatever it was, the worst
was over.  Mr. Shimerda signed to us that Pavel was asleep.
Without a word Peter got up and lit his lantern.  He was going
out to get his team to drive us home.  Mr. Shimerda went with him.
We sat and watched the long bowed back under the blue sheet,
scarcely daring to breathe.

On the way home, when we were lying in the straw, under the jolting
and rattling Antonia told me as much of the story as she could.
What she did not tell me then, she told later; we talked of nothing
else for days afterward.


When Pavel and Peter were young men, living at home in Russia,
they were asked to be groomsmen for a friend who was to marry
the belle of another village.  It was in the dead of winter
and the groom's party went over to the wedding in sledges.
Peter and Pavel drove in the groom's sledge, and six sledges
followed with all his relatives and friends.

After the ceremony at the church, the party went to a dinner given
by the parents of the bride.  The dinner lasted all afternoon;
then it became a supper and continued far into the night.
There was much dancing and drinking.  At midnight the parents
of the bride said good-bye to her and blessed her.
The groom took her up in his arms and carried her out to his sledge
and tucked her under the blankets.  He sprang in beside her,
and Pavel and Peter (our Pavel and Peter!) took the front seat.
Pavel drove.  The party set out with singing and the jingle
of sleigh-bells, the groom's sledge going first.
All the drivers were more or less the worse for merry-making,
and the groom was absorbed in his bride.

The wolves were bad that winter, and everyone knew it, yet when they
heard the first wolf-cry, the drivers were not much alarmed.
They had too much good food and drink inside them.
The first howls were taken up and echoed and with
quickening repetitions.  The wolves were coming together.
There was no moon, but the starlight was clear on the snow.
A black drove came up over the hill behind the wedding party.
The wolves ran like streaks of shadow; they looked no bigger
than dogs, but there were hundreds of them.

Something happened to the hindmost sledge:  the driver lost control--
he was probably very drunk--the horses left the road,
the sledge was caught in a clump of trees, and overturned.
The occupants rolled out over the snow, and the fleetest
of the wolves sprang upon them.  The shrieks that followed made
everybody sober.  The drivers stood up and lashed their horses.
The groom had the best team and his sledge was lightest--
all the others carried from six to a dozen people.

Another driver lost control.  The screams of the horses were
more terrible to hear than the cries of the men and women.
Nothing seemed to check the wolves.  It was hard to tell
what was happening in the rear; the people who were falling
behind shrieked as piteously as those who were already lost.
The little bride hid her face on the groom's shoulder and sobbed.
Pavel sat still and watched his horses.  The road was clear
and white, and the groom's three blacks went like the wind.
It was only necessary to be calm and to guide them carefully.

At length, as they breasted a long hill, Peter rose cautiously
and looked back.  `There are only three sledges left,' he whispered.

`And the wolves?'  Pavel asked.

`Enough! Enough for all of us.'

Pavel reached the brow of the hill, but only two sledges followed him
down the other side.  In that moment on the hilltop, they saw behind
them a whirling black group on the snow.  Presently the groom screamed.
He saw his father's sledge overturned, with his mother and sisters.
He sprang up as if he meant to jump, but the girl shrieked and held him back.
It was even then too late.  The black ground-shadows were already
crowding over the heap in the road, and one horse ran out across
the fields, his harness hanging to him, wolves at his heels.
But the groom's movement had given Pavel an idea.

They were within a few miles of their village now.
The only sledge left out of six was not very far behind them,
and Pavel's middle horse was failing.  Beside a frozen pond
something happened to the other sledge; Peter saw it plainly.
Three big wolves got abreast of the horses, and the horses
went crazy.  They tried to jump over each other, got tangled
up in the harness, and overturned the sledge.

When the shrieking behind them died away, Pavel realized
that he was alone upon the familiar road.  `They still come?'
he asked Peter.

`Yes.'

`How many?'

`Twenty, thirty--enough.'

Now his middle horse was being almost dragged by the other two.
Pavel gave Peter the reins and stepped carefully into the back
of the sledge.  He called to the groom that they must lighten--
and pointed to the bride.  The young man cursed him and held her tighter.
Pavel tried to drag her away.  In the struggle, the groom rose.
Pavel knocked him over the side of the sledge and threw the girl
after him.  He said he never remembered exactly how he did it,
or what happened afterward.  Peter, crouching in the front seat,
saw nothing.  The first thing either of them noticed was a new
sound that broke into the clear air, louder than they had ever
heard it before--the bell of the monastery of their own village,
ringing for early prayers.

Pavel and Peter drove into the village alone, and they had
been alone ever since.  They were run out of their village.
Pavel's own mother would not look at him.  They went away
to strange towns, but when people learned where they came from,
they were always asked if they knew the two men who had fed the bride
to the wolves.  Wherever they went, the story followed them.
It took them five years to save money enough to come to America.
They worked in Chicago, Des Moines, Fort Wayne, but they
were always unfortunate.  When Pavel's health grew so bad,
they decided to try farming.

Pavel died a few days after he unburdened his mind to Mr. Shimerda,
and was buried in the Norwegian graveyard.  Peter sold off everything,
and left the country--went to be cook in a railway construction camp
where gangs of Russians were employed.

At his sale we bought Peter's wheelbarrow and some of his harness.
During the auction he went about with his head down, and never lifted
his eyes.  He seemed not to care about anything.  The Black Hawk
money-lender who held mortgages on Peter's livestock was there,
and he bought in the sale notes at about fifty cents on the dollar.
Everyone said Peter kissed the cow before she was led away by her new owner.
I did not see him do it, but this I know:  after all his furniture and
his cookstove and pots and pans had been hauled off by the purchasers,
when his house was stripped and bare, he sat down on the floor with his
clasp-knife and ate all the melons that he had put away for winter.
When Mr. Shimerda and Krajiek drove up in their wagon to take Peter
to the train, they found him with a dripping beard, surrounded by heaps
of melon rinds.

The loss of his two friends had a depressing effect upon old
Mr. Shimerda.  When he was out hunting, he used to go into
the empty log house and sit there, brooding.  This cabin was
his hermitage until the winter snows penned him in his cave.
For Antonia and me, the story of the wedding party was
never at an end.  We did not tell Pavel's secret to anyone,
but guarded it jealously--as if the wolves of the Ukraine
had gathered that night long ago, and the wedding party
been sacrificed, to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure.
At night, before I went to sleep, I often found myself in a sledge
drawn by three horses, dashing through a country that looked
something like Nebraska and something like Virginia.


IX

THE FIRST SNOWFALL came early in December.  I remember how
the world looked from our sitting-room window as I dressed behind
the stove that morning:  the low sky was like a sheet of metal;
the blond cornfields had faded out into ghostliness at last;
the little pond was frozen under its stiff willow bushes.
Big white flakes were whirling over everything and disappearing
in the red grass.

Beyond the pond, on the slope that climbed to the cornfield, there was,
faintly marked in the grass, a great circle where the Indians used to ride.
Jake and Otto were sure that when they galloped round that ring the Indians
tortured prisoners, bound to a stake in the centre; but grandfather thought
they merely ran races or trained horses there.  Whenever one looked at this
slope against the setting sun, the circle showed like a pattern in the grass;
and this morning, when the first light spray of snow lay over it, it came
out with wonderful distinctness, like strokes of Chinese white on canvas.
The old figure stirred me as it had never done before and seemed a good omen
for the winter.

As soon as the snow had packed hard, I began to drive about
the country in a clumsy sleigh that Otto Fuchs made for me by
fastening a wooden goods-box on bobs.  Fuchs had been apprenticed
to a cabinetmaker in the old country and was very handy with tools.
He would have done a better job if I hadn't hurried him.
My first trip was to the post-office, and the next day I went
over to take Yulka and Antonia for a sleigh-ride.

It was a bright, cold day.  I piled straw and buffalo robes
into the box, and took two hot bricks wrapped in old blankets.
When I got to the Shimerdas', I did not go up to the house,
but sat in m sleigh at the bottom of the draw and called.
Antonia and Yulka came running out, wearing little rabbit-skin
hats their father had made for them.  They had heard
about my sledge from Ambrosch and knew why I had come.
They tumbled in beside me and we set off toward the north,
along a road that happened to be broken.

The sky was brilliantly blue, and the sunlight on the
glittering white stretches of prairie was almost blinding.
As Antonia said, the whole world was changed by the snow;
we kept looking in vain for familiar landmarks.  The deep
arroyo through which Squaw Creek wound was now only a cleft
between snowdrifts--very blue when one looked down into it.
The tree-tops that had been gold all the autumn were dwarfed
and twisted, as if they would never have any life in them again.
The few little cedars, which were so dull and dingy before,
now stood out a strong, dusky green.  The wind had the burning
taste of fresh snow; my throat and nostrils smarted as if someone
had opened a hartshorn bottle.  The cold stung, and at the same
time delighted one.  My horse's breath rose like steam,
and whenever we stopped he smoked all over.  The cornfields
got back a little of their colour under the dazzling light,
and stood the palest possible gold in the sun and snow.
All about us the snow was crusted in shallow terraces,
with tracings like ripple-marks at the edges, curly waves that
were the actual impression of the stinging lash in the wind.

The girls had on cotton dresses under their shawls; they kept shivering
beneath the buffalo robes and hugging each other for warmth.
But they were so glad to get away from their ugly cave and
their mother's scolding that they begged me to go on and on,
as far as Russian Peter's house.  The great fresh open, after the
stupefying warmth indoors, made them behave like wild things.
They laughed and shouted, and said they never wanted to go home again.
Couldn't we settle down and live in Russian Peter's house, Yulka asked,
and couldn't I go to town and buy things for us to keep house with?

All the way to Russian Peter's we were extravagantly happy,
but when we turned back--it must have been about four o'clock--
the east wind grew stronger and began to howl; the sun lost
its heartening power and the sky became grey and sombre.
I took off my long woollen comforter and wound it around Yulka's throat.
She got so cold that we made her hide her head under the buffalo robe.
Antonia and I sat erect, but I held the reins clumsily,
and my eyes were blinded by the wind a good deal of the time.
It was growing dark when we got to their house, but I refused
to go in with them and get warm.  I knew my hands would ache
terribly if I went near a fire.  Yulka forgot to give me back
my comforter, and I had to drive home directly against the wind.
The next day I came down with an attack of quinsy, which kept me
in the house for nearly two weeks.

The basement kitchen seemed heavenly safe and warm in those days--
like a tight little boat in a winter sea.  The men were out in
the fields all day, husking corn, and when they came in at noon,
with long caps pulled down over their ears and their feet in
red-lined overshoes, I used to think they were like Arctic explorers.
In the afternoons, when grandmother sat upstairs darning,
or making husking-gloves, I read `The Swiss Family Robinson'
aloud to her, and I felt that the Swiss family had no
advantages over us in the way of an adventurous life.
I was convinced that man's strongest antagonist is the cold.
I admired the cheerful zest with which grandmother went
about keeping us warm and comfortable and well-fed. She
often reminded me, when she was preparing for the return
of the hungry men, that this country was not like Virginia;
and that here a cook had, as she said, `very little to do with.'
On Sundays she gave us as much chicken as we could eat,
and on other days we had ham or bacon or sausage meat.
She baked either pies or cake for us every day, unless, for a change,
she made my favourite pudding, striped with currants and boiled
in a bag.

Next to getting warm and keeping warm, dinner and supper were
the most interesting things we had to think about.  Our lives centred
around warmth and food and the return of the men at nightfall.
I used to wonder, when they came in tired from the fields,
their feet numb and their hands cracked and sore, how they could do
all the chores so conscientiously:  feed and water and bed the horses,
milk the cows, and look after the pigs.  When supper was over,
it took them a long while to get the cold out of their bones.
While grandmother and I washed the dishes and grandfather read
his paper upstairs, Jake and Otto sat on the long bench behind
the stove, `easing' their inside boots, or rubbing mutton tallow
into their cracked hands.

Every Saturday night we popped corn or made taffy,
and Otto Fuchs used to sing, `For I Am a Cowboy and Know
I've Done Wrong,' or, `Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairee.'
He had a good baritone voice and always led the singing when we
went to church services at the sod schoolhouse.

I can still see those two men sitting on the bench; Otto's close-clipped
head and Jake's shaggy hair slicked flat in front by a wet comb.
I can see the sag of their tired shoulders against the whitewashed wall.
What good fellows they were, how much they knew, and how many things
they had kept faith with!

Fuchs had been a cowboy, a stage-driver, a bartender,
a miner; had wandered all over that great Western country
and done hard work everywhere, though, as grandmother said,
he had nothing to show for it.  Jake was duller than Otto.
He could scarcely read, wrote even his name with difficulty,
and he had a violent temper which sometimes made him behave like
a crazy man--tore him all to pieces and actually made him ill.
But he was so soft-hearted that anyone could impose upon him.
If he, as he said, `forgot himself' and swore before grandmother,
he went about depressed and shamefaced all day.  They were both
of them jovial about the cold in winter and the heat in summer,
always ready to work overtime and to meet emergencies.
It was a matter of pride with them not to spare themselves.
Yet they were the sort of men who never get on, somehow, or do
anything but work hard for a dollar or two a day.

On those bitter, starlit nights, as we sat around the old stove
that fed us and warmed us and kept us cheerful, we could hear
the coyotes howling down by the corrals, and their hungry,
wintry cry used to remind the boys of wonderful animal stories;
about grey wolves and bears in the Rockies, wildcats and panthers
in the Virginia mountains.  Sometimes Fuchs could be persuaded
to talk about the outlaws and desperate characters he had known.
I remember one funny story about himself that made grandmother,
who was working her bread on the bread-board, laugh until she
wiped her eyes with her bare arm, her hands being floury.
It was like this:

When Otto left Austria to come to America, he was asked
by one of his relatives to look after a woman who was
crossing on the same boat, to join her husband in Chicago.
The woman started off with two children, but it was clear
that her family might grow larger on the journey.
Fuchs said he `got on fine with the kids,' and liked
the mother, though she played a sorry trick on him.
In mid-ocean she proceeded to have not one baby, but three!
This event made Fuchs the object of undeserved notoriety,
since he was travelling with her.  The steerage stewardess was
indignant with him, the doctor regarded him with suspicion.
The first-cabin passengers, who made up a purse for the woman,
took an embarrassing interest in Otto, and often enquired
of him about his charge.  When the triplets were taken ashore
at New York, he had, as he said, `to carry some of them.'
The trip to Chicago was even worse than the ocean voyage.
On the train it was very difficult to get milk for the babies
and to keep their bottles clean.  The mother did her best,
but no woman, out of her natural resources, could feed three babies.
The husband, in Chicago, was working in a furniture
factory for modest wages, and when he met his family
at the station he was rather crushed by the size of it.
He, too, seemed to consider Fuchs in some fashion to blame.
`I was sure glad,' Otto concluded, `that he didn't take his hard
feeling out on that poor woman; but he had a sullen eye for me,
all right!  Now, did you ever hear of a young feller's having
such hard luck, Mrs. Burden?'

Grandmother told him she was sure the Lord had remembered these things
to his credit, and had helped him out of many a scrape when he didn't
realize that he was being protected by Providence.



X

FOR SEVERAL WEEKS after my sleigh-ride, we heard nothing
from the Shimerdas.  My sore throat kept me indoors,
and grandmother had a cold which made the housework heavy for her.
When Sunday came she was glad to have a day of rest.  One night
at supper Fuchs told us he had seen Mr. Shimerda out hunting.

`He's made himself a rabbit-skin cap, Jim, and a rabbit-skin collar
that he buttons on outside his coat.  They ain't got but one
overcoat among 'em over there, and they take turns wearing it.
They seem awful scared of cold, and stick in that hole
in the bank like badgers.'

`All but the crazy boy,' Jake put in.  `He never wears the coat.
Krajiek says he's turrible strong and can stand anything.
I guess rabbits must be getting scarce in this locality.
Ambrosch come along by the cornfield yesterday where I
was at work and showed me three prairie dogs he'd shot.
He asked me if they was good to eat.  I spit and made a face
and took on, to scare him, but he just looked like he was
smarter'n me and put 'em back in his sack and walked off.'

Grandmother looked up in alarm and spoke to grandfather.
`Josiah, you don't suppose Krajiek would let them poor creatures
eat prairie dogs, do you?'

`You had better go over and see our neighbours tomorrow, Emmaline,'
he replied gravely.

Fuchs put in a cheerful word and said prairie dogs were clean beasts and
ought to be good for food, but their family connections were against them.
I asked what he meant, and he grinned and said they belonged to
the rat family.

When I went downstairs in the morning, I found grandmother and Jake packing
a hamper basket in the kitchen.

`Now, Jake,' grandmother was saying, `if you can find that old rooster that
got his comb froze, just give his neck a twist, and we'll take him along.
There's no good reason why Mrs. Shimerda couldn't have got hens
from her neighbours last fall and had a hen-house going by now.
I reckon she was confused and didn't know where to begin.
I've come strange to a new country myself, but I never forgot hens
are a good thing to have, no matter what you don't have.

`Just as you say, ma'm,' said Jake, `but I hate to think of Krajiek
getting a leg of that old rooster.'  He tramped out through the long
cellar and dropped the heavy door behind him.

After breakfast grandmother and Jake and I bundled ourselves up
and climbed into the cold front wagon-seat. As we approached
the Shimerdas', we heard the frosty whine of the pump and
saw Antonia, her head tied up and her cotton dress blown about her,
throwing all her weight on the pump-handle as it went up and down.
She heard our wagon, looked back over her shoulder, and, catching up
her pail of water, started at a run for the hole in the bank.

Jake helped grandmother to the ground, saying he would
bring the provisions after he had blanketed his horses.
We went slowly up the icy path toward the door sunk in the drawside.
Blue puffs of smoke came from the stovepipe that stuck out through
the grass and snow, but the wind whisked them roughly away.

Mrs. Shimerda opened the door before we knocked and seized
grandmother's hand.  She did not say `How do!' as usual,
but at once began to cry, talking very fast in her own language,
pointing to her feet which were tied up in rags, and looking
about accusingly at everyone.

The old man was sitting on a stump behind the stove,
crouching over as if he were trying to hide from us.
Yulka was on the floor at his feet, her kitten in her lap.
She peeped out at me and smiled, but, glancing up at her mother,
hid again.  Antonia was washing pans and dishes in a dark corner.
The crazy boy lay under the only window, stretched on
a gunny-sack stuffed with straw.  As soon as we entered,
he threw a grain-sack over the crack at the bottom of the door.
The air in the cave was stifling, and it was very dark, too.
A lighted lantern, hung over the stove, threw out a
feeble yellow glimmer.

Mrs. Shimerda snatched off the covers of two barrels behind the door,
and made us look into them.  In one there were some potatoes that had
been frozen and were rotting, in the other was a little pile of flour.
Grandmother murmured something in embarrassment, but the Bohemian woman
laughed scornfully, a kind of whinny-laugh, and, catching up an empty
coffee-pot from the shelf, shook it at us with a look positively vindictive.

Grandmother went on talking in her polite Virginia way, not admitting
their stark need or her own remissness, until Jake arrived with
the hamper, as if in direct answer to Mrs. Shimerda's reproaches.
Then the poor woman broke down.  She dropped on the floor beside
her crazy son, hid her face on her knees, and sat crying bitterly.
Grandmother paid no heed to her, but called Antonia to come
and help empty the basket.  Tony left her corner reluctantly.
I had never seen her crushed like this before.

`You not mind my poor mamenka, Mrs. Burden.  She is so sad,'
she whispered, as she wiped her wet hands on her skirt and took
the things grandmother handed her.

The crazy boy, seeing the food, began to make soft, gurgling noises and
stroked his stomach.  Jake came in again, this time with a sack of potatoes.
Grandmother looked about in perplexity.

`Haven't you got any sort of cave or cellar outside, Antonia?
This is no place to keep vegetables.  How did your potatoes get frozen?'

`We get from Mr. Bushy, at the post-office what he throw out.
We got no potatoes, Mrs. Burden,' Tony admitted mournfully.

When Jake went out, Marek crawled along the floor and stuffed up
the door-crack again.  Then, quietly as a shadow, Mr. Shimerda came
out from behind the stove.  He stood brushing his hand over his smooth
grey hair, as if he were trying to clear away a fog about his head.
He was clean and neat as usual, with his green neckcloth and his coral pin.
He took grandmother's arm and led her behind the stove, to the back
of the room.  In the rear wall was another little cave; a round hole,
not much bigger than an oil barrel, scooped out in the black earth.
When I got up on one of the stools and peered into it, I saw
some quilts and a pile of straw.  The old man held the lantern.
`Yulka,' he said in a low, despairing voice, `Yulka; my Antonia!'

Grandmother drew back.  `You mean they sleep in there--your girls?'
He bowed his head.

Tony slipped under his arm.  `It is very cold on the floor, and this is warm
like the badger hole.  I like for sleep there,' she insisted eagerly.
`My mamenka have nice bed, with pillows from our own geese in Bohemie.
See, Jim?'  She pointed to the narrow bunk which Krajiek had built
against the wall for himself before the Shimerdas came.

Grandmother sighed.  `Sure enough, where WOULD you sleep, dear!
I don't doubt you're warm there.  You'll have a better house
after while, Antonia, and then you will forget these hard times.'

Mr. Shimerda made grandmother sit down on the only chair and pointed
his wife to a stool beside her.  Standing before them with his hand on
Antonia's shoulder, he talked in a low tone, and his daughter translated.
He wanted us to know that they were not beggars in the old country;
he made good wages, and his family were respected there.
He left Bohemia with more than a thousand dollars in savings, after their
passage money was paid.  He had in some way lost on exchange in New York,
and the railway fare to Nebraska was more than they had expected.
By the time they paid Krajiek for the land, and bought his horses
and oxen and some old farm machinery, they had very little money left.
He wished grandmother to know, however, that he still had some money.
If they could get through until spring came, they would buy a cow
and chickens and plant a garden, and would then do very well.
Ambrosch and Antonia were both old enough to work in the fields,
and they were willing to work.  But the snow and the bitter weather
had disheartened them all.

Antonia explained that her father meant to build a new house
for them in the spring; he and Ambrosch had already split
the logs for it, but the logs were all buried in the snow,
along the creek where they had been felled.

While grandmother encouraged and gave them advice, I sat
down on the floor with Yulka and let her show me her kitten.
Marek slid cautiously toward us and began to exhibit his webbed fingers.
I knew he wanted to make his queer noises for me--to bark like a dog
or whinny like a horse--but he did not dare in the presence of his elders.
Marek was always trying to be agreeable, poor fellow, as if he had
it on his mind that he must make up for his deficiencies.

Mrs. Shimerda grew more calm and reasonable before our visit
was over, and, while Antonia translated, put in a word now
and then on her own account.  The woman had a quick ear,
and caught up phrases whenever she heard English spoken.
As we rose to go, she opened her wooden chest and brought
out a bag made of bed-ticking, about as long as a flour
sack and half as wide, stuffed full of something.
At sight of it, the crazy boy began to smack his lips.
When Mrs. Shimerda opened the bag and stirred the contents
with her hand, it gave out a salty, earthy smell,
very pungent, even among the other odours of that cave.
She measured a teacup full, tied it up in a bit of sacking,
and presented it ceremoniously to grandmother.

`For cook,' she announced.  `Little now; be very much when cook,'
spreading out her hands as if to indicate that the pint would
swell to a gallon.  `Very good.  You no have in this country.
All things for eat better in my country.'

`Maybe so, Mrs. Shimerda,' grandmother said dryly.
`I can't say but I prefer our bread to yours, myself.'

Antonia undertook to explain.  `This very good, Mrs. Burden'--
she clasped her hands as if she could not express how good--'it
make very much when you cook, like what my mama say.
Cook with rabbit, cook with chicken, in the gravy--oh, so good!'

All the way home grandmother and Jake talked about how easily good Christian
people could forget they were their brothers' keepers.

`I will say, Jake, some of our brothers and sisters are hard to keep.
Where's a body to begin, with these people?  They're wanting in everything,
and most of all in horse-sense. Nobody can give 'em that, I guess.
Jimmy, here, is about as able to take over a homestead as they are.
Do you reckon that boy Ambrosch has any real push in him?'

`He's a worker, all right, ma'm, and he's got some ketch-on about him;
but he's a mean one.  Folks can be mean enough to get on in this world;
and then, ag'in, they can be too mean.'

That night, while grandmother was getting supper, we opened
the package Mrs. Shimerda had given her.  It was full of little
brown chips that looked like the shavings of some root.
They were as light as feathers, and the most noticeable
thing about them was their penetrating, earthy odour.
We could not determine whether they were animal or vegetable.

`They might be dried meat from some queer beast, Jim.
They ain't dried fish, and they never grew on stalk or vine.
I'm afraid of 'em.  Anyhow, I shouldn't want to eat anything that
had been shut up for months with old clothes and goose pillows.'

She threw the package into the stove, but I bit off a corner
of one of the chips I held in my hand, and chewed it tentatively.
I never forgot the strange taste; though it was many years before I
knew that those little brown shavings, which the Shimerdas had
brought so far and treasured so jealously, were dried mushrooms.
They had been gathered, probably, in some deep Bohemian forest....



XI

DURING THE WEEK before Christmas, Jake was the most important
person of our household, for he was to go to town and do all
our Christmas shopping.  But on the twenty-first of December,
the snow began to fall.  The flakes came down so thickly that from
the sitting-room windows I could not see beyond the windmill--
its frame looked dim and grey, unsubstantial like a shadow.
The snow did not stop falling all day, or during the night that followed.
The cold was not severe, but the storm was quiet and resistless.
The men could not go farther than the barns and corral.
They sat about the house most of the day as if it were Sunday;
greasing their boots, mending their suspenders, plaiting whiplashes.

On the morning of the twenty-second, grandfather announced at breakfast
that it would be impossible to go to Black Hawk for Christmas purchases.
Jake was sure he could get through on horseback, and bring home our things
in saddle-bags; but grandfather told him the roads would be obliterated,
and a newcomer in the country would be lost ten times over.  Anyway, he would
never allow one of his horses to be put to such a strain.

We decided to have a country Christmas, without any help from town.
I had wanted to get some picture books for Yulka and Antonia;
even Yulka was able to read a little now.  Grandmother took me into
the ice-cold storeroom, where she had some bolts of gingham and sheeting.
She cut squares of cotton cloth and we sewed them together into a book.
We bound it between pasteboards, which I covered with brilliant calico,
representing scenes from a circus.  For two days I sat at the
dining-room table, pasting this book full of pictures for Yulka.
We had files of those good old family magazines which used to publish
coloured lithographs of popular paintings, and I was allowed to use
some of these.  I took `Napoleon Announcing the Divorce to Josephine'
for my frontispiece.  On the white pages I grouped Sunday-School cards
and advertising cards which I had brought from my `old country.'
Fuchs got out the old candle-moulds and made tallow candles.
Grandmother hunted up her fancy cake-cutters and baked gingerbread men
and roosters, which we decorated with burnt sugar and red cinnamon drops.

On the day before Christmas, Jake packed the things we were sending to
the Shimerdas in his saddle-bags and set off on grandfather's grey gelding.
When he mounted his horse at the door, I saw that he had a hatchet
slung to his belt, and he gave grandmother a meaning look which told me
he was planning a surprise for me.  That afternoon I watched long and
eagerly from the sitting-room window.  At last I saw a dark spot moving
on the west hill, beside the half-buried cornfield, where the sky was
taking on a coppery flush from the sun that did not quite break through.
I put on my cap and ran out to meet Jake.  When I got to the pond,
I could see that he was bringing in a little cedar tree across his pommel.
He used to help my father cut Christmas trees for me in Virginia,
and he had not forgotten how much I liked them.

By the time we had placed the cold, fresh-smelling little tree
in a corner of the sitting-room, it was already Christmas Eve.
After supper we all gathered there, and even grandfather, reading his
paper by the table, looked up with friendly interest now and then.
The cedar was about five feet high and very shapely.
We hung it with the gingerbread animals, strings of popcorn,
and bits of candle which Fuchs had fitted into pasteboard sockets.
Its real splendours, however, came from the most unlikely place
in the world--from Otto's cowboy trunk.  I had never seen anything
in that trunk but old boots and spurs and pistols, and a fascinating
mixture of yellow leather thongs, cartridges, and shoemaker's wax.
From under the lining he now produced a collection of brilliantly coloured
paper figures, several inches high and stiff enough to stand alone.
They had been sent to him year after year, by his old mother in Austria.
There was a bleeding heart, in tufts of paper lace; there were
the three kings, gorgeously apparelled, and the ox and the ass
and the shepherds; there was the Baby in the manger, and a group
of angels, singing; there were camels and leopards, held by the black
slaves of the three kings.  Our tree became the talking tree of the
fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.
Grandmother said it reminded her of the Tree of Knowledge.
We put sheets of cotton wool under it for a snow-field, and Jake's
pocket-mirror for a frozen lake.

I can see them now, exactly as they looked, working about
the table in the lamplight:  Jake with his heavy features,
so rudely moulded that his face seemed, somehow, unfinished;
Otto with his half-ear and the savage scar that made his
upper lip curl so ferociously under his twisted moustache.
As I remember them, what unprotected faces they were;
their very roughness and violence made them defenceless.
These boys had no practised manner behind which they
could retreat and hold people at a distance.
They had only their hard fists to batter at the world with.
Otto was already one of those drifting, case-hardened
labourers who never marry or have children of their own.
Yet he was so fond of children!



XII

ON CHRISTMAS MORNING, when I got down to the kitchen,
the men were just coming in from their morning chores--
the horses and pigs always had their breakfast before we did.
Jake and Otto shouted `Merry Christmas!' to me, and winked
at each other when they saw the waffle-irons on the stove.
Grandfather came down, wearing a white shirt and his Sunday coat.
Morning prayers were longer than usual.  He read the chapters from
Saint Matthew about the birth of Christ, and as we listened, it all
seemed like something that had happened lately, and near at hand.
In his prayer he thanked the Lord for the first Christmas,
and for all that it had meant to the world ever since.
He gave thanks for our food and comfort, and prayed for the poor
and destitute in great cities, where the struggle for life
was harder than it was here with us.  Grandfather's prayers
were often very interesting.  He had the gift of simple and
moving expression.  Because he talked so little, his words had
a peculiar force; they were not worn dull from constant use.
His prayers reflected what he was thinking about at the time,
and it was chiefly through them that we got to know his feelings
and his views about things.

After we sat down to our waffles and sausage, Jake told us
how pleased the Shimerdas had been with their presents;
even Ambrosch was friendly and went to the creek with him to cut
the Christmas tree.  It was a soft grey day outside, with heavy
clouds working across the sky, and occasional squalls of snow.
There were always odd jobs to be done about the barn on holidays,
and the men were busy until afternoon.  Then Jake and I
played dominoes, while Otto wrote a long letter home to his mother.
He always wrote to her on Christmas Day, he said, no matter where
he was, and no matter how long it had been since his last letter.
All afternoon he sat in the dining-room. He would write for a while,
then sit idle, his clenched fist lying on the table, his eyes
following the pattern of the oilcloth.  He spoke and wrote
his own language so seldom that it came to him awkwardly.
His effort to remember entirely absorbed him.

At about four o'clock a visitor appeared:  Mr. Shimerda, wearing his
rabbit-skin cap and collar, and new mittens his wife had knitted.
He had come to thank us for the presents, and for all grandmother's
kindness to his family.  Jake and Otto joined us from the basement and we
sat about the stove, enjoying the deepening grey of the winter afternoon
and the atmosphere of comfort and security in my grandfather's house.
This feeling seemed completely to take possession of Mr. Shimerda.
I suppose, in the crowded clutter of their cave, the old man had
come to believe that peace and order had vanished from the earth,
or existed only in the old world he had left so far behind.
He sat still and passive, his head resting against the back
of the wooden rocking-chair, his hands relaxed upon the arms.
His face had a look of weariness and pleasure, like that of sick
people when they feel relief from pain.  Grandmother insisted on
his drinking a glass of Virginia apple-brandy after his long walk
in the cold, and when a faint flush came up in his cheeks, his features
might have been cut out of a shell, they were so transparent.
He said almost nothing, and smiled rarely; but as he rested there
we all had a sense of his utter content.

As it grew dark, I asked whether I might light the Christmas
tree before the lamp was brought.  When the candle-ends sent up
their conical yellow flames, all the coloured figures from Austria
stood out clear and full of meaning against the green boughs.
Mr. Shimerda rose, crossed himself, and quietly knelt down before the tree,
his head sunk forward.  His long body formed a letter `S.' I saw
grandmother look apprehensively at grandfather.  He was rather narrow
in religious matters, and sometimes spoke out and hurt people's feelings.
There had been nothing strange about the tree before, but now,
with some one kneeling before it--images, candles ... Grandfather
merely put his finger-tips to his brow and bowed his venerable head,
thus Protestantizing the atmosphere.

We persuaded our guest to stay for supper with us.  He needed little urging.
As we sat down to the table, it occurred to me that he liked to look at us,
and that our faces were open books to him.  When his deep-seeing eyes rested
on me, I felt as if he were looking far ahead into the future for me,
down the road I would have to travel.

At nine o'clock Mr. Shimerda lighted one of our lanterns and put
on his overcoat and fur collar.  He stood in the little entry hall,
the lantern and his fur cap under his arm, shaking hands with us.
When he took grandmother's hand, he bent over it as he always did,
and said slowly, `Good woman!'  He made the sign of the cross
over me, put on his cap and went off in the dark.  As we turned
back to the sitting-room, grandfather looked at me searchingly.
`The prayers of all good people are good,' he said quietly.



XIII

THE WEEK FOLLOWING Christmas brought in a thaw, and by New Year's Day
all the world about us was a broth of grey slush, and the guttered
slope between the windmill and the barn was running black water.
The soft black earth stood out in patches along the roadsides.
I resumed all my chores, carried in the cobs and wood and water,
and spent the afternoons at the barn, watching Jake shell corn
with a hand-sheller.

One morning, during this interval of fine weather, Antonia and her
mother rode over on one of their shaggy old horses to pay us a visit.
It was the first time Mrs. Shimerda had been to our house,
and she ran about examining our carpets and curtains and furniture,
all the while commenting upon them to her daughter in an envious,
complaining tone.  In the kitchen she caught up an iron pot that stood
on the back of the stove and said:  `You got many, Shimerdas no got.'
I thought it weak-minded of grandmother to give the pot to her.

After dinner, when she was helping to wash the dishes,
she said, tossing her head:  `You got many things for cook.
If I got all things like you, I make much better.'

She was a conceited, boastful old thing, and even misfortune could
not humble her.  I was so annoyed that I felt coldly even toward
Antonia and listened unsympathetically when she told me her father
was not well.

`My papa sad for the old country.  He not look good.
He never make music any more.  At home he play violin
all the time; for weddings and for dance.  Here never.
When I beg him for play, he shake his head no.  Some days
he take his violin out of his box and make with his fingers
on the strings, like this, but never he make the music.
He don't like this kawntree.'

`People who don't like this country ought to stay at home,' I said severely.
`We don't make them come here.'

`He not want to come, never!' she burst out.  `My mamenka
make him come.  All the time she say:  "America big country;
much money, much land for my boys, much husband for my girls."
My papa, he cry for leave his old friends what make music with him.
He love very much the man what play the long horn like this'--
she indicated a slide trombone.  "They go to school together
and are friends from boys.  But my mama, she want Ambrosch
for be rich, with many cattle.'

`Your mama,' I said angrily, `wants other people's things.'

"Your grandfather is rich," she retorted fiercely.  `Why he not help my papa?
Ambrosch be rich, too, after while, and he pay back.  He is very smart boy.
For Ambrosch my mama come here.'

Ambrosch was considered the important person in the family.
Mrs. Shimerda and Antonia always deferred to him, though he was
often surly with them and contemptuous toward his father.
Ambrosch and his mother had everything their own way.
Though Antonia loved her father more than she did anyone else,
she stood in awe of her elder brother.

After I watched Antonia and her mother go over the hill
on their miserable horse, carrying our iron pot with them,
I turned to grandmother, who had taken up her darning,
and said I hoped that snooping old woman wouldn't come to see
us any more.

Grandmother chuckled and drove her bright needle across a hole
in Otto's sock.  `She's not old, Jim, though I expect she seems old
to you.  No, I wouldn't mourn if she never came again.  But, you see,
a body never knows what traits poverty might bring out in 'em.
It makes a woman grasping to see her children want for things.
Now read me a chapter in "The Prince of the House of David."
Let's forget the Bohemians.'

We had three weeks of this mild, open weather.  The cattle
in the corral ate corn almost as fast as the men could shell it
for them, and we hoped they would be ready for an early market.
One morning the two big bulls, Gladstone and Brigham Young,
thought spring had come, and they began to tease and butt
at each other across the barbed wire that separated them.
Soon they got angry.  They bellowed and pawed up the soft earth
with their hoofs, rolling their eyes and tossing their heads.
Each withdrew to a far corner of his own corral, and then
they made for each other at a gallop.  Thud, thud, we could
hear the impact of their great heads, and their bellowing
shook the pans on the kitchen shelves.  Had they not
been dehorned, they would have torn each other to pieces.
Pretty soon the fat steers took it up and began butting and
horning each other.  Clearly, the affair had to be stopped.
We all stood by and watched admiringly while Fuchs rode into
the corral with a pitchfork and prodded the bulls again and again,
finally driving them apart.

The big storm of the winter began on my eleventh birthday, the twentieth
of January.  When I went down to breakfast that morning, Jake and Otto
came in white as snow-men, beating their hands and stamping their feet.
They began to laugh boisterously when they saw me, calling:

`You've got a birthday present this time, Jim, and no mistake.
They was a full-grown blizzard ordered for you.'

All day the storm went on.  The snow did not fall this time, it simply
spilled out of heaven, like thousands of featherbeds being emptied.
That afternoon the kitchen was a carpenter-shop; the men brought
in their tools and made two great wooden shovels with long handles.
Neither grandmother nor I could go out in the storm, so Jake fed
the chickens and brought in a pitiful contribution of eggs.

Next day our men had to shovel until noon to reach the barn--
and the snow was still falling!  There had not been such a
storm in the ten years my grandfather had lived in Nebraska.
He said at dinner that we would not try to reach the cattle--
they were fat enough to go without their corn for a day or two;
but tomorrow we must feed them and thaw out their water-tap so that they
could drink.  We could not so much as see the corrals, but we knew
the steers were over there, huddled together under the north bank.
Our ferocious bulls, subdued enough by this time, were probably
warming each other's backs.  `This'll take the bile out of 'em!'
Fuchs remarked gleefully.

At noon that day the hens had not been heard from.
After dinner Jake and Otto, their damp clothes now dried on them,
stretched their stiff arms and plunged again into the drifts.
They made a tunnel through the snow to the hen-house, with walls
so solid that grandmother and I could walk back and forth in it.
We found the chickens asleep; perhaps they thought night had
come to stay.  One old rooster was stirring about, pecking at
the solid lump of ice in their water-tin. When we flashed
the lantern in their eyes, the hens set up a great cackling
and flew about clumsily, scattering down-feathers. The mottled,
pin-headed guinea-hens, always resentful of captivity,
ran screeching out into the tunnel and tried to poke their ugly,
painted faces through the snow walls.  By five o'clock the chores
were done just when it was time to begin them all over again!
That was a strange, unnatural sort of day.


XIV

ON THE MORNING of the twenty-second I wakened with a start.
Before I opened my eyes, I seemed to know that something
had happened.  I heard excited voices in the kitchen--
grandmother's was so shrill that I knew she must be almost
beside herself.  I looked forward to any new crisis with delight.
What could it be, I wondered, as I hurried into my clothes.
Perhaps the barn had burned; perhaps the cattle had frozen to death;
perhaps a neighbour was lost in the storm.

Down in the kitchen grandfather was standing before the stove
with his hands behind him.  Jake and Otto had taken off their
boots and were rubbing their woollen socks.  Their clothes
and boots were steaming, and they both looked exhausted.
On the bench behind the stove lay a man, covered up with a blanket.
Grandmother motioned me to the dining-room. I obeyed reluctantly.
I watched her as she came and went, carrying dishes.
Her lips were tightly compressed and she kept whispering to herself:
`Oh, dear Saviour!'  `Lord, Thou knowest!'

Presently grandfather came in and spoke to me:  `Jimmy, we will not
have prayers this morning, because we have a great deal to do.
Old Mr. Shimerda is dead, and his family are in great distress.
Ambrosch came over here in the middle of the night, and Jake and Otto
went back with him.  The boys have had a hard night, and you must not
bother them with questions.  That is Ambrosch, asleep on the bench.
Come in to breakfast, boys.'

After Jake and Otto had swallowed their first cup of coffee, they began
to talk excitedly, disregarding grandmother's warning glances.
I held my tongue, but I listened with all my ears.

`No, sir,' Fuchs said in answer to a question from grandfather,
`nobody heard the gun go off.  Ambrosch was out with the ox-team, trying
to break a road, and the women-folks was shut up tight in their cave.
When Ambrosch come in, it was dark and he didn't see nothing, but the oxen
acted kind of queer.  One of 'em ripped around and got away from him--
bolted clean out of the stable.  His hands is blistered where the rope
run through.  He got a lantern and went back and found the old man,
just as we seen him.'

`Poor soul, poor soul!' grandmother groaned.  `I'd like to think he never
done it.  He was always considerate and un-wishful to give trouble.
How could he forget himself and bring this on us!'

`I don't think he was out of his head for a minute, Mrs. Burden,'
Fuchs declared.  `He done everything natural.  You know he was always
sort of fixy, and fixy he was to the last.  He shaved after dinner,
and washed hisself all over after the girls had done the dishes.
Antonia heated the water for him.  Then he put on a clean shirt
and clean socks, and after he was dressed he kissed her and the little
one and took his gun and said he was going out to hunt rabbits.
He must have gone right down to the barn and done it then.  He layed
down on that bunk-bed, close to the ox stalls, where he always slept.
When we found him, everything was decent except'--Fuchs wrinkled
his brow and hesitated--'except what he couldn't nowise foresee.
His coat was hung on a peg, and his boots was under the bed.
He'd took off that silk neckcloth he always wore, and folded it
smooth and stuck his pin through it.  He turned back his shirt
at the neck and rolled up his sleeves.'

`I don't see how he could do it!' grandmother kept saying.

Otto misunderstood her.  `Why, ma'am, it was simple enough;
he pulled the trigger with his big toe.  He layed over
on his side and put the end of the barrel in his mouth,
then he drew up one foot and felt for the trigger.
He found it all right!'

`Maybe he did,' said Jake grimly.  `There's something mighty
queer about it.'

`Now what do you mean, Jake?' grandmother asked sharply.

`Well, ma'm, I found Krajiek's axe under the manger, and I
picks it up and carries it over to the corpse, and I take my
oath it just fit the gash in the front of the old man's face.
That there Krajiek had been sneakin' round, pale and quiet,
and when he seen me examinin' the axe, he begun whimperin',
"My God, man, don't do that!"  "I reckon I'm a-goin'
to look into this," says I. Then he begun to squeal like a rat
and run about wringin' his hands.  "They'll hang me!" says he.
"My God, they'll hang me sure!"'

Fuchs spoke up impatiently.  `Krajiek's gone silly, Jake, and so
have you.  The old man wouldn't have made all them preparations
for Krajiek to murder him, would he?  It don't hang together.
The gun was right beside him when Ambrosch found him.'

`Krajiek could 'a' put it there, couldn't he?'  Jake demanded.

Grandmother broke in excitedly:  `See here, Jake Marpole, don't you
go trying to add murder to suicide.  We're deep enough in trouble.
Otto reads you too many of them detective stories.'

`It will be easy to decide all that, Emmaline,' said grandfather quietly.
`If he shot himself in the way they think, the gash will be torn from
the inside outward.'

`Just so it is, Mr. Burden,' Otto affirmed.  `I seen bunches
of hair and stuff sticking to the poles and straw along the roof.
They was blown up there by gunshot, no question.'

Grandmother told grandfather she meant to go over to the Shimerdas' with him.

`There is nothing you can do,' he said doubtfully.  `The body
can't be touched until we get the coroner here from Black Hawk,
and that will be a matter of several days, this weather.'

`Well, I can take them some victuals, anyway, and say a word of
comfort to them poor little girls.  The oldest one was his darling,
and was like a right hand to him.  He might have thought of her.
He's left her alone in a hard world.'  She glanced distrustfully
at Ambrosch, who was now eating his breakfast at the kitchen table.

Fuchs, although he had been up in the cold nearly all night, was going
to make the long ride to Black Hawk to fetch the priest and the coroner.
On the grey gelding, our best horse, he would try to pick his way across
the country with no roads to guide him.

`Don't you worry about me, Mrs. Burden,' he said cheerfully,
as he put on a second pair of socks.  `I've got a good
nose for directions, and I never did need much sleep.
It's the grey I'm worried about.  I'll save him what I can,
but it'll strain him, as sure as I'm telling you!'

`This is no time to be over-considerate of animals, Otto; do the best
you can for yourself.  Stop at the Widow Steavens's for dinner.
She's a good woman, and she'll do well by you.'

After Fuchs rode away, I was left with Ambrosch.
I saw a side of him I had not seen before.  He was deeply,
even slavishly, devout.  He did not say a word all morning,
but sat with his rosary in his hands, praying, now silently,
now aloud.  He never looked away from his beads, nor lifted
his hands except to cross himself.  Several times the poor
boy fell asleep where he sat, wakened with a start, and began
to pray again.

No wagon could be got to the Shimerdas' until a road was broken,
and that would be a day's job.  Grandfather came from the barn on one
of our big black horses, and Jake lifted grandmother up behind him.
She wore her black hood and was bundled up in shawls.
Grandfather tucked his bushy white beard inside his overcoat.
They looked very Biblical as they set off, I thought.
Jake and Ambrosch followed them, riding the other black and
my pony, carrying bundles of clothes that we had got together
for Mrs. Shimerda.  I watched them go past the pond and over
the hill by the drifted cornfield.  Then, for the first time,
I realized that I was alone in the house.

I felt a considerable extension of power and authority,
and was anxious to acquit myself creditably.  I carried in cobs
and wood from the long cellar, and filled both the stoves.
I remembered that in the hurry and excitement of the morning nobody
had thought of the chickens, and the eggs had not been gathered.
Going out through the tunnel, I gave the hens their corn,
emptied the ice from their drinking-pan, and filled it with water.
After the cat had had his milk, I could think of nothing else
to do, and I sat down to get warm.  The quiet was delightful,
and the ticking clock was the most pleasant of companions.
I got `Robinson Crusoe' and tried to read, but his life on
the island seemed dull compared with ours.  Presently, as I
looked with satisfaction about our comfortable sitting-room, it
flashed upon me that if Mr. Shimerda's soul were lingering about
in this world at all, it would be here, in our house, which had
been more to his liking than any other in the neighbourhood.
I remembered his contented face when he was with us on Christmas Day.
If he could have lived with us, this terrible thing would
never have happened.

I knew it was homesickness that had killed Mr. Shimerda, and I wondered
whether his released spirit would not eventually find its way back to his
own country.  I thought of how far it was to Chicago, and then to Virginia,
to Baltimore--and then the great wintry ocean.  No, he would not at
once set out upon that long journey.  Surely, his exhausted spirit,
so tired of cold and crowding and the struggle with the ever-falling snow,
was resting now in this quiet house.

I was not frightened, but I made no noise.  I did not wish to disturb him.
I went softly down to the kitchen which, tucked away so snugly underground,
always seemed to me the heart and centre of the house.  There, on the bench
behind the stove, I thought and thought about Mr. Shimerda.  Outside I could
hear the wind singing over hundreds of miles of snow.  It was as if I had let
the old man in out of the tormenting winter, and were sitting there with him.
I went over all that Antonia had ever told me about his life before he came
to this country; how he used to play the fiddle at weddings and dances.
I thought about the friends he had mourned to leave, the trombone-player,
the great forest full of game--belonging, as Antonia said, to the `nobles'--
from which she and her mother used to steal wood on moonlight nights.
There was a white hart that lived in that forest, and if anyone killed it,
he would be hanged, she said.  Such vivid pictures came to me that they
might have been Mr. Shimerda's memories, not yet faded out from the air
in which they had haunted him.

It had begun to grow dark when my household returned,
and grandmother was so tired that she went at once to bed.
Jake and I got supper, and while we were washing the dishes
he told me in loud whispers about the state of things over at
the Shimerdas'. Nobody could touch the body until the coroner came.
If anyone did, something terrible would happen, apparently.
The dead man was frozen through, `just as stiff as a dressed
turkey you hang out to freeze,' Jake said.  The horses and oxen
would not go into the barn until he was frozen so hard that there
was no longer any smell of blood.  They were stabled there now,
with the dead man, because there was no other place to keep them.
A lighted lantern was kept hanging over Mr. Shimerda's head.
Antonia and Ambrosch and the mother took turns going
down to pray beside him.  The crazy boy went with them,
because he did not feel the cold.  I believed he felt cold as much
as anyone else, but he liked to be thought insensible to it.
He was always coveting distinction, poor Marek!

Ambrosch, Jake said, showed more human feeling than he would have supposed him
capable of, but he was chiefly concerned about getting a priest, and about
his father's soul, which he believed was in a place of torment and would
remain there until his family and the priest had prayed a great deal for him.
`As I understand it,' Jake concluded, `it will be a matter of years to pray
his soul out of Purgatory, and right now he's in torment.'

`I don't believe it,' I said stoutly.  `I almost know it
isn't true.'  I did not, of course, say that I believed
he had been in that very kitchen all afternoon, on his way
back to his own country.  Nevertheless, after I went to bed,
this idea of punishment and Purgatory came back on me crushingly.
I remembered the account of Dives in torment, and shuddered.
But Mr. Shimerda had not been rich and selfish:
he had only been so unhappy that he could not live any longer.



XV

OTTO FUCHS GOT back from Black Hawk at noon the next day.  He reported
that the coroner would reach the Shimerdas' sometime that afternoon,
but the missionary priest was at the other end of his parish, a hundred
miles away, and the trains were not running.  Fuchs had got a few hours'
sleep at the livery barn in town, but he was afraid the grey gelding
had strained himself.  Indeed, he was never the same horse afterward.
That long trip through the deep snow had taken all the endurance
out of him.

Fuchs brought home with him a stranger, a young Bohemian who had
taken a homestead near Black Hawk, and who came on his only horse
to help his fellow countrymen in their trouble.  That was the first
time I ever saw Anton Jelinek.  He was a strapping young fellow
in the early twenties then, handsome, warm-hearted, and full of life,
and he came to us like a miracle in the midst of that grim business.
I remember exactly how he strode into our kitchen in his felt boots
and long wolfskin coat, his eyes and cheeks bright with the cold.
At sight of grandmother, he snatched off his fur cap, greeting her
in a deep, rolling voice which seemed older than he.

`I want to thank you very much, Mrs. Burden, for that you are so kind
to poor strangers from my kawntree.'

He did not hesitate like a farmer boy, but looked one eagerly in the eye
when he spoke.  Everything about him was warm and spontaneous.
He said he would have come to see the Shimerdas before, but he had hired
out to husk corn all the fall, and since winter began he had been going
to the school by the mill, to learn English, along with the little children.
He told me he had a nice `lady-teacher' and that he liked to go to school.

At dinner grandfather talked to Jelinek more than he usually
did to strangers.

`Will they be much disappointed because we cannot get a priest?' he asked.

Jelinek looked serious.

`Yes, sir, that is very bad for them.  Their father has
done a great sin'--he looked straight at grandfather.
`Our Lord has said that.'

Grandfather seemed to like his frankness.

`We believe that, too, Jelinek.  But we believe that Mr. Shimerda's
soul will come to its Creator as well off without a priest.
We believe that Christ is our only intercessor.'

The young man shook his head.  `I know how you think.
My teacher at the school has explain.  But I have seen too much.
I believe in prayer for the dead.  I have seen too much.'

We asked him what he meant.

He glanced around the table.  `You want I shall tell you?  When I was
a little boy like this one, I begin to help the priest at the altar.
I make my first communion very young; what the Church teach seem
plain to me.  By 'n' by war-times come, when the Prussians fight us.
We have very many soldiers in camp near my village, and the cholera
break out in that camp, and the men die like flies.  All day long
our priest go about there to give the Sacrament to dying men,
and I go with him to carry the vessels with the Holy Sacrament.
Everybody that go near that camp catch the sickness but me and the priest.
But we have no sickness, we have no fear, because we carry that blood
and that body of Christ, and it preserve us.'  He paused, looking
at grandfather.  `That I know, Mr. Burden, for it happened to myself.
All the soldiers know, too.  When we walk along the road, the old priest
and me, we meet all the time soldiers marching and officers on horse.
All those officers, when they see what I carry under the cloth, pull up
their horses and kneel down on the ground in the road until we pass.
So I feel very bad for my kawntree-man to die without the Sacrament,
and to die in a bad way for his soul, and I feel sad for his family.'

We had listened attentively.  It was impossible not to admire
his frank, manly faith.

`I am always glad to meet a young man who thinks seriously about
these things,' said grandfather, land I would never be the one to say
you were not in God's care when you were among the soldiers.'
    After dinner it was  decided  that  young  Jelinek
should hook our two strong black farm-horses to the scraper and break a road
through to the Shimerdas', so that a wagon could go when it was necessary.
Fuchs, who was the only cabinetmaker in the neighbourhood was set to work
on a coffin.

Jelinek put on his long wolfskin coat, and when we admired it,
he told us that he had shot and skinned the coyotes, and the young man
who `batched' with him, Jan Bouska, who had been a fur-worker in Vienna,
made the coat.  From the windmill I watched Jelinek come out of the barn
with the blacks, and work his way up the hillside toward the cornfield.
Sometimes he was completely hidden by the clouds of snow that rose about him;
then he and the horses would emerge black and shining.

Our heavy carpenter's bench had to be brought from the barn and carried
down into the kitchen.  Fuchs selected boards from a pile of planks
grandfather had hauled out from town in the fall to make a new floor
for the oats-bin. When at last the lumber and tools were assembled, and the
doors were closed again and the cold draughts shut out, grandfather rode
away to meet the coroner at the Shimerdas', and Fuchs took off his coat
and settled down to work.  I sat on his worktable and watched him.
He did not touch his tools at first, but figured for a long while on
a piece of paper, and measured the planks and made marks on them.
While he was thus engaged, he whistled softly to himself, or teasingly pulled
at his half-ear. Grandmother moved about quietly, so as not to disturb him.
At last he folded his ruler and turned a cheerful face to us.

`The hardest part of my job's done,' he announced.
`It's the head end of it that comes hard with me, especially when I'm
out of practice.  The last time I made one of these, Mrs. Burden,'
he continued, as he sorted and tried his chisels, `was for a
fellow in the Black Tiger Mine, up above Silverton, Colorado.
The mouth of that mine goes right into the face of the cliff,
and they used to put us in a bucket and run us over on a trolley
and shoot us into the shaft.  The bucket travelled across a box
canon three hundred feet deep, and about a third full of water.
Two Swedes had fell out of that bucket once, and hit the water,
feet down.  If you'll believe it, they went to work the next day.
You can't kill a Swede.  But in my time a little Eyetalian
tried the high dive, and it turned out different with him.
We was snowed in then, like we are now, and I happened
to be the only man in camp that could make a coffin for him.
It's a handy thing to know, when you knock about like I've done.'

`We'd be hard put to it now, if you didn't know, Otto,' grandmother said.

`Yes, 'm,' Fuchs admitted with modest pride.  `So few folks
does know how to make a good tight box that'll turn water.
I sometimes wonder if there'll be anybody about to do it for me.
However, I'm not at all particular that way.'

All afternoon, wherever one went in the house, one could hear
the panting wheeze of the saw or the pleasant purring of the plane.
They were such cheerful noises, seeming to promise new
things for living people:  it was a pity that those freshly
planed pine boards were to be put underground so soon.
The lumber was hard to work because it was full of frost,
and the boards gave off a sweet smell of pine woods,
as the heap of yellow shavings grew higher and higher.
I wondered why Fuchs had not stuck to cabinet-work,
he settled down to it with such ease and content.
He handled the tools as if he liked the feel of them;
and when he planed, his hands went back and forth over the boards
in an eager, beneficent way as if he were blessing them.
He broke out now and then into German hymns, as if this
occupation brought back old times to him.

At four o'clock Mr. Bushy, the postmaster, with another neighbour
who lived east of us, stopped in to get warm.  They were on
their way to the Shimerdas'. The news of what had happened over
there had somehow got abroad through the snow-blocked country.
Grandmother gave the visitors sugar-cakes and hot coffee.
Before these callers were gone, the brother of the Widow Steavens,
who lived on the Black Hawk road, drew up at our door, and after
him came the father of the German family, our nearest neighbours
on the south.  They dismounted and joined us in the dining-room.
They were all eager for any details about the suicide,
and they were greatly concerned as to where Mr. Shimerda would
be buried.  The nearest Catholic cemetery was at Black Hawk,
and it might be weeks before a wagon could get so far.
Besides, Mr. Bushy and grandmother were sure that a man who had
killed himself could not be buried in a Catholic graveyard.
There was a burying-ground over by the Norwegian church,
west of Squaw Creek; perhaps the Norwegians would take
Mr. Shimerda in.

After our visitors rode away in single file over the hill,
we returned to the kitchen.  Grandmother began to make
the icing for a chocolate cake, and Otto again filled
the house with the exciting, expectant song of the plane.
One pleasant thing about this time was that everybody talked
more than usual.  I had never heard the postmaster say anything
but `Only papers, to-day,' or, `I've got a sackful of mail for ye,'
until this afternoon.  Grandmother always talked, dear woman:
to herself or to the Lord, if there was no one else to listen;
but grandfather was naturally taciturn, and Jake and Otto
were often so tired after supper that I used to feel as if I
were surrounded by a wall of silence.  Now everyone seemed eager
to talk.  That afternoon Fuchs told me story after story:
about the Black Tiger Mine, and about violent deaths
and casual buryings, and the queer fancies of dying men.
You never really knew a man, he said, until you saw him die.
Most men were game, and went without a grudge.

The postmaster, going home, stopped to say that grandfather
would bring the coroner back with him to spend the night.
The officers of the Norwegian church, he told us, had held
a meeting and decided that the Norwegian graveyard could not
extend its hospitality to Mr. Shimerda.

Grandmother was indignant.  `If these foreigners are so clannish,
Mr. Bushy, we'll have to have an American graveyard that will be more
liberal-minded. I'll get right after Josiah to start one in the spring.
If anything was to happen to me, I don't want the Norwegians holding
inquisitions over me to see whether I'm good enough to be laid amongst 'em.'

Soon grandfather returned, bringing with him Anton Jelinek,
and that important person, the coroner.  He was a mild,
flurried old man, a Civil War veteran, with one sleeve hanging empty.
He seemed to find this case very perplexing, and said if it had not been
for grandfather he would have sworn out a warrant against Krajiek.
`The way he acted, and the way his axe fit the wound, was enough
to convict any man.'

Although it was perfectly clear that Mr. Shimerda had
killed himself, Jake and the coroner thought something ought
to be done to Krajiek because he behaved like a guilty man.
He was badly frightened, certainly, and perhaps he even felt
some stirrings of remorse for his indifference to the old
man's misery and loneliness.

At supper the men ate like vikings, and the chocolate cake,
which I had hoped would linger on until tomorrow in a
mutilated condition, disappeared on the second round.
They talked excitedly about where they should bury Mr. Shimerda;
I gathered that the neighbours were all disturbed and shocked
about something.  It developed that Mrs. Shimerda and Ambrosch
wanted the old man buried on the southwest corner of their
own land; indeed, under the very stake that marked the corner.
Grandfather had explained to Ambrosch that some day,
when the country was put under fence and the roads were confined
to section lines, two roads would cross exactly on that corner.
But Ambrosch only said, `It makes no matter.'

Grandfather asked Jelinek whether in the old country there was
some superstition to the effect that a suicide must be buried
at the cross-roads.

Jelinek said he didn't know; he seemed to remember hearing there
had once been such a custom in Bohemia.  `Mrs. Shimerda is made
up her mind,' he added.  `I try to persuade her, and say it looks
bad for her to all the neighbours; but she say so it must be.
"There I will bury him, if I dig the grave myself," she say.
I have to promise her I help Ambrosch make the grave tomorrow.'

Grandfather smoothed his beard and looked judicial.
`I don't know whose wish should decide the matter, if not hers.
But if she thinks she will live to see the people of this
country ride over that old man's head, she is mistaken.'



XVI

MR.  SHIMERDA LAY DEAD in the barn four days, and on the fifth
they buried him.  All day Friday Jelinek was off with Ambrosch
digging the grave, chopping out the frozen earth with old axes.
On Saturday we breakfasted before daylight and got into the wagon
with the coffin.  Jake and Jelinek went ahead on horseback to cut
the body loose from the pool of blood in which it was frozen fast
to the ground.

When grandmother and I went into the Shimerdas' house, we found
the womenfolk alone; Ambrosch and Marek were at the barn.
Mrs. Shimerda sat crouching by the stove, Antonia was washing dishes.
When she saw me, she ran out of her dark corner and threw her arms
around me.  `Oh, Jimmy,' she sobbed, `what you tink for my lovely papa!'
It seemed to me that I could feel her heart breaking as she
clung to me.

Mrs. Shimerda, sitting on the stump by the stove, kept looking over
her shoulder toward the door while the neighbours were arriving.
They came on horseback, all except the postmaster, who brought
his family in a wagon over the only broken wagon-trail. The Widow
Steavens rode up from her farm eight miles down the Black Hawk road.
The cold drove the women into the cave-house, and it was soon crowded.
A fine, sleety snow was beginning to fall, and everyone was afraid
of another storm and anxious to have the burial over with.

Grandfather and Jelinek came to tell Mrs. Shimerda that it
was time to start.  After bundling her mother up in clothes
the neighbours had brought, Antonia put on an old cape from our
house and the rabbit-skin hat her father had made for her.
Four men carried Mr. Shimerda's box up the hill; Krajiek slunk
along behind them.  The coffin was too wide for the door,
so it was put down on the slope outside.  I slipped out from
the cave and looked at Mr. Shimerda.  He was lying on his side,
with his knees drawn up.  His body was draped in a black shawl,
and his head was bandaged in white muslin, like a mummy's;
one of his long, shapely hands lay out on the black cloth;
that was all one could see of him.

Mrs. Shimerda came out and placed an open prayer-book against the body,
making the sign of the cross on the bandaged head with her fingers.
Ambrosch knelt down and made the same gesture, and after him Antonia
and Marek.  Yulka hung back.  Her mother pushed her forward,
and kept saying something to her over and over.  Yulka knelt down,
shut her eyes, and put out her hand a little way, but she drew it
back and began to cry wildly.  She was afraid to touch the bandage.
Mrs. Shimerda caught her by the shoulders and pushed her toward
the coffin, but grandmother interfered.

`No, Mrs. Shimerda,' she said firmly, `I won't stand
by and see that child frightened into spasms.
She is too little to understand what you want of her.
Let her alone.'

At a look from grandfather, Fuchs and Jelinek placed the lid
on the box, and began to nail it down over Mr. Shimerda.
I was afraid to look at Antonia.  She put her arms round Yulka
and held the little girl close to her.

The coffin was put into the wagon.  We drove slowly away, against the fine,
icy snow which cut our faces like a sand-blast. When we reached
the grave, it looked a very little spot in that snow-covered waste.
The men took the coffin to the edge of the hole and lowered it with ropes.
We stood about watching them, and the powdery snow lay without melting
on the caps and shoulders of the men and the shawls of the women.
Jelinek spoke in a persuasive tone to Mrs. Shimerda, and then
turned to grandfather.

`She says, Mr. Burden, she is very glad if you can make some prayer for him
here in English, for the neighbours to understand.'

Grandmother looked anxiously at grandfather.  He took off his hat,
and the other men did likewise.  I thought his prayer remarkable.
I still remember it.  He began, `Oh, great and just God,
no man among us knows what the sleeper knows, nor is it
for us to judge what lies between him and Thee.'  He prayed
that if any man there had been remiss toward the stranger come
to a far country, God would forgive him and soften his heart.
He recalled the promises to the widow and the fatherless,
and asked God to smooth the way before this widow and her children,
and to `incline the hearts of men to deal justly with her.'
In closing, he said we were leaving Mr. Shimerda at `Thy
judgment seat, which is also Thy mercy seat.'

All the time he was praying, grandmother watched him through the black
fingers of her glove, and when he said `Amen,' I thought she looked satisfied
with him.  She turned to Otto and whispered, `Can't you start a hymn, Fuchs?
It would seem less heathenish.'

Fuchs glanced about to see if there was general approval
of her suggestion, then began, `Jesus, Lover of my Soul,'
and all the men and women took it up after him.  Whenever I
have heard the hymn since, it has made me remember that white
waste and the little group of people; and the bluish air,
full of fine, eddying snow, like long veils flying:

          `While the nearer waters roll,
          While the tempest still is high.'

Years afterward, when the open-grazing days were over,
and the red grass had been ploughed under and under until it
had almost disappeared from the prairie; when all the fields were
under fence, and the roads no longer ran about like wild things,
but followed the surveyed section-lines, Mr. Shimerda's
grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it,
and an unpainted wooden cross.  As grandfather had predicted,
Mrs. Shimerda never saw the roads going over his head.
The road from the north curved a little to the east just there,
and the road from the west swung out a little to the south;
so that the grave, with its tall red grass that was never mowed,
was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon
or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look
like soft grey rivers flowing past it.  I never came upon
the place without emotion, and in all that country it was
the spot most dear to me.  I loved the dim superstition,
the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still
more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence--
the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth
roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset.
Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure,
without wishing well to the sleeper.



XVII

WHEN SPRING CAME, AFTER that hard winter, one could not get
enough of the nimble air.  Every morning I wakened with a fresh
consciousness that winter was over.  There were none of the signs
of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods
or blooming gardens.  There was only--spring itself; the throb of it,
the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere:
in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm,
high wind--rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful
like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted.
If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should
have known that it was spring.

Everywhere now there was the smell of burning grass.
Our neighbours burned off their pasture before the new grass
made a start, so that the fresh growth would not be mixed
with the dead stand of last year.  Those light, swift fires,
running about the country, seemed a part of the same kindling
that was in the air.

The Shimerdas were in their new log house by then.
The neighbours had helped them to build it in March.  It stood
directly in front of their old cave, which they used as a cellar.
The family were now fairly equipped to begin their struggle
with the soil.  They had four comfortable rooms to live in,
a new windmill--bought on credit--a chicken-house and poultry.
Mrs. Shimerda had paid grandfather ten dollars for a milk cow,
and was to give him fifteen more as soon as they harvested
their first crop.

When I rode up to the Shimerdas' one bright windy afternoon
in April, Yulka ran out to meet me.  It was to her, now, that I
gave reading lessons; Antonia was busy with other things.
I tied my pony and went into the kitchen where Mrs. Shimerda
was baking bread, chewing poppy seeds as she worked.
By this time she could speak enough English to ask me a great
many questions about what our men were doing in the fields.
She seemed to think that my elders withheld helpful information,
and that from me she might get valuable secrets.  On this
occasion she asked me very craftily when grandfather expected
to begin planting corn.  I told her, adding that he thought we
should have a dry spring and that the corn would not be held
back by too much rain, as it had been last year.

She gave me a shrewd glance.  `He not Jesus,' she blustered;
`he not know about the wet and the dry.

I did not answer her; what was the use?  As I sat waiting
for the hour when Ambrosch and Antonia would return
from the fields, I watched Mrs. Shimerda at her work.
She took from the oven a coffee-cake which she wanted to keep warm
for supper, and wrapped it in a quilt stuffed with feathers.
I have seen her put even a roast goose in this quilt to keep it hot.
When the neighbours were there building the new house, they saw
her do this, and the story got abroad that the Shimerdas kept
their food in their featherbeds.

When the sun was dropping low, Antonia came up the big south draw
with her team.  How much older she had grown in eight months!
She had come to us a child, and now she was a tall, strong young girl,
although her fifteenth birthday had just slipped by.  I ran out and met
her as she brought her horses up to the windmill to water them.
She wore the boots her father had so thoughtfully taken off before
he shot himself, and his old fur cap.  Her outgrown cotton dress
switched about her calves, over the boot-tops. She kept her sleeves
rolled up all day, and her arms and throat were burned as brown
as a sailor's. Her neck came up strongly out of her shoulders,
like the bole of a tree out of the turf.  One sees that draught-horse
neck among the peasant women in all old countries.

She greeted me gaily, and began at once to tell me how much ploughing
she had done that day.  Ambrosch, she said, was on the north quarter,
breaking sod with the oxen.

`Jim, you ask Jake how much he ploughed to-day. I don't
want that Jake get more done in one day than me.
I want we have very much corn this fall.'

While the horses drew in the water, and nosed each other,
and then drank again, Antonia sat down on the windmill step
and rested her head on her hand.

`You see the big prairie fire from your place last night?
I hope your grandpa ain't lose no stacks?'

`No, we didn't. I came to ask you something, Tony.
Grandmother wants to know if you can't go to the term of
school that begins next week over at the sod schoolhouse.
She says there's a good teacher, and you'd learn a lot.'

Antonia stood up, lifting and dropping her shoulders as if they
were stiff.  `I ain't got time to learn.  I can work like mans now.
My mother can't say no more how Ambrosch do all and nobody to help him.
I can work as much as him.  School is all right for little boys.
I help make this land one good farm.'

She clucked to her team and started for the barn.  I walked beside her,
feeling vexed.  Was she going to grow up boastful like her mother,
I wondered?  Before we reached the stable, I felt something tense
in her silence, and glancing up I saw that she was crying.
She turned her face from me and looked off at the red streak
of dying light, over the dark prairie.

I climbed up into the loft and threw down the hay for her, while she
unharnessed her team.  We walked slowly back toward the house.
Ambrosch had come in from the north quarter, and was watering his
oxen at the tank.

Antonia took my hand.  `Sometime you will tell me all those nice things
you learn at the school, won't you, Jimmy?' she asked with a sudden
rush of feeling in her voice.  `My father, he went much to school.
He know a great deal; how to make the fine cloth like what you not got here.
He play horn and violin, and he read so many books that the priests
in Bohemie come to talk to him.  You won't forget my father, Jim?'
`No,' I said, `I will never forget him.'

Mrs. Shimerda asked me to stay for supper.  After Ambrosch and Antonia
had washed the field dust from their hands and faces at the wash-basin
by the kitchen door, we sat down at the oilcloth-covered table.
Mrs. Shimerda ladled meal mush out of an iron pot and poured milk
on it.  After the mush we had fresh bread and sorghum molasses,
and coffee with the cake that had been kept warm in the feathers.
Antonia and Ambrosch were talking in Bohemian; disputing about which of
them had done more ploughing that day.  Mrs. Shimerda egged them on,
chuckling while she gobbled her food.

Presently Ambrosch said sullenly in English:  `You take them ox
tomorrow and try the sod plough.  Then you not be so smart.'

His sister laughed.  `Don't be mad.  I know it's awful
hard work for break sod.  I milk the cow for you tomorrow,
if you want.'

Mrs. Shimerda turned quickly to me.  `That cow not give so much milk
like what your grandpa say.  If he make talk about fifteen dollars,
I send him back the cow.'

`He doesn't talk about the fifteen dollars,' I exclaimed indignantly.
`He doesn't find fault with people.'

`He say I break his saw when we build, and I never,' grumbled Ambrosch.

I knew he had broken the saw, and then hid it and lied
about it.  I began to wish I had not stayed for supper.
Everything was disagreeable to me.  Antonia ate so noisily now,
like a man, and she yawned often at the table and kept
stretching her arms over her head, as if they ached.
Grandmother had said, `Heavy field work'll spoil that girl.
She'll lose all her nice ways and get rough ones.'
She had lost them already.

After supper I rode home through the sad, soft spring twilight.
Since winter I had seen very little of Antonia.
She was out in the fields from sunup until sundown.
If I rode over to see her where she was ploughing, she stopped
at the end of a row to chat for a moment, then gripped her
plough-handles, clucked to her team, and waded on down the furrow,
making me feel that she was now grown up and had no time for me.
On Sundays she helped her mother make garden or sewed all day.
Grandfather was pleased with Antonia.  When we complained of her,
he only smiled and said, `She will help some fellow get ahead
in the world.'

Nowadays Tony could talk of nothing but the prices of things, or how
much she could lift and endure.  She was too proud of her strength.
I knew, too, that Ambrosch put upon her some chores a girl ought
not to do, and that the farm-hands around the country joked
in a nasty way about it.  Whenever I saw her come up the furrow,
shouting to her beasts, sunburned, sweaty, her dress open at the neck,
and her throat and chest dust-plastered, I used to think of the tone
in which poor Mr. Shimerda, who could say so little, yet managed
to say so much when he exclaimed, `My Antonia!'


XVIII

AFTER I BEGAN TO go to the country school, I saw less of the Bohemians.
We were sixteen pupils at the sod schoolhouse, and we all came on horseback
and brought our dinner.  My schoolmates were none of them very interesting,
but I somehow felt that, by Taking comrades of them, I was getting
even with Antonia for her indifference.  Since the father's death,
Ambrosch was more than ever the head of the house, and he seemed
to direct the feelings as well as the fortunes of his womenfolk.
Antonia often quoted his opinions to me, and she let me see that she
admired him, while she thought of me only as a little boy.  Before the spring
was over, there was a distinct coldness between us and the Shimerdas.
It came about in this way.

One Sunday I rode over there with Jake to get a horse-collar
which Ambrosch had borrowed from him and had not returned.
It was a beautiful blue morning.  The buffalo-peas were blooming
in pink and purple masses along the roadside, and the larks,
perched on last year's dried sunflower stalks, were singing
straight at the sun, their heads thrown back and their yellow
breasts a-quiver. The wind blew about us in warm, sweet gusts.
We rode slowly, with a pleasant sense of Sunday indolence.

We found the Shimerdas working just as if it were a week-day. Marek was
cleaning out the stable, and Antonia and her mother were making garden,
off across the pond in the draw-head. Ambrosch was up on the windmill tower,
oiling the wheel.  He came down, not very cordially.  When Jake asked
for the collar, he grunted and scratched his head.  The collar belonged
to grandfather, of course, and Jake, feeling responsible for it, flared up.
`Now, don't you say you haven't got it, Ambrosch, because I know you have,
and if you ain't a-going to look for it, I will.'

Ambrosch shrugged his shoulders and sauntered down the hill toward
the stable.  I could see that it was one of his mean days.
Presently he returned, carrying a collar that had been badly used--
trampled in the dirt and gnawed by rats until the hair was sticking
out of it.

`This what you want?' he asked surlily.

Jake jumped off his horse.  I saw a wave of red come up under
the rough stubble on his face.  `That ain't the piece of harness
I loaned you, Ambrosch; or, if it is, you've used it shameful.
I ain't a-going to carry such a looking thing back to Mr. Burden.'

Ambrosch dropped the collar on the ground.  `All right,'
he said coolly, took up his oil-can, and began to climb the mill.
Jake caught him by the belt of his trousers and yanked him back.
Ambrosch's feet had scarcely touched the ground when he lunged out
with a vicious kick at Jake's stomach.  Fortunately, Jake was in such
a position that he could dodge it.  This was not the sort of thing
country boys did when they played at fisticuffs, and Jake was furious.
He landed Ambrosch a blow on the head--it sounded like the crack
of an axe on a cow-pumpkin. Ambrosch dropped over, stunned.

We heard squeals, and looking up saw Antonia and her mother coming
on the run.  They did not take the path around the pond, but plunged
through the muddy water, without even lifting their skirts.
They came on, screaming and clawing the air.  By this time Ambrosch
had come to his senses and was sputtering with nosebleed.

Jake sprang into his saddle.  `Let's get out of this, Jim,' he called.

Mrs. Shimerda threw her hands over her head and clutched as if she
were going to pull down lightning.  `Law, law!' she shrieked after us.
`Law for knock my Ambrosch down!'

`I never like you no more, Jake and Jim Burden,' Antonia panted.
`No friends any more!'

Jake stopped and turned his horse for a second.
`Well, you're a damned ungrateful lot, the whole pack of you,'
he shouted back.  `I guess the Burdens can get along without you.
You've been a sight of trouble to them, anyhow!'

We rode away, feeling so outraged that the fine morning was spoiled for us.
I hadn't a word to say, and poor Jake was white as paper and trembling
all over.  It made him sick to get so angry.

`They ain't the same, Jimmy,' he kept saying in a hurt tone.
`These foreigners ain't the same.  You can't trust 'em to be fair.
It's dirty to kick a feller.  You heard how the women turned on you--
and after all we went through on account of 'em last winter!
They ain't to be trusted.  I don't want to see you get too thick
with any of 'em.'

`I'll never be friends with them again, Jake,' I declared hotly.
`I believe they are all like Krajiek and Ambrosch underneath.'

Grandfather heard our story with a twinkle in his eye.
He advised Jake to ride to town tomorrow, go to a justice of
the peace, tell him he had knocked young Shimerda down, and pay
his fine.  Then if Mrs. Shimerda was inclined to make trouble--
her son was still under age--she would be forestalled.
Jake said he might as well take the wagon and haul to market
the pig he had been fattening.  On Monday, about an hour
after Jake had started, we saw Mrs. Shimerda and her Ambrosch
proudly driving by, looking neither to the right nor left.
As they rattled out of sight down the Black Hawk road,
grandfather chuckled, saying he had rather expected she would
follow the matter up.

Jake paid his fine with a ten-dollar bill grandfather had given
him for that purpose.  But when the Shimerdas found that Jake
sold his pig in town that day, Ambrosch worked it out in his
shrewd head that Jake had to sell his pig to pay his fine.
This theory afforded the Shimerdas great satisfaction, apparently.
For weeks afterward, whenever Jake and I met Antonia on her way
to the post-office, or going along the road with her work-team, she
would clap her hands and call to us in a spiteful, crowing voice:

`Jake-y, Jake-y, sell the pig and pay the slap!'

Otto pretended not to be surprised at Antonia's behaviour.
He only lifted his brows and said, `You can't tell me anything
new about a Czech; I'm an Austrian.'

Grandfather was never a party to what Jake called our feud with
the Shimerdas.  Ambrosch and Antonia always greeted him respectfully,
and he asked them about their affairs and gave them advice
as usual.  He thought the future looked hopeful for them.
Ambrosch was a far-seeing fellow; he soon realized that
his oxen were too heavy for any work except breaking sod,
and he succeeded in selling them to a newly arrived German.
With the money he bought another team of horses, which grandfather
selected for him.  Marek was strong, and Ambrosch worked him hard;
but he could never teach him to cultivate corn, I remember.
The one idea that had ever got through poor Marek's thick
head was that all exertion was meritorious.  He always bore
down on the handles of the cultivator and drove the blades
so deep into the earth that the horses were soon exhausted.

In June, Ambrosch went to work at Mr. Bushy's for a week, and took Marek
with him at full wages.  Mrs. Shimerda then drove the second cultivator;
she and Antonia worked in the fields all day and did the chores at night.
While the two women were running the place alone, one of the new horses got
colic and gave them a terrible fright.

Antonia had gone down to the barn one night to see that all was
well before she went to bed, and she noticed that one of the roans
was swollen about the middle and stood with its head hanging.
She mounted another horse, without waiting to saddle him,
and hammered on our door just as we were going to bed.
Grandfather answered her knock.  He did not send one of his men,
but rode back with her himself, taking a syringe and an old piece
of carpet he kept for hot applications when our horses were sick.
He found Mrs. Shimerda sitting by the horse with her lantern,
groaning and wringing her hands.  It took but a few moments
to release the gases pent up in the poor beast, and the two
women heard the rush of wind and saw the roan visibly
diminish in girth.

`If I lose that horse, Mr. Burden,' Antonia exclaimed,
`I never stay here till Ambrosch come home!  I go drown myself
in the pond before morning.'

When Ambrosch came back from Mr. Bushy's, we learned that
he had given Marek's wages to the priest at Black Hawk,
for Masses for their father's soul.  Grandmother thought
Antonia needed shoes more than Mr. Shimerda needed prayers,
but grandfather said tolerantly, `If he can spare six dollars,
pinched as he is, it shows he believes what he professes.'

It was grandfather who brought about a reconciliation with the Shimerdas.
One morning he told us that the small grain was coming on so well,
he thought he would begin to cut his wheat on the first of July.
He would need more men, and if it were agreeable to everyone he would
engage Ambrosch for the reaping and threshing, as the Shimerdas had no
small grain of their own.

`I think, Emmaline,' he concluded, `I will ask Antonia to come over
and help you in the kitchen.  She will be glad to earn something,
and it will be a good time to end misunderstandings.
I may as well ride over this morning and make arrangements.
Do you want to go with me, Jim?'  His tone told me that he had
already decided for me.

After breakfast we set off together.  When Mrs. Shimerda
saw us coming, she ran from her door down into the draw
behind the stable, as if she did not want to meet us.
Grandfather smiled to himself while he tied his horse,
and we followed her.

Behind the barn we came upon a funny sight.  The cow had evidently
been grazing somewhere in the draw.  Mrs. Shimerda had run to
the animal, pulled up the lariat pin, and, when we came upon her,
she was trying to hide the cow in an old cave in the bank.
As the hole was narrow and dark, the cow held back, and the old
woman was slapping and pushing at her hind quarters, trying to spank
her into the drawside.

Grandfather ignored her singular occupation and greeted her politely.
`Good morning, Mrs. Shimerda.  Can you tell me where I will find Ambrosch?
Which field?'

`He with the sod corn.'  She pointed toward the north, still standing
in front of the cow as if she hoped to conceal it.

`His sod corn will be good for fodder this winter,'
said grandfather encouragingly.  `And where is Antonia?'

`She go with.'  Mrs. Shimerda kept wiggling her bare feet about nervously
in the dust.

`Very well.  I will ride up there.  I want them to come over and help me
cut my oats and wheat next month.  I will pay them wages.  Good morning.
By the way, Mrs. Shimerda,' he said as he turned up the path, `I think
we may as well call it square about the cow.'

She started and clutched the rope tighter.
Seeing that she did not understand, grandfather turned back.
`You need not pay me anything more; no more money.
The cow is yours.'

`Pay no more, keep cow?' she asked in a bewildered tone,
her narrow eyes snapping at us in the sunlight.

`Exactly. Pay no more, keep cow.'  He nodded.

Mrs. Shimerda dropped the rope, ran after us, and, crouching down
beside grandfather, she took his hand and kissed it.
I doubt if he had ever been so much embarrassed before.
I was a little startled, too.  Somehow, that seemed to bring
the Old World very close.

We rode away laughing, and grandfather said:  `I expect she
thought we had come to take the cow away for certain, Jim.
I wonder if she wouldn't have scratched a little if we'd laid
hold of that lariat rope!'

Our neighbours seemed glad to make peace with us.  The next Sunday
Mrs. Shimerda came over and brought Jake a pair of socks she had knitted.
She presented them with an air of great magnanimity, saying, `Now you
not come any more for knock my Ambrosch down?'

Jake laughed sheepishly.  `I don't want to have no trouble with Ambrosch.
If he'll let me alone, I'll let him alone.'

`If he slap you, we ain't got no pig for pay the fine,'
she said insinuatingly.

Jake was not at all disconcerted.  `Have the last word ma'm,'
he said cheerfully.  `It's a lady's privilege.'



XIX

JULY CAME ON with that breathless, brilliant heat which makes
the plains of Kansas and Nebraska the best corn country in the world.
It seemed as if we could hear the corn growing in the night;
under the stars one caught a faint crackling in the dewy, heavy-odoured
cornfields where the feathered stalks stood so juicy and green.
If all the great plain from the Missouri to the Rocky Mountains
had been under glass, and the heat regulated by a thermometer,
it could not have been better for the yellow tassels that were
ripening and fertilizing the silk day by day.  The cornfields were
far apart in those times, with miles of wild grazing land between.
It took a clear, meditative eye like my grandfather's to foresee
that they would enlarge and multiply until they would be,
not the Shimerdas' cornfields, or Mr. Bushy's, but the world's cornfields;
that their yield would be one of the great economic facts,
like the wheat crop of Russia, which underlie all the activities
of men, in peace or war.

The burning sun of those few weeks, with occasional rains at night,
secured the corn.  After the milky ears were once formed, we had little
to fear from dry weather.  The men were working so hard in the wheatfields
that they did not notice the heat--though I was kept busy carrying water
for them--and grandmother and Antonia had so much to do in the kitchen
that they could not have told whether one day was hotter than another.
Each morning, while the dew was still on the grass, Antonia went
with me up to the garden to get early vegetables for dinner.
Grandmother made her wear a sunbonnet, but as soon as we reached
the garden she threw it on the grass and let her hair fly in the breeze.
I remember how, as we bent over the pea-vines, beads of perspiration
used to gather on her upper lip like a little moustache.

`Oh, better I like to work out-of-doors than in a house!'
she used to sing joyfully.  `I not care that your grandmother
say it makes me like a man.  I like to be like a man.'
She would toss her head and ask me to feel the muscles swell
in her brown arm.

We were glad to have her in the house.  She was so gay and responsive that
one did not mind her heavy, running step, or her clattery way with pans.
Grandmother was in high spirits during the weeks that Antonia worked for us.

All the nights were close and hot during that harvest season.
The harvesters slept in the hayloft because it was cooler there
than in the house.  I used to lie in my bed by the open window,
watching the heat lightning play softly along the horizon,
or looking up at the gaunt frame of the windmill against the blue
night sky.  One night there was a beautiful electric storm,
though not enough rain fell to damage the cut grain.
The men went down to the barn immediately after supper,
and when the dishes were washed, Antonia and I climbed up on
the slanting roof of the chicken-house to watch the clouds.
The thunder was loud and metallic, like the rattle of sheet iron,
and the lightning broke in great zigzags across the heavens,
making everything stand out and come close to us for a moment.
Half the sky was chequered with black thunderheads, but all
the west was luminous and clear:  in the lightning flashes it
looked like deep blue water, with the sheen of moonlight on it;
and the mottled part of the sky was like marble pavement,
like the quay of some splendid seacoast city, doomed to destruction.
Great warm splashes of rain fell on our upturned faces.
One black cloud, no bigger than a little boat, drifted out
into the clear space unattended, and kept moving westward.
All about us we could hear the felty beat of the raindrops
on the soft dust of the farmyard.  Grandmother came to the door
and said it was late, and we would get wet out there.

`In a minute we come,' Antonia called back to her.
`I like your grandmother, and all things here,' she sighed.
`I wish my papa live to see this summer.  I wish no winter
ever come again.'

`It will be summer a long while yet,' I reassured her.
`Why aren't you always nice like this, Tony?'

`How nice?'

`Why, just like this; like yourself.  Why do you all the time try
to be like Ambrosch?'

She put her arms under her head and lay back, looking up at the sky.
`If I live here, like you, that is different.  Things will be easy for you.
But they will be hard for us.'





BOOK II

The Hired Girls



I


I HAD BEEN LIVING with my grandfather for nearly three years
when he decided to move to Black Hawk.  He and grandmother
were getting old for the heavy work of a farm, and as I was
now thirteen they thought I ought to be going to school.
Accordingly our homestead was rented to `that good woman,
the Widow Steavens,' and her bachelor brother, and we bought
Preacher White's house, at the north end of Black Hawk.
This was the first town house one passed driving in from the farm,
a landmark which told country people their long ride was over.

We were to move to Black Hawk in March, and as soon as grandfather
had fixed the date he let Jake and Otto know of his intention.
Otto said he would not be likely to find another place
that suited him so well; that he was tired of farming and
thought he would go back to what he called the `wild West.'
Jake Marpole, lured by Otto's stories of adventure,
decided to go with him.  We did our best to dissuade Jake.
He was so handicapped by illiteracy and by his trusting
disposition that he would be an easy prey to sharpers.
Grandmother begged him to stay among kindly, Christian people,
where he was known; but there was no reasoning with him.
He wanted to be a prospector.  He thought a silver mine was
waiting for him in Colorado.

Jake and Otto served us to the last.  They moved us into town,
put down the carpets in our new house, made shelves and cupboards
for grandmother's kitchen, and seemed loath to leave us.
But at last they went, without warning.  Those two fellows
had been faithful to us through sun and storm, had given us
things that cannot be bought in any market in the world.
With me they had been like older brothers; had restrained their
speech and manners out of care for me, and given me so much
good comradeship.  Now they got on the westbound train one morning,
in their Sunday clothes, with their oilcloth valises--and I
never saw them again.  Months afterward we got a card from Otto,
saying that Jake had been down with mountain fever, but now they
were both working in the Yankee Girl Mine, and were doing well.
I wrote to them at that address, but my letter was returned to me,
`Unclaimed.' After that we never heard from them.

Black Hawk, the new world in which we had come to live,
was a clean, well-planted little prairie town, with white fences
and good green yards about the dwellings, wide, dusty streets,
and shapely little trees growing along the wooden sidewalks.
In the centre of the town there were two rows of new brick
`store' buildings, a brick schoolhouse, the court-house,
and four white churches.  Our own house looked down over
the town, and from our upstairs windows we could see
the winding line of the river bluffs, two miles south of us.
That river was to be my compensation for the lost freedom
of the farming country.

We came to Black Hawk in March, and by the end of April we felt
like town people.  Grandfather was a deacon in the new Baptist Church,
grandmother was busy with church suppers and missionary societies,
and I was quite another boy, or thought I was.  Suddenly put down
among boys of my own age, I found I had a great deal to learn.
Before the spring term of school was over, I could fight, play `keeps,' tease
the little girls, and use forbidden words as well as any boy in my class.
I was restrained from utter savagery only by the fact that Mrs. Harling,
our nearest neighbour, kept an eye on me, and if my behaviour went beyond
certain bounds I was not permitted to come into her yard or to play
with her jolly children.

We saw more of our country neighbours now than when we lived on the farm.
Our house was a convenient stopping-place for them.  We had a big barn
where the farmers could put up their teams, and their womenfolk more
often accompanied them, now that they could stay with us for dinner,
and rest and set their bonnets right before they went shopping.
The more our house was like a country hotel, the better I liked it.
I was glad, when I came home from school at noon, to see a farm-wagon
standing in the back yard, and I was always ready to run downtown
to get beefsteak or baker's bread for unexpected company.
All through that first spring and summer I kept hoping that
Ambrosch would bring Antonia and Yulka to see our new house.
I wanted to show them our red plush furniture, and the trumpet-blowing
cherubs the German paperhanger had put on our parlour ceiling.

When Ambrosch came to town, however, he came alone, and though
he put his horses in our barn, he would never stay for dinner,
or tell us anything about his mother and sisters.  If we ran
out and questioned him as he was slipping through the yard,
he would merely work his shoulders about in his coat and say,
`They all right, I guess.'

Mrs. Steavens, who now lived on our farm, grew as fond of Antonia as we
had been, and always brought us news of her.  All through the wheat season,
she told us, Ambrosch hired his sister out like a man, and she went
from farm to farm, binding sheaves or working with the threshers.
The farmers liked her and were kind to her; said they would rather
have her for a hand than Ambrosch.  When fall came she was to husk corn
for the neighbours until Christmas, as she had done the year before;
but grandmother saved her from this by getting her a place to work
with our neighbours, the Harlings.



II

GRANDMOTHER OFTEN SAID THAT if she had to live in town, she thanked
God she lived next the Harlings.  They had been farming people,
like ourselves, and their place was like a little farm, with a big
barn and a garden, and an orchard and grazing lots--even a windmill.
The Harlings were Norwegians, and Mrs. Harling had lived in Christiania
until she was ten years old.  Her husband was born in Minnesota.
He was a grain merchant and cattle-buyer, and was generally
considered the most enterprising business man in our county.
He controlled a line of grain elevators in the little towns along
the railroad to the west of us, and was away from home a great deal.
In his absence his wife was the head of the household.

Mrs. Harling was short and square and sturdy-looking, like
her house.  Every inch of her was charged with an energy
that made itself felt the moment she entered a room.
Her face was rosy and solid, with bright, twinkling eyes
and a stubborn little chin.  She was quick to anger,
quick to laughter, and jolly from the depths of her soul.
How well I remember her laugh; it had in it the same sudden
recognition that flashed into her eyes, was a burst of humour,
short and intelligent.  Her rapid footsteps shook her own floors,
and she routed lassitude and indifference wherever she came.
She could not be negative or perfunctory about anything.
Her enthusiasm, and her violent likes and dislikes,
asserted themselves in all the everyday occupations of life.
Wash-day was interesting, never dreary, at the Harlings'.
Preserving-time was a prolonged festival, and house-cleaning was
like a revolution.  When Mrs. Harling made garden that spring,
we could feel the stir of her undertaking through the willow
hedge that separated our place from hers.

Three of the Harling children were near me in age.  Charley, the only son--
they had lost an older boy--was sixteen; Julia, who was known as the
musical one, was fourteen when I was; and Sally, the tomboy with short hair,
was a year younger.  She was nearly as strong as I, and uncannily clever
at all boys' sports.  Sally was a wild thing, with sunburned yellow hair,
bobbed about her ears, and a brown skin, for she never wore a hat.
She raced all over town on one roller skate, often cheated at `keeps,'
but was such a quick shot one couldn't catch her at it.

The grown-up daughter, Frances, was a very important person in our world.
She was her father's chief clerk, and virtually managed his Black Hawk office
during his frequent absences.  Because of her unusual business ability,
he was stern and exacting with her.  He paid her a good salary,
but she had few holidays and never got away from her responsibilities.
Even on Sundays she went to the office to open the mail and read the markets.
With Charley, who was not interested in business, but was already preparing
for Annapolis, Mr. Harling was very indulgent; bought him guns and tools
and electric batteries, and never asked what he did with them.

Frances was dark, like her father, and quite as tall.
In winter she wore a sealskin coat and cap, and she and Mr. Harling
used to walk home together in the evening, talking about
grain-cars and cattle, like two men.  Sometimes she came over
to see grandfather after supper, and her visits flattered him.
More than once they put their wits together to rescue
some unfortunate farmer from the clutches of Wick Cutter,
the Black Hawk money-lender. Grandfather said Frances Harling
was as good a judge of credits as any banker in the county.
The two or three men who had tried to take advantage of her
in a deal acquired celebrity by their defeat.  She knew every
farmer for miles about:  how much land he had under cultivation,
how many cattle he was feeding, what his liabilities were.
Her interest in these people was more than a business interest.
She carried them all in her mind as if they were characters
in a book or a play.

When Frances drove out into the country on business,
she would go miles out of her way to call on some of the
old people, or to see the women who seldom got to town.
She was quick at understanding the grandmothers who spoke
no English, and the most reticent and distrustful of them would
tell her their story without realizing they were doing so.
She went to country funerals and weddings in all weathers.
A farmer's daughter who was to be married could count on
a wedding present from Frances Harling.

In August the Harlings' Danish cook had to leave them.
Grandmother entreated them to try Antonia.  She cornered
Ambrosch the next time he came to town, and pointed
out to him that any connection with Christian Harling
would strengthen his credit and be of advantage to him.
One Sunday Mrs. Harling took the long ride out to the Shimerdas'
with Frances.  She said she wanted to see `what the girl
came from' and to have a clear understanding with her mother.
I was in our yard when they came driving home, just before sunset.
They laughed and waved to me as they passed, and I could see
they were in great good humour.  After supper, when grandfather
set off to church, grandmother and I took my short cut
through the willow hedge and went over to hear about the visit
to the Shimerdas'.

We found Mrs. Harling with Charley and Sally on the front porch,
resting after her hard drive.  Julia was in the hammock--
she was fond of repose--and Frances was at the piano,
playing without a light and talking to her mother through
the open window.

Mrs. Harling laughed when she saw us coming.  `I expect you left
your dishes on the table tonight, Mrs. Burden,' she called.
Frances shut the piano and came out to join us.

They had liked Antonia from their first glimpse of her;
felt they knew exactly what kind of girl she was.
As for Mrs. Shimerda, they found her very amusing.
Mrs. Harling chuckled whenever she spoke of her.  `I expect I am
more at home with that sort of bird than you are, Mrs. Burden.
They're a pair, Ambrosch and that old woman!'

They had had a long argument with Ambrosch about Antonia's allowance
for clothes and pocket-money. It was his plan that every cent
of his sister's wages should be paid over to him each month,
and he would provide her with such clothing as he thought necessary.
When Mrs. Harling told him firmly that she would keep fifty dollars
a year for Antonia's own use, he declared they wanted to take
his sister to town and dress her up and make a fool of her.
Mrs. Harling gave us a lively account of Ambrosch's behaviour
throughout the interview; how he kept jumping up and putting
on his cap as if he were through with the whole business, and how
his mother tweaked his coat-tail and prompted him in Bohemian.
Mrs. Harling finally agreed to pay three dollars a week
for Antonia's services--good wages in those days--and to keep
her in shoes.  There had been hot dispute about the shoes,
Mrs. Shimerda finally saying persuasively that she would send
Mrs. Harling three fat geese every year to `make even.'
Ambrosch was to bring his sister to town next Saturday.

`She'll be awkward and rough at first, like enough,' grandmother said
anxiously, `but unless she's been spoiled by the hard life she's led,
she has it in her to be a real helpful girl.'

Mrs. Harling laughed her quick, decided laugh.  `Oh, I'm
not worrying, Mrs. Burden!  I can bring something out of that girl.
She's barely seventeen, not too old to learn new ways.
She's good-looking, too!' she added warmly.

Frances turned to grandmother.  `Oh, yes, Mrs. Burden, you didn't
tell us that!  She was working in the garden when we got there,
barefoot and ragged.  But she has such fine brown legs and arms,
and splendid colour in her cheeks--like those big dark red plums.'

We were pleased at this praise.  Grandmother spoke feelingly.
`When she first came to this country, Frances, and had that genteel old man
to watch over her, she was as pretty a girl as ever I saw.  But, dear me,
what a life she's led, out in the fields with those rough threshers!
Things would have been very different with poor Antonia if her
father had lived.'

The Harlings begged us to tell them about Mr. Shimerda's death
and the big snowstorm.  By the time we saw grandfather coming
home from church, we had told them pretty much all we knew
of the Shimerdas.

`The girl will be happy here, and she'll forget those things,'
said Mrs. Harling confidently, as we rose to take our leave.



III

ON SATURDAY AMBROSCH drove up to the back gate, and Antonia jumped
down from the wagon and ran into our kitchen just as she used to do.
She was wearing shoes and stockings, and was breathless and excited.
She gave me a playful shake by the shoulders.  `You ain't forget
about me, Jim?'

Grandmother kissed her.  `God bless you, child!  Now you've come,
you must try to do right and be a credit to us.'

Antonia looked eagerly about the house and admired everything.
`Maybe I be the kind of girl you like better; now I come to town,'
she suggested hopefully.

How good it was to have Antonia near us again; to see her every day
and almost every night!  Her greatest fault, Mrs. Harling found,
was that she so often stopped her work and fell to playing
with the children.  She would race about the orchard with us,
or take sides in our hay-fights in the barn, or be the old
bear that came down from the mountain and carried off Nina.
Tony learned English so quickly that by the time school began
she could speak as well as any of us.

I was jealous of Tony's admiration for Charley Harling.
Because he was always first in his classes at school,
and could mend the water-pipes or the doorbell and take
the clock to pieces, she seemed to think him a sort of prince.
Nothing that Charley wanted was too much trouble for her.
She loved to put up lunches for him when he went hunting,
to mend his ball-gloves and sew buttons on his shooting-coat,
baked the kind of nut-cake he liked, and fed his setter dog
when he was away on trips with his father.  Antonia had made
herself cloth working-slippers out of Mr. Harling's old coats,
and in these she went padding about after Charley, fairly panting
with eagerness to please him.

Next to Charley, I think she loved Nina best.  Nina was only six,
and she was rather more complex than the other children.
She was fanciful, had all sorts of unspoken preferences,
and was easily offended.  At the slightest disappointment
or displeasure, her velvety brown eyes filled with tears,
and she would lift her chin and walk silently away.
If we ran after her and tried to appease her, it did no good.
She walked on unmollified.  I used to think that no eyes
in the world could grow so large or hold so many tears as
Nina's. Mrs. Harling and Antonia invariably took her part.
We were never given a chance to explain.  The charge was simply:
`You have made Nina cry.  Now, Jimmy can go home, and Sally
must get her arithmetic.'  I liked Nina, too; she was so quaint
and unexpected, and her eyes were lovely; but I often wanted
to shake her.

We had jolly evenings at the Harlings' when the father was away.
If he was at home, the children had to go to bed early,
or they came over to my house to play.  Mr. Harling not only
demanded a quiet house, he demanded all his wife's attention.
He used to take her away to their room in the west ell,
and talk over his business with her all evening.
Though we did not realize it then, Mrs. Harling was our audience
when we played, and we always looked to her for suggestions.
Nothing flattered one like her quick laugh.

Mr. Harling had a desk in his bedroom, and his own
easy-chair by the window, in which no one else ever sat.
On the nights when he was at home, I could see his shadow
on the blind, and it seemed to me an arrogant shadow.
Mrs. Harling paid no heed to anyone else if he was there.
Before he went to bed she always got him a lunch of smoked salmon
or anchovies and beer.  He kept an alcohol lamp in his room,
and a French coffee-pot, and his wife made coffee for him
at any hour of the night he happened to want it.

Most Black Hawk fathers had no personal habits outside their
domestic ones; they paid the bills, pushed the baby-carriage
after office hours, moved the sprinkler about over the lawn,
and took the family driving on Sunday.  Mr. Harling,
therefore, seemed to me autocratic and imperial in his ways.
He walked, talked, put on his gloves, shook hands, like a man
who felt that he had power.  He was not tall, but he carried
his head so haughtily that he looked a commanding figure,
and there was something daring and challenging in his eyes.
I used to imagine that the ,nobles' of whom Antonia was always
talking probably looked very much like Christian Harling,
wore caped overcoats like his, and just such a glittering
diamond upon the little finger.

Except when the father was at home, the Harling house was never quiet.
Mrs. Harling and Nina and Antonia made as much noise as a houseful
of children, and there was usually somebody at the piano.  Julia was the only
one who was held down to regular hours of practising, but they all played.
When Frances came home at noon, she played until dinner was ready.
When Sally got back from school, she sat down in her hat and coat and drummed
the plantation melodies that Negro minstrel troupes brought to town.
Even Nina played the Swedish Wedding March.

Mrs. Harling had studied the piano under a good teacher,
and somehow she managed to practise every day.
I soon learned that if I were sent over on an errand and found
Mrs. Harling at the piano, I must sit down and wait quietly
until she turned to me.  I can see her at this moment:
her short, square person planted firmly on the stool,
her little fat hands moving quickly and neatly over the keys,
her eyes fixed on the music with intelligent concentration.


IV

          `I won't have none of your weevily wheat,
               and I won't have none of your barley,
          But I'll take a measure of fine white
               flour, to make a cake for Charley.'

WE WERE SINGING rhymes to tease Antonia while she was beating up
one of Charley's favourite cakes in her big mixing-bowl.

It was a crisp autumn evening, just cold enough to make one glad
to quit playing tag in the yard, and retreat into the kitchen.
We had begun to roll popcorn balls with syrup when we heard a knock
at the back door, and Tony dropped her spoon and went to open it.

A plump, fair-skinned girl was standing in the doorway.
She looked demure and pretty, and made a graceful picture
in her blue cashmere dress and little blue hat, with a plaid
shawl drawn neatly about her shoulders and a clumsy pocket-book
in her hand.

`Hello, Tony.  Don't you know me?' she asked in a smooth, low voice,
looking in at us archly.

Antonia gasped and stepped back.

`Why, it's Lena!  Of course I didn't know you, so dressed up!'

Lena Lingard laughed, as if this pleased her.  I had not recognized
her for a moment, either.  I had never seen her before with a hat on
her head--or with shoes and stockings on her feet, for that matter.
And here she was, brushed and smoothed and dressed like a town girl,
smiling at us with perfect composure.

`Hello, Jim,' she said carelessly as she walked into the kitchen and looked
about her.  `I've come to town to work, too, Tony.'

`Have you, now?  Well, ain't that funny" Antonia stood ill at ease,
and didn't seem to know just what to do with her visitor.

The door was open into the dining-room, where Mrs. Harling sat crocheting
and Frances was reading.  Frances asked Lena to come in and join them.

`You are Lena Lingard, aren't you?  I've been to see your mother,
but you were off herding cattle that day.  Mama, this is Chris
Lingard's oldest girl.'

Mrs. Harling dropped her worsted and examined the visitor
with quick, keen eyes.  Lena was not at all disconcerted.
She sat down in the chair Frances pointed out, carefully
arranging her pocket-book and grey cotton gloves on her lap.
We followed with our popcorn, but Antonia hung back--
said she had to get her cake into the oven.

`So you have come to town,' said Mrs. Harling, her eyes still fixed on Lena.
`Where are you working?'

`For Mrs. Thomas, the dressmaker.  She is going to teach me to sew.
She says I have quite a knack.  I'm through with the farm.  There ain't
any end to the work on a farm, and always so much trouble happens.
I'm going to be a dressmaker.'

`Well, there have to be dressmakers.  It's a good trade.  But I wouldn't
run down the farm, if I were you,' said Mrs. Harling rather severely.
`How is your mother?'

`Oh, mother's never very well; she has too much to do.
She'd get away from the farm, too, if she could.
She was willing for me to come.  After I learn to do sewing,
I can make money and help her.'

`See that you don't forget to,' said Mrs. Harling sceptically,
as she took up her crocheting again and sent the hook in and out
with nimble fingers.

`No, 'm, I won't,' said Lena blandly.  She took a few grains
of the popcorn we pressed upon her, eating them discreetly
and taking care not to get her fingers sticky.

Frances drew her chair up nearer to the visitor.  `I thought
you were going to be married, Lena,' she said teasingly.
`Didn't I hear that Nick Svendsen was rushing you pretty hard?'

Lena looked up with her curiously innocent smile.  `He did go with me quite
a while.  But his father made a fuss about it and said he wouldn't give
Nick any land if he married me, so he's going to marry Annie Iverson.
I wouldn't like to be her; Nick's awful sullen, and he'll take it out on her.
He ain't spoke to his father since he promised.'

Frances laughed.  `And how do you feel about it?'

`I don't want to marry Nick, or any other man,' Lena murmured.
`I've seen a good deal of married life, and I don't care for it.
I want to be so I can help my mother and the children at home,
and not have to ask lief of anybody.'

`That's right,' said Frances.  `And Mrs. Thomas thinks you
can learn dressmaking?'

`Yes, 'm.  I've always liked to sew, but I never had much to do with.
Mrs. Thomas makes lovely things for all the town ladies.
Did you know Mrs. Gardener is having a purple velvet made?
The velvet came from Omaha.  My, but it's lovely!'
Lena sighed softly and stroked her cashmere folds.
`Tony knows I never did like out-of-door work,' she added.

Mrs. Harling glanced at her.  `I expect you'll learn to sew
all right, Lena, if you'll only keep your head and not go
gadding about to dances all the time and neglect your work,
the way some country girls do.'

`Yes, 'm.  Tiny Soderball is coming to town, too.  She's going
to work at the Boys' Home Hotel.  She'll see lots of strangers,'
Lena added wistfully.

`Too many, like enough,' said Mrs. Harling.  `I don't think a hotel
is a good place for a girl; though I guess Mrs. Gardener keeps an eye
on her waitresses.'

Lena's candid eyes, that always looked a little sleepy under their
long lashes, kept straying about the cheerful rooms with naive admiration.
Presently she drew on her cotton gloves.  `I guess I must be leaving,'
she said irresolutely.

Frances told her to come again, whenever she was lonesome or wanted
advice about anything.  Lena replied that she didn't believe she
would ever get lonesome in Black Hawk.

She lingered at the kitchen door and begged Antonia to come
and see her often.  `I've got a room of my own at Mrs. Thomas's,
with a carpet.'

Tony shuffled uneasily in her cloth slippers.  `I'll come sometime,
but Mrs. Harling don't like to have me run much,' she said evasively.

`You can do what you please when you go out, can't you?'
Lena asked in a guarded whisper.  `Ain't you crazy about town, Tony?
I don't care what anybody says, I'm done with the farm!'
She glanced back over her shoulder toward the dining-room,
where Mrs. Harling sat.

When Lena was gone, Frances asked Antonia why she hadn't been a little
more cordial to her.

`I didn't know if your mother would like her coming here,' said Antonia,
looking troubled.  `She was kind of talked about, out there.'

`Yes, I know.  But mother won't hold it against her if she behaves
well here.  You needn't say anything about that to the children.
I guess Jim has heard all that gossip?'

When I nodded, she pulled my hair and told me I knew too much, anyhow.
We were good friends, Frances and I.

I ran home to tell grandmother that Lena Lingard had come to town.
We were glad of it, for she had a hard life on the farm.

Lena lived in the Norwegian settlement west of Squaw Creek, and she
used to herd her father's cattle in the open country between his place
and the Shimerdas'. Whenever we rode over in that direction we saw
her out among her cattle, bareheaded and barefooted, scantily dressed
in tattered clothing, always knitting as she watched her herd.
Before I knew Lena, I thought of her as something wild, that always
lived on the prairie, because I had never seen her under a roof.
Her yellow hair was burned to a ruddy thatch on her head; but her legs
and arms, curiously enough, in spite of constant exposure to the sun,
kept a miraculous whiteness which somehow made her seem more undressed
than other girls who went scantily clad.  The first time I stopped to talk
to her, I was astonished at her soft voice and easy, gentle ways.
The girls out there usually got rough and mannish after they went to herding.
But Lena asked Jake and me to get off our horses and stay awhile, and behaved
exactly as if she were in a house and were accustomed to having visitors.
She was not embarrassed by her ragged clothes, and treated us as if we
were old acquaintances.  Even then I noticed the unusual colour of her eyes--
a shade of deep violet--and their soft, confiding expression.

Chris Lingard was not a very successful farmer, and he had a large family.
Lena was always knitting stockings for little brothers and sisters,
and even the Norwegian women, who disapproved of her, admitted that she was
a good daughter to her mother.  As Tony said, she had been talked about.
She was accused of making Ole Benson lose the little sense he had--
and that at an age when she should still have been in pinafores.

Ole lived in a leaky dugout somewhere at the edge of the settlement.
He was fat and lazy and discouraged, and bad luck had become a habit
with him.  After he had had every other kind of misfortune, his wife,
`Crazy Mary,' tried to set a neighbour's barn on fire, and was sent
to the asylum at Lincoln.  She was kept there for a few months,
then escaped and walked all the way home, nearly two hundred miles,
travelling by night and hiding in barns and haystacks by day.
When she got back to the Norwegian settlement, her poor feet
were as hard as hoofs.  She promised to be good, and was allowed
to stay at home--though everyone realized she was as crazy as ever,
and she still ran about barefooted through the snow, telling her
domestic troubles to her neighbours.

Not long after Mary came back from the asylum, I heard a young Dane,
who was helping us to thresh, tell Jake and Otto that Chris Lingard's
oldest girl had put Ole Benson out of his head, until he had no
more sense than his crazy wife.  When Ole was cultivating his corn
that summer, he used to get discouraged in the field, tie up
his team, and wander off to wherever Lena Lingard was herding.
There he would sit down on the drawside and help her watch her cattle.
All the settlement was talking about it.  The Norwegian preacher's
wife went to Lena and told her she ought not to allow this;
she begged Lena to come to church on Sundays.  Lena said she hadn't
a dress in the world any less ragged than the one on her back.
Then the minister's wife went through her old trunks and found
some things she had worn before her marriage.

The next Sunday Lena appeared at church, a little late,
with her hair done up neatly on her head, like a young woman,
wearing shoes and stockings, and the new dress, which she had made
over for herself very becomingly.  The congregation stared at her.
Until that morning no one--unless it were Ole--had realized how pretty
she was, or that she was growing up.  The swelling lines of her figure
had been hidden under the shapeless rags she wore in the fields.
After the last hymn had been sung, and the congregation was dismissed,
Ole slipped out to the hitch-bar and lifted Lena on her horse.
That, in itself, was shocking; a married man was not expected
to do such things.  But it was nothing to the scene that followed.
Crazy Mary darted out from the group of women at the church door,
and ran down the road after Lena, shouting horrible threats.

`Look out, you Lena Lingard, look out!  I'll come over with
a corn-knife one day and trim some of that shape off you.
Then you won't sail round so fine, making eyes at the men!...'

The Norwegian women didn't know where to look.  They were
formal housewives, most of them, with a severe sense of decorum.
But Lena Lingard only laughed her lazy, good-natured laugh and rode on,
gazing back over her shoulder at Ole's infuriated wife.

The time came, however, when Lena didn't laugh.  More than once Crazy Mary
chased her across the prairie and round and round the Shimerdas' cornfield.
Lena never told her father; perhaps she was ashamed; perhaps she was
more afraid of his anger than of the corn-knife. I was at the Shimerdas'
one afternoon when Lena came bounding through the red grass as fast
as her white legs could carry her.  She ran straight into the house
and hid in Antonia's feather-bed. Mary was not far behind:
she came right up to the door and made us feel how sharp her blade was,
showing us very graphically just what she meant to do to Lena.
Mrs. Shimerda, leaning out of the window, enjoyed the situation keenly,
and was sorry when Antonia sent Mary away, mollified by an apronful
of bottle-tomatoes. Lena came out from Tony's room behind the kitchen,
very pink from the heat of the feathers, but otherwise calm.
She begged Antonia and me to go with her, and help get her cattle together;
they were scattered and might be gorging themselves in somebody's cornfield.

`Maybe you lose a steer and learn not to make somethings with your eyes
at married men,' Mrs. Shimerda told her hectoringly.

Lena only smiled her sleepy smile.  `I never made anything to him with
my eyes.  I can't help it if he hangs around, and I can't order him off.
It ain't my prairie.'


V

AFTER LENA CAME To Black Hawk, I often met her downtown, where she
would be matching sewing silk or buying `findings' for Mrs. Thomas.
If I happened to walk home with her, she told me all about the dresses
she was helping to make, or about what she saw and heard when she
was with Tiny Soderball at the hotel on Saturday nights.

The Boys' Home was the best hotel on our branch of the Burlington,
and all the commercial travellers in that territory tried to get into
Black Hawk for Sunday.  They used to assemble in the parlour after
supper on Saturday nights.  Marshall Field's man, Anson Kirkpatrick,
played the piano and sang all the latest sentimental songs.
After Tiny had helped the cook wash the dishes, she and Lena sat on
the other side of the double doors between the parlour and the dining-room,
listening to the music and giggling at the jokes and stories.
Lena often said she hoped I would be a travelling man when I grew up.
They had a gay life of it; nothing to do but ride about on trains
all day and go to theatres when they were in big cities.
Behind the hotel there was an old store building, where the salesmen
opened their big trunks and spread out their samples on the counters.
The Black Hawk merchants went to look at these things and order goods,
and Mrs. Thomas, though she was I retail trade,' was permitted to see
them and to `get ideas.'  They were all generous, these travelling men;
they gave Tiny Soderball handkerchiefs and gloves and ribbons
and striped stockings, and so many bottles of perfume and cakes
of scented soap that she bestowed some of them on Lena.

One afternoon in the week before Christmas, I came upon Lena and her funny,
square-headed little brother Chris, standing before the drugstore,
gazing in at the wax dolls and blocks and Noah's Arks arranged
in the frosty show window.  The boy had come to town with a neighbour
to do his Christmas shopping, for he had money of his own this year.
He was only twelve, but that winter he had got the job of sweeping out
the Norwegian church and making the fire in it every Sunday morning.
A cold job it must have been, too!

We went into Duckford's dry-goods store, and Chris unwrapped
all his presents and showed them to me something for each of
the six younger than himself, even a rubber pig for the baby.
Lena had given him one of Tiny Soderball's bottles of perfume
for his mother, and he thought he would get some handkerchiefs
to go with it.  They were cheap, and he hadn't much money left.
We found a tableful of handkerchiefs spread out for view
at Duckford's. Chris wanted those with initial letters
in the corner, because he had never seen any before.
He studied them seriously, while Lena looked over his shoulder,
telling him she thought the red letters would hold their colour best.
He seemed so perplexed that I thought perhaps he hadn't
enough money, after all.  Presently he said gravely:

`Sister, you know mother's name is Berthe.  I don't know if I
ought to get B for Berthe, or M for Mother.'

Lena patted his bristly head.  `I'd get the B, Chrissy.
It will please her for you to think about her name.
Nobody ever calls her by it now.'

That satisfied him.  His face cleared at once, and he took
three reds and three blues.  When the neighbour came in to say
that it was time to start, Lena wound Chris's comforter about
his neck and turned up his jacket collar--he had no overcoat--
and we watched him climb into the wagon and start on his long,
cold drive.  As we walked together up the windy street,
Lena wiped her eyes with the back of her woollen glove.
`I get awful homesick for them, all the same,' she murmured,
as if she were answering some remembered reproach.



VI

WINTER COMES DOWN SAVAGELY over a little town on the prairie.
The wind that sweeps in from the open country strips away all
the leafy screens that hide one yard from another in summer,
and the houses seem to draw closer together.  The roofs,
that looked so far away across the green tree-tops, now stare
you in the face, and they are 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
for 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 suppers cooking
as I passed.  Few people were abroad, and each one of them was hurrying
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 plush cap.
The young men capered along with their hands in their pockets,
and sometimes tried a slide on the icy sidewalk.  The children, in their
bright hoods and comforters, never walked, but always ran from the moment
they left their door, beating their mittens against their sides.
When I got as far as the Methodist Church, I was about halfway home.
I can remember how glad I was when there happened to be a light
in the church, and the painted glass window shone out at us as we came
along the frozen street.  In the winter bleakness a hunger for colour
came over people, like the Laplander's 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 coloured glass held us there.

On winter nights, the lights in the Harlings' windows drew me like
the painted glass.  Inside that warm, roomy house there was colour, too.
After supper I used to catch up my cap, stick my hands in 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 on
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 to the nights when we
acted charades, or had a costume ball in the back parlour,
with Sally always dressed like a boy.  Frances taught us
to dance that winter, and she said, from the first lesson,
that Antonia 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 the story
while she played.  Every Saturday night was like a party.
The parlour, the back parlour, and 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, with Ambrosch's
sullen silences and her mother's complaints, the Harlings'
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 Charley gave her three winks,
Tony would rush into the kitchen and build a fire in the range
on 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 interpreted the stories about the creche fancifully, and in spite
of our derision she cherished a belief that Christ was born in Bohemia
a short time before the Shimerdas left that country.  We all liked
Tony's stories.  Her voice had a peculiarly engaging quality; it was deep,
a little husky, and one 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 new story.

`Mrs. Harling, did you ever hear about what happened up in the
Norwegian settlement last summer, when I was threshing 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'm, I did.  I could shovel just as fast as that fat Andern
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 Ole 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 it was going to burn the world up.
After a while I see a man coming across the stubble,
and when he got close I see it was a tramp.  His toes stuck
out of his shoes, and he hadn't shaved for a long while,
and his eyes was 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 is done got so low a man
couldn't drownd himself in one of 'em.'

`I told him nobody wanted to drownd themselves, but if we didn't
have rain soon we'd have to pump water for the cattle.

`"Oh, cattle," he says, "you'll all take care of your cattle!
Ain't you got no beer here?"  I told him he'd have to go to the Bohemians
for beer; the Norwegians didn't have none when they threshed.
"My God!" he says, "so it's Norwegians now, is it?  I thought
this was Americy."

`Then he goes up to the machine and yells out to Ole Iverson,
"Hello, partner, let me up there.  I can cut bands, and I'm
tired of trampin'. I won't go no farther."

`I tried to make signs to Ole, 'cause I thought that
man was crazy and might get the machine stopped up.
But Ole, he was glad to get down out of the sun and chaff--
it gets down your neck and sticks to you something awful
when it's hot like that.  So Ole jumped down and crawled under
one of the wagons for 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 to me and jumped head-first right into
the threshing machine after the wheat.

`I begun to scream, and the men run to stop the horses,
but the belt had sucked him down, and by the time they
got her stopped, he was all beat and cut to pieces.
He was wedged in so tight it was a hard job to get him out,
and the machine ain't 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 won't
get you while 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'm. He hadn't been seen nowhere except in a little town they
call Conway.  He tried to get beer there, but there wasn't any saloon.
Maybe he came in on a freight, but the brakeman hadn't seen him.
They couldn't find no letters nor nothing on him; nothing but an old
penknife 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 Frances.  `It was "The Old Oaken Bucket,"
cut out of a newspaper and nearly worn out.  Ole Iverson
brought it into the office and showed it to me.'

`Now, wasn't that strange, Miss Frances?'  Tony asked thoughtfully.
`What would anybody want to kill themselves in summer for?
In threshing time, too!  It's nice everywhere then.'

`So it is, Antonia,' said Mrs. Harling heartily.  `Maybe I'll go home
and help you thresh next summer.  Isn't that taffy nearly ready to eat?
I've been smelling it a long while.'

There was 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 up soft white beds 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 was a kind of hearty joviality,
a relish of life, not over-delicate, but very invigorating.
I never tried to define it, but I was distinctly conscious of it.
I could not imagine Antonia's living for a week in any other house
in Black Hawk than the Harlings'.




VII

WINTER LIES TOO LONG in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby,
old and sullen.  On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's
affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.
But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched,
frozen down to the bare stalk.

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 grey and mournful-looking. I was tired of school,
tired of winter clothes, of the rutted streets, of the dirty drifts
and the piles of cinders that had lain in the yards so long.
There was only one break in the dreary monotony of that month:
when Blind d'Arnault, 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 d'Arnault for years.  She told Antonia
she had better go to see Tiny that Saturday evening, as there
would certainly be music at the Boys' Home.

Saturday night after supper I ran downtown to the hotel and
slipped quietly into the parlour.  The chairs and sofas were
already occupied, and the air smelled pleasantly of cigar smoke.
The parlour had once been two rooms, and the floor
was swaybacked 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. Gardener had gone to Omaha for a week.  Johnnie had been
having drinks with the guests until he was rather absent-minded. It
was Mrs. Gardener who ran the business and looked after everything.
Her husband stood at the desk and welcomed incoming travellers.
He was a popular fellow, but no manager.

Mrs. Gardener was admittedly the best-dressed woman in Black Hawk,
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
in 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. Gardener stopped to chat with them for a moment.
The patrons of the hotel were divided into two classes:
those who had seen Mrs. Gardener's diamonds, and those who had not.

When I stole into the parlour, Anson Kirkpatrick, Marshall Field's man,
was at the piano, playing airs from a musical comedy then running in Chicago.
He was a dapper little Irishman, 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 Willy O'Reilly,
who travelled for a jewellery house and sold musical instruments.
The talk was all about good and bad hotels, actors and actresses
and musical prodigies.  I learned that Mrs. Gardener 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 Johnnie Gardener came in,
directing Blind d'Arnault--he would never consent to be led.
He was a heavy, bulky mulatto, on short legs, and he 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 but folds of neck under close-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 way 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 pedals 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. Gardener, she always has this piano tuned up
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,
his shrivelled eyelids never fluttering.

He was born in the Far South, on the d'Arnault 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.
As soon as he was old enough to sit up alone and toddle about,
another affliction, the nervous motion of his body, became apparent.
His mother, a buxom young Negro wench who was laundress for
the d'Arnaults, 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,
remembered 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 Miss Nellie d'Arnault practised 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 see him.  Whenever she caught him slipping away from the cabin,
she whipped him unmercifully, and told him what dreadful things old
Mr. d'Arnault 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 Miss d'Arnault stopped practising for a moment and went toward
the window, she saw this hideous little pickaninny, dressed in
an old piece of sacking, standing in the open space between
the hollyhock rows, 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 nearly 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 Miss Nellie was playing
her lesson to her music-teacher. 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 to 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 in 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 finger-tips 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, 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 over all the sounds,
he began to finger out passages from things Miss Nellie had been practising,
passages that were already his, that lay under the bone 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 all ready-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 a 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, d'Arnault suddenly began
to play softly, and, turning to one of the men who stood
behind him, whispered, `Somebody dancing in there.'
He jerked his bullet-head toward the dining-room. `I hear
little feet--girls, I spect.'

Anson Kirkpatrick mounted a 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 toward 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 roomful of lonesome men on the other side of the partition!
Introduce me to your friends, Tiny.'

The girls, still laughing, were trying to escape.  Tiny looked alarmed.
`Mrs. Gardener wouldn't like it,' she protested.  `She'd be awful mad
if you was to come out here and dance with us.'

`Mrs. Gardener's in Omaha, girl.  Now, you're Lena, are you?--
and you're Tony and you're Mary.  Have I got you all straight?'

O'Reilly and the others began to pile the chairs on the tables.
Johnnie Gardener 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 the minute anything's moved in the dining-room.'

`Oh, what do you care, Johnnie?  Fire the cook and wire Molly
to bring another.  Come along, nobody'll tell tales.'

Johnnie shook his head.  `'S a fact, boys,' he said confidentially.
`If I take a drink in Black Hawk, Molly knows it in Omaha!'

His guests laughed and slapped him on the shoulder.  `Oh, we'll make it
all right with Molly.  Get your back up, Johnnie.'

Molly was Mrs. Gardener's name, of course.  `Molly Bawn' was painted
in large blue letters on the glossy white sides of the hotel bus,
and `Molly' was engraved inside Johnnie'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, d'Arnault spread 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 goin' back on me?
One of these city gentlemen, I bet!  Now, you girls, you ain't goin'
to let that floor get cold?'

Antonia seemed frightened at first, and kept looking
questioningly at Lena and Tiny over Willy O'Reilly's shoulder.
Tiny Soderball was trim and slender, with lively little
feet and pretty ankles--she wore her dresses very short.
She was quicker in speech, lighter in movement and manner than
the other girls.  Mary Dusak 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 colour of their country
upbringing, and in their eyes that brilliancy which is called--
by no metaphor, alas!--`the light of youth.'

D'Arnault 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 d'Arnault play in New Orleans.  At last
he tapped his way upstairs, after bowing to everybody, 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.



VIII

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 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 about under 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 in June, for Mrs. Harling and Antonia
were preserving cherries, when I stopped one morning
to tell them that a dancing pavilion had come to town.
I had seen two drays hauling the canvas and painted poles up
from the depot.

That afternoon three cheerful-looking Italians strolled about Black Hawk,
looking at everything, and with them was a dark, stout woman who wore
a long gold watch-chain about her neck and carried a black lace parasol.
They seemed especially interested in children and vacant lots.  When I
overtook 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 summer they
went out among the farming towns with their tent and taught dancing.
When business fell off in one place, they moved on to another.

The dancing pavilion was put up near the Danish laundry,
on a vacant lot surrounded by tall, arched cottonwood trees.
It was very much like a merry-go-round tent,
with open sides and gay 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-collared shirts of the time,
hurrying along the sidewalk on their way to the tent.
Mrs. Vanni received them at the entrance, always dressed
in lavender with 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 fancywork 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 the dancing was over.  Mr. Jensen,
the Danish laundryman, 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 iced lemonade under a white umbrella at the corner,
and made faces at the spruce youngsters who came to dance.
That 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 hardy flowers had run away from
the laundryman's garden, and the grass in the middle of the lot
was pink with them.

The Vannis kept exemplary order, and closed every evening
at the hour suggested by the city council.  When Mrs. Vanni
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 their front porches,
and the boys and girls tramped and tramped the board sidewalks--
northward to the edge of the open prairie, south to the depot, then back
again to the post-office, the ice-cream parlour, the butcher shop.
Now there was a place where the 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 lighthearted sounds.
First the deep purring of Mr. Vanni's harp came in silvery ripples
through the blackness of the dusty-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 toward 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 Euchre Club arranged with the Vannis
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 iceman, the farm-hands who lived near enough to ride into town
after their 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 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 Euchre Club used
to drop in late and risk a tiff with their sweethearts and general
condemnation for a waltz with `the hired girls.'


IX

THERE WAS A CURIOUS social situation in Black Hawk.  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 made such sacrifices and who have had `advantages,' never seem
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 early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender
age from an old country to a new.

I can remember a score of these country girls who were in service
in Black Hawk 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 vigour which, when they got over their
first shyness on coming to town, developed into a positive
carriage and freedom of movement, and made them conspicuous
among Black Hawk 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 schoolroom, 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 Black Hawk 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 neighbours 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 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
behaviour as they had been when they ploughed 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 ploughs 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 neighbours--usually of like nationality--
and the girls who once worked in Black Hawk kitchens are
to-day 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 toward these girls very stupid.
If I told my schoolmates that Lena Lingard'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 Antonia's 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.  To-day 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 grating of his father's bank, and let his eyes
follow Lena Lingard, 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 mettle
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 parlour 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 Marys 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 Marys were the heroines of a cycle of scandalous stories,
which the old men were fond of relating as they sat about
the cigar-stand in the drugstore.  Mary Dusak 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 Svoboda, who was similarly embarrassed.  The three Marys 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 Vannis' 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 drawside and watch Lena herd 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.



X

IT WAS AT THE Vannis' 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 Vannis 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 Marshalls' 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 iceman 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 wakened 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 Paine,
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's 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 back yard 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. Paine 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 teakettle 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.



XI

WICK CUTTER WAS the money-lender 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 sentiment's sake,' as he said with a 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 Black Hawk business men.  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 Almanack' 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 worse
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, scroll-work 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 which he was training for the track.
On Sunday mornings one could see him out at the fair grounds,
speeding around the race-course in his trotting-buggy,
wearing yellow gloves and a black-and-white-check
travelling 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 stop-watch, 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 sackful of tin cans in his alley.
It was a peculiar combination of old-maidishness 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 colour 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 aigrettes.

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 her 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 quarrelled 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 insinuations about his physical soundness,
Cutter would resume his dumb-bell 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 quarrelled 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 I 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. Cutters all over the world; sometimes founding
new religions, sometimes being forcibly fed--easily recognizable,
even when superficially tamed.



XII

AFTER ANTONIA 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. Gardener'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 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 fairy tale,
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 parlour, where they would sit chattering
and laughing, telling me all the news from the country.

I remember how angry Tiny Soderball 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 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.



XIII

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 money.  I wish it was.  But I've heard things.
You must 'a' known it would come back to me sometime.'
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 Firemen'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 Firemen'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 May-basket
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 Harlings' 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 Frances, and talked 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 hurt about Antonia, and she can't understand
why you like to be with Tiny and Lena better than with the girls
of your own set.'

`Can you?'  I asked bluntly.

Frances 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 in 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 fervour
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.
Afterward 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 Hansen.

`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 very 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.



XIV

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 blond
pastures between, scanning the `Aeneid' aloud and committing long
passages to memory.  Sometimes in the evening Mrs. Harling called to me
as I passed her gate, and asked me to come in and let her play for me.
She was lonely for Charley, 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 elderblow wine.

`Anna's to drive us down in the Marshalls' delivery wagon,
and we'll take a nice lunch and have a picnic.  Just us; nobody else.
Couldn't you happen along, Jim?  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 Black Hawk
while the dew was still heavy on the long meadow grasses.
It was the high season for summer flowers.
The pink bee-bush stood tall along the sandy roadsides,
and the cone-flowers and rose mallow grew everywhere.
Across the wire fence, in the long grass, I saw a clump of flaming
orange-coloured 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 summer, where the gaillardia
came up year after year and matted over the ground with the deep,
velvety red that is in Bokhara carpets.  The country was
empty and solitary except for the larks that Sunday morning,
and it seemed to lift itself up to me and to come very close.

The river was running strong for midsummer; 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 should be homesick for that river after I left it.
The sandbars, with their clean white beaches and their little groves
of willows and cottonwood seedlings, were a sort of No Man's Land,
little newly created worlds that belonged to the Black Hawk boys.
Charley Harling and I had 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 and 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,
steadying 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 peals of laughter.
Anna Hansen shook the reins and they drove on, while I zigzagged
back to my inlet and clambered up behind an 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 Marshalls' 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 their
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 under-brush 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 and by the warm silence about me.
There was no sound but the high, singsong buzz of wild bees
and 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 her what
was the matter.

`It makes me homesick, Jimmy, this flower, this smell,' she said softly.
`We have 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 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 that 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 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 of 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 quarrelled with him because he did.
I used to hear the old people at 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 was the only time I was ever in my grandmother's house.
Don't that seem strange?'

While she talked, I lay 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. Shimerda.

`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 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 ain't 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 that 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 one of the chalk bluffs,
where even on the calmest days there was always a breeze.
The flat-topped, twisted little oaks threw 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 farm-houses 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 Soderball, `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 father's
raised rye flour for her.'

`It must have been a 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 never has caught up.'

`Yes, a new country's hard on the old ones, sometimes,'
said Anna thoughtfully.  `My grandmother's getting feeble now,
and her mind wanders.  She's forgot about this country,
and thinks she's at home in Norway.  She keeps asking mother
to take her down to the waterside and 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
the 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.

Antonia pushed her away.  `You'll never get it out like that,'
she said sharply.  She gave my head a rough touzling
and finished me off with something like a box on the ear.
`Lena, you oughtn't to try to wear those slippers any more.
They're too small for your feet.  You'd better give them
to me for Yulka.'

`All right,' said Lena good-naturedly, tucking her white stockings
under her skirt.  `You get all Yulka'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 this fall, if the sulky plough's never paid for!'

Tiny asked her 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 playthings.
I like to buy them playthings 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 are all right; if only they don't come
in winter.  Ours nearly always did.  I don't see how mother stood it.
I 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.  Johnnie, 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 Kronn.  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 was smart like her, I'd be at my books day and night.
But she was born smart--and look 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 Lapp.  I guess that's what's the matter with me;
they say Lapp blood will out.'

`A real Lapp, Lena?'  I exclaimed.  `The kind that wear skins?'

`I don't know if she wore skins, but she was a Lapps all right,
and his folks felt dreadful about it.  He was sent up North
on some government job he had, and fell in 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 Lapp girls, though; 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 Wants 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 any more.
We threw ourselves down on the grass, out of breath.

`Jim,' Antonia said dreamily, `I want you to tell the girls about how the
Spanish first came here, like you and Charley 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 and 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 Charley Harling and I had a strong belief that he had been
along this very river.  A farmer in the county north of ours,
when he was breaking sod, had turned up a metal stirrup 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.
Charley 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 Charley 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
and his castles and his king?  I couldn't tell them.
I only knew the schoolbooks said he `died in the wilderness,
of a broken heart.'

`More than him has done that,' said Antonia sadly,
and the girls murmured assent.

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 on 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 ringdove
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, 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 toward it.  In a moment
we realized what it was.  On some upland farm, a plough 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 share--black against the molten red.
There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing 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 plough had sunk back to its own littleness
somewhere on the prairie.



XV

LATE IN AUGUST the Cutters went to Omaha for a few days,
leaving Antonia in charge of the house.  Since the scandal
about the Swedish girl, Wick Cutter could never get his wife
to stir out of Black Hawk without him.

The day after the Cutters left, Antonia came over to see us.
Grandmother noticed that she seemed troubled and distracted.
`You've got something on your mind, Antonia,' she said anxiously.

`Yes, Mrs. Burden.  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 were 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 she knew to stay with her at night.
She would be perfectly safe, he said, as he had just put a new Yale
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 is 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, 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 their 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 the window.  I was afraid to leave
the window open last night.'

I liked my own room, and I didn't like the Cutters' 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 Cutters', I awoke 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 Cutters' silver, whoever he was.
Perhaps if I did not move, he would find it and get out 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 cologne-scented 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 handful of whiskers and pulled, 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 as 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.
Then 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 Black Hawk in my
night-shirt, just as one sometimes finds one's self behaving in bad dreams.
When I got home, I climbed in at the kitchen window.  I was covered with
blood from my nose and lip, but I was too sick to do anything about it.
I found a shawl and an overcoat on the hat-rack, lay down on the parlour sofa,
and in spite of my hurts, went to sleep.

Grandmother found me there in the morning.  Her cry of fright
awakened me.  Truly, I was a battered object.  As she helped
me to my room, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.
My lip was cut and stood out like a snout.  My nose looked like a big
blue plum, and one eye was swollen shut and hideously discoloured.
Grandmother said we must have the doctor at once, but I implored her,
as I had never begged for anything before, not to send for him.
I could stand anything, I told her, so long as nobody saw
me or knew what had happened to me.  I entreated her not to
let grandfather, even, come into my room.  She seemed to understand,
though I was too faint and miserable to go into explanations.
When she took off my night-shirt, she found such bruises on my
chest and shoulders that she began to cry.  She spent the whole
morning bathing and poulticing me, and rubbing me with arnica.
I heard Antonia sobbing outside my door, but I asked grandmother
to send her away.  I felt that I never wanted to see her again.
I hated her almost as much as I hated Cutter.  She had let me in
for all this disgustingness.  Grandmother kept saying how thankful
we ought to be that I had been there instead of Antonia.  But I lay
with my disfigured face to the wall and felt no particular gratitude.
My one concern was that grandmother should keep everyone away from me.
If the story once got abroad, I would never hear the last of it.
I could well imagine what the old men down at the drugstore would
do with such a theme.

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

That afternoon, while I was asleep, Antonia took grandmother with her,
and went over to the Cutters' to pack her trunk.  They found the place
locked up, and they had to break the window to get into Antonia's bedroom.
There everything was in shocking disorder.  Her clothes had been taken out
of her closet, thrown into the middle of the room, and trampled and torn.
My own garments had been treated so badly that I never saw them again;
grandmother burned them in the Cutters' kitchen range.

While Antonia was packing her trunk and putting her room in order,
to leave it, the front doorbell rang violently.  There stood Mrs. Cutter--
locked out, for she had no key to the new lock--her head trembling with rage.
`I advised her to control herself, or she would have a stroke,'
grandmother said afterward.

Grandmother would not let her see Antonia at all, but made her sit down in
the parlour while she related to her just what had occurred the night before.
Antonia was frightened, and was going home to stay for a while, she told
Mrs. Cutter; it would be useless to interrogate the girl, for she knew nothing
of what had happened.

Then Mrs. Cutter told her story.  She and her husband had started home from
Omaha together the morning before.  They had to stop over several hours at
Waymore Junction to catch the Black Hawk train.  During the wait, Cutter left
her at the depot and went to the Waymore bank to attend to some business.
When he returned, he told her that he would have to stay overnight there,
but she could go on home.  He bought her ticket and put her on the train.
She saw him slip a twenty-dollar bill into her handbag with her ticket.
That bill, she said, should have aroused her suspicions at once--but did not.

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

Cutter could have got home a day earlier than his wife by any
one of a dozen simpler devices; he could have left her in the
Omaha hotel, and said he was going on to Chicago for a few days.
But apparently it was part of his fun to outrage her feelings
as much as possible.

`Mr. Cutter will pay for this, Mrs. Burden.  He will pay!'
Mrs. Cutter avouched, nodding her horse-like head and
rolling her eyes.

Grandmother said she hadn't a doubt of it.

Certainly Cutter liked to have his wife think him a devil.
In some way he depended upon the excitement He could arouse in her
hysterical nature.  Perhaps he got the feeling of being a rake more from
his wife's rage and amazement than from any experiences of his own.
His zest in debauchery might wane, but never Mrs. Cutter's belief in it.
The reckoning with his wife at the end of an escapade was something
he counted on--like the last powerful liqueur after a long dinner.
The one excitement he really couldn't do without was quarrelling
with Mrs. Cutter!





BOOK III

Lena Lingard



I

AT THE UNIVERSITY I had the good fortune to come immediately
under the influence of a brilliant and inspiring young scholar.
Gaston Cleric had arrived in Lincoln only a few weeks earlier
than I, to begin his work as head of the Latin Department.
He came West at the suggestion of his physicians,
his health having been enfeebled by a long illness in Italy.
When I took my entrance examinations, he was my examiner,
and my course was arranged under his supervision.

I did not go home for my first summer vacation, but stayed
in Lincoln, working off a year's Greek, which had been my only
condition on entering the freshman class.  Cleric's doctor advised
against his going back to New England, and, except for a few
weeks in Colorado, he, too, was in Lincoln all that summer.
We played tennis, read, and took long walks together.
I shall always look back on that time of mental awakening
as one of the happiest in my life.  Gaston Cleric introduced
me to the world of ideas; when one first enters that world
everything else fades for a time, and all that went before
is as if it had not been.  Yet I found curious survivals;
some of the figures of my old life seemed to be waiting for me
in the new.

In those days there were many serious young men among
the students who had come up to the university from the farms
and the little towns scattered over the thinly settled state.
Some of those boys came straight from the cornfields with only
a summer's wages in their pockets, hung on through the four years,
shabby and underfed, and completed the course by really
heroic self-sacrifice. Our instructors were oddly assorted;
wandering pioneer school-teachers, stranded ministers of the Gospel,
a few enthusiastic young men just out of graduate schools.
There was an atmosphere of endeavour, of expectancy and bright
hopefulness about the young college that had lifted its head
from the prairie only a few years before.

Our personal life was as free as that of our instructors.
There were no college dormitories; we lived where we could and as we could.
I took rooms with an old couple, early settlers in Lincoln, who had married
off their children and now lived quietly in their house at the edge of town,
near the open country.  The house was inconveniently situated for students,
and on that account I got two rooms for the price of one.  My bedroom,
originally a linen-closet, was unheated and was barely large enough
to contain my cot-bed, but it enabled me to call the other room my study.
The dresser, and the great walnut wardrobe which held all my clothes,
even my hats and shoes, I had pushed out of the way, and I considered them
non-existent, as children eliminate incongruous objects when they are
playing house.  I worked at a commodious green-topped table placed directly
in front of the west window which looked out over the prairie.  In the corner
at my right were all my books, in shelves I had made and painted myself.
On the blank wall at my left the dark, old-fashioned wall-paper was
covered by a large map of ancient Rome, the work of some German scholar.
Cleric had ordered it for me when he was sending for books from abroad.
Over the bookcase hung a photograph of the Tragic Theatre at Pompeii,
which he had given me from his collection.

When I sat at work I half-faced a deep, upholstered chair which
stood at the end of my table, its high back against the wall.
I had bought it with great care.  My instructor sometimes looked in upon
me when he was out for an evening tramp, and I noticed that he was
more likely to linger and become talkative if I had a comfortable
chair for him to sit in, and if he found a bottle of Benedictine
and plenty of the kind of cigarettes he liked, at his elbow.
He was, I had discovered, parsimonious about small expenditures--
a trait absolutely inconsistent with his general character.
Sometimes when he came he was silent and moody, and after a few
sarcastic remarks went away again, to tramp the streets of Lincoln,
which were almost as quiet and oppressively domestic as those
of Black Hawk.  Again, he would sit until nearly midnight,
talking about Latin and English poetry, or telling me about his long
stay in Italy.

I can give no idea of the peculiar charm and vividness of his talk.
In a crowd he was nearly always silent.  Even for his classroom
he had no platitudes, no stock of professorial anecdotes.
When he was tired, his lectures were clouded, obscure, elliptical;
but when he was interested they were wonderful.  I believe that Gaston
Cleric narrowly missed being a great poet, and I have sometimes thought
that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift.
He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication.
How often I have seen him draw his dark brows together, fix his eyes
upon some object on the wall or a figure in the carpet, and then
flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his brain.
He could bring the drama of antique life before one out
of the shadows--white figures against blue backgrounds.
I shall never forget his face as it looked one night when he told me
about the solitary day he spent among the sea temples at Paestum:
the soft wind blowing through the roofless columns, the birds flying low
over the flowering marsh grasses, the changing lights on the silver,
cloud-hung mountains.  He had wilfully stayed the short summer
night there, wrapped in his coat and rug, watching the constellations
on their path down the sky until `the bride of old Tithonus'
rose out of the sea, and the mountains stood sharp in the dawn.
It was there he caught the fever which held him back on the eve of
his departure for Greece and of which he lay ill so long in Naples.
He was still, indeed, doing penance for it.

I remember vividly another evening, when something led us to talk
of Dante's veneration for Virgil.  Cleric went through canto
after canto of the `Commedia,' repeating the discourse between
Dante and his `sweet teacher,' while his cigarette burned itself
out unheeded between his long fingers.  I can hear him now,
speaking the lines of the poet Statius, who spoke for Dante:
`I was famous on earth with the name which endures longest
and honours most.  The seeds of my ardour were the sparks from
that divine flame whereby more than a thousand have kindled;
I speak of the "Aeneid," mother to me and nurse to me in poetry.'

Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not
deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar.
I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things.
Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back
to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it.
While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms
that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me,
and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people
of my own infinitesimal past.  They stood out strengthened and
simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun.
They were all I had for an answer to the new appeal.
I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took
up in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things.
But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early
friends were quickened within it, and in some strange
way they accompanied me through all my new experiences.
They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder
whether they were alive anywhere else, or how.



II

ONE MARCH EVENING in my sophomore year I was sitting alone
in my room after supper.  There had been a warm thaw all day,
with mushy yards and little streams of dark water gurgling
cheerfully into the streets out of old snow-banks. My window
was open, and the earthy wind blowing through made me indolent.
On the edge of the prairie, where the sun had gone down, the sky
was turquoise blue, like a lake, with gold light throbbing in it.
Higher up, in the utter clarity of the western slope, the evening
star hung like a lamp suspended by silver chains--like the lamp
engraved upon the title-page of old Latin texts, which is always
appearing in new heavens, and waking new desires in men.
It reminded me, at any rate, to shut my window and light
my wick in answer.  I did so regretfully, and the dim objects
in the room emerged from the shadows and took their place
about me with the helpfulness which custom breeds.

I propped my book open and stared listlessly at the page
of the `Georgics' where tomorrow's lesson began.
It opened with the melancholy reflection that, in the lives
of mortals the best days are the first to flee.
'Optima dies ... prima fugit.'  I turned back to the beginning
of the third book, which we had read in class that morning.
'Primus ego in patriam mecum ... deducam Musas'; `for I shall
be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country.'
Cleric had explained to us that `patria' here meant, not a nation
or even a province, but the little rural neighbourhood on the Mincio
where the poet was born.  This was not a boast, but a hope,
at once bold and devoutly humble, that he might bring the Muse
(but lately come to Italy from her cloudy Grecian mountains),
not to the capital, the palatia Romana, but to his own little
I country'; to his father's fields, `sloping down to the river
and to the old beech trees with broken tops.'

Cleric said he thought Virgil, when he was dying at Brindisi,
must have remembered that passage.  After he had faced the bitter
fact that he was to leave the `Aeneid' unfinished, and had decreed
that the great canvas, crowded with figures of gods and men,
should be burned rather than survive him unperfected, then his mind
must have gone back to the perfect utterance of the `Georgics,'
where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow;
and he must have said to himself, with the thankfulness of a good man,
`I was the first to bring the Muse into my country.'

We left the classroom quietly, conscious that we had been
brushed by the wing of a great feeling, though perhaps I alone
knew Cleric intimately enough to guess what that feeling was.
In the evening, as I sat staring at my book, the fervour of his
voice stirred through the quantities on the page before me.
I was wondering whether that particular rocky strip of New England
coast about which he had so often told me was Cleric's patria.
Before I had got far with my reading, I was disturbed by a knock.
I hurried to the door and when I opened it saw a woman standing
in the dark hall.

`I expect you hardly know me, Jim.'

The voice seemed familiar, but I did not recognize her until she
stepped into the light of my doorway and I beheld--Lena Lingard!
She was so quietly conventionalized by city clothes that I
might have passed her on the street without seeing her.
Her black suit fitted her figure smoothly, and a black lace hat,
with pale-blue forget-me-nots, sat demurely on her yellow hair.

I led her toward Cleric's chair, the only comfortable one I had,
questioning her confusedly.

She was not disconcerted by my embarrassment.
She looked about her with the naive curiosity I remembered
so well.  `You are quite comfortable here, aren't you?
I live in Lincoln now, too, Jim.  I'm in business for myself.
I have a dressmaking shop in the Raleigh Block, out on O Street.
I've made a real good start.'

`But, Lena, when did you come?'

`Oh, I've been here all winter.  Didn't your grandmother ever
write you?  I've thought about looking you up lots of times.
But we've all heard what a studious young man you've got to be,
and I felt bashful.  I didn't know whether you'd be glad to see me.'
She laughed her mellow, easy laugh, that was either very artless
or very comprehending, one never quite knew which.  `You seem
the same, though--except you're a young man, now, of course.
Do you think I've changed?'

`Maybe you're prettier--though you were always pretty enough.
Perhaps it's your clothes that make a difference.'

`You like my new suit?  I have to dress pretty well in my business.'

She took off her jacket and sat more at ease in her blouse,
of some soft, flimsy silk.  She was already at home in my place,
had slipped quietly into it, as she did into everything.
She told me her business was going well, and she had saved
a little money.

`This summer I'm going to build the house for mother I've talked
about so long.  I won't be able to pay up on it at first,
but I want her to have it before she is too old to enjoy it.
Next summer I'll take her down new furniture and carpets,
so she'll have something to look forward to all winter.'

I watched Lena sitting there so smooth and sunny and well-cared-for, and
thought of how she used to run barefoot over the prairie until after the snow
began to fly, and how Crazy Mary chased her round and round the cornfields.
It seemed to me wonderful that she should have got on so well in the world.
Certainly she had no one but herself to thank for it.

`You must feel proud of yourself, Lena,' I said heartily.
`Look at me; I've never earned a dollar, and I don't know
that I'll ever be able to.'

`Tony says you're going to be richer than Mr. Harling some day.
She's always bragging about you, you know.'

`Tell me, how IS Tony?'

`She's fine.  She works for Mrs. Gardener at the hotel now.
She's housekeeper.  Mrs. Gardener's health isn't what it was,
and she can't see after everything like she used to.
She has great confidence in Tony.  Tony's made it up with
the Harlings, too.  Little Nina is so fond of her that Mrs. Harling
kind of overlooked things.'

`Is she still going with Larry Donovan?'

`Oh, that's on, worse than ever!  I guess they're engaged.
Tony talks about him like he was president of the railroad.
Everybody laughs about it, because she was never a girl to be soft.
She won't hear a word against him.  She's so sort of innocent.'

I said I didn't like Larry, and never would.

Lena's face dimpled.  `Some of us could tell her things,
but it wouldn't do any good.  She'd always believe him.
That's Antonia's failing, you know; if she once likes people,
she won't hear anything against them.'

`I think I'd better go home and look after Antonia,' I said.

`I think you had.'  Lena looked up at me in frank amusement.
`It's a good thing the Harlings are friendly with her again.
Larry's afraid of them.  They ship so much grain, they have
influence with the railroad people.  What are you studying?'
She leaned her elbows on the table and drew my book toward her.
I caught a faint odour of violet sachet.  `So that's Latin, is it?
It looks hard.  You do go to the theatre sometimes, though,
for I've seen you there.  Don't you just love a good play, Jim?
I can't stay at home in the evening if there's one in town.
I'd be willing to work like a slave, it seems to me, to live
in a place where there are theatres.'

`Let's go to a show together sometime.  You are going to let
me come to see you, aren't you?'

`Would you like to?  I'd be ever so pleased.  I'm never busy
after six o'clock, and I let my sewing girls go at half-past five.
I board, to save time, but sometimes I cook a chop for myself,
and I'd be glad to cook one for you.  Well'--she began to put
on her white gloves--'it's been awful good to see you, Jim.'

`You needn't hurry, need you?  You've hardly told me anything yet.'

`We can talk when you come to see me.  I expect you don't often
have lady visitors.  The old woman downstairs didn't want to let
me come up very much.  I told her I was from your home town,
and had promised your grandmother to come and see you.
How surprised Mrs. Burden would be!'  Lena laughed softly
as she rose.

When I caught up my hat, she shook her head.
`No, I don't want you to go with me.  I'm to meet some
Swedes at the drugstore.  You wouldn't care for them.
I wanted to see your room so I could write Tony all about it,
but I must tell her how I left you right here with your books.
She's always so afraid someone will run off with you!'
Lena slipped her silk sleeves into the jacket I held for her,
smoothed it over her person, and buttoned it slowly.
I walked with her to the door.  `Come and see me sometimes when
you're lonesome.  But maybe you have all the friends you want.
Have you?'  She turned her soft cheek to me.  `Have you?'
she whispered teasingly in my ear.  In a moment I watched
her fade down the dusky stairway.

When I turned back to my room the place seemed much pleasanter than before.
Lena had left something warm and friendly in the lamplight.
How I loved to hear her laugh again!  It was so soft and unexcited
and appreciative gave a favourable interpretation to everything.
When I closed my eyes I could hear them all laughing--the Danish laundry
girls and the three Bohemian Marys.  Lena had brought them all back to me.
It came over me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls
like those and the poetry of Virgil.  If there were no girls like them
in the world, there would be no poetry.  I understood that clearly,
for the first time.  This revelation seemed to me inestimably precious.
I clung to it as if it might suddenly vanish.

As I sat down to my book at last, my old dream about Lena
coming across the harvest-field in her short skirt seemed to me
like the memory of an actual experience.  It floated before me on
the page like a picture, and underneath it stood the mournful line:
'Optima dies ... prima fugit.'



III

IN LINCOLN THE BEST part of the theatrical season came late,
when the good companies stopped off there for one-night stands,
after their long runs in New York and Chicago.  That spring
Lena went with me to see Joseph Jefferson in `Rip Van Winkle,'
and to a war play called `Shenandoah.' She was inflexible
about paying for her own seat; said she was in business now,
and she wouldn't have a schoolboy spending his money on her.
I liked to watch a play with Lena; everything was wonderful to her,
and everything was true.  It was like going to revival meetings
with someone who was always being converted.  She handed her
feelings over to the actors with a kind of fatalistic resignation.
Accessories of costume and scene meant much more to her than to me.
She sat entranced through `Robin Hood' and hung upon the lips
of the contralto who sang, `Oh, Promise Me!'

Toward the end of April, the billboards, which I watched anxiously
in those days, bloomed out one morning with gleaming white posters
on which two names were impressively printed in blue Gothic letters:
the name of an actress of whom I had often heard, and the name `Camille.'

I called at the Raleigh Block for Lena on Saturday evening,
and we walked down to the theatre.  The weather was
warm and sultry and put us both in a holiday humour.
We arrived early, because Lena liked to watch the people come in.
There was a note on the programme, saying that the `incidental music'
would be from the opera `Traviata,' which was made from the same
story as the play.  We had neither of us read the play, and we
did not know what it was about--though I seemed to remember
having heard it was a piece in which great actresses shone.
`The Count of Monte Cristo,' which I had seen James O'Neill play
that winter, was by the only Alexandre Dumas I knew.  This play,
I saw, was by his son, and I expected a family resemblance.
A couple of jack-rabbits, run in off the prairie, could not have
been more innocent of what awaited them than were Lena and I.

Our excitement began with the rise of the curtain, when the
moody Varville, seated before the fire, interrogated Nanine.
Decidedly, there was a new tang about this dialogue.
I had never heard in the theatre lines that were alive,
that presupposed and took for granted, like those which passed
between Varville and Marguerite in the brief encounter before
her friends entered.  This introduced the most brilliant,
worldly, the most enchantingly gay scene I had ever looked upon.
I had never seen champagne bottles opened on the stage before--
indeed, I had never seen them opened anywhere.  The memory
of that supper makes me hungry now; the sight of it then,
when I had only a students' boarding-house dinner behind me,
was delicate torment.  I seem to remember gilded chairs
and tables (arranged hurriedly by footmen in white gloves
and stockings), linen of dazzling whiteness, glittering glass,
silver dishes, a great bowl of fruit, and the reddest of roses.
The room was invaded by beautiful women and dashing young men,
laughing and talking together.  The men were dressed more or less
after the period in which the play was written; the women were not.
I saw no inconsistency.  Their talk seemed to open to one
the brilliant world in which they lived; every sentence made
one older and wiser, every pleasantry enlarged one's horizon.
One could experience excess and satiety without the inconvenience
of learning what to do with one's hands in a drawing-room!
When the characters all spoke at once and I missed some
of the phrases they flashed at each other, I was in misery.
I strained my ears and eyes to catch every exclamation.

The actress who played Marguerite was even then old-fashioned,
though historic.  She had been a member of Daly's famous New
York company, and afterward a `star' under his direction.
She was a woman who could not be taught, it is said, though she
had a crude natural force which carried with people whose
feelings were accessible and whose taste was not squeamish.
She was already old, with a ravaged countenance and a physique
curiously hard and stiff.  She moved with difficulty--
I think she was lame--I seem to remember some story about
a malady of the spine.  Her Armand was disproportionately
young and slight, a handsome youth, perplexed in the extreme.
But what did it matter?  I believed devoutly in her power
to fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness.  I believed
her young, ardent, reckless, disillusioned, under sentence,
feverish, avid of pleasure.  I wanted to cross the footlights
and help the slim-waisted Armand in the frilled shirt to convince
her that there was still loyalty and devotion in the world.
Her sudden illness, when the gaiety was at its height,
her pallor, the handkerchief she crushed against her lips,
the cough she smothered under the laughter while Gaston
kept playing the piano lightly--it all wrung my heart.
But not so much as her cynicism in the long dialogue with her lover
which followed.  How far was I from questioning her unbelief!
While the charmingly sincere young man pleaded with her--
accompanied by the orchestra in the old `Traviata' duet,
'misterioso, misterios' altero!'--she maintained her
bitter scepticism, and the curtain fell on her dancing
recklessly with the others, after Armand had been sent away
with his flower.

Between the acts we had no time to forget.  The orchestra
kept sawing away at the `Traviata' music, so joyous and sad,
so thin and far-away, so clap-trap and yet so heart-breaking.
After the second act I left Lena in tearful contemplation
of the ceiling, and went out into the lobby to smoke.
As I walked about there I congratulated myself that I had not
brought some Lincoln girl who would talk during the waits about
the junior dances, or whether the cadets would camp at Plattsmouth.
Lena was at least a woman, and I was a man.

Through the scene between Marguerite and the elder Duval,
Lena wept unceasingly, and I sat helpless to prevent the closing
of that chapter of idyllic love, dreading the return of the young
man whose ineffable happiness was only to be the measure
of his fall.

I suppose no woman could have been further in person,
voice, and temperament from Dumas' appealing heroine than
the veteran actress who first acquainted me with her.
Her conception of the character was as heavy and uncompromising
as her diction; she bore hard on the idea and on the consonants.
At all times she was highly tragic, devoured by remorse.
Lightness of stress or behaviour was far from her.
Her voice was heavy and deep:  `Ar-r-r-mond!' she would begin,
as if she were summoning him to the bar of Judgment.
But the lines were enough.  She had only to utter them.
They created the character in spite of her.

The heartless world which Marguerite re-entered with Varville
had never been so glittering and reckless as on the night
when it gathered in Olympe's salon for the fourth act.
There were chandeliers hung from the ceiling, I remember,
many servants in livery, gaming-tables where the men played
with piles of gold, and a staircase down which the guests
made their entrance.  After all the others had gathered round
the card-tables and young Duval had been warned by Prudence,
Marguerite descended the staircase with Varville;
such a cloak, such a fan, such jewels--and her face!
One knew at a glance how it was with her.  When Armand, with the
terrible words, `Look, all of you, I owe this woman nothing!'
flung the gold and bank-notes at the half-swooning Marguerite,
Lena cowered beside me and covered her face with her hands.

The curtain rose on the bedroom scene.  By this time there wasn't a nerve
in me that hadn't been twisted.  Nanine alone could have made me cry.
I loved Nanine tenderly; and Gaston, how one clung to that good fellow!
The New Year's presents were not too much; nothing could be too much now.
I wept unrestrainedly.  Even the handkerchief in my breast-pocket,
worn for elegance and not at all for use, was wet through by the time
that moribund woman sank for the last time into the arms of her lover.

When we reached the door of the theatre, the streets
were shining with rain.  I had prudently brought along
Mrs. Harling's useful Commencement present, and I took
Lena home under its shelter.  After leaving her, I walked
slowly out into the country part of the town where I lived.
The lilacs were all blooming in the yards, and the smell of them
after the rain, of the new leaves and the blossoms together,
blew into my face with a sort of bitter sweetness.
I tramped through the puddles and under the showery trees,
mourning for Marguerite Gauthier as if she had died only yesterday,
sighing with the spirit of 1840, which had sighed so much,
and which had reached me only that night, across long years and
several languages, through the person of an infirm old actress.
The idea is one that no circumstances can frustrate.
Wherever and whenever that piece is put on, it is April.



IV

HOW WELL I REMEMBER the stiff little parlour where I used
to wait for Lena:  the hard horsehair furniture, bought at some
auction sale, the long mirror, the fashion-plates on the wall.
If I sat down even for a moment, I was sure to find threads and
bits of coloured silk clinging to my clothes after I went away.
Lena's success puzzled me.  She was so easygoing; had none of
the push and self-assertiveness that get people ahead in business.
She had come to Lincoln, a country girl, with no introductions
except to some cousins of Mrs. Thomas who lived there, and she was
already making clothes for the women of `the young married set.'
Evidently she had great natural aptitude for her work.
She knew, as she said, `what people looked well in.'
She never tired of poring over fashion-books. Sometimes in the evening
I would find her alone in her work-room, draping folds of satin
on a wire figure, with a quite blissful expression of countenance.
I couldn't help thinking that the years when Lena literally hadn't
enough clothes to cover herself might have something to do with her
untiring interest in dressing the human figure.  Her clients said
that Lena `had style,' and overlooked her habitual inaccuracies.
She never, I discovered, finished anything by the time she had promised,
and she frequently spent more money on materials than her customer
had authorized.  Once, when I arrived at six o'clock, Lena was
ushering out a fidgety mother and her awkward, overgrown daughter.
The woman detained Lena at the door to say apologetically:

`You'll try to keep it under fifty for me, won't you, Miss Lingard?
You see, she's really too young to come to an expensive dressmaker,
but I knew you could do more with her than anybody else.'

`Oh, that will be all right, Mrs. Herron.  I think we'll manage to get
a good effect,' Lena replied blandly.

I thought her manner with her customers very good, and wondered
where she had learned such self-possession.

Sometimes after my morning classes were over, I used to encounter
Lena downtown, in her velvet suit and a little black hat, with a veil
tied smoothly over her face, looking as fresh as the spring morning.
Maybe she would be carrying home a bunch of jonquils or a hyacinth plant.
When we passed a candy store her footsteps would hesitate and linger.
`Don't let me go in,' she would murmur.  `Get me by if you can.'
She was very fond of sweets, and was afraid of growing too plump.

We had delightful Sunday breakfasts together at Lena's. At the back
of her long work-room was a bay-window, large enough to hold
a box-couch and a reading-table. We breakfasted in this recess,
after drawing the curtains that shut out the long room, with
cutting-tables and wire women and sheet-draped garments on the walls.
The sunlight poured in, making everything on the table shine and
glitter and the flame of the alcohol lamp disappear altogether.
Lena's curly black water-spaniel, Prince, breakfasted with us.
He sat beside her on the couch and behaved very well until
the Polish violin-teacher across the hall began to practise,
when Prince would growl and sniff the air with disgust.
Lena's landlord, old Colonel Raleigh, had given her the dog,
and at first she was not at all pleased.  She had spent too much
of her life taking care of animals to have much sentiment about them.
But Prince was a knowing little beast, and she grew fond of him.
After breakfast I made him do his lessons; play dead dog,
shake hands, stand up like a soldier.  We used to put my cadet
cap on his head--I had to take military drill at the university--
and give him a yard-measure to hold with his front leg.
His gravity made us laugh immoderately.

Lena's talk always amused me.  Antonia had never talked
like the people about her.  Even after she learned to speak
English readily, there was always something impulsive and foreign
in her speech.  But Lena had picked up all the conventional
expressions she heard at Mrs. Thomas's dressmaking shop.
Those formal phrases, the very flower of small-town proprieties,
and the flat commonplaces, nearly all hypocritical in their origin,
became very funny, very engaging, when they were uttered in Lena's
soft voice, with her caressing intonation and arch naivete.
Nothing could be more diverting than to hear Lena, who was almost
as candid as Nature, call a leg a `limb' or a house a `home.'

We used to linger a long while over our coffee in that sunny corner.
Lena was never so pretty as in the morning; she wakened fresh
with the world every day, and her eyes had a deeper colour then,
like the blue flowers that are never so blue as when they first open.
I could sit idle all through a Sunday morning and look at her.
Ole Benson's behaviour was now no mystery to me.

`There was never any harm in Ole,' she said once.
`People needn't have troubled themselves.  He just liked to come
over and sit on the drawside and forget about his bad luck.
I liked to have him.  Any company's welcome when you're off
with cattle all the time.'

`But wasn't he always glum?'  I asked.  `People said he never talked at all.'

`Sure he talked, in Norwegian.  He'd been a sailor on an English
boat and had seen lots of queer places.  He had wonderful tattoos.
We used to sit and look at them for hours; there wasn't
much to look at out there.  He was like a picture book.
He had a ship and a strawberry girl on one arm,
and on the other a girl standing before a little house,
with a fence and gate and all, waiting for her sweetheart.
Farther up his arm, her sailor had come back and was kissing her.
"The Sailor's Return," he called it.'

I admitted it was no wonder Ole liked to look at a pretty girl once
in a while, with such a fright at home.

`You know,' Lena said confidentially, `he married Mary
because he thought she was strong-minded and would keep
him straight.  He never could keep straight on shore.
The last time he landed in Liverpool he'd been out on a
two years' voyage.  He was paid off one morning, and by the next
he hadn't a cent left, and his watch and compass were gone.
He'd got with some women, and they'd taken everything.
He worked his way to this country on a little passenger boat.
Mary was a stewardess, and she tried to convert him on the way over.
He thought she was just the one to keep him steady.
Poor Ole!  He used to bring me candy from town, hidden in
his feed-bag. He couldn't refuse anything to a girl.
He'd have given away his tattoos long ago, if he could.
He's one of the people I'm sorriest for.'

If I happened to spend an evening with Lena and stayed late,
the Polish violin-teacher across the hall used to come out
and watch me descend the stairs, muttering so threateningly
that it would have been easy to fall into a quarrel with him.
Lena had told him once that she liked to hear him practise,
so he always left his door open, and watched who came and went.

There was a coolness between the Pole and Lena's landlord on her account.
Old Colonel Raleigh had come to Lincoln from Kentucky and invested
an inherited fortune in real estate, at the time of inflated prices.
Now he sat day after day in his office in the Raleigh Block, trying to
discover where his money had gone and how he could get some of it back.
He was a widower, and found very little congenial companionship in this
casual Western city.  Lena's good looks and gentle manners appealed to him.
He said her voice reminded him of Southern voices, and he found as many
opportunities of hearing it as possible.  He painted and papered her rooms
for her that spring, and put in a porcelain bathtub in place of the tin one
that had satisfied the former tenant.  While these repairs were being made,
the old gentleman often dropped in to consult Lena's preferences.
She told me with amusement how Ordinsky, the Pole, had presented himself
at her door one evening, and said that if the landlord was annoying
her by his attentions, he would promptly put a stop to it.

`I don't exactly know what to do about him,' she said,
shaking her head, `he's so sort of wild all the time.
I wouldn't like to have him say anything rough to that nice old man.
The colonel is long-winded, but then I expect he's lonesome.
I don't think he cares much for Ordinsky, either.  He said
once that if I had any complaints to make of my neighbours,
I mustn't hesitate.'

One Saturday evening when I was having supper with Lena, we heard a knock
at her parlour door, and there stood the Pole, coatless, in a dress shirt
and collar.  Prince dropped on his paws and began to growl like a mastiff,
while the visitor apologized, saying that he could not possibly come
in thus attired, but he begged Lena to lend him some safety pins.

`Oh, you'll have to come in, Mr. Ordinsky, and let me see what's the matter.'
She closed the door behind him.  `Jim, won't you make Prince behave?'

I rapped Prince on the nose, while Ordinsky explained that he had not
had his dress clothes on for a long time, and tonight, when he was
going to play for a concert, his waistcoat had split down the back.
He thought he could pin it together until he got it to a tailor.

Lena took him by the elbow and turned him round.
She laughed when she saw the long gap in the satin.
`You could never pin that, Mr. Ordinsky.  You've kept it
folded too long, and the goods is all gone along the crease.
Take it off.  I can put a new piece of lining-silk in there
for you in ten minutes.'  She disappeared into her work-room
with the vest, leaving me to confront the Pole, who stood
against the door like a wooden figure.  He folded his arms
and glared at me with his excitable, slanting brown eyes.
His head was the shape of a chocolate drop, and was covered with dry,
straw-coloured hair that fuzzed up about his pointed crown.
He had never done more than mutter at me as I passed him,
and I was surprised when he now addressed me.  `Miss Lingard,'
he said haughtily, `is a young woman for whom I have the utmost,
the utmost respect.'

`So have I,' I said coldly.

He paid no heed to my remark, but began to do rapid finger-exercises
on his shirt-sleeves, as he stood with tightly folded arms.

`Kindness of heart,' he went on, staring at the ceiling,
`sentiment, are not understood in a place like this.
The noblest qualities are ridiculed.  Grinning college boys,
ignorant and conceited, what do they know of delicacy!'

I controlled my features and tried to speak seriously.

`If you mean me, Mr. Ordinsky, I have known Miss Lingard a long time,
and I think I appreciate her kindness.  We come from the same town,
and we grew up together.'

His gaze travelled slowly down from the ceiling and rested on me.
`Am I to understand that you have this young woman's interests at heart?
That you do not wish to compromise her?'

`That's a word we don't use much here, Mr. Ordinsky.  A girl who makes
her own living can ask a college boy to supper without being talked about.
We take some things for granted.'

`Then I have misjudged you, and I ask your pardon'--he bowed gravely.
`Miss Lingard,' he went on, `is an absolutely trustful heart.
She has not learned the hard lessons of life.  As for you and me,
noblesse oblige'--he watched me narrowly.

Lena returned with the vest.  `Come in and let us look at you as you
go out, Mr. Ordinsky.  I've never seen you in your dress suit,'
she said as she opened the door for him.

A few moments later he reappeared with his violin-case a heavy
muffler about his neck and thick woollen gloves on his bony hands.
Lena spoke encouragingly to him, and he went off with such an important
professional air that we fell to laughing as soon as we had shut the door.
`Poor fellow,' Lena said indulgently, `he takes everything so hard.'

After that Ordinsky was friendly to me, and behaved as if there
were some deep understanding between us.  He wrote a furious article,
attacking the musical taste of the town, and asked me to do him
a great service by taking it to the editor of the morning paper.
If the editor refused to print it, I was to tell him that he would
be answerable to Ordinsky `in person.'  He declared that he would never
retract one word, and that he was quite prepared to lose all his pupils.
In spite of the fact that nobody ever mentioned his article to him after
it appeared--full of typographical errors which he thought intentional--
he got a certain satisfaction from believing that the citizens
of Lincoln had meekly accepted the epithet `coarse barbarians.'
`You see how it is,' he said to me, `where there is no chivalry,
there is no amour-propre.' When I met him on his rounds now,
I thought he carried his head more disdainfully than ever, and strode
up the steps of front porches and rang doorbells with more assurance.
He told Lena he would never forget how I had stood by him when
he was `under fire.'

All this time, of course, I was drifting.  Lena had broken
up my serious mood.  I wasn't interested in my classes.
I played with Lena and Prince, I played with the Pole, I went
buggy-riding with the old colonel, who had taken a fancy to me
and used to talk to me about Lena and the `great beauties'
he had known in his youth.  We were all three in love with Lena.

Before the first of June, Gaston Cleric was offered
an instructorship at Harvard College, and accepted it.
He suggested that I should follow him in the fall, and complete
my course at Harvard.  He had found out about Lena--not from me--
and he talked to me seriously.

`You won't do anything here now.  You should either quit school
and go to work, or change your college and begin again in earnest.
You won't recover yourself while you are playing about with this
handsome Norwegian.  Yes, I've seen her with you at the theatre.
She's very pretty, and perfectly irresponsible, I should judge.'

Cleric wrote my grandfather that he would like to take me East with him.
To my astonishment, grandfather replied that I might go if I wished.
I was both glad and sorry on the day when the letter came.
I stayed in my room all evening and thought things over.
I even tried to persuade myself that I was standing in Lena's way--
it is so necessary to be a little noble!--and that if she had not me
to play with, she would probably marry and secure her future.

The next evening I went to call on Lena.  I found her propped up
on the couch in her bay-window, with her foot in a big slipper.
An awkward little Russian girl whom she had taken into
her work-room had dropped a flat-iron on Lena's toe.
On the table beside her there was a basket of early summer
flowers which the Pole had left after he heard of the accident.
He always managed to know what went on in Lena's apartment.

Lena was telling me some amusing piece of gossip about one of her clients,
when I interrupted her and picked up the flower basket.

`This old chap will be proposing to you some day, Lena.'

`Oh, he has--often!' she murmured.

`What! After you've refused him?'

`He doesn't mind that.  It seems to cheer him to mention the subject.
Old men are like that, you know.  It makes them feel important to think
they're in love with somebody.'

`The colonel would marry you in a minute.  I hope you
won't marry some old fellow; not even a rich one.'
Lena shifted her pillows and looked up at me in surprise.

`Why, I'm not going to marry anybody.  Didn't you know that?'

`Nonsense, Lena.  That's what girls say, but you know better.
Every handsome girl like you marries, of course.'

She shook her head.  `Not me.'

`But why not?  What makes you say that?'  I persisted.

Lena laughed.

`Well, it's mainly because I don't want a husband.
Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them
they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones.
They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish,
and want you to stick at home all the time.  I prefer to be
foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.'

`But you'll be lonesome.  You'll get tired of this sort of life,
and you'll want a family.'

`Not me.  I like to be lonesome.  When I went to work for
Mrs. Thomas I was nineteen years old, and I had never slept
a night in my life when there weren't three in the bed.
I never had a minute to myself except when I was off
with the cattle.'

Usually, when Lena referred to her life in the country at all,
she dismissed it with a single remark, humorous or mildly cynical.
But tonight her mind seemed to dwell on those early years.
She told me she couldn't remember a time when she was so little that
she wasn't lugging a heavy baby about, helping to wash for babies,
trying to keep their little chapped hands and faces clean.
She remembered home as a place where there were always too many children,
a cross man and work piling up around a sick woman.

`It wasn't mother's fault.  She would have made us comfortable if she could.
But that was no life for a girl!  After I began to herd and milk, I could
never get the smell of the cattle off me.  The few underclothes I had I
kept in a cracker-box. On Saturday nights, after everybody was in bed,
then I could take a bath if I wasn't too tired.  I could make two trips
to the windmill to carry water, and heat it in the wash-boiler on the stove.
While the water was heating, I could bring in a washtub out of the cave,
and take my bath in the kitchen.  Then I could put on a clean night-gown
and get into bed with two others, who likely hadn't had a bath unless
I'd given it to them.  You can't tell me anything about family life.
I've had plenty to last me.'

`But it's not all like that,' I objected.

`Near enough.  It's all being under somebody's thumb.
What's on your mind, Jim?  Are you afraid I'll want you to marry
me some day?'

Then I told her I was going away.

`What makes you want to go away, Jim?  Haven't I been nice to you?'

`You've been just awfully good to me, Lena,' I blurted.
`I don't think about much else.  I never shall think about much else
while I'm with you.  I'll never settle down and grind if I stay here.
You know that.'

I dropped down beside her and sat looking at the floor.
I seemed to have forgotten all my reasonable explanations.

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

`I oughtn't to have begun it, ought I?' she murmured.
`I oughtn't to have gone to see you that first time.  But I did
want to.  I guess I've always been a little foolish about you.
I don't know what first put it into my head, unless it was Antonia,
always telling me I mustn't be up to any of my nonsense with you.
I let you alone for a long while, though, didn't I?'

She was a sweet creature to those she loved, that Lena Lingard!

At last she sent me away with her soft, slow, renunciatory kiss.

`You aren't sorry I came to see you that time?' she whispered.
`It seemed so natural.  I used to think I'd like to be your first sweetheart.
You were such a funny kid!'

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

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

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





BOOK IV

The Pioneer Woman's Story



I

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

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

Poor Antonia!  Everyone would be saying that now, I thought bitterly.
I replied that grandmother had written me how Antonia went away
to marry Larry Donovan at some place where he was working;
that he had deserted her, and that there was now a baby.
This was all I knew.

`He never married her,' Frances said.  `I haven't seen her since she
came back.  She lives at home, on the farm, and almost never comes
to town.  She brought the baby in to show it to mama once.
I'm afraid she's settled down to be Ambrosch's drudge for good.'

I tried to shut Antonia out of my mind.  I was bitterly disappointed
in her.  I could not forgive her for becoming an object of pity,
while Lena Lingard, for whom people had always foretold trouble,
was now the leading dressmaker of Lincoln, much respected in Black Hawk.
Lena gave her heart away when she felt like it, but she kept her head
for her business and had got on in the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



II

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

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

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

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

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

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

`Why don't you go out and see your grandfather's tenant,
the Widow Steavens?  She knows more about it than anybody else.
She helped Antonia get ready to be married, and she was there when
Antonia came back.  She took care of her when the baby was born.
She could tell you everything.  Besides, the Widow Steavens
is a good talker, and she has a remarkable memory.'


III

ON THE FIRST OR second day of August I got a horse and cart
and set out for the high country, to visit the Widow Steavens.
The wheat harvest was over, and here and there along the horizon I
could see black puffs of smoke from the steam threshing-machines.
The old pasture land was now being broken up into wheatfields
and cornfields, the red grass was disappearing, and the whole
face of the country was changing.  There were wooden houses
where the old sod dwellings used to be, and little orchards,
and big red barns; all this meant happy children, contented women,
and men who saw their lives coming to a fortunate issue.
The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another,
had enriched and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort
that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines
of fertility.  The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me;
it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea.
I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw.
I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one
remembers the modelling of human faces.

When I drew up to our old windmill, the Widow Steavens came out to meet me.
She was brown as an Indian woman, tall, and very strong.  When I was little,
her massive head had always seemed to me like a Roman senator's. I told her
at once why I had come.

`You'll stay the night with us, Jimmy?  I'll talk to you
after supper.  I can take more interest when my work is off my mind.
You've no prejudice against hot biscuit for supper?
Some have, these days.'

While I was putting my horse away, I heard a rooster squawking.
I looked at my watch and sighed; it was three o'clock, and I knew
that I must eat him at six.

After supper Mrs. Steavens and I went upstairs to the old sitting-room,
while her grave, silent brother remained in the basement to read his
farm papers.  All the windows were open.  The white summer moon was
shining outside, the windmill was pumping lazily in the light breeze.
My hostess put the lamp on a stand in the corner, and turned it low
because of the heat.  She sat down in her favourite rocking-chair
and settled a little stool comfortably under her tired feet.
`I'm troubled with calluses, Jim; getting old,' she sighed cheerfully.
She crossed her hands in her lap and sat as if she were at a meeting
of some kind.

`Now, it's about that dear Antonia you want to know?  Well, you've come
to the right person.  I've watched her like she'd been my own daughter.

`When she came home to do her sewing that summer before she
was to be married, she was over here about every day.
They've never had a sewing-machine at the Shimerdas', and
she made all her things here.  I taught her hemstitching,
and I helped her to cut and fit.  She used to sit there
at that machine by the window, pedalling the life out of it--
she was so strong--and always singing them queer Bohemian songs,
like she was the happiest thing in the world.

 `"Antonia," I used to say, "don't run that
machine so fast.  You won't hasten the day none that way."

`Then she'd laugh and slow down for a little, but she'd soon forget
and begin to pedal and sing again.  I never saw a girl work harder to go
to housekeeping right and well-prepared. Lovely table-linen the Harlings
had given her, and Lena Lingard had sent her nice things from Lincoln.
We hemstitched all the tablecloths and pillow-cases, and some of the sheets.
Old Mrs. Shimerda knit yards and yards of lace for her underclothes.
Tony told me just how she meant to have everything in her house.
She'd even bought silver spoons and forks, and kept them in her trunk.
She was always coaxing brother to go to the post-office. Her young man
did write her real often, from the different towns along his run.

`The first thing that troubled her was when he wrote
that his run had been changed, and they would likely have
to live in Denver.  "I'm a country girl," she said, "and I
doubt if I'll be able to manage so well for him in a city.
I was counting on keeping chickens, and maybe a cow."
She soon cheered up, though.

`At last she got the letter telling her when to come.
She was shaken by it; she broke the seal and read it in this room.
I suspected then that she'd begun to get faint-hearted, waiting;
though she'd never let me see it.

`Then there was a great time of packing.  It was in March,
if I remember rightly, and a terrible muddy, raw spell,
with the roads bad for hauling her things to town.
And here let me say, Ambrosch did the right thing.
He went to Black Hawk and bought her a set of plated silver
in a purple velvet box, good enough for her station.
He gave her three hundred dollars in money; I saw the cheque.
He'd collected her wages all those first years she worked out,
and it was but right.  I shook him by the hand in this room.
"You're behaving like a man, Ambrosch," I said, "and I'm glad
to see it, son."

`'Twas a cold, raw day he drove her and her three trunks into Black Hawk
to take the night train for Denver--the boxes had been shipped before.
He stopped the wagon here, and she ran in to tell me good-bye. She threw
her arms around me and kissed me, and thanked me for all I'd done for her.
She was so happy she was crying and laughing at the same time, and her red
cheeks was all wet with rain.

`"You're surely handsome enough for any man," I said, looking her over.

`She laughed kind of flighty like, and whispered, "Good-bye, dear house!"
and then ran out to the wagon.  I expect she meant that for you and
your grandmother, as much as for me, so I'm particular to tell you.
This house had always been a refuge to her.

`Well, in a few days we had a letter saying she got to Denver safe,
and he was there to meet her.  They were to be married in a few days.
He was trying to get his promotion before he married, she said.
I didn't like that, but I said nothing.  The next week Yulka got a postal
card, saying she was "well and happy."  After that we heard nothing.
A month went by, and old Mrs. Shimerda began to get fretful.
Ambrosch was as sulky with me as if I'd picked out the man and
arranged the match.

`One night brother William came in and said that on his way back from the
fields he had passed a livery team from town, driving fast out the west road.
There was a trunk on the front seat with the driver, and another behind.
In the back seat there was a woman all bundled up; but for all her veils,
he thought `twas Antonia Shimerda, or Antonia Donovan, as her name ought
now to be.

`The next morning I got brother to drive me over.  I can walk still,
but my feet ain't what they used to be, and I try to save myself.
The lines outside the Shimerdas' house was full of washing,
though it was the middle of the week.  As we got nearer,
I saw a sight that made my heart sink--all those underclothes
we'd put so much work on, out there swinging in the wind.
Yulka came bringing a dishpanful of wrung clothes, but she darted
back into the house like she was loath to see us.  When I went in,
Antonia was standing over the tubs, just finishing up a big washing.
Mrs. Shimerda was going about her work, talking and scolding to herself.
She didn't so much as raise her eyes.  Tony wiped her hand on her
apron and held it out to me, looking at me steady but mournful.
When I took her in my arms she drew away.  "Don't, Mrs. Steavens,"
she says, "you'll make me cry, and I don't want to."

`I whispered and asked her to come out-of-doors with me.
I knew she couldn't talk free before her mother.  She went
out with me, bareheaded, and we walked up toward the garden.

`"I'm not married, Mrs. Steavens," she says to me very quiet
and natural-like, "and I ought to be."

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

`She sat down on the drawside, out of sight of the house.
"He's run away from me," she said.  "I don't know if he ever
meant to marry me."

`"You mean he's thrown up his job and quit the country?" says I.

`"He didn't have any job.  He'd been fired; blacklisted for knocking
down fares.  I didn't know.  I thought he hadn't been treated right.
He was sick when I got there.  He'd just come out of the hospital.
He lived with me till my money gave out, and afterward I found he hadn't
really been hunting work at all.  Then he just didn't come back.
One nice fellow at the station told me, when I kept going to look for him,
to give it up.  He said he was afraid Larry'd gone bad and wouldn't come
back any more.  I guess he's gone to Old Mexico.  The conductors get rich
down there, collecting half-fares off the natives and robbing the company.
He was always talking about fellows who had got ahead that way."

`I asked her, of course, why she didn't insist on a civil marriage at once--
that would have given her some hold on him.  She leaned her head on
her hands, poor child, and said, "I just don't know, Mrs. Steavens.
I guess my patience was wore out, waiting so long.  I thought if he saw
how well I could do for him, he'd want to stay with me."

`Jimmy, I sat right down on that bank beside her and made lament.
I cried like a young thing.  I couldn't help it.
I was just about heart-broke. It was one of them lovely warm
May days, and the wind was blowing and the colts jumping
around in the pastures; but I felt bowed with despair.
My Antonia, that had so much good in her, had come home disgraced.
And that Lena Lingard, that was always a bad one, say what you will,
had turned out so well, and was coming home here every summer
in her silks and her satins, and doing so much for her mother.
I give credit where credit is due, but you know well enough,
Jim Burden, there is a great difference in the principles of those
two girls.  And here it was the good one that had come to grief!
I was poor comfort to her.  I marvelled at her calm.
As we went back to the house, she stopped to feel of her clothes
to see if they was drying well, and seemed to take pride in
their whiteness--she said she'd been living in a brick block,
where she didn't have proper conveniences to wash them.

`The next time I saw Antonia, she was out in the fields ploughing corn.
All that spring and summer she did the work of a man on the farm; it seemed
to be an understood thing.  Ambrosch didn't get any other hand to help him.
Poor Marek had got violent and been sent away to an institution a good
while back.  We never even saw any of Tony's pretty dresses.  She didn't
take them out of her trunks.  She was quiet and steady.  Folks respected
her industry and tried to treat her as if nothing had happened.
They talked, to be sure; but not like they would if she'd put on airs.
She was so crushed and quiet that nobody seemed to want to humble her.
She never went anywhere.  All that summer she never once came to see me.
At first I was hurt, but I got to feel that it was because this house
reminded her of too much.  I went over there when I could, but the times
when she was in from the fields were the times when I was busiest here.
She talked about the grain and the weather as if she'd never had
another interest, and if I went over at night she always looked dead weary.
She was afflicted with toothache; one tooth after another ulcerated,
and she went about with her face swollen half the time.  She wouldn't
go to Black Hawk to a dentist for fear of meeting people she knew.
Ambrosch had got over his good spell long ago, and was always surly.
Once I told him he ought not to let Antonia work so hard and pull
herself down.  He said, "If you put that in her head, you better stay home."
And after that I did.

`Antonia worked on through harvest and threshing, though she was too modest
to go out threshing for the neighbours, like when she was young and free.
I didn't see much of her until late that fall when she begun to herd
Ambrosch's cattle in the open ground north of here, up toward the big
dog-town. Sometimes she used to bring them over the west hill,
there, and I would run to meet her and walk north a piece with her.
She had thirty cattle in her bunch; it had been dry, and the pasture
was short, or she wouldn't have brought them so far.

`It was a fine open fall, and she liked to be alone.
While the steers grazed, she used to sit on them grassy
banks along the draws and sun herself for hours.
Sometimes I slipped up to visit with her, when she hadn't
gone too far.

`"It does seem like I ought to make lace, or knit like Lena
used to," she said one day, "but if I start to work, I look
around and forget to go on.  It seems such a little while ago
when Jim Burden and I was playing all over this country.
Up here I can pick out the very places where my father used to stand.
Sometimes I feel like I'm not going to live very long,
so I'm just enjoying every day of this fall."

`After the winter begun she wore a man's long overcoat and boots,
and a man's felt hat with a wide brim.  I used to watch
her coming and going, and I could see that her steps were
getting heavier.  One day in December, the snow began to fall.
Late in the afternoon I saw Antonia driving her cattle homeward
across the hill.  The snow was flying round her and she bent
to face it, looking more lonesome-like to me than usual.
"Deary me," I says to myself, "the girl's stayed out too late.
It'll be dark before she gets them cattle put into the corral."
I seemed to sense she'd been feeling too miserable to get up
and drive them.

`That very night, it happened.  She got her cattle home, turned them into
the corral, and went into the house, into her room behind the kitchen,
and shut the door.  There, without calling to anybody, without a groan,
she lay down on the bed and bore her child.

`I was lifting supper when old Mrs. Shimerda came running
down the basement stairs, out of breath and screeching:

`"Baby come, baby come!" she says.  "Ambrosch much like devil!"

`Brother William is surely a patient man.  He was just ready
to sit down to a hot supper after a long day in the fields.
Without a word he rose and went down to the barn and hooked up
his team.  He got us over there as quick as it was humanly possible.
I went right in, and began to do for Antonia; but she
laid there with her eyes shut and took no account of me.
The old woman got a tubful of warm water to wash the baby.
I overlooked what she was doing and I said out loud:
"Mrs. Shimerda, don't you put that strong yellow soap near that baby.
You'll blister its little skin."  I was indignant.

`"Mrs. Steavens," Antonia said from the bed, "if you'll look
in the top tray of my trunk, you'll see some fine soap."
That was the first word she spoke.

`After I'd dressed the baby, I took it out to show it to Ambrosch.
He was muttering behind the stove and wouldn't look at it.

`"You'd better put it out in the rain-barrel," he says.

`"Now, see here, Ambrosch," says I, "there's a law in this land,
don't forget that.  I stand here a witness that this baby has come into
the world sound and strong, and I intend to keep an eye on what befalls it."
I pride myself I cowed him.

`Well I expect you're not much interested in babies, but Antonia's
got on fine.  She loved it from the first as dearly as if she'd
had a ring on her finger, and was never ashamed of it.
It's a year and eight months old now, and no baby was ever
better cared-for. Antonia is a natural-born mother.
I wish she could marry and raise a family, but I don't know
as there's much chance now.'


I slept that night in the room I used to have when I was a little boy,
with the summer wind blowing in at the windows, bringing the smell
of the ripe fields.  I lay awake and watched the moonlight shining
over the barn and the stacks and the pond, and the windmill making
its old dark shadow against the blue sky.



IV

THE NEXT AFTERNOON I walked over to the Shimerdas'. Yulka showed me the baby
and told me that Antonia was shocking wheat on the southwest quarter.
I went down across the fields, and Tony saw me from a long way off.  She stood
still by her shocks, leaning on her pitchfork, watching me as I came.
We met like the people in the old song, in silence, if not in tears.
Her warm hand clasped mine.

`I thought you'd come, Jim.  I heard you were at Mrs. Steavens's last night.
I've been looking for you all day.'

She was thinner than I had ever seen her, and looked as Mrs. Steavens said,
`worked down,' but there was a new kind of strength in the gravity of
her face, and her colour still gave her that look of deep-seated health
and ardour.  Still?  Why, it flashed across me that though so much had
happened in her life and in mine, she was barely twenty-four years old.

Antonia stuck her fork in the ground, and instinctively we walked toward
that unploughed patch at the crossing of the roads as the fittest
place to talk to each other.  We sat down outside the sagging wire
fence that shut Mr. Shimerda's plot off from the rest of the world.
The tall red grass had never been cut there.  It had died down in winter
and come up again in the spring until it was as thick and shrubby
as some tropical garden-grass. I found myself telling her everything:
why I had decided to study law and to go into the law office of one
of my mother's relatives in New York City; about Gaston Cleric's death
from pneumonia last winter, and the difference it had made in my life.
She wanted to know about my friends, and my way of living,
and my dearest hopes.

`Of course it means you are going away from us for good,'
she said with a sigh.  `But that don't mean I'll lose you.
Look at my papa here; he's been dead all these years,
and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else.
He never goes out of my life.  I talk to him and consult
him all the time.  The older I grow, the better I know him
and the more I understand him.'

She asked me whether I had learned to like big cities.
`I'd always be miserable in a city.  I'd die of lonesomeness.
I like to be where I know every stack and tree, and where
all the ground is friendly.  I want to live and die here.
Father Kelly says everybody's put into this world for something,
and I know what I've got to do.  I'm going to see that
my little girl has a better chance than ever I had.
I'm going to take care of that girl, Jim.'

I told her I knew she would.  `Do you know, Antonia, since I've
been away, I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part
of the world.  I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife,
or my mother or my sister--anything that a woman can be to a man.
The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes
and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it.
You really are a part of me.'

She turned her bright, believing eyes to me, and the tears
came up in them slowly, `How can it be like that, when you
know so many people, and when I've disappointed you so?
Ain't it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other?
I'm so glad we had each other when we were little.
I can't wait till my little girl's old enough to tell her
about all the things we used to do.  You'll always remember
me when you think about old times, won't you?  And I guess
everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people.'

As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped
and lay like a great golden globe in the low west.
While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big
as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour,
thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes,
the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land,
resting on opposite edges of the world.

In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower
stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed;
the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply.
I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out
of those fields at nightfall.  I wished I could be a little boy again,
and that my way could end there.

We reached the edge of the field, where our ways parted.
I took her hands and held them against my breast, feeling once
more how strong and warm and good they were, those brown hands,
and remembering how many kind things they had done for me.
I held them now a long while, over my heart.  About us it
was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see
her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest,
realest face, under all the shadows of women's faces,
at the very bottom of my memory.

`I'll come back,' I said earnestly, through the soft, intrusive darkness.

`Perhaps you will'--I felt rather than saw her smile.
`But even if you don't, you're here, like my father.
So I won't be lonesome.'

As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe
that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do,
laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.





BOOK V

Cuzak's Boys



I

I TOLD ANTONIA I would come back, but life intervened, and it was twenty
years before I kept my promise.  I heard of her from time to time;
that she married, very soon after I last saw her, a young Bohemian,
a cousin of Anton Jelinek; that they were poor, and had a large family.
Once when I was abroad I went into Bohemia, and from Prague I sent
Antonia some photographs of her native village.  Months afterward came
a letter from her, telling me the names and ages of her many children,
but little else; signed, `Your old friend, Antonia Cuzak.'
When I met Tiny Soderball in Salt Lake, she told me that Antonia had not
`done very well'; that her husband was not a man of much force, and she
had had a hard life.  Perhaps it was cowardice that kept me away so long.
My business took me West several times every year, and it was always
in the back of my mind that I would stop in Nebraska some day and go
to see Antonia.  But I kept putting it off until the next trip.
I did not want to find her aged and broken; I really dreaded it.
In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions.
I did not wish to lose the early ones.  Some memories are realities,
and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

I owe it to Lena Lingard that I went to see Antonia at last.
I was in San Francisco two summers ago when both Lena and Tiny
Soderball were in town.  Tiny lives in a house of her own,
and Lena's shop is in an apartment house just around the corner.
It interested me, after so many years, to see the two women together.
Tiny audits Lena's accounts occasionally, and invests her money for her;
and Lena, apparently, takes care that Tiny doesn't grow too miserly.
`If there's anything I can't stand,' she said to me in Tiny's presence,
`it's a shabby rich woman.'  Tiny smiled grimly and assured me that Lena
would never be either shabby or rich.  `And I don't want to be,'
the other agreed complacently.

Lena gave me a cheerful account of Antonia and urged me to make
her a visit.

`You really ought to go, Jim.  It would be such a satisfaction to her.
Never mind what Tiny says.  There's nothing the matter with Cuzak.
You'd like him.  He isn't a hustler, but a rough man would never have
suited Tony.  Tony has nice children--ten or eleven of them by this time,
I guess.  I shouldn't care for a family of that size myself, but somehow
it's just right for Tony.  She'd love to show them to you.'

On my way East I broke my journey at Hastings, in Nebraska,
and set off with an open buggy and a fairly good livery team
to find the Cuzak farm.  At a little past midday, I knew I must
be nearing my destination.  Set back on a swell of land at my right,
I saw a wide farm-house, with a red barn and an ash grove,
and cattle-yards in front that sloped down to the highroad.
I drew up my horses and was wondering whether I should drive in here,
when I heard low voices.  Ahead of me, in a plum thicket beside
the road, I saw two boys bending over a dead dog.  The little one,
not more than four or five, was on his knees, his hands folded,
and his close-clipped, bare head drooping forward in deep dejection.
The other stood beside him, a hand on his shoulder, and was
comforting him in a language I had not heard for a long while.
When I stopped my horses opposite them, the older boy took his
brother by the hand and came toward me.  He, too, looked grave.
This was evidently a sad afternoon for them.

`Are you Mrs. Cuzak's boys?'  I asked.

The younger one did not look up; he was submerged in his own feelings,
but his brother met me with intelligent grey eyes.  `Yes, sir.'

`Does she live up there on the hill?  I am going to see her.
Get in and ride up with me.'

He glanced at his reluctant little brother.  `I guess we'd better walk.
But we'll open the gate for you.'

I drove along the side-road and they followed slowly behind.
When I pulled up at the windmill, another boy, barefooted and
curly-headed, ran out of the barn to tie my team for me.
He was a handsome one, this chap, fair-skinned and freckled,
with red cheeks and a ruddy pelt as thick as a lamb's wool,
growing down on his neck in little tufts.  He tied my team
with two flourishes of his hands, and nodded when I asked him
if his mother was at home.  As he glanced at me, his face
dimpled with a seizure of irrelevant merriment, and he shot up
the windmill tower with a lightness that struck me as disdainful.
I knew he was peering down at me as I walked toward the house.

Ducks and geese ran quacking across my path.  White cats were sunning
themselves among yellow pumpkins on the porch steps.  I looked
through the wire screen into a big, light kitchen with a white floor.
I saw a long table, rows of wooden chairs against the wall,
and a shining range in one corner.  Two girls were washing
dishes at the sink, laughing and chattering, and a little one,
in a short pinafore, sat on a stool playing with a rag baby.
When I asked for their mother, one of the girls dropped her towel,
ran across the floor with noiseless bare feet, and disappeared.
The older one, who wore shoes and stockings, came to the door to admit me.
She was a buxom girl with dark hair and eyes, calm and self-possessed.

`Won't you come in?  Mother will be here in a minute.'

Before I could sit down in the chair she offered me, the miracle
happened; one of those quiet moments that clutch the heart,
and take more courage than the noisy, excited passages in life.
Antonia came in and stood before me; a stalwart, brown woman,
flat-chested, her curly brown hair a little grizzled.
It was a shock, of course.  It always is, to meet people
after long years, especially if they have lived as much and
as hard as this woman had.  We stood looking at each other.
The eyes that peered anxiously at me were--simply Antonia's eyes.
I had seen no others like them since I looked into them last,
though I had looked at so many thousands of human faces.
As I confronted her, the changes grew less apparent to me,
her identity stronger.  She was there, in the full vigour
of her personality, battered but not diminished, looking at me,
speaking to me in the husky, breathy voice I remembered so well.

`My husband's not at home, sir.  Can I do anything?'

`Don't you remember me, Antonia?  Have I changed so much?'

She frowned into the slanting sunlight that made her brown
hair look redder than it was.  Suddenly her eyes widened,
her whole face seemed to grow broader.  She caught her breath
and put out two hard-worked hands.

`Why, it's Jim!  Anna, Yulka, it's Jim Burden!'
She had no sooner caught my hands than she looked alarmed.
`What's happened?  Is anybody dead?'

I patted her arm.

`No. I didn't come to a funeral this time.  I got off the train at Hastings
and drove down to see you and your family.'

She dropped my hand and began rushing about.  `Anton, Yulka,
Nina, where are you all?  Run, Anna, and hunt for the boys.
They're off looking for that dog, somewhere.  And call Leo.
Where is that Leo!'  She pulled them out of corners and came
bringing them like a mother cat bringing in her kittens.
`You don't have to go right off, Jim?  My oldest boy's not here.
He's gone with papa to the street fair at Wilber.  I won't let
you go!  You've got to stay and see Rudolph and our papa.'
She looked at me imploringly, panting with excitement.

While I reassured her and told her there would be plenty of time,
the barefooted boys from outside were slipping into the kitchen
and gathering about her.

`Now, tell me their names, and how old they are.'

As she told them off in turn, she made several mistakes about ages,
and they roared with laughter.  When she came to my light-footed
friend of the windmill, she said, `This is Leo, and he's old enough
to be better than he is.'

He ran up to her and butted her playfully with his curly head,
like a little ram, but his voice was quite desperate.
`You've forgot!  You always forget mine.  It's mean!
Please tell him, mother!'  He clenched his fists in vexation
and looked up at her impetuously.

She wound her forefinger in his yellow fleece and pulled it, watching him.
`Well, how old are you?'

`I'm twelve,' he panted, looking not at me but at her; `I'm twelve years old,
and I was born on Easter Day!'

She nodded to me.  `It's true.  He was an Easter baby.'

The children all looked at me, as if they expected me
to exhibit astonishment or delight at this information.
Clearly, they were proud of each other, and of being so many.
When they had all been introduced, Anna, the eldest daughter,
who had met me at the door, scattered them gently, and came
bringing a white apron which she tied round her mother's waist.

`Now, mother, sit down and talk to Mr. Burden.  We'll finish
the dishes quietly and not disturb you.'

Antonia looked about, quite distracted.  `Yes, child, but why don't we take
him into the parlour, now that we've got a nice parlour for company?'

The daughter laughed indulgently, and took my hat from me.
`Well, you're here, now, mother, and if you talk here, Yulka and I
can listen, too.  You can show him the parlour after while.'
She smiled at me, and went back to the dishes, with her sister.
The little girl with the rag doll found a place on the bottom step
of an enclosed back stairway, and sat with her toes curled up,
looking out at us expectantly.

`She's Nina, after Nina Harling,' Antonia explained.
`Ain't her eyes like Nina's? I declare, Jim, I loved you children
almost as much as I love my own.  These children know all about
you and Charley and Sally, like as if they'd grown up with you.
I can't think of what I want to say, you've got me so stirred up.
And then, I've forgot my English so.  I don't often talk it
any more.  I tell the children I used to speak real well.'
She said they always spoke Bohemian at home.  The little ones
could not speak English at all--didn't learn it until they
went to school.

`I can't believe it's you, sitting here, in my own kitchen.
You wouldn't have known me, would you, Jim?  You've kept
so young, yourself.  But it's easier for a man.  I can't see
how my Anton looks any older than the day I married him.
His teeth have kept so nice.  I haven't got many left.
But I feel just as young as I used to, and I can do as much work.
Oh, we don't have to work so hard now!  We've got plenty
to help us, papa and me.  And how many have you got, Jim?'

When I told her I had no children, she seemed embarrassed.
`Oh, ain't that too bad!  Maybe you could take one of my bad ones, now?
That Leo; he's the worst of all.'  She leaned toward me with a smile.
`And I love him the best,' she whispered.

`Mother!' the two girls murmured reproachfully from the dishes.

Antonia threw up her head and laughed.  `I can't help it.
You know I do.  Maybe it's because he came on Easter Day, I don't know.
And he's never out of mischief one minute!'

I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered--
about her teeth, for instance.  I know so many women who have kept
all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded.
Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.
Her skin, so brown and hardened, had not that look of flabbiness,
as if the sap beneath it had been secretly drawn away.

While we were talking, the little boy whom they called Jan came in and
sat down on the step beside Nina, under the hood of the stairway.
He wore a funny long gingham apron, like a smock, over his trousers,
and his hair was clipped so short that his head looked white and naked.
He watched us out of his big, sorrowful grey eyes.

`He wants to tell you about the dog, mother.  They found it dead,'
Anna said, as she passed us on her way to the cupboard.

Antonia beckoned the boy to her.  He stood by her chair,
leaning his elbows on her knees and twisting her apron strings in his
slender fingers, while he told her his story softly in Bohemian,
and the tears brimmed over and hung on his long lashes.
His mother listened, spoke soothingly to him and in a whisper
promised him something that made him give her a quick, teary smile.
He slipped away and whispered his secret to Nina, sitting close
to her and talking behind his hand.

When Anna finished her work and had washed her hands,
she came and stood behind her mother's chair.  `Why don't we
show Mr. Burden our new fruit cave?' she asked.

We started off across the yard with the children at our heels.
The boys were standing by the windmill, talking about the dog;
some of them ran ahead to open the cellar door.  When we descended,
they all came down after us, and seemed quite as proud of the cave
as the girls were.

Ambrosch, the thoughtful-looking one who had directed me down by the plum
bushes, called my attention to the stout brick walls and the cement floor.
`Yes, it is a good way from the house,' he admitted.  `But, you see, in winter
there are nearly always some of us around to come out and get things.'

Anna and Yulka showed me three small barrels; one full of dill pickles,
one full of chopped pickles, and one full of pickled watermelon rinds.

`You wouldn't believe, Jim, what it takes to feed them all!'
their mother exclaimed.  `You ought to see the bread we bake on
Wednesdays and Saturdays!  It's no wonder their poor papa can't
get rich, he has to buy so much sugar for us to preserve with.
We have our own wheat ground for flour--but then there's that much
less to sell.'

Nina and Jan, and a little girl named Lucie, kept shyly pointing out to me
the shelves of glass jars.  They said nothing, but, glancing at me,
traced on the glass with their finger-tips the outline of the cherries
and strawberries and crabapples within, trying by a blissful expression
of countenance to give me some idea of their deliciousness.

`Show him the spiced plums, mother.  Americans don't have those,'
said one of the older boys.  `Mother uses them to make kolaches,' he added.

Leo, in a low voice, tossed off some scornful remark in Bohemian.

I turned to him.  `You think I don't know what kolaches are, eh?
You're mistaken, young man.  I've eaten your mother's kolaches long
before that Easter Day when you were born.'

`Always too fresh, Leo,' Ambrosch remarked with a shrug.

Leo dived behind his mother and grinned out at me.

We turned to leave the cave; Antonia and I went up the stairs first,
and the children waited.  We were standing outside talking,
when they all came running up the steps together, big and little,
tow heads and gold heads and brown, and flashing little naked legs;
a veritable explosion of life out of the dark cave into the sunlight.
It made me dizzy for a moment.

The boys escorted us to the front of the house, which I hadn't
yet seen; in farm-houses, somehow, life comes and goes by the
back door.  The roof was so steep that the eaves were not much
above the forest of tall hollyhocks, now brown and in seed.
Through July, Antonia said, the house was buried in them;
the Bohemians, I remembered, always planted hollyhocks.
The front yard was enclosed by a thorny locust hedge, and at
the gate grew two silvery, mothlike trees of the mimosa family.
From here one looked down over the cattle-yards, with their
two long ponds, and over a wide stretch of stubble which they
told me was a ryefield in summer.

At some distance behind the house were an ash grove and two orchards:
a cherry orchard, with gooseberry and currant bushes between the rows,
and an apple orchard, sheltered by a high hedge from the hot winds.
The older children turned back when we reached the hedge, but Jan and Nina
and Lucie crept through it by a hole known only to themselves and hid
under the low-branching mulberry bushes.

As we walked through the apple orchard, grown up in tall bluegrass,
Antonia kept stopping to tell me about one tree and another.
`I love them as if they were people,' she said, rubbing her hand
over the bark.  `There wasn't a tree here when we first came.
We planted every one, and used to carry water for them, too--after we'd
been working in the fields all day.  Anton, he was a city man,
and he used to get discouraged.  But I couldn't feel so tired
that I wouldn't fret about these trees when there was a dry time.
They were on my mind like children.  Many a night after he was asleep
I've got up and come out and carried water to the poor things.
And now, you see, we have the good of them.  My man worked in
the orange groves in Florida, and he knows all about grafting.
There ain't one of our neighbours has an orchard that bears like ours.'

In the middle of the orchard we came upon a grape arbour,
with seats built along the sides and a warped plank table.
The three children were waiting for us there.  They looked up
at me bashfully and made some request of their mother.

`They want me to tell you how the teacher has the school picnic
here every year.  These don't go to school yet, so they think it's
all like the picnic.'

After I had admired the arbour sufficiently, the youngsters ran away
to an open place where there was a rough jungle of French pinks,
and squatted down among them, crawling about and measuring with a string.

`Jan wants to bury his dog there,' Antonia explained.
`I had to tell him he could.  He's kind of like Nina Harling;
you remember how hard she used to take little things?
He has funny notions, like her.'

We sat down and watched them.  Antonia leaned her elbows on the table.
There was the deepest peace in that orchard.  It was surrounded by a
triple enclosure; the wire fence, then the hedge of thorny locusts,
then the mulberry hedge which kept out the hot winds of summer
and held fast to the protecting snows of winter.  The hedges were
so tall that we could see nothing but the blue sky above them,
neither the barn roof nor the windmill.  The afternoon sun poured
down on us through the drying grape leaves.  The orchard seemed full
of sun, like a cup, and we could smell the ripe apples on the trees.
The crabs hung on the branches as thick as beads on a string,
purple-red, with a thin silvery glaze over them.  Some hens and ducks
had crept through the hedge and were pecking at the fallen apples.
The drakes were handsome fellows, with pinkish grey bodies,
their heads and necks covered with iridescent green feathers
which grew close and full, changing to blue like a peacock's neck.
Antonia said they always reminded her of soldiers--some uniform
she had seen in the old country, when she was a child.

`Are there any quail left now?'  I asked.  I reminded her how she
used to go hunting with me the last summer before we moved to town.
`You weren't a bad shot, Tony.  Do you remember how you used to want
to run away and go for ducks with Charley Harling and me?'

`I know, but I'm afraid to look at a gun now.'  She picked up
one of the drakes and ruffled his green capote with her fingers.
`Ever since I've had children, I don't like to kill anything.
It makes me kind of faint to wring an old goose's neck.
Ain't that strange, Jim?'

`I don't know.  The young Queen of Italy said the same thing once,
to a friend of mine.  She used to be a great huntswoman,
but now she feels as you do, and only shoots clay pigeons.'

`Then I'm sure she's a good mother,' Antonia said warmly.

She told me how she and her husband had come out to this new country
when the farm-land was cheap and could be had on easy payments.
The first ten years were a hard struggle.  Her husband knew
very little about farming and often grew discouraged.
`We'd never have got through if I hadn't been so strong.
I've always had good health, thank God, and I was able to help him
in the fields until right up to the time before my babies came.
Our children were good about taking care of each other.
Martha, the one you saw when she was a baby, was such
a help to me, and she trained Anna to be just like her.
My Martha's married now, and has a baby of her own.
Think of that, Jim!

`No, I never got down-hearted. Anton's a good man, and I loved
my children and always believed they would turn out well.
I belong on a farm.  I'm never lonesome here like I used to be in town.
You remember what sad spells I used to have, when I didn't know
what was the matter with me?  I've never had them out here.
And I don't mind work a bit, if I don't have to put up with sadness.'
She leaned her chin on her hand and looked down through the orchard,
where the sunlight was growing more and more golden.

`You ought never to have gone to town, Tony,' I said, wondering at her.

She turned to me eagerly.

`Oh, I'm glad I went!  I'd never have known anything about cooking
or housekeeping if I hadn't. I learned nice ways at the Harlings',
and I've been able to bring my children up so much better.
Don't you think they are pretty well-behaved for country children?
If it hadn't been for what Mrs. Harling taught me, I expect I'd have
brought them up like wild rabbits.  No, I'm glad I had a chance to learn;
but I'm thankful none of my daughters will ever have to work out.
The trouble with me was, Jim, I never could believe harm of
anybody I loved.'

While we were talking, Antonia assured me that she
could keep me for the night.  `We've plenty of room.
Two of the boys sleep in the haymow till cold weather comes,
but there's no need for it.  Leo always begs to sleep there,
and Ambrosch goes along to look after him.'

I told her I would like to sleep in the haymow, with the boys.

`You can do just as you want to.  The chest is full of clean blankets,
put away for winter.  Now I must go, or my girls will be doing all the work,
and I want to cook your supper myself.'

As we went toward the house, we met Ambrosch and Anton,
starting off with their milking-pails to hunt the cows.
I joined them, and Leo accompanied us at some distance,
running ahead and starting up at us out of clumps of ironweed,
calling, `I'm a jack rabbit,' or, `I'm a big bull-snake.'

I walked between the two older boys--straight, well-made fellows,
with good heads and clear eyes.  They talked about their school
and the new teacher, told me about the crops and the harvest,
and how many steers they would feed that winter.  They were easy
and confidential with me, as if I were an old friend of the family--
and not too old.  I felt like a boy in their company, and all manner
of forgotten interests revived in me.  It seemed, after all,
so natural to be walking along a barbed-wire fence beside the sunset,
toward a red pond, and to see my shadow moving along at my right,
over the close-cropped grass.

`Has mother shown you the pictures you sent her from the old country?'
Ambrosch asked.  `We've had them framed and they're hung up in the parlour.
She was so glad to get them.  I don't believe I ever saw her so pleased
about anything.'  There was a note of simple gratitude in his voice that made
me wish I had given more occasion for it.

I put my hand on his shoulder.  `Your mother, you know,
was very much loved by all of us.  She was a beautiful girl.'

`Oh, we know!'  They both spoke together; seemed a little
surprised that I should think it necessary to mention this.
`Everybody liked her, didn't they?  The Harlings and your grandmother,
and all the town people.'

`Sometimes,' I ventured, `it doesn't occur to boys that their mother
was ever young and pretty.'

`Oh, we know!' they said again, warmly.  `She's not very old now,'
Ambrosch added.  `Not much older than you.'

`Well,' I said, `if you weren't nice to her, I think I'd take a club and go
for the whole lot of you.  I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate,
or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you.
You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's
nobody like her.'

The boys laughed and seemed pleased and embarrassed.

`She never told us that,' said Anton.  `But she's always talked
lots about you, and about what good times you used to have.
She has a picture of you that she cut out of the Chicago paper once,
and Leo says he recognized you when you drove up to the windmill.
You can't tell about Leo, though; sometimes he likes to be smart.'

We brought the cows home to the corner nearest the barn, and the boys
milked them while night came on.  Everything was as it should be:
the strong smell of sunflowers and ironweed in the dew, the clear blue
and gold of the sky, the evening star, the purr of the milk into the pails,
the grunts and squeals of the pigs fighting over their supper.
I began to feel the loneliness of the farm-boy at evening, when the chores
seem everlastingly the same, and the world so far away.

What a tableful we were at supper:  two long rows of restless
heads in the lamplight, and so many eyes fastened excitedly upon
Antonia as she sat at the head of the table, filling the plates
and starting the dishes on their way.  The children were seated
according to a system; a little one next an older one, who was
to watch over his behaviour and to see that he got his food.
Anna and Yulka left their chairs from time to time to bring
fresh plates of kolaches and pitchers of milk.

After supper we went into the parlour, so that Yulka and Leo
could play for me.  Antonia went first, carrying the lamp.
There were not nearly chairs enough to go round,
so the younger children sat down on the bare floor.
Little Lucie whispered to me that they were going to have
a parlour carpet if they got ninety cents for their wheat.
Leo, with a good deal of fussing, got out his violin.
It was old Mr. Shimerda's instrument, which Antonia had always kept,
and it was too big for him.  But he played very well for a
self-taught boy.  Poor Yulka's efforts were not so successful.
While they were playing, little Nina got up from her corner,
came out into the middle of the floor, and began to do
a pretty little dance on the boards with her bare feet.
No one paid the least attention to her, and when she was
through she stole back and sat down by her brother.

Antonia spoke to Leo in Bohemian.  He frowned and wrinkled up his face.
He seemed to be trying to pout, but his attempt only brought out
dimples in unusual places.  After twisting and screwing the keys,
he played some Bohemian airs, without the organ to hold him back,
and that went better.  The boy was so restless that I had not had
a chance to look at his face before.  My first impression was right;
he really was faun-like. He hadn't much head behind his ears,
and his tawny fleece grew down thick to the back of his neck.
His eyes were not frank and wide apart like those of the other boys,
but were deep-set, gold-green in colour, and seemed sensitive to the light.
His mother said he got hurt oftener than all the others put together.
He was always trying to ride the colts before they were broken,
teasing the turkey gobbler, seeing just how much red the bull would
stand for, or how sharp the new axe was.

After the concert was over, Antonia brought out a big boxful of photographs:
she and Anton in their wedding clothes, holding hands; her brother Ambrosch
and his very fat wife, who had a farm of her own, and who bossed her husband,
I was delighted to hear; the three Bohemian Marys and their large families.

`You wouldn't believe how steady those girls have turned out,'
Antonia remarked.  `Mary Svoboda's the best butter-maker
in all this country, and a fine manager.  Her children will
have a grand chance.'

As Antonia turned over the pictures the young Cuzaks stood behind her chair,
looking over her shoulder with interested faces.  Nina and Jan,
after trying to see round the taller ones, quietly brought a chair,
climbed up on it, and stood close together, looking.  The little boy forgot
his shyness and grinned delightedly when familiar faces came into view.
In the group about Antonia I was conscious of a kind of physical harmony.
They leaned this way and that, and were not afraid to touch each other.
They contemplated the photographs with pleased recognition; looked at
some admiringly, as if these characters in their mother's girlhood had been
remarkable people.  The little children, who could not speak English,
murmured comments to each other in their rich old language.

Antonia held out a photograph of Lena that had come from San
Francisco last Christmas.  `Does she still look like that?
She hasn't been home for six years now.'  Yes, it was exactly
like Lena, I told her; a comely woman, a trifle too plump,
in a hat a trifle too large, but with the old lazy eyes,
and the old dimpled ingenuousness still lurking at the corners
of her mouth.

There was a picture of Frances Harling in a befrogged riding costume that I
remembered well.  `Isn't she fine!' the girls murmured.  They all assented.
One could see that Frances had come down as a heroine in the family legend.
Only Leo was unmoved.

`And there's Mr. Harling, in his grand fur coat.  He was awfully rich,
wasn't he, mother?'

`He wasn't any Rockefeller,' put in Master Leo, in a very low tone,
which reminded me of the way in which Mrs. Shimerda had once said
that my grandfather `wasn't Jesus.'  His habitual scepticism was
like a direct inheritance from that old woman.

`None of your smart speeches,' said Ambrosch severely.

Leo poked out a supple red tongue at him, but a moment later broke
into a giggle at a tintype of two men, uncomfortably seated,
with an awkward-looking boy in baggy clothes standing between them:
Jake and Otto and I!  We had it taken, I remembered, when we went
to Black Hawk on the first Fourth of July I spent in Nebraska.
I was glad to see Jake's grin again, and Otto's ferocious moustaches.
The young Cuzaks knew all about them.  `He made grandfather's coffin,
didn't he?'  Anton asked.

`Wasn't they good fellows, Jim?'  Antonia's eyes filled.
`To this day I'm ashamed because I quarrelled with Jake that way.
I was saucy and impertinent to him, Leo, like you are with
people sometimes, and I wish somebody had made me behave.'

`We aren't through with you, yet,' they warned me.
They produced a photograph taken just before I went away to college:
a tall youth in striped trousers and a straw hat, trying to look
easy and jaunty.

`Tell us, Mr. Burden,' said Charley, `about the rattler you killed
at the dog-town. How long was he?  Sometimes mother says six feet
and sometimes she says five.'

These children seemed to be upon very much the same terms with
Antonia as the Harling children had been so many years before.
They seemed to feel the same pride in her, and to look to her
for stories and entertainment as we used to do.

It was eleven o'clock when I at last took my bag and some blankets
and started for the barn with the boys.  Their mother came to the door
with us, and we tarried for a moment to look out at the white
slope of the corral and the two ponds asleep in the moonlight,
and the long sweep of the pasture under the star-sprinkled sky.

The boys told me to choose my own place in the haymow,
and I lay down before a big window, left open in warm weather,
that looked out into the stars.  Ambrosch and Leo cuddled up in a
hay-cave, back under the eaves, and lay giggling and whispering.
They tickled each other and tossed and tumbled in the hay;
and then, all at once, as if they had been shot, they were still.
There was hardly a minute between giggles and bland slumber.

I lay awake for a long while, until the slow-moving moon passed
my window on its way up the heavens.  I was thinking about
Antonia and her children; about Anna's solicitude for her,
Ambrosch's grave affection, Leo's jealous, animal little love.
That moment, when they all came tumbling out of the cave into
the light, was a sight any man might have come far to see.
Antonia had always been one to leave images in the mind
that did not fade--that grew stronger with time.
In my memory there was a succession of such pictures,
fixed there like the old woodcuts of one's first primer:
Antonia kicking her bare legs against the sides of my pony when we
came home in triumph with our snake; Antonia in her black shawl
and fur cap, as she stood by her father's grave in the snowstorm;
Antonia coming in with her work-team along the evening sky-line.
She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize
by instinct as universal and true.  I had not been mistaken.
She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she
still had that something which fires the imagination,
could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or
gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things.
She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a
little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel
the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last.
All the strong things of her heart came out in her body,
that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions.

It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight.
She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.



II

WHEN I AWOKE IN THE morning, long bands of sunshine were
coming in at the window and reaching back under the eaves
where the two boys lay.  Leo was wide awake and was tickling
his brother's leg with a dried cone-flower he had pulled
out of the hay.  Ambrosch kicked at him and turned over.
I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep.  Leo lay on
his back, elevated one foot, and began exercising his toes.
He picked up dried flowers with his toes and brandished them
in the belt of sunlight.  After he had amused himself thus
for some time, he rose on one elbow and began to look at me,
cautiously, then critically, blinking his eyes in the light.
His expression was droll; it dismissed me lightly.
`This old fellow is no different from other people.
He doesn't know my secret.'  He seemed conscious of possessing
a keener power of enjoyment than other people; his quick recognitions
made him frantically impatient of deliberate judgments.
He always knew what he wanted without thinking.

After dressing in the hay, I washed my face in cold water at the windmill.
Breakfast was ready when I entered the kitchen, and Yulka was baking
griddle-cakes. The three older boys set off for the fields early.
Leo and Yulka were to drive to town to meet their father, who would
return from Wilber on the noon train.

`We'll only have a lunch at noon,' Antonia said,
and cook the geese for supper, when our papa will be here.
I wish my Martha could come down to see you.  They have a Ford
car now, and she don't seem so far away from me as she used to.
But her husband's crazy about his farm and about having
everything just right, and they almost never get away
except on Sundays.  He's a handsome boy, and he'll be rich
some day.  Everything he takes hold of turns out well.
When they bring that baby in here, and unwrap him, he looks
like a little prince; Martha takes care of him so beautiful.
I'm reconciled to her being away from me now, but at first I
cried like I was putting her into her coffin.'

We were alone in the kitchen, except for Anna, who was pouring
cream into the churn.  She looked up at me.  `Yes, she did.
We were just ashamed of mother.  She went round crying,
when Martha was so happy, and the rest of us were all glad.
Joe certainly was patient with you, mother.'

Antonia nodded and smiled at herself.  `I know it was silly,
but I couldn't help it.  I wanted her right here.
She'd never been away from me a night since she was born.
If Anton had made trouble about her when she was a baby, or wanted
me to leave her with my mother, I wouldn't have married him.
I couldn't. But he always loved her like she was his own.'

`I didn't even know Martha wasn't my full sister until after she
was engaged to Joe,' Anna told me.

Toward the middle of the afternoon, the wagon drove in, with the father and
the eldest son.  I was smoking in the orchard, and as I went out to meet them,
Antonia came running down from the house and hugged the two men as if they
had been away for months.

`Papa,' interested me, from my first glimpse of him.
He was shorter than his older sons; a crumpled little man,
with run-over boot-heels, and he carried one shoulder
higher than the other.  But he moved very quickly,
and there was an air of jaunty liveliness about him.
He had a strong, ruddy colour, thick black hair, a little grizzled,
a curly moustache, and red lips.  His smile showed the strong
teeth of which his wife was so proud, and as he saw me
his lively, quizzical eyes told me that he knew all about me.
He looked like a humorous philosopher who had hitched up one
shoulder under the burdens of life, and gone on his way having
a good time when he could.  He advanced to meet me and gave me
a hard hand, burned red on the back and heavily coated with hair.
He wore his Sunday clothes, very thick and hot for the weather,
an unstarched white shirt, and a blue necktie with big
white dots, like a little boy's, tied in a flowing bow.
Cuzak began at once to talk about his holiday--from politeness
he spoke in English.

`Mama, I wish you had see the lady dance on the slack-wire
in the street at night.  They throw a bright light on her and
she float through the air something beautiful, like a bird!
They have a dancing bear, like in the old country, and two-three
merry-go-around, and people in balloons, and what you call
the big wheel, Rudolph?'

`A Ferris wheel,' Rudolph entered the conversation in a deep baritone voice.
He was six foot two, and had a chest like a young blacksmith.
`We went to the big dance in the hall behind the saloon last night,
mother, and I danced with all the girls, and so did father.
I never saw so many pretty girls.  It was a Bohunk crowd, for sure.
We didn't hear a word of English on the street, except from the show people,
did we, papa?'

Cuzak nodded.  `And very many send word to you, Antonia.
You will excuse'--turning to me--`if I tell her.'  While we walked
toward the house he related incidents and delivered messages
in the tongue he spoke fluently, and I dropped a little behind,
curious to know what their relations had become--or remained.
The two seemed to be on terms of easy friendliness, touched
with humour.  Clearly, she was the impulse, and he the corrective.
As they went up the hill he kept glancing at her sidewise,
to see whether she got his point, or how she received it.
I noticed later that he always looked at people sidewise,
as a work-horse does at its yokemate.  Even when he sat opposite
me in the kitchen, talking, he would turn his head a little
toward the clock or the stove and look at me from the side,
but with frankness and good nature.  This trick did not
suggest duplicity or secretiveness, but merely long habit,
as with the horse.

He had brought a tintype of himself and Rudolph for Antonia's collection,
and several paper bags of candy for the children.  He looked a little
disappointed when his wife showed him a big box of candy I had got
in Denver--she hadn't let the children touch it the night before.
He put his candy away in the cupboard, `for when she rains,'
and glanced at the box, chuckling.  `I guess you must have hear
about how my family ain't so small,' he said.

Cuzak sat down behind the stove and watched his womenfolk
and the little children with equal amusement.  He thought
they were nice, and he thought they were funny, evidently.
He had been off dancing with the girls and forgetting that he was
an old fellow, and now his family rather surprised him; he seemed
to think it a joke that all these children should belong to him.
As the younger ones slipped up to him in his retreat, he kept
taking things out of his pockets; penny dolls, a wooden clown,
a balloon pig that was inflated by a whistle.  He beckoned to
the little boy they called Jan, whispered to him, and presented
him with a paper snake, gently, so as not to startle him.
Looking over the boy's head he said to me, `This one is bashful.
He gets left.'

Cuzak had brought home with him a roll of illustrated Bohemian papers.
He opened them and began to tell his wife the news, much of which seemed to
relate to one person.  I heard the name Vasakova, Vasakova, repeated several
times with lively interest, and presently I asked him whether he were talking
about the singer, Maria Vasak.

`You know?  You have heard, maybe?' he asked incredulously.
When I assured him that I had heard her, he pointed out her
picture and told me that Vasak had broken her leg, climbing in
the Austrian Alps, and would not be able to fill her engagements.
He seemed delighted to find that I had heard her sing in
London and in Vienna; got out his pipe and lit it to enjoy
our talk the better.  She came from his part of Prague.
His father used to mend her shoes for her when she was a student.
Cuzak questioned me about her looks, her popularity, her voice;
but he particularly wanted to know whether I had noticed her
tiny feet, and whether I thought she had saved much money.
She was extravagant, of course, but he hoped she wouldn't
squander everything, and have nothing left when she was old.
As a young man, working in Wienn, he had seen a good many artists
who were old and poor, making one glass of beer last all evening,
and `it was not very nice, that.'

When the boys came in from milking and feeding, the long table
was laid, and two brown geese, stuffed with apples, were put
down sizzling before Antonia.  She began to carve, and Rudolph,
who sat next his mother, started the plates on their way.
When everybody was served, he looked across the table at me.

`Have you been to Black Hawk lately, Mr. Burden?
Then I wonder if you've heard about the Cutters?'

No, I had heard nothing at all about them.

`Then you must tell him, son, though it's a terrible thing
to talk about at supper.  Now, all you children be quiet,
Rudolph is going to tell about the murder.'

`Hurrah! The murder!' the children murmured, looking pleased and interested.

Rudolph told his story in great detail, with occasional promptings
from his mother or father.

Wick Cutter and his wife had gone on living in the house that
Antonia and I knew so well, and in the way we knew so well.
They grew to be very old people.  He shrivelled up,
Antonia said, until he looked like a little old yellow monkey,
for his beard and his fringe of hair never changed colour.
Mrs. Cutter remained flushed and wild-eyed as we had known her,
but as the years passed she became afflicted with a shaking palsy
which made her nervous nod continuous instead of occasional.
Her hands were so uncertain that she could no longer disfigure china,
poor woman!  As the couple grew older, they quarrelled more and
more often about the ultimate disposition of their `property.'
A new law was passed in the state, securing the surviving
wife a third of her husband's estate under all conditions.
Cutter was tormented by the fear that Mrs. Cutter would
live longer than he, and that eventually her `people,'
whom he had always hated so violently, would inherit.
Their quarrels on this subject passed the boundary of the
close-growing cedars, and were heard in the street by whoever
wished to loiter and listen.

One morning, two years ago, Cutter went into the hardware store and
bought a pistol, saying he was going to shoot a dog, and adding that
he `thought he would take a shot at an old cat while he was about it.'
(Here the children interrupted Rudolph's narrative by smothered giggles.)

Cutter went out behind the hardware store, put up a target,
practised for an hour or so, and then went home.  At six
o'clock that evening, when several men were passing the Cutter
house on their way home to supper, they heard a pistol shot.
They paused and were looking doubtfully at one another,
when another shot came crashing through an upstairs window.
They ran into the house and found Wick Cutter lying on
a sofa in his upstairs bedroom, with his throat torn open,
bleeding on a roll of sheets he had placed beside his head.

`Walk in, gentlemen,' he said weakly.  `I am alive, you see,
and competent.  You are witnesses that I have survived my wife.
You will find her in her own room.  Please make your examination
at once, so that there will be no mistake.'

One of the neighbours telephoned for a doctor, while the others
went into Mrs. Cutter's room.  She was lying on her bed,
in her night-gown and wrapper, shot through the heart.
Her husband must have come in while she was taking her afternoon
nap and shot her, holding the revolver near her breast.
Her night-gown was burned from the powder.

The horrified neighbours rushed back to Cutter.  He opened his eyes and
said distinctly, `Mrs. Cutter is quite dead, gentlemen, and I am conscious.
My affairs are in order.'  Then, Rudolph said, `he let go and died.'

On his desk the coroner found a letter, dated at five o'clock that afternoon.
It stated that he had just shot his wife; that any will she might secretly
have made would be invalid, as he survived her.  He meant to shoot himself at
six o'clock and would, if he had strength, fire a shot through the window in
the hope that passersby might come in and see him `before life was extinct,'
as he wrote.

`Now, would you have thought that man had such a cruel heart?'
Antonia turned to me after the story was told.  `To go and do
that poor woman out of any comfort she might have from his money
after he was gone!'

`Did you ever hear of anybody else that killed himself for spite,
Mr. Burden?' asked Rudolph.

I admitted that I hadn't. Every lawyer learns over and over
how strong a motive hate can be, but in my collection
of legal anecdotes I had nothing to match this one.
When I asked how much the estate amounted to, Rudolph said it
was a little over a hundred thousand dollars.

Cuzak gave me a twinkling, sidelong glance.  `The lawyers,
they got a good deal of it, sure,' he said merrily.

A hundred thousand dollars; so that was the fortune that had been
scraped together by such hard dealing, and that Cutter himself
had died for in the end!

After supper Cuzak and I took a stroll in the orchard and sat
down by the windmill to smoke.  He told me his story as if it
were my business to know it.

His father was a shoemaker, his uncle a furrier, and he,
being a younger son, was apprenticed to the latter's trade.
You never got anywhere working for your relatives, he said,
so when he was a journeyman he went to Vienna and worked
in a big fur shop, earning good money.  But a young fellow
who liked a good time didn't save anything in Vienna; there were
too many pleasant ways of spending every night what he'd made
in the day.  After three years there, he came to New York.
He was badly advised and went to work on furs during a strike,
when the factories were offering big wages.  The strikers won,
and Cuzak was blacklisted.  As he had a few hundred
dollars ahead, he decided to go to Florida and raise oranges.
He had always thought he would like to raise oranges!
The second year a hard frost killed his young grove,
and he fell ill with malaria.  He came to Nebraska
to visit his cousin, Anton Jelinek, and to look about.
When he began to look about, he saw Antonia, and she was
exactly the kind of girl he had always been hunting for.
They were married at once, though he had to borrow money
from his cousin to buy the wedding ring.

`It was a pretty hard job, breaking up this place and making
the first crops grow,' he said, pushing back his hat and scratching
his grizzled hair.  `Sometimes I git awful sore on this place and want
to quit, but my wife she always say we better stick it out.  The babies
come along pretty fast, so it look like it be hard to move, anyhow.
I guess she was right, all right.  We got this place clear now.
We pay only twenty dollars an acre then, and I been offered a hundred.
We bought another quarter ten years ago, and we got it most paid for.
We got plenty boys; we can work a lot of land.  Yes, she is a good
wife for a poor man.  She ain't always so strict with me, neither.
Sometimes maybe I drink a little too much beer in town, and when I
come home she don't say nothing.  She don't ask me no questions.
We always get along fine, her and me, like at first.
The children don't make trouble between us, like sometimes happens.'
He lit another pipe and pulled on it contentedly.

I found Cuzak a most companionable fellow.  He asked me a great many
questions about my trip through Bohemia, about Vienna and the Ringstrasse
and the theatres.

`Gee! I like to go back there once, when the boys is big enough to farm
the place.  Sometimes when I read the papers from the old country,
I pretty near run away,' he confessed with a little laugh.
`I never did think how I would be a settled man like this.'

He was still, as Antonia said, a city man.  He liked theatres and lighted
streets and music and a game of dominoes after the day's work was over.
His sociability was stronger than his acquisitive instinct.
He liked to live day by day and night by night, sharing in the excitement
of the crowd.--Yet his wife had managed to hold him here on a farm,
in one of the loneliest countries in the world.

I could see the little chap, sitting here every evening by
the windmill, nursing his pipe and listening to the silence;
the wheeze of the pump, the grunting of the pigs,
an occasional squawking when the hens were disturbed by a rat.
It did rather seem to me that Cuzak had been made the instrument
of Antonia's special mission.  This was a fine life, certainly,
but it wasn't the kind of life he had wanted to live.
I wondered whether the life that was right for one was ever
right for two!

I asked Cuzak if he didn't find it hard to do without the gay
company he had always been used to.  He knocked out his pipe
against an upright, sighed, and dropped it into his pocket.

`At first I near go crazy with lonesomeness,' he said frankly, `but my woman
is got such a warm heart.  She always make it as good for me as she could.
Now it ain't so bad; I can begin to have some fun with my boys, already!'

As we walked toward the house, Cuzak cocked his hat jauntily over one
ear and looked up at the moon.  `Gee!' he said in a hushed voice,
as if he had just wakened up, `it don't seem like I am away from
there twenty-six year!'


III

AFTER DINNER THE NEXT day I said good-bye and drove
back to Hastings to take the train for Black Hawk.
Antonia and her children gathered round my buggy before I started,
and even the little ones looked up at me with friendly faces.
Leo and Ambrosch ran ahead to open the lane gate.
When I reached the bottom of the hill, I glanced back.
The group was still there by the windmill.  Antonia was
waving her apron.

At the gate Ambrosch lingered beside my buggy, resting his arm
on the wheel-rim. Leo slipped through the fence and ran off
into the pasture.

`That's like him,' his brother said with a shrug.  `He's a crazy kid.
Maybe he's sorry to have you go, and maybe he's jealous.
He's jealous of anybody mother makes a fuss over, even the priest.'

I found I hated to leave this boy, with his pleasant voice and his fine
head and eyes.  He looked very manly as he stood there without a hat,
the wind rippling his shirt about his brown neck and shoulders.

`Don't forget that you and Rudolph are going hunting with me up
on the Niobrara next summer,' I said.  `Your father's agreed to let
you off after harvest.'

He smiled.  `I won't likely forget.  I've never had such a nice thing
offered to me before.  I don't know what makes you so nice to us boys,'
he added, blushing.

`Oh, yes, you do!'  I said, gathering up my reins.

He made no answer to this, except to smile at me with unabashed
pleasure and affection as I drove away.

My day in Black Hawk was disappointing.  Most of my old friends
were dead or had moved away.  Strange children, who meant nothing
to me, were playing in the Harlings' big yard when I passed;
the mountain ash had been cut down, and only a sprouting stump
was left of the tall Lombardy poplar that used to guard the gate.
I hurried on.  The rest of the morning I spent with Anton Jelinek,
under a shady cottonwood tree in the yard behind his saloon.
While I was having my midday dinner at the hotel, I met one
of the old lawyers who was still in practice, and he took me
up to his office and talked over the Cutter case with me.
After that, I scarcely knew how to put in the time until
the night express was due.

I took a long walk north of the town, out into the pastures
where the land was so rough that it had never been ploughed up,
and the long red grass of early times still grew shaggy over
the draws and hillocks.  Out there I felt at home again.
Overhead the sky was that indescribable blue of autumn;
bright and shadowless, hard as enamel.  To the south I could
see the dun-shaded river bluffs that used to look so big to me,
and all about stretched drying cornfields, of the pale-gold colour,
I remembered so well.  Russian thistles were blowing across
the uplands and piling against the wire fences like barricades.
Along the cattle-paths the plumes of goldenrod were already
fading into sun-warmed velvet, grey with gold threads in it.
I had escaped from the curious depression that hangs over little towns,
and my mind was full of pleasant things; trips I meant to take
with the Cuzak boys, in the Bad Lands and up on the Stinking Water.
There were enough Cuzaks to play with for a long while yet.
Even after the boys grew up, there would always be Cuzak himself!
I meant to tramp along a few miles of lighted streets with Cuzak.

As I wandered over those rough pastures, I had the good luck
to stumble upon a bit of the first road that went from Black
Hawk out to the north country; to my grandfather's farm,
then on to the Shimerdas' and to the Norwegian settlement.
Everywhere else it had been ploughed under when the highways
were surveyed; this half-mile or so within the pasture fence
was all that was left of that old road which used to run like a
wild thing across the open prairie, clinging to the high places
and circling and doubling like a rabbit before the hounds.

On the level land the tracks had almost disappeared--were mere
shadings in the grass, and a stranger would not have noticed them.
But wherever the road had crossed a draw, it was easy to find.
The rains had made channels of the wheel-ruts and washed
them so deeply that the sod had never healed over them.
They looked like gashes torn by a grizzly's claws, on the slopes
where the farm-wagons used to lurch up out of the hollows with a pull
that brought curling muscles on the smooth hips of the horses.
I sat down and watched the haystacks turn rosy in the slanting sunlight.

This was the road over which Antonia and I came on that night
when we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in
the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither.
I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in
the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness.
The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and
touch them with my hand.  I had the sense of coming home to myself,
and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is.
For Antonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny;
had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined
for us all that we can ever be.  Now I understood that the same
road was to bring us together again.  Whatever we had missed,
we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.



THE END




End of Project Gutenberg text of My Antonia by Willa Cather

</span>
<h1>


                      The Troll Garden
                             and
                      Selected Stories</h1><h2>
                       by Willa Cather</h2>
<sub>
              Introduction by Rita Mae Brown</sub>
<span>







                        BANTAM BOOKS

     NEW YORK - TORONTO - LONDON - SYDNEY - AUCKLAND



          THE TROLL GARDEN AND SELECTED STORIES
          <i>A Bantam Classic Book / November 1990</i>
<i>Cover art "Stone City, Iowa" by Grant Wood;
              courtesy of Joselyn Art Museum</i>
<i>All rights reserved.</i>
<i>Introduction copyright (c) 1990 by Rita Mae Brown.
  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted
  in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
 including photocopying, recording, or by any information
  storage and retrieval system, without permission in 
                writing from the publisher.

          For information address: Bantam Books.</i>

                     ISBN 0-553-21385-7

<i>Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada</i>
<i>Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.  Its trademark, consisting of
the words "Bantam Books" and the portrayal of a rooster, is
Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other
countries.  Marca Registrada.  Bantam Books, 666 Fifth Avenue, New
York, New York 10103.</i>

      PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

       OPM       0  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1



                Contents

Introduction by Rita Mae Brown                     vii


<i>Selected Stories</i>

On the Divide                                        1
Eric Hermannson's Soul                              15
The Enchanted Bluff                                 40
The Bohemian Girl                                   51


<i>The Troll Garden</i>

Flavia and Her Artists                              99
The Sculptor's Funeral                             128
"A Death in the Desert"                            144
The Garden Lodge                                   167
The Marriage of Phaedra                            180
A Wagner Matinee                                   199
Paul's Case                                        208






Selected Stories


On the Divide


Near Rattlesnake Creek, on the side of a little draw stood
Canute's shanty.  North, east, south, stretched the level
Nebraska plain of long rust-red grass that undulated constantly
in the wind.  To the west the ground was broken and rough, and a
narrow strip of timber wound along the turbid, muddy little
stream that had scarcely ambition enough to crawl over its black
bottom.  If it had not been for the few stunted cottonwoods and
elms that grew along its banks, Canute would have shot himself
years ago.  The Norwegians are a timber-loving people, and if
there is even a turtle pond with a few plum bushes around it they
seem irresistibly drawn toward it.

As to the shanty itself, Canute had built it without aid of
any kind, for when he first squatted along the banks of
Rattlesnake Creek there was not a human being within twenty
miles.  It was built of logs split in halves, the chinks stopped
with mud and plaster.  The roof was covered with earth and was
supported by one gigantic beam curved in the shape of a round
arch.  It was almost impossible that any tree had ever grown in
that shape.  The Norwegians used to say that Canute had taken the
log across his knee and bent it into the shape he wished.  There
were two rooms, or rather there was one room with a partition
made of ash saplings interwoven and bound together like big straw
basket work.  In one corner there was a cook stove, rusted and
broken.  In the other a bed made of unplaned planks and poles. it
was fully eight feet long, and upon it was a heap of dark bed
clothing.  There was a chair and a bench of colossal proportions. 
There was an ordinary kitchen cupboard with a few cracked dirty
dishes in it, and beside it on a tall box a tin washbasin.  Under
the bed was a pile of pint flasks, some broken, some whole,
all empty.  On the wood box lay a pair of shoes of almost
incredible dimensions.  On the wall hung a saddle, a gun, and
some ragged clothing, conspicuous among which was a suit of dark
cloth, apparently new, with a paper collar carefully wrapped in a
red silk handkerchief and pinned to the sleeve.  Over the door hung
a wolf and a badger skin, and on the door itself a brace of thirty
or forty snake skins whose noisy tails rattled ominously every time
it opened.  The strangest things in the shanty were the wide
windowsills.  At first glance they looked as though they had been
ruthlessly hacked and mutilated with a hatchet, but on closer
inspection all the notches and holes in the wood took form and
shape.  There seemed to be a series of pictures.  They were, in a
rough way, artistic, but the figures were heavy and labored, as
though they had been cut very slowly and with very awkward
instruments.  There were men plowing with little horned imps
sitting on their shoulders and on their horses' heads. There were
men praying with a skull hanging over their heads and little demons
behind them mocking their attitudes.  There were men fighting with
big serpents, and skeletons dancing together.  All about these
pictures were blooming vines and foliage such as never grew in this
world, and coiled among the branches of the vines there was always
the scaly body of a serpent, and behind every flower there was a
serpent's head.  It was a veritable Dance of Death by one who had
felt its sting.  In the wood box lay some boards, and every inch of
them was cut up in the same manner.  Sometimes the work was very
rude and careless, and looked as though the hand of the workman had
trembled.  It would sometimes have been hard to distinguish the men
from their evil geniuses but for one fact, the men were always
grave and were either toiling or praying, while the devils were
always smiling and dancing.  Several of these boards had been split
for kindling and it was evident that the artist did not value his
work highly.

It was the first day of winter on the Divide.  Canute stumbled
into his shanty carrying a basket of. cobs, and after filling the
stove, sat down on a stool and crouched his seven foot frame over
the fire, staring drearily out of the window at the wide gray
sky.  He knew by heart every individual clump of bunch grass in the
miles of red shaggy prairie that stretched before his cabin.  He
knew it in all the deceitful loveliness of its early summer, in all
the bitter barrenness of its autumn.  He had seen it smitten by all
the plagues of Egypt.  He had seen it parched by drought, and
sogged by rain, beaten by hail, and swept by fire, and in the
grasshopper years he had seen it eaten as bare and clean as bones
that the vultures have left.  After the great fires he had seen it
stretch for miles and miles, black and smoking as the floor of
hell.

He rose slowly and crossed the room, dragging his big feet
heavily as though they were burdens to him.  He looked out of the
window into the hog corral and saw the pigs burying themselves in
the straw before the shed.  The leaden gray clouds were beginning
to spill themselves, and the snow flakes were settling down over
the white leprous patches of frozen earth where the hogs had gnawed
even the sod away.  He shuddered and began to walk, trampling
heavily with his ungainly feet.  He was the wreck of ten winters on
the Divide and he knew what that meant.  Men fear the winters of
the Divide as a child fears night or as men in the North Seas fear
the still dark cold of the polar twilight.  His eyes fell upon his
gun, and he took it down from the wall and looked it over.  He sat
down on the edge of his bed and held the barrel towards his face,
letting his forehead rest upon it, and laid his finger on the
trigger.  He was perfectly calm, there was neither passion nor
despair in his face, but the thoughtful look of a man who is
considering.  Presently he laid down the gun, and reaching into the
cupboard, drew out a pint bottle of raw white alcohol.  Lifting it
to his lips, he drank greedily.  He washed his face in the tin
basin and combed his rough hair and shaggy blond beard.  Then he
stood in uncertainty before the suit of dark clothes that hung on
the wall.  For the fiftieth time he took them in his hands and
tried to summon courage to put them on.  He took the paper collar
that was pinned to the sleeve of the coat and cautiously slipped it
under his rough beard, looking with timid expectancy into the
cracked, splashed glass that hung over the bench.  With a short
laugh he threw it down on the bed, and pulling on his old
black hat, he went out, striking off across the level.

It was a physical necessity for him to get away from his cabin
once in a while.  He had been there for ten years, digging and
plowing and sowing, and reaping what little the hail and the hot
winds and the frosts left him to reap.  Insanity and suicide are
very common things on the Divide.  They come on like an epidemic in
the hot wind season.  Those scorching dusty winds that blow up over
the bluffs from Kansas seem to dry up the blood in men's veins as
they do the sap in the corn leaves.  Whenever the yellow scorch
creeps down over the tender inside leaves about the ear, then the
coroners prepare for active duty; for the oil of the country is
burned out and it does not take long for the flame to eat up the
wick.  It causes no great sensation there when a Dane is found
swinging to his own windmill tower, and most of the Poles after
they have become too careless and discouraged to shave themselves
keep their razors to cut their throats with.

It may be that the next generation on the Divide will be very
happy, but the present one came too late in life.  It is useless
for men that have cut hemlocks among the mountains of Sweden for
forty years to try to be happy in a country as flat and gray and
naked as the sea.  It is not easy for men that have spent their
youth fishing in the Northern seas to be content with following a
plow, and men that have served in the Austrian army hate hard work
and coarse clothing on the loneliness of the plains, and long for
marches and excitement and tavern company and pretty barmaids. 
After a man has passed his fortieth birthday it is not easy for him
to change the habits and conditions of his life.  Most men bring
with them to the Divide only the dregs of the lives that they have
squandered in other lands and among other peoples.

Canute Canuteson was as mad as any of them, but his madness
did not take the form of suicide or religion but of alcohol.  He
had always taken liquor when he wanted it, as all Norwegians do,
but after his first year of solitary life he settled down to it
steadily.  He exhausted whisky after a while, and went to alcohol,
because its effects were speedier and surer.  He was a big man and
with a terrible amount of resistant force, and it took a great
deal of alcohol even to move him.  After nine years of drinking,
the quantities he could take would seem fabulous to an ordinary
drinking man.  He never let it interfere with his work, he
generally drank at night and on Sundays.  Every night, as soon as
his chores were done, he began to drink.  While he was able to sit
up he would play on his mouth harp or hack away at his window sills
with his jackknife.  When the liquor went to his head he would lie
down on his bed and stare out of the window until he went to sleep. 
He drank alone and in solitude not for pleasure or good cheer, but
to forget the awful loneliness and level of the Divide.  Milton
made a sad blunder when he put mountains in hell.  Mountains
postulate faith and aspiration.  All mountain peoples are
religious.  It was the cities of the plains that, because of their
utter lack of spirituality and the mad caprice of their vice, were
cursed of God.

Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. 
Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration.  A foolish man drunk becomes
maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.  Canute was
none of these, but he was morose and gloomy, and liquor took him
through all the hells of Dante.  As he lay on his giant's bed all
the horrors of this world and every other were laid bare to his
chilled senses.  He was a man who knew no joy, a man who toiled in
silence and bitterness.  The skull and the serpent were always
before him, the symbols of eternal futileness and of eternal hate.

When the first Norwegians near enough to be called neighbors
came, Canute rejoiced, and planned to escape from his bosom vice. 
But he was not a social man by nature and had not the power of
drawing out the social side of other people.  His new neighbors
rather feared him because of his great strength and size, his
silence and his lowering brows.  Perhaps, too, they knew that he
was mad, mad from the eternal treachery of the plains, which every
spring stretch green and rustle with the promises of Eden, showing
long grassy lagoons full of clear water and cattle whose hoofs are
stained with wild roses.  Before autumn the lagoons are dried up,
and the ground is burnt dry and hard until it blisters and cracks
open.

So instead of becoming a friend and neighbor to the men that
settled about him, Canute became a mystery and a terror.  They told
awful stories of his size and strength and of the alcohol he drank.

They said that one night, when he went out to see to his horses
just before he went to bed, his steps were unsteady and the rotten
planks of the floor gave way and threw him behind the feet of a
fiery young stallion.  His foot was caught fast in the floor, and
the nervous horse began kicking frantically.  When Canute felt the
blood trickling down into his eyes from a scalp wound in his head,
he roused himself from his kingly indifference, and with the quiet
stoical courage of a drunken man leaned forward and wound his arms
about the horse's hind legs and held them against his breast with
crushing embrace.  All through the darkness and cold of the night
he lay there, matching strength against strength.  When little Jim
Peterson went over the next morning at four o'clock to go with him
to the Blue to cut wood, he found him so, and the horse was on its
fore knees, trembling and whinnying with fear.  This is the story
the Norwegians tell of him, and if it is true it is no wonder that
they feared and hated this Holder of the Heels of Horses.

One spring there moved to the next "eighty" a family that made
a great change in Canute's life.  Ole Yensen was too drunk most of
the time to be afraid of any one, and his wife Mary was too
garrulous to be afraid of any one who listened to her talk, and
Lena, their pretty daughter, was not afraid of man nor devil.  So
it came about that Canute went over to take his alcohol with Ole
oftener than he took it alone, After a while the report spread that
he was going to marry Yensen's daughter, and the Norwegian girls
began to tease Lena about the great bear she was going to keep
house for.  No one could quite see how the affair had come about,
for Canute's tactics of courtship were somewhat peculiar.  He
apparently never spoke to her at all: he would sit for hours with
Mary chattering on one side of him and Ole drinking on the other
and watch Lena at her work.  She teased him, and threw flour in his
face and put vinegar in his coffee, but he took her rough jokes
with silent wonder, never even smiling.  He took her to church
occasionally, but the most watchful and curious people never
saw him speak to her.  He would sit staring at her while she
giggled and flirted with the other men.

Next spring Mary Lee went to town to work in a steam laundry. 
She came home every Sunday, and always ran across to Yensens to
startle Lena with stories of ten cent theaters, firemen's dances,
and all the other esthetic delights of metropolitan life.  In a few
weeks Lena's head was completely turned, and she gave her father no
rest until he let her go to town to seek her fortune at the ironing
board.  From the time she came home on her first visit she began to
treat Canute with contempt.  She had bought a plush cloak and kid
gloves, had her clothes made by the dress maker, and assumed airs
and graces that made the other women of the neighborhood cordially
detest her.  She generally brought with her a young man from town
who waxed his mustache and wore a red necktie, and she did not even
introduce him to Canute.

The neighbors teased Canute a good deal until he knocked one
of them down.  He gave no sign of suffering from her neglect except
that he drank more and avoided the other Norwegians more carefully
than ever, He lay around in his den and no one knew what he felt or
thought, but little Jim Peterson, who had seen him glowering at
Lena in church one Sunday when she was there with the town man,
said that he would not give an acre of his wheat for Lena's life or
the town chap's either; and Jim's wheat was so wondrously worthless
that the statement was an exceedingly strong one.

Canute had bought a new suit of clothes that looked as nearly
like the town man I s as possible.  They had cost him half a millet
crop; for tailors are not accustomed to fitting giants and they
charge for it.  He had hung those clothes in his shanty two months
ago and had never put them on, partly from fear of ridicule, partly
from discouragement, and partly because there was something in his
own soul that revolted at the littleness of the device.

Lena was at home just at this time.  Work was slack in the
laundry and Mary had not been well, so Lena stayed at home, glad
enough to get an opportunity to torment Canute once more.

She was washing in the side kitchen, singing loudly as
she worked.  Mary was on her knees, blacking the stove and scolding
violently about the young man who was coming out from town that
night.  The young man had committed the fatal error of laughing at
Mary's ceaseless babble and had never been forgiven.

"He is no good, and you will come to a bad end by running with
him!  I do not see why a daughter of mine should act so.  I do not
see why the Lord should visit such a punishment upon me as to give
me such a daughter.  There are plenty of good men you can marry."

Lena tossed her head and answered curtly, "I don't happen to
want to marry any man right away, and so long as Dick dresses nice
and has plenty of money to spend, there is no harm in my going with
him."

"Money to spend?  Yes, and that is all he does with it I'll be
bound.  You think it very fine now, but you will change your tune
when you have been married five years and see your children running
naked and your cupboard empty.  Did Anne Hermanson come to any good
end by marrying a town man?"

"I don't know anything about Anne Hermanson, but I know any of
the laundry girls would have Dick quick enough if they could get
him."

"Yes, and a nice lot of store clothes huzzies you are too.  Now
there is Canuteson who has an 'eighty' proved up and fifty head
of cattle and--"

"And hair that ain't been cut since he was a baby, and a big
dirty beard, and he wears overalls on Sundays, and drinks like a
pig.  Besides he will keep.  I can have all the fun I want, and
when I am old and ugly like you he can have me and take care of me.

The Lord knows there ain't nobody else going to marry him."

Canute drew his hand back from the latch as though it were red
hot.  He was not the kind of man to make a good eavesdropper, and
he wished he had knocked sooner.  He pulled himself together and
struck the door like a battering ram.  Mary jumped and opened it
with a screech.

"God!  Canute, how you scared us!  I thought it was crazy Lou--
he has been tearing around the neighborhood trying to convert
folks.  I am afraid as death of him.  He ought to be sent off, I
think.  He is just as liable as not to kill us all, or burn
the barn, or poison the dogs.  He has been worrying even the poor
minister to death, and he laid up with the rheumatism, too!  Did
you notice that he was too sick to preach last Sunday?  But don't
stand there in the cold, come in.  Yensen isn't here, but he just
went over to Sorenson's for the mail; he won't be gone long.  Walk
right in the other room and sit down."

Canute followed her, looking steadily in front of him and not
noticing Lena as he passed her.  But Lena's vanity would not allow
him to pass unmolested.  She took the wet sheet she was wringing
out and cracked him across the face with it, and ran giggling to
the other side of the room.  The blow stung his cheeks and the
soapy water flew in his eves, and he involuntarily began rubbing
them with his hands.  Lena giggled with delight at his
discomfiture, and the wrath in Canute's face grew blacker than
ever.  A big man humiliated is vastly more undignified than a
little one.  He forgot the sting of his face in the bitter
consciousness that he had made a fool of himself He stumbled
blindly into the living room, knocking his head against the door
jamb because he forgot to stoop.  He dropped into a chair behind
the stove, thrusting his big feet back helplessly on either side of
him.

Ole was a long time in coming, and Canute sat there, still and
silent, with his hands clenched on his knees, and the skin of his
face seemed to have shriveled up into little wrinkles that trembled
when he lowered his brows.  His life had been one long lethargy of
solitude and alcohol, but now he was awakening, and it was as when
the dumb stagnant heat of summer breaks out into thunder.

When Ole came staggering in, heavy with liquor, Canute rose at
once.

"Yensen," he said quietly, "I have come to see if you will let
me marry your daughter today."

"Today!" gasped Ole.

"Yes, I will not wait until tomorrow.  I am tired of living alone."

Ole braced his staggering knees against the bedstead, and
stammered eloquently: "Do you think I will marry my daughter to a
drunkard? a man who drinks raw alcohol? a man who sleeps with
rattle snakes?  Get out of my house or I will kick you out
for your impudence."  And Ole began looking anxiously for his feet.

Canute answered not a word, but he put on his hat and went out
into the kitchen.  He went up to Lena and said without looking at
her, "Get your things on and come with me!"

The tones of his voice startled her, and she said angrily,
dropping the soap, "Are you drunk?"

"If you do not come with me, I will take you--you had better
come," said Canute quietly.

She lifted a sheet to strike him, but he caught her arm
roughly and wrenched the sheet from her.  He turned to the wall and
took down a hood and shawl that hung there, and began wrapping her
up.  Lena scratched and fought like a wild thing.  Ole stood in the
door, cursing, and Mary howled and screeched at the top of her
voice.  As for Canute, he lifted the girl in his arms and went out
of the house.  She kicked and struggled, but the helpless wailing
of Mary and Ole soon died away in the distance, and her face was
held down tightly on Canute's shoulder so that she could not see
whither he was taking her.  She was conscious only of the north
wind whistling in her ears, and of rapid steady motion and of a
great breast that heaved beneath her in quick, irregular breaths. 
The harder she struggled the tighter those iron arms that had held
the heels of horses crushed about her, until she felt as if they
would crush the breath from her, and lay still with fear.  Canute
was striding across the level fields at a pace at which man never
went before, drawing the stinging north winds into his lungs in
great gulps.  He walked with his eyes half closed and looking
straight in front of him, only lowering them when he bent his head
to blow away the snow flakes that settled on her hair.  So it was
that Canute took her to his home, even as his bearded barbarian
ancestors took the fair frivolous women of the South in their hairy
arms and bore them down to their war ships.  For ever and anon the
soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with
a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable
to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it
cannot win by cunning.

When Canute reached his shanty he placed the girl upon a
chair, where she sat sobbing.  He stayed only a few minutes.  He
filled the stove with wood and lit the lamp, drank a huge swallow
of alcohol and put the bottle in his pocket.  He paused a moment,
staring heavily at the weeping girl, then he went off and locked
the door and disappeared in the gathering gloom of the night.

Wrapped in flannels and soaked with turpentine, the little
Norwegian preacher sat reading his Bible, when he heard a
thundering knock at his door, and Canute entered, covered with snow
and his beard frozen fast to his coat.

"Come in, Canute, you must be frozen," said the little man,
shoving a chair towards his visitor.

Canute remained standing with his hat on and said quietly, "I
want you to come over to my house tonight to marry me to Lena
Yensen."

"Have you got a license, Canute?"

"No, I don't want a license.  I want to be married."

"But I can't marry you without a license, man. it would not be
legal."

A dangerous light came in the big Norwegian's eye.  "I want
you to come over to my house to marry me to Lena Yensen."

"No, I can't, it would kill an ox to go out in a storm like
this, and my rheumatism is bad tonight."

"Then if you will not go I must take you," said Canute with a
sigh.

He took down the preacher's bearskin coat and bade him put it
on while he hitched up his buggy.  He went out and closed the door
softly after him.  Presently he returned and found the frightened
minister crouching before the fire with his coat lying beside him. 
Canute helped him put it on and gently wrapped his head in his big
muffler.  Then he picked him up and carried him out and placed him
in his buggy.  As he tucked the buffalo robes around him be said:
"Your horse is old, he might flounder or lose his way in this
storm.  I will lead him."

The minister took the reins feebly in his hands and sat
shivering with the cold.  Sometimes when there was a lull in the
wind, he could see the horse struggling through the snow with
the man plodding steadily beside him.  Again the blowing snow would
hide them from him altogether.  He had no idea where they were or
what direction they were going.  He felt as though he were being
whirled away in the heart of the storm, and he said all the prayers
he knew.  But at last the long four miles were over, and Canute set
him down in the snow while he unlocked the door.  He saw the bride
sitting by the fire with her eyes red and swollen as though she had
been weeping.  Canute placed a huge chair for him, and said
roughly,--

"Warm yourself."

Lena began to cry and moan afresh, begging the minister to
take her home.  He looked helplessly at Canute.  Canute said
simply,

"If you are warm now, you can marry us."

"My daughter, do you take this step of your own free will?"
asked the minister in a trembling voice.

"No, sir, I don't, and it is disgraceful he should force me
into it!  I won't marry him."

"Then, Canute, I cannot marry you," said the minister,
standing as straight as his rheumatic limbs would let him.

"Are you ready to marry us now, sir?" said Canute, laying one
iron hand on his stooped shoulder.  The little preacher was a good
man, but like most men of weak body he was a coward and had a
horror of physical suffering, although he had known so much of it. 
So with many qualms of conscience he began to repeat the marriage
service.  Lena sat sullenly in her chair, staring at the fire. 
Canute stood beside her, listening with his head bent reverently
and his hands folded on his breast.  When the little man had prayed
and said amen, Canute began bundling him up again.

"I will take you home, now," he said as he carried him out and
placed him in his buggy, and started off with him through the fury
of the storm, floundering among the snow drifts that brought even
the giant himself to his knees.

After she was left alone, Lena soon ceased weeping.  She was
not of a particularly sensitive temperament, and had little
pride beyond that of vanity.  After the first bitter anger wore
itself out, she felt nothing more than a healthy sense of
humiliation and defeat.  She had no inclination to run away, for
she was married now, and in her eyes that was final and all
rebellion was useless.  She knew nothing about a license, but she
knew that a preacher married folks.  She consoled herself by
thinking that she had always intended to marry Canute someday,
anyway.

She grew tired of crying and looking into the fire, so she got
up and began to look about her.  She had heard queer tales about
the inside of Canute's shanty, and her curiosity soon got the
better of her rage.  One of the first things she noticed was the
new black suit of clothes hanging on the wall.  She was dull, but
it did not take a vain woman long to interpret anything so
decidedly flattering, and she was pleased in spite of herself.  As
she looked through the cupboard, the general air of neglect and
discomfort made her pity the man who lived there.

"Poor fellow, no wonder he wants to get married to get
somebody to wash up his dishes.  Batchin's pretty hard on a man."

It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled. 
She looked at the windowsill and gave a little shudder and wondered
if the man were crazy.  Then she sat down again and sat a long time
wondering what her Dick and Ole would do.

"It is queer Dick didn't come right over after me.  He surely
came, for he would have left town before the storm began and he
might just as well come right on as go back.  If he'd hurried he
would have gotten here before the preacher came.  I suppose he was
afraid to come, for he knew Canuteson could pound him to jelly, the
coward!"  Her eyes flashed angrily.

The weary hours wore on and Lena began to grow horribly
lonesome.  It was an uncanny night and this was an uncanny place to
be in.  She could hear the coyotes howling hungrily a little way
from the cabin, and more terrible still were all the unknown noises
of the storm.  She remembered the tales they told of the big log
overhead and she was afraid of those snaky things on the
windowsills.  She remembered the man who had been killed in the
draw, and she wondered what she would do if she saw crazy Lou's
white face glaring into the window.  The rattling of the door
became unbearable, she thought the latch must be loose and took the
lamp to look at it.  Then for the first time she saw the ugly brown
snake skins whose death rattle sounded every time the wind jarred
the door.

"Canute, Canute!" she screamed in terror.

Outside the door she heard a heavy sound as of a big dog
getting up and shaking himself.  The door opened and Canute stood
before her, white as a snow drift.

"What is it?" he asked kindly.

"I am cold," she faltered.

He went out and got an armful of wood and a basket of cobs and
filled the stove.  Then he went out and lay in the snow before the
door.  Presently he heard her calling again.

"What is it?" he said, sitting up.

"I'm so lonesome, I'm afraid to stay in here all alone."

"I will go over and get your mother."  And he got up.

"She won't come."

"I'll bring her," said Canute grimly.

"No, no.  I don't want her, she will scold all  the  time."

"Well, I will bring your father."

She spoke again and it seemed as though her mouth was close up
to the key-hole.  She spoke lower than he had ever heard her speak
before, so low that he had to put his ear up to the lock to hear
her.

"I don't want him either, Canute,--I'd rather have you."

For a moment she heard no noise at all, then something like a
groan.  With a cry of fear she opened the door, and saw Canute
stretched in the snow at her feet, his face in his hands, sobbing
on the doorstep.





Eric Hermannson's Soul


It was a great night at the Lone Star schoolhouse--a night
when the Spirit was present with power and when God was very near
to man.  So it seemed to Asa Skinner, servant of God and Free
Gospeller.  The schoolhouse was crowded with the saved and
sanctified, robust men and women, trembling and quailing before the
power of some mysterious psychic force.  Here and there among this
cowering, sweating multitude crouched some poor wretch who had felt
the pangs of an awakened conscience, but had not yet experienced
that complete divestment of reason, that frenzy born of a
convulsion of the mind, which, in the parlance of the Free
Gospellers, is termed "the Light."  On the floor before the
mourners' bench lay the unconscious figure of a man in whom
outraged nature had sought her last resort.  This "trance" state
is the highest evidence of grace among the Free Gospellers, and
indicates a close walking with God.

Before the desk stood Asa Skinner, shouting of the mercy and
vengeance of God, and in his eyes shone a terrible earnestness, an
almost prophetic flame.  Asa was a converted train gambler who used
to run between Omaha and Denver.  He was a man made for the
extremes of life; from the most debauched of men he had become the
most ascetic.  His was a bestial face, a. face that bore the stamp
of Nature's eternal injustice.  The forehead was low, projecting
over the eyes, and the sandy hair was plastered down over it and
then brushed back at an abrupt right angle.  The chin was heavy,
the nostrils were low and wide, and the lower lip hung loosely
except in his moments of spasmodic earnestness, when it shut like
a steel trap.  Yet about those coarse features there were deep,
rugged furrows, the scars of many a hand-to-hand struggle with the
weakness of the flesh, and about that drooping lip were sharp,
strenuous lines that had conquered it and taught it to pray.  Over
those seamed cheeks there was a certain pallor, a greyness caught
from many a vigil.  It was as though, after Nature had done her
worst with that face, some fine chisel had gone over it, chastening
and almost transfiguring it.  Tonight, as his muscles twitched with
emotion, and the perspiration dropped from his hair and chin, there
was a certain convincing power in the man.  For Asa Skinner was a
man possessed of a belief, of that sentiment of the sublime before
which all inequalities are leveled, that transport of conviction
which seems superior to all laws of condition, under which
debauchees have become martyrs; which made a tinker an artist and
a camel-driver the founder of an empire.  This was with Asa Skinner
tonight, as he stood proclaiming the vengeance of God.

It might have occurred to an impartial observer that Asa
Skinner's God was indeed a vengeful God if he could reserve
vengeance for those of his creatures who were packed into the Lone
Star schoolhouse that night.  Poor exiles of all nations; men from
the south and the north, peasants from almost every country of
Europe, most of them from the mountainous, night-bound coast of
Norway.  Honest men for the most part, but men with whom the world
had dealt hardly; the failures of all countries, men sobered by
toil and saddened by exile, who had been driven to fight for the
dominion of an untoward soil, to sow where others should gather,
the advance guard of a mighty civilization to be.

Never had Asa Skinner spoken more earnestly than now.  He felt
that the Lord had this night a special work for him to do.  Tonight
Eric Hermannson, the wildest lad on all the Divide, sat in his
audience with a fiddle on his knee, just as he had dropped in on
his way to play for some dance.  The violin is an object of
particular abhorrence to the Free Gospellers.  Their antagonism to
the church organ is bitter enough, but the fiddle they regard as a
very incarnation of evil desires, singing forever of worldly
pleasures and inseparably associated with all forbidden things.

Eric Hermannson had long been the object of the prayers of the
revivalists.  His mother had felt the power of the Spirit weeks
ago, and special prayer-meetings had been held at her house for her
son.  But Eric had only gone his ways laughing, the ways of youth,
which are short enough at best, and none too flowery on the Divide.

He slipped away from the prayer-meetings to meet the Campbell boys
in Genereau's saloon, or hug the plump little French girls at
Chevalier's dances, and sometimes, of a summer night, he even went
across the dewy cornfields and through the wild-plum thicket to
play the fiddle for Lena Hanson, whose name was a reproach through
all the Divide country, where the women are usually too plain and
too busy and too tired to depart from the ways of virtue.  On such
occasions Lena, attired in a pink wrapper and silk stockings and
tiny pink slippers, would sing to him, accompanying herself on a
battered guitar.  It gave him a delicious sense of freedom and
experience to be with a woman who, no matter how, had lived in big
cities and knew the ways of town folk, who had never worked in the
fields and had kept her hands white and soft, her throat fair and
tender, who had heard great singers in Denver and Salt Lake, and
who knew the strange language of flattery and idleness and mirth.

Yet, careless as he seemed, the frantic prayers of his mother
were not altogether without their effect upon Eric.  For days he
had been fleeing before them as a criminal from his pursuers, and
over his pleasures had fallen the shadow of something dark and
terrible that dogged his steps.  The harder he danced, the louder
he sang, the more was he conscious that this phantom was gaining
upon him, that in time it would track him down.  One Sunday
afternoon, late in the fall, when he had been drinking beer with
Lena Hanson and listening to a song which made his cheeks burn, a
rattlesnake had crawled out of the side of the sod house and thrust
its ugly head in under the screen door.  He was not afraid of
snakes, but he knew enough of Gospellism to feel the significance
of the reptile lying coiled there upon her doorstep.  His lips were
cold when he kissed Lena goodbye, and he went there no more.

The final barrier between Eric and his mother's faith was his
violin, and to that he clung as a man sometimes will cling to his
dearest sin, to the weakness more precious to him than all his
strength, In the great world beauty comes to men in many guises,
and art in a hundred forms, but for Eric there was only his violin.

It stood, to him, for all the manifestations of art; it was his
only bridge into the kingdom of the soul.

It was to Eric Hermannson that the evangelist directed his
impassioned pleading that night.

"<i>Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?</i> Is there a Saul here
tonight who has stopped his ears to that gentle pleading, who has
thrust a spear into that bleeding side?  Think of it, my brother;
you are offered this wonderful love and you prefer the worm that
dieth not and the fire which will not be quenched.  What right have
you to lose one of God's precious souls?  <i>Saul, Saul, why
persecutest thou me?</i>"

A great joy dawned in Asa Skinner's pale face, for he saw that
Eric Hermannson was swaying to and fro in his seat.  The minister
fell upon his knees and threw his long arms up over his head.

"O my brothers!  I feel it coming, the blessing we have prayed
for.  I tell you the Spirit is coming! just a little more prayer,
brothers, a little more zeal, and he will be here.  I can feel his
cooling wing upon my brow.  Glory be to God forever and ever,
amen!"

The whole congregation groaned under the pressure of this
spiritual panic.  Shouts and hallelujahs went up from every lip. 
Another figure fell prostrate upon the floor.  From the mourners'
bench rose a chant of terror and rapture:


            "Eating honey and drinking wine,
            <i>Glory to the bleeding Lamb!</i>
            I am my Lord's and he is mine,
            <i>Glory to the bleeding Lamb!"</i>


The hymn was sung in a dozen dialects and voiced all the vague
yearning of these hungry lives, of these people who had starved all
the passions so long, only to fall victims to the barest of them
all, fear.

A groan of ultimate anguish rose from Eric Hermannson's bowed
head, and the sound was like the groan of a great tree when it
falls in the forest.

The minister rose suddenly to his feet and threw back his
head, crying in a loud voice:

"<i>Lazarus, come forth!</i> Eric Hermannson, you are lost, going
down at sea.  In the name of God, and Jesus Christ his Son, I throw
you the life line.  Take hold!  Almighty God, my soul for his!" 
The minister threw his arms out and lifted his quivering face.

Eric Hermannson rose to his feet; his lips were set and the
lightning was in his eyes.  He took his violin by the neck and
crushed it to splinters across his knee, and to Asa Skinner the
sound was like the shackles of sin broken audibly asunder.



                              II

For more than two years Eric Hermannson kept the austere faith
to which he had sworn himself, kept it until a girl from the East
came to spend a week on the Nebraska Divide.  She was a girl of
other manners and conditions, and there were greater distances
between her life and Eric's than all the miles which separated
Rattlesnake Creek from New York City.  Indeed, she had no business
to be in the West at all; but ah! across what leagues of land and
sea, by what improbable chances, do the unrelenting gods bring to
us our fate!

It was in a year of financial depression that Wyllis Elliot
came to Nebraska to buy cheap land and revisit the country where he
had spent a year of his youth.  When he had graduated from Harvard
it was still customary for moneyed gentlemen to send their
scapegrace sons to rough it on ranches in the wilds of Nebraska or
Dakota, or to consign them to a living death in the sagebrush of
the Black Hills.  These young men did not always return to the ways
of civilized life.  But Wyllis Elliot had not married a
half-breed, nor been shot in a cowpunchers' brawl, nor wrecked by
bad whisky, nor appropriated by a smirched adventuress.  He had
been saved from these things by a girl, his sister, who had been
very near to his life ever since the days when they read fairy
tales together and dreamed the dreams that never come true.  On
this, his first visit to his father's ranch since he left it six
years before, he brought her with him.  She had been laid up half
the winter from a sprain received while skating, and had had too
much time for reflection during those months.  She was restless and
filled with a desire to see something of the wild country of which
her brother had told her so much.  She was to be married the next
winter, and Wyllis understood her when she begged him to take her
with him on this long, aimless jaunt across the continent, to taste
the last of their freedom together. it comes to all women of her
type--that desire to taste the unknown which allures and terrifies,
to run one's whole soul's length out to the wind--just once.

It had been an eventful journey.  Wyllis somehow understood that
strain of gypsy blood in his sister, and he knew where to take her. 
They had slept in sod houses on the Platte River, made the
acquaintance of the personnel of a third-rate opera company on the
train to Deadwood, dined in a camp of railroad constructors at the
world's end beyond New Castle, gone through the Black Hills on
horseback, fished for trout in Dome Lake, watched a dance at
Cripple Creek, where the lost souls who hide in the hills
gathered for their besotted revelry.  And now, last of all, before
the return to thraldom, there was this little shack, anchored on
the windy crest of the Divide, a little black dot against the
flaming sunsets, a scented sea of cornland bathed in opalescent air
and blinding sunlight.

Margaret Elliot was one of those women of whom there are so
many in this day, when old order, passing, giveth place to new;
beautiful, talented, critical, unsatisfied, tired of the world at
twenty-four.  For the moment the life and people of the Divide
interested her.  She was there but a week; perhaps had she stayed
longer, that inexorable ennui which travels faster even than the
Vestibule Limited would have overtaken her.  The week she
tarried there was the week that Eric Hermannson was helping Jerry
Lockhart thresh; a week earlier or a week later, and there would
have been no story to write.

It was on Thursday and they were to leave on Saturday.  Wyllis
and his sister were sitting on the wide piazza of the ranchhouse,
staring out into the afternoon sunlight and protesting against the
gusts of hot wind that blew up from the sandy riverbottom twenty
miles to the southward.

The young man pulled his cap lower over his eyes and remarked:

"This wind is the real thing; you don't strike it anywhere
else.  You remember we had a touch of it in Algiers and I told you
it came from Kansas.  It's the keynote of this country."

Wyllis touched her hand that lay on the hammock and continued
gently:

"I hope it's paid you, Sis.  Roughing it's dangerous business;
it takes the taste out of things."

She shut her fingers firmly over the brown hand that was so
like her own.

"Paid?  Why, Wyllis, I haven't been so happy since we were
children and were going to discover the ruins of Troy together some
day.  Do you know, I believe I could just stay on here forever and
let the world go on its own gait.  It seems as though the tension
and strain we used to talk of last winter were gone for good, as
though one could never give one's strength out to such petty things
any more."

Wyllis brushed the ashes of his pipe away from the silk
handkerchief that was knotted about his neck and stared moodily off
at the skyline.

"No, you're mistaken.  This would bore you after a while.  You
can't shake the fever of the other life.  I've tried it. There was
a time when the gay fellows of Rome could trot down into the
Thebaid and burrow into the sandhills and get rid of it.  But it's
all too complex now.  You see we've made our dissipations so dainty
and respectable that they've gone further in than the flesh, and
taken hold of the ego proper.  You couldn't rest, even here.  The
war cry would follow you."

"You don't waste words, Wyllis, but you never miss fire.  I
talk more than you do, without saying half so much.  You must have
learned the art of silence from these taciturn Norwegians.  I think
I like silent men."

"Naturally," said Wyllis, "since you have decided to marry the most
brilliant talker you know."

Both were silent for a time, listening to the sighing of the
hot wind through the parched morning-glory vines.  Margaret spoke
first.

"Tell me, Wyllis, were many of the Norwegians you used to know
as interesting as Eric Hermannson?"

"Who, Siegfried?  Well, no.  He used to be the flower of the
Norwegian youth in my day, and he's rather an exception, even now. 
He has retrograded, though.  The bonds of the soil have tightened
on him, I fancy."

"Siegfried?  Come, that's rather good, Wyllis.  He looks like
a dragon-slayer.  What is it that makes him so different from the
others?  I can talk to him; he seems quite like a human being."

 "Well," said Wyllis, meditatively, "I don't read Bourget
as much as my cultured sister, and I'm not so well up in analysis,
but I fancy it's because one keeps cherishing a perfectly
unwarranted suspicion that under that big, hulking anatomy of his,
he may conceal a soul somewhere.  <i>Nicht wahr?</i>"

"Something like that," said Margaret, thoughtfully, "except
that it's more than a suspicion, and it isn't groundless.  He has
one, and he makes it known, somehow, without speaking."

"I always have my doubts about loquacious souls," Wyllis
remarked, with the unbelieving smile that had grown habitual with
him.

Margaret went on, not heeding the interruption.  "I knew it
from the first, when he told me about the suicide of his cousin,
the Bernstein boy.  That kind of blunt pathos can't be summoned at
will in anybody.  The earlier novelists rose to it, sometimes,
unconsciously.  But last night when I sang for him I was doubly
sure.  Oh, I haven't told you about that yet!  Better light your
pipe again.  You see, he stumbled in on me in the dark when I was
pumping away at that old parlour organ to please Mrs. Lockhart
It's her household fetish and I've forgotten how many pounds of
butter she made and sold to buy it.  Well, Eric stumbled in, and in
some inarticulate manner made me understand that he wanted me to
sing for him.  I sang just the old things, of course.  It's queer
to sing familiar things here at the world's end.  It makes one
think how the hearts of men have carried them around the world,
into the wastes of Iceland and the jungles of Africa and the
islands of the Pacific.  I think if one lived here long enough one
would quite forget how to be trivial, and would read only the great
books that we never get time to read in the world, and would
remember only the great music, and the things that are really worth
while would stand out clearly against that horizon over there.  And
of course I played the intermezzo from <i>Cavalleria Rusticana</i>
for him; it goes rather better on an organ than most things do.  He
shuffled his feet and twisted his big hands up into knots and
blurted out that he didn't know there was any music like that in
the world.  Why, there were tears in his voice, Wyllis!  Yes, like
Rossetti, I <i>heard</i> his tears.  Then it dawned upon me that it
was probably the first good music be had ever heard in all his
life.  Think of it, to care for music as he does and never to hear
it, never to know that it exists on earth!  To long for it as we
long for other perfect experiences that never come.  I can't tell
you what music means to that man.  I never saw any one so
susceptible to it. It gave him speech, he became alive.  When I had
finished the intermezzo, he began telling me about a little
crippled brother who died and whom he loved and used to carry
everywhere in his arms.  He did not wait for encouragement.  He
took up the story and told it slowly, as if to himself, just sort
of rose up and told his own woe to answer Mascagni's.  It overcame
me."

"Poor devil," said Wyllis, looking at her with mysterious
eyes, "and so you've given him a new woe.  Now he'll go on
wanting Grieg and Schubert the rest of his days and never getting
them.  That's a girl's philanthropy for you!"

Jerry Lockhart came out of the house screwing his chin over
the unusual luxury of a stiff white collar, which his wife insisted
upon as a necessary article of toilet while Miss Elliot was
at the house.  Jerry sat down on the step and smiled his broad, red
smile at Margaret.

"Well, I've got the music for your dance, Miss Elliot.  Olaf
Oleson will bring his accordion and Mollie will play the organ,
when she isn't lookin' after the grub, and a little chap from
Frenchtown will bring his fiddle--though the French don't mix with
the Norwegians much."

"Delightful!  Mr. Lockhart, that dance will be the feature of
our trip, and it's so nice of you to get it up for us. We'll see
the Norwegians in character at last," cried Margaret, cordially.

"See here, Lockhart, I'll settle with you for backing her in
this scheme," said Wyllis, sitting up and knocking the ashes out of
his pipe.  "She's done crazy things enough on this trip, but to
talk of dancing all night with a gang of half-mad Norwegians and
taking the carriage at four to catch the six o'clock train out of
Riverton--well, it's tommyrot, that's what it is!"

"Wyllis, I leave it to your sovereign power of reason to
decide whether it isn't easier to stay up all night than to get up
at three in the morning.  To get up at three, think what that
means!  No, sir, I prefer to keep my vigil and then get into a
sleeper."

"But what do you want with the Norwegians?  I thought you were
tired of dancing."

"So I am, with some people.  But I want to see a Norwegian
dance, and I intend to.  Come, Wyllis, you know how seldom it is
that one really wants to do anything nowadays.  I wonder when I
have really wanted to go to a party before.  It will be something
to remember next month at Newport, when we have to and don't want
to.  Remember your own theory that contrast is about the only thing
that makes life endurable.  This is my party and Mr. Lockhart's;
your whole duty tomorrow night will consist in being nice to the
Norwegian girls.  I'll warrant you were adept enough at it once. 
And you'd better be very nice indeed, for if there are many such
young Valkyries as Eric's sister among them, they would simply tie
you up in a knot if they suspected you were guying them."

Wyllis groaned and sank back into the hammock to consider his
fate, while his sister went on.

"And the guests, Mr. Lockhart, did they accept?"

Lockhart took out his knife and began sharpening it on the sole of
his plowshoe.

"Well, I guess we'll have a couple dozen.  You see it's pretty
hard to get a crowd together here any more.  Most of 'em have gone
over to the Free Gospellers, and they'd rather put their feet in
the fire than shake 'em to a fiddle."

Margaret made a gesture of impatience.  "Those Free Gospellers
have just cast an evil spell over this country, haven't they?"

"Well," said Lockhart, cautiously, "I don't just like to pass
judgment on any Christian sect, but if you're to know the chosen by
their works, the Gospellers can't make a very proud showin', an'
that's a fact.  They're responsible for a few suicides, and they've
sent a good-sized delegation to the state insane asylum, an' I
don't see as they've made the rest of us much better than we were
before.  I had a little herdboy last spring, as square a little
Dane as I want to work for me, but after the Gospellers got hold of
him and sanctified him, the little beggar used to get down on his
knees out on the prairie and pray by the hour and let the cattle
get into the corn, an' I had to fire him.  That's about the way it
goes.  Now there's Eric; that chap used to be a hustler and the
spryest dancer in all this section-called all the dances.  Now he's
got no ambition and he's glum as a preacher.  I don't suppose we
can even get him to come in tomorrow night."

"Eric?  Why, he must dance, we can't let him off," said
Margaret, quickly.  "Why, I intend to dance with him myself."

"I'm afraid he won't dance.  I asked him this morning if he'd
help us out and he said, 'I don't dance now, any more,' " said
Lockhart, imitating the laboured English of the Norwegian.

"'The Miller of Hofbau, the Miller of Hofbau, O my Princess!'"
chirped Wyllis, cheerfully, from his hammock.

The red on his sister's cheek deepened a little, and she
laughed mischievously.  "We'll see about that, sir.  I'll not admit
that I am beaten until I have asked him myself."

Every night Eric rode over to St. Anne, a little village in
the heart of the French settlement, for the mail.  As the road lay
through the most attractive part of the Divide country, on several
occasions Margaret Elliot and her brother had accompanied him. 
Tonight Wyllis had business with Lockhart, and Margaret rode
with Eric, mounted on a frisky little mustang that Mrs. Lockhart
had broken to the sidesaddle.  Margaret regarded her escort very
much as she did the servant who always accompanied her on long
rides at home, and the ride to the village was a silent one.  She
was occupied with thoughts of another world, and Eric was wrestling
with more thoughts than had ever been crowded into his head before.

He rode with his eyes riveted on that slight figure before him, as
though he wished to absorb it through the optic nerves and hold it
in his brain forever.  He understood the situation perfectly.  His
brain worked slowly, but he had a keen sense of the values of
things.  This girl represented an entirely new species of humanity
to him, but he knew where to place her.  The prophets of old, when
an angel first appeared unto them, never doubted its high origin.

Eric was patient under the adverse conditions of his life, but
he was not servile.  The Norse blood in him had not entirely lost
its self-reliance.  He came of a proud fisher line, men who were
not afraid of anything but the ice and the  devil, and he had
prospects before him when his father went down off the North Cape
in the long Arctic night, and his mother, seized by a violent
horror of seafaring life, had followed her brother to America. 
Eric was eighteen then, handsome as young Siegfried, a giant in
stature, with a skin singularly pure and delicate, like a Swede's;
hair as yellow as the locks of Tennyson's amorous Prince, and eyes
of a fierce, burning blue, whose flash was most dangerous to women.

He had in those days a certain pride of bearing, a certain
confidence of approach, that usually accompanies physical
perfection.  It was even said of him then that he was in love with
life, and inclined to levity, a vice most unusual on the Divide. 
But the sad history of those Norwegian exiles, transplanted in an
arid soil and under a scorching sun, had repeated itself in his
case.  Toil and isolation had sobered him, and he grew more and
more like the clods among which he laboured. It was as though some
red-hot instrument had touched for a moment those delicate
fibers of the brain which respond to acute pain or pleasure, in
which lies the power of exquisite sensation, and had seared them
quite away.  It is a painful thing to watch the light die out of
the eyes of those Norsemen, leaving an expression of impenetrable
sadness, quite passive, quite hopeless, a shadow that is never
lifted.  With some this change comes almost at once, in the first
bitterness of homesickness, with others it comes more slowly,
according to the time it takes each man's heart to die.

Oh, those poor Northmen of the Divide!  They are dead many a
year before they are put to rest in the little graveyard on the
windy hill where exiles of all nations grow akin.

The peculiar species of hypochondria to which the exiles of
his people sooner or later succumb had not developed in Eric until
that night at the Lone Star schoolhouse, when he had broken his
violin across his knee.  After that, the gloom of his people
settled down upon him, and the gospel of maceration began its work.

<i>"If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,"</i> et cetera.  The
pagan smile that once hovered about his lips was gone, and he was
one with sorrow.  Religion heals a hundred hearts for one that it
embitters, but when it destroys, its work is quick and deadly, and
where the agony of the cross has been, joy will not come again. 
This man understood things literally: one must live without
pleasure to die without fear; to save the soul, it was necessary to
starve the soul.

The sun hung low above the cornfields when Margaret and her
cavalier left St. Anne.  South of the town there is a stretch of
road that runs for some three miles through the French settlement,
where the prairie is as level as the surface of a lake.  There the
fields of flax and wheat and rye are bordered by precise rows of
slender, tapering Lombard poplars.  It was a yellow world that
Margaret Elliot saw under the wide light of the setting sun.

The girl gathered up her reins and called back to Eric, "It
will be safe to run the horses here, won't it?"

"Yes, I think so, now," he answered, touching his spur to his
pony's flank.  They were off like the wind.  It is an old
saying in the West that newcomers always ride a horse or two
to death before they get broken in to the country.  They are
tempted by the great open spaces and try to outride the horizon, to
get to the end of something.  Margaret galloped over the level
road, and Eric, from behind, saw her long veil fluttering in the
wind.  It had fluttered just so in his dreams last night and the
night before.  With a sudden inspiration of courage he overtook her
and rode beside her, looking intently at her half-averted face. 
Before, he had only stolen occasional glances at it, seen it in
blinding flashes, always with more or less embarrassment, but now
he determined to let every line of it sink into his memory.  Men of
the world would have said that it was an unusual face, nervous,
finely cut, with clear, elegant lines that betokened ancestry.  Men
of letters would have called it a historic face, and would have
conjectured at what old passions, long asleep, what old sorrows
forgotten time out of mind, doing battle together in ages gone, had
curved those delicate nostrils, left their unconscious memory in
those eyes.  But Eric read no meaning in these details.  To him
this beauty was something more than colour and line; it was a flash
of white light, in which one cannot distinguish colour because all
colours are there.  To him it was a complete revelation, an
embodiment of those dreams of impossible loveliness that linger by
a young man's pillow on midsummer nights; yet, because it held
something more than the attraction of health and youth and
shapeliness, it troubled him, and in its presence he felt as the
Goths before the white marbles in the Roman Capitol, not knowing
whether they were men or gods.  At times he felt like uncovering
his head before it, again the fury seized him to break and despoil,
to find the clay in this spirit-thing and stamp upon it.  Away from
her, he longed to strike out with his arms, and take and hold; it
maddened him that this woman whom he could break in his hands
should be so much stronger than he. But near her, he never
questioned this strength; he admitted its potentiality as he
admitted the miracles of the Bible; it enervated and conquered him.

Tonight, when he rode so close to her that he could have touched
her, he knew that he might as well reach out his hand to
take a star.

Margaret stirred uneasily under his gaze and turned questioningly
in her saddle.

"This wind puts me a little out of breath when we ride fast,"
she said.

Eric turned his eyes away.

"I want to ask you if I go to New York to work, if I maybe
hear music like you sang last night?  I been a purty good hand to
work," he asked, timidly.

Margaret looked at him with surprise, and then, as she studied
the outline of his face, pityingly.

"Well, you might--but you'd lose a good deal else.  I shouldn't
like you to go to New York--and be poor, you'd be out of
atmosphere, some way," she said, slowly.  Inwardly she was
thinking: <i>There he would be altogether sordid, impossible--a
machine who would carry one's trunks upstairs, perhaps.  Here he is
every inch a man, rather picturesque; why is it?</i>  "No," she
added aloud, "I shouldn't like that."

"Then I not go," said Eric, decidedly.

Margaret turned her face to hide a smile.  She was a trifle
amused and a trifle annoyed.  Suddenly she spoke again.

"But I'll tell you what I do want you to do, Eric.  I want you
to dance with us tomorrow night and teach me some of the Norwegian
dances; they say you know them all.  Won't you?"

Eric straightened himself in his saddle and his eyes flashed
as they had done in the Lone Star schoolhouse when he broke his
violin across his knee.

"Yes, I will," he said, quietly, and he believed that he
delivered his soul to hell as he said it.

They had reached the rougher country now, where the road wound
through a narrow cut in one of the bluffs along the creek, when a
beat of hoofs ahead and the sharp neighing of horses made the
ponies start and Eric rose in his stirrups.  Then down the gulch in
front of them and over the steep clay banks thundered a herd of
wild ponies, nimble as monkeys and wild as rabbits, such as horse-
traders drive east from the plains of Montana to sell in the
farming country.  Margaret's pony made a shrill sound, a neigh that
was almost a scream, and started up the clay bank to meet them, all
the wild blood of the range breaking out in an instant.  Margaret
called to Eric just as he threw himself out of the saddle and
caught her pony's bit.  But the wiry little animal had gone mad and
was kicking and biting like a devil.  Her wild brothers of the
range were all about her, neighing, and pawing the earth, and
striking her with their forefeet and snapping at her flanks.  It
was the old liberty of the range that the little beast fought for.

"Drop the reins and hold tight, tight!" Eric called, throwing
all his weight upon the bit, struggling under those frantic
forefeet that now beat at his breast, and now kicked at the wild
mustangs that surged and tossed about him.  He succeeded in
wrenching the pony's head toward him and crowding her withers
against the clay bank, so that she could not roll.

"Hold tight, tight!" he shouted again, launching a kick at a
snorting animal that reared back against Margaret's saddle.  If she
should lose her courage and fall now, under those hoofs--  He
struck out again and again, kicking right and left with all his
might.  Already the negligent drivers had galloped into the cut,
and their long quirts were whistling over the heads of the herd. 
As suddenly as it had come, the struggling, frantic wave of wild
life swept up out of the gulch and on across the open prairie, and
with a long despairing whinny of farewell the pony dropped her head
and stood trembling in her sweat, shaking the foam and blood from
her bit.

Eric stepped close to Margaret's side and laid his hand on her
saddle.  "You are not hurt?" he asked, hoarsely.  As he raised his
face in the soft starlight she saw that it was white and drawn and
that his lips were working nervously.

"No, no, not at all.  But you, you are suffering; they struck
you!" she cried in sharp alarm.

He stepped back and drew his hand across his brow.

"No, it is not that," he spoke rapidly now, with his hands
clenched at his side.  "But if they had hurt you, I would beat
their brains out with my hands.  I would kill them all.  I
was never afraid before.  You are the only beautiful thing that
has ever come close to me.  You came like an angel out of the sky.
You are like the music you sing, you are like the stars and the
snow on the mountains where I played when I was a little boy.  You
are like all that I wanted once and never had, you are all that
they have killed in me.  I die for you tonight, tomorrow, for all
eternity.  I am not a coward; I was afraid because I love you more
than Christ who died for me, more than I am afraid of hell, or hope
for heaven.  I was never afraid before.  If you had fallen--oh, my
God!"  He threw his arms out blindly and dropped his head upon the
pony's mane, leaning ]imply against the animal like a man struck
by some sickness.  His shoulders rose and fell perceptibly with his
laboured breathing.  The horse stood cowed with exhaustion and
fear.  Presently Margaret laid her hand on Eric's head and said
gently:

"You are better now, shall we go on?  Can you get your horse?"

"No, he has gone with the herd.  I will lead yours, she is not
safe.  I will not frighten you again."  His voice was still husky,
but it was steady now.  He took hold of the bit and tramped home in
silence.

When they reached the house, Eric stood stolidly by the pony's
head until Wyllis came to lift his sister from the saddle.

"The horses were badly frightened, Wyllis.  I think I was pretty
thoroughly scared myself," she said as she took her brother's arm
and went slowly up the hill toward the house.  "No, I'm not hurt,
thanks to Eric.  You must thank him for taking such good care of
me.  He's a mighty fine fellow.  I'll tell you all about it in the
morning, dear.  I was pretty well shaken up and I'm going right to
bed now.  Good night."

When she reached the low room in which she slept, she sank
upon the bed in her riding dress, face downward.

"Oh, I pity him!  I pity him!" she murmured, with a long sigh
of exhaustion.  She must have slept a little.  When she rose again,
she took from her dress a letter that had been waiting for her at
the village post-office.  It was closely written in a long,
angular hand, covering a dozen pages of foreign note-paper, and
began:

My Dearest Margaret: if I should attempt to say <i>how like
a winter hath thine absence been</i>, I should incur the risk of
being tedious.  Really, it takes the sparkle out of everything. 
Having nothing better to do, and not caring to go anywhere in
particular without you, I remained in the city until Jack Courtwell
noted my general despondency and brought me down here to his place
on the sound to manage some open-air theatricals he is getting up. 
<i>As You Like It</i> is of course the piece selected.  Miss
Harrison plays Rosalind.  I wish you had been here to take the
part.  Miss Harrison reads her lines well, but she is either a
maiden-all-forlorn or a tomboy; insists on reading into the part
all sorts of deeper meanings and highly coloured suggestions wholly
out of harmony with the pastoral setting.  Like most of the
professionals, she exaggerates the emotional element and quite
fails to do justice to Rosalind's facile wit and really brilliant
mental qualities.  Gerard will do Orlando, but rumor says he is
<i>epris</i> of your sometime friend, Miss Meredith, and his memory
is treacherous and his interest fitful.

My new pictures arrived last week on the <i>Gascogne</i>.  The
Puvis de Chavannes is even more beautiful than I thought it in
Paris.  A pale dream-maiden sits by a pale dream-cow and a
stream of anemic water flows at her feet.  The Constant, you
will remember, I got because you admired it.  It is here in
all its florid splendour, the whole dominated by a glowing
sensuosity.  The drapery of the female figure is as wonderful
as you said; the fabric all barbaric pearl and gold, painted
with an easy, effortless voluptuousness, and that white,
gleaming line of African coast in the background recalls
memories of you very precious to me.  But it is useless to
deny that Constant irritates me.  Though I cannot prove the
charge against him, his brilliancy always makes me suspect him
of cheapness.

Here Margaret stopped and glanced at the remaining pages of
this strange love-letter.  They seemed to be filled chiefly with
discussions of pictures and books, and with a slow smile she laid
them by.

She rose and began undressing.  Before she lay down she went
to open the window.  With her hand on the sill, she hesitated,
feeling suddenly as though some danger were lurking outside, some
inordinate desire waiting to spring upon her in the darkness.  She
stood there for a long time, gazing at the infinite sweep of the
sky.

"Oh, it is all so little, so little there," she murmured. 
"When everything else is so dwarfed, why should one expect love to
be great?  Why should one try to read highly coloured suggestions
into a life like that?  If only I could find one thing in it all
that mattered greatly, one thing that would warm me when I am
alone!  Will life never give me that one great moment?"

As she raised the window, she heard a sound in the plum bushes
outside.  It was only the house-dog roused from his sleep, but
Margaret started violently and trembled so that she caught the foot
of the bed for support.  Again she felt herself pursued by some
overwhelming longing, some desperate necessity for herself, like
the outstretching of helpless, unseen arms in the darkness, and the
air seemed heavy with sighs of yearning.  She fled to her bed with
the words, "I love you more than Christ who died for me!" ringing
in her ears.


                             III

About midnight the dance at Lockhart's was at its height. 
Even the old men who had come to "look on" caught the spirit of
revelry and stamped the floor with the vigor of old Silenus.  Eric
took the violin from the Frenchmen, and Minna Oleson sat at the
organ, and the music grew more and more characteristic--rude, half
mournful music, made up of the folksongs of the North, that the
villagers sing through the long night in hamlets by the sea, when
they are thinking of the sun, and the spring, and the fishermen so
long away.  To Margaret some of it sounded like Grieg's <i>Peer
Gynt</i> music.  She found something irresistibly infectious in
the mirth of these people who were so seldom merry, and she felt
almost one of them.  Something seemed struggling for freedom in
them tonight, something of the joyous childhood of the nations
which exile had not killed.  The girls were all boisterous with
delight.  Pleasure came to them but rarely, and when it came, they
caught at it wildly and crushed its fluttering wings in their
strong brown fingers.  They had a hard life enough, most of them. 
Torrid summers and freezing winters, labour and drudgery and
ignorance, were the portion of their girlhood; a short wooing, a
hasty, loveless marriage, unlimited maternity, thankless sons,
premature age and ugliness, were the dower of their womanhood.  But
what matter?  Tonight there was hot liquor in the glass and hot
blood in the heart; tonight they danced.

Tonight Eric Hermannson had renewed his youth.  He was no
longer the big, silent Norwegian who had sat at Margaret's feet and
looked hopelessly into her eyes.  Tonight he was a man, with a
man's rights and a man's power.  Tonight he was Siegfried indeed. 
His hair was yellow as the heavy wheat in the ripe of summer, and
his eyes flashed like the blue water between the ice packs in the
north seas.  He was not afraid of Margaret tonight, and when he
danced with her he held her firmly.  She was tired and dragged on
his arm a little, but the strength of the man was like an all-
pervading fluid, stealing through her veins, awakening under her
heart some nameless, unsuspected existence that had slumbered there
all these years and that went out through her throbbing fingertips
to his that answered.  She wondered if the hoydenish blood of some
lawless ancestor, long asleep, were calling out in her tonight,
some drop of a hotter fluid that the centuries had failed to cool,
and why, if this curse were in her, it had not spoken before.  But
was it a curse, this awakening, this wealth before undiscovered,
this music set free?  For the first time in her life her heart held
something stronger than herself, was not this worthwhile?  Then she
ceased to wonder.  She lost sight of the lights and the faces and
the music was drowned by the beating of her own arteries.  She saw
only the blue eyes that flashed above her, felt only the
warmth of that throbbing hand which held hers and which the blood
of his heart fed.  Dimly, as in a dream, she saw the drooping
shoulders, high white forehead and tight, cynical mouth of the man
she was to marry in December.  For an hour she had been crowding
back the memory of that face with all her strength.

"Let us stop, this is enough," she whispered.  His only answer
was to tighten the arm behind her.  She sighed and let that
masterful strength bear her where it would.  She forgot that this
man was little more than a savage, that they would part at dawn. 
The blood has no memories, no reflections, no regrets for the past,
no consideration of the future.

"Let us go out where it is cooler," she said when the music
stopped; thinking, <i>I am  growing faint here, I shall be all
right in the open air</i>.  They stepped out into the cool, blue
air of the night.

Since the older folk had begun dancing, the young Norwegians
had been slipping out in couples to climb the windmill tower into
the cooler atmosphere, as is their custom.

"You like to go up?" asked Eric, close to her ear.

She turned and looked at him with suppressed amusement.  "How
high is it?"

"Forty feet, about.  I not let you fall."  There was a note of
irresistible pleading in his voice, and she felt that he
tremendously wished her to go.  Well, why not?  This was a night of
the unusual, when she was not herself at all, but was living an
unreality.  Tomorrow, yes, in a few hours, there would be the
Vestibule Limited and the world.

"Well, if you'll take good care of me.  I used to be able to
climb, when I was a little girl."

Once at the top and seated on the platform, they were silent. 
Margaret wondered if she would not hunger for that scene all her
life, through all the routine of the days to come.  Above them
stretched the great Western sky, serenely blue, even in the night,
with its big, burning stars, never so cold and dead and far away as
in denser atmospheres.  The moon would not be up for twenty minutes
yet, and all about the horizon, that wide horizon, which
seemed to reach around the world, lingered a pale white light, as
of a universal dawn.  The weary wind brought up to them the heavy
odours of the cornfields.  The music of the dance sounded faintly
from below.  Eric leaned on his elbow beside her, his legs swinging
down on the ladder.  His great shoulders looked more than ever like
those of the stone Doryphorus, who stands in his perfect, reposeful
strength in the Louvre, and had often made her wonder if such men
died forever with the youth of Greece.

"How sweet the corn smells at night," said Margaret nervously.

"Yes, like the flowers that grow in paradise, I think."

She was somewhat startled by this reply, and more startled
when this taciturn man spoke again.

"You go away tomorrow?"

"Yes, we have stayed longer than we thought to now."

"You not come back any more?"

"No, I expect not.  You see, it is a long trip halfway across
the continent."

"You soon forget about this country, I guess."  It seemed to
him now a little thing to lose his soul for this woman, but that
she should utterly forget this night into which he threw all his
life and all his eternity, that was a bitter thought.

"No, Eric, I will not forget.  You have all been too kind to
me for that.  And you won't be sorry you danced this one night,
will you?"

"I never be sorry.  I have not been so happy before.  I not be
so happy again, ever.  You will be happy many nights yet, I only
this one.  I will dream sometimes, maybe."

The mighty resignation of his tone alarmed and touched her. 
It was as when some great animal composes itself for death, as when
a great ship goes down at sea.

She sighed, but did not answer him.  He drew a little closer
and looked into her eyes.

"You are not always happy, too?" he asked.

"No, not always, Eric; not very often, I think."

"You have a trouble?"

"Yes, but I cannot put it into words.  Perhaps if I could do
that, I could cure it."

He clasped his hands together over his heart, as children do when
they pray, and said falteringly, "If I own all the world, I give
him you."

Margaret felt a sudden moisture in her eyes, and laid her hand
on his.

"Thank you, Eric; I believe you would.  But perhaps even then
I should not be happy.  Perhaps I have too much of it already."

She did not take her hand away from him; she did not dare. 
She sat still and waited for the traditions in which she had always
believed to speak and save her.  But they were dumb.  She belonged
to an ultra-refined civilization which tries to cheat nature with
elegant sophistries.  Cheat nature?  Bah!  One generation may do
it, perhaps two, but the third--  Can we ever rise above nature or
sink below her?  Did she not turn on Jerusalem as upon Sodom, upon
St. Anthony in his desert as upon Nero in his seraglio?  Does she
not always cry in brutal triumph: "I am here still, at the bottom
of things, warming the roots of life; you cannot starve me nor tame
me nor thwart me; I made the world, I rule it, and I am its
destiny."

This woman, on a windmill tower at the world's end with a
giant barbarian, heard that cry tonight, and she was afraid!  Ah!
the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear
ourselves!  Until then we have not lived.

"Come, Eric, let us go down; the moon is up and the music has
begun again," she said.

He rose silently and stepped down upon the ladder, putting his
arm about her to help her.  That arm could have thrown Thor's
hammer out in the cornfields yonder, yet it scarcely touched her,
and his hand trembled as it had done in the dance.  His face was
level with hers now and the moonlight fell sharply upon it.  All
her life she had searched the faces of men for the look that lay in
his eyes.  She knew that that look had never shone for her before,
would never shine for her on earth again, that such love comes to
one only in dreams or in impossible places like this, unattainable
always.  This was Love's self, in a moment it would die.  Stung by
the agonized appeal that emanated from the man's whole being, she
leaned forward and laid her lips on his.  Once, twice and again she
heard the deep respirations rattle in his throat while she held
them there, and the riotous force under her head became an
engulfing weakness.  He drew her up to him until he felt all the
resistance go out of her body, until every nerve relaxed and
yielded.  When she drew her face back from
his, it was white with fear.

"Let us go down, oh, my God! let us go down!" she muttered. 
And the drunken stars up yonder seemed reeling to some appointed
doom as she clung to the rounds of the ladder.  All that she was to
know of love she had left upon his lips.

"The devil is loose again," whispered Olaf Oleson, as he saw Eric
dancing a moment later, his eyes blazing.

But Eric was thinking with an almost savage exultation of the
time when he should pay for this.  Ah, there would be no quailing
then! if ever a soul went fearlessly, proudly down to the gates
infernal, his should go.  For a moment he fancied he was there
already, treading down the tempest of flame, hugging the fiery
hurricane to his breast.  He wondered whether in ages gone, all the
countless years of sinning in which men had sold and lost and flung
their souls away, any man had ever so cheated Satan, had ever
bartered his soul for so great a price.

It seemed but a little while till dawn.

The carriage was brought to the door and Wyllis Elliot and his
sister said goodbye.  She could not meet Eric's eyes as she gave
him her hand, but as he stood by the horse's head, just as the
carriage moved off, she gave him one swift glance that said, "I
will not forget."  In a moment the carriage was gone.

Eric changed his coat and plunged his head into the water tank
and went to the barn to hook up his team.  As he led his horses to
the door, a shadow fell across his path, and he saw Skinner rising
in his stirrups.  His rugged face was pale and worn with looking
after his wayward flock, with dragging men into the way of
salvation.

"Good morning, Eric.  There was a dance here last night?" he
asked, sternly.

"A dance?  Oh, yes, a dance," replied Eric, cheerfully.

"Certainly you did not dance, Eric?"

"Yes, I danced. I danced all the time."

The minister's shoulders drooped, and an expression of profound
discouragement settled over his haggard face.  There was almost
anguish in the yearning he felt for this soul.

"Eric, I didn't look for this from you.  I thought God had set
his mark on you if he ever had on any man.  And it is for things
like this that you set your soul back a thousand years from God. 0
foolish and perverse generation!"

Eric drew himself up to his full height and looked off to
where the new day was gilding the corn-tassels and flooding the
uplands with light.  As his nostrils drew in the breath of the dew
and the morning, something from the only poetry he had ever read
flashed across his mind, and he murmured, half to himself, with
dreamy exultation:

"'And a day shall be as a thousand years, and a thousand years
as a day.'"




The Enchanted Bluff

We had our swim before sundown, and while we were cooking our
supper the oblique rays of light made a dazzling glare on the white
sand about us.  The translucent red ball itself sank behind the
brown stretches of cornfield as we sat down to eat, and the warm
layer of air that had rested over the water and our clean sand bar
grew fresher and smelled of the rank ironweed and sunflowers
growing on the flatter shore.  The river was brown and sluggish,
like any other of the half-dozen streams that water the Nebraska
corn lands.  On one shore was an irregular line of bald clay bluffs
where a few scrub oaks with thick trunks and flat, twisted tops
threw light shadows on the long grass.  The western shore was low
and level, with cornfields that stretched to the skyline, and all
along the water's edge were little sandy coves and beaches where
slim cottonwoods and willow saplings flickered.

The turbulence of the river in springtime discouraged milling,
and, beyond keeping the old red bridge in repair, the busy farmers
did not concern themselves with the stream; so the Sandtown boys
were left in undisputed possession.  In the autumn we hunted quail
through the miles of stubble and fodder land along the flat shore,
and, after the winter skating season was over and the ice had gone
out, the spring freshets and flooded bottoms gave us our great
excitement of the year.  The channel was never the same for two
successive seasons.  Every spring the swollen stream undermined a
bluff to the east, or bit out a few acres of cornfield to the west
and whirled the soil away, to deposit it in spumy mud banks
somewhere else.  When the water fell low in midsummer, new sand
bars were thus exposed to dry and whiten in the August sun.
Sometimes these were banked so firmly that the fury of the next
freshet failed to unseat them; the little willow seedlings emerged
triumphantly from the yellow froth, broke into spring leaf, shot up
into summer growth, and with their mesh of roots bound together the
moist sand beneath them against the batterings of another April. 
Here and there a cottonwood soon glittered among them, quivering in
the low current of air that, even on breathless days when the dust
hung like smoke above the wagon road, trembled along the face of
the water.

It was on such an island, in the third summer of its yellow
green, that we built our watch fire; not in the thicket of dancing
willow wands, but on the level terrace of fine sand which had been
added that spring; a little new bit of world, beautifully ridged
with ripple marks, and strewn with the tiny skeletons of turtles
and fish, all as white and dry as if they had been expertly cured. 
We had been careful not to mar the freshness of the place, although
we often swam to it on summer evenings and lay on the sand to rest.

This was our last watch fire of the year, and there were
reasons why I should remember it better than any of the others. 
Next week the other boys were to file back to their old places in
the Sandtown High School, but I was to go up to the Divide to teach
my first country school in the Norwegian district.  I was already
homesick at the thought of quitting the boys with whom I had always
played; of leaving the river, and going up into a windy plain that
was all windmills and cornfields and big pastures; where there was
nothing wilful or unmanageable in the landscape, no new islands,
and no chance of unfamiliar birds--such as often followed the
watercourses.

Other boys came and went and used the river for fishing or
skating, but we six were sworn to the spirit of the stream, and we
were friends mainly because of the river.  There were the two
Hassler boys, Fritz and Otto, sons of the little German tailor. 
They were the youngest of us; ragged boys of ten and twelve, with
sunburned hair, weather-stained faces, and pale blue eyes.  Otto,
the elder, was the best mathematician in school, and clever
at his books, but he always dropped out in the spring term as if
the river could not get on without him.  He and Fritz caught the
fat, horned catfish and sold them about the town, and they lived
so much in the water that they were as brown and sandy as the river
itself.

There was Percy Pound, a fat, freckled boy with chubby cheeks,
who took half a dozen boys' story-papers and was always being kept
in for reading detective stories behind his desk.  There was Tip
Smith, destined by his freckles and red hair to be the buffoon in
all our games, though he walked like a timid little old man and had
a funny, cracked laugh.  Tip worked hard in his father's grocery
store every afternoon, and swept it out before school in the
morning.  Even his recreations were laborious.  He collected
cigarette cards and tin tobacco-tags indefatigably, and would sit
for hours humped up over a snarling little scroll-saw which he kept
in his attic.  His dearest possessions were some little pill
bottles that purported to contain grains of wheat from the Holy
Land, water from the Jordan and the Dead Sea, and earth from the
Mount of Olives.  His father had bought these dull things from a
Baptist missionary who peddled them, and Tip seemed to derive great
satisfaction from their remote origin.

The tall boy was Arthur Adams.  He had fine hazel eves that
were almost too reflective and sympathetic for a boy, and such a
pleasant voice that we all loved to hear him read aloud.  Even when
he had to read poetry aloud at school, no one ever thought of
laughing.  To be sure, he was not at school very much of the time. 
He was seventeen and should have finished the High School the year
before, but he was always off somewhere with his gun.  Arthur's
mother was dead, and his father, who was feverishly absorbed in
promoting schemes, wanted to send the boy away to school and get
him off his hands; but Arthur always begged off for another year
and promised to study.  I remember him as a tall, brown boy with an
intelligent face, always lounging among a lot of us little fellows,
laughing at us oftener than with us, but such a soft, satisfied
laugh that we felt rather flattered when we provoked it.  In
after-years people said that Arthur had been given to evil ways
as a ]ad, and it is true that we often saw him with the gambler's
sons and with old Spanish Fanny's boy, but if he learned anything
ugly in their company he never betrayed it to us.  We would have
followed Arthur anywhere, and I am bound to say that he led us into
no worse places than the cattail marshes and the stubble fields. 
These, then, were the boys who camped with me that summer night
upon the sand bar.

After we finished our supper we beat the willow thicket for
driftwood.  By the time we had collected enough, night had fallen,
and the pungent, weedy smell from the shore increased with the
coolness.  We threw ourselves down about the fire and made another
futile effort to show Percy Pound the Little Dipper.  We had tried
it often before, but he could never be got past the big one.

"You see those three big stars just below the handle, with the
bright one in the middle?" said Otto Hassler; "that's Orion's belt,
and the bright one is the clasp."  I crawled behind Otto's shoulder
and sighted up his arm to the star that seemed perched upon the tip
of his steady forefinger.  The Hassler boys did seine-fishing at
night, and they knew a good many stars.

Percy gave up the Little Dipper and lay back on the sand, his
hands clasped under his head.  "I can see the North Star," he
announced, contentedly, pointing toward it with his big toe. 
"Anyone might get lost and need to know that."

We all looked up at it.

"How do you suppose Columbus felt when his compass didn't
point north any more?" Tip asked.

Otto shook his head.  "My father says that there was another
North Star once, and that maybe this one won't last always.  I
wonder what would happen to us down here if anything went wrong
with it?"

Arthur chuckled.  "I wouldn't worry, Ott.  Nothing's apt to
happen to it in your time.  Look at the Milky Way!  There must be
lots of good dead Indians."

We lay back and looked, meditating, at the dark cover of the
world.  The gurgle of the water had become heavier.  We had often
noticed a mutinous, complaining note in it at night, quite
different from its cheerful daytime chuckle, and seeming like the
voice of a much deeper and more powerful stream.  Our water had
always these two moods: the one of sunny complaisance, the other of
inconsolable, passionate regret.

"Queer how the stars are all in sort of diagrams," remarked
Otto.  "You could do most any proposition in geometry with 'em. 
They always look as if they meant something.  Some folks say
everybody's fortune is all written out in the stars, don't they?"

"They believe so in the old country," Fritz affirmed.

But Arthur only laughed at him.  "You're thinking of Napoleon,
Fritzey.  He had a star that went out when he began to lose
battles.  I guess the stars don't keep any close tally on Sandtown
folks."

We were speculating on how many times we could count a hundred
before the evening star went down behind the cornfields, when
someone cried, "There comes the moon, and it's as big as a cart
wheel!"

We all jumped up to greet it as it swam over the bluffs behind
us.  It came up like a galleon in full sail; an enormous, barbaric
thing, red as an angry heathen god.

"When the moon came up red like that, the Aztecs used to
sacrifice their prisoners on the temple top," Percy announced.

"Go on, Perce.  You got that out of <i>Golden Days</i>.  Do you
believe that, Arthur?" I appealed.

Arthur answered, quite seriously: "Like as not.  The moon was
one of their gods.  When my father was in Mexico City he saw the
stone where they used to sacrifice their prisoners."

As we dropped down by the fire again some one asked whether
the Mound-Builders were older than the Aztecs.  When we once got
upon the Mound-Builders we never willingly got away from them, and
we were still conjecturing when we heard a loud splash in the
water.

"Must have been a big cat jumping," said Fritz.  "They do
sometimes.  They must see bugs in the dark.  Look what a track the
moon makes!"

There was a long, silvery streak on the water, and where the
current fretted over a big log it boiled up like gold pieces.

"Suppose there ever <i>was</i> any gold hid away in this old
river?" Fritz asked.  He lay like a little brown Indian, close to
the fire, his chin on his hand and his bare feet in the air.  His
brother laughed at him, but Arthur took his suggestion seriously.

"Some of the Spaniards thought there was gold up here somewhere. 
Seven cities chuck full of gold, they had it, and Coronado and his
men came up to hunt it.  The Spaniards were all over this country
once."

Percy looked interested.  "Was that before the Mormons went
through?"

We all laughed at this.

"Long enough before.  Before the Pilgrim Fathers, Perce.  Maybe
they came along this very river.  They always followed the
watercourses."

"I wonder where this river really does begin?" Tip mused. 
That was an old and a favorite mystery which the map did not
clearly explain.  On the map the little black line stopped
somewhere in western Kansas; but since rivers generally rose in
mountains, it was only reasonable to suppose that ours came from
the Rockies.  Its destination, we knew, was the Missouri, and the
Hassler boys always maintained that we could embark at Sandtown in
floodtime, follow our noses, and eventually arrive at New Orleans. 
Now they took up their old argument.  "If us boys had grit enough
to try it, it wouldn't take no time to get to Kansas City and St.
Joe."

We began to talk about the places we wanted to go to. The
Hassler boys wanted to see the stockyards in Kansas City, and Percy
wanted to see a big store in Chicago.  Arthur was interlocutor and
did not betray himself.

"Now it's your turn, Tip."

Tip rolled over on his elbow and poked the fire, and his eyes
looked shyly out of his queer, tight little face.  "My place is
awful far away.  My Uncle Bill told me about it."

Tip's Uncle Bill was a wanderer, bitten with mining fever, who
had drifted into Sandtown with a broken arm, and when it was well
had drifted out again.

"Where is it?"

"Aw, it's down in New Mexico somewheres.  There aren't no
railroads or anything.  You have to go on mules, and you run out of
water before you get there and have to drink canned tomatoes."

"Well, go on, kid.  What's it like when you do get there?"

Tip sat up and excitedly began his story.

"There's a big red rock there that goes right up out of the
sand for about nine hundred feet.  The country's flat all around
it, and this here rock goes up all by itself, like a monument. 
They call it the Enchanted Bluff down there, because no white man
has ever been on top of it.  The sides are smooth rock, and
straight up, like a wall.  The Indians say that hundreds of years
ago, before the Spaniards came, there was a village away up there
in the air.  The tribe that lived there had some sort of steps,
made out of wood and bark, bung down over the face of the bluff,
and the braves went down to hunt and carried water up in big jars
swung on their backs.  They kept a big supply of water and dried
meat up there, and never went down except to hunt.  They were a
peaceful tribe that made cloth and pottery, and they went up there
to get out of the wars.  You see, they could pick off any war party
that tried to get up their little steps.  The Indians say they were
a handsome people, and they had some sort of queer religion.  Uncle
Bill thinks they were Cliff-Dwellers who had got into trouble and
left home.  They weren't fighters, anyhow.

"One time the braves were down hunting and an awful storm came
up--a kind of waterspout--and when they got back to their rock they
found their little staircase had been all broken to pieces, and
only a few steps were left hanging away up in the air.  While they
were camped at the foot of the rock, wondering what to do, a
war party from the north came along and massacred 'em to a man,
with all the old folks and women looking on from the rock.  Then
the war party went on south and left the village to get down the
best way they could.  Of course they never got down.  They starved
to death up there, and when the war party came back on their way
north, they could hear the children crying from the edge of the
bluff where they had crawled out, but they didn't see a sign of a
grown Indian, and nobody has ever been up there since."

We exclaimed at this dolorous legend and sat up.

"There couldn't have been many people up there," Percy demurred. 
"How big is the top, Tip?"

"Oh, pretty big.  Big enough so that the rock doesn't look
nearly as tall as it is.  The top's bigger than the base.  The
bluff is sort of worn away for several hundred feet up.  That's one
reason it's so hard to climb."

I asked how the Indians got up, in the first place.

"Nobody knows how they got up or when.  A hunting party came
along once and saw that there was a town up there, and that was
all."

Otto rubbed his chin and looked thoughtful.  "Of course there
must be some way to get up there.  Couldn't people get a rope over
someway and pull a ladder up?"

Tip's little eyes were shining with excitement.  "I know a
way.  Me and Uncle Bill talked it over.  There's a kind of rocket
that would take a rope over--lifesavers use 'em--and then you could
hoist a rope ladder and peg it down at the bottom and make it tight
with guy ropes on the other side.  I'm going to climb that there
bluff, and I've got it all planned out."

Fritz asked what he expected to find when he got up there.

"Bones, maybe, or the ruins of their town, or pottery, or some
of their idols.  There might be 'most anything up there.  Anyhow,
I want to see."

"Sure nobody else has been up there, Tip?" Arthur asked.

"Dead sure.  Hardly anybody ever goes down there.  Some hunters
tried to cut steps in the rock once, but they didn't get higher
than a man can reach.  The Bluff's all red granite, and Uncle Bill
thinks it's a boulder the glaciers left.  It's a queer place,
anyhow.  Nothing but cactus and desert for hundreds of miles, and
yet right under the Bluff there's good water and plenty of grass. 
That's why the bison used to go down there."

Suddenly we heard a scream above our fire, and jumped up to
see a dark, slim bird floating southward far above us--a whooping
crane, we knew by her cry and her long neck.  We ran to the edge of
the island, hoping we might see her alight, but she wavered
southward along the rivercourse until we lost her.  The Hassler
boys declared that by the look of the heavens it must be after
midnight, so we threw more wood on our fire, put on our jackets,
and curled down in the warm sand.  Several of us pretended to doze,
but I fancy we were really thinking about Tip's Bluff and the
extinct people.  Over in the wood the ring doves were calling
mournfully to one another, and once we heard a dog bark, far away. 
"Somebody getting into old Tommy's melon patch," Fritz murmured
sleepily, but nobody answered him.  By and by Percy spoke out of
the shadows.

"Say, Tip, when you go down there will you take me with you?"

"Maybe."

"Suppose one of us beats you down there, Tip?"

"Whoever gets to the Bluff first has got to promise to tell
the rest of us exactly what he finds," remarked one of the Hassler
boys, and to this we all readily assented.

Somewhat reassured, I dropped off to sleep.  I must have
dreamed about a race for the Bluff, for I awoke in a kind of fear
that other people were getting ahead of me and that I was losing my
chance.  I sat up in my damp clothes and looked at the other boys,
who lay tumbled in uneasy attitudes about the dead fire.  It was
still dark, but the sky was blue with the last wonderful azure of
night.  The stars glistened like crystal globes, and trembled as if
they shone through a depth of clear water.  Even as I watched, they
began to pale and the sky brightened.  Day came suddenly, almost
instantaneously.  I turned for another look at the blue
night, and it was gone.  Everywhere the birds began to call, and
all manner of little insects began to chirp and hop about in the
willows.  A breeze sprang up from the west and brought the heavy
smell of ripened corn.  The boys rolled over and shook themselves.
We stripped and plunged into the river just as the sun came up over
the windy bluffs.

When I came home to Sandtown at Christmas time, we skated out
to our island and talked over the whole project of the Enchanted
Bluff, renewing our resolution to find it.


Although that was twenty years ago, none of us have ever
climbed the Enchanted Bluff.  Percy Pound is a stockbroker in
Kansas City and will go nowhere that his red touring car cannot
carry him.  Otto Hassler went on the railroad and lost his foot
braking; after which he and Fritz succeeded their father as the
town tailors.

Arthur sat about the sleepy little town all his life--he died
before he was twenty-five.  The last time I saw him, when I was
home on one of my college vacations, he was sitting in a steamer
chair under a cottonwood tree in the little yard behind one of the
two Sandtown saloons.  He was very untidy and his hand was not
steady, but when he rose, unabashed, to greet me, his eyes were as
clear and warm as ever.  When I had talked with him for an hour and
heard him laugh again, I wondered how it was that when Nature had
taken such pains with a man, from his hands to the arch of his long
foot, she had ever lost him in Sandtown.  He joked about Tip
Smith's Bluff, and declared he was going down there just as soon as
the weather got cooler; he thought the Grand Canyon might be worth
while, too.

I was perfectly sure when I left him that he would never get
beyond the high plank fence and the comfortable shade of the
cottonwood.  And, indeed, it was under that very tree that he died
one summer morning.

Tip Smith still talks about going to New Mexico.  He married
a slatternly, unthrifty country girl, has been much tied to a
perambulator, and has grown stooped and grey from irregular
meals and broken sleep.  But the worst of his difficulties are now
over, and he has, as he says, come into easy water.  When I was
last in Sandtown I walked home with him late one moonlight night,
after he had balanced his cash and shut up his store.  We took the
long way around and sat down on the schoolhouse steps, and between
us we quite revived the romance of the lone red rock and the
extinct people.  Tip insists that he still means to go down there,
but he thinks now he will wait until his boy Bert is old enough to
go with him.  Bert has been let into the story, and thinks of
nothing but the Enchanted Bluff.






The Bohemian Girl

The transcontinental express swung along the windings of the
Sand River Valley, and in the rear seat of the observation car a
young man sat greatly at his ease, not in the least discomfited by
the fierce sunlight which beat in upon his brown face and neck and
strong back.  There was a look of relaxation and of great passivity
about his broad shoulders, which seemed almost too heavy until he
stood up and squared them.  He wore a pale flannel shirt and a blue
silk necktie with loose ends.  His trousers were wide and belted at
the waist, and his short sack coat hung open.  His heavy shoes had
seen good service.  His reddish-brown hair, like his clothes, had
a foreign cut.  He had deep-set, dark blue eyes under heavy reddish
eyebrows.  His face was kept clean only by close shaving, and even
the sharpest razor left a glint of yellow in the smooth brown of
his skin.  His teeth and the palms of his hands were very white. 
His head, which looked hard and stubborn, lay indolently in the
green cushion of the wicker chair, and as he looked out at the ripe
summer country a teasing, not unkindly smile played over his lips. 
Once, as he basked thus comfortably, a quick light flashed in his
eves, curiously dilating the pupils, and his mouth became a hard,
straight line, gradually relaxing into its former smile of rather
kindly mockery.  He told himself, apparently, that there was no
point in getting excited; and he seemed a master hand at taking his
ease when he could.  Neither the sharp whistle of the locomotive
nor the brakeman's call disturbed him.  It was not until after the
train had stopped that he rose, put on a Panama hat, took from the
rack a small valise and a flute case, and stepped deliberately to
the station platform.  The baggage was already unloaded, and the
stranger presented a check for a battered sole-leather steamer
trunk.

"Can you keep it here for a day or two?" he asked the agent.  "I
may send for it, and I may not."

"Depends on whether you like the country, I suppose?" demanded
the agent in a challenging tone.

"Just so."

The agent shrugged his shoulders, looked scornfully at the
small trunk, which was marked "N.E.," and handed out a claim check
without further comment.  The stranger watched him as he caught one
end of the trunk and dragged it into the express room.  The agent's
manner seemed to remind him of something amusing.  "Doesn't seem to
be a very big place," he remarked, looking about.

"It's big enough for us," snapped the agent, as he banged the
trunk into a corner.

That remark, apparently, was what Nils Ericson had wanted.  He
chuckled quietly as he took a leather strap from his pocket and
swung his valise around his shoulder.  Then he settled his Panama
securely on his head, turned up his trousers, tucked the flute case
under his arm, and started off across the fields.  He gave the
town, as he would have said, a wide berth, and cut through a great
fenced pasture, emerging, when he rolled under the barbed wire at
the farther corner, upon a white dusty road which ran straight up
from the river valley to the high prairies, where the ripe wheat
stood yellow and the tin roofs and weathercocks were twinkling in
the fierce sunlight.  By the time Nils had done three miles, the
sun was sinking and the farm wagons on their way home from town
came rattling by, covering him with dust and making him sneeze. 
When one of the farmers pulled up and offered to give him a lift,
he clambered in willingly.  The driver was a thin, grizzled old man
with a long lean neck and a foolish sort of beard, like a goat's. 
"How fur ye goin'?" he asked, as he clucked to his horses and
started off.

"Do you go by the Ericson place?"

"Which Ericson?"  The old man drew in his reins as if he expected
to stop again.

"Preacher Ericson's."

"Oh, the Old Lady Ericson's!"  He turned and looked at Nils. 
"La, me!  If you're goin' out there you might a' rid out in the
automobile.  That's a pity, now.  The Old Lady Ericson was in town
with her auto.  You might 'a' heard it snortin' anywhere about the
post-office er the butcher shop."

"Has she a motor?" asked the stranger absently.

"'Deed an' she has!  She runs into town every night about this
time for her mail and meat for supper.  Some folks say she's afraid
her auto won't get exercise enough, but I say that's jealousy."

"Aren't there any other motors about here?"

"Oh, yes! we have fourteen in all.  But nobody else gets
around like the Old Lady Ericson.  She's out, rain er shine, over
the whole county, chargin' into town and out amongst her farms, an'
up to her sons' places.  Sure you ain't goin' to the wrong place?"
He craned his neck and looked at Nils' flute case with eager
curiosity.  "The old woman ain't got any piany that I knows on. 
Olaf, he has a grand.  His wife's musical: took lessons in
Chicago."

"I'm going up there tomorrow," said Nils imperturbably.  He
saw that the driver took him for a piano tuner.

"Oh, I see!"  The old man screwed up his eyes mysteriously.  He
was a little dashed by the stranger's noncommunicativeness, but he
soon broke out again.

"I'm one o' Miss Ericson's tenants.  Look after one of her
places.  I did own the place myself once, but I lost it a while
back, in the bad years just after the World's Fair.  Just as well,
too, I say.  Lets you out o' payin' taxes.  The Ericsons do own
most of the county now.  I remember the old preacher's favorite
text used to be, 'To them that hath shall be given.' They've spread
something wonderful--run over this here country like bindweed.  But
I ain't one that begretches it to 'em.  Folks is entitled to what
they kin git; and they're hustlers.  Olaf, he's in the Legislature
now, and a likely man fur Congress.  Listen, if that ain't the old
woman comin' now.  Want I should stop her?"

Nils shook his head.  He heard the deep chug-chug of a motor
vibrating steadily in the clear twilight behind them.  The pale
lights of the car swam over the hill, and the old man slapped his
reins and turned clear out of the road, ducking his head at
the first of three angry snorts from behind.  The motor was running
at a hot, even speed, and passed without turning an inch from its
course.  The driver was a stalwart woman who sat at ease in the
front seat and drove her car bareheaded.  She left a cloud of dust
and a trail of gasoline behind her.  Her tenant threw back his head
and sneezed.

"Whew!  I sometimes say I'd as lief be <i>before</i> Mrs. Ericson
as behind her.  She does beat all!  Nearly seventy, and never lets
another soul touch that car.  Puts it into commission herself
every morning, and keeps it tuned up by the hitch-bar all day.  I
never stop work for a drink o' water that I don't hear her a-
churnin' up the road.  I reckon her darter-in-laws never sets
down easy nowadays.  Never know when she'll pop in.  Mis' Otto,
she says to me: 'We're so afraid that thing'll blow up and do Ma
some injury yet, she's so turrible venturesome.' Says I: 'I
wouldn't stew, Mis' Otto; the old lady'll drive that car to the
funeral of every darter-in-law she's got.' That was after the old
woman had jumped a turrible bad culvert."

The stranger heard vaguely what the old man was saying. 
Just now he was experiencing something very much like
homesickness, and he was wondering what had brought it about. 
The mention of a name or two, perhaps; the rattle of a wagon
along a dusty road; the rank, resinous smell of sunflowers and
ironweed, which the night damp brought up from the draws and low
places; perhaps, more than all, the dancing lights of the motor
that had plunged by. He squared his shoulders with a comfortable
sense of strength.

The wagon, as it jolted westward, climbed a pretty steady
up-grade.  The country, receding from the rough river valley,
swelled more and more gently, as if it had been smoothed out by
the wind.  On one of the last of the rugged ridges, at the end of
a branch road, stood a grim square house with a tin roof and
double porches.  Behind the house stretched a row of broken,
wind-racked poplars, and down the hill slope to the left
straggled the sheds and stables.  The old man stopped his horses
where the Ericsons' road branched across a dry sand creek that
wound about the foot of the hill.

"That's the old lady's place.  Want I should drive in?"  "No,
thank you.  I'll roll out here.  Much obliged to you.  Good
night."

His passenger stepped down over the front wheel, and the old
man drove on reluctantly, looking back as if he would like to see
how the stranger would be received.

As Nils was crossing the dry creek he heard the restive
tramp of a horse coming toward him down the hill.  Instantly he
flashed out of the road and stood behind a thicket of wild plum
bushes that grew in the sandy bed.  Peering through the dusk, be
saw a light horse, under tight rein, descending the hill at a
sharp walk.  The rider was a slender woman--barely visible
against the dark hillside--wearing an old-fashioned derby hat and
a long riding skirt.  She sat lightly in the saddle, with her
chin high, and seemed to be looking into the distance.  As she
passed the plum thicket her horse snuffed the air and shied.  She
struck him, pulling him in sharply, with an angry exclamation,
<i>"Blazne!"</i> in Bohemian.  Once in the main road, she let him
out into a lope, and they soon emerged upon the crest of high land,
where they moved along the skyline, silhouetted against the band
of faint colour that lingered in the west.  This horse and rider,
with their free, rhythmical gallop, were the only moving things
to be seen on the face of the flat country.  They seemed, in the
last sad light of evening, not to be there accidentally, but as
an inevitable detail of the landscape.

Nils watched them until they had shrunk to a mere moving
speck against the sky, then he crossed the sand creek and climbed
the hill.  When he reached the gate the front of the house was
dark, but a light was shining from the side windows.  The pigs
were squealing in the hog corral, and Nils could see a tall boy,
who carried two big wooden buckets, moving about among them. 
Halfway between the barn and the house, the windmill wheezed
lazily.  Following the path that ran around to the back porch,
Nils stopped to look through the screen door into the lamplit
kitchen.  The kitchen was the largest room in the house; Nils
remembered that his older brothers used to give dances there when
he was a boy.  Beside the stove stood a little girl with two
light yellow braids and a broad, flushed face, peering
anxiously into a frying pan.  In the dining-room beyond, a large,
broad-shouldered woman was moving about the table.  She walked
with an active, springy step.  Her face was heavy and florid,
almost without wrinkles, and her hair was black at seventy.  Nils
felt proud of her as he watched her deliberate activity; never a
momentary hesitation, or a movement that did not tell.  He waited
until she came out into the kitchen and, brushing the child aside,
took her place at the stove.  Then he tapped on the screen door
and entered.

"It's nobody but Nils, Mother.  I expect you weren't looking
for me."

Mrs. Ericson turned away from the stove and stood staring at
him.  "Bring the lamp, Hilda, and let me look."

Nils laughed and unslung his valise.  "What's the matter,
Mother?  Don't you know me?"

Mrs. Ericson put down the lamp.  "You must be Nils.  You
don't look very different, anyway."

"Nor you, Mother.  You hold your own.  Don't you wear
glasses yet?"

"Only to read by.  Where's your trunk, Nils?"

"Oh, I left that in town.  I thought it might not be
convenient for you to have company so near threshing-time."

"Don't be foolish, Nils."  Mrs. Ericson turned back to the
stove.  "I don't thresh now.  I hitched the wheat land onto the
next farm and have a tenant.  Hilda, take some hot water up to
the company room, and go call little Eric."

The tow-haired child, who had been standing in mute
amazement, took up the tea-kettle and withdrew, giving Nils a
long, admiring look from the door of the kitchen stairs.

"Who's the youngster?" Nils asked, dropping down on the
bench behind the kitchen stove.

"One of your Cousin Henrik's."

"How long has Cousin Henrik been dead?"

"Six years.  There are two boys.  One stays with Peter and
one with Anders.  Olaf is their guardeen."

There was a clatter of pails on the porch, and a tall, lanky
boy peered wonderingly in through the screen door.  He had a
fair, gentle face and big grey eyes, and wisps of soft yellow
hair hung down under his cap.  Nils sprang up and pulled
him into the kitchen, hugging him and slapping him on the
shoulders.  "Well, if it isn't my kid!  Look at the size of him!
Don't you know me, Eric?"

The boy reddened tinder his sunburn and freckles, and hung his
head.  "I guess it's Nils," he said shyly.

"You're a good guesser," laughed Nils giving the lad's hand a
swing.  To himself he was thinking: "That's why the little girl
looked so friendly.  He's taught her to like me.  He was only six
when I went away, and he's remembered for twelve years."

Eric stood fumbling with his cap and smiling.  "You look just
like I thought you would," he ventured.

"Go wash your hands, Eric," called Mrs. Ericson.  "I've got
cob corn for supper, Nils.  You used to like it.  I guess you don't
get much of that in the old country.  Here's Hilda; she'll take you
up to your room.  You'll want to get the dust off you before you
eat."

Mrs. Ericson went into the dining-room to lay another plate,
and the little girl came up and nodded to Nils as if to let him
know that his room was ready.  He put out his hand and she took it,
with a startled glance up at his face.  Little Eric dropped his
towel, threw an arm about Nils and one about Hilda, gave them a
clumsy squeeze, and then stumbled out to the porch.

During supper Nils heard exactly how much land each of his
eight grown brothers farmed, how their crops were coming on, and
how much livestock they were feeding.  His mother watched him
narrowly as she talked.  "You've got better looking, Nils," she
remarked abruptly, whereupon he grinned and the children giggled. 
Eric, although he was eighteen and as tall as Nils, was always
accounted a child, being the last of so many sons.  His face seemed
childlike, too, Nils thought, and he had the open, wandering eves
of a little boy.  All the others had been men at his age.

After supper Nils went out to the front porch and sat down on
the step to smoke a pipe.  Mrs. Ericson drew a rocking-chair up
near him and began to knit busily.  It was one of the few Old World
customs she had kept up, for she could not bear to sit with idle
hands.

"Where's little Eric, Mother?"

"He's helping Hilda with the dishes.  He does it of his own
will; I don't like a boy to be too handy about the house."

"He seems like a nice kid."

"He's very obedient."

Nils smiled a little in the dark.  It was just as well to
shift the line of conversation.  "What are you knitting there,
Mother?"

"Baby stockings.  The boys keep me busy."  Mrs. Ericson
chuckled and clicked her needles.

"How many grandchildren have you?"

"Only thirty-one now.  Olaf lost his three.  They were
sickly, like their mother."

"I supposed he had a second crop by this time!"

"His second wife has no children.  She's too proud.  She
tears about on horseback all the time.  But she'll get caught up
with, yet.  She sets herself very high, though nobody knows what
for.  They were low enough Bohemians she came of.  I never
thought much of Bohemians; always drinking."

Nils puffed away at his pipe in silence, and Mrs. Ericson
knitted on.  In a few moments she added grimly: "She was down
here tonight, just before you came.  She'd like to quarrel with
me and come between me and Olaf, but I don't give her the chance. 
I suppose you'll be bringing a wife home some day."

"I don't know.  I've never thought much about it."

"Well, perhaps it's best as it is," suggested Mrs. Ericson
hopefully.  "You'd never be contented tied down to the land. 
There was roving blood in your father's family, and it's come out
in you.  I expect your own way of life suits you best."  Mrs.
Ericson had dropped into a blandly agreeable tone which Nils well
remembered.  It seemed to amuse him a good deal and his white
teeth flashed behind his pipe.  His mother's strategies had
always diverted him, even when he was a boy--they were so flimsy
and patent, so illy proportioned to her vigor and force. 
"They've been waiting to see which way I'd jump," he reflected. 
He felt that Mrs. Ericson was pondering his case deeply as she
sat clicking her needles.

"I don't suppose you've ever got used to steady work," she went on
presently.  "Men ain't apt to if they roam around too long.  It's
a pity you didn't come back the year after the World's Fair.  Your
father picked up a good bit of land cheap then, in the hard times,
and I expect maybe he'd have give you a farm. it's too bad you put
off comin' back so long, for I always thought he meant to do
something by you."

Nils laughed and shook the ashes out of his pipe.  "I'd have
missed a lot if I had come back then.  But I'm sorry I didn't get
back to see father."

"Well, I suppose we have to miss things at one end or the
other.  Perhaps you are as well satisfied with your own doings,
now, as you'd have been with a farm," said Mrs. Ericson
reassuringly.

"Land's a good thing to have," Nils commented, as he lit
another match and sheltered it with his hand.

His mother looked sharply at his face until the match burned
out.  "Only when you stay on it!" she hastened to say.

Eric came round the house by the path just then, and Nils
rose, with a yawn.  "Mother, if you don't mind, Eric and I will
take a little tramp before bedtime.  It will make me sleep."

"Very well; only don't stay long.  I'll sit up and wait for
you.  I like to lock up myself."

Nils put his hand on Eric's shoulder, and the two tramped down
the hill and across the sand creek into the dusty highroad beyond. 
Neither spoke.  They swung along at an even gait, Nils puffing at
his pipe.  There was no moon, and the white road and the wide
fields lay faint in the starlight.  Over everything was darkness
and thick silence, and the smell of dust and sunflowers.  The
brothers followed the road for a mile or more without finding a
place to sit down.  Finally, Nils perched on a stile over the wire
fence, and Eric sat on the lower step.

"I began to think you never would come back, Nils," said the
boy softly.

"Didn't I promise you I would?"

"Yes; but people don't bother about promises they make to
babies.  Did you really know you were going away for good
when you went to Chicago with the cattle that time?"

"I thought it very likely, if I could make my way."

"I don't see how you did it, Nils.  Not many fellows could."
Eric rubbed his shoulder against his brother's knee.

"The hard thing was leaving home you and father.  It was easy
enough, once I got beyond Chicago.  Of course I got awful homesick;
used to cry myself to sleep.  But I'd burned my bridges."

"You had always wanted to go, hadn't you?"

"Always.  Do you still sleep in our little room?  Is that
cottonwood still by the window?"

Eric nodded eagerly and smiled up at his brother in the grey
darkness.

"You remember how we always said the leaves were whispering
when they rustled at night?  Well, they always whispered to me
about the sea.  Sometimes they said names out of the geography
books.  In a high wind they had a desperate sound, like someone
trying to tear loose."

"How funny, Nils," said Eric dreamily, resting his chin on his
hand.  "That tree still talks like that, and 'most always it talks
to me about you."

They sat a while longer, watching the stars.  At last Eric
whispered anxiously: "Hadn't we better go back now?  Mother will
get tired waiting for us."  They rose and took a short cut home,
through the pasture.


                           II

The next morning Nils woke with the first flood of light that
came with dawn.  The white-plastered walls of his room reflected
the glare that shone through the thin window shades, and he found
it impossible to sleep.  He dressed hurriedly and slipped down the
hall and up the back stairs to the half-story room which be used to
share with his little brother.  Eric, in a skimpy nightshirt, was
sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing his eyes, his pale yellow
hair standing up in tufts all over his head.  When he saw Nils, he
murmured something confusedly and hustled his long legs into
his trousers.  "I didn't expect you'd be up so early, Nils," he
said, as his head emerged from his blue shirt.

"Oh, you thought I was a dude, did you?"  Nils gave him a
playful tap which bent the tall boy up like a clasp knife.  "See
here: I must teach you to box."  Nils thrust his hands into his
pockets and walked about.  "You haven't changed things much up
here.  Got most of my old traps, haven't you?"

He took down a bent, withered piece of sapling that hung over
the dresser.  "If this isn't the stick Lou Sandberg killed himself
with!"

The boy looked up from his shoe-lacing.

"Yes; you never used to let me play with that.  Just how did
he do it, Nils?  You were with father when he found Lou, weren't
you?"

"Yes.  Father was going off to preach somewhere, and, as we
drove along, Lou's place looked sort of forlorn, and we thought
we'd stop and cheer him up.  When we found him father said he'd
been dead a couple days.  He'd tied a piece of binding twine round
his neck, made a noose in each end, fixed the nooses over the ends
of a bent stick, and let the stick spring straight; strangled
himself."

"What made him kill himself such a silly way?"

The simplicity of the boy's question set Nils laughing.  He
clapped little Eric on the shoulder.  "What made him such a silly
as to kill himself at all, I should say!"

"Oh, well!  But his hogs had the cholera, and all up and died
on him, didn't they?"

"Sure they did; but he didn't have cholera; and there were
plenty of bogs left in the world, weren't there?"

"Well, but, if they weren't his, how could they do him any
good?" Eric asked, in astonishment.

"Oh, scat!  He could have had lots of fun with other people's
hogs.  He was a chump, Lou Sandberg.  To kill yourself for a pig--
think of that, now!"  Nils laughed all the way downstairs, and
quite embarrassed little Eric, who fell to scrubbing his face and
hands at the tin basin.  While he was parting his wet hair at the
kitchen looking glass, a heavy tread sounded on the stairs.  The
boy dropped his comb.  "Gracious, there's Mother.  We must have
talked too long."  He hurried out to the shed, slipped on his
overalls, and disappeared with the milking pails.

Mrs. Ericson came in, wearing a clean white apron, her black
hair shining from the application of a wet brush.

"Good morning, Mother.  Can't I make the fire for you?"

"No, thank you, Nils.  It's no trouble to make a cob fire, and
I like to manage the kitchen stove myself" Mrs. Ericson paused with
a shovel full of ashes in her hand.  "I expect you will be wanting
to see your brothers as soon as possible.  I'll take you up to
Anders' place this morning.  He's threshing, and most of our boys
are over there."

"Will Olaf be there?"

Mrs. Ericson went on taking out the ashes, and spoke between
shovels.  "No; Olaf's wheat is all in, put away in his new barn. 
He got six thousand bushel this year.  He's going to town today to
get men to finish roofing his barn."

"So Olaf is building a new barn?" Nils asked absently.

"Biggest one in the county, and almost done.  You'll likely be
here for the barn-raising.  He's going to have a supper and a dance
as soon as everybody's done threshing.  Says it keeps the voters in
good humour.  I tell him that's all nonsense; but Olaf has a head
for politics."

"Does Olaf farm all Cousin Henrik's land?"

Mrs. Ericson frowned as she blew into the faint smoke curling up
about the cobs.  "Yes; he holds it in trust for the children, Hilda
and her brothers.  He keeps strict account of everything he raises
on it, and puts the proceeds out at compound interest for them."

Nils smiled as he watched the little flames shoot up.  The
door of the back stairs opened, and Hilda emerged, her arms behind
her, buttoning up her long gingham apron as she came.  He nodded to
her gaily, and she twinkled at him out of her little blue eyes, set
far apart over her wide cheekbones.

"There, Hilda, you grind the coffee--and just put in an extra
handful; I expect your Cousin Nils likes his strong," said Mrs.
Ericson, as she went out to the shed.

Nils turned to look at the little girl, who gripped the coffee
grinder between her knees and ground so hard that her two braids
bobbed and her face flushed under its broad spattering of
freckles.  He noticed on her middle finger something that had not
been there last night, and that had evidently been put on for
company: a tiny gold ring with a clumsily set garnet stone.  As her
hand went round and round he touched the ring with the tip of his
finger, smiling.

Hilda glanced toward the shed door through which Mrs. Ericson
had disappeared.  "My Cousin Clara gave me that," she whispered
bashfully.  "She's Cousin Olaf's wife."


                           III

Mrs. Olaf Ericson--Clara Vavrika, as many people still called
her--was moving restlessly about her big bare house that morning. 
Her husband had left for the county town before his wife was out of
bed--her lateness in rising was one of the many things the Ericson
family had against her.  Clara seldom came downstairs before eight
o'clock, and this morning she was even later, for she had dressed
with unusual care.  She put on, however, only a tightfitting black
dress, which people thereabouts thought very plain.  She was a
tall, dark woman of thirty, with a rather sallow complexion and a
touch of dull salmon red in her cheeks, where the blood seemed to
burn under her brown skin.  Her hair, parted evenly above her low
forehead, was so black that there were distinctly blue lights in
it.  Her black eyebrows were delicate half-moons and her lashes
were long and heavy.  Her eyes slanted a little, as if she had a
strain of Tartar or gypsy blood, and were sometimes full of fiery
determination and sometimes dull and opaque.  Her expression was
never altogether amiable; was often, indeed, distinctly sullen, or,
when she was animated, sarcastic.  She was most attractive in
profile, for then one saw to advantage her small, well-shaped head
and delicate ears, and felt at once that here was a very positive,
if not an altogether pleasing, personality.

The entire management of Mrs. Olaf's household devolved upon
her aunt, Johanna Vavrika, a superstitious, doting woman of fifty. 
When Clara was a little girl her mother died, and Johanna's life
had been spent in ungrudging service to her niece.  Clara,
like many self-willed and discontented persons, was really very
apt, without knowing it, to do as other people told her, and to let
her destiny be decided for her by intelligences much below her own. 
It was her Aunt Johanna who had humoured and spoiled her in her
girlhood, who had got her off to Chicago to study piano, and who
had finally persuaded her to marry Olaf Ericson as the best match
she would be likely to make in that part of the country.  Johanna
Vavrika had been deeply scarred by smallpox in the old country. 
She was short and fat, homely and jolly and sentimental.  She was
so broad, and took such short steps when she walked, that her
brother, Joe Vavrika, always called her his duck.  She adored her
niece because of her talent, because of her good looks and
masterful ways, but most of all because of her selfishness.

Clara's marriage with Olaf Ericson was Johanna's particular
triumph.  She was inordinately proud of Olaf's position, and she
found a sufficiently exciting career in managing Clara's house, in
keeping it above the criticism of the Ericsons, in pampering Olaf
to keep him from finding fault with his wife, and in concealing
from every one Clara's domestic infelicities.  While Clara slept of
a morning, Johanna Vavrika was bustling about, seeing that Olaf and
the men had their breakfast, and that the cleaning or the butter-
making or the washing was properly begun by the two girls in the
kitchen.  Then, at about eight o'clock, she would take Clara's
coffee up to her, and chat with her while she drank it, telling her
what was going on in the house.  Old Mrs. Ericson frequently said
that her daughter-in-law would not know what day of the week it was
if Johanna did not tell her every morning.  Mrs. Ericson despised
and pitied Johanna, but did not wholly dislike her.  The one thing
she hated in her daughter-in-law above everything else was the way
in which Clara could come it over people.  It enraged her that the
affairs of her son's big, barnlike house went on as well as they
did, and she used to feel that in this world we have to wait
overlong to see the guilty punished.  "Suppose Johanna Vavrika died
or got sick?" the old lady used to say to Olaf.  "Your wife
wouldn't know where to look for her own dish-cloth."  Olaf
only shrugged his shoulders. The fact remained that Johanna did
not die, and, although Mrs. Ericson often told her she was
looking poorly, she was never ill.  She seldom left the house,
and she slept in a little room off the kitchen.  No Ericson, by
night or day, could come prying about there to find fault without
her knowing it.  Her one weakness was that she was an incurable
talker, and she sometimes made trouble without meaning to.

This morning Clara was tying a wine-coloured ribbon about
her throat when Johanna appeared with her coffee.  After putting
the tray on a sewing table, she began to make Clara's bed,
chattering the while in Bohemian.

"Well, Olaf got off early, and the girls are baking.  I'm
going down presently to make some poppy-seed bread for Olaf.  He
asked for prune preserves at breakfast, and I told him I was out
of them, and to bring some prunes and honey and cloves from
town."

Clara poured her coffee.  "Ugh!  I don't see how men can eat
so much sweet stuff.  In the morning, too!"

Her aunt chuckled knowingly.  "Bait a bear with honey, as we
say in the old country."

"Was he cross?" her niece asked indifferently.

"Olaf?  Oh, no!  He was in fine spirits.  He's never cross if
you know how to take him.  I never knew a man to make so little
fuss about bills.  I gave him a list of things to get a yard
long, and he didn't say a word; just folded it up and put it in
his pocket."

"I can well believe he didn't say a word," Clara remarked
with a shrug.  "Some day he'll forget how to talk."

"Oh, but they say he's a grand speaker in the Legislature. 
He knows when to keep quiet.  That's why he's got such influence
in politics.  The people have confidence in him."  Johanna beat up
a pillow and held it under her fat chin while she slipped on the
case.  Her niece laughed.

"Maybe we could make people believe we were wise, Aunty, if
we held our tongues.  Why did you tell Mrs. Ericson that Norman
threw me again last Saturday and turned my foot?  She's been
talking to Olaf."

Johanna fell into great confusion.  "Oh, but, my precious,
the old lady asked for you, and she's always so angry if I can't
give an excuse.  Anyhow, she needn't talk; she's always tearing
up something with that motor of hers."

When her aunt clattered down to the kitchen, Clara went to
dust the parlour.  Since there was not much there to dust, this did
not take very long.  Olaf had built the house new for her before
their marriage, but her interest in furnishing it had been short-
lived.  It went, indeed, little beyond a bathtub and her piano. 
They had disagreed about almost even, other article of furniture,
and Clara had said she would rather have her house empty than full
of things she didn't want.  The house was set in a hillside, and
the west windows of the parlour looked out above the kitchen yard
thirty feet below.  The east windows opened directly into the front
yard.  At one of the latter, Clara, while she was dusting, heard a
low whistle.  She did not turn at once, but listened intently as
she drew her cloth slowly along the round of a chair.  Yes, there
it was:

I dreamt that I dwelt in ma-a-arble halls.

She turned and saw Nils Ericson laughing in the sunlight, his
hat in his hand, just outside the window.  As she crossed the room
he leaned against the wire screen.  "Aren't you at all surprised to
see me, Clara Vavrika?"

"No; I was expecting to see you.  Mother Ericson telephoned
Olaf last night that you were here."

Nils squinted and gave a long whistle.  "Telephoned?  That must
have been while Eric and I were out walking.  Isn't she
enterprising?  Lift this screen, won't you?"

Clara lifted the screen, and Nils swung his leg across the
window-sill.  As he stepped into the room she said: "You didn't
think you were going to get ahead of your mother, did you?"

He threw his hat on the piano.  "Oh, I do sometimes.  You see,
I'm ahead of her now.  I'm supposed to be in Anders' wheat-field. 
But, as we were leaving, Mother ran her car into a soft place
beside the road and sank up to the hubs.  While they were going for
the horses to pull her out, I cut away behind the stacks and
escaped."  Nils chuckled.  Clara's dull eyes lit up as she looked
at him admiringly.

"You've got them guessing already. 1 don't know what your
mother said to Olaf over the telephone, but be came back looking as
if he'd seen a ghost, and he didn't go to bed until a dreadful
hour--ten o'clock, I should think.  He sat out on the porch in the
dark like a graven image.  It had been one of his talkative days,
too."  They both laughed, easily and lightly, like people who have
laughed a great deal together; but they remained standing.

"Anders and Otto and Peter looked as if they had seen ghosts,
too, over in the threshing field.  What's the matter with them
all?"

Clara gave him a quick, searching look.  "Well, for one thing,
they've always been afraid you have the other will."

Nils looked interested.  "The other will?"

"Yes.  A later one.  They knew your father made another, but
they never knew what he did with it.  They almost tore the old
house to pieces looking for it.  They always suspected that he
carried on a clandestine correspondence with you, for the one thing
he would do was to get his own mail himself.  So they thought he
might have sent the new will to you for safekeeping.  The old one,
leaving everything to your mother, was made long before you went
away, and it's understood among them that it cuts you out--that she
will leave all the property to the others.  Your father made the
second will to prevent that.  I've been hoping you had it.  It
would be such fun to spring it on them."  Clara laughed mirthfully,
a thing she did not often do now.

Nils shook his head reprovingly.  "Come, now, you're malicious."

"No, I'm not.  But I'd like something to happen to stir them
all up, just for once.  There never was such a family for having
nothing ever happen to them but dinner and threshing.  I'd almost
be willing to die, just to have a funeral.  <i>You</i> wouldn't
stand it for three weeks."

Nils bent over the piano and began pecking at the keys with
the finger of one hand.  "I wouldn't?  My dear young lady, how do
you know what I can stand?  <i>You</i> wouldn't wait to find out."

Clara flushed darkly and frowned.  "I didn't believe you would
ever come back--" she said defiantly.

"Eric believed I would, and he was only a baby when I went
away.  However, all's well that ends well, and I haven't come back
to be a skeleton at the feast.  We mustn't quarrel.  Mother mill be
here with a search warrant pretty soon."  He swung round and faced
her, thrusting his hands into his coat pockets.  "Come, you ought
to be glad to see me, if you want something to happen.  I'm
something, even without a will.  We can have a little fun, can't
we?  I think we can!"

She echoed him, "I think we can!"  They both laughed and their
eyes sparkled.  Clara Vavrika looked ten years younger than when
she had put the velvet ribbon about her throat that morning.

"You know, I'm so tickled to see mother," Nils went on. "I
didn't know I was so proud of her.  A regular pile driver.  How
about little pigtails, down at the house?  Is Olaf doing the square
thing by those children?"

Clara frowned pensively.  "Olaf has to do something that looks
like the square thing, now that he's a public man!"  She glanced
drolly at Nils.  "But he makes a good commission out of it.  On
Sundays they all get together here and figure.  He lets Peter and
Anders put in big bills for the keep of the two boys, and he pays
them out of the estate.  They are always having what they call
accountings.  Olaf gets something out of it, too.  I don't know
just how they do it, but it's entirely a family matter, as they
say.  And when the Ericsons say that--"  Clara lifted her eyebrows.

Just then the angry <i>honk-honk</i> of an approaching motor
sounded from down the road.  Their eyes met and they began to
laugh.  They laughed as children do when they can not contain
themselves, and can not explain the cause of their mirth to grown
people, but share it perfectly together.  When Clara Vavrika sat
down at the piano after he was gone, she felt that she had laughed
away a dozen years.  She practised as if the house were burning
over her head.

When Nils greeted his mother and climbed into the front seat
of the motor beside her, Mrs. Ericson looked grim, but she
made no comment upon his truancy until she had turned her car and
was retracing her revolutions along the road that ran by Olaf's big
pasture.  Then she remarked dryly:

"If I were you I wouldn't see too much of Olaf's wife while
you are here.  She's the kind of woman who can't see much of men
without getting herself talked about.  She was a good deal talked
about before he married her."

"Hasn't Olaf tamed her?" Nils asked indifferently.

Mrs. Ericson shrugged her massive shoulders.  "Olaf don't seem
to have much luck, when it comes to wives.  The first one was meek
enough, but she was always ailing.  And this one has her own way. 
He says if he quarreled with her she'd go back to her father, and
then he'd lose the Bohemian vote.  There are a great many Bohunks
in this district.  But when you find a man under his wife's thumb
you can always be sure there's a soft spot in him somewhere."

Nils thought of his own father, and smiled.  "She brought him
a good deal of money, didn't she, besides the Bohemian vote?"

Mrs. Ericson sniffed.  "Well, she has a fair half section in
her own name, but I can't see as that does Olaf much good.  She
will have a good deal of property some day, if old Vavrika don't
marry again.  But I don't consider a saloonkeeper's money as good
as other people's money,"

Nils laughed outright.  "Come, Mother, don't let your
prejudices carry you that far.  Money's money.  Old Vavrika's a
mighty decent sort of saloonkeeper.  Nothing rowdy about him."

Mrs. Ericson spoke up angrily.  "Oh, I know you always stood
up for them!  But hanging around there when you were a boy never
did you any good, Nils, nor any of the other boys who went there. 
There weren't so many after her when she married Olaf, let me tell
you.  She knew enough to grab her chance."

Nils settled back in his seat.  "Of course I liked to go
there, Mother, and you were always cross about it.  You never took
the trouble to find out that it was the one jolly house in this
country for a boy to go to.  All the rest of you were working
yourselves to death, and the houses were mostly a mess, full
of babies and washing and flies. oh, it was all right--I understand
that; but you are young only once, and I happened to be young then.
Now, Vavrika's was always jolly.  He played the violin, and I used
to take my flute, and Clara played the piano, and Johanna used to
sing Bohemian songs.  She always had a big supper for us--herrings
and pickles and poppy-seed bread, and lots of cake and preserves.
Old Joe had been in the army in the old country, and he could tell
lots of good stories.  I can see him cutting bread, at the head of
the table, now.  I don't know what I'd have done when I was a kid
if it hadn't been for the Vavrikas, really."

"And all the time he was taking money that other people had
worked hard in the fields for," Mrs. Ericson observed.

"So do the circuses, Mother, and they're a good thing.  People
ought to get fun for some of their money.  Even father liked old
Joe."

"Your father," Mrs. Ericson said grimly, "liked everybody."

As they crossed the sand creek and turned into her own place,
Mrs. Ericson observed, "There's Olaf's buggy.  He's stopped on his
way from town."  Nils shook himself and prepared to greet his
brother, who was waiting on the porch.

Olaf was a big, heavy Norwegian, slow of speech and movement. 
His head was large and square, like a block of wood.  When Nils, at
a distance, tried to remember what his brother looked like, he
could recall only his heavy head, high forehead, large nostrils,
and pale blue eyes, set far apart.  Olaf's features were
rudimentary: the thing one noticed was the face itself, wide and
flat and pale; devoid of any expression, betraying his fifty years
as little as it betrayed anything else, and powerful by reason of
its very stolidness.  When Olaf shook hands with Nils he looked at
him from under his light eyebrows, but Nils felt that no one could
ever say what that pale look might mean.  The one thing he had
always felt in Olaf was a heavy stubbornness, like the unyielding
stickiness of wet loam against the plow.  He had always found Olaf
the most difficult of his brothers.

"How do you do, Nils?  Expect to stay with us long?"

"Oh, I may stay forever," Nils answered gaily.  "I like this
country better than I used to."

"There's been some work put into it since you left," Olaf remarked.

"Exactly.  I think it's about ready to live in now--and I'm
about ready to settle down."  Nils saw his brother lower his big
head ("Exactly like a bull," he thought.) "Mother's been persuading
me to slow down now, and go in for farming," he went on lightly.

Olaf made a deep sound in his throat.  "Farming ain't learned
in a day," he brought out, still looking at the ground.

"Oh, I know!  But I pick things up quickly."  Nils had not meant
to antagonize his brother, and he did not know now why he was doing
it.  "Of course," he went on, "I shouldn't expect to make a big
success, as you fellows have done.  But then, I'm not ambitious. 
I won't want much.  A little land, and some cattle, maybe."

Olaf still stared at the ground, his head down.  He wanted to
ask Nils what he had been doing all these years, that he didn't
have a business somewhere he couldn't afford to leave; why he
hadn't more pride than to come back with only a little sole-leather
trunk to show for himself, and to present himself as the only
failure in the family.  He did not ask one of these questions, but
he made them all felt distinctly.

"Humph!" Nils thought.  "No wonder the man never talks, when
he can butt his ideas into you like that without ever saying a
word.  I suppose he uses that kind of smokeless powder on his wife
all the time.  But I guess she has her innings."  He chuckled, and
Olaf looked up.  "Never mind me, Olaf.  I laugh without knowing
why, like little Eric.  He's another cheerful dog."

"Eric," said Olaf slowly, "is a spoiled kid.  He's just let
his mother's best cow go dry because he don't milk her right.  I
was hoping you'd take him away somewhere and put him into business.

If he don't do any good among strangers, he never will."  This was
a long speech for Olaf, and as he finished it he climbed into his
buggy.

Nils shrugged his shoulders.  "Same old tricks," he
thought.  "Hits from behind you every time.  What a whale of a
man!"  He turned and went round to the kitchen, where his mother
was scolding little Eric for letting the gasoline get low.


                           IV

Joe Vavrika's saloon was not in the county seat, where Olaf
and Mrs. Ericson did their trading, but in a cheerfuller place, a
little Bohemian settlement which lay at the other end of the
county, ten level miles north of Olaf's farm.  Clara rode up to see
her father almost every day.  Vavrika's house was, so to speak, in
the back yard of his saloon.  The garden between the two buildings
was inclosed by a high board fence as tight as a partition, and in
summer Joe kept beer tables and wooden benches among the gooseberry
bushes under his little cherry tree.  At one of these tables Nils
Ericson was seated in the late afternoon, three days after his
return home.  Joe had gone in to serve a customer, and Nils was
lounging on his elbows, looking rather mournfully into his half-
emptied pitcher, when he heard a laugh across the little garden. 
Clara, in her riding habit, was standing at the back door of the
house, under the grapevine trellis that old Joe had grown there
long ago.  Nils rose.

"Come out and keep your father and me company.  We've been
gossiping all afternoon.  Nobody to bother us but the flies."

She shook her head.  "No, I never come out here any more.  Olaf
doesn't like it.  I must live up to my position, you know."

"You mean to tell me you never come out and chat with the boys, as
you used to?  He <i>has</i> tamed you!  Who keeps up these
flower-beds?"

"I come out on Sundays, when father is alone, and read the
Bohemian papers to him.  But I am never here when the bar is open. 
What have you two been doing?"

"Talking, as I told you.  I've been telling him about my
travels.  I find I can't talk much at home, not even to Eric."

Clara reached up and poked with her riding-whip at a white
moth that was fluttering in the sunlight among the vine leaves.  "I
suppose you will never tell me about all those things."

"Where can I tell them?  Not in Olaf's house, certainly. 
What's the matter with our talking here?"  He pointed persuasively
with his hat to the bushes and the green table, where the flies
were singing lazily above the empty beer glasses.

Clara shook her head weakly.  "No, it wouldn't do.  Besides,
I am going now."

"I'm on Eric's mare.  Would you be angry if I overtook you?"

Clara looked back and laughed.  "You might try and see.  I can
leave you if I don't want you.  Eric's mare can't keep up with
Norman."

Nils went into the bar and attempted to pay his score.  Big
Joe, six feet four, with curly yellow hair and mustache, clapped
him on the shoulder.  "Not a Goddamn a your money go in my drawer,
you hear?  Only next time you bring your flute, te-te-te-te-te-ty."
Joe wagged his fingers in imitation of the flute player's position.

"My Clara, she come all-a-time Sundays an' play for me.  She not
like to play at Ericson's place."  He shook his yellow curls and
laughed.  "Not a Goddamn a fun at Ericson's.  You come a Sunday. 
You like-a fun.  No forget de flute."  Joe talked very rapidly and
always tumbled over his English.  He seldom spoke it to his
customers, and had never learned much.

Nils swung himself into the saddle and trotted to the west of
the village, where the houses and gardens scattered into prairie
land and the road turned south.  Far ahead of him, in the declining
light, he saw Clara Vavrika's slender figure, loitering on
horseback.  He touched his mare with the whip, and shot along the
white, level road, under the reddening sky.  When he overtook
Olaf's wife he saw that she had been crying.  "What's the matter,
Clara Vavrika?" he asked kindly.

"Oh, I get blue sometimes.  It was awfully jolly living there
with father.  I wonder why I ever went away."

Nils spoke in a low, kind tone that he sometimes used with women:
"That's what I've been wondering these many years.  You were the
last girl in the country I'd have picked for a wife for Olaf.  What
made you do it, Clara?"

"I suppose I really did it to oblige the neighbours"--Clara
tossed her head.  "People were beginning to wonder."

"To wonder?"

"Yes--why I didn't get married.  I suppose I didn't like to
keep them in suspense.  I've discovered that most girls marry out
of consideration for the neighbourhood."

Nils bent his head toward her and his white teeth flashed. 
"I'd have gambled that one girl I knew would say, 'Let the
neighbourhood be damned.'"

Clara shook her head mournfully.  "You see, they have it on
you, Nils; that is, if you're a woman.  They say you're beginning
to go off.  That's what makes us get married: we can't stand the
laugh."

Nils looked sidewise at her.  He had never seen her head droop
before.  Resignation was the last thing he would have expected of
her.  "In your case, there wasn't something else?"

"Something else?"

"I mean, you didn't do it to spite somebody?  Somebody who
didn't come back?"

Clara drew herself up.  "Oh, I never thought you'd come back. 
Not after I stopped writing to you, at least.  <i>That</i> was all
over, long before I married Olaf."

"It never occurred to you, then, that the meanest thing you
could do to me was to marry Olaf?"

Clara laughed.  "No; I didn't know you were so fond of Olaf."

Nils smoothed his horse's mane with his glove.  "You know,
Clara Vavrika, you are never going to stick it out.  You'll cut
away some day, and I've been thinking you might as well cut away
with me."

Clara threw up her chin.  "Oh, you don't know me as well as
you think.  I won't cut away.  Sometimes, when I'm with father, I
feel like it.  But I can hold out as long as the Ericsons can. 
They've never got the best of me yet, and one can live, so long as
one isn't beaten.  If I go back to father, it's all up with Olaf in
politics.  He knows that, and he never goes much beyond
sulking.  I've as much wit as the Ericsons.  I'll never leave them
unless I can show them a thing or two."

"You mean unless you can come it over them?"

"Yes--unless I go away with a man who is cleverer than they
are, and who has more money."

Nils whistled.  "Dear me, you are demanding a good deal.  The
Ericsons, take the lot of them, are a bunch to beat.  But I should
think the excitement of tormenting them would have worn off by this
time."

"It has, I'm afraid," Clara admitted mournfully.

"Then why don't you cut away?  There are more amusing games
than this in the world.  When I came home I thought it might amuse
me to bully a few quarter sections out of the Ericsons; but I've
almost decided I can get more fun for my money somewhere else."

Clara took in her breath sharply.  "Ah, you have got the other
will!  That was why you came home!"

"No, it wasn't.  I came home to see how you were getting on
with Olaf."

Clara struck her horse with the whip, and in a bound she was
far ahead of him.  Nils dropped one word, "Damn!" and whipped after
her; but she leaned forward in her saddle and fairly cut the wind. 
Her long riding skirt rippled in the still air behind her.  The sun
was just sinking behind the stubble in a vast, clear sky, and the
shadows drew across the fields so rapidly that Nils could scarcely
keep in sight the dark figure on the road.  When he overtook her he
caught her horse by the bridle.  Norman reared, and Nils was
frightened for her; but Clara kept her seat.

"Let me go, Nils Ericson!" she cried.  "I hate you more than
any of them.  You were created to torture me, the whole tribe of
you--to make me suffer in every possible way."

She struck her horse again and galloped away from him.  Nils
set his teeth and looked thoughtful.  He rode slowly home along the
deserted road, watching the stars come out in the clear violet sky.

They flashed softly into the limpid heavens, like jewels let fall
into clear water.  They were a reproach, he felt, to a sordid
world.  As he turned across the sand creek, he looked up at
the North Star and smiled, as if there were an understanding
between them.  His mother scolded him for being late for supper.


                           V

On Sunday afternoon Joe Vavrika, in his shirt sleeves arid
carpet slippers, was sitting in his garden, smoking a long-tasseled
porcelain pipe with a hunting scene painted on the bowl.  Clara sat
under the cherry tree, reading aloud to him from the, weekly
Bohemian papers.  She had worn a white muslin dress under her
riding habit, and the leaves of the cherry tree threw a pattern of
sharp shadows over her skirt.  The black cat was dozing in the
sunlight at her feet, and Joe's dachshund was scratching a hole
under the scarlet geraniums and dreaming of badgers.  Joe was
filling his pipe for the third time since dinner, when he heard a
knocking on the fence.  He broke into a loud guffaw and unlatched
the little door that led into the street.  He did not call Nils by
name, but caught him by the hand and dragged him in.  Clara
stiffened and the colour deepened under her dark skin.  Nils, too,
felt a little awkward.  He had not seen her since the night when
she rode away from him and left him alone on the level road between
the fields.  Joe dragged him to the wooden bench beside the green
table.

"You bring de flute," he cried, tapping the leather case under
Nils' arm.  "Ah, das-a good' Now we have some liddle fun like old
times.  I got somet'ing good for you."  Joe shook his finger at
Nils and winked his blue eye, a bright clear eye, full of fire,
though the tiny bloodvessels on the ball were always a little
distended.  "I got somet'ing for you from"--he paused and waved his
hand--  "Hongarie. You know Hongarie?  You wait!"  He pushed Nils
down on the bench, and went through the back door of his saloon.

Nils looked at Clara, who sat frigidly with her white skirts
drawn tight about her.  "He didn't tell you he had asked me to
come, did he?  He wanted a party and proceeded to arrange it.
Isn't he fun?  Don't be cross; let's give him a good time."

Clara smiled and shook out her skirt.  "Isn't that like
Father?  And he has sat here so meekly all day.  Well, I won't
pout.  I'm glad you came.  He doesn't have very many good times now
any more.  There are so few of his kind left.  The second
generation are a tame lot."

Joe came back with a flask in one hand and three wine glasses
caught by the stems between the fingers of the other.  These he
placed on the table with an air of ceremony, and, going behind
Nils, held the flask between him and the sun, squinting into it
admiringly.  "You know dis, Tokai?  A great friend of mine, he
bring dis to me, a present out of Hongarie.  You know how much it
cost, dis wine?  Chust so much what it weigh in gold.  Nobody but
de nobles drink him in Bohemie.  Many, many years I save him up,
dis Tokai."  Joe whipped out his official corkscrew and delicately
removed the cork.  "De old man die what bring him to me, an' dis
wine he lay on his belly in my cellar an' sleep.  An' now,"
carefully pouring out the heavy yellow wine, "an' now he wake up;
and maybe he wake us up, too!"  He carried one of the glasses to
his daughter and presented it with great gallantry.

Clara shook her head, but, seeing her father's disappointment,
relented.  "You taste it first.  I don't want so much."

Joe sampled it with a beatific expression, and turned to Nils. 
"You drink him slow, dis wine.  He very soft, but he go down hot. 
You see!"

After a second glass Nils declared that he couldn't take any
more without getting sleepy.  "Now get your fiddle, Vavrika," he
said as he opened his flute case.

But Joe settled back in his wooden rocker and wagged his big
carpet slipper.  "No-no-no-no-no-no-no!  No play fiddle now any
more: too much ache in de finger," waving them, "all-a-time
rheumatic.  You play de flute, te-tety-tetety-te.  Bohemie songs."

"I've forgotten all the Bohemian songs I used to play with you
and Johanna.  But here's one that will make Clara pout.  You
remember how her eyes used to snap when we called her the Bohemian
Girl?"  Nils lifted his flute and began "When Other Lips and Other
Hearts," and Joe hummed the air in a husky baritone, waving
his carpet slipper.  "Oh-h-h, das-a fine music," he cried, clapping
his hands as Nils finished.  "Now 'Marble Halls, Marble Halls'!
Clara, you sing him."

Clara smiled and leaned back in her chair, beginning softly:

       I dreamt that I dwelt in ma-a-arble halls,
          With vassals and serfs at my knee,"

and Joe hummed like a big bumblebee.

"There's one more you always played," Clara said quietly, "I
remember that best."  She locked her hands over her knee and began
"The Heart Bowed Down," and sang it through without groping for the
words.  She was singing with a good deal of warmth when she came to
the end of the old song:

             "For memory is the only friend
             That grief can call its own."

Joe flashed out his red silk handkerchief and blew his nose,
shaking his head.  "No-no-no-no-no-no-no!  Too sad, too sad!  I not
like-a dat.  Play quick somet'ing gay now."

Nils put his lips to the instrument, and Joe lay back in his
chair, laughing and singing, "Oh, Evelina, Sweet Evelina!"  Clara
laughed, too.  Long ago, when she and Nils went to high school, the
model student of their class was a very homely girl in thick
spectacles.  Her name was Evelina Oleson; she had a long, swinging
walk which somehow suggested the measure of that song, and they
used mercilessly to sing it at her.

"Dat ugly Oleson girl, she teach in de school," Joe gasped,
"an' she still walks chust like dat, yup-a, yup-a, yup-a, chust
like a camel she go!  Now, Nils, we have some more li'l drink.  Oh,
yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-<i>yes</i>!  Dis time you haf to drink, and
Clara she haf to, so she show she not jealous.  So, we all drink to
your girl.  You not tell her name, eh?  No-no-no, I no make you
tell.  She pretty, eh?  She make good sweetheart?  I bet!"  Joe
winked and lifted his glass.  "How soon you get married?"

Nils screwed up his eyes.  "That I don't know.  When she says."

Joe threw out his chest.  "Das-a way boys talks.  No way for
mans.  Mans say, 'You come to de church, an' get a hurry on you.'
Das-a way mans talks."

"Maybe Nils hasn't got enough to keep a wife," put in Clara
ironically.  "How about that, Nils?" she asked him frankly, as if
she wanted to know.

Nils looked at her coolly, raising one eyebrow.  "oh, I can
keep her, all right."

"The way she wants to be kept?"

"With my wife, I'll decide that," replied Nils calmly.  "I'll
give her what's good for her."

Clara made a wry face.  "You'll give her the strap, I expect,
like old Peter Oleson gave his wife."

"When she needs it," said Nils lazily, locking his hands
behind his head and squinting up through the leaves of the cherry
tree.  "Do you remember the time I squeezed the cherries all over
your clean dress, and Aunt Johanna boxed my ears for me?  My
gracious, weren't you mad!  You had both hands full of cherries,
and I squeezed 'em and made the juice fly all over you.  I liked to
have fun with you; you'd get so mad."

"We <i>did</i> have fun, didn't we?  None of the other kids ever
had so much fun.  We knew how to play."

Nils dropped his elbows on the table and looked steadily
across at her.  "I've played with lots of girls since, but I
haven't found one who was such good fun."

Clara laughed.  The late afternoon sun was shining full in her
face, and deep in the back of her eyes there shone something fiery,
like the yellow drops of Tokai in the brown glass bottle.  "Can you
still play, or are you only pretending?"

"I can play better than I used to, and harder."

"Don't you ever work, then?"  She had not intended to say it. 
It slipped out because she was confused enough to say just the
wrong thing.

"I work between times."  Nils' steady gaze still beat upon her. 
"Don't you worry about my working, Mrs. Ericson.  You're getting
like all the rest of them."  He reached his brown, warm hand across
the table and dropped it on Clara's, which was cold as an
icicle.  "Last call for play, Mrs. Ericson!"  Clara shivered, and
suddenly her hands and cheeks grew warm.  Her fingers lingered in
his a moment, and they looked at each other earnestly.  Joe Vavrika
had put the mouth of the bottle to his lips and was swallowing the
last drops of the Tokai, standing.  The sun, just about to sink
behind his shop, glistened on the bright glass, on his flushed face
and curly yellow hair.  "Look," Clara whispered, "that's the way I
want to grow old."


                           VI

On the day of Olaf Ericson's barn-raising, his wife, for once
in a way, rose early.  Johanna Vavrika had been baking cakes and
frying and boiling and spicing meats for a week beforehand, but it
was not until the day before the party was to take place that Clara
showed any interest in it. Then she was seized with one of her
fitful spasms of energy, and took the wagon and little Eric and
spent the day on Plum Creek, gathering vines and swamp goldenrod
to decorate the barn.

By four o'clock in the afternoon buggies and wagons began to
arrive at the big unpainted building in front of Olaf's house. 
When Nils and his mother came at five, there were more than fifty
people in the barn, and a great drove of children.  On the ground
floor stood six long tables, set with the crockery of seven
flourishing Ericson families, lent for the occasion.  In the middle
of each table was a big yellow pumpkin, hollowed out and filled
with woodbine.  In one corner of the barn, behind a pile of green-
and-white striped watermelons, was a circle of chairs for the old
people; the younger guests sat on bushel measures or barbed-wire
spools, and the children tumbled about in the haymow.  The box
stalls Clara had converted into booths.  The framework was hidden
by goldenrod and sheaves of wheat, and the partitions were covered
'With wild grapevines full of fruit.  At one of these Johanna
Vavrika watched over her cooked meats, enough to provision an army;
and at the next her kitchen girls had ranged the ice-cream
freezers, and Clara was already cutting pies and cakes
against the hour of serving.  At the third stall, little Hilda, in
a bright pink lawn dress, dispensed lemonade throughout the
afternoon.  Olaf, as a public man, had thought it inadvisable
to serve beer in his barn; but Joe Vavrika had come over with two
demijohns concealed in his buggy, and after his arrival the wagon
shed was much frequented by the men.

"Hasn't Cousin Clara fixed things lovely?" little Hilda
whispered, when Nils went up to her stall and asked for lemonade.

Nils leaned against the booth, talking to the excited little
girl and watching the people.  The barn faced the west, and the
sun, pouring in at the big doors, filled the whole interior with a
golden light, through which filtered fine particles of dust from
the haymow, where the children were romping.  There was a great
chattering from the stall where Johanna Vavrika exhibited to the
admiring women her platters heaped with fried chicken, her roasts
of beef, boiled tongues, and baked hams with cloves stuck in the
crisp brown fat and garnished with tansy and parsley.  The older
women, having assured themselves that there were twenty kinds of
cake, not counting cookies, and three dozen fat pies, repaired to
the corner behind the pile of watermelons, put on their white
aprons, and fell to their knitting and fancywork.  They were a fine
company of old women, and a Dutch painter would have loved to find
them there together, where the sun made bright patches on the floor
and sent long, quivering shafts of gold through the dusky shade up
among the rafters.  There were fat, rosy old women who looked hot
in their best black dresses; spare, alert old women with brown,
dark-veined hands; and several of almost heroic frame, not less
massive than old Mrs. Ericson herself.  Few of them wore glasses,
and old Mrs. Svendsen, a Danish woman, who was quite bald, wore the
only cap among them.  Mrs. Oleson, who had twelve big
grandchildren, could still show two braids of yellow hair as thick
as her own wrists.  Among all these grandmothers there were more
brown heads than white.  They all had a pleased, prosperous air, as
if they were more than satisfied with themselves and with life. 
Nils, leaning against Hilda's lemonade stand, watched them
as they sat chattering in four languages, their fingers never
lagging behind their tongues.

"Look at them over there," he whispered, detaining Clara as
she passed him.  "Aren't they the Old Guard?  I've just counted
thirty hands.  I guess they've wrung many a chicken's neck and
warmed many a boy's jacket for him in their time."

In reality he fell into amazement when he thought of the
Herculean labours those fifteen pairs of hands had performed: of
the cows they had milked, the butter they had made, the gardens
they had planted, the children and grandchildren they had tended,
the brooms they had worn out, the mountains of food they had
cooked.  It made him dizzy.  Clara Vavrika smiled a hard,
enigmatical smile at him and walked rapidly away.  Nils' eyes
followed her white figure as she went toward the house.  He
watched her walking alone in the sunlight, looked at her slender,
defiant shoulders and her little hard-set head with its coils of
blue-black hair.  "No," he reflected; "she'd never be like them,
not if she lived here a hundred years.  She'd only grow more
bitter.  You can't tame a wild thing; you can only chain it. 
People aren't all alike.  I mustn't lose my nerve."  He gave
Hilda's pigtail a parting tweak and set out after Clara.  "Where
to?" he asked, as he came upon her in the kitchen.

"I'm going to the cellar for preserves."

"Let me go with you.  I never get a moment alone with you. 
Why do you keep out of my way?"

Clara laughed.  "I don't usually get in anybody's way."

Nils followed her down the stairs and to the far corner of
the cellar, where a basement window let in a stream of light. 
From a swinging shelf Clara selected several glass jars, each
labeled in Johanna's careful hand.  Nils took up a brown flask. 
"What's this?  It looks good."

"It is.  It's some French brandy father gave me when I was
married.  Would you like some?  Have you a corkscrew?  I'll get
glasses."

When she brought them, Nils took them from her and put them
down on the window-sill.  "Clara Vavrika, do you remember how
crazy I used to be about you?"

Clara shrugged her shoulders.  "Boys are always crazy
about somebody or another.  I dare say some silly has been crazy
about Evelina Oleson.  You got over it in a hurry."

"Because I didn't come back, you mean?  I had to get on, you
know, and it was hard sledding at first.  Then I heard you'd
married Olaf."

"And then you stayed away from a broken heart," Clara laughed.

"And then I began to think about you more than I had since I
first went away.  I began to wonder if you were really as you had
seemed to me when I was a boy.  I thought I'd like to see.  I've
had lots of girls, but no one ever pulled me the same way.  The
more I thought about you, the more I remembered how it used to be--
like hearing a wild tune you can't resist, calling you out at
night.  It had been a long while since anything had pulled me out
of my boots, and I wondered whether anything ever could again."
Nils thrust his hands into his coat pockets and squared his
shoulders, as his mother sometimes squared hers, as Olaf, in a
clumsier manner, squared his.  "So I thought I'd come back and see.
Of course the family have tried to do me, and I rather thought I'd
bring out father's will and make a fuss.  But they can have their
old land; they've put enough sweat into it."  He took the flask and
filled the two glasses carefully to the brim.  "I've found out what
I want from the Ericsons.  Drink <i>skoal</i>, Clara."  He lifted
his glass, and Clara took hers with downcast eyes.  "Look at me,
Clara Vavrika.  <i>Skoal!</i>"

She raised her burning eyes and answered fiercely: "<i>Skoal!</i>"


The barn supper began at six o'clock and lasted for two
hilarious hours.  Yense Nelson had made a wager that he could eat
two whole fried chickens, and he did.  Eli Swanson stowed away two
whole custard pies, and Nick Hermanson ate a chocolate layer cake
to the last crumb.  There was even a cooky contest among the
children, and one thin, slablike Bohemian boy consumed sixteen and
won the prize, a gingerbread pig which Johanna Vavrika had
carefully decorated with red candies and burnt sugar.  Fritz
Sweiheart, the German carpenter, won in the pickle contest, but he
disappeared soon after supper and was not seen for the rest of the
evening.  Joe Vavrika said that Fritz could have managed the
pickles all right, but he had sampled the demijohn in his buggy too
often before sitting down to the table.

While the supper was being cleared away the two fiddlers began
to tune up for the dance.  Clara was to accompany them on her old
upright piano, which had been brought down from her father's.  By
this time Nils had renewed old acquaintances.  Since his interview
with Clara in the cellar, he had been busy telling all the old
women how young they looked, and all the young ones how pretty they
were, and assuring the men that they had here the best farmland in
the world.  He had made himself so agreeable that old Mrs.
Ericson's friends began to come up to her and tell how lucky she
was to get her smart son back again, and please to get him to play
his flute.  Joe Vavrika, who could still play very well when he
forgot that he had rheumatism, caught up a fiddle from Johnny
Oleson and played a crazy Bohemian dance tune that set the wheels
going.  When he dropped the bow every one was ready to dance.

Olaf, in a frock coat and a solemn made-up necktie, led the grand
march with his mother.  Clara had kept well out of <i>that</i>
by sticking to the piano.  She played the march with a pompous
solemnity which greatly amused the prodigal son, who went over and
stood behind her.

"Oh, aren't you rubbing it into them, Clara Vavrika?  And
aren't you lucky to have me here, or all your wit would be thrown
away."

"I'm used to being witty for myself.  It saves my life."

The fiddles struck up a polka, and Nils convulsed Joe Vavrika
by leading out Evelina Oleson, the homely schoolteacher.  His next
partner was a very fat Swedish girl, who, although she was an
heiress, had not been asked for the first dance, but had stood
against the wall in her tight, high-heeled shoes, nervously
fingering a lace handkerchief.  She was soon out of breath, so Nils
led her, pleased and panting, to her seat, and went over to the
piano, from which Clara had been watching his gallantry.  "Ask
Olena Yenson," she whispered.  "She waltzes beautifully."

Olena, too, was rather inconveniently plump, handsome in a smooth,
heavy way, with a fine colour and good-natured, sleepy eyes.  She
was redolent of violet sachet powder, and had warm, soft, white
hands, but she danced divinely, moving as smoothly as the tide
coming in. "There, that's something like," Nils said as he released
her.  "You'll give me the next waltz, won't you?  Now I must go and
dance with my little cousin."

Hilda was greatly excited when Nils went up to her stall and
held out his arm.  Her little eyes sparkled, but she declared that
she could not leave her lemonade.  Old Mrs. Ericson, who happened
along at this moment, said she would attend to that, and Hilda came
out, as pink as her pink dress.  The dance was a schottische, and
in a moment her yellow braids were fairly standing on end. 
"Bravo!" Nils cried encouragingly.  "Where did you learn to dance
so nicely?"

"My Cousin Clara taught me," the little girl panted.

Nils found Eric sitting with a group of boys who were too
awkward or too shy to dance, and told him that he must dance the
next waltz with Hilda.

The boy screwed up his shoulders.  "Aw, Nils, I can't dance. 
My feet are too big; I look silly."

"Don't be thinking about yourself.  It doesn't matter how boys
look."

Nils had never spoken to him so sharply before, and Eric made
haste to scramble out of his corner and brush the straw from his
coat.

Clara nodded approvingly.  "Good for you, Nils.  I've been
trying to get hold of him.  They dance very nicely together; I
sometimes play for them."

"I'm obliged to you for teaching him.  There's no reason why he
should grow up to be a lout."

"He'll never be that.  He's more like you than any of them. 
Only he hasn't your courage."  From her slanting eyes Clara shot
forth one of those keen glances, admiring and at the same time
challenging, which she seldom bestowed on any one, and which seemed
to say, "Yes, I admire you, but I am your equal."

Clara was proving a much better host than Olaf, who, once the
supper was over, seemed to feel no interest in anything but the
lanterns.  He had brought a locomotive headlight from
town to light the revels, and he kept skulking about as if he
feared the mere light from it might set his new barn on fire.
His wife, on the contrary, was cordial to every one, was
animated and even gay.  The deep salmon colour in her cheeks burned
vividly, and her eyes were full of life.  She gave the piano over
to the fat Swedish heiress, pulled her father away from the corner
where he sat gossiping with his cronies, and made him dance a
Bohemian dance with her.  In his youth Joe had been a famous
dancer, and his daughter got him so limbered up that every one sat
around and applauded them.  The old ladies were particularly
delighted, and made them go through the dance again.  From their
corner where they watched and commented, the old women kept time
with their feet and hands, and whenever the fiddles struck up a new
air old Mrs. Svendsen's white cap would begin to bob.

Clara was waltzing with little Eric when Nils came up to them,
brushed his brother aside, and swung her out among the dancers. 
"Remember how we used to waltz on rollers at the old skating rink
in town?  I suppose people don't do that any more.  We used to keep
it up for hours.  You know, we never did moon around as other boys
and girls did.  It was dead serious with us from the beginning. 
When we were most in love with each other, we used to fight.  You
were always pinching people; your fingers were like little nippers.

A regular snapping turtle, you were.  Lord, how you'd like
Stockholm!  Sit out in the streets in front of cafes and talk all
night in summer. just like a reception--officers and ladies and
funny English people.  Jolliest people in the world, the Swedes,
once you get them going.  Always drinking things--champagne and
stout mixed, half-and-half, serve it out of big pitchers, and serve
plenty.  Slow pulse, you know; they can stand a lot.  Once they
light up, they're glowworms, I can tell you."

"All the same, you don't really like gay people."

"<i>I</i> don't?"

"No; I could tell that when you were looking at the old women
there this afternoon.  They're the kind you really admire, after
all; women like your mother.  And that's the kind you'll marry."

"Is it, Miss Wisdom?  You'll see who I'll marry, and she
won't have a domestic virtue to bless herself with.  She'll be a
snapping turtle, and she'll be a match for me.  All the same,
they're a fine bunch of old dames over there.  You admire them
yourself

"No, I don't; I detest them."

"You won't, when you look back on them from Stockholm or
Budapest.  Freedom settles all that.  Oh, but you're the real
Bohemian Girl, Clara Vavrika!"  Nils laughed down at her sullen
frown and began mockingly to sing:

       "Oh, how could a poor gypsy maiden like me
       Expect the proud bride of a baron to be?"

Clara clutched his shoulder.  "Hush, Nils; every one is looking at
you."

"I don't care.  They can't gossip.  It's all in the family, as
the Ericsons say when they divide up little Hilda's patrimony
amongst them.  Besides, we'll give them something to talk about
when we hit the trail.  Lord, it will be a godsend to them!  They
haven't had anything so interesting to chatter about since the
grasshopper year.  It'll give them a new lease of life.  And Olaf
won't lose the Bohemian vote, either.  They'll have the laugh on
him so that they'll vote two apiece.  They'll send him to Congress.
They'll never forget his barn party, or us.  They'll always
remember us as we're dancing together now.  We're making a legend. 
Where's my waltz, boys?" he called as they whirled past the
fiddlers.

The musicians grinned, looked at each other, hesitated, and
began a new air; and Nils sang with them, as the couples fell from
a quick waltz to a long, slow glide:

           "When other lips and other hearts
            Their tale of love shall tell,
            In language whose excess imparts
            The power they feel so well."

The old women applauded vigorously.  "What a gay one he is,
that Nils!"  And old Mrs. Svendsen's cap lurched dreamily
from side to side to the flowing measure of the dance.

          Of days that have as ha-a-p-py been,
          And you'll remember me."


                          VII

The moonlight flooded that great, silent land.  The reaped
fields lay yellow in it.  The straw stacks and poplar windbreaks
threw sharp black shadows.  The roads were white rivers of dust. 
The sky was a deep, crystalline blue, and the stars were few and
faint.  Everything seemed to have succumbed, to have sunk to sleep,
under the great, golden, tender, midsummer moon.  The splendour of
it seemed to transcend human life and human fate.  The senses were
too feeble to take it in, and every time one looked up at the sky
one felt unequal to it, as if one were sitting deaf under the waves
of a great river of melody.  Near the road, Nils Ericson was lying
against a straw stack in Olaf's wheat field.  His own life seemed
strange and unfamiliar to him, as if it were something he had read
about, or dreamed, and forgotten.  He lay very still, watching the
white road that ran in front of him, lost itself among the fields,
and then, at a distance, reappeared over a little hill.  At last,
against this white band he saw something moving rapidly, and he got
up and walked to the edge of the field.  "She is passing the row of
poplars now," he thought.  He heard the padded beat of hoofs along
the dusty road, and as she came into sight he stepped out and waved
his arms.  Then, for fear of frightening the horse, he drew back
and waited.  Clara had seen him, and she came up at a walk.  Nils
took the horse by the bit and stroked his neck.

"What are you doing out so late, Clara Vavrika?  I went to the
house, but Johanna told me you had gone to your father's."

"Who can stay in the house on a night like this?  Aren't you
out yourself?"

"Ah, but that's another matter."

Nils turned the horse into the field.

"What are you doing?  Where are you taking Norman?"

"Not far, but I want to talk to you tonight; I have something to
say to you.  I can't talk to you at the house, with Olaf sitting
there on the porch, weighing a thousand tons."

Clara laughed.  "He won't be sitting there now.  He's in bed
by this time, and asleep--weighing a thousand tons."

Nils plodded on across the stubble.  "Are you really going
to spend the rest of your life like this, night after night,
summer after summer?  Haven't you anything better to do on a night
like this than to wear yourself and Norman out tearing across the
country to your father's and back?  Besides, your father won't
live forever, you know.  His little place will be shut up or
sold, and then you'll have nobody but the Ericsons.  You'll have
to fasten down the hatches for the winter then."

Clara moved her head restlessly.  "Don't talk about that.  I
try never to think of it.  If I lost Father I'd lose everything,
even my hold over the Ericsons."

"Bah!  You'd lose a good deal more than that.  You'd lose
your race, everything that makes you yourself.  You've lost a
good deal of it now."

"Of what?"

"Of your love of life, your capacity for delight."

Clara put her hands up to her face.  "I haven't, Nils
Ericson, I haven't!  Say anything to me but that.  I won't have
it!" she declared vehemently.

Nils led the horse up to a straw stack, and turned to Clara,
looking at her intently, as he had looked at her that Sunday
afternoon at Vavrika's.  "But why do you fight for that so?  What
good is the power to enjoy, if you never enjoy?  Your hands are
cold again; what are you afraid of all the time?  Ah, you're
afraid of losing it; that's what's the matter with you!  And you
will, Clara Vavrika, you will!  When I  used to know you--listen;
you've caught a wild bird in your hand, haven't you, and felt its
heart beat so hard that you were afraid it would shatter its
little body to pieces?  Well, you used to be just like that, a
slender, eager thing with a wild delight inside you.  That is how
I remembered you.  And I come back and find you--a bitter
woman.  This is a perfect ferret fight here; you live by biting
and being bitten.  Can't you remember what life used to be?  Can't
you remember that old delight?  I've never forgotten it, or known
its like, on land or sea."

He drew the horse under the shadow of the straw stack. 
Clara felt him take her foot out of the stirrup, and she slid
softly down into his arms.  He kissed her slowly.  He was a
deliberate man, but his nerves were steel when he wanted
anything.  Something flashed out from him like a knife out of a
sheath.  Clara felt everything slipping away from her; she was
flooded by the summer night.  He thrust his hand into his pocket,
and then held it out at arm's length.  "Look," he said.  The
shadow of the straw stack fell sharp across his wrist, and in the
palm of his hand she saw a silver dollar shining.  "That's my
pile," he muttered; "will you go with me?"

Clara nodded, and dropped her forehead on his shoulder.

Nils took a deep breath.  "Will you go with me tonight?"

"Where?" she whispered softly.

"To town, to catch the midnight flyer."

Clara lifted her head and pulled herself together.  "Are you
crazy, Nils?  We couldn't go away like that."

"That's the only way we ever will go.  You can't sit on the
bank and think about it.  You have to plunge.  That's the way
I've always done, and it's the right way for people like you and
me.  There's nothing so dangerous as sitting still.  You've only
got one life, one youth, and you can let it slip through your
fingers if you want to; nothing easier.  Most people do that. 
You'd be better off tramping the roads with me than you are
here."  Nils held back her head and looked into her eyes.  "But
I'm not that kind of a tramp, Clara.  You won't have to take in
sewing.  I'm with a Norwegian shipping line; came over on
business with the New York offices, but now I'm going straight
back to Bergen.  I expect I've got as much money as the Ericsons. 
Father sent me a little to get started.  They never knew about
that.  There, I hadn't meant to tell you; I wanted you to come on
your own nerve."

Clara looked off across the fields.  "It isn't that, Nils,
but something seems to hold me.  I'm afraid to pull against it.
It comes out of the ground, I think."

"I know all about that.  One has to tear loose.  You're not
needed here.  Your father will understand; he's made like us.  As
for Olaf, Johanna will take better care of him than ever you
could.  It's now or never, Clara Vavrika.  My bag's at the
station; I smuggled it there yesterday."

Clara clung to him and hid her face against his shoulder. 
"Not tonight," she whispered.  "Sit here and talk to me tonight. 
I don't want to go anywhere tonight.  I may never love you like
this again."

Nils laughed through his teeth.  "You can't come that on me. 
That's not my way, Clara Vavrika.  Eric's mare is over there
behind the stacks, and I'm off on the midnight.  It's goodbye, or
off across the world with me.  My carriage won't wait.  I've
written a letter to Olaf, I'll mail it in town.  When he reads it
he won't bother us--not if I know him.  He'd rather have the
land.  Besides, I could demand an investigation of his
administration of Cousin Henrik's estate, and that would be bad
for a public man.  You've no clothes, I know; but you can sit up
tonight, and we can get everything on the way.  Where's your old
dash, Clara Vavrika?  What's become of your Bohemian blood?  I used
to think you had courage enough for anything.  Where's your
nerve--what are you waiting for?"

Clara drew back her head, and he saw the slumberous fire in
her eyes.  "For you to say one thing, Nils Ericson."

"I never say that thing to any woman, Clara Vavrika."  He
leaned back, lifted her gently from the ground, and whispered
through his teeth: "But I'll never, never let you go, not to any
man on earth but me!  Do you understand me?  Now, wait here."

Clara sank down on a sheaf of wheat and covered her face
with her hands.  She did not know what she was going to do--
whether she would go or stay.  The great, silent country seemed
to lay a spell upon her.  The ground seemed to hold her as if by
roots.  Her knees were soft under her.  She felt as if she could
not bear separation from her old sorrows, from her old discontent.
They were dear to her, they had kept her alive, they were
a part of her.  There would be nothing left of her if she were
wrenched away from them.  Never could she pass beyond that skyline
against which her restlessness had beat so many times.  She felt
as if her soul had built itself a nest there on that horizon at
which she looked every morning and every evening, and it was dear
to her, inexpressibly dear.  She pressed her fingers against her
eyeballs to shut it out.  Beside her she heard the tramping of
horses in the soft earth.  Nils said nothing to her.  He put his
hands under her arms and lifted her lightly to her saddle.  Then
he swung himself into his own.

"We shall have to ride fast to catch the midnight train.  A
last gallop, Clara Vavrika.  Forward!"

There was a start, a thud of hoofs along the moonlit road, two
dark shadows going over the hill; and then the great, still land
stretched untroubled under the azure night.  Two shadows had
passed.


                          VII

A year after the flight of Olaf Ericson's wife, the night
train was steaming across the plains of Iowa.  The conductor was
hurrying through one of the day coaches, his lantern on his arm,
when a lank, fair-haired boy sat up in one of the plush seats and
tweaked him by the coat.

"What is the next stop, please, sir?"

"Red Oak, Iowa.  But you go through to Chicago, don't you?"
He looked down, and noticed that the boy's eyes were red and his
face was drawn, as if he were in trouble.

"Yes.  But I was wondering whether I could get off at the
next place and get a train back to Omaha."

"Well, I suppose you could.  Live in Omaha?"

"No.  In the western part of the State.  How soon do we get
to Red Oak?"

"Forty minutes.  You'd better make up your mind, so I can
tell the baggageman to put your trunk off."

"Oh, never mind about that!  I mean, I haven't got any," the
boy added, blushing.

"Run away," the conductor thought, as he slammed the coach
door behind him.

Eric Ericson crumpled down in his seat and put his brown hand
to his forehead.  He had been crying, and he had had no supper, and
his head was aching violently.  "Oh, what shall I do?" he thought,
as he looked dully down at his big shoes.  "Nils will be ashamed of
me; I haven't got any spunk."

Ever since Nils had run away with his brother's wife, life at
home had been hard for little Eric.  His mother and Olaf both
suspected him of complicity.  Mrs. Ericson was harsh and
faultfinding, constantly wounding the boy's pride; and Olaf was
always setting her against him.

Joe Vavrika heard often from his daughter.  Clara had always
been fond of her father, and happiness made her kinder.  She wrote
him long accounts of the voyage to Bergen, and of the trip she and
Nils took through Bohemia to the little town where her father had
grown up and where she herself was born.  She visited all her
kinsmen there, and sent her father news of his brother, who was a
priest; of his sister, who had married a horse-breeder--of their
big farm and their many children.  These letters Joe always managed
to read to little Eric.  They contained messages for Eric and
Hilda.  Clara sent presents, too, which Eric never dared to take
home and which poor little Hilda never even saw, though she loved
to hear Eric tell about them when they were out getting the eggs
together.  But Olaf once saw Eric coming out of Vavrika's house--
the old man had never asked the boy to come into his saloon--and
Olaf went straight to his mother and told her.  That night Mrs.
Ericson came to Eric's room after he was in bed and made a terrible
scene.  She could be very terrifying when she was really angry. 
She forbade him ever to speak to Vavrika again, and after that
night she would not allow him to go to town alone.  So it was a
long while before Eric got any more news of his brother.  But old
Joe suspected what was going on, and he carried Clara's letters
about in his pocket.  One Sunday he drove out to see a German
friend of his, and chanced to catch sight of Eric, sitting by the
cattle pond in the big pasture.  They went together into Fritz
Oberlies' barn, and read the letters and talked things over.  Eric
admitted that things were getting hard for him at home.  That very
night old Joe sat down and laboriously penned a statement of the
case to his daughter.

Things got no better for Eric.  His mother and Olaf felt
that, however closely he was watched, he still, as they said,
"heard."  Mrs. Ericson could not admit neutrality.  She had sent
Johanna Vavrika packing back to her brother's, though Olaf would
much rather have kept her than Anders' eldest daughter, whom Mrs.
Ericson installed in her place.  He was not so highhanded as his
mother, and he once sulkily told her that she might better have
taught her granddaughter to cook before she sent Johanna away. 
Olaf could have borne a good deal for the sake of prunes spiced
in honey, the secret of which Johanna had taken away with her.

At last two letters came to Joe Vavrika: one from Nils,
enclosing a postal order for money to pay Eric's passage to
Bergen, and one from Clara, saying that Nils had a place for Eric
in the offices of his company, that he was to live with them, and
that they were only waiting for him to come.  He was to leave New
York on one of the boats of Nils' own line; the captain was one
of their friends, and Eric was to make himself known at once.

Nils' directions were so explicit that a baby could have
followed them, Eric felt.  And here he was, nearing Red Oak,
Iowa, and rocking backward and forward in despair.  Never had he
loved his brother so much, and never had the big world called to
him so hard.  But there was a lump in his throat which would not
go down.  Ever since nightfall he had been tormented by the
thought of his mother, alone in that big house that had sent
forth so many men.  Her unkindness now seemed so little, and her
loneliness so great.  He remembered everything she had ever done
for him: how frightened she had been when he tore his hand in the
corn-sheller, and how she wouldn't let Olaf scold him.  When Nils
went away he didn't leave his mother all alone, or he would never
have gone.  Eric felt sure of that.

The train whistled.  The conductor came in, smiling not unkindly. 
"Well, young man, what are you going to do?  We stop at Red Oak in
three minutes."

"Yes, thank you.  I'll let you know."  The conductor went out,
and the boy doubled up with misery.  He couldn't let his one chance
go like this.  He felt for his breast pocket and crackled Nils'
letter to give him courage.  He didn't want Nils to be ashamed of
him.  The train stopped.  Suddenly he remembered his brother's
kind, twinkling eyes, that always looked at you as if from far
away.  The lump in his throat softened.  "Ah, but Nils, Nils would
<i>understand</i>!" he thought.  "That's just it about Nils; he
always understands."

A lank, pale boy with a canvas telescope stumbled off the
train to the Red Oak siding, just as the conductor called, "All
aboard!"

The next night Mrs. Ericson was sitting alone in her wooden
rocking-chair on the front porch.  Little Hilda had been sent to
bed and had cried herself to sleep.  The old woman's knitting was
on her lap, but her hands lay motionless on top of it.  For more
than an hour she had not moved a muscle.  She simply sat, as only
the Ericsons and the mountains can sit.  The house was dark, and
there was no sound but the croaking of the frogs down in the pond
of the little pasture.

Eric did not come home by the road, but across the fields,
where no one could see him.  He set his telescope down softly in
the kitchen shed, and slipped noiselessly along the path to the
front porch.  He sat down on the step without saying anything. 
Mrs. Ericson made no sign, and the frogs croaked on.  At last the
boy spoke timidly.

"I've come back, Mother."

"Very well," said Mrs. Ericson.

Eric leaned over and picked up a little stick out of the grass.

"How about the milking?" he faltered.

"That's been done, hours ago."

"Who did you get?"

"Get?  I did it myself.  I can milk as good as any of you."

Eric slid along the step nearer to her.  "Oh, Mother, why did you?"
he asked sorrowfully.  "Why didn't you get one of Otto's boys?"

"I didn't want anybody to know I was in need of a boy," said
Mrs. Ericson bitterly.  She looked straight in front of her and her
mouth tightened.  "I always meant to give you the home farm," she
added.

The boy stared and slid closer.  "Oh, Mother," he faltered, "I
don't care about the farm.  I came back because I thought you might
be needing me, maybe."  He hung his head and got no further.

"Very well," said Mrs. Ericson.  Her hand went out from her
suddenly and rested on his head.  Her fingers twined themselves in
his soft, pale hair.  His tears splashed down on the boards;
happiness filled his heart.





The Troll Garden





Flavia and Her Artists

As the train neared Tarrytown, Imogen Willard began to
wonder why she had consented to be one of Flavia's house party at
all.  She had not felt enthusiastic about it since leaving the
city, and was experiencing a prolonged ebb of purpose, a current
of chilling indecision, under which she vainly sought for the
motive which had induced her to accept Flavia's invitation.

Perhaps it was a vague curiosity to see Flavia's husband,
who had been the magician of her childhood and the hero of
innumerable Arabian fairy tales.  Perhaps it was a desire to see
M. Roux, whom Flavia had announced as the especial attraction of
the occasion.  Perhaps it was a wish to study that remarkable
woman in her own setting.

Imogen admitted a mild curiosity concerning Flavia.  She was
in the habit of taking people rather seriously, but somehow found
it impossible to take Flavia so, because of the very vehemence
and insistence with which Flavia demanded it.  Submerged in her
studies, Imogen had, of late years, seen very little of Flavia;
but Flavia, in her hurried visits to New York, between her
excursions from studio to studio--her luncheons with this lady
who had to play at a matinee, and her dinners with that singer
who had an evening concert--had seen enough of her friend's
handsome daughter to conceive for her an inclination of such
violence and assurance as only Flavia could afford.  The fact
that Imogen had shown rather marked capacity in certain esoteric
lines of scholarship, and had decided to specialize in a well-
sounding branch of philology at the Ecole des Chartes, had fairly
placed her in that category of "interesting people" whom Flavia
considered her natural affinities, and lawful prey.

When Imogen stepped upon the station platform she was immediately
appropriated by her hostess, whose commanding figure and assurance
of attire she had recognized from a distance.  She was hurried into
a high tilbury and Flavia, taking the driver's cushion beside her,
gathered up the reins with an experienced hand.

"My dear girl," she remarked, as she turned the horses up the
street, "I was afraid the train might be late.  M. Roux insisted
upon coming up by boat and did not arrive until after seven."

"To think of M. Roux's being in this part of the world at
all, and subject to the vicissitudes of river boats!  Why in the
world did he come over?" queried Imogen with lively interest. 
"He is the sort of man who must dissolve and become a shadow
outside of Paris."

"Oh, we have a houseful of the most interesting people,"
said Flavia, professionally.  "We have actually managed to get
Ivan Schemetzkin.  He was ill in California at the close of his
concert tour, you know, and he is recuperating with us, after his
wearing journey from the coast.  Then there is Jules Martel, the
painter; Signor Donati, the tenor; Professor Schotte, who has dug
up Assyria, you know; Restzhoff, the Russian chemist; Alcee
Buisson, the philologist; Frank Wellington, the novelist; and
Will Maidenwood, the editor of <i>Woman</i>.  Then there is my
second cousin, Jemima Broadwood, who made such a hit in Pinero's
comedy last winter, and Frau Lichtenfeld.  <i>Have</i> you read
her?"

Imogen confessed her utter ignorance of Frau Lichtenfeld,
and Flavia went on.

"Well, she is a most remarkable person; one of those
advanced German women, a militant iconoclast, and this drive will
not be long enough to permit of my telling you her history.  Such
a story!  Her novels were the talk of all Germany when I was there
last, and several of them have been suppressed--an honor in
Germany, I understand.  'At Whose Door' has been translated.  I
am so unfortunate as not to read German."

"I'm all excitement at the prospect of meeting Miss
Broadwood," said Imogen.  "I've seen her in nearly everything she
does.  Her stage personality is delightful.  She always reminds me
of a nice, clean, pink-and-white boy who has just had his cold
bath, and come down all aglow for a run before breakfast."

"Yes, but isn't it unfortunate that she will limit herself to
those minor comedy parts that are so little appreciated in this
country?  One ought to be satisfied with nothing less than the
best, ought one?"  The peculiar, breathy tone in which Flavia
always uttered that word "best," the most worn in her vocabulary,
always jarred on Imogen and always made her obdurate.

"I don't at all agree with you," she said reservedly.  "I
thought everyone admitted that the most remarkable thing about Miss
Broadwood is her admirable sense of fitness, which is rare enough
in her profession."

Flavia could not endure being contradicted; she always seemed
to regard it in the light of a defeat, and usually colored
unbecomingly.  Now she changed the subject.

"Look, my dear," she cried, "there is Frau Lichtenfeld now,
coming to meet us.  Doesn't she look as if she had just escaped out
of Valhalla?  She is actually over six feet."

Imogen saw a woman of immense stature, in a very short skirt
and a broad, flapping sun hat, striding down the hillside at a
long, swinging gait.  The refugee from Valhalla approached,
panting.  Her heavy, Teutonic features were scarlet from the rigor
of her exercise, and her hair, under her flapping sun hat, was
tightly befrizzled about her brow.  She fixed her sharp little eves
upon Imogen and extended both her hands.

"So this is the little friend?" she cried, in a rolling baritone.

Imogen was quite as tall as her hostess; but everything, she
reflected, is comparative.  After the introduction Flavia
apologized.

"I wish I could ask you to drive up with us, Frau Lichtenfeld."

"Ah, no!" cried the giantess, drooping her head in humorous
caricature of a time-honored pose of the heroines of sentimental
romances.  "It has never been my fate to be fitted into corners. 
I have never known the sweet privileges of the tiny."

Laughing, Flavia started the ponies, and the colossal woman,
standing in the middle of the dusty road, took off her wide hat
and waved them a farewell which, in scope of gesture, recalled
the salute of a plumed cavalier.

When they arrived at the house, Imogen looked about her with
keen curiosity, for this was veritably the work of Flavia's
hands, the materialization of hopes long deferred.  They passed
directly into a large, square hall with a gallery on three sides,
studio fashion.  This opened at one end into a Dutch breakfast
room, beyond which was the large dining room.  At the other end
of the hall was the music room.  There was a smoking room, which
one entered through the library behind the staircase.  On the
second floor there was the same general arrangement: a square
hall, and, opening from it, the guest chambers, or, as Miss
Broadwood termed them, the "cages."

When Imogen went to her room, the guests had begun to return
from their various afternoon excursions.  Boys were gliding
through the halls with ice water, covered trays, and flowers,
colliding with maids and valets who carried shoes and other
articles of wearing apparel.  Yet, all this was done in response
to inaudible bells, on felt soles, and in hushed voices, so that
there was very little confusion about it.

Flavia had at last built her house and hewn out her seven
pillars; there could be no doubt, now, that the asylum for
talent, the sanatorium of the arts, so long projected, was an
accomplished fact.  Her ambition had long ago outgrown the
dimensions of her house on Prairie Avenue; besides, she had
bitterly complained that in Chicago traditions were against her. 
Her project had been delayed by Arthur's doggedly standing out
for the Michigan woods, but Flavia knew well enough that certain
of the <i>rarae aves</i>--"the best"--could not be lured so far
away from the seaport, so she declared herself for the historic
Hudson and knew no retreat.  The establishing of a New York office
had at length overthrown Arthur's last valid objection to quitting
the lake country for three months of the year; and Arthur could
be wearied into anything, as those who knew him knew.

Flavia's house was the mirror of her exultation; it was
a temple to the gods of Victory, a sort of triumphal arch.  In
her earlier days she had swallowed experiences that would have
unmanned one of less torrential enthusiasm or blind pertinacity. 
But, of late years, her determination had told; she saw less and
less of those mysterious persons with mysterious obstacles in
their path and mysterious grievances against the world, who had
once frequented her house on Prairie Avenue.  In the stead of
this multitude of the unarrived, she had now the few, the select,
"the best."  Of all that band of indigent retainers who had once
fed at her board like the suitors in the halls of Penelope, only
Alcee Buisson still retained his right of entree.  He alone had
remembered that ambition hath a knapsack at his back, wherein he
puts alms to oblivion, and he alone had been considerate enough
to do what Flavia had expected of him, and give his name a
current value in the world.  Then, as Miss Broadwood put it, "he
was her first real one,"--and Flavia, like Mohammed, could
remember her first believer.

"The House of Song," as Miss Broadwood had called it, was
the outcome of Flavia's more exalted strategies.  A woman who
made less a point of sympathizing with their delicate organisms,
might have sought to plunge these phosphorescent pieces into the
tepid bath of domestic life; but Flavia's discernment was deeper. 
This must be a refuge where the shrinking soul, the sensitive
brain, should be unconstrained; where the caprice of fancy should
outweigh the civil code, if necessary.  She considered that this
much Arthur owed her; for she, in her turn, had made concessions. 
Flavia had, indeed, quite an equipment of epigrams to the effect
that our century creates the iron genii which evolve its fairy
tales: but the fact that her husband's name was annually painted
upon some ten thousand threshing machines in reality contributed
very little to her happiness.

Arthur Hamilton was born and had spent his boyhood in the
West Indies, and physically he had never lost the brand of the
tropics.  His father, after inventing the machine which bore his
name, had returned to the States to patent and manufacture it. 
After leaving college, Arthur had spent five years ranching in
the West and traveling abroad.  Upon his father's death
he had returned to Chicago and, to the astonishment of all his
friends, had taken up the business--without any demonstration of
enthusiasm, but with quiet perseverance, marked ability, and
amazing industry.  Why or how a self-sufficient, rather ascetic
man of thirty, indifferent in manner, wholly negative in all
other personal relations, should have doggedly wooed and finally
married Flavia Malcolm was a problem that had vexed older heads
than Imogen's.

While Imogen was dressing she heard a knock at her door, and
a young woman entered whom she at once recognized as Jemima
Broadwood--"Jimmy" Broadwood she was called by people in her own
profession.  While there was something unmistakably professional
in her frank <i>savoir-faire</i>, "Jimmy's" was one of those faces
to which the rouge never seems to stick.  Her eyes were keen and
gray as a windy April sky, and so far from having been seared by
calcium lights, you might have fancied they had never looked on
anything less bucolic than growing fields and country fairs.  She
wore her thick, brown hair short and parted at the side; and,
rather than hinting at freakishness, this seemed admirably in
keeping with her fresh, boyish countenance.  She extended to
Imogen a large, well-shaped hand which it was a pleasure to
clasp.

"Ah!  You are Miss Willard, and I see I need not introduce
myself.  Flavia said you were kind enough to express a wish to
meet me, and I preferred to meet you alone.  Do you mind if I
smoke?"

"Why, certainly not," said Imogen, somewhat disconcerted and
looking hurriedly about for matches.

"There, be calm, I'm always prepared," said Miss Broadwood,
checking Imogen's flurry with a soothing gesture, and producing
an oddly fashioned silver match-case from some mysterious recess
in her dinner gown.  She sat down in a deep chair, crossed her
patent-leather Oxfords, and lit her cigarette.  "This matchbox,"
she went on meditatively, "once belonged to a Prussian officer. 
He shot himself in his bathtub, and I bought it at the sale of
his effects."

Imogen had not yet found any suitable reply to make to this
rather irrelevant confidence, when Miss Broadwood turned to her
cordially: "I'm awfully glad you've come, Miss Willard, though I've
not quite decided why you did it. I wanted very much to meet you. 
Flavia gave me your thesis to read."

"Why, how funny!" ejaculated Imogen.

"On the contrary," remarked Miss Broadwood.  "I thought it
decidedly lacked humor."

"I meant," stammered Imogen, beginning to feel very much
like Alice in Wonderland, "I meant that I thought it rather
strange Mrs. Hamilton should fancy you would be interested."

Miss Broadwood laughed heartily.  "Now, don't let my
rudeness frighten you.  Really, I found it very interesting, and
no end impressive.  You see, most people in my profession are
good for absolutely nothing else, and, therefore, they have a
deep and abiding conviction that in some other line they might
have shone.  Strange to say, scholarship is the object of our
envious and particular admiration.  Anything in type impresses us
greatly; that's why so many of us marry authors or newspapermen
and lead miserable lives."  Miss Broadwood saw that she had rather
disconcerted Imogen, and blithely tacked in another direction. 
"You see," she went on, tossing aside her half-consumed
cigarette, "some years ago Flavia would not have deemed me worthy
to open the pages of your thesis--nor to be one of her house
party of the chosen, for that matter.  I've Pinero to thank for
both pleasures.  It all depends on the class of business I'm
playing whether I'm in favor or not.  Flavia is my second cousin,
you know, so I can say whatever disagreeable things I choose with
perfect good grace.  I'm quite desperate for someone to laugh
with, so I'm going to fasten myself upon you--for, of course, one
can't expect any of these gypsy-dago people to see anything
funny.  I don't intend you shall lose the humor of the situation. 
What do you think of Flavia's infirmary for the arts, anyway?"

"Well, it's rather too soon for me to have any opinion at
all," said Imogen, as she again turned to her dressing.  "So far,
you are the only one of the artists I've met."

"One of them?" echoed Miss Broadwood.  "One of the <i>artists</i>?
My offense may be rank, my dear, but I really don't deserve
that.  Come, now, whatever badges of my tribe I may bear upon me,
just let me divest you of any notion that I take myself seriously."

Imogen turned from the mirror in blank astonishment and sat
down on the arm of a chair, facing her visitor.  "I can't fathom
you at all, Miss Broadwood," she said frankly.  "Why shouldn't
you take yourself seriously?  What's the use of beating about the
bush?  Surely you know that you are one of the few players on this
side of the water who have at all the spirit of natural or
ingenuous comedy?"

"Thank you, my dear.  Now we are quite even about the thesis,
aren't we?  Oh, did you mean it?  Well, you <i>are</i> a clever
girl.  But you see it doesn't do to permit oneself to look at it
in that light.  If we do, we always go to pieces and waste our
substance astarring as the unhappy daughter of the Capulets.  But
there, I hear Flavia coming to take you down; and just remember
I'm not one of them--the artists, I mean."


Flavia conducted Imogen and Miss Broadwood downstairs.  As
they reached the lower hall they heard voices from the music
room, and dim figures were lurking in the shadows under the
gallery, but their hostess led straight to the smoking room.  The
June evening was chilly, and a fire had been lighted in the
fireplace.  Through the deepening dusk, the firelight flickered
upon the pipes and curious weapons on the wall and threw an
orange glow over the Turkish hangings.  One side of the smoking
room was entirely of glass, separating it from the conservatory,
which was flooded with white light from the electric bulbs. 
There was about the darkened room some suggestion of certain
chambers in the Arabian Nights, opening on a court of palms. 
Perhaps it was partially this memory-evoking suggestion that
caused Imogen to start so violently when she saw dimly, in a blur
of shadow, the figure of a man, who sat smoking in a low, deep
chair before the fire.  He was long, and thin, and brown.  His
long, nerveless hands drooped from the arms of his chair.  A
brown mustache shaded his mouth, and his eyes were sleepy and
apathetic.  When Imogen entered he rose indolently and gave her
his hand, his manner barely courteous.

"I am glad you arrived promptly, Miss Willard," he said with
an indifferent drawl.  "Flavia was afraid you might be late.  You
had a pleasant ride up, I hope?"

"Oh, very, thank you, Mr. Hamilton," she replied, feeling
that he did not particularly care whether she replied at all.

Flavia explained that she had not yet had time to dress for
dinner, as she had been attending to Mr. Will Maidenwood, who had
become faint after hurting his finger in an obdurate window, and
immediately excused herself As she left, Hamilton turned to Miss
Broadwood with a rather spiritless smile.

"Well, Jimmy," he remarked, "I brought up a piano box full
of fireworks for the boys.  How do you suppose we'll manage to
keep them until the Fourth?"

"We can't, unless we steel ourselves to deny there are any on the
premises," said Miss Broadwood, seating herself on a low stool by
Hamilton's chair and leaning back against the mantel.  "Have you
seen Helen, and has she told you the tragedy of the tooth?"

"She met me at the station, with her tooth wrapped up in
tissue paper.  I had tea with her an hour ago.  Better sit down,
Miss Willard;" he rose and pushed a chair toward Imogen, who was
standing peering into the conservatory.  "We are scheduled to
dine at seven, but they seldom get around before eight."

By this time Imogen had made out that here the plural
pronoun, third person, always referred to the artists.  As
Hamilton's manner did not spur one to cordial intercourse, and as
his attention seemed directed to Miss Broadwood, insofar as it
could be said to be directed to anyone, she sat down facing the
conservatory and watched him, unable to decide in how far he was
identical with the man who had first met Flavia Malcolm in her
mother's house, twelve years ago.  Did he at all remember having
known her as a little girl, and why did his indifference hurt her
so, after all these years?  Had some remnant of her childish
affection for him gone on living, somewhere down in the sealed
caves of her consciousness, and had she really expected to find
it possible to be fond of him again?  Suddenly she saw a light in
the man's sleepy eyes, an unmistakable expression of
interest and pleasure that fairly startled her.  She turned
quickly in the direction of his glance, and saw Flavia, just
entering, dressed for dinner and lit by the effulgence of her
most radiant manner.  Most people considered Flavia handsome,
and there was no gainsaying that she carried her five-and-thirty
years splendidly.  Her figure had never grown matronly, and her
face was of the sort that does not show wear.  Its blond tints
were as fresh and enduring as enamel--and quite as hard.  Its
usual expression was one of tense, often strained, animation,
which compressed her lips nervously.  A perfect scream of
animation, Miss Broadwood had called it, created and maintained
by sheer, indomitable force of will.  Flavia's appearance on any
scene whatever made a ripple, caused a certain agitation and
recognition, and, among impressionable people, a certain
uneasiness, For all her sparkling assurance of manner, Flavia
was certainly always ill at ease and, even more certainly,
anxious.  She seemed not convinced of the established order of
material things, seemed always trying to conceal her feeling that
walls might crumble, chasms open, or the fabric of her life fly
to the winds in irretrievable entanglement.  At least this was
the impression Imogen got from that note in Flavia which was so
manifestly false.

Hamilton's keen, quick, satisfied glance at his wife had
recalled to Imogen all her inventory of speculations about them. 
She looked at him with compassionate surprise.  As a child she
had never permitted herself to believe that Hamilton cared at all
for the woman who had taken him away from her; and since she had
begun to think about them again, it had never occurred to her
that anyone could become attached to Flavia in that deeply
personal and exclusive sense.  It seemed quite as irrational as
trying to possess oneself of Broadway at noon.

When they went out to dinner Imogen realized the completeness of
Flavia's triumph.  They were people of one name, mostly, like
kings; people whose names stirred the imagination like a romance or
a melody.  With the notable exception of M. Roux, Imogen had seen
most of them before, either in concert halls or lecture rooms; but
they looked noticeably older and dimmer than she remembered them.

Opposite her sat Schemetzkin, the Russian pianist, a short,
corpulent man, with an apoplectic face and purplish skin, his
thick, iron-gray hair tossed back from his forehead.  Next to the
German giantess sat the Italian tenor --the tiniest of men--pale,
with soft, light hair, much in disorder, very red lips, and
fingers yellowed by cigarettes.  Frau Lichtenfeld shone in a gown
of emerald green, fitting so closely as to enhance her natural
floridness.  However, to do the good lady justice, let her attire
be never so modest, it gave an effect of barbaric splendor.  At
her left sat Herr Schotte, the Assyriologist, whose features were
effectually concealed by the convergence of his hair and beard,
and whose glasses were continually falling into his plate.  This
gentleman had removed more tons of earth in the course of his
explorations than had any of his confreres, and his vigorous
attack upon his food seemed to suggest the strenuous nature of
his accustomed toil.  His eyes were small and deeply set, and his
forehead bulged fiercely above his eves in a bony ridge.  His
heavy brows completed the leonine suggestion of his face.  Even
to Imogen, who knew something of his work and greatly respected
it, he was entirely too reminiscent of the Stone Age to be
altogether an agreeable dinner companion.  He seemed, indeed, to
have absorbed something of the savagery of those early types of
life which he continually studied.

Frank Wellington, the young Kansas man who had been two
years out of Harvard and had published three historical novels,
sat next to Mr. Will Maidenwood, who was still pale from his
recent sufferings and carried his hand bandaged.  They took
little part in the general conversation, but, like the lion and
the unicorn, were always at it, discussing, every time they met,
whether there were or were not passages in Mr. Wellington's works
which should be eliminated, out of consideration for the Young
Person.  Wellington had fallen into the hands of a great American
syndicate which most effectually befriended struggling authors
whose struggles were in the right direction, and which had
guaranteed to make him famous before he was thirty.  Feeling the
security of his position he stoutly defended those passages which
jarred upon the sensitive nerves of the young editor of
<i>Woman</i>.  Maidenwood, in the smoothest of voices, urged the
necessity of the author's recognizing certain restrictions at the
outset, and Miss Broadwood, who joined the argument quite without
invitation or encouragement, seconded him with pointed and
malicious remarks which caused the young editor manifest
discomfort.  Restzhoff, the chemist, demanded the attention of the
entire company for his exposition of his devices for manufacturing
ice cream from vegetable oils and for administering drugs in
bonbons.

Flavia, always noticeably restless at dinner, was somewhat
apathetic toward the advocate of peptonized chocolate and was
plainly concerned about the sudden departure of M. Roux, who had
announced that it would be necessary for him to leave tomorrow. 
M. Emile Roux, who sat at Flavia's right, was a man in middle
life and quite bald, clearly without personal vanity, though his
publishers preferred to circulate only those of his portraits
taken in his ambrosial youth.  Imogen was considerably shocked at
his unlikeness to the slender, black-stocked Rolla he had looked
at twenty.  He had declined into the florid, settled heaviness of
indifference and approaching age.  There was, however, a certain
look of durability and solidity about him; the look of a man who
has earned the right to be fat and bald, and even silent at
dinner if he chooses.

Throughout the discussion between Wellington and Will
Maidenwood, though they invited his participation, he remained
silent, betraying no sign either of interest or contempt.  Since
his arrival he had directed most of his conversation to Hamilton,
who had never read one of his twelve great novels.  This
perplexed and troubled Flavia.  On the night of his arrival Jules
Martel had enthusiastically declared, "There are schools and
schools, manners and manners; but Roux is Roux, and Paris sets
its watches by his clock."  Flavia bad already repeated this
remark to Imogen.  It haunted her, and each time she quoted it
she was impressed anew.

Flavia shifted the conversation uneasily, evidently exasperated
and excited by her repeated failures to draw the novelist out.
"Monsieur Roux," she began abruptly, with her most animated smile,
"I remember so well a statement I read some years ago in your 'Mes
Etudes des Femmes' to the effect that you had never met a really
intellectual woman.  May I ask, without being impertinent, whether
that assertion still represents your experience?"

"I meant, madam," said the novelist conservatively, "intellectual
in a sense very special, as we say of men in whom the purely
intellectual functions seem almost independent."

"And you still think a woman so constituted a mythical
personage?" persisted Flavia, nodding her head encouragingly.

"<i>Une Meduse</i>, madam, who, if she were discovered, would
transmute us all into stone," said the novelist, bowing gravely. 
"If she existed at all," he added deliberately, "it was my
business to find her, and she has cost me many a vain pilgrimage. 
Like Rudel of Tripoli, I have crossed seas and penetrated deserts
to seek her out.  I have, indeed, encountered women of learning
whose industry I have been compelled to respect; many who have
possessed beauty and charm and perplexing cleverness; a few with
remarkable information and a sort of fatal facility."

"And Mrs. Browning, George Eliot, and your own Mme.  Dudevant?"
queried Flavia with that fervid enthusiasm with which she could, on
occasion, utter things simply incomprehensible for their
banality--at her feats of this sort Miss Broadwood was wont to sit
breathless with admiration.

"Madam, while the intellect was undeniably present in the
performances of those women, it was only the stick of the rocket. 
Although this woman has eluded me I have studied her conditions
and perturbances as astronomers conjecture the orbits of planets
they have never seen. if she exists, she is probably neither an
artist nor a woman with a mission, but an obscure personage, with
imperative intellectual needs, who absorbs rather than produces."

Flavia, still nodding nervously, fixed a strained glance of
interrogation upon M. Roux.  "Then you think she would be a woman
whose first necessity would be to know, whose instincts would be
satisfied only with the best, who could draw from others;
appreciative, merely?"

The novelist lifted his dull eyes to his interlocutress with
an untranslatable smile and a slight inclination of his
shoulders.  "Exactly so; you are really remarkable, madam," he
added, in a tone of cold astonishment.

After dinner the guests took their coffee in the music room,
where Schemetzkin sat down at the piano to drum ragtime, and give
his celebrated imitation of the boardingschool girl's execution
of Chopin.  He flatly refused to play anything more serious, and
would practice only in the morning, when he had the music room to
himself.  Hamilton and M. Roux repaired to the smoking room to
discuss the necessity of extending the tax on manufactured
articles in France--one of those conversations which particularly
exasperated Flavia.

After Schemetzkin had grimaced and tortured the keyboard
with malicious vulgarities for half an hour, Signor Donati, to
put an end to his torture, consented to sing, and Flavia and
Imogen went to fetch Arthur to play his accompaniments.  Hamilton
rose with an annoyed look and placed his cigarette on the mantel. 
"Why yes, Flavia, I'll accompany him, provided he sings something
with a melody, Italian arias or ballads, and provided the recital
is not interminable."

"You will join us, M. Roux?"

"Thank you, but I have some letters to write," replied the
novelist, bowing.

As Flavia had remarked to Imogen, "Arthur really played
accompaniments remarkably well."  To hear him recalled vividly the
days of her childhood, when he always used to spend his business
vacations at her mother's home in Maine.  He had possessed for
her that almost hypnotic influence which young men sometimes
exert upon little girls.  It was a sort of phantom love affair,
subjective and fanciful, a precocity of instinct, like that
tender and maternal concern which some little girls feel for
their dolls.  Yet this childish infatuation is capable of all the
depressions and exaltations of love itself, it has its bitter
jealousies, cruel disappointments, its exacting caprices.

Summer after summer she had awaited his coming and wept at his
departure, indifferent to the gayer young men who had called her
their sweetheart and laughed at everything she said.  Although
Hamilton never said so, she had been always quite sure that he was
fond of her.  When he pulled her up the river to hunt for fairy
knolls shut about by low, hanging willows, he was often silent for
an hour at a time, yet she never felt he was bored or was
neglecting her.  He would lie in the sand smoking, his eyes
half-closed, watching her play, and she was always conscious that
she was entertaining him.  Sometimes he would take a copy of "Alice
in Wonderland" in his pocket, and no one could read it as he could,
laughing at her with his dark eyes, when anything amused him.  No
one else could laugh so, with just their eyes, and without moving
a muscle of their face.  Though he usually smiled at passages that
seemed not at all funny to the child, she always laughed gleefully,
because he was so seldom moved to mirth that any such demonstration
delighted her and she took the credit of it entirely to herself Her
own inclination had been for serious stories, with sad endings,
like the Little Mermaid, which he had once told her in an unguarded
moment when she had a cold, and was put to bed early on her
birthday night and cried because she could not have her party.  But
he highly disapproved of this preference, and had called it a
morbid taste, and always shook his finger at her when she asked for
the story.  When she had been particularly good, or particularly
neglected by other people, then he would sometimes melt and tell
her the story, and never laugh at her if she enjoyed the "sad
ending" even to tears.  When Flavia had taken him away and he came
no more, she wept inconsolably for the space of two weeks, and
refused to learn her lessons.  Then she found the story of the
Little Mermaid herself, and forgot him.

Imogen had discovered at dinner that he could still smile at
one secretly, out of his eyes, and that he had the old manner of
outwardly seeming bored, but letting you know that he was not. 
She was intensely curious about his exact state of feeling toward
his wife, and more curious still to catch a sense of his final
adjustment to the conditions of life in general.  This, she could
not help feeling, she might get again--if she could have him alone
for an hour, in some place where there was a little river and a
sandy cove bordered by drooping willows, and a blue sky seen
through white sycamore boughs.

That evening, before retiring, Flavia entered her husband's
room, where be sat in his smoking jacket, in one of his favorite
low chairs.

"I suppose it's a grave responsibility to bring an ardent,
serious young thing like Imogen here among all these fascinating
personages," she remarked reflectively.  "But, after all, one can
never tell.  These grave, silent girls have their own charm, even
for facile people."

"Oh, so that is your plan?" queried her husband dryly.  "I
was wondering why you got her up here.  She doesn't seem to mix
well with the faciles.  At least, so it struck me."

Flavia paid no heed to this jeering remark, but repeated, "No,
after all, it may not be a bad thing."

"Then do consign her to that shaken reed, the tenor," said
her husband yawning.  "I remember she used to have a taste for
the pathetic."

"And then," remarked Flavia coquettishly, "after all, I owe her
mother a return in kind.  She was not afraid to trifle with
destiny."

But Hamilton was asleep in his chair.


Next morning Imogen found only Miss Broadwood in the breakfast
room.

"Good morning, my dear girl, whatever are you doing up so
early?  They never breakfast before eleven.  Most of them take
their coffee in their room.  Take this place by me."

Miss Broadwood looked particularly fresh and encouraging in
her blue serge walking skirt, her open jacket displaying an
expanse of stiff, white shirt bosom, dotted with some almost
imperceptible figure, and a dark blue-and-white necktie, neatly
knotted under her wide, rolling collar.  She wore a white rosebud
in the lapel of her coat, and decidedly she seemed more than ever
like a nice, clean boy on his holiday.  Imogen was just hoping
that they would breakfast alone when Miss Broadwood exclaimed,
"Ah, there comes Arthur with the children.  That's the reward of
early rising in this house; you never get to see the youngsters
at any other time."

Hamilton entered, followed by two dark, handsome little
boys.  The girl, who was very tiny, blonde like her mother, and
exceedingly frail, he carried in his arms.  The boys came up and
said good morning with an ease and cheerfulness uncommon, even in
well-bred children, but the little girl hid her face on her
father's shoulder.

"She's a shy little lady," he explained as he put her gently
down in her chair.  "I'm afraid she's like her father; she can't
seem to get used to meeting people.  And you, Miss Willard, did
you dream of the White Rabbit or the Little Mermaid?"

"Oh, I dreamed of them all!  All the personages of that
buried civilization," cried Imogen, delighted that his estranged
manner of the night before had entirely vanished and feeling
that, somehow, the old confidential relations had been restored
during the night.

"Come, William," said Miss Broadwood, turning to the younger
of the two boys, "and what did you dream about?"

"We dreamed," said William gravely--he was the more assertive of
the two and always spoke for both--"we dreamed that there were
fireworks hidden in the basement of the carriage house; lots and
lots of fireworks."

His elder brother looked up at him with apprehensive
astonishment, while Miss Broadwood hastily put her napkin to her
lips and Hamilton dropped his eyes.  "If little boys dream
things, they are so apt not to come true," he reflected sadly. 
This shook even the redoubtable William, and he glanced nervously
at his brother.  "But do things vanish just because they have
been dreamed?" he objected.

"Generally that is the very best reason for their vanishing,"
said Arthur gravely.

"But, Father, people can't help what they dream,"
remonstrated Edward gently.

"Oh, come!  You're making these children talk like a
Maeterlinck dialogue," laughed Miss Broadwood.

Flavia presently entered, a book in her hand, and bade them all
good morning.  "Come, little people, which story shall it be this
morning?" she asked winningly.  Greatly excited, the children
followed her into the garden.  "She does then, sometimes," murmured
Imogen as they left the breakfast room.

"Oh, yes, to be sure," said Miss Broadwood cheerfully.  "She
reads a story to them every morning in the most picturesque part
of the garden.  The mother of the Gracchi, you know.  She does so
long, she says, for the time when they will be intellectual
companions for her.  What do you say to a walk over the hills?"

As they left the house they met Frau Lichtenfeld and the
bushy Herr Schotte--the professor cut an astonishing figure in
golf stockings--returning from a walk and engaged in an animated
conversation on the tendencies of German fiction.

"Aren't they the most attractive little children," exclaimed
Imogen as they wound down the road toward the river.

"Yes, and you must not fail to tell Flavia that you think
so.  She will look at you in a sort of startled way and say,
'Yes, aren't they?' and maybe she will go off and hunt them up
and have tea with them, to fully appreciate them.  She is awfully
afraid of missing anything good, is Flavia.  The way those
youngsters manage to conceal their guilty presence in the House
of Song is a wonder."

"But don't any of the artist-folk fancy children?" asked Imogen.

"Yes, they just fancy them and no more.  The chemist remarked the
other day that children are like certain salts which need not be
actualized because the formulae are quite sufficient for practical
purposes.  I don't see how even Flavia can endure to have that man
about."

"I have always been rather curious to know what Arthur
thinks of it all," remarked Imogen cautiously.

"Thinks of it!" ejaculated Miss Broadwood.  "Why, my dear,
what would any man think of having his house turned into an
hotel, habited by freaks who discharge his servants, borrow his
money, and insult his neighbors?  This place is shunned like a
lazaretto!"

Well, then, why does he--why does he--" persisted Imogen.

"Bah!" interrupted Miss Broadwood impatiently, "why did he
in the first place?  That's the question."

"Marry her, you mean?" said Imogen coloring.

"Exactly so," said Miss Broadwood sharply, as she snapped
the lid of her matchbox.

"I suppose that is a question rather beyond us, and
certainly one which we cannot discuss," said Imogen.  "But his
toleration on this one point puzzles me, quite apart from other
complications."

"Toleration?  Why this point, as you call it, simply is
Flavia.  Who could conceive of her without it?  I don't know where
it's all going to end, I'm sure, and I'm equally sure that, if it
were not for Arthur, I shouldn't care," declared Miss Broadwood,
drawing her shoulders together.

"But will it end at all, now?"

"Such an absurd state of things can't go on indefinitely.  A
man isn't going to see his wife make a guy of herself forever, is
he?  Chaos has already begun in the servants' quarters.  There are
six different languages spoken there now.  You see, it's all on
an entirely false basis.  Flavia hasn't the slightest notion of
what these people are really like, their good and their bad alike
escape her.  They, on the other hand, can't imagine what she is
driving at. Now, Arthur is worse off than either faction; he is
not in the fairy story in that he sees these people exactly as
they are, <i>but</i> he is utterly unable to see Flavia as they see
her.  There you have the situation.  Why can't he see her as we do? 
My dear, that has kept me awake o' nights.  This man who has
thought so much and lived so much, who is naturally a critic,
really takes Flavia at very nearly her own estimate.  But now I am
entering upon a wilderness.  From a brief acquaintance with her
you can know nothing of the icy fastnesses of Flavia's self-
esteem.  It's like St. Peter's; you can't realize its magnitude
at once.  You have to grow into a sense of it by living under its
shadow.  It has perplexed even Emile Roux, that merciless
dissector of egoism.  She has puzzled him the more because be saw
at a glance what some of them do not perceive at once, and what
will be mercifully concealed from Arthur until the trump sounds;
namely, that all Flavia's artists have done or ever will do means
exactly as much to her as a symphony means to an oyster; that
there is no bridge by which the significance of any work of art
could be conveyed to her."

"Then, in the name of goodness, why does she bother?" gasped
Imogen.  "She is pretty, wealthy, well-established; why should
she bother?"

"That's what M. Roux has kept asking himself.  I can't pretend to
analyze it.  She reads papers on the Literary Landmarks of Paris,
the Loves of the Poets, and that sort of thing, to clubs out in
Chicago.  To Flavia it is more necessary to be called clever than
to breathe.  I would give a good deal to know that glum Frenchman's
diagnosis.  He has been watching her out of those fishy eyes of his
as a biologist watches a hemisphereless frog."

For several days after M. Roux's departure Flavia gave an
embarrassing share of her attention to Imogen.  Embarrassing,
because Imogen had the feeling of being energetically and
futilely explored, she knew not for what.  She felt herself under
the globe of an air pump, expected to yield up something.  When
she confined the conversation to matters of general interest
Flavia conveyed to her with some pique that her one endeavor in
life had been to fit herself to converse with her friends upon
those things which vitally interested them.  "One has no right to
accept their best from people unless one gives, isn't it so?  I
want to be able to give--!" she declared vaguely.  Yet whenever
Imogen strove to pay her tithes and plunged bravely into her
plans for study next winter, Flavia grew absent-minded and
interrupted her by amazing generalizations or by such
embarrassing questions as, "And these grim studies really have
charm for you; you are quite buried in them; they make other
things seem light and ephemeral?"

"I rather feel as though I had got in here under false
pretenses," Imogen confided to Miss Broadwood.  "I'm sure I don't
know what it is that she wants of me."

"Ah," chuckled Jemima, "you are not equal to these heart to
heart talks with Flavia.  You utterly fail to communicate to her
the atmosphere of that untroubled joy in which you dwell.  You
must remember that she gets no feeling out of things
herself, and she demands that you impart yours to her by some
process of psychic transmission.  I once met a blind girl, blind
from birth, who could discuss the peculiarities of the Barbizon
school with just Flavia's glibness and enthusiasm.  Ordinarily
Flavia knows how to get what she wants from people, and her
memory is wonderful.  One evening I heard her giving Frau
Lichtenfeld some random impressions about Hedda Gabler which she
extracted from me five years ago; giving them with an impassioned
conviction of which I was never guilty.  But I have known other
people who could appropriate  your stories and opinions; Flavia
is infinitely more subtle than that; she can soak up the very
thrash and drift of  your daydreams, and take the very thrills
off your back, as it were."

After some days of unsuccessful effort, Flavia withdrew
herself, and Imogen found Hamilton ready to catch her when she
was tossed afield.  He seemed only to have been awaiting this
crisis, and at once their old intimacy reestablished itself as a
thing inevitable and beautifully prepared for.  She convinced
herself that she had not been mistaken in him, despite all the
doubts that had come up in later years, and this renewal of faith
set more than one question thumping in her brain.  "How did he,
how can he?" she kept repeating with a tinge of her childish
resentment, "what right had he to waste anything so fine?"

When Imogen and Arthur were returning from a walk before
luncheon one morning about a week after M. Roux's departure, they
noticed an absorbed group before one of the hall windows.  Herr
Schotte and Restzhoff sat on the window seat with a newspaper
between them, while Wellington, Schemetzkin, and Will Maidenwood
looked over their shoulders.  They seemed intensely interested,
Herr Schotte occasionally pounding his knees with his fists in
ebullitions of barbaric glee.  When imogen entered the hall,
however, the men were all sauntering toward the breakfast room
and the paper was lying innocently on the divan.  During luncheon
the personnel of that window group were unwontedly animated and
agreeable all save Schemetzkin, whose stare was blanker than
ever, as though Roux's mantle of insulting indifference
had fallen upon him, in addition to his own oblivious self-
absorption.  Will Maidenwood seemed embarrassed and annoyed; the
chemist employed himself with making polite speeches to Hamilton.
Flavia did not come down to lunch--and there was a malicious
gleam under Herr Schotte's eyebrows.  Frank Wellington announced
nervously that an imperative letter from his protecting syndicate
summoned him to the city.

After luncheon the men went to the golf links, and Imogen,
at the first opportunity, possessed herself of the newspaper
which had been left on the divan.  One of the first things that
caught her eye was an article headed "Roux on Tuft Hunters; The
Advanced American Woman as He Sees Her; Aggressive, Superficial,
and Insincere."  The entire interview was nothing more nor less
than a satiric characterization of Flavia, aquiver with
irritation and vitriolic malice.  No one could mistake it; it was
done with all his deftness of portraiture.  Imogen had not finished
the article when she heard a footstep, and clutching the paper she
started precipitately toward the stairway as Arthur entered.  He
put out his hand, looking critically at her distressed face.

"Wait a moment, Miss Willard," he said peremptorily, "I want
to see whether we can find what it was that so interested our
friends this morning.  Give me the paper, please."

Imogen grew quite white as he opened the journal.  She
reached forward and crumpled it with her hands.  "Please don't,
please don't," she pleaded; "it's something I don't want you to
see.  Oh, why will you? it's just something low and despicable
that you can't notice."

Arthur had gently loosed her hands, and he pointed her to a chair. 
He lit a cigar and read the article through without comment.  When
he had finished it he walked to the fireplace, struck a match, and
tossed the flaming journal between the brass andirons.

"You are right," he remarked as he came back, dusting his
hands with his handkerchief.  "It's quite impossible to comment. 
There are extremes of blackguardism for which we have no name. 
The only thing necessary is to see that Flavia gets no
wind of this.  This seems to be my cue to act; poor girl."

Imogen looked at him tearfully; she could only murmur, "Oh,
why did you read it!"

Hamilton laughed spiritlessly.  "Come, don't you worry about
it.  You always took other people's troubles too seriously.  When
you were little and all the world was gay and everybody happy,
you must needs get the Little Mermaid's troubles to grieve over. 
Come with me into the music room.  You remember the musical
setting I once made you for the Lay of the Jabberwock?  I was
trying it over the other night, long after you were in bed, and I
decided it was quite as fine as the Erl-King music.  How I wish I
could give you some of the cake that Alice ate and make you a
little girl again.  Then, when you had got through the glass door
into the little garden, you could call to me, perhaps, and tell
me all the fine things that were going on there.  What a pity it
is that you ever grew up!" he added, laughing; and Imogen, too,
was thinking just that.

At dinner that evening, Flavia, with fatal persistence,
insisted upon turning the conversation to M. Roux.  She had been
reading one of his novels and had remembered anew that Paris set
its watches by his clock.  Imogen surmised that she was tortured
by a feeling that she had not sufficiently appreciated him while
she had had him.  When she first mentioned his name she was
answered only by the pall of silence that fell over the company. 
Then everyone began to talk at once, as though to correct a false
position.  They spoke of him with a fervid, defiant admiration,
with the sort of hot praise that covers a double purpose.  Imogen
fancied she could see that they felt a kind of relief at what the
man had done, even those who despised him for doing it; that they
felt a spiteful hate against Flavia, as though she had tricked
them, and a certain contempt for themselves that they had been
beguiled.  She was reminded of the fury of the crowd in the fairy
tale, when once the child had called out that the king was in his
night clothes.  Surely these people knew no more about Flavia
than they had known before, but the mere fact that the
thing had been said altered the situation.  Flavia, meanwhile,
sat chattering amiably, pathetically unconscious of her nakedness.

Hamilton lounged, fingering the stem of his wineglass,
gazing down the table at one face after another and studying the
various degrees of self-consciousness they exhibited.  Imogen's
eyes followed his, fearfully.  When a lull came in the spasmodic
flow of conversation, Arthur, leaning back in his chair, remarked
deliberately, "As for M. Roux, his very profession places him
in that class of men whom society has never been able to accept
unconditionally because it has never been able to assume that
they have any ordered notion of taste.  He and his ilk remain,
with the mountebanks and snake charmers, people indispensable to
our civilization, but wholly unreclaimed by it; people whom we
receive, but whose invitations we do not accept."

Fortunately for Flavia, this mine was not exploded until
just before the coffee was brought.  Her laughter was pitiful to
hear; it echoed through the silent room as in a vault, while she
made some tremulously light remark about her husband's drollery,
grim as a jest from the dying.  No one responded and she sat
nodding her head like a mechanical toy and smiling her white, set
smile through her teeth, until Alcee Buisson and Frau Lichtenfeld
came to her support.

After dinner the guests retired immediately to their rooms,
and Imogen went upstairs on tiptoe, feeling the echo of breakage
and the dust of crumbling in the air.  She wondered whether
Flavia's habitual note of uneasiness were not, in a manner,
prophetic, and a sort of unconscious premonition, after all.  She
sat down to write a letter, but she found herself so nervous, her
head so hot and her hands so cold, that she soon abandoned the
effort. just as she was about to seek Miss Broadwood, Flavia
entered and embraced her hysterically.

"My dearest girl," she began, "was there ever such an
unfortunate and incomprehensible speech made before?  Of course
it is scarcely necessary to explain to you poor Arthur's lack of
tact, and that he meant nothing.  But they!  Can they be
expected to understand?  He will feel wretchedly about it when
he realizes what he has done, but in the meantime?  And M. Roux,
of all men!  When we were so fortunate as to get him, and he made
himself so unreservedly agreeable, and I fancied that, in his way,
Arthur quite admired him.  My dear, you have no idea what that
speech has done.  Schemetzkin and Herr Schotte have already sent
me word that they must leave us tomorrow.  Such a thing from a
host!"  Flavia paused, choked by tears of vexation and despair.

Imogen was thoroughly disconcerted; this was the first time
she had ever seen Flavia betray any personal emotion which was
indubitably genuine.  She replied with what consolation she
could.  "Need they take it personally at all?  It was a mere
observation upon a class of people--"

"Which he knows nothing whatever about, and with whom he has
no sympathy," interrupted Flavia.  "Ah, my dear, you could not be
<i>expected</i> to understand.  You can't realize, knowing Arthur
as you do, his entire lack of any aesthetic sense whatever.  He is
absolutely <i>nil</i>, stone deaf and stark blind, on that side. 
He doesn't mean to be brutal, it is just the brutality of utter
ignorance.  They always feel it--they are so sensitive to
unsympathetic influences, you know; they know it the moment they
come into the house.  I have spent my life apologizing for him
and struggling to conceal it; but in spite of me, he wounds them;
his very attitude, even in silence, offends them.  Heavens!  Do I
not know?  Is it not perpetually and forever wounding me?  But
there has never been anything so dreadful as this--never!  If I
could conceive of any possible motive, even!"

"But, surely, Mrs. Hamilton, it was, after all, a mere
expression of opinion, such as we are any of us likely to venture
upon any subject whatever.  It was neither more personal nor more
extravagant than many of M. Roux's remarks."

"But, Imogen, certainly M. Roux has the right.  It is a part
of his art, and that is altogether another matter.  Oh, this is
not the only instance!" continued Flavia passionately, "I've
always had that narrow, bigoted prejudice to contend with.  It
has always held me back.  But this--!"

"I think you mistake his attitude," replied Imogen, feeling
a flush that made her ears tingle.  "That is, I fancy he is more
appreciative than he seems.  A man can't be very demonstrative
about those things--not if he is a real man.  I should not think
you would care much about saving the feelings of people who are
too narrow to admit of any other point of view than their own."
She stopped, finding herself in the impossible position of
attempting to explain Hamilton to his wife; a task which, if once
begun, would necessitate an entire course of enlightenment which
she doubted Flavia's ability to receive, and which she could
offer only with very poor grace.

"That's just where it stings most"--here Flavia began pacing
the floor--"it is just because they have all shown such tolerance
and have treated Arthur with such unfailing consideration that I
can find no reasonable pretext for his rancor.  How can he fail
to see the value of such friendships on the children's account,
if for nothing else!  What an advantage for them to grow up among
such associations!  Even though he cares nothing about these
things himself he might realize that.  Is there nothing I could
say by way of explanation?  To them, I mean?  If someone were to
explain to them how unfortunately limited he is in these
things--"

"I'm afraid I cannot advise you," said Imogen decidedly,
"but that, at least, seems to me impossible."

Flavia took her hand and glanced at her affectionately,
nodding nervously.  "Of course, dear girl, I can't ask you to be
quite frank with me.  Poor child, you are trembling and your
hands are icy.  Poor Arthur!  But you must not judge him by this
altogether; think how much he misses in life.  What a cruel shock
you've had.  I'll send you some sherry, Good night, my dear."

When Flavia shut the door Imogen burst into a fit of nervous
weeping.

Next morning she awoke after a troubled and restless night.  At
eight o'clock Miss Broadwood entered in a red and white striped
bathrobe.

"Up, up, and see the great doom's image!" she cried, her
eyes sparkling with excitement.  "The hall is full of
trunks, they are packing.  What bolt has fallen?  It's you, <i>ma
cherie</i>, you've brought Ulysses home again and the slaughter has
begun!" she blew a cloud of smoke triumphantly from her lips and
threw herself into a chair beside the bed.

Imogen, rising on her elbow, plunged excitedly into the
story of the Roux interview, which Miss Broadwood heard with the
keenest interest, frequently interrupting her with exclamations
of delight.  When Imogen reached the dramatic scene which
terminated in the destruction of the newspaper, Miss Broadwood
rose and took a turn about the room, violently switching the
tasselled cords of her bathrobe.

"Stop a moment," she cried, "you mean to tell me that he had
such a heaven-sent means to bring her to her senses and didn't
use it--that he held such a weapon and threw it away?"

"Use it?" cried Imogen unsteadily.  "Of course he didn't!  He
bared his back to the tormentor, signed himself over to
punishment in that speech he made at dinner, which everyone
understands but Flavia.  She was here for an hour last night and
disregarded every limit of taste in her maledictions."

"My dear!" cried Miss Broadwood, catching her hand in
inordinate delight at the situation, "do you see what he has
done?  There'll be no end to it.  Why he has sacrificed himself to
spare the very vanity that devours him, put rancors in the
vessels of his peace, and his eternal jewel given to the common
enemy of man, to make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings!  He is
magnificent!"

"Isn't he always that?" cried Imogen hotly.  "He's like a
pillar of sanity and law in this house of shams and swollen
vanities, where people stalk about with a sort of madhouse
dignity, each one fancying himself a king or a pope.  If you
could have heard that woman talk of him!  Why, she thinks him
stupid, bigoted, blinded by middleclass prejudices.  She talked
about his having no aesthetic sense and insisted that her artists
had always shown him tolerance.  I don't know why it should get
on my nerves so, I'm sure, but her stupidity and assurance are
enough to drive one to the brink of collapse."

"Yes, as opposed to his singular fineness, they are
calculated to do just that," said Miss Broadwood gravely, wisely
ignoring Imogen's tears.  "But what has been is nothing to what
will be.  Just wait until Flavia's black swans have flown!  You
ought not to try to stick it out; that would only make it harder
for everyone.  Suppose you let me telephone your mother to wire
you to come home by the evening train?"

"Anything, rather than have her come at me like that again.  It
puts me in a perfectly impossible position, and he <i>is</i> so
fine!"

"Of course it does," said Miss Broadwood sympathetically,
"and there is no good to be got from facing it.  I will stay
because such things interest me, and Frau Lichtenfeld will stay
because she has no money to get away, and Buisson will stay
because he feels somewhat responsible.  These complications are
interesting enough to cold-blooded folk like myself who have an
eye for the dramatic element, but they are distracting and
demoralizing to young people with any serious purpose in life."

Miss Broadwood's counsel was all the more generous seeing
that, for her, the most interesting element of this denouement
would be eliminated by Imogen's departure.  "If she goes now,
she'll get over it," soliloquized Miss Broadwood.  "If she stays,
she'll be wrung for him and the hurt may go deep enough to last. 
I haven't the heart to see her spoiling things for herself."  She
telephoned Mrs. Willard and helped Imogen to pack.  She even took
it upon herself to break the news of Imogen's going to Arthur,
who remarked, as he rolled a cigarette in his nerveless fingers:

"Right enough, too.  What should she do here with old cynics
like you and me, Jimmy?  Seeing that she is brim full of dates and
formulae and other positivisms, and is so girt about with
illusions that she still casts a shadow in the sun.  You've been
very tender of her, haven't you?  I've watched you.  And to think
it may all be gone when we see her next.  'The common fate of all
things rare,' you know.  What a good fellow you are, anyway,
Jimmy," he added, putting his hands affectionately on her
shoulders.

Arthur went with them to the station.  Flavia was so
prostrated by the concerted action of her guests that she was
able to see Imogen only for a moment in her darkened sleeping
chamber, where she kissed her hysterically, without lifting her
head, bandaged in aromatic vinegar.  On the way to the station
both Arthur and Imogen threw the burden of keeping up appearances
entirely upon Miss Broadwood, who blithely rose to the occasion. 
When Hamilton carried Imogen's bag into the car, Miss Broadwood
detained her for a moment, whispering as she gave her a large,
warm handclasp, "I'll come to see you when I get back to town;
and, in the meantime, if you meet any of our artists, tell them
you have left Caius Marius among the ruins of Carthage."





The Sculptor's Funeral

A group of the townspeople stood on the station siding of a
little Kansas town, awaiting the coming of the night train, which
was already twenty minutes overdue.  The snow had fallen thick
over everything; in the pale starlight the line of bluffs across
the wide, white meadows south of the town made soft, smoke-
colored curves against the clear sky.  The men on the siding
stood first on one foot and then on the other, their hands thrust
deep into their trousers pockets, their overcoats open, their
shoulders screwed up with the cold; and they glanced from time to
time toward the southeast, where the railroad track wound along
the river shore.  They conversed in low tones and moved about
restlessly, seeming uncertain as to what was expected of them. 
There was but one of the company who looked as though he knew
exactly why he was there; and he kept conspicuously apart;
walking to the far end of the platform, returning to the station
door, then pacing up the track again, his chin sunk in the high
collar of his overcoat, his burly shoulders drooping forward, his
gait heavy and dogged.  Presently he was approached by a tall,
spare, grizzled man clad in a faded Grand Army suit, who shuffled
out from the group and advanced with a certain deference, craning
his neck forward until his back made the angle of a jackknife
three-quarters open.

"I reckon she's agoin' to be pretty late ag'in tonight,
Jim," he remarked in a squeaky falsetto.  "S'pose it's the snow?"

"I don't know," responded the other man with a shade of
annoyance, speaking from out an astonishing cataract of red beard
that grew fiercely and thickly in all directions.

The spare man shifted the quill toothpick he was chewing to
the other side of his mouth.  "It ain't likely that anybody from
the East will come with the corpse, I s'pose," he went on
reflectively.

"I don't know," responded the other, more curtly than before.

"It's too bad he didn't belong to some lodge or other.  I
like an order funeral myself.  They seem more appropriate for
people of some reputation," the spare man continued, with an
ingratiating concession in his shrill voice, as he carefully
placed his toothpick in his vest pocket.  He always carried the
flag at the G. A. R. funerals in the town.

The heavy man turned on his heel, without replying, and walked up
the siding.  The spare man shuffled back to the uneasy group. 
"Jim's ez full ez a tick, ez ushel," he commented commiseratingly.

Just then a distant whistle sounded, and there was a
shuffling of feet on the platform.  A number of lanky boys of all
ages appeared as suddenly and slimily as eels wakened by the
crack of thunder; some came from the waiting room, where they had
been warming themselves by the red stove, or half-asleep on the
slat benches; others uncoiled themselves from baggage trucks or
slid out of express wagons.  Two clambered down from the driver's
seat of a hearse that stood backed up against the siding.  They
straightened their stooping shoulders and lifted their heads, and
a flash of momentary animation kindled their dull eyes at that
cold, vibrant scream, the world-wide call for men.  It stirred
them like the note of a trumpet; just as it had often stirred the
man who was coming home tonight, in his boyhood.

The night express shot, red as a rocket, from out the eastward
marsh lands and wound along the river shore under the long lines of
shivering poplars that sentineled the meadows, the escaping steam
hanging in gray masses against the pale sky and blotting out the
Milky Way.  In a moment the red glare from the headlight streamed
up the snow-covered track before the siding and glittered on the
wet, black rails.  The burly man with the disheveled red beard
walked swiftly up the platform toward the approaching train,
uncovering his head as he went.  The group of men behind him
hesitated, glanced questioningly at one another, and awkwardly
followed his example.  The train stopped, and the crowd shuffled up
to the express car just as the door was thrown open, the spare man
in the G. A. B. suit thrusting his head forward with curiosity. 
The express messenger appeared in the doorway, accompanied by a
young man in a long ulster and traveling cap.

"Are Mr. Merrick's friends here?" inquired the young man.

The group on the platform swayed and shuffled uneasily. 
Philip Phelps, the banker, responded with dignity: "We have come
to take charge of the body.  Mr. Merrick's father is very feeble
and can't be about."

"Send the agent out here," growled the express messenger,
"and tell the operator to lend a hand."

The coffin was got out of its rough box and down on the
snowy platform.  The townspeople drew back enough to make room
for it and then formed a close semicircle about it, looking
curiously at the palm leaf which lay across the black cover.  No
one said anything.  The baggage man stood by his truck, waiting
to get at the trunks.  The engine panted heavily, and the fireman
dodged in and out among the wheels with his yellow torch and long
oilcan, snapping the spindle boxes.  The young Bostonian, one of
the dead sculptor's pupils who had come with the body, looked
about him helplessly.  He turned to the banker, the only one of
that black, uneasy, stoop-shouldered group who seemed enough of
an individual to be addressed.

"None of Mr. Merrick's brothers are here?" he asked uncertainly.

The man with the red heard for the first time stepped up and
joined the group.  "No, they have not come yet; the family is
scattered.  The body will be taken directly to the house."  He
stooped and took hold of one of the handles of the coffin.

"Take the long hill road up, Thompson--it will be easier on
the horses," called the liveryman as the undertaker snapped the
door of the hearse and prepared to mount to the driver's seat.

Laird, the red-bearded lawyer, turned again to the stranger:
"We didn't know whether there would be anyone with him or not,"
he explained.  "It's a long walk, so you'd better go up in the
hack."  He pointed to a single, battered conveyance, but the young
man replied stiffly: "Thank you, but I think I will go up with
the hearse.  If you don't object," turning to the undertaker,
"I'll ride with you."

They clambered up over the wheels and drove off in the
starlight tip the long, white hill toward the town.  The lamps in
the still village were shining from under the low, snow-burdened
roofs; and beyond, on every side, the plains reached out into
emptiness, peaceful and wide as the soft sky itself, and wrapped
in a tangible, white silence.

When the hearse backed up to a wooden sidewalk before a naked,
weatherbeaten frame house, the same composite, ill-defined group
that had stood upon the station siding was huddled about the gate. 
The front yard was an icy swamp, and a couple of warped planks,
extending from the sidewalk to the door, made a sort of rickety
footbridge.  The gate hung on one hinge and was opened wide with
difficulty.  Steavens, the young stranger, noticed that something
black was tied to the knob of the front door.

The grating sound made by the casket, as it was drawn from the
hearse, was answered by a scream from the house; the front door was
wrenched open, and a tall, corpulent woman rushed out bareheaded
into the snow and flung herself upon the coffin, shrieking: "My
boy, my boy!  And this is how you've come home to me!"

As Steavens turned away and closed his eyes with a shudder
of unutterable repulsion, another woman, also tall, but flat and
angular, dressed entirely in black, darted out of the house and
caught Mrs. Merrick by the shoulders, crying sharply: "Come,
come, Mother; you mustn't go on like this!"  Her tone changed to
one of obsequious solemnity as she turned to the banker: "The
parlor is ready, Mr. Phelps."

The bearers carried the coffin along the narrow boards,
while the undertaker ran ahead with the coffin-rests.  They
bore it into a large, unheated room that smelled of dampness and
disuse and furniture polish, and set it down under a hanging lamp
ornamented with jingling glass prisms and before a "Rogers group"
of John Alden and Priscilla, wreathed with smilax.  Henry
Steavens stared about him with the sickening conviction that
there had been some horrible mistake, and that he had somehow
arrived at the wrong destination.  He looked painfully about over
the clover-green Brussels, the fat plush upholstery, among the
hand-painted china plaques and panels, and vases, for some mark
of identification, for something that might once conceivably have
belonged to Harvey Merrick.  It was not until he recognized his
friend in the crayon portrait of a little boy in kilts and curls
hanging above the piano that he felt willing to let any of these
people approach the coffin.

"Take the lid off, Mr. Thompson; let me see my boy's face,"
wailed the elder woman between her sobs.  This time Steavens
looked fearfully, almost beseechingly into her face, red and
swollen under its masses of strong, black, shiny hair.  He
flushed, dropped his eyes, and then, almost incredulously, looked
again.  There was a kind of power about her face--a kind of
brutal handsomeness, even, but it was scarred and furrowed by
violence, and so colored and coarsened by fiercer passions that
grief seemed never to have laid a gentle finger there.  The long
nose was distended and knobbed at the end, and there were deep
lines on either side of it; her heavy, black brows almost met
across her forehead; her teeth were large and square and set far
apart--teeth that could tear.  She filled the room; the men were
obliterated, seemed tossed about like twigs in an angry water,
and even Steavens felt himself being drawn into the whirlpool.

The daughter--the tall, rawboned woman in crepe, with a
mourning comb in her hair which curiously lengthened her long
face sat stiffly upon the sofa, her hands, conspicuous for their
large knuckles, folded in her lap, her mouth and eyes drawn down,
solemnly awaiting the opening of the coffin.  Near the door stood
a mulatto woman, evidently a servant in the house, with a timid
bearing and an emaciated face pitifully sad and gentle.
She was weeping silently, the corner of her calico apron lifted
to her eyes, occasionally suppressing a long, quivering sob.
Steavens walked over and stood beside her.

Feeble steps were heard on the stairs, and an old man, tall
and frail, odorous of pipe smoke, with shaggy, unkept gray hair
and a dingy beard, tobacco stained about the mouth, entered
uncertainly.  He went slowly up to the coffin and stood, rolling
a blue cotton handkerchief between his hands, seeming so pained
and embarrassed by his wife's orgy of grief that he had no
consciousness of anything else.

"There, there, Annie, dear, don't take on so," he quavered
timidly, putting out a shaking hand and awkwardly patting her
elbow.  She turned with a cry and sank upon his shoulder with
such violence that he tottered a little.  He did not even glance
toward the coffin, but continued to look at her with a dull,
frightened, appealing expression, as a spaniel looks at the whip. 
His sunken cheeks slowly reddened and burned with miserable
shame.  When his wife rushed from the room her daughter strode
after her with set lips.  The servant stole up to the coffin,
bent over it for a moment, and then slipped away to the kitchen,
leaving Steavens, the lawyer, and the father to themselves.  The
old man stood trembling and looking down at his dead son's face. 
The sculptor's splendid head seemed even more noble in its rigid
stillness than in life.  The dark hair had crept down upon the
wide forehead; the face seemed strangely long, but in it there
was not that beautiful and chaste repose which we expect to find
in the faces of the dead.  The brows were so drawn that there
were two deep lines above the beaked nose, and the chin was
thrust forward defiantly.  It was as though the strain of life
had been so sharp and bitter that death could not at once wholly
relax the tension and smooth the countenance into perfect peace--
as though he were still guarding something precious and holy,
which might even yet be wrested from him.

The old man's lips were working under his stained beard.  He
turned to the lawyer with timid deference: "Phelps and the rest are
comin' back to set up with Harve, ain't they?" he asked.  "Thank
'ee, Jim, thank 'ee."  He brushed the hair back gently from his
son's forehead.  "He was a good boy, Jim; always a good boy.  He
was ez gentle ez a child and the kindest of 'em all--only we didn't
none of us ever onderstand him."  The tears trickled slowly down
his beard and dropped upon the sculptor's coat.

"Martin, Martin.  Oh, Martin! come here," his wife wailed
from the top of the stairs.  The old man started timorously:
"Yes, Annie, I'm coming."  He turned away, hesitated  stood for a
moment in miserable indecision; then he reached back and patted
the dead man's hair softly, and stumbled from the room.

"Poor old man, I didn't think he had any tears left.  Seems
as if his eyes would have gone dry long ago.  At his age nothing
cuts very deep," remarked the lawyer.

Something in his tone made Steavens glance up.  While the
mother had been in the room the young man had scarcely seen
anyone else; but now, from the moment he first glanced into Jim
Laird's florid face and bloodshot eyes, he knew that he had found
what he had been heartsick at not finding before--the feeling,
the understanding, that must exist in someone, even here.

The man was red as his beard, with features swollen and
blurred by dissipation, and a hot, blazing blue eye.  His face
was strained--that of a man who is controlling himself with
difficulty--and he kept plucking at his beard with a sort of
fierce resentment.  Steavens, sitting by the window, watched him
turn down the glaring lamp, still its jangling pendants with an
angry gesture, and then stand with his hands locked behind him,
staring down into the master's face.  He could not help wondering
what link there could have been between the porcelain vessel and
so sooty a lump of potter's clay.

From the kitchen an uproar was sounding; when the dining-
room door opened the import of it was clear.  The mother was
abusing the maid for having forgotten to make the dressing for
the chicken salad which had been prepared for the watchers. 
Steavens had never heard anything in the least like it; it was
injured, emotional, dramatic abuse, unique and masterly
in its excruciating cruelty, as violent and unrestrained as had
been her grief of twenty minutes before.  With a shudder of
disgust the lawyer went into the dining room and closed the door
into the kitchen.

"Poor Roxy's getting it now," he remarked when he came back. 
"The Merricks took her out of the poorhouse years ago; and if her
loyalty would let her, I guess the poor old thing could tell
tales that would curdle your blood.  She's the mulatto woman who
was standing in here a while ago, with her apron to her eyes. 
The old woman is a fury; there never was anybody like her for
demonstrative piety and ingenious cruelty.  She made Harvey's
life a hell for him when he lived at home; he was so sick ashamed
of it. I never could see how he kept himself so sweet."

"He was wonderful," said Steavens slowly, "wonderful; but
until tonight I have never known how wonderful."

"That is the true and eternal wonder of it, anyway; that it
can come even from such a dung heap as this," the lawyer cried,
with a sweeping gesture which seemed to indicate much more than
the four walls within which they stood.

"I think I'll see whether I can get a little air.  The room
is so close I am beginning to feel rather faint," murmured
Steavens, struggling with one of the windows.  The sash was
stuck, however, and would not yield, so he sat down dejectedly
and began pulling at his collar.  The lawyer came over, loosened
the sash with one blow of his red fist, and sent the window up a
few inches.  Steavens thanked him, but the nausea which had been
gradually climbing into his throat for the last half-hour left
him with but one desire--a desperate feeling that he must get
away from this place with what was left of Harvey Merrick.  Oh,
he comprehended well enough now the quiet bitterness of the smile
that he had seen so often on his master's lips!

He remembered that once, when Merrick returned from a visit
home, he brought with him a singularly feeling and suggestive
bas-relief of a thin, faded old woman, sitting and sewing
something pinned to her knee; while a full-lipped, full-blooded
little urchin, his trousers held up by a single gallows,
stood beside her, impatiently twitching her gown to call her
attention to a butterfly he had caught.  Steavens, impressed by
the tender and delicate modeling of the thin, tired face, had
asked him if it were his mother.  He remembered the dull flush
that had burned up in the sculptor's face.

The lawyer was sitting in a rocking chair beside the coffin,
his head thrown back and his eyes closed.  Steavens looked at him
earnestly, puzzled at the line of the chin, and wondering why a
man should conceal a feature of such distinction under that
disfiguring shock of beard.  Suddenly, as though he felt the
young sculptor's keen glance, he opened his eyes.

"Was he always a good deal of an oyster?" he asked abruptly. 
"He was terribly shy as a boy."

"Yes, he was an oyster, since you put it so," rejoined
Steavens.  "Although he could be very fond of people, he always
gave one the impression of being detached.  He disliked violent
emotion; he was reflective, and rather distrustful of himself--
except, of course, as regarded his work.  He was surefooted
enough there.  He distrusted men pretty thoroughly and women even
more, yet somehow without believing ill of them.  He was
determined, indeed, to believe the best, but he seemed afraid to
investigate."

"A burnt dog dreads the fire," said the lawyer grimly, and
closed his eyes.

Steavens went on and on, reconstructing that whole miserable
boyhood.  All this raw, biting ugliness had been the portion of
the man whose tastes were refined beyond the limits of the
reasonable--whose mind was an exhaustless gallery of beautiful
impressions, and so sensitive that the mere shadow of a poplar
leaf flickering against a sunny wall would be etched and held
there forever.  Surely, if ever a man had the magic word in his
fingertips, it was Merrick.  Whatever he touched, he revealed its
holiest secret; liberated it from enchantment and restored it to
its pristine loveliness, like the Arabian prince who fought the
enchantress spell for spell.  Upon whatever he had come in
contact with, he had left a beautiful record of the experience--a
sort of ethereal signature; a scent, a sound, a color that was
his own.

Steavens understood now the real tragedy of his master's
life; neither love nor wine, as many had conjectured, but a blow
which had fallen earlier and cut deeper than these could have
done--a shame not his, and yet so unescapably his, to bide in his
heart from his very boyhood.  And without--the frontier warfare;
the yearning of a boy, cast ashore upon a desert of newness and
ugliness and sordidness, for all that is chastened and old, and
noble with traditions.

At eleven o'clock the tall, flat woman in black crepe
entered, announced that the watchers were arriving, and asked
them "to step into the dining room."  As Steavens rose the lawyer
said dryly: "You go on--it'll be a good experience for you,
doubtless; as for me, I'm not equal to that crowd tonight; I've
had twenty years of them."

As Steavens closed the door after him be glanced back at the
lawyer, sitting by the coffin in the dim light, with his chin
resting on his hand.

The same misty group that had stood before the door of the
express car shuffled into the dining room.  In the light of the
kerosene lamp they separated and became individuals.  The
minister, a pale, feeble-looking man with white hair and blond
chin-whiskers, took his seat beside a small side table and placed
his Bible upon it.  The Grand Army man sat down behind the stove
and tilted his chair back comfortably against the wall, fishing
his quill toothpick from his waistcoat pocket.  The two bankers,
Phelps and Elder, sat off in a corner behind the dinner table,
where they could finish their discussion of the new usury law and
its effect on chattel security loans.  The real estate agent, an
old man with a smiling, hypocritical face, soon joined them.  The
coal-and-lumber dealer and the cattle shipper sat on opposite
sides of the hard coal-burner, their feet on the nickelwork. 
Steavens took a book from his pocket and began to read.  The talk
around him ranged through various topics of local interest while
the house was quieting down.  When it was clear that the members
of the family were in bed the Grand Army man hitched his
shoulders and, untangling his long legs, caught his heels on the
rounds of his chair.

"S'pose there'll be a will, Phelps?" he queried in his weak
falsetto.

The banker laughed disagreeably and began trimming his nails
with a pearl-handled pocketknife.

"There'll scarcely be any need for one, will there?" he
queried in his turn.

The restless Grand Army man shifted his position again,
getting his knees still nearer his chin.  "Why, the ole man says
Harve's done right well lately," he chirped.

The other banker spoke up.  "I reckon he means by that Harve
ain't asked him to mortgage any more farms lately, so as he could
go on with his education."

"Seems like my mind don't reach back to a time when Harve
wasn't bein' edycated," tittered the Grand Army man.

There was a general chuckle.  The minister took out his
handkerchief and blew his nose sonorously.  Banker Phelps closed
his  knife with a snap.  "It's too bad the old man's sons didn't 
turn out better," he remarked with reflective authority.  "They
never hung together.  He spent money enough on Harve to stock a
dozen cattle farms and he might as well have poured it into Sand
Creek.  If Harve had stayed at home and helped nurse what little
they had, and gone into stock on the old man's bottom farm, they
might all have been well fixed.  But the old man had to trust
everything to tenants and was cheated right and left."

"Harve never could have handled stock none," interposed the
cattleman.  "He hadn't it in him to be sharp.  Do you remember
when he bought Sander's mules for eight-year-olds, when everybody
in town knew that Sander's father-in-law give 'em to his wife for
a wedding present eighteen years before, an' they was full-grown
mules then."

Everyone chuckled, and the Grand Army man rubbed his knees
with a spasm of childish delight.

"Harve never was much account for anything practical, and he
shore was never fond of work," began the coal-and-lumber dealer. 
"I mind the last time he was home; the day he left, when the old
man was out to the barn helpin' his hand hitch up to take
Harve to the train, and Cal Moots was patchin' up the fence, Harve,
he come out on the step and sings out, in his ladylike voice: 'Cal
Moots, Cal Moots! please come cord my trunk.'"

"That's Harve for you," approved the Grand Army man
gleefully.  "I kin hear him howlin' yet when he was a big feller
in long pants and his mother used to whale him with a rawhide in
the barn for lettin' the cows git foundered in the cornfield when
he was drivin' 'em home from pasture.  He killed a cow of mine
that-a-way onc't--a pure Jersey and the best milker I had, an'
the ole man had to put up for her.  Harve, he was watchin' the
sun set acros't the marshes when the anamile got away; he argued
that sunset was oncommon fine."

"Where the old man made his mistake was in sending the boy
East to school," said Phelps, stroking his goatee and speaking in
a deliberate, judicial tone.  "There was where he got his head
full of traipsing to Paris and all such folly.  What Harve
needed, of all people, was a course in some first-class Kansas
City business college."

The letters were swimming before Steavens's eyes.  Was it
possible that these men did not understand, that the palm on the
coffin meant nothing to them?  The very name of their town would
have remained forever buried in the postal guide had it not been
now and again mentioned in the world in connection with Harvey
Merrick's.  He remembered what his master had said to him on the
day of his death, after the congestion of both lungs had shut off
any probability of recovery, and the sculptor had asked his pupil
to send his body home.  "It's not a pleasant place to be lying
while the world is moving and doing and bettering," he had said
with a feeble smile, "but it rather seems as though we ought to
go back to the place we came from in the end.  The townspeople
will come in for a look at me; and after they have had their say
I shan't have much to fear from the judgment of God.  The wings
of the Victory, in there"--with a weak gesture toward his studio--
will not shelter me."

The cattleman took up the comment.  "Forty's young for a
Merrick to cash in; they usually hang on pretty well.  Probably
he helped it along with whisky."

"His mother's people were not long-lived, and Harvey never
had a robust constitution," said the minister mildly.  He would
have liked to say more.  He had been the boy's Sunday-school
teacher, and had been fond of him; but he felt that he was not in
a position to speak.  His own sons had turned out badly, and it
was not a year since one of them had made his last trip home in
the express car, shot in a gambling house in the Black Hills.

"Nevertheless, there is no disputin' that Harve frequently
looked upon the wine when it was red, also variegated, and it
shore made an oncommon fool of him," moralized the cattleman.

Just then the door leading into the parlor rattled loudly,
and everyone started involuntarily, looking relieved when only
Jim Laird came out.  His red face was convulsed with anger, and
the Grand Army man ducked his head when he saw the spark in his
blue, bloodshot eye.  They were all afraid of Jim; he was a
drunkard, but he could twist the law to suit his client's needs
as no other man in all western Kansas could do; and there were
many who tried.  The lawyer closed the door gently behind him,
leaned back against it and folded his arms, cocking his head a
little to one side.  When he assumed this attitude in the
courtroom, ears were always pricked up, as it usually foretold a
flood of withering sarcasm.

"I've been with you gentlemen before," he began in a dry,
even tone, "when you've sat by the coffins of boys born and
raised in this town; and, if I remember rightly, you were never
any too well satisfied when you checked them up.  What's the
matter, anyhow?  Why is it that reputable young men are as scarce
as millionaires in Sand City?  It might almost seem to a stranger
that there was some way something the matter with your
progressive town.  Why did Ruben Sayer, the brightest young
lawyer you ever turned out, after he had come home from the
university as straight as a die, take to drinking and forge a
check and shoot himself?  Why did Bill Merrit's son die of the
shakes in a saloon in Omaha?  Why was Mr. Thomas's son, here,
shot in a gambling house?  Why did young Adams burn his mill to
beat the insurance companies and go to the pen?"

The lawyer paused and unfolded his arms, laying one clenched
fist quietly on the table.  "I'll tell you why.  Because you
drummed nothing but money and knavery into their ears from the
time they wore knickerbockers; because you carped away at them as
you've been carping here tonight, holding our friends Phelps and
Elder up to them for their models, as our grandfathers held up
George Washington and John Adams.  But the boys, worse luck, were
young and raw at the business you put them to; and how could they
match coppers with such artists as Phelps and Elder?  You wanted
them to be successful rascals; they were only unsuccessful ones--
that's all the difference.  There was only one boy ever raised in
this borderland between ruffianism and civilization who didn't
come to grief, and you hated Harvey Merrick more for winning out
than you hated all the other boys who got under the wheels. 
Lord, Lord, how you did hate him!  Phelps, here, is fond of saying
that he could buy and sell us all out any time he's a mind to;
but he knew Harve wouldn't have given a tinker's damn for his
bank and all his cattle farms put together; and a lack of
appreciation, that way, goes hard with Phelps.

"Old Nimrod, here, thinks Harve drank too much; and this
from such as Nimrod and me!"

"Brother Elder says Harve was too free with the old man's
money--fell short in filial consideration, maybe.  Well, we can
all remember the very tone in which brother Elder swore his own
father was a liar, in the county court; and we all know that the
old man came out of that partnership with his son as bare as a
sheared lamb.  But maybe I'm getting personal, and I'd better be
driving ahead at what I want to say."

The lawyer paused a moment, squared his heavy shoulders, and
went on: "Harvey Merrick and I went to school together, back
East.  We were dead in earnest, and we wanted you all to be proud
of us some day.  We meant to be great men.  Even 1, and I haven't
lost my sense of humor, gentlemen, I meant to be a great man.  I
came back here to practice, and I found you didn't in the least
want me to be a great man.  You wanted me to be a shrewd lawyer--
oh, yes!  Our veteran here wanted me to get him an increase of
pension, because he had dyspepsia; Phelps wanted a new county
survey that would put the widow Wilson's little bottom
farm inside his south line; Elder wanted to lend money at 5 per
cent a month and get it collected; old Stark here wanted to
wheedle old women up in Vermont into investing their annuities in
real estate mortgages that are not worth the paper they are
written on. Oh, you needed me hard  enough, and you'll go on
needing me; and that's why I'm not afraid to plug the truth home
to you this once.

"Well, I came back here and became the damned shyster you
wanted me to be.  You pretend to have some sort of respect for
me; and yet you'll stand up and throw mud at Harvey Merrick,
whose soul you couldn't dirty and whose hands you couldn't tie. 
Oh, you're a discriminating lot of Christians!  There have been
times when the sight of Harvey's name in some Eastern paper has
made me hang my head like a whipped dog; and, again, times when I
liked to think of him off there in the world, away from all this
hog wallow, doing his great work and climbing the big, clean
upgrade he'd set for himself.

"And we?  Now that we've fought and lied and sweated and
stolen, and hated as only the disappointed strugglers in a
bitter, dead little Western town know how to do, what have we got
to show for it?  Harvey Merrick wouldn't have given one sunset
over your marshes for all you've got put together, and you know
it.  It's not for me to say why, in the inscrutable wisdom of
God, a genius should ever have been called from this place of
hatred and bitter waters; but I want this Boston man to know that
the drivel he's been hearing here tonight is the only tribute any
truly great man could ever have from such a lot of sick, side-
tracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharks as the here-present
financiers of Sand City--upon which town may God have mercy!"

The lawyer thrust out his hand to Steavens as he passed him,
caught up his overcoat in the hall, and had left the house before
the Grand Army man had had time to lift his ducked head and crane
his long neck about at his fellows.


Next day Jim Laird was drunk and unable to attend the
funeral services.  Steavens called twice at his office, but was
compelled to start East without seeing him.  He had a
presentiment that he would hear from him again, and left his
address on the lawyer's table; but if Laird found it, he never
acknowledged it.  The thing in him that Harvey Merrick had loved
must have gone underground with Harvey Merrick's coffin; for it
never spoke again, and Jim got the cold he died of driving across
the Colorado mountains to defend one of Phelps's sons, who had
got into trouble out there by cutting government timber.





"A Death in the Desert"

Everett Hilgarde was conscious that the man in the seat
across the aisle was looking at him intently.  He was a large,
florid man, wore a conspicuous diamond solitaire upon his third
finger, and Everett judged him to be a traveling salesman of some
sort.  He had the air of an adaptable fellow who had been about
the world and who could keep cool and clean under almost any
circumstances.

The "High Line Flyer," as this train was derisively called
among railroad men, was jerking along through the hot afternoon
over the monotonous country between Holdridge and Cheyenne. 
Besides the blond man and himself the only occupants of the car
were two dusty, bedraggled-looking girls who had been to the
Exposition at Chicago, and who were earnestly discussing the cost
of their first trip out of Colorado.  The four uncomfortable
passengers were covered with a sediment of fine, yellow dust
which clung to their hair and eyebrows like gold powder.  It blew
up in clouds from the bleak, lifeless country through which they
passed, until they were one color with the sagebrush and
sandhills.  The gray-and-yellow desert was varied only by
occasional ruins of deserted towns, and the little red boxes of
station houses, where the spindling trees and sickly vines in the
bluegrass yards made little green reserves fenced off in that
confusing wilderness of sand.

As the slanting rays of the sun beat in stronger and
stronger through the car windows, the blond gentleman asked the
ladies' permission to remove his coat, and sat in his lavender
striped shirt sleeves, with a black silk handkerchief tucked
carefully about his collar.  He had seemed interested in Everett
since they had boarded the train at Holdridge, and kept
glancing at him curiously and then looking reflectively out of
the window, as though he were trying to recall something.  But
wherever Everett went someone was almost sure to look at him with
that curious interest, and it had ceased to embarrass or annoy him.
Presently the stranger, seeming satisfied with his observation,
leaned back in his seat, half-closed his eyes, and began softly
to whistle the "Spring Song" from <i>Proserpine</i>, the cantata
that a dozen years before had made its young composer famous in a
night.  Everett had heard that air on guitars in Old Mexico, on
mandolins at college glees, on cottage organs in New England
hamlets, and only two weeks ago he had heard it played on
sleighbells at a variety theater in Denver.  There was literally no
way of escaping his brother's precocity.  Adriance could live on
the other side of the Atlantic, where his youthful indiscretions
were forgotten in his mature achievements, but his brother had
never been able to outrun <i>Proserpine</i>, and here he found it
again in the Colorado sand hills.  Not that Everett was exactly
ashamed of <i>Proserpine</i>; only a man of genius could have
written it, but it was the sort of thing that a man of genius
outgrows as soon as he can.

Everett unbent a trifle and smiled at his neighbor across
the aisle.  Immediately the large man rose and, coming over,
dropped into the seat facing Hilgarde, extending his card.

"Dusty ride, isn't it?  I don't mind it myself; I'm used to
it.  Born and bred in de briar patch, like Br'er Rabbit.  I've
been trying to place you for a long time; I think I must have met
you before."

"Thank you," said Everett, taking the card; "my name is
Hilgarde.  You've probably met my brother, Adriance; people often
mistake me for him."

The traveling man brought his hand down upon his knee with
such vehemence that the solitaire blazed.

"So I was right after all, and if you're not Adriance
Hilgarde, you're his double.  I thought I couldn't be mistaken. 
Seen him?  Well, I guess!  I never missed one of his recitals at
the Auditorium, and he played the piano score of <i>Proserpine</i>
through to us once at the Chicago Press Club.  I used to be on
the <i>Commercial</i> there before I <i>146</i> began to travel
for the publishing department of the concern.  So you're Hilgarde's
brother, and here I've run into you at the jumping-off place. 
Sounds like a newspaper yarn, doesn't it?"

The traveling man laughed and offered Everett a cigar, and
plied him with questions on the only subject that people ever
seemed to care to talk to Everett about.  At length the salesman
and the two girls alighted at a Colorado way station, and Everett
went on to Cheyenne alone.

The train pulled into Cheyenne at nine o'clock, late by a
matter of four hours or so; but no one seemed particularly
concerned at its tardiness except the station agent, who grumbled
at being kept in the office overtime on a summer night.  When
Everett alighted from the train he walked down the platform and
stopped at the track crossing, uncertain as to what direction he
should take to reach a hotel.  A phaeton stood near the crossing,
and a woman held the reins.  She was dressed in white, and her
figure was clearly silhouetted against the cushions, though it
was too dark to see her face.  Everett had scarcely noticed her,
when the switch engine came puffing up from the opposite
direction, and the headlight threw a strong glare of light on his
face.  Suddenly the woman in the phaeton uttered a low cry and
dropped the reins.  Everett started forward and caught the
horse's head, but the animal only lifted its ears and whisked its
tail in impatient surprise.  The woman sat perfectly still, her
head sunk between her shoulders and her handkerchief pressed to
her face.  Another woman came out of the depot and hurried toward
the phaeton, crying, "Katharine, dear, what is the matter?"

Everett hesitated a moment in painful embarrassment, then
lifted his hat and passed on.  He was accustomed to sudden
recognitions in the most impossible places, especially by women,
but this cry out of the night had shaken him.

While Everett was breakfasting the next morning, the headwaiter
leaned over his chair to murmur that there was a gentleman waiting
to see him in the parlor.  Everett finished his coffee and went in
the direction indicated, where he found his visitor restlessly
pacing the floor.  His whole manner betrayed a high degree of
agitation, though his physique was not that of a man whose nerves
lie near the surface.  He was something below medium height,
square-shouldered and solidly built.  His thick, closely cut hair
was beginning to show gray about the ears, and his bronzed face was
heavily lined.  His square brown hands were locked behind him, and
he held his shoulders like a man conscious of responsibilities;
yet, as he turned to greet Everett, there was an incongruous
diffidence in his address.

"Good morning, Mr. Hilgarde," he said, extending his hand;
"I found your name on the hotel register.  My name is Gaylord. 
I'm afraid my sister startled you at the station last night, Mr.
Hilgarde, and I've come around to apologize."

"Ah!  The young lady in the phaeton?  I'm sure I didn't know
whether I had anything to do with her alarm or not.  If I did, it
is I who owe the apology."

The man colored a little under the dark brown of his face.

"Oh, it's nothing you could help, sir, I fully understand
that.  You see, my sister used to be a pupil of your brother's,
and it seems you favor him; and when the switch engine threw a
light on your face it startled her."

Everett wheeled about in his chair.  "Oh! <i>Katharine</i> Gaylord!
Is it possible!  Now it's you who have given me a turn.  Why, I
used to know her when I was a boy.  What on earth--"

"Is she doing here?" said Gaylord, grimly filling out the
pause.  "You've got at the heart of the matter.  You knew my
sister had been in bad health for a long time?"

"No, I had never heard a word of that.  The last I knew of
her she was singing in London.  My brother and I correspond
infrequently and seldom get beyond family matters.  I am deeply
sorry to hear this.  There are more reasons why I am concerned
than I can tell you."

The lines in Charley Gaylord's brow relaxed a little.

"What I'm trying to say, Mr. Hilgarde, is that she wants to see
you.  I hate to ask you, but she's so set on it.  We live several
miles out of town, but my rig's below, and I can take you out
anytime you can go."

"I can go now, and it will give me real pleasure to do so," said
Everett, quickly.  "I'll get my hat and be with you in a moment."

When he came downstairs Everett found a cart at the door,
and Charley Gaylord drew a long sigh of relief as he gathered up
the reins and settled back into his own element.

"You see, I think I'd better tell you something about my
sister before you see her, and I don't know just where to begin. 
She traveled in Europe with your brother and his wife, and sang
at a lot of his concerts; but I don't know just how much you know
about her."

"Very little, except that my brother always thought her the
most gifted of his pupils, and that when I knew her she was very
young and very beautiful and turned my head sadly for a while."

Everett saw that Gaylord's mind was quite engrossed by his
grief.  He was wrought up to the point where his reserve and
sense of proportion had quite left him, and his trouble was the
one vital thing in the world.  "That's the whole thing," he went
on, flicking his horses with the whip.

"She was a great woman, as you say, and she didn't come of a
great family.  She had to fight her own way from the first.  She
got to Chicago, and then to New York, and then to Europe, where
she went up like lightning, and got a taste for it all; and now
she's dying here like a rat in a hole, out of her own world, and
she can't fall back into ours.  We've grown apart, some way--
miles and miles apart--and I'm afraid she's fearfully unhappy."

"It's a very tragic story that you are telling me, Gaylord,"
said Everett.  They were well out into the country now, spinning
along over the dusty plains of red grass, with the ragged-blue
outline of the mountains before them.

"Tragic!" cried Gaylord, starting up in his seat, "my God, man,
nobody will ever know how tragic.  It's a tragedy I live with and
eat with and sleep with, until I've lost my grip on everything. 
You see she had made a good bit of money, but she spent it all
going to health resorts.  It's her lungs, you know.  I've got money
enough to send her anywhere, but the doctors all say it's no use. 
She hasn't the ghost of a chance.  It's just getting through the
days now.  I had no notion she was half so bad before she came to
me.  She just wrote that she was all run down.  Now that she's
here, I think she'd be happier anywhere under the sun, but she
won't leave.  She says it's easier to let go of life here, and that
to go East would be dying twice.  There was a time when I was a
brakeman with a run out of Bird City, Iowa, and she was a little
thing I could carry on my shoulder, when I could get her everything
on earth she wanted, and she hadn't a wish my $80 a month didn't
cover; and now, when I've got a little property together, I can't
buy her a night's sleep!"

Everett saw that, whatever Charley Gaylord's present status
in the world might be, he had brought the brakeman's heart up the
ladder with him, and the brakeman's frank avowal of sentiment. 
Presently Gaylord went on:

"You can understand how she has outgrown her family.  We're
all a pretty common sort, railroaders from away back.  My father
was a conductor.  He died when we were kids.  Maggie, my other
sister, who lives with me, was a telegraph operator here while I
was getting my grip on things.  We had no education to speak of. 
I have to hire a stenographer because I can't spell straight--the
Almighty couldn't teach me to spell.  The things that make up
life to Kate are all Greek to me, and there's scarcely a point
where we touch any more, except in our recollections of the old
times when we were all young and happy together, and Kate sang in
a church choir in Bird City.  But I believe, Mr. Hilgarde, that
if she can see just one person like you, who knows about the
things and people she's interested in, it will give her about the
only comfort she can have now."

The reins slackened in Charley Gaylord's hand as they drew
up before a showily painted house with many gables and a round
tower.  "Here we are," he said, turning to Everett, "and I guess
we understand each other."

They were met at the door by a thin, colorless woman, whom
Gaylord introduced as "my sister, Maggie."  She asked her brother
to show Mr. Hilgarde into the music room, where Katharine wished
to see him alone.

When Everett entered the music room he gave a little start
of surprise, feeling that he had stepped from the glaring Wyoming
sunlight into some New York studio that he had always known.  He
wondered which it was of those countless studios, high up under
the roofs, over banks and shops and wholesale houses, that this
room resembled, and he looked incredulously out of the window at
the gray plain that ended in the great upheaval of the Rockies.

The haunting air of familiarity about the room perplexed
him.  Was it a copy of some particular studio he knew, or was it
merely the studio atmosphere that seemed so individual and
poignantly reminiscent here in Wyoming?  He sat down in a reading
chair and looked keenly about him.  Suddenly his eye fell upon a
large photograph of his brother above the piano.  Then it all
became clear to him: this was veritably his brother's room.  If
it were not an exact copy of one of the many studios that
Adriance had fitted up in various parts of the world, wearying of
them and leaving almost before the renovator's varnish had dried,
it was at least in the same tone.  In every detail Adriance's
taste was so manifest that the room seemed to exhale his
personality.

Among the photographs on the wall there was one of Katharine
Gaylord, taken in the days when Everett had known her, and when
the flash of her eye or the flutter of her skirt was enough to
set his boyish heart in a tumult.  Even now, he stood before the
portrait with a certain degree of embarrassment.  It was the face
of a woman already old in her first youth, thoroughly
sophisticated and a trifle hard, and it told of what her brother
had called her fight.  The camaraderie of her frank, confident
eyes was qualified by the deep lines about her mouth and the
curve of the lips, which was both sad and cynical.  Certainly she
had more good will than confidence toward the world, and the
bravado of her smile could not conceal the shadow of an unrest
that was almost discontent.  The chief charm of the woman, as
Everett had known her, lay in her superb figure and in her eyes,
which possessed a warm, lifegiving quality like the sunlight;
eyes which glowed with a sort of perpetual <i>salutat</i> to the
world.  Her head, Everett remembered as peculiarly well-shaped and
proudly poised.  There had been always a little of the imperatrix
about her, and her pose in the photograph revived all his old
impressions of her unattachedness, of how absolutely and valiantly
she stood alone.

Everett was still standing before the picture, his hands behind him
and his head inclined, when he heard the door open.  A very tall
woman advanced toward him, holding out her hand.  As she started to
speak, she coughed slightly; then, laughing, said, in a low, rich
voice, a trifle husky: "You see I make the traditional Camille
entrance--with the cough.  How good of you to come, Mr. Hilgarde."

Everett was acutely conscious that while addressing him she
was not looking at him at all, and, as he assured her of his
pleasure in coming, he was glad to have an opportunity to collect
himself.  He had not reckoned upon the ravages of a long illness. 
The long, loose folds of her white gown had been especially
designed to conceal the sharp outlines of her emaciated body, but
the stamp of her disease was there; simple and ugly and obtrusive,
a pitiless fact that could not be disguised or evaded.  The
splendid shoulders were stooped, there was a swaying unevenness in
her gait, her arms seemed disproportionately long, and her hands
were transparently white and cold to the touch.  The changes in her
face were less obvious; the proud carriage of the head, the warm,
clear eyes, even the delicate flush of color in her cheeks, all
defiantly remained, though they were all in a lower key--older,
sadder, softer.

She sat down upon the divan and began nervously to arrange the
pillows.  "I know I'm not an inspiring object to look upon, but you
must be quite frank and sensible about that and get used to it at
once, for we've no time to lose.  And if I'm a trifle irritable you
won't mind?--for I'm more than usually nervous."

"Don't bother with me this morning, if you are tired," urged
Everett.  "I can come quite as well tomorrow."

"Gracious, no!" she protested, with a flash of that quick,
keen humor that he remembered as a part of her.  "It's solitude
that I'm tired to death of--solitude and the wrong kind of people. 
You see, the minister, not content with reading the prayers for the
sick, called on me this morning.  He happened to be riding
by on his bicycle and felt it his duty to stop.  Of course, he
disapproves of my profession, and I think he takes it for granted
that I have a dark past.  The funniest feature of his conversation
is that he is always excusing my own vocation to me--condoning it,
you know--and trying to patch up my peace with my conscience by
suggesting possible noble uses for what he kindly calls my talent."

Everett laughed.  "Oh!  I'm afraid I'm not the person to call
after such a serious gentleman--I can't sustain the situation. 
At my best I don't reach higher than low comedy.  Have you
decided to which one of the noble uses you will devote yourself?"

Katharine lifted her hands in a gesture of renunciation and
exclaimed: "I'm not equal to any of them, not even the least
noble.  I didn't study that method."

She laughed and went on nervously: "The parson's not so bad. 
His English never offends me, and he has read Gibbon's <i>Decline
and Fall</i>, all five volumes, and that's something.  Then, he has
been to New York, and that's a great deal.  But how we are losing
time!  Do tell me about New York; Charley says you're just on from
there.  How does it look and taste and smell just now?  I think a
whiff of the Jersey ferry would be as flagons of cod-liver oil to
me.  Who conspicuously walks the Rialto now, and what does he or
she wear?  Are the trees still green in Madison Square, or have
they grown brown and dusty?  Does the chaste Diana on the Garden
Theatre still keep her vestal vows through all the exasperating
changes of weather?  Who has your brother's old studio now, and
what misguided aspirants practice their scales in the rookeries
about Carnegie Hall?  What do people go to see at the theaters,
and what do they eat and drink there in the world nowadays?  You
see, I'm homesick for it all, from the Battery to Riverside.  Oh,
let me die in Harlem!"  She was interrupted by a violent attack
of coughing, and Everett, embarrassed by her discomfort, plunged
into gossip about the professional people he had met in town
during the summer and the musical outlook for the winter.  He was
diagraming with his pencil, on the back of an old envelope he
found in his pocket, some new mechanical device to be
used at the Metropolitan in the production of the <i>Rheingold</i>,
when he became conscious that she was looking at him intently, and
that he was talking to the four walls.

Katharine was lying back among the pillows, watching him
through half-closed eyes, as a painter looks at a picture.  He
finished his explanation vaguely enough and put the envelope back
in his pocket.  As he did so she said, quietly: "How wonderfully
like Adriance you are!" and he felt as though a crisis of some
sort had been met and tided over.

He laughed, looking up at her with a touch of pride in his
eyes that made them seem quite boyish.  "Yes, isn't it absurd?
It's almost as awkward as looking like Napoleon--but, after all,
there are some advantages.  It has made some of his friends like
me, and I hope it will make you."

Katharine smiled and gave him a quick, meaning glance from
under her lashes.  "Oh, it did that long ago.  What a haughty,
reserved youth you were then, and how you used to stare at people
and then blush and look cross if they paid you back in your own
coin.  Do you remember that night when you took me home from a
rehearsal and scarcely spoke a word to me?"

"It was the silence of admiration," protested Everett, "very
crude and boyish, but very sincere and not a little painful. 
Perhaps you suspected something of the sort?  I remember you saw
fit to be very grown-up and worldly.

"I believe I suspected a pose; the one that college boys
usually affect with singers--'an earthen vessel in love with a
star,' you know.  But it rather surprised me in you, for you must
have seen a good deal of your brother's pupils.  Or had you an
omnivorous capacity, and elasticity that always met the
occasion?"

"Don't ask a man to confess the follies of his youth," said
Everett, smiling a little sadly; "I am sensitive about some of
them even now.  But I was not so sophisticated as you imagined. 
I saw my brother's pupils come and go, but that was about all. 
Sometimes I was called on to play accompaniments, or to fill out
a vacancy at a rehearsal, or to order a carriage for an
infuriated soprano who had thrown up her part.  But they never
spent any time on me, unless it was to notice the resemblance you
speak of."

"Yes", observed Katharine, thoughtfully, "I noticed it then,
too; but it has grown as you have grown older.  That is rather
strange, when you have lived such different lives.  It's not
merely an ordinary family likeness of feature, you know, but a
sort of interchangeable individuality; the suggestion of the
other man's personality in your face like an air transposed to
another key.  But I'm not attempting to define it; it's beyond
me; something altogether unusual and a trifle--well, uncanny,"
she finished, laughing.

"I remember," Everett said seriously, twirling the pencil
between his fingers and looking, as he sat with his head thrown
back, out under the red window blind which was raised just a
little, and as it swung back and forth in the wind revealed the
glaring panorama of the desert--a blinding stretch of yellow,
flat as the sea in dead calm, splotched here and there with deep
purple shadows; and, beyond, the ragged-blue outline of the
mountains and the peaks of snow, white as the white clouds--"I
remember, when I was a little fellow I used to be very sensitive
about it. I don't think it exactly displeased me, or that I would
have had it otherwise if I could, but it seemed to me like a
birthmark, or something not to be lightly spoken of.  People were
naturally always fonder of Ad than of me, and I used to feel the
chill of reflected light pretty often.  It came into even my
relations with my mother.  Ad went abroad to study when he was
absurdly young, you know, and mother was all broken up over it. 
She did her whole duty by each of us, but it was sort of
generally understood among us that she'd have made burnt
offerings of us all for Ad any day.  I was a little fellow then,
and when she sat alone on the porch in the summer dusk she used
sometimes to call me to her and turn my face up in the light that
streamed out through the shutters and kiss me, and then I always
knew she was thinking of Adriance."

"Poor little chap," said Katharine, and her tone was a
trifle huskier than usual.  "How fond people have always been of
Adriance!  Now tell me the latest news of him.  I haven't heard,
except through the press, for a year or more.  He was in Algeria
then, in the valley of the Chelif, riding horseback night and day
in an Arabian costume, and in his usual enthusiastic fashion he
had quite made up his mind to adopt the Mohammedan faith
and become as nearly an Arab as possible.  How many countries and
faiths has be adopted, I wonder?  Probably he was playing Arab to
himself all the time.  I remember he was a sixteenth-century duke
in Florence once for weeks together."

"Oh, that's Adriance," chuckled Everett.  "He is himself
barely long enough to write checks and be measured for his
clothes.  I didn't hear from him while he was an Arab; I missed
that."

"He was writing an Algerian suite for the piano then; it
must be in the publisher's hands by this time.  I have been too
ill to answer his letter, and have lost touch with him."

Everett drew a letter from his pocket.  "This came about a
month ago.  It's chiefly about his new opera, which is to be
brought out in London next winter.  Read it at your leisure."

"I think I shall keep it as a hostage, so that I may be sure
you will come again.  Now I want you to play for me.  Whatever
you like; but if there is anything new in the world, in mercy let
me hear it.  For nine months I have heard nothing but 'The
Baggage Coach Ahead' and 'She Is My Baby's Mother.'"

He sat down at the piano, and Katharine sat near him,
absorbed in his remarkable physical likeness to his brother and
trying to discover in just what it consisted.  She told herself
that it was very much as though a sculptor's finished work had
been rudely copied in wood.  He was of a larger build than
Adriance, and his shoulders were broad and heavy, while those of
his brother were slender and rather girlish.  His face was of the
same oval mold, but it was gray and darkened about the mouth by
continual shaving.  His eyes were of the same inconstant April
color, but they were reflective and rather dull; while Adriance's
were always points of highlight, and always meaning another thing
than the thing they meant yesterday.  But it was hard to see why
this earnest man should so continually suggest that lyric,
youthful face that was as gay as his was grave.  For Adriance,
though he was ten years the elder, and though his hair was
streaked with silver, had the face of a boy of twenty, so mobile
that it told his thoughts before he could put them into words.
A contralto, famous for the extravagance of her vocal
methods and of her affections, had once said to him that the
shepherd boys who sang in the Vale of Tempe must certainly have
looked like young Hilgarde; and the comparison had been
appropriated by a hundred shyer women who preferred to quote.


As Everett sat smoking on the veranda of the InterOcean
House that night, he was a victim to random recollections.  His
infatuation for Katharine Gaylord, visionary as it was, had been
the most serious of his boyish love affairs, and had long
disturbed his bachelor dreams.  He was painfully timid in
everything relating to the emotions, and his hurt had withdrawn
him from the society of women.  The fact that it was all so done
and dead and far behind him, and that the woman had lived her
life out since then, gave him an oppressive sense of age and
loss.  He bethought himself of something he had read about
"sitting by the hearth and remembering the faces of women without
desire," and felt himself an octogenarian.

He remembered how bitter and morose he had grown during his
stay at his brother's studio when Katharine Gaylord was working
there, and how he had wounded Adriance on the night of his last
concert in New York.  He had sat there in the box while his
brother and Katharine were called back again and again after the
last number, watching the roses go up over the footlights until
they were stacked half as high as the piano, brooding, in his
sullen boy's heart, upon the pride those two felt in each other's
work--spurring each other to their best and beautifully
contending in song.  The footlights had seemed a hard, glittering
line drawn sharply between their life and his; a circle of flame
set about those splendid children of genius.  He walked back to
his hotel alone and sat in his window staring out on Madison
Square until long after midnight, resolving to beat no more at
doors that he could never enter and realizing more keenly than
ever before how far this glorious world of beautiful creations
lay from the paths of men like himself.  He told himself that he
had in common with this woman only the baser uses of life.

Everett's week in Cheyenne stretched to three, and he saw no
prospect of release except through the thing he dreaded.  The
bright, windy days of the Wyoming autumn passed swiftly.  Letters
and telegrams came urging him to hasten his trip to the coast,
but he resolutely postponed his business engagements.  The
mornings he spent on one of Charley Gaylord's ponies, or fishing
in the mountains, and in the evenings he sat in his room writing
letters or reading.  In the afternoon he was usually at his post
of duty.  Destiny, he reflected, seems to have very positive
notions about the sort of parts we are fitted to play.  The scene
changes and the compensation varies, but in the end we usually
find that we have played the same class of business from first to
last.  Everett had been a stopgap all his life.  He remembered
going through a looking glass labyrinth when he was a boy and
trying gallery after gallery, only at every turn to bump his nose
against his own face--which, indeed, was not his own, but his
brother's.  No matter what his mission, east or west, by land or
sea, he was sure to find himself employed in his brother's
business, one of the tributary lives which helped to swell the
shining current of Adriance Hilgarde's.  It was not the first
time that his duty had been to comfort, as best he could, one of
the broken things his brother's imperious speed had cast aside
and forgotten.  He made no attempt to analyze the situation or to
state it in exact terms; but he felt Katharine Gaylord's need for
him, and he accepted it as a commission from his brother to help
this woman to die.  Day by day he felt her demands on him grow
more imperious, her need for him grow more acute and positive;
and day by day he felt that in his peculiar relation to her his
own individuality played a smaller and smaller part.  His power
to minister to her comfort, he saw, lay solely in his link with
his brother's life.  He understood all that his physical
resemblance meant to her.  He knew that she sat by him always
watching for some common trick of gesture, some familiar play of
expression, some illusion of light and shadow, in which he should
seem wholly Adriance.  He knew that she lived upon this and that
her disease fed upon it; that it sent shudders of remembrance
through her and that in the exhaustion which followed this
turmoil of her dying senses, she slept deep and sweet and
dreamed of youth and art and days in a certain old Florentine
garden, and not of bitterness and death.

The question which most perplexed him was, "How much shall I
know?  How much does she wish me to know?"  A few days after his
first meeting with Katharine Gaylord, he had cabled his brother
to write her.  He had merely said that she was mortally ill; he
could depend on Adriance to say the right thing--that was a part
of his gift.  Adriance always said not only the right thing, but
the opportune, graceful, exquisite thing.  His phrases took the
color of the moment and the then-present condition, so that they
never savored of perfunctory compliment or frequent usage.  He
always caught the lyric essence of the moment, the poetic
suggestion of every situation.  Moreover, he usually did the
right thing, the opportune, graceful, exquisite thing--except,
when he did very cruel things--bent upon making people happy
when their existence touched his, just as he insisted that his
material environment should be beautiful; lavishing upon those
near him all the warmth and radiance of his rich nature, all the
homage of the poet and troubadour, and, when they were no longer
near, forgetting--for that also was a part of Adriance's gift.

Three weeks after Everett had sent his cable, when he made
his daily call at the gaily painted ranch house, he found
Katharine laughing like a schoolgirl.  "Have you ever thought,"
she said, as he entered the music room, "how much these seances
of ours are like Heine's 'Florentine Nights,' except that I don't
give you an opportunity to monopolize the conversation as Heine
did?"  She held his hand longer than usual, as she greeted him,
and looked searchingly up into his face.  "You are the kindest
man living; the kindest," she added, softly.

Everett's gray face colored faintly as he drew his hand
away, for he felt that this time she was looking at him and not
at a whimsical caricature of his brother.  "Why, what have I done
now?" he asked, lamely.  "I can't remember having sent you any
stale candy or champagne since yesterday."

She drew a letter with a foreign postmark from between
the leaves of a book and held it out, smiling.  "You got him to
write it.  Don't say you didn't, for it came direct, you see, and
the last address I gave him was a place in Florida.  This deed
shall be remembered of you when I am with the just in Paradise.
But one thing you did not ask him to do, for you didn't know about
it.  He has sent me his latest work, the new sonata, the most
ambitious thing he has ever done, and you are to play it for me
directly, though it looks horribly intricate.  But first for the
letter; I think you would better read it aloud to me."

Everett sat down in a low chair facing the window seat in
which she reclined with a barricade of pillows behind her.  He
opened the letter, his lashes half-veiling his kind eyes, and saw
to his satisfaction that it was a long one--wonderfully tactful
and tender, even for Adriance, who was tender with his valet and
his stable boy, with his old gondolier and the beggar-women who
prayed to the saints for him.

The letter was from Granada, written in the Alhambra, as he
sat by the fountain of the Patio di Lindaraxa.  The air was
heavy, with the warm fragrance of the South and full of the sound
of splashing, running water, as it had been in a certain old
garden in Florence, long ago.  The sky was one great turquoise,
heated until it glowed.  The wonderful Moorish arches threw
graceful blue shadows all about him.  He had sketched an outline
of them on the margin of his notepaper.  The subtleties of Arabic
decoration had cast an unholy spell over him, and the brutal
exaggerations of Gothic art were a bad dream, easily forgotten. 
The Alhambra itself had, from the first, seemed perfectly
familiar to him, and he knew that he must have trod that court,
sleek and brown and obsequious, centuries before Ferdinand rode
into Andalusia.  The letter was full of confidences about his
work, and delicate allusions to their old happy days of study and
comradeship, and of her own work, still so warmly remembered and
appreciatively discussed everywhere he went.

As Everett folded the letter he felt that Adriance had
divined the thing needed and had risen to it in his own wonderful
way.  The letter was consistently egotistical and seemed to him
even a trifle patronizing, yet it was just what she had
wanted.  A strong realization of his brother's charm and intensity
and power came over him; he felt the breath of that whirlwind of
flame in which Adriance passed, consuming all in his path, and
himself even more resolutely than he consumed others.  Then he
looked down at this white, burnt-out brand that lay before him.
"Like him, isn't it?" she said, quietly.

"I think I can scarcely answer his letter, but when you see
him next you can do that for me.  I want you to tell him many
things for me, yet they can all be summed up in this: I want him
to grow wholly into his best and greatest self, even at the cost
of the dear boyishness that is half his charm to you and me.  Do
you understand me?"

"I know perfectly well what you mean," answered Everett,
thoughtfully.  "I have often felt so about him myself.  And yet
it's difficult to prescribe for those fellows; so little makes,
so little mars."

Katharine raised herself upon her elbow, and her face
flushed with feverish earnestness.  "Ah, but it is the waste of
himself that I mean; his lashing himself out on stupid and
uncomprehending people until they take him at their own estimate. 
He can kindle marble, strike fire from putty, but is it worth
what it costs him?"

"Come, come," expostulated Everett, alarmed at her excitement. 
"Where is the new sonata?  Let him speak for himself."

He sat down at the piano and began playing the first
movement, which was indeed the voice of Adriance, his proper
speech.  The sonata was the most ambitious work he had done up to
that time and marked the transition from his purely lyric vein to
a deeper and nobler style.  Everett played intelligently and with
that sympathetic comprehension which seems peculiar to a certain
lovable class of men who never accomplish anything in particular. 
When he had finished he turned to Katharine.

"How he has grown!" she cried.  "What the three last years have
done for him!  He used to write only the tragedies of passion; but
this is the tragedy of the soul, the shadow coexistent with the
soul.  This is the tragedy of effort and failure, the thing Keats
called hell.  This is my tragedy, as I lie here spent by the
racecourse, listening to the feet of the runners as they pass me. 
Ah, God!  The swift feet of the runners!"

She turned her face away and covered it with her straining
hands.  Everett crossed over to her quickly and knelt beside her. 
In all the days he had known her she had never before, beyond an
occasional ironical jest, given voice to the bitterness of her
own defeat.  Her courage had become a point of pride with him,
and to see it going sickened him.

"Don't do it," he gasped.  "I can't stand it, I really
can't, I feel it too much.  We mustn't speak of that; it's too
tragic and too vast."

When she turned her face back to him there was a ghost of the old,
brave, cynical smile on it, more bitter than the tears she could
not shed.  "No, I won't be so ungenerous; I will save that for the
watches of the night when I have no better company.  Now you may
mix me another drink of some sort.  Formerly, when it was not
<i>if</i> I should ever sing Brunnhilde, but quite simply when I
<i>should</i> sing Brunnhilde, I was always starving myself and
thinking what I might drink and what I might not.  But broken music
boxes may drink whatsoever they list, and no one cares whether they
lose their figure.  Run over that theme at the beginning again. 
That, at least, is not new.  It was running in his head when we
were in Venice years ago, and he used to drum it on his glass at
the dinner table.  He had just begun to work it out when the late
autumn came on, and the paleness of the Adriatic oppressed him,
and he decided to go to Florence for the winter, and lost touch
with the theme during his illness.  Do you remember those
frightful days?  All the people who have loved him are not strong
enough to save him from himself!  When I got word from Florence
that he had been ill I was in Nice filling a concert engagement. 
His wife was hurrying to him from Paris, but I reached him first. 
I arrived at dusk, in a terrific storm.  They had taken an old
palace there for the winter, and I found him in the library--a
long, dark room full of old Latin books and heavy furniture and
bronzes.  He was sitting by a wood fire at one end of the room,
looking, oh, so worn and pale!--as he always does when he is ill,
you know.  Ah, it is so good that you <i>do</i> know!  Even
his red smoking jacket lent no color to his face.  His first words
were not to tell me how ill he had been, but that that morning he
had been well enough to put the last strokes to the score of his
<i>Souvenirs d'Automne</i>.  He was as I most like to remember him:
so calm and happy and tired; not gay, as he usually is, but just
contented and tired with that heavenly tiredness that comes after
a good work done at last.  Outside, the rain poured down in
torrents, and the wind moaned for the pain of all the world and
sobbed in the branches of the shivering olives and about the walls
of that desolated old palace.  How that night comes back to me!
There were no lights in the room, only the wood fire which glowed
upon the hard features of the bronze Dante, like the reflection of
purgatorial flames, and threw long black shadows about us; beyond
us it scarcely penetrated the gloom at all, Adriance sat staring at
the fire with the weariness of all his life in his eves, and of all
the other lives that must aspire and suffer to make up one such
life as his.  Somehow the wind with all its world-pain had got into
the room, and the cold rain was in our eyes, and the wave came up
in both of us at once--that awful, vague, universal pain, that
cold fear of life and death and God and hope--and we were like
two clinging together on a spar in midocean after the shipwreck
of everything.  Then we heard the front door open with a great
gust of wind that shook even the walls, and the servants came
running with lights, announcing that Madam had returned, <i>'and in
the book we read no more that night.'</i>"

She gave the old line with a certain bitter humor, and with
the hard, bright smile in which of old she had wrapped her
weakness as in a glittering garment.  That ironical smile, worn
like a mask through so many years, had gradually changed even the
lines of her face completely, and when she looked in the mirror
she saw not herself, but the scathing critic, the amused observer
and satirist of herself.  Everett dropped his head upon his hand
and sat looking at the rug.  "How much you have cared!" he said.

"Ah, yes, I cared," she replied, closing her eyes with a
long-drawn sigh of relief; and lying perfectly still, she went
on: "You can't imagine what a comfort it is to have you know how I
cared, what a relief it is to be able to tell it to someone.  I
used to want to shriek it out to the world in the long nights when
I could not sleep.  It seemed to me that I could not die with it. 
It demanded some sort of expression.  And now that you know, you
would scarcely believe how much less sharp the anguish of it is."

Everett continued to look helplessly at the floor.  "I was
not sure how much you wanted me to know," he said.

"Oh, I intended you should know from the first time I looked
into your face, when you came that day with Charley.  I flatter
myself that I have been able to conceal it when I chose, though I
suppose women always think that.  The more observing ones may
have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often
kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern. 
But I wanted you to know; you are so like him that it is almost
like telling him himself.  At least, I feel now that he will know
some day, and then I will be quite sacred from his compassion,
for we none of us dare pity the dead.  Since it was what my life
has chiefly meant, I should like him to know.  On the whole I am
not ashamed of it.  I have fought a good fight."

"And has he never known at all?" asked Everett, in a thick voice.

"Oh!  Never at all in the way that you mean.  Of course, he
is accustomed to looking into the eyes of women and finding love
there; when he doesn't find it there he thinks he must have been
guilty of some discourtesy and is miserable about it.  He has a
genuine fondness for everyone who is not stupid or gloomy, or old
or preternaturally ugly.  Granted youth and cheerfulness, and a
moderate amount of wit and some tact, and Adriance will always be
glad to see you coming around the corner.  I shared with the
rest; shared the smiles and the gallantries and the droll little
sermons.  It was quite like a Sunday-school picnic; we wore our
best clothes and a smile and took our turns.  It was his kindness
that was hardest.  I have pretty well used my life up at standing
punishment."

"Don't; you'll make me hate him," groaned Everett.

Katharine laughed and began to play nervously with her fan. 
"It wasn't in the slightest degree his fault; that is the most
grotesque part of it.  Why, it had really begun before I
ever met him.  I fought my way to him, and I drank my doom
greedily enough."

Everett rose and stood hesitating.  "I think I must go.  You ought
to be quiet, and I don't think I can hear any more just now."

She put out her hand and took his playfully.  "You've put in
three weeks at this sort of thing, haven't you?  Well, it may
never be to your glory in this world, perhaps, but it's been the
mercy of heaven to me, and it ought to square accounts for a much
worse life than yours will ever be."

Everett knelt beside her, saying, brokenly: "I stayed because I
wanted to be with you, that's all.  I have never cared about other
women since I met you in New York when I was a lad.  You are a part
of my destiny, and I could not leave you if I would."

She put her hands on his shoulders and shook her head.  "No,
no; don't tell me that.  I have seen enough of tragedy, God
knows.  Don't show me any more just as the curtain is going down. 
No, no, it was only a boy's fancy, and your divine pity and my
utter pitiableness have recalled it for a moment.  One does not
love the dying, dear friend.  If some fancy of that sort had been
left over from boyhood, this would rid you of it, and that were
well.  Now go, and you will come again tomorrow, as long as there
are tomorrows, will you not?"  She took his hand with a smile that
lifted the mask from her soul, that was both courage and despair,
and full of infinite loyalty and tenderness, as she said softly:

     For ever and for ever, farewell, Cassius;
     If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;
     If not, why then, this parting was well made.

The courage in her eyes was like the clear light of a star to him
as he went out.

On the night of Adriance Hilgarde's opening concert in Paris
Everett sat by the bed in the ranch house in Wyoming, watching
over the last battle that we have with the flesh before we are
done with it and free of it forever.  At times it seemed that the
serene soul of her must have left already and found some refuge
from the storm, and only the tenacious animal life were left to do
battle with death.  She labored under a delusion at once pitiful
and merciful, thinking that she was in the Pullman on her way to
New York, going back to her life and her work.  When she aroused
from her stupor it was only to ask the porter to waken her half an
hour out of Jersey City, or to remonstrate with him about the
delays and the roughness of the road.  At midnight Everett and the
nurse were left alone with her.  Poor Charley Gaylord had lain down
on a couch outside the door.  Everett sat looking at the sputtering
night lamp until it made his eyes ache.  His head dropped forward
on the foot of the bed, and he sank into a heavy, distressful
slumber.  He was dreaming of Adriance's concert in Paris, and of
Adriance, the troubadour, smiling and debonair, with his boyish
face and the touch of silver gray in his hair.  He heard the
applause and he saw the roses going up over the footlights until
they were stacked half as high as the piano, and the petals fell
and scattered, making crimson splotches on the floor.  Down this
crimson pathway came Adriance with his youthful step, leading his
prima donna by the hand; a dark woman this time, with Spanish eyes.

The nurse touched him on the shoulder; he started and awoke. 
She screened the lamp with her hand.  Everett saw that Katharine
was awake and conscious, and struggling a little.  He lifted her
gently on his arm and began to fan her.  She laid her hands
lightly on his hair and looked into his face with eyes that
seemed never to have wept or doubted.  "Ah, dear Adriance, dear,
dear," she whispered.

Everett went to call her brother, but when they came back
the madness of art was over for Katharine.

Two days later Everett was pacing the station siding,
waiting for the westbound train.  Charley Gaylord walked beside
him, but the two men had nothing to say to each other.  Everett's
bags were piled on the truck, and his step was hurried and his
eyes were full of impatience, as he gazed again and again up the
track, watching for the train.  Gaylord's impatience was not less
than his own; these two, who had grown so close, had now become
painful and impossible to each other, and longed for the
wrench of farewell.

As the train pulled in Everett wrung Gaylord's hand among
the crowd of alighting passengers.  The people of a German opera
company, en route to the coast, rushed by them in frantic haste
to snatch their breakfast during the stop.  Everett heard an
exclamation in a broad German dialect, and a massive woman whose
figure persistently escaped from her stays in the most improbable
places rushed up to him, her blond hair disordered by the wind,
and glowing with joyful surprise she caught his coat sleeve with
her tightly gloved hands.

"<i>Herr Gott</i>, Adriance, <i>lieber Freund</i>," she cried,
emotionally.

Everett quickly withdrew his arm and lifted  his hat,
blushing.  "Pardon me, madam, but I see that  you have mistaken
me for Adriance Hilgarde.  I am his brother," he said quietly,
and turning from the crestfallen singer, he hurried into the car.




The Garden Lodge

When Caroline Noble's friends learned that Raymond d'Esquerre was
to spend a month at her place on the Sound before he sailed to fill
his engagement for the London opera season, they considered it
another striking instance of the perversity of things.  That the
month was May, and the most mild and florescent of all the
blue-and-white Mays the middle coast had known in years, but added
to their sense of wrong.  D'Esquerre, they learned, was ensconced
in the lodge in the apple orchard, just beyond Caroline's glorious
garden, and report went that at almost any hour the sound of the
tenor's voice and of Caroline's crashing accompaniment could be
heard floating through the open windows, out among the snowy apple
boughs.  The Sound, steel-blue and dotted with white sails, was
splendidly seen from the windows of the lodge.  The garden to the
left and the orchard to the right had never been so riotous with
spring, and had burst into impassioned bloom, as if to accommodate
Caroline, though she was certainly the last woman to whom the
witchery of Freya could be attributed; the last woman, as her
friends affirmed, to at all adequately appreciate and make the most
of such a setting for the great tenor.

Of course, they admitted, Caroline was musical--well, she
ought to be!--but in that, as in everything, she was paramountly
cool-headed, slow of impulse, and disgustingly practical; in
that, as in everything else, she had herself so provokingly well
in hand.  Of course, it would be she, always mistress of herself
in any situation, she, who would never be lifted one inch from
the ground by it, and who would go on superintending her
gardeners and workmen as usual--it would be she who got him. 
Perhaps some of them suspected that this was exactly why
she did get him, and it but nettled them the more.

Caroline's coolness, her capableness, her general success,
especially exasperated people because they felt that, for the
most part, she had made herself what she was; that she had cold-
bloodedly set about complying with the demands of life and making
her position comfortable and masterful.  That was why, everyone
said, she had married Howard Noble.  Women who did not get
through life so well as Caroline, who could not make such good
terms either with fortune or their husbands, who did not find
their health so unfailingly good, or hold their looks so well, or
manage their children so easily, or give such distinction to all
they did, were fond of stamping Caroline as a materialist, and
called her hard.

The impression of cold calculation, of having a definite
policy, which Caroline gave, was far from a false one; but there
was this to be said for her--that there were extenuating
circumstances which her friends could not know.

If Caroline held determinedly to the middle course, if she
was apt to regard with distrust everything which inclined toward
extravagance, it was not because she was unacquainted with other
standards than her own, or had never seen another side of life. 
She had grown up in Brooklyn, in a shabby little house under the
vacillating administration of her father, a music teacher who
usually neglected his duties to write orchestral compositions for
which the world seemed to have no especial need.  His spirit was
warped by bitter vindictiveness and puerile self-commiseration,
and he spent his days in scorn of the labor that brought him
bread and in pitiful devotion to the labor that brought him only
disappointment, writing interminable scores which demanded of the
orchestra everything under heaven except melody.

It was not a cheerful home for a girl to grow up in.  The
mother, who idolized her husband as the music lord of the future,
was left to a lifelong battle with broom and dustpan, to
neverending conciliatory overtures to the butcher and grocer, to
the making of her own gowns and of Caroline's, and to the delicate
task of mollifying Auguste's neglected pupils.

The son, Heinrich, a painter, Caroline's only brother, had
inherited all his father's vindictive sensitiveness without his
capacity for slavish application.  His little studio on the third
floor had been much frequented by young men as unsuccessful as
himself, who met there to give themselves over to contemptuous
derision of this or that artist whose industry and stupidity had
won him recognition.  Heinrich, when he worked at all, did
newspaper sketches at twenty-five dollars a week.  He was too
indolent and vacillating to set himself seriously to his art, too
irascible and poignantly self-conscious to make a living, too
much addicted to lying late in bed, to the incontinent reading of
poetry, and to the use of chloral to be anything very positive
except painful.  At twenty-six he shot himself in a frenzy, and
the whole wretched affair had effectually shattered his mother's
health and brought on the decline of which she died.  Caroline
had been fond of him, but she felt a certain relief when he no
longer wandered about the little house, commenting ironically
upon its shabbiness, a Turkish cap on his head and a cigarette
hanging from between his long, tremulous fingers.

After her mother's death Caroline assumed the management of
that bankrupt establishment.  The funeral expenses were unpaid,
and Auguste's pupils had been frightened away by the shock of
successive disasters and the general atmosphere of wretchedness
that pervaded the house.  Auguste himself was writing a symphonic
poem, Icarus, dedicated to the memory of his son.  Caroline was
barely twenty when she was called upon to face this tangle of
difficulties, but she reviewed the situation candidly.  The house
had served its time at the shrine of idealism; vague, distressing,
unsatisfied yearnings had brought it low enough.  Her mother,
thirty years before, had eloped and left Germany with her music
teacher, to give herself over to lifelong, drudging bondage at the
kitchen range.  Ever since Caroline could remember, the law in the
house had been a sort of mystic worship of things distant,
intangible and unattainable.  The family had lived in successive
ebullitions of generous enthusiasm, in talk of masters and
masterpieces, only to come down to the cold facts in the case; to
boiled mutton and to the necessity of turning the dining-room
carpet.  All these emotional pyrotechnics had ended in petty
jealousies, in neglected duties, and in cowardly fear of the little
grocer on the corner.

From her childhood she had hated it, that humiliating and
uncertain existence, with its glib tongue and empty pockets, its
poetic ideals and sordid realities, its indolence and poverty
tricked out in paper roses.  Even as a little girl, when vague
dreams beset her, when she wanted to lie late in bed and commune
with visions, or to leap and sing because the sooty little trees
along the street were putting out their first pale leaves in the
sunshine, she would clench her hands and go to help her mother
sponge the spots from her father's waistcoat or press Heinrich's
trousers.  Her mother never permitted the slightest question
concerning anything Auguste or Heinrich saw fit to do, but from
the time Caroline could reason at all she could not help thinking
that many things went wrong at home.  She knew, for example, that
her father's pupils ought not to be kept waiting half an hour
while he discussed Schopenhauer with some bearded socialist over
a dish of herrings and a spotted tablecloth.  She knew that
Heinrich ought not to give a dinner on Heine's birthday, when the
laundress had not been paid for a month and when he frequently
had to ask his mother for carfare.  Certainly Caroline had served
her apprenticeship to idealism and to all the embarrassing
inconsistencies which it sometimes entails, and she decided to
deny herself this diffuse, ineffectual answer to the sharp
questions of life.

When she came into the control of herself and the house she
refused to proceed any further with her musical education.  Her
father, who had intended to make a concert pianist of her, set
this down as another item in his long list of disappointments and
his grievances against the world.  She was young and pretty, and
she had worn turned gowns and soiled gloves and improvised hats
all her life.  She wanted the luxury of being like other people,
of being honest from her hat to her boots, of having nothing to
hide, not even in the matter of stockings, and she was willing to
work for it.  She rented a little studio away from that house of
misfortune and began to give lessons.  She managed well and was
the sort of girl people liked to help.  The bills were
paid and Auguste went on composing, growing indignant only when
she refused to insist that her pupils should study his compositions
for the piano.  She began to get engagements in New York to play
accompaniments at song recitals.  She dressed well, made herself
agreeable, and gave herself a chance.  She never permitted herself
to look further than a step ahead, and set herself with all the
strength of her will to see things as they are and meet them
squarely in the broad day.  There were two things she feared even
more than poverty: the part of one that sets up an idol and the
part of one that bows down and worships it.

When Caroline was twenty-four she married Howard Noble, then
a widower of forty, who had been for ten years a power in Wall
Street.  Then, for the first time, she had paused to take breath. 
It took a substantialness as unquestionable as his; his money,
his position, his energy, the big vigor of his robust person, to
satisfy her that she was entirely safe.  Then she relaxed a
little, feeling that there was a barrier to be counted upon
between her and that world of visions and quagmires and failure.

Caroline had been married for six years when Raymond
d'Esquerre came to stay with them.  He came chiefly because
Caroline was what she was; because he, too, felt occasionally the
need of getting out of Klingsor's garden, of dropping down
somewhere for a time near a quiet nature, a cool head, a strong
hand.  The hours he had spent in the garden lodge were hours of
such concentrated study as, in his fevered life, he seldom got in
anywhere.  She had, as he told Noble, a fine appreciation of the
seriousness of work.

One evening two weeks after d'Esquerre had sailed, Caroline
was in the library giving her husband an account of the work she
had laid out for the gardeners.  She superintended the care of
the grounds herself.  Her garden, indeed, had become quite a part
of her; a sort of beautiful adjunct, like gowns or jewels.  It
was a famous spot, and Noble was very proud of it.

"What do you think, Caroline, of having the garden lodge torn down
and putting a new summer house there at the end of the arbor; a big
rustic affair where you could have tea served in midsummer?" he
asked.

"The lodge?" repeated Caroline looking at him quickly.  "Why, that
seems almost a shame, doesn't it, after d'Esquerre has used it?"

Noble put down his book with a smile of amusement.

"Are you going to be sentimental about it?  Why, I'd sacrifice the
whole place to see that come to pass.  But I don't believe you
could do it for an hour together."

"I don't believe so, either," said his wife, smiling.

Noble took up his book again and Caroline went into the
music room to practice.  She was not ready to have the lodge torn
down.  She had gone there for a quiet hour every day during the
two weeks since d'Esquerre had left them.  It was the sheerest
sentiment she had ever permitted herself.  She was ashamed of it,
but she was childishly unwilling to let it go.

Caroline went to bed soon after her husband, but she was not
able to sleep.  The night was close and warm, presaging storm. 
The wind had fallen, and the water slept, fixed and motionless as
the sand.  She rose and thrust her feet into slippers and,
putting a dressing gown over her shoulders, opened the door of
her husband's room; he was sleeping soundly.  She went into the
hall and down the stairs; then, leaving the house through a side
door, stepped into the vine-covered arbor that led to the garden
lodge.  The scent of the June roses was heavy in the still air,
and the stones that paved the path felt pleasantly cool through
the thin soles of her slippers.  Heat-lightning flashed
continuously from the bank of clouds that had gathered over the
sea, but the shore was flooded with moonlight and, beyond, the
rim of the Sound lay smooth and shining.  Caroline had the key of
the lodge, and the door creaked as she opened it.  She stepped
into the long, low room radiant with the moonlight which streamed
through the bow window and lay in a silvery pool along the waxed
floor.  Even that part of the room which lay in the shadow was
vaguely illuminated; the piano, the tall candlesticks, the
picture frames and white casts standing out as clearly in the
half-light as did the sycamores and black poplars of the garden
against the still, expectant night sky.  Caroline sat
down to think it all over.  She had come here to do just that
every day of the two weeks since d'Esquerre's departure, but,
far from ever having reached a conclusion, she had succeeded
only in losing her way in a maze of memories--sometimes
bewilderingly confused, sometimes too acutely distinct--where
there was neither path, nor clue, nor any hope of finality.  She
had, she realized, defeated a lifelong regimen; completely
confounded herself by falling unaware and incontinently into
that luxury of reverie which, even as a little girl, she had so
determinedly denied herself, she had been developing with
alarming celerity that part of one which sets up an idol and
that part of one which bows down and worships it.

It was a mistake, she felt, ever to have asked d'Esquerre to come
at all.  She had an angry feeling that she had done it rather in
self-defiance, to rid herself finally of that instinctive fear of
him which had always troubled and perplexed her.  She knew that she
had reckoned with herself before he came; but she had been equal to
so much that she had never really doubted she would be equal to
this.  She had come to believe, indeed, almost arrogantly in her
own malleability and endurance; she had done so much with herself
that she had come to think that there was nothing which she could
not do; like swimmers, overbold, who reckon upon their strength and
their power to hoard it, forgetting the ever-changing moods of
their adversary, the sea.

And d'Esquerre was a man to reckon with.  Caroline did not
deceive herself now upon that score.  She admitted it humbly
enough, and since she had said good-by to him she had not been
free for a moment from the sense of his formidable power.  It
formed the undercurrent of her consciousness; whatever she might
be doing or thinking, it went on, involuntarily, like her
breathing, sometimes welling up until suddenly she found herself
suffocating.  There was a moment of this tonight, and Caroline
rose and stood shuddering, looking about her in the blue
duskiness of the silent room.  She had not been here at night
before, and the spirit of the place seemed more troubled and
insistent than ever it had in the quiet of the afternoons. 
Caroline brushed her hair back from her damp forehead
and went over to the bow window.  After raising it she sat down
upon the low seat.  Leaning her head against the sill, and
loosening her nightgown at the throat, she half-closed her eyes
and looked off into the troubled night, watching the play of
the heat-lightning upon the massing clouds between the pointed
tops of the poplars.

Yes, she knew, she knew well enough, of what absurdities
this spell was woven; she mocked, even while she winced.  His
power, she knew, lay not so much in anything that he actually
had--though he had so much--or in anything that he actually was,
but in what he suggested, in what he seemed picturesque enough to
have or be and that was just anything that one chose to believe
or to desire.  His appeal was all the more persuasive and alluring
in that it was to the imagination alone, in that it was as
indefinite and impersonal as those cults of idealism which so
have their way with women.  What he had was that, in his mere
personality, he quickened and in a measure gratified that
something without which--to women--life is no better than
sawdust, and to the desire for which most of their mistakes and
tragedies and astonishingly poor bargains are due.

D'Esquerre had become the center of a movement, and the
Metropolitan had become the temple of a cult.  When he could be
induced to cross the Atlantic, the opera season in New York was
successful; when he could not, the management lost money; so much
everyone knew.  It was understood, too, that his superb art had
disproportionately little to do with his peculiar position. 
Women swayed the balance this way or that; the opera, the
orchestra, even his own glorious art, achieved at such a cost, were
but the accessories of himself; like the scenery and costumes and
even the soprano, they all went to produce atmosphere, were the
mere mechanics of the beautiful illusion.

Caroline understood all this; tonight was not the first time
that she had put it to herself so.  She had seen the same feeling
in other people, watched for it in her friends, studied it in the
house night after night when he sang, candidly putting herself
among a thousand others.

D'Esquerre's arrival in the early winter was the signal for
a feminine hegira toward New York.  On the nights when he sang
women flocked to the Metropolitan from mansions and hotels, from
typewriter desks, schoolrooms, shops, and fitting rooms.  They
were of all conditions and complexions.  Women of the world who
accepted him knowingly as they sometimes took champagne for its
agreeable effect; sisters of charity and overworked shopgirls,
who received him devoutly; withered women who had taken doctorate
degrees and who worshipped furtively through prism spectacles;
business women and women of affairs, the Amazons who dwelt afar
from men in the stony fastnesses of apartment houses.  They all
entered into the same romance; dreamed, in terms as various as
the hues of fantasy, the same dream; drew the same quick breath
when he stepped upon the stage, and, at his exit, felt the same
dull pain of shouldering the pack again.

There were the maimed, even; those who came on crutches, who
were pitted by smallpox or grotesquely painted by cruel birth
stains.  These, too, entered with him into enchantment.  Stout
matrons became slender girls again; worn spinsters felt their
cheeks flush with the tenderness of their lost youth.  Young and
old, however hideous, however fair, they yielded up their heat--
whether quick or latent--sat hungering for the mystic bread
wherewith he fed them at this eucharist of sentiment.

Sometimes, when the house was crowded from the orchestra to
the last row of the gallery, when the air was charged with this
ecstasy of fancy, he himself was the victim of the burning
reflection of his power.  They acted upon him in turn; he felt
their fervent and despairing appeal to him; it stirred him as the
spring drives the sap up into an old tree; he, too, burst into
bloom.  For the moment he, too, believed again, desired again, he
knew not what, but something.

But it was not in these exalted moments that Caroline had
learned to fear him most.  It was in the quiet, tired reserve,
the dullness, even, that kept him company between these outbursts
that she found that exhausting drain upon her sympathies which
was the very pith and substance of their alliance.  It was the
tacit admission of disappointment under all this glamour
of success--the helplessness of the enchanter to at all enchant
himself--that awoke in her an illogical, womanish desire to in
some way compensate, to make it up to him.

She had observed drastically to herself that it was her
eighteenth year he awoke in her--those hard years she had spent
in turning gowns and placating tradesmen, and which she had never
had time to live.  After all, she reflected, it was better to
allow one's self a little youth--to dance a little at the
carnival and to live these things when they are natural and
lovely, not to have them coming back on one and demanding arrears
when they are humiliating and impossible.  She went over tonight
all the catalogue of her self-deprivations; recalled how, in the
light of her father's example, she had even refused to humor her
innocent taste for improvising at the piano; how, when she began
to teach, after her mother's death, she had struck out one little
indulgence after another, reducing her life to a relentless
routine, unvarying as clockwork.  It seemed to her that ever
since d'Esquerre first came into the house she had been haunted
by an imploring little girlish ghost that followed her about,
wringing its hands and entreating for an hour of life.

The storm had held off unconscionably long; the air within
the lodge was stifling, and without the garden waited,
breathless.  Everything seemed pervaded by a poignant distress;
the hush of feverish, intolerable expectation.  The still earth,
the heavy flowers, even the growing darkness, breathed the
exhaustion of protracted waiting.  Caroline felt that she ought
to go; that it was wrong to stay; that the hour and the place
were as treacherous as her own reflections.  She rose and began
to pace the floor, stepping softly, as though in fear of
awakening someone, her figure, in its thin drapery, diaphanously
vague and white.  Still unable to shake off the obsession of the
intense stillness, she sat down at the piano and began to run
over the first act of the <i>Walkure</i>, the last of his roles
they had practiced together; playing listlessly and absently at
first, but with gradually increasing seriousness.  Perhaps it was
the still heat of the summer night, perhaps it was the heavy odors
from the garden that came in through the open windows; but as she
played there grew and grew the feeling that he was there, beside
her, standing in his accustomed place.  In the duet at the end of
the first act she heard him clearly: <i>"Thou art the Spring for
which I sighed in Winter's cold embraces."</i>  Once as he sang
it, he had put his arm about her, his one hand under her heart,
while with the other he took her right from the keyboard, holding
her as he always held <i>Sieglinde</i> when he drew her toward the
window.  She had been wonderfully the mistress of herself at the
time; neither repellent nor acquiescent.  She remembered that she
had rather exulted, then, in her self-control--which he had seemed
to take for granted, though there was perhaps the whisper of a
question from the hand under her heart.  <i>"Thou art the Spring
for which I sighed in Winter's cold embraces."</i>  Caroline lifted
her hands quickly from the keyboard, and she bowed her head in
them, sobbing.

The storm broke and the rain beat in, spattering her
nightdress until she rose and lowered the windows.  She dropped
upon the couch and began fighting over again the battles of other
days, while the ghosts of the slain rose as from a sowing of
dragon's teeth, The shadows of things, always so scorned and
flouted, bore down upon her merciless and triumphant.  It was not
enough; this happy, useful, well-ordered life was not enough.  It
did not satisfy, it was not even real.  No, the other things, the
shadows-they were the realities.  Her father, poor Heinrich, even
her mother, who had been able to sustain her poor romance and
keep her little illusions amid the tasks of a scullion, were
nearer happiness than she.  Her sure foundation was but made
ground, after all, and the people in Klingsor's garden were more
fortunate, however barren the sands from which they conjured
their paradise.

The lodge was still and silent; her fit of weeping over,
Caroline made no sound, and within the room, as without in the
garden, was the blackness of storm.  Only now and then a flash of
lightning showed a woman's slender figure rigid on the couch, her
face buried in her hands.

Toward morning, when the occasional rumbling of thunder was
heard no more and the beat of the raindrops upon the orchard
leaves was steadier, she fell asleep and did not waken
until the first red streaks of dawn shone through the twisted
boughs of the apple trees.  There was a moment between world and
world, when, neither asleep nor awake, she felt her dream grow
thin, melting away from her, felt the warmth under her heart
growing cold.  Something seemed to slip from the clinging hold
of her arms, and she groaned protestingly through her parted lips,
following it a little way with fluttering hands.  Then her eyes
opened wide and she sprang up and sat holding dizzily to the
cushions of the couch, staring down at her bare, cold feet, at
her laboring breast, rising and falling under her open nightdress.

The dream was gone, but the feverish reality of it still
pervaded her and she held it as the vibrating string holds a
tone.  In the last hour the shadows had had their way with
Caroline.  They had shown her the nothingness of time and space,
of system and discipline, of closed doors and broad waters. 
Shuddering, she thought of the Arabian fairy tale in which the
genie brought the princess of China to the sleeping prince of
Damascus and carried her through the air back to her palace at
dawn.  Caroline closed her eyes and dropped her elbows weakly
upon her knees, her shoulders sinking together.  The horror was
that it had not come from without, but from within.  The dream
was no blind chance; it was the expression of something she had
kept so close a prisoner that she had never seen it herself, it
was the wail from the donjon deeps when the watch slept.  Only as
the outcome of such a night of sorcery could the thing have been
loosed to straighten its limbs and measure itself with her; so
heavy were the chains upon it, so many a fathom deep, it was
crushed down into darkness.  The fact that d'Esquerre happened to
be on the other side of the world meant nothing; had he been
here, beside her, it could scarcely have hurt her  self-respect
so much.  As it was, she was without even the  extenuation of an
outer impulse, and she could scarcely have despised herself more
had she come to him here in the night three weeks ago and thrown
herself down upon the stone slab at the door there.

Caroline rose unsteadily and crept guiltily from the lodge
and along the path under the arbor, terrified lest the
servants should be stirring, trembling with the chill air, while
the wet shrubbery, brushing against her, drenched her nightdress
until it clung about her limbs.

At breakfast her husband looked across the table at her with
concern.  "It seems to me that you are looking rather fagged,
Caroline.  It was a beastly night to sleep.  Why don't you go up
to the mountains until this hot weather is over?  By the way, were
you in earnest about letting the lodge stand?"

Caroline laughed quietly.  "No, I find I was not very serious.  I
haven't sentiment enough to forego a summer house.  Will you tell
Baker to come tomorrow to talk it over with me?  If we are to have
a house party, I should like to put him to work on it at once."

Noble gave her a glance, half-humorous, half-vexed.  "Do you
know I am rather disappointed?" he said.  "I had almost hoped
that, just for once, you know, you would be a little bit foolish."

"Not now that I've slept over it," replied Caroline, and
they both rose from the table, laughing.




The Marriage of Phaedra

The sequence of events was such that MacMaster did not make his
pilgrimage to Hugh Treffinger's studio until three years after that
painter's death.  MacMaster was himself a painter, an American of
the Gallicized type, who spent his winters in New York, his summers
in Paris, and no inconsiderable amount of time on the broad waters
between.  He had often contemplated stopping in London on one of
his return trips in the late autumn, but he had always deferred
leaving Paris until the prick of necessity drove him home by the
quickest and shortest route.

Treffinger was a comparatively young man at the time of his
death, and there had seemed no occasion for haste until haste was
of no avail.  Then, possibly, though there had been some
correspondence between them, MacMaster felt certain qualms about
meeting in the flesh a man who in the flesh was so diversely
reported.  His intercourse with Treffinger's work had been so
deep and satisfying, so apart from other appreciations, that he
rather dreaded a critical juncture of any sort.  He had always
felt himself singularly inept in personal relations, and in this
case he had avoided the issue until it was no longer to be feared
or hoped for.  There still remained, however, Treffinger's great
unfinished picture, the <i>Marriage of Phaedra</i>, which had never
left his studio, and of which MacMaster's friends had now and again
brought report that it was the painter's most characteristic
production.

The young man arrived in London in the evening, and the next
morning went out to Kensington to find Treffinger's studio.  It
lay in one of the perplexing bystreets off Holland Road, and the
number he found on a door set in a high garden wall, the top of
which was covered with broken green glass and over which
a budding lilac bush nodded.  Treffinger's plate was still there,
and a card requesting visitors to ring for the attendant.  In
response to MacMaster's ring, the door was opened by a cleanly
built little man, clad in a shooting jacket and trousers that had
been made for an ampler figure.  He had a fresh complexion, eyes
of that common uncertain shade of gray, and was closely shaven
except for the incipient muttonchops on his ruddy cheeks.  He
bore himself in a manner strikingly capable, and there was a sort
of trimness and alertness about him, despite the too-generous
shoulders of his coat.  In one hand he held a bulldog pipe, and
in the other a copy of <i>Sporting Life</i>.  While MacMaster was
explaining the purpose of his call he noticed that the man surveyed
him critically, though not impertinently.  He was admitted into a
little tank of a lodge made of whitewashed stone, the back door
and windows opening upon a garden.  A visitor's book and a pile
of catalogues lay on a deal table, together with a bottle of ink
and some rusty pens.  The wall was ornamented with photographs
and colored prints of racing favorites.

"The studio is h'only open to the public on Saturdays and Sundays,"
explained the man--he referred to himself as "Jymes"--"but of
course we make exceptions in the case of pynters.  Lydy Elling
Treffinger 'erself is on the Continent, but Sir 'Ugh's orders was
that pynters was to 'ave the run of the place."  He selected a key
from his pocket and threw open the door into the studio which, like
the lodge, was built against the wall of the garden.

MacMaster entered a long, narrow room, built of smoothed
planks, painted a light green; cold and damp even on that fine
May morning.  The room was utterly bare of furniture--unless a
stepladder, a model throne, and a rack laden with large leather
portfolios could be accounted such--and was windowless, without
other openings than the door and the skylight, under which hung
the unfinished picture itself.  MacMaster had never seen so many
of Treffinger's paintings together.  He knew the painter had
married a woman with money and had been able to keep such of his
pictures as he wished.  These, with all of <i>182</i> his
replicas and studies, he had left as a sort of common legacy to
the younger men of the school he had originated.

As soon as he was left alone MacMaster sat down on the edge
of the model throne before the unfinished picture.  Here indeed
was what he had come for; it rather paralyzed his receptivity for
the moment, but gradually the thing found its way to him.

At one o'clock he was standing before the collection of studies
done for <i>Boccaccio's Garden</i> when he heard a voice at his
elbow.

"Pardon, sir, but I was just about to lock up and go to
lunch.  Are you lookin' for the figure study of Boccaccio
'imself?" James queried respectfully.  "Lydy Elling Treffinger
give it to Mr. Rossiter to take down to Oxford for some lectures
he's been agiving there."

"Did he never paint out his studies, then?" asked MacMaster
with perplexity.  "Here are two completed ones for this picture. 
Why did he keep them?"

"I don't know as I could say as to that, sir," replied James,
smiling indulgently, "but that was 'is way.  That is to say, 'e
pynted out very frequent, but 'e always made two studies to stand;
one in watercolors and one in oils, before 'e went at the final
picture--to say nothink of all the pose studies 'e made in pencil
before he begun on the composition proper at all.  He was that
particular.  You see, 'e wasn't so keen for the final effect as for
the proper pyntin' of 'is pictures.  'E used to say they ought to
be well made, the same as any other h'article of trade.  I can lay
my 'and on the pose studies for you, sir."  He rummaged in one of
the portfolios and produced half a dozen drawings, "These three,"
he continued, "was discarded; these two was the pose he finally
accepted; this one without alteration, as it were.

"That's in Paris, as I remember," James continued reflectively. 
"It went with the <i>Saint Cecilia</i> into the Baron H---'s
collection.  Could you tell me, sir, 'as 'e it still?  I
don't like to lose account of them, but some 'as changed 'ands
since Sir 'Ugh's death."

"H---'s collection is still intact, I believe," replied MacMaster. 
"You were with Treffinger long?"

"From my boyhood, sir," replied James with gravity.  "I was
a stable boy when 'e took me."

"You were his man, then?"

"That's it, sir.  Nobody else ever done anything around the studio. 
I always mixed 'is colors and 'e taught me to do a share of the
varnishin'; 'e said as 'ow there wasn't a 'ouse in England as could
do it  proper.  You ayn't looked at the <i>Marriage</i> yet, sir?"
he asked abruptly, glancing doubtfully at MacMaster, and indicating
with his thumb the picture under the north light.

"Not very closely.  I prefer to begin with something simpler;
that's rather appalling, at first glance," replied MacMaster.

"Well may you say that, sir," said James warmly.  "That one regular
killed Sir 'Ugh; it regular broke 'im up, and nothink will ever
convince me as 'ow it didn't bring on 'is second stroke."

When MacMaster walked back to High Street to take his bus
his mind was divided between two exultant convictions.  He felt
that he had not only found Treffinger's greatest picture, but
that, in James, he had discovered a kind of cryptic index to the
painter's personality--a clue which, if tactfully followed, might
lead to much.

Several days after his first visit to the studio, MacMaster
wrote to Lady Mary Percy, telling her that he would be in London
for some time and asking her if he might call.  Lady Mary was an
only sister of Lady Ellen Treffinger, the painter's widow, and
MacMaster had known her during one winter he spent at Nice.  He
had known her, indeed, very well, and Lady Mary, who was
astonishingly frank and communicative upon all subjects, had been
no less so upon the matter of her sister's unfortunate marriage.

In her reply to his note Lady Mary named an afternoon when
she would be alone.  She was as good as her word, and when
MacMaster arrived he found the drawing room empty.  Lady Mary
entered shortly after he was announced.  She was a tall woman,
thin and stiffly jointed, and her body stood out under the folds
of her gown with the rigor of cast iron.  This rather metallic
suggestion was further carried out in her heavily knuckled hands,
her stiff gray hair, and her long, bold-featured face,
which was saved from freakishness only by her alert eyes.

"Really," said Lady Mary, taking a seat beside him and
giving him a sort of military inspection through her nose
glasses, "really, I had begun to fear that I had lost you
altogether.  It's four years since I saw you at Nice, isn't it?  I
was in Paris last winter, but I heard nothing from you."

"I was in New York then."

"It occurred to me that you might be.  And why are you in London?"

"Can you ask?" replied MacMaster gallantly.

Lady Mary smiled ironically.  "But for what else, incidentally?"

"Well, incidentally, I came to see Treffinger's studio and
his unfinished picture.  Since I've been here, I've decided to
stay the summer.  I'm even thinking of attempting to do a
biography of him."

"So that is what brought you to London?"

"Not exactly.  I had really no intention of anything so serious
when I came.  It's his last picture, I fancy, that has rather
thrust it upon me.  The notion has settled down on me like a thing
destined."

"You'll not be offended if I question the clemency of such a
destiny," remarked Lady Mary dryly.  "Isn't there rather a
surplus of books on that subject already?"

"Such as they are.  Oh, I've read them all"--here MacMaster
faced Lady Mary triumphantly.  "He has quite escaped your amiable
critics," he added, smiling.

"I know well enough what you think, and I daresay we are not
much on art," said Lady Mary with tolerant good humor.  "We leave
that to peoples who have no physique.  Treffinger made a stir for
a time, but it seems that we are not capable of a sustained
appreciation of such extraordinary methods.  In the end we go
back to the pictures we find agreeable and unperplexing.  He was
regarded as an experiment, I fancy; and now it seems that he was
rather an unsuccessful one.  If you've come to us in a missionary
spirit, we'll tolerate you politely, but we'll laugh in our
sleeve, I warn you."

"That really doesn't daunt me, Lady Mary," declared
MacMaster blandly.  "As I told you, I'm a man with a mission."

Lady Mary laughed her hoarse, baritone laugh.  "Bravo!  And
you've come to me for inspiration for your panegyric?"

MacMaster smiled with some embarrassment.  "Not altogether
for that purpose.  But I want to consult you, Lady Mary, about
the advisability of troubling Lady Ellen Treffinger in the
matter.  It seems scarcely legitimate to go on without asking her
to give some sort of grace to my proceedings, yet I feared the
whole subject might be painful to her.  I shall rely wholly upon
your discretion."

"I think she would prefer to be consulted," replied Lady
Mary judicially.  "I can't understand how she endures to have the
wretched affair continually raked up, but she does.  She seems to
feel a sort of moral responsibility.  Ellen has always been
singularly conscientious about this matter, insofar as her light
goes,--which rather puzzles me, as hers is not exactly a
magnanimous nature.  She is certainly trying to do what she
believes to be the right thing.  I shall write to her, and you
can see her when she returns from Italy."

"I want very much to meet her.  She is, I hope, quite
recovered in every way," queried MacMaster, hesitatingly.

"No, I can't say that she is.  She has remained in much the
same condition she sank to before his death.  He trampled over
pretty much whatever there was in her, I fancy.  Women don't
recover from wounds of that sort--at least, not women of Ellen's
grain.  They go on bleeding inwardly."

"You, at any rate, have not grown more reconciled," MacMaster
ventured.

"Oh I give him his dues.  He was a colorist, I grant you;
but that is a vague and unsatisfactory quality to marry to; Lady
Ellen Treffinger found it so."

"But, my dear Lady Mary," expostulated MacMaster, "and just
repress me if I'm becoming too personal--but it must, in the
first place, have been a marriage of choice on her part as well
as on his."

Lady Mary poised her glasses on her large forefinger and
assumed an attitude suggestive of the clinical lecture room as
she replied.  "Ellen, my dear boy, is an essentially
romantic person.  She is quiet about it, but she runs deep.  I
never knew how deep until I came against her on the issue of that
marriage.  She was always discontented as a girl; she found
things dull and prosaic, and the ardor of his courtship was
agreeable to her.  He met her during her first season in town. 
She is handsome, and there were plenty of other men, but I grant
you your scowling brigand was the most picturesque of the lot. 
In his courtship, as in everything else, he was theatrical to the
point of being ridiculous, but Ellen's sense of humor is not her
strongest quality.  He had the charm of celebrity, the air of a
man who could storm his way through anything to get what he
wanted.  That sort of vehemence is particularly effective with
women like Ellen, who can be warmed only by reflected heat, and
she couldn't at all stand out against it. He convinced her of his
necessity; and that done, all's done."

"I can't help thinking that, even on such a basis, the marriage
should have turned out better," MacMaster remarked reflectively.

"The marriage," Lady Mary continued with a shrug, "was made
on the basis of a mutual misunderstanding.  Ellen, in the nature
of the case, believed that she was doing something quite out of
the ordinary in accepting him, and expected concessions which,
apparently, it never occurred to him to make.  After his marriage
he relapsed into his old habits of incessant work, broken by
violent and often brutal relaxations.  He insulted her friends
and foisted his own upon her--many of them well calculated to
arouse aversion in any well-bred girl.  He had Ghillini
constantly at the house--a homeless vagabond, whose conversation
was impossible.  I don't say, mind you, that he had not
grievances on his side.  He had probably overrated the girl's
possibilities, and he let her see that he was disappointed in
her.  Only a large and generous nature could have borne with him,
and Ellen's is not that.  She could not at all understand that
odious strain of plebeian pride which plumes itself upon not
having risen above its sources.

As MacMaster drove back to his hotel he reflected that Lady
Mary Percy had probably had good cause for dissatisfaction
with her brother-in-law.  Treffinger was, indeed, the last man who
should have married into the Percy family.  The son of a small
tobacconist, he had grown up a sign-painter's apprentice; idle,
lawless, and practically letterless until he had drifted into the
night classes of the Albert League, where Ghillini sometimes
lectured.  From the moment he came under the eye and influence of
that erratic Italian, then a political exile, his life had swerved
sharply from its old channel.  This man had been at once incentive
and guide, friend and master, to his pupil.  He had taken the raw
clay out of the London streets and molded it anew.  Seemingly he
had divined at once where the boy's possibilities lay, and had
thrown aside every canon of orthodox instruction in the training of
him.  Under him Treffinger acquired his superficial, yet facile,
knowledge of the classics; had steeped himself in the monkish Latin
and medieval romances which later gave his work so naive and remote
a quality.  That was the beginning of the wattle fences, the cobble
pave, the brown roof beams, the cunningly wrought fabrics that gave
to his pictures such a richness of decorative effect.

As he had told Lady Mary Percy, MacMaster had found the imperative
inspiration of his purpose in Treffinger's unfinished picture, the
<i>Marriage of Phaedra</i>.  He had always believed that the key to
Treffinger's individuality lay in his singular education; in the
<i>Roman de la Rose</i>, in Boccaccio, and Amadis, those works
which had literally transcribed themselves upon the blank soul of
the London street boy, and through which he had been born into the
world of spiritual things.  Treffinger had been a man who lived
after his imagination; and his mind, his ideals and, as MacMaster
believed, even his personal ethics, had to the last been colored by
the trend of his early training.  There was in him alike the
freshness and spontaneity, the frank brutality and the religious
mysticism, which lay well back of the fifteenth century.  In the
<i>Marriage of Phaedra</i> MacMaster found the ultimate expression
of this spirit, the final word as to Treffinger's point of view.

As in all Treffinger's classical subjects, the conception
was wholly medieval.  This Phaedra, just turning from her husband
and maidens to greet her husband's son, giving him her
first fearsome glance from under her half-lifted veil, was no
daughter of Minos.  The daughter of <i>heathenesse</i> and the
early church she was; doomed to torturing visions and scourgings,
and the wrangling of soul with flesh.  The venerable Theseus
might have been victorious Charlemagne, and Phaedra's maidens
belonged rather in the train of Blanche of Castile than at the
Cretan court.  In the earlier studies Hippolytus had been done
with a more pagan suggestion; but in each successive drawing the
glorious figure bad been deflowered of something of its serene
unconsciousness, until, in the canvas under the skylight, he
appeared a very Christian knight.  This male figure, and the face
of Phaedra, painted with such magical preservation of tone under
the heavy shadow of the veil, were plainly Treffinger's highest
achievements of craftsmanship.  By what labor he had reached the
seemingly inevitable composition of the picture--with its twenty
figures, its plenitude of light and air, its restful distances
seen through white porticoes--countless studies bore witness.

From James's attitude toward the picture MacMaster could
well conjecture what the painter's had been.  This picture was
always uppermost in James's mind; its custodianship formed, in
his eyes, his occupation.  He was manifestly apprehensive when
visitors--not many came nowadays--lingered near it.  "It was the
<i>Marriage</i> as killed 'im," he would often say, "and for the
matter 'o that, it did like to 'av been the death of all of us."

By the end of his second week in London MacMaster had begun the
notes for his study of Hugh Treffinger and his work.  When his
researches led him occasionally to visit the studios of
Treffinger's friends and erstwhile disciples, he found their
Treffinger manner fading as the ring of Treffinger's personality
died out in them.  One by one they were stealing back into the
fold of national British art; the hand that had wound them up was
still.  MacMaster despaired of them and confined himself more and
more exclusively to the studio, to such of Treffinger's letters
as were available--they were for the most part singularly negative
and colorless--and to his interrogation of Treffinger's man.

He could not himself have traced the successive steps
by which he was gradually admitted into James's confidence. 
Certainly most of his adroit strategies to that end failed
humiliatingly, and whatever it was that built up an understanding
between them must have been instinctive and intuitive on both
sides.  When at last James became anecdotal, personal, there was
that in every word he let fall which put breath and blood into
MacMaster's book.  James had so long been steeped in that
penetrating personality that he fairly exuded it.  Many of his
very phrases, mannerisms, and opinions were impressions that he
had taken on like wet plaster in his daily contact with
Treffinger.  Inwardly he was lined with cast-off epitheliums, as
outwardly he was clad in the painter's discarded coats.  If the
painter's letters were formal and perfunctory, if his expressions
to his friends had been extravagant, contradictory, and often
apparently insincere--still, MacMaster felt himself not entirely
without authentic sources.  It was James who possessed
Treffinger's legend; it was with James that he had laid aside his
pose.  Only in his studio, alone, and face to face with his work,
as it seemed, had the man invariably been himself.  James had
known him in the one attitude in which he was entirely honest;
their relation had fallen well within the painter's only
indubitable integrity.  James's report of Treffinger was
distorted by no hallucination of artistic insight, colored by no
interpretation of his own.  He merely held what he had heard and
seen; his mind was a sort of camera obscura.  His very
limitations made him the more literal and minutely accurate.

One morning, when MacMaster was seated before the <i>Marriage
of Phaedra</i>, James entered on his usual round of dusting.

"I've 'eard from Lydy Elling by the post, sir," he remarked,
"an' she's give h'orders to 'ave the 'ouse put in readiness.  I
doubt she'll be 'ere by Thursday or Friday next."

"She spends most of her time abroad?" queried MacMaster; on
the subject of Lady Treffinger James consistently maintained a
very delicate reserve.

"Well, you could 'ardly say she does that, sir.  She finds
the 'ouse a bit dull, I daresay, so durin' the season she stops
mostly with Lydy Mary Percy, at Grosvenor Square.  Lydy
Mary's a h'only sister."  After a few moments he continued,
speaking in jerks governed by the rigor of his dusting: "H'only
this morning I come upon this scarfpin," exhibiting a very
striking instance of that article, "an' I recalled as 'ow Sir
'Ugh give it me when 'e was acourting of Lydy Elling.  Blowed if
I ever see a man go in for a 'oman like 'im!  'E was that gone,
sir.  'E never went in on anythink so 'ard before nor since,
till 'e went in on the <i>Marriage</i> there--though 'e mostly
went in on things pretty keen; 'ad the measles when 'e was
thirty, strong as cholera, an' come close to dyin' of 'em. 
'E wasn't strong for Lydy Elling's set; they was a bit too stiff
for 'im.  A free an' easy gentleman, 'e was; 'e liked 'is dinner
with a few friends an' them jolly, but 'e wasn't much on what you
might call big affairs.  But once 'e went in for Lydy Elling 'e
broke 'imself to new paces; He give away 'is rings an' pins, an'
the tylor's man an' the 'aberdasher's man was at 'is rooms
continual.  'E got 'imself put up for a club in Piccadilly; 'e
starved 'imself thin, an' worrited 'imself white, an' ironed
'imself out, an' drawed 'imself tight as a bow string.  It was a
good job 'e come a winner, or I don't know w'at'd 'a been to
pay."

The next week, in consequence of an invitation from Lady
Ellen Treffinger, MacMaster went one afternoon to take tea with
her.  He was shown into the garden that lay between the residence
and the studio, where the tea table was set under a gnarled pear
tree.  Lady Ellen rose as he approached--he was astonished to
note how tall she was-and greeted him graciously, saying that she
already knew him through her sister.  MacMaster felt a certain
satisfaction in her; in her reassuring poise and repose, in the
charming modulations of her voice and the indolent reserve of her
full, almond eyes.  He was even delighted to find her face so
inscrutable, though it chilled his own warmth and made the open
frankness he had wished to permit himself impossible.  It was a
long face, narrow at the chin, very delicately featured, yet
steeled by an impassive mask of self-control.  It was behind just
such finely cut, close-sealed faces, MacMaster reflected, that
nature sometimes hid astonishing secrets.  But in spite of this
suggestion of hardness he felt that the unerring taste that
Treffinger had always shown in larger matters had not deserted
him when he came to the choosing of a wife, and he admitted that
he could not himself have selected a woman who looked more as
Treffinger's wife should look.

While he was explaining the purpose of his frequent visits
to the studio she heard him with courteous interest.  "I have
read, I think, everything that has been published on Sir Hugh
Treffinger's work, and it seems to me that there is much left to
be said," he concluded.

"I believe they are rather inadequate," she remarked vaguely.  She
hesitated a moment, absently fingering the ribbons of her gown,
then continued, without raising her eyes; "I hope you will not
think me too exacting if I ask to see the proofs of such chapters
of your work as have to do with Sir Hugh's personal life.  I have
always asked that privilege."

MacMaster hastily assured her as to this, adding, "I mean to touch
on only such facts in his personal life as have to do directly with
his work--such as his monkish education under Ghillini."

"I see your meaning, I think," said Lady Ellen, looking at
him with wide, uncomprehending eyes.

When MacMaster stopped at the studio on leaving the house he
stood for some time before Treffinger's one portrait of himself,
that brigand of a picture, with its full throat and square head;
the short upper lip blackened by the close-clipped mustache, the
wiry hair tossed down over the forehead, the strong white teeth
set hard on a short pipestem.  He could well understand what
manifold tortures the mere grain of the man's strong red and
brown flesh might have inflicted upon a woman like Lady Ellen. 
He could conjecture, too, Treffinger's impotent revolt against
that very repose which had so dazzled him when it first defied
his daring; and how once possessed of it, his first instinct had
been to crush it, since he could not melt it.

Toward the close of the season Lady Ellen Treffinger left
town.  MacMaster's work was progressing rapidly, and he and James
wore away the days in their peculiar relation, which by this time
had much of friendliness.  Excepting for the regular visits of a
Jewish picture dealer, there were few intrusions upon their
solitude.  Occasionally a party of Americans rang at the
little door in the garden wall, but usually they departed speedily
for the Moorish hall and tinkling fountain of the great show
studio of London, not far away.

This Jew, an Austrian by birth, who had a large business in
Melbourne, Australia, was a man of considerable discrimination,
and at once selected the <i>Marriage of Phaedra</i> as the object
of his especial interest.  When, upon his first visit, Lichtenstein
had declared the picture one of the things done for time, MacMaster
had rather warmed toward him and had talked to him very freely. 
Later, however, the man's repulsive personality and innate
vulgarity so wore upon him that, the more genuine the Jew's
appreciation, the more he resented it and the more base he somehow
felt it to be.  It annoyed him to see Lichtenstein walking up and
down before the picture, shaking his head and blinking his watery
eyes over his nose glasses, ejaculating: "Dot is a chem, a chem! 
It is wordt to gome den dousant miles for such a bainting, eh?  To
make Eurobe abbreciate such a work of ardt it is necessary to take
it away while she is napping.  She has never abbreciated until she
has lost, but," knowingly, "she will buy back."

James had, from the first, felt such a distrust of the man
that he would never leave him alone in the studio for a moment. 
When Lichtenstein insisted upon having Lady Ellen Treffinger's
address James rose to the point of insolence.  "It ayn't no use
to give it, noway.  Lydy Treffinger never has nothink to do with
dealers."  MacMaster quietly repented his rash confidences,
fearing that he might indirectly cause Lady Ellen annoyance from
this merciless speculator, and he recalled with chagrin that
Lichtenstein had extorted from him, little by little, pretty much
the entire plan of his book, and especially the place in it which
the <i>Marriage of Phaedra</i> was to occupy.

By this time the first chapters of MacMaster's book were in
the hands of his publisher, and his visits to the studio were
necessarily less frequent.  The greater part of his time was now
employed with the engravers who were to reproduce such of
Treffinger's pictures as he intended to use as illustrations.

He returned to his hotel late one evening after a long
and vexing day at the engravers to find James in his room, seated
on his steamer trunk by the window, with the outline of a great
square draped in sheets resting against his knee.

"Why, James, what's up?" he cried in astonishment, glancing
inquiringly at the sheeted object.

"Ayn't you seen the pypers, sir?" jerked out the man.

"No, now I think of it, I haven't even looked at a paper.  I've
been at the engravers' plant all day.  I haven't seen anything."

James drew a copy of the <i>Times</i> from his pocket and handed it
to him, pointing with a tragic finger to a paragraph in the
social column.  It was merely the announcement of Lady Ellen
Treffinger's engagement to Captain Alexander Gresham.

"Well, what of it, my man?  That surely is her privilege."

James took the paper, turned to another page, and silently pointed
to a paragraph in the art notes which stated that Lady Treffinger
had presented to the X--gallery the entire collection of paintings
and sketches now in her late husband's studio, with the exception
of his unfinished picture, the <i>Marriage Of Phaedra</i>, which
she had sold for a large sum to an Australian dealer who had come
to London purposely to secure some of Treffinger's paintings.

MacMaster pursed up his lips and sat down, his overcoat
still on.  "Well, James, this is something of a--something of a
jolt, eh?  It never occurred to me she'd really do it."

"Lord, you don't know 'er, sir," said James bitterly, still
staring at the floor in an attitude of abandoned dejection.

MacMaster started up in a flash of enlightenment, "What on
earth have you got there, James?  It's not-surely it's not--"

Yes, it is, sir," broke in the man excitedly.  "It's the
<i>Marriage</i> itself.  It ayn't agoing to H'Australia, no'ow!"

"But man, what are you going to do with it?  It's
Lichtenstein's property now, as it seems."

It ayn't, sir, that it ayn't.  No, by Gawd, it ayn't!"
shouted James, breaking into a choking fury.  He controlled
himself with an effort and added supplicatingly: "Oh, sir, you
ayn't agoing to see it go to H'Australia, w'ere they send
convic's?"  He unpinned and flung aside the sheets as though to
let <i>Phaedra</i> plead for herself.

MacMaster sat down again and looked sadly at the doomed
masterpiece.  The notion of James having carried it across London
that night rather appealed to his fancy.  There was certainly a
flavor about such a highhanded proceeding.  "However did you get
it here?" he queried.

"I got a four-wheeler and come over direct, sir.  Good job I
'appened to 'ave the chaynge about me."

"You came up High Street, up Piccadilly, through the
Haymarket and Trafalgar Square, and into the Strand?" queried
MacMaster with a relish.

"Yes, sir.  Of course, sir, " assented James with surprise.

MacMaster laughed delightedly.  "It was a beautiful idea,
James, but I'm afraid we can't carry it any further."

"I was thinkin' as 'ow it would be a rare chance to get you to take
the <i>Marriage</i> over to Paris for a year or two, sir, until the
thing blows over?" suggested James blandly.

"I'm afraid that's out of the question, James.  I haven't
the right stuff in me for a pirate, or even a vulgar smuggler,
I'm afraid."  MacMaster found it surprisingly difficult to say
this, and he busied himself with the lamp as he said it. He heard
James's hand fall heavily on the trunk top, and he discovered
that he very much disliked sinking in the man's estimation.

"Well, sir," remarked James in a more formal tone, after a
protracted silence; "then there's nothink for it but as 'ow I'll
'ave to make way with it myself."

"And how about your character, James?  The evidence would be
heavy against you, and even if Lady Treffinger didn't prosecute
you'd be done for."

"Blow my character!--your pardon, sir," cried James, starting to
his feet.  "W'at do I want of a character?  I'll chuck the 'ole
thing, and damned lively, too.  The shop's to be sold out, an' my
place is gone any'ow.  I'm agoing to enlist, or try the gold
fields.  I've lived too long with h'artists; I'd never give
satisfaction in livery now.  You know 'ow it is yourself, sir;
there ayn't no life like it, no'ow."

For a moment MacMaster was almost equal to abetting James in
his theft.  He reflected that pictures had been whitewashed, or
hidden in the crypts of churches, or under the floors of palaces
from meaner motives, and to save them from a fate less
ignominious.  But presently, with a sigh, he shook his head.

"No, James, it won't do at all.  It has been tried over and
over again, ever since the world has been agoing and pictures
amaking.  It was tried in Florence and in Venice, but the
pictures were always carried away in the end.  You see, the
difficulty is that although Treffinger told you what was not to
be done with the picture, he did not say definitely what was to
be done with it.  Do you think Lady Treffinger really understands
that he did not want it to be sold?"

"Well, sir, it was like this, sir," said James, resuming his seat
on the trunk and again resting the picture against his knee.  "My
memory is as clear as glass about it.  After Sir 'Ugh got up from
'is first stroke, 'e took a fresh start at the <i>Marriage</i>. 
Before that 'e 'ad been working at it only at night for a while
back; the <i>Legend</i> was the big picture then, an' was under the
north light w'ere 'e worked of a morning.  But one day 'e bid me
take the <i>Legend</i> down an' put the <i>Marriage</i> in its
place, an' 'e says, dashin' on 'is jacket, 'Jymes, this is a start
for the finish, this time.'

"From that on 'e worked at the night picture in the mornin'--a
thing contrary to 'is custom.  The <i>Marriage</i> went wrong, and
wrong--an' Sir 'Ugh agettin' seedier an' seedier every day.  'E
tried models an' models, an' smudged an' pynted out on account of
'er face goin' wrong in the shadow.  Sometimes 'e layed it on the
colors, an' swore at me an' things in general.  He got that
discouraged about 'imself that on 'is low days 'e used to say to
me: 'Jymes, remember one thing; if anythink 'appens to me, the
<i>Marriage</i> is not to go out of 'ere unfinished.  It's worth
the lot of 'em, my boy, an' it's not agoing to go shabby for lack
of pains.' 'E said things to that effect repeated.

"He was workin' at the picture the last day, before 'e went
to 'is club.  'E kept the carriage waitin' near an hour while 'e
put on a stroke an' then drawed back for to look at it, an' then
put on another, careful like.  After 'e 'ad 'is gloves on,
'e come back an' took away the brushes I was startin' to clean, an'
put in another touch or two.  'It's acomin', Jymes,' 'e says, 'by
gad if it ayn't.' An' with that 'e goes out.  It was cruel sudden,
w'at come after.

"That night I was lookin' to 'is clothes at the 'ouse when
they brought 'im 'ome.  He was conscious, but w'en I ran
downstairs for to 'elp lift 'im up, I knowed 'e was a finished
man.  After we got 'im into bed 'e kept lookin' restless at me
and then at Lydy Elling and ajerkin' of 'is 'and.  Finally 'e
quite raised it an' shot 'is thumb out toward the wall.  'He
wants water; ring, Jymes,' says Lydy Elling, placid.  But I
knowed 'e was pointin' to the shop.

"'Lydy Treffinger,' says I, bold, 'he's pointin' to the studio.  He
means about the <i>Marriage</i>; 'e told me today as 'ow 'e never
wanted it sold unfinished.  Is that it, Sir 'Ugh?'

"He smiled an' nodded slight an' closed 'is eyes.  'Thank
you, Jymes,' says Lydy Elling, placid.  Then 'e opened 'is eyes
an' looked long and 'ard at Lydy Elling.

"'Of course I'll try to do as you'd wish about the picture,
'Ugh, if that's w'at's troublin' you,' she says quiet.  With that
'e closed 'is eyes and 'e never opened 'em.  He died unconscious
at four that mornin'.

"You see, sir, Lydy Elling was always cruel 'ard on the
<i>Marriage</i>.  From the first it went wrong, an' Sir 'Ugh was
out of temper pretty constant.  She came into the studio one day
and looked at the picture an 'asked 'im why 'e didn't throw it up
an' quit aworriting 'imself.  He answered sharp, an' with that she
said as 'ow she didn't see w'at there was to make such a row
about, no'ow.  She spoke 'er mind about that picture, free; an'
Sir 'Ugh swore 'ot an' let a 'andful of brushes fly at 'is study,
an' Lydy Elling picked up 'er skirts careful an' chill, an'
drifted out of the studio with 'er eyes calm and 'er chin 'igh. 
If there was one thing Lydy Elling 'ad no comprehension of, it
was the usefulness of swearin'.  So the <i>Marriage</i> was a sore
thing between 'em.  She is uncommon calm, but uncommon bitter, is
Lydy Elling.  She's never come anear the studio since that day she
went out 'oldin' up of 'er skirts.  W'en 'er friends goes over she
excuses 'erself along o' the strain.  Strain--Gawd!"  James ground
his wrath short in his teeth.

"I'll tell you what I'll do, James, and it's our only hope.  I'll
see Lady Ellen tomorrow.  The <i>Times</i> says she returned today.
You take the picture back to its place, and I'll do what I can
for it.  If anything is done to save it, it must be done through
Lady Ellen Treffinger herself, that much is clear.  I can't think
that she fully understands the situation.  If she did, you know,
she really couldn't have any motive--" He stopped suddenly. 
Somehow, in the dusky lamplight, her small, close-sealed face
came ominously back to him.  He rubbed his forehead and knitted
his brows thoughtfully.  After a moment he shook his head and
went on: "I am positive that nothing can be gained by highhanded
methods, James.  Captain Gresham is one of the most popular men
in London, and his friends would tear up Treffinger's bones if he
were annoyed by any scandal of our making--and this scheme you
propose would inevitably result in scandal.  Lady Ellen has, of
course, every legal right to sell the picture.  Treffinger made
considerable inroads upon her estate, and, as she is about to
marry a man without income, she doubtless feels that she has a
right to replenish her patrimony."

He found James amenable, though doggedly skeptical.  He went
down into the street, called a carriage, and saw James and his
burden into it.  Standing in the doorway, he watched the carriage
roll away through the drizzling mist, weave in and out among the
wet, black vehicles and darting cab lights, until it was
swallowed up in the glare and confusion of the Strand.  "It is
rather a fine touch of irony," he reflected, "that he, who is so
out of it, should be the one to really care.  Poor Treffinger,"
he murmured as, with a rather spiritless smile, he turned back
into his hotel.  "Poor Treffinger; <i>sic transit gloria</i>."

The next afternoon MacMaster kept his promise.  When he
arrived at Lady Mary Percy's house he saw preparations for a
function of some sort, but he went resolutely up the steps,
telling the footman that his business was urgent.  Lady Ellen
came down alone, excusing her sister.  She was dressed for
receiving, and MacMaster had never seen one so beautiful. 
The color in her cheeks sent a softening glow over her small,
delicately cut features.

MacMaster apologized for his intrusion and came unflinchingly
to the object of his call.  He had come, he said, not only to offer
her his warmest congratulations, but to express his regret that a
great work of art was to leave England.

Lady Treffinger looked at him in wide-eyed astonishment. 
Surely, she said, she had been careful to select the best of the
pictures for the X--- gallery, in accordance with Sir Hugh
Treffinger's wishes.

"And did he--pardon me, Lady Treffinger, but in mercy set my
mind at rest--did he or did he not express any definite wish
concerning this one picture, which to me seems worth all the
others, unfinished as it is?"

Lady Treffinger paled perceptibly, but it was not the pallor
of confusion.  When she spoke there was a sharp tremor in her
smooth voice, the edge of a resentment that tore her like pain. 
"I think his man has some such impression, but I believe it to be
utterly unfounded.  I cannot find that he ever expressed any wish
concerning the disposition of the picture to any of his friends. 
Unfortunately, Sir Hugh was not always discreet in his remarks to
his servants."

"Captain Gresham, Lady Ellingham, and Miss Ellingham,"
announced a servant, appearing at the door.

There was a murmur in the hall, and MacMaster greeted the
smiling Captain and his aunt as he bowed himself out.

To all intents and purposes the <i>Marriage of Phaedra</i> was
already entombed in a vague continent in the Pacific, somewhere
on the other side of the world.




A Wagner Matinee

I received one morning a letter, written in pale ink on
glassy, blue-lined notepaper, and bearing the postmark of a
little Nebraska village.  This communication, worn and rubbed,
looking as though it had been carried for some days in a coat
pocket that was none too clean, was from my Uncle Howard and
informed me that his wife had been left a small legacy by a
bachelor relative who had recently died, and that it would be
necessary for her to go to Boston to attend to the settling of
the estate.  He requested me to meet her at the station and
render her whatever services might be necessary.  On examining
the date indicated as that of her arrival I found it no later
than tomorrow.  He had characteristically delayed writing until,
had I been away from home for a day, I must have missed the good
woman altogether.

The name of my Aunt Georgiana called up not alone her own
figure, at once pathetic and grotesque, but opened before my feet
a gulf of recollection so wide and deep that, as the letter
dropped from my hand, I felt suddenly a stranger to all the
present conditions of my existence, wholly ill at ease and out of
place amid the familiar surroundings of my study.  I became, in
short, the gangling farm boy my aunt had known, scourged with
chilblains and bashfulness, my hands cracked and sore from the
corn husking.  I felt the knuckles of my thumb tentatively, as
though they were raw again.  I sat again before her parlor organ,
fumbling the scales with my stiff, red hands, while she, beside
me, made canvas mittens for the huskers.

The next morning, after preparing my landlady somewhat, I
set out for the station.  When the train arrived I had some
difficulty in finding my aunt.  She was the last of
the passengers to alight, and it was not until I got her into the
carriage that she seemed really to recognize me.  She had come
all the way in a day coach; her linen duster had become black
with soot, and her black bonnet gray with dust, during the
journey.  When we arrived at my boardinghouse the landlady put
her to bed at once and I did not see her again until the next
morning.

Whatever shock Mrs. Springer experienced at my aunt's
appearance she considerately concealed.  As for myself, I saw my
aunt's misshapen figure with that feeling of awe and respect with
which we behold explorers who have left their ears and fingers
north of Franz Josef Land, or their health somewhere along the
Upper Congo.  My Aunt Georgiana had been a music teacher at the
Boston Conservatory, somewhere back in the latter sixties.  One
summer, while visiting in the little village among the Green
Mountains where her ancestors had dwelt for generations, she had
kindled the callow fancy of the most idle and shiftless of all
the village lads, and had conceived for this Howard Carpenter one
of those extravagant passions which a handsome country boy of
twenty-one sometimes inspires in an angular, spectacled woman of
thirty.  When she returned to her duties in Boston, Howard
followed her, and the upshot of this inexplicable infatuation was
that she eloped with him, eluding the reproaches of her family
and the criticisms of her friends by going with him to the
Nebraska frontier.  Carpenter, who, of course, had no money, had
taken a homestead in Red Willow County, fifty miles from the
railroad.  There they had measured off their quarter section
themselves by driving across the prairie in a wagon, to the wheel
of which they had tied a red cotton handkerchief, and counting
off its revolutions.  They built a dugout in the red hillside,
one of those cave dwellings whose inmates so often reverted to
primitive conditions.  Their water they got from the lagoons
where the buffalo drank, and their slender stock of provisions
was always at the mercy of bands of roving Indians.  For thirty
years my aunt had not been further than fifty miles from the
homestead.

But Mrs. Springer knew nothing of all this, and must have
been considerably shocked at what was left of my kinswoman. 
Beneath the soiled linen duster which, on her arrival, was the most
conspicuous feature of her costume, she wore a black stuff dress,
whose ornamentation showed that she had surrendered herself
unquestioningly into the hands of a country dressmaker.  My poor
aunt's figure, however, would have presented astonishing
difficulties to any dressmaker.  Originally stooped, her shoulders
were now almost bent together over her sunken chest.  She wore no
stays, and her gown, which trailed unevenly behind, rose in a sort
of peak over her abdomen.  She wore ill-fitting false teeth, and
her skin was as yellow as a Mongolian's from constant exposure to
a pitiless wind and to the alkaline water which hardens the most
transparent cuticle into a sort of flexible leather.

I owed to this woman most of the good that ever came my way
in my boyhood, and had a reverential affection for her.  During
the years when I was riding herd for my uncle, my aunt, after
cooking the three meals--the first of which was ready at six
o'clock in the morning-and putting the six children to bed, would
often stand until midnight at her ironing board, with me at the
kitchen table beside her, hearing me recite Latin declensions and
conjugations, gently shaking me when my drowsy head sank down
over a page of irregular verbs.  It was to her, at her ironing or
mending, that I read my first Shakespeare', and her old textbook
on mythology was the first that ever came into my empty hands. 
She taught me my scales and exercises, too--on the little parlor
organ, which her husband had bought her after fifteen years,
during which she had not so much as seen any instrument, but an
accordion that belonged to one of the Norwegian farmhands.  She
would sit beside me by the hour, darning and counting while I
struggled with the "Joyous Farmer," but she seldom talked to me
about music, and I understood why.  She was a pious woman; she
had the consolations of religion and, to her at least, her
martyrdom was not wholly sordid.  Once when I had been doggedly
beating out some easy passages from an old score of
<i>Euryanthe</i> I had found among her music books, she came up to
me and, putting her hands over my eyes, gently drew my head back
upon her shoulder, saying tremulously, "Don't love it so well,
Clark, or it may be taken from you.  Oh, dear boy, pray that
whatever your sacrifice may be, it be not that."

When my aunt appeared on the morning after her arrival she
was still in a semi-somnambulant state.  She seemed not to realize
that she was in the city where she had spent her youth, the place
longed for hungrily half a lifetime.  She had been so wretchedly
train-sick throughout the journey that she bad no recollection of
anything but her discomfort, and, to all intents and purposes,
there were but a few hours of nightmare between the farm in Red
Willow County and my study on Newbury Street.  I had planned a
little pleasure for her that afternoon, to repay her for some of
the glorious moments she had given me when we used to milk
together in the straw-thatched cowshed and she, because I was
more than usually tired, or because her husband had spoken
sharply to me, would tell me of the splendid performance of the
<i>Huguenots</i> she had seen in Paris, in her youth.  At two
o'clock the Symphony Orchestra was to give a Wagner program, and I
intended to take my aunt; though, as I conversed with her I grew
doubtful about her enjoyment of it.  Indeed, for her own sake, I
could only wish her taste for such things quite dead, and the
long struggle mercifully ended at last.  I suggested our visiting
the Conservatory and the Common before lunch, but she seemed
altogether too timid to wish to venture out.  She questioned me
absently about various changes in the city, but she was chiefly
concerned that she had forgotten to leave instructions about
feeding half-skimmed milk to a certain weakling calf, "old
Maggie's calf, you know, Clark," she explained, evidently having
forgotten how long I had been away.  She was further troubled
because she had neglected to tell her daughter about the freshly
opened kit of mackerel in the cellar, which would spoil if it
were not used directly.

I asked her whether she had ever heard any of the Wagnerian
operas and found that she had not, though she was perfectly
familiar with their respective situations, and had once possessed
the piano score of <i>The Flying Dutchman</i>.  I began to think it
would have been best to get her back to Red Willow County without
waking her, and regretted having suggested the concert.

From the time we entered the concert hall, however, she was
a trifle less passive and inert, and for the first time seemed to
perceive her surroundings.  I had felt some trepidation lest she
might become aware of the absurdities of her attire, or might
experience some painful embarrassment at stepping suddenly into
the world to which she had been dead for a quarter of a century. 
But, again, I found how superficially I had judged her.  She sat
looking about her with eyes as impersonal, almost as stony, as
those with which the granite Rameses in a museum watches the
froth and fret that ebbs and flows about his pedestal-separated
from it by the lonely stretch of centuries.  I have seen this
same aloofness in old miners who drift into the Brown Hotel at
Denver, their pockets full of bullion, their linen soiled, their
haggard faces unshaven; standing in the thronged corridors as
solitary as though they were still in a frozen camp on the Yukon,
conscious that certain experiences have isolated them from their
fellows by a gulf no haberdasher could bridge.

We sat at the extreme left of the first balcony, facing the
arc of our own and the balcony above us, veritable hanging
gardens, brilliant as tulip beds.  The matinee audience was made
up chiefly of women.  One lost the contour of faces and figures--
indeed, any effect of line whatever-and there was only the color
of bodices past counting, the shimmer of fabrics soft and firm,
silky and sheer: red, mauve, pink, blue, lilac, purple, ecru,
rose, yellow, cream, and white, all the colors that an
impressionist finds in a sunlit landscape, with here and there
the dead shadow of a frock coat.  My Aunt Georgiana regarded them
as though they had been so many daubs of tube-paint on a palette.

When the musicians came out and took their places, she gave
a little stir of anticipation and looked with quickening interest
down over the rail at that invariable grouping, perhaps the first
wholly familiar thing that had greeted her eye since she had left
old Maggie and her weakling calf.  I could feel how all those
details sank into her soul, for I had not forgotten how they had
sunk into mine when.  I came fresh from plowing forever and
forever between green aisles of corn, where, as in a treadmill,
one might walk from daybreak to dusk without perceiving a shadow
of change.  The clean profiles of the musicians, the gloss of
their linen, the dull black of their coats, the beloved shapes of
the instruments, the patches of yellow light thrown by the green-
shaded lamps on the smooth, varnished bellies of the cellos and
the bass viols in the rear, the restless, wind-tossed forest of
fiddle necks and bows-I recalled how, in the first orchestra I
had ever heard, those long bow strokes seemed to draw the heart
out of me, as a conjurer's stick reels out yards of paper ribbon
from a hat.

The first number was the <i>Tannhauser</i> overture.  When the
horns drew out the first strain of the Pilgrim's chorus my Aunt
Georgiana clutched my coat sleeve.  Then it was I first realized
that for her this broke a silence of thirty years; the
inconceivable silence of the plains.  With the battle between the
two motives, with the frenzy of the Venusberg theme and its
ripping of strings, there came to me an overwhelming sense of the
waste and wear we are so powerless to combat; and I saw again the
tall, naked house on the prairie, black and grim as a wooden
fortress; the black pond where I had learned to swim, its margin
pitted with sun-dried cattle tracks; the rain-gullied clay banks
about the naked house, the four dwarf ash seedlings where the
dishcloths were always hung to dry before the kitchen door.  The
world there was the flat world of the ancients; to the east, a
cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west, a corral that
reached to sunset; between, the conquests of peace, dearer bought
than those of war.

The overture closed; my aunt released my coat sleeve, but
she said nothing.  She sat staring at the orchestra through a
dullness of thirty years, through the films made little by little
by each of the three hundred and sixty-five days in every one of
them.  What, I wondered, did she get from it?  She had been a good
pianist in her day I knew, and her musical education had been
broader than that of most music teachers of a quarter of a
century ago.  She had often told me of Mozart's operas and
Meyerbeer's, and I could remember hearing her sing, years ago,
certain melodies of Verdi's.  When I had fallen ill with a fever
in her house she used to sit by my cot in the evening--when the
cool, night wind blew in through the faded mosquito netting
tacked over the window, and I lay watching a certain bright star
that burned red above the cornfield--and sing "Home to our
mountains, O, let us return!" in a way fit to break the heart of
a Vermont boy near dead of homesickness already.

I watched her closely through the prelude to <i>Tristan and
Isolde</i>, trying vainly to conjecture what that seething turmoil
of strings and winds might mean to her, but she sat mutely staring
at the violin bows that drove obliquely downward, like the
pelting streaks of rain in a summer shower.  Had this music any
message for her?  Had she enough left to at all comprehend this
power which had kindled the world since she had left it?  I was
in a fever of curiosity, but Aunt Georgiana sat silent upon her
peak in Darien.  She preserved this utter immobility throughout
the number from <i>The Flying Dutchman</i>, though her fingers
worked mechanically upon her black dress, as though, of themselves,
they were recalling the piano score they had once played.  Poor old
hands!  They had been stretched and twisted into mere tentacles to
hold and lift and knead with; the palms unduly swollen, the
fingers bent and knotted--on one of them a thin, worn band that
had once been a wedding ring.  As I pressed and gently quieted
one of those groping hands I remembered with quivering eyelids
their services for me in other days.

Soon after the tenor began the "Prize Song," I heard a quick
drawn breath and turned to my aunt.  Her eyes were closed, but
the tears were glistening on her cheeks, and I think, in a moment
more, they were in my eyes as well.  It never really died, then--
the soul that can suffer so excruciatingly and so interminably;
it withers to the outward eye only; like that strange moss which
can lie on a dusty shelf half a century and yet, if placed in
water, grows green again.  She wept so throughout the development
and elaboration of the melody.

During the intermission before the second half of the concert, I
questioned my aunt and found that the "Prize Song" was not new to
her.  Some years before there had drifted to the farm in Red Willow
County a young German, a tramp cowpuncher, who had sung the chorus
at Bayreuth, when he was a boy, along with the other peasant boys
and girls.  Of a Sunday morning he used to sit on his
gingham-sheeted bed in the hands' bedroom which opened off the
kitchen, cleaning the leather of his boots and saddle, singing the
"Prize Song," while my aunt went about her work in the kitchen. 
She had hovered about him until she had prevailed upon him to join
the country church, though his sole fitness for this step, insofar
as I could gather, lay in his boyish face and his possession of
this divine melody.  Shortly afterward he had gone to town on the
Fourth of July, been drunk for several days, lost his money at a
faro table, ridden a saddled Texan steer on a bet, and disappeared
with a fractured collarbone.  All this my aunt told me huskily,
wanderingly, as though she were talking in the weak lapses of
illness.

"Well, we have come to better things than the old <i>Trovatore</i>
at any rate, Aunt Georgie?" I queried, with a well-meant effort
at jocularity.

Her lip quivered and she hastily put her handkerchief up to
her mouth.  From behind it she murmured, "And you have been
hearing this ever since you left me, Clark?"  Her question was the
gentlest and saddest of reproaches.

The second half of the program consisted of four numbers from the
<i>Ring</i>, and closed with Siegfried's funeral march.  My
aunt wept quietly, but almost continuously, as a shallow vessel
overflows in a rainstorm.  From time to time her dim eyes looked
up at the lights which studded the ceiling, burning softly under
their dull glass globes; doubtless they were stars in truth to
her.  I was still perplexed as to what measure of musical
comprehension was left to her, she who had heard nothing but the
singing of gospel hymns at Methodist services in the square frame
schoolhouse on Section Thirteen for so many years.  I was wholly
unable to gauge how much of it had been dissolved in soapsuds, or
worked into bread, or milked into the bottom of a pail.

The deluge of sound poured on and on; I never knew what she
found in the shining current of it; I never knew how far it bore
her, or past what happy islands.  From the trembling of her face
I could well believe that before the last numbers she had been
carried out where the myriad graves are, into the gray,
nameless burying grounds of the sea; or into some world of death
vaster yet, where, from the beginning of the world, hope has lain
down with hope and dream with dream and, renouncing, slept.

The concert was over; the people filed out of the hall
chattering and laughing, glad to relax and find the living level
again, but my kinswoman made no effort to rise.  The harpist
slipped its green felt cover over his instrument; the flute
players shook the water from their mouthpieces; the men of the
orchestra went out one by one, leaving the stage to the chairs
and music stands, empty as a winter cornfield.

I spoke to my aunt.  She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly. 
"I don't want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!"

I understood.  For her, just outside the door of the concert
hall, lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the
tall, unpainted house, with weather-curled boards; naked as a
tower, the crook-backed ash seedlings where the dishcloths hung
to dry; the gaunt, molting turkeys picking up refuse about the
kitchen door.




Paul's Case

<i>A Study in Temperament</i>

It was Paul's afternoon to appear before the faculty of the
Pittsburgh High School to account for his various misdemeanors. 
He had been suspended a week ago, and his father had called at
the Principal's office and confessed his perplexity about his
son.  Paul entered the faculty room suave and smiling.  His
clothes were a trifle outgrown, and the tan velvet on the collar
of his open overcoat was frayed and worn; but for all that there
was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opal pin in
his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in his
buttonhole.  This latter adornment the faculty somehow felt was
not properly significant of the contrite spirit befitting a boy
under the ban of suspension.

Paul was tall for his age and very thin, with high, cramped
shoulders and a narrow chest.  His eyes were remarkable for a
certain hysterical brilliancy, and he continually used them in a
conscious, theatrical sort of way, peculiarly offensive in a boy. 
The pupils were abnormally large, as though he were addicted to
belladonna, but there was a glassy glitter about them which that
drug does not produce.

When questioned by the Principal as to why he was there Paul
stated, politely enough, that he wanted to come back to school. 
This was a lie, but Paul was quite accustomed to lying; found it,
indeed, indispensable for overcoming friction.  His teachers were
asked to state their respective charges against him, which they
did with such a rancor and aggrievedness as evinced that this was
not a usual case, Disorder and impertinence were among the
offenses named, yet each of his instructors felt that it was
scarcely possible to put into words the real cause of the trouble,
which lay in a sort of hysterically defiant manner of the boy's; in
the contempt which they all knew he felt for them, and which he
seemingly made not the least effort to conceal.  Once, when he
had been making a synopsis of a paragraph at the blackboard, his
English teacher had stepped to his side and attempted to guide
his hand.  Paul had started back with a shudder and thrust his
hands violently behind him.  The astonished woman could scarcely
have been more hurt and embarrassed had he struck at her.  The
insult was so involuntary and definitely personal as to be
unforgettable. in one way and another he had made all his
teachers, men and women alike, conscious of the same feeling of
physical aversion.  In one class he habitually sat with his hand
shading his eyes; in another he always looked out of the window
during the recitation; in another he made a running commentary on
the lecture, with humorous intention.

His teachers felt this afternoon that his whole attitude was
symbolized by his shrug and his flippantly red carnation flower,
and they fell upon him without mercy, his English teacher leading
the pack.  He stood through it smiling, his pale lips parted over
his white teeth. (His lips were continually twitching, and be had
a habit of raising his eyebrows that was contemptuous and
irritating to the last degree.) Older boys than Paul had broken
down and shed tears under that baptism of fire, but his set smile
did not once desert him, and his only sign of discomfort was the
nervous trembling of the fingers that toyed with the buttons of
his overcoat, and an occasional jerking of the other hand that
held his hat.  Paul was always smiling, always glancing about
him, seeming to feel that people might be watching him and trying
to detect something.  This conscious expression, since it was as
far as possible from boyish mirthfulness, was usually attributed
to insolence or "smartness."

As the inquisition proceeded one of his instructors repeated
an impertinent remark of the boy's, and the Principal asked him
whether he thought that a courteous speech to have made a
woman.  Paul shrugged his shoulders slightly and his eyebrows
twitched.

"I don't know," he replied.  "I didn't mean to be polite or
impolite, either.  I guess it's a sort of way I have of saying
things regardless."

The Principal, who was a sympathetic man, asked him whether
he didn't think that a way it would be well to get rid of.  Paul
grinned and said he guessed so.  When he was told that he could
go he bowed gracefully and went out.  His bow was but a
repetition of the scandalous red carnation.

His teachers were in despair, and his drawing master voiced
the feeling of them all when he declared there was something
about the boy which none of them understood.  He added: "I don't
really believe that smile of his comes altogether from insolence;
there's something sort of haunted about it.  The boy is not
strong, for one thing.  I happen to know that he was born in
Colorado, only a few months before his mother died out there of a
long illness.  There is something wrong about the fellow."

The drawing master had come to realize that, in looking at
Paul, one saw only his white teeth and the forced animation of
his eyes.  One warm afternoon the boy had gone to sleep at his
drawing board, and his master had noted with amazement what a
white, blue-veined face it was; drawn and wrinkled like an old
man's about the eyes, the lips twitching even in his sleep, and
stiff with a nervous tension that drew them back from his teeth.

His teachers left the building dissatisfied and unhappy;
humiliated to have felt so vindictive toward a mere boy, to have
uttered this feeling in cutting terms, and to have set each other
on, as it were, in the gruesome game of intemperate reproach. 
Some of them remembered having seen a miserable street cat set at
bay by a ring of tormentors.

As for Paul, he ran down the hill whistling the "Soldiers' Chorus"
from <i>Faust</i>, looking wildly behind him now and then to see
whether some of his teachers were not there to writhe under his
lightheartedness.  As it was now late in the afternoon and Paul
was on duty that evening as usher at Carnegie Hall, he decided
that he would not go home to supper.  When he reached the
concert hall the doors were not yet open and, as it was chilly
outside, he decided to go up into the picture gallery--always
deserted at this hour--where there were some of Raffelli's gay
studies of Paris streets and an airy blue Venetian scene or two
that always exhilarated him.  He was delighted to find no one in
the gallery but the old guard, who sat in one corner, a newspaper
on his knee, a black patch over one eye and the other closed.
Paul possessed himself of the peace and walked confidently up and
down, whistling under his breath.  After a while he sat down before
a blue Rico and lost himself.  When he bethought him to look at his
watch, it was after seven o'clock, and he rose with a start and ran
downstairs, making a face at Augustus, peering out from the cast
room, and an evil gesture at the Venus de Milo as he passed her on
the stairway.

When Paul reached the ushers' dressing room half a dozen
boys were there already, and he began excitedly to tumble into
his uniform.  It was one of the few that at all approached
fitting, and Paul thought it very becoming-though he knew that
the tight, straight coat accentuated his narrow chest, about
which he was exceedingly sensitive.  He was always considerably
excited while be dressed, twanging all over to the tuning of the
strings and the preliminary flourishes of the horns in the music
room; but tonight he seemed quite beside himself, and he teased
and plagued the boys until, telling him that he was crazy, they
put him down on the floor and sat on him.

Somewhat calmed by his suppression, Paul dashed out to the
front of the house to seat the early comers.  He was a model
usher; gracious and smiling he ran up and down the aisles;
nothing was too much trouble for him; he carried messages and
brought programs as though it were his greatest pleasure in life,
and all the people in his section thought him a charming boy,
feeling that he remembered and admired them.  As the house
filled, he grew more and more vivacious and animated, and the
color came to his cheeks and lips.  It was very much as though
this were a great reception and Paul were the host. just as the
musicians came out to take their places, his English teacher
arrived with checks for the seats which a prominent
manufacturer had taken for the season.  She betrayed some
embarrassment when she handed Paul the tickets, and a hauteur
which subsequently made her feel very foolish.  Paul was
startled for a moment, and had the feeling of wanting to put her
out; what business had she here among all these fine people and
gay colors?  He looked her over and decided that she was not
appropriately dressed and must be a fool to sit downstairs in
such togs.  The tickets had probably been sent her out of
kindness, he reflected as he put down a seat for her, and she had
about as much right to sit there as he had.

When the symphony began Paul sank into one of the rear seats
with a long sigh of relief, and lost himself as he had done
before the Rico.  It was not that symphonies, as such, meant
anything in particular to Paul, but the first sigh of the
instruments seemed to free some hilarious and potent spirit
within him; something that struggled there like the genie in the
bottle found by the Arab fisherman.  He felt a sudden zest of
life; the lights danced before his eyes and the concert hall
blazed into unimaginable splendor.  When the soprano soloist came
on Paul forgot even the nastiness of his teacher's being there
and gave himself up to the peculiar stimulus such personages
always had for him.  The soloist chanced to be a German woman, by
no means in her first youth, and the mother of many children; but
she wore an elaborate gown and a tiara, and above all she had
that indefinable air of achievement, that world-shine upon her,
which, in Paul's eyes, made her a veritable queen of Romance.

After a concert was over Paul was always irritable and
wretched until he got to sleep, and tonight he was even more than
usually restless.  He had the feeling of not being able to let
down, of its being impossible to give up this delicious
excitement which was the only thing that could be called living
at all.  During the last number he withdrew and, after hastily
changing his clothes in the dressing room, slipped out to the
side door where the soprano's carriage stood.  Here he began
pacing rapidly up and down the walk, waiting to see her come out.

Over yonder, the Schenley, in its vacant stretch, loomed big and
square through the fine rain, the windows of its twelve stories
glowing like those of a lighted cardboard house under a Christmas
tree.  All the actors and singers of the better class stayed there
when they were in the city, and a number of the big manufacturers
of the place lived there in the winter.  Paul had often hung about
the hotel, watching the people go in and out, longing to enter and
leave schoolmasters and dull care behind him forever.

At last the singer came out, accompanied by the conductor, who
helped her into her carriage and closed the door with a cordial
<i>auf wiedersehen</i> which set Paul to wondering whether she
were not an old sweetheart of his.  Paul followed the carriage
over to the hotel, walking so rapidly as not to be far from the
entrance when the singer alighted, and disappeared behind the
swinging glass doors that were opened by a Negro in a tall hat
and a long coat.  In the moment that the door was ajar it seemed
to Paul that he, too, entered.  He seemed to feel himself go
after her up the steps, into the warm, lighted building, into an
exotic, tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and basking
ease.  He reflected upon the mysterious dishes that were brought
into the dining room, the green bottles in buckets of ice, as he
had seen them in the supper party pictures of the <i>Sunday
World</i> supplement.  A quick gust of wind brought the rain down
with sudden vehemence, and Paul was startled to find that he was
still outside in the slush of the gravel driveway; that his boots
were letting in the water and his scanty overcoat was clinging wet
about him; that the lights in front of the concert hall were out
and that the rain was driving in sheets between him and the
orange glow of the windows above him.  There it was, what be
wanted--tangibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmas
pantomime--but mocking spirits stood guard at the doors, and, as
the rain beat in his face, Paul wondered whether he were destined
always to shiver in the black night outside, looking up at it.

He turned and walked reluctantly toward the car tracks.  The
end had to come sometime; his father in his nightclothes at the
top of the stairs, explanations that did not explain, hastily
improvised fictions that were forever tripping him up,
his upstairs room and its horrible yellow wallpaper, the creaking
bureau with the greasy plush collarbox, and over his painted
wooden bed the pictures of George Washington and John Calvin, and
the framed motto, "Feed my Lambs," which had been worked in red
worsted by his mother.

Half an hour later Paul alighted from his car and went
slowly down one of the side streets off the main thoroughfare. 
It was a highly respectable street, where all the houses were
exactly alike, and where businessmen of moderate means begot and
reared large families of children, all of whom went to Sabbath
school and learned the shorter catechism, and were interested in
arithmetic; all of whom were as exactly alike as their homes, and
of a piece with the monotony in which they lived.  Paul never
went up Cordelia Street without a shudder of loathing.  His home
was next to the house of the Cumberland minister.  He approached
it tonight with the nerveless sense Of defeat, the hopeless
feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that
he had always had when he came home.  The moment he turned into
Cordelia Street he felt the waters close above his head.  After
each of these orgies of living he experienced all the physical
depression which follows a debauch; the loathing of respectable
beds, of common food, of a house penetrated by kitchen odors; a
shuddering repulsion for the flavorless, colorless mass of
everyday existence; a morbid desire for cool things and soft
lights and fresh flowers.

The nearer he approached the house, the more absolutely
unequal Paul felt to the sight of it all: his ugly sleeping
chamber; the cold bathroom with the grimy zinc tub, the cracked
mirror, the dripping spiggots; his father, at the top of the
stairs, his hairy legs sticking out from his nightshirt, his feet
thrust into carpet slippers.  He was so much later than usual
that there would certainly be inquiries and reproaches.  Paul
stopped short before the door.  He felt that he could not be
accosted by his father tonight; that he could not toss again on
that miserable bed.  He would not go in.  He would tell his
father that he had no carfare and it was raining so hard he had
gone home with one of the boys and stayed all night.

Meanwhile, he was wet and cold.  He went around to the back
of the house and tried one of the basement windows, found it
open, raised it cautiously, and scrambled down the cellar wall to
the floor.  There he stood, holding his breath, terrified by the
noise he had made, but the floor above him was silent, and there
was no creak on the stairs.  He found a soapbox, and carried it
over to the soft ring of light that streamed from the furnace
door, and sat down.  He was horribly afraid of rats, so he did
not try to sleep, but sat looking distrustfully at the dark,
still terrified lest he might have awakened his father.  In such
reactions, after one of the experiences which made days and
nights out of the dreary blanks of the calendar, when his senses
were deadened, Paul's head was always singularly clear.  Suppose
his father had heard him getting in at the window and had come
down and shot him for a burglar?  Then, again, suppose his father
had come down, pistol in hand, and he had cried out in time to
save himself, and his father had been horrified to think how
nearly he had killed him?  Then, again, suppose a day should come
when his father would remember that night, and wish there had
been no warning cry to stay his hand?  With this last supposition
Paul entertained himself until daybreak.

The following Sunday was fine; the sodden November chill was
broken by the last flash of autumnal summer.  In the morning Paul
had to go to church and Sabbath school, as always.  On seasonable
Sunday afternoons the burghers of Cordelia Street always sat out
on their front stoops and talked to their neighbors on the next
stoop, or called to those across the street in neighborly
fashion.  The men usually sat on gay cushions placed upon the
steps that led down to the sidewalk, while the women, in their
Sunday "waists," sat in rockers on the cramped porches, pretending
to be greatly at their ease.  The children played in the
streets; there were so many of them that the place resembled the
recreation grounds of a kindergarten.  The men on the steps--all
in their shirt sleeves, their vests unbuttoned--sat with their
legs well apart, their stomachs comfortably protruding, and
talked of the prices of things, or told anecdotes of the sagacity
of their various chiefs and overlords.  They occasionally looked
over the multitude of squabbling children, listened
affectionately to their high-pitched, nasal voices, smiling to
see their own proclivities reproduced in their offspring, and
interspersed their legends of the iron kings with remarks about
their sons' progress at school, their grades in arithmetic, and
the amounts they had saved in their toy banks.

On this last Sunday of November Paul sat all the afternoon
on the lowest step of his stoop, staring into the street, while
his sisters, in their rockers, were talking to the minister's
daughters next door about how many shirtwaists they had made in
the last week, and bow many waffles someone had eaten at the last
church supper.  When the weather was warm, and his father was in
a particularly jovial frame of mind, the girls made lemonade,
which was always brought out in a red-glass pitcher, ornamented
with forget-me-nots in blue enamel.  This the girls thought very
fine, and the neighbors always joked about the suspicious color
of the pitcher.

Today Paul's father sat on the top step, talking to a young
man who shifted a restless baby from knee to knee.  He happened
to be the young man who was daily held up to Paul as a model, and
after whom it was his father's dearest hope that he would
pattern.  This young man was of a ruddy complexion, with a
compressed, red mouth, and faded, nearsighted eyes, over which he
wore thick spectacles, with gold bows that curved about his ears. 
He was clerk to one of the magnates of a great steel corporation,
and was looked upon in Cordelia Street as a young man with a
future.  There was a story that, some five years ago--he was now
barely twenty-six--he had been a trifle dissipated, but in order
to curb his appetites and save the loss of time and strength that
a sowing of wild oats might have entailed, he had taken his
chief's advice, oft reiterated to his employees, and at twenty-
one had married the first woman whom he could persuade to share
his fortunes.  She happened to be an angular schoolmistress, much
older than he, who also wore thick glasses, and who had now borne
him four children, all nearsighted, like herself.

The young man was relating how his chief, now cruising in
the Mediterranean, kept in touch with all the details of
the business, arranging his office hours on his yacht just as
though he were at home, and "knocking off work enough to keep two
stenographers busy."  His father told, in turn, the plan his
corporation was considering, of putting in an electric railway
plant in Cairo.  Paul snapped his teeth; he had an awful
apprehension that they might spoil it all before he got there. 
Yet he rather liked to hear these legends of the iron kings that
were told and retold on Sundays and holidays; these stories of
palaces in Venice, yachts on the Mediterranean, and high play at
Monte Carlo appealed to his fancy, and he was interested in the
triumphs of these cash boys who had become famous, though he had
no mind for the cash-boy stage.

After supper was over and he had helped to dry the dishes,
Paul nervously asked his father whether he could go to George's
to get some help in his geometry, and still more nervously asked
for carfare.  This latter request he had to repeat, as his
father, on principle, did not like to hear requests for money,
whether much or little.  He asked Paul whether he could not go to
some boy who lived nearer, and told him that he ought not to
leave his schoolwork until Sunday; but he gave him the dime.  He
was not a poor man, but he had a worthy ambition to come up in
the world.  His only reason for allowing Paul to usher was that
he thought a boy ought to be earning a little.

Paul bounded upstairs, scrubbed the greasy odor of the
dishwater from his hands with the ill-smelling soap he hated, and
then shook over his fingers a few drops of violet water from the
bottle he kept hidden in his drawer.  He left the house with his
geometry conspicuously under his arm, and the moment he got out
of Cordelia Street and boarded a downtown car, he shook off the
lethargy of two deadening days and began to live again.

The leading juvenile of the permanent stock company which played at
one of the downtown theaters was an acquaintance of Paul's, and the
boy had been invited to drop in at the Sunday-night rehearsals
whenever he could.  For more than a year Paul had spent every
available moment loitering about Charley Edwards's dressing room. 
He had won a place among Edwards's following not only because the
young actor, who could not afford to employ a dresser, often found
him useful, but because he recognized in Paul something akin to
what churchmen term "vocation."

It was at the theater and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really
lived; the rest was but a sleep and a forgetting.  This was
Paul's fairy tale, and it had for him all the allurement of a
secret love.  The moment he inhaled the gassy, painty, dusty odor
behind the scenes, he breathed like a prisoner set free, and felt
within him the possibility of doing or saying splendid,
brilliant, poetic things.  The moment the cracked orchestra beat
out the overture from <i>Martha</i>, or jerked at the serenade from
<i>Rigoletto</i>, all stupid and ugly things slid from him, and his
senses were deliciously, yet delicately fired.

Perhaps it was because, in Paul's world, the natural nearly
always wore the guise of ugliness, that a certain element of
artificiality seemed to him necessary in beauty.  Perhaps it was
because his experience of life elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-
school picnics, petty economies, wholesome advice as to how to
succeed in life, and the inescapable odors of cooking, that he
found this existence so alluring, these smartly clad men and
women so attractive, that he was so moved by these starry apple
orchards that bloomed perennially under the limelight.

It would be difficult to put it strongly enough how
convincingly the stage entrance of that theater was for Paul the
actual portal of Romance.  Certainly none of the company ever
suspected it, least of all Charley Edwards.  It was very like the
old stories that used to float about London of fabulously rich
Jews, who had subterranean halls there, with palms, and
fountains, and soft lamps and richly appareled women who never
saw the disenchanting light of London day.  So, in the midst of
that smoke-palled city, enamored of figures and grimy toil, Paul
had his secret temple, his wishing carpet, his bit of blue-and-
white Mediterranean shore bathed in perpetual sunshine.

Several of Paul's teachers had a theory that his imagination
had been perverted by garish fiction, but the truth was that he
scarcely ever read at all.  The books at home were not such as
would either tempt or corrupt a youthful mind, and as for reading
the novels that some of his friends urged upon him--well, he got
what he wanted much more quickly from music; any sort of music,
from an orchestra to a barrel organ.  He needed only the spark, the
indescribable thrill that made his imagination master of his
senses, and he could make plots and pictures enough of his own.  It
was equally true that he was not stagestruck-not, at any rate, in
the usual acceptation of that expression.  He had no desire to
become an actor, any more than he had to become a musician.  He
felt no necessity to do any of these things; what he wanted was
to see, to be in the atmosphere, float on the wave of it, to be
carried out, blue league after blue league, away from everything.

After a night behind the scenes Paul found the schoolroom
more than ever repulsive; the bare floors and naked walls; the
prosy men who never wore frock coats, or violets in their
buttonholes; the women with their dull gowns, shrill voices, and
pitiful seriousness about prepositions that govern the dative. 
He could not bear to have the other pupils think, for a moment,
that he took these people seriously; he must convey to them that
he considered it all trivial, and was there only by way of a
jest, anyway.  He had autographed pictures of all the members of
the stock company which he showed his classmates, telling them
the most incredible stories of his familiarity with these people,
of his acquaintance with the soloists who came to Carnegie Hall,
his suppers with them and the flowers he sent them.  When these
stories lost their effect, and his audience grew listless, he
became desperate and would bid all the boys good-by, announcing
that he was going to travel for a while; going to Naples, to
Venice, to Egypt.  Then, next Monday, he would slip back,
conscious and nervously smiling; his sister was ill, and he
should have to defer his voyage until spring.

Matters went steadily worse with Paul at school.  In the
itch to let his instructors know how heartily he despised them
and their homilies, and how thoroughly he was appreciated
elsewhere, he mentioned once or twice that he had no time to fool
with theorems; adding--with a twitch of the eyebrows and a touch
of that nervous bravado which so perplexed them--that he was
helping the people down at the stock company; they were old
friends of his.

The upshot of the matter was that the Principal went to
Paul's father, and Paul was taken out of school and put to work. 
The manager at Carnegie Hall was told to get another usher in his
stead; the doorkeeper at the theater was warned not to admit him
to the house; and Charley Edwards remorsefully promised the boy's
father not to see him again.

The members of the stock company were vastly amused when
some of Paul's stories reached them--especially the women.  They
were hardworking women, most of them supporting indigent husbands
or brothers, and they laughed rather bitterly at having stirred
the boy to such fervid and florid inventions.  They agreed with
the faculty and with his father that Paul's was a bad case.


The eastbound train was plowing through a January snowstorm;
the dull dawn was beginning to show gray when the engine whistled
a mile out of Newark.  Paul started up from the seat where he had
lain curled in uneasy slumber, rubbed the breath-misted window
glass with his hand, and peered out.  The snow was whirling in
curling eddies above the white bottom lands, and the drifts lay
already deep in the fields and along the fences, while here and
there the long dead grass and dried weed stalks protruded black
above it.  Lights shone from the scattered houses, and a gang of
laborers who stood beside the track waved their lanterns.

Paul had slept very little, and he felt grimy and uncomfortable. 
He had made the all-night journey in a day coach, partly because he
was ashamed, dressed as he was, to go into a Pullman, and partly
because he was afraid of being seen there by some Pittsburgh
businessman, who might have noticed him in Denny &amp; Carson's office. 
When the whistle awoke him, he clutched quickly at his breast
pocket, glancing about him with an uncertain smile.  But the
little, clay-bespattered Italians were still sleeping, the
slatternly women across the aisle were in open-mouthed oblivion,
and even the crumby, crying babies were for the nonce stilled. 
Paul settled back to struggle with his impatience as best he could.

When he arrived at the Jersey City station he hurried through his
breakfast, manifestly ill at ease and keeping a sharp eye about
him.  After he reached the Twenty-third Street station, he
consulted a cabman and had himself driven to a men's-furnishings
establishment that was just opening for the day.  He spent upward
of two hours there, buying with endless reconsidering and great
care.  His new street suit he put on in the fitting room; the frock
coat and dress clothes he had bundled into the cab with his linen. 
Then he drove to a hatter's and a shoe house.  His next errand was
at Tiffany's, where he selected his silver and a new scarf pin.  He
would not wait to have his silver marked, he said.  Lastly, he
stopped at a trunk shop on Broadway and had his purchases packed
into various traveling bags.

It was a little after one o'clock when he drove up to the
Waldorf, and after settling with the cabman, went into the
office.  He registered from Washington; said his mother and
father had been abroad, and that he had come down to await the
arrival of their steamer.  He told his story plausibly and had no
trouble, since he volunteered to pay for them in advance, in
engaging his rooms; a sleeping room, sitting room, and bath.

Not once, but a hundred times, Paul had planned this entry
into New York.  He had gone over every detail of it with Charley
Edwards, and in his scrapbook at home there were pages of
description about New York hotels, cut from the Sunday papers. 
When he was shown to his sitting room on the eighth floor he saw
at a glance that everything was as it should be; there was but
one detail in his mental picture that the place did not realize,
so he rang for the bellboy and sent him down for flowers.  He
moved about nervously until the boy returned, putting away his
new linen and fingering it delightedly as he did so. When the
flowers came he put them hastily into water, and then tumbled
into a hot bath.  Presently he came out of his white bathroom,
resplendent in his new silk underwear, and playing with the
tassels of his red robe.  The snow was whirling so fiercely
outside his windows that he could scarcely see across the street,
but within the air was deliciously soft and fragrant.  He put the
violets and jonquils on the taboret beside the couch, and threw
himself down, with a long sigh, covering himself with a Roman
blanket.  He was thoroughly tired; he had been in such haste, he
had stood up to such a strain, covered so much ground in the last
twenty-four hours, that he wanted to think how it had all come
about.  Lulled by the sound of the wind, the warm air, and the
cool fragrance of the flowers, he sank into deep, drowsy
retrospection.

It had been wonderfully simple; when they had shut him out
of the theater and concert hall, when they had taken away his
bone, the whole thing was virtually determined.  The rest was a
mere matter of opportunity.  The only thing that at all surprised
him was his own courage-for he realized well enough that he had
always been tormented by fear, a sort of apprehensive dread that,
of late years, as the meshes of the lies he had told closed about
him, had been pulling the muscles of his body tighter and
tighter.  Until now he could not remember the time when he had
not been dreading something.  Even when he was a little boy it
was always there--behind him, or before, or on either side. 
There had always been the shadowed corner, the dark place into
which he dared not look, but from which something seemed always
to be watching him--and Paul had done things that were not pretty
to watch, he knew.

But now he had a curious sense of relief, as though he had
at last thrown down the gauntlet to the thing in the corner.

Yet it was but a day since he had been sulking in the
traces; but yesterday afternoon that he had been sent to the bank
with Denny &amp; Carson's deposit, as usual--but this time he was
instructed to leave the book to be balanced.  There was above two
thousand dollars in checks, and nearly a thousand in the bank
notes which he had taken from the book and quietly transferred to
his pocket.  At the bank he had made out a new deposit slip.  His
nerves had been steady enough to permit of his returning to the
office, where he had finished his work and asked for a full day's
holiday tomorrow, Saturday, giving a perfectly reasonable
pretext.  The bankbook, be knew, would not be returned before
Monday or Tuesday, and his father would be out of town for the
next week.  From the time he slipped the bank notes into his
pocket until he boarded the night train for New York, he
had not known a moment's hesitation.  It was not the first time
Paul had steered through treacherous waters.

How astonishingly easy it had all been; here he was, the
thing done; and this time there would be no awakening, no figure
at the top of the stairs.  He watched the snowflakes whirling by
his window until he fell asleep.

When he awoke, it was three o'clock in the afternoon.  He
bounded up with a start; half of one of his precious days gone
already!  He spent more than an hour in dressing, watching every
stage of his toilet carefully in the mirror.  Everything was
quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of boy he had always
wanted to be.

When he went downstairs Paul took a carriage and drove up
Fifth Avenue toward the Park.  The snow had somewhat abated;
carriages and tradesmen's wagons were hurrying soundlessly to and
fro in the winter twilight; boys in woolen mufflers were
shoveling off the doorsteps; the avenue stages made fine spots of
color against the white street.  Here and there on the corners
were stands, with whole flower gardens blooming under glass
cases, against the sides of which the snowflakes stuck and
melted; violets, roses, carnations, lilies of the valley--somehow
vastly more lovely and alluring that they blossomed thus
unnaturally in the snow.  The Park itself was a wonderful stage
winterpiece.

When he returned, the pause of the twilight had ceased and
the tune of the streets had changed.  The snow was falling
faster, lights streamed from the hotels that reared their dozen
stories fearlessly up into the storm, defying the raging Atlantic
winds.  A long, black stream of carriages poured down the avenue,
intersected here and there by other streams, tending
horizontally.  There were a score of cabs about the entrance of
his hotel, and his driver had to wait.  Boys in livery were
running in and out of the awning stretched across the sidewalk,
up and down the red velvet carpet laid from the door to the
street.  Above, about, within it all was the rumble and roar, the
hurry and toss of thousands of human beings as hot for pleasure
as himself, and on every side of him towered the glaring
affirmation of the omnipotence of wealth.

The boy set his teeth and drew his shoulders together in a
spasm of realization; the plot of all dramas, the text of all
romances, the nerve-stuff of all sensations was whirling about
him like the snowflakes.  He burnt like a faggot in a tempest.

When Paul went down to dinner the music of the orchestra
came floating up the elevator shaft to greet him.  His head
whirled as he stepped into the thronged corridor, and he sank
back into one of the chairs against the wall to get his breath. 
The lights, the chatter, the perfumes, the bewildering medley of
color--he had, for a moment, the feeling of not being able to
stand it.  But only for a moment; these were his own people, he
told himself.  He went slowly about the corridors, through the
writing rooms, smoking rooms, reception rooms, as though he were
exploring the chambers of an enchanted palace, built and peopled
for him alone.

When he reached the dining room he sat down at a table near a
window.  The flowers, the white linen, the many-colored
wineglasses, the gay toilettes of the women, the low popping of
corks, the undulating repetitions of the <i>Blue Danube</i> from
the orchestra, all flooded Paul's dream with bewildering radiance. 
When the roseate tinge of his champagne was added--that cold,
precious, bubbling stuff that creamed and foamed in his glass--
Paul wondered that there were honest men in the world at all. 
This was what all the world was fighting for, he reflected; this
was what all the struggle was about.  He doubted the reality of
his past.  Had he ever known a place called Cordelia Street, a
place where fagged-looking businessmen got on the early car; mere
rivets in a machine they seemed to Paul,--sickening men, with
combings of children's hair always hanging to their coats, and
the smell of cooking in their clothes.  Cordelia Street--Ah, that
belonged to another time and country; had he not always been
thus, had he not sat here night after night, from as far back as
he could remember, looking pensively over just such shimmering
textures and slowly twirling the stem of a glass like this one
between his thumb and middle finger?  He rather thought he had.

He was not in the least abashed or lonely.  He had no
especial desire to meet or to know any of these people; all
he demanded was the right to look on and conjecture, to watch the
pageant.  The mere stage properties were all he contended for. 
Nor was he lonely later in the evening, in his lodge at the
Metropolitan.  He was now entirely rid of his nervous misgivings,
of his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire to show
himself different from his surroundings.  He felt now that his
surroundings explained him.  Nobody questioned the purple; he had
only to wear it passively.  He had only to glance down at his
attire to reassure himself that here it would be impossible for
anyone to humiliate him.

He found it hard to leave his beautiful sitting room to go
to bed that night, and sat long watching the raging storm from
his turret window.  When he went to sleep it was with the lights
turned on in his bedroom; partly because of his old timidity, and
partly so that, if he should wake in the night, there would be no
wretched moment of doubt, no horrible suspicion of yellow
wallpaper, or of Washington and Calvin above his bed.

Sunday morning the city was practically snowbound.  Paul
breakfasted late, and in the afternoon he fell in with a wild San
Francisco boy, a freshman at Yale, who said he had run down for a
"little flyer" over Sunday.  The young man offered to show Paul
the night side of the town, and the two boys went out together
after dinner, not returning to the hotel until seven o'clock the
next morning.  They had started out in the confiding warmth of a
champagne friendship, but their parting in the elevator was
singularly cool.  The freshman pulled himself together to make
his train, and Paul went to bed.  He awoke at two o'clock in the
afternoon, very thirsty and dizzy, and rang for icewater, coffee,
and the Pittsburgh papers.

On the part of the hotel management, Paul excited no suspicion. 
There was this to be said for him, that he wore his spoils with
dignity and in no way made himself conspicuous.  Even under the
glow of his wine he was never boisterous, though he found the stuff
like a magician's wand for wonder-building.  His chief greediness
lay in his ears and eyes, and his excesses were not offensive ones. 
His dearest pleasures were the gray winter twilights in his sitting
room; his quiet enjoyment of his flowers, his clothes, his wide
divan, his cigarette, and his sense of power.  He could not
remember a time when he had felt so at peace with himself.  The
mere release from the necessity of petty lying, lying every day and
every day, restored his self-respect.  He had never lied for
pleasure, even at school; but to be noticed and admired, to assert
his difference from other Cordelia Street boys; and he felt a good
deal more manly, more honest, even, now that he had no need for
boastful pretensions, now that he could, as his actor friends used
to say, "dress the part."  It was characteristic that remorse did
not occur to him.  His golden days went by without a shadow, and he
made each as perfect as he could.

On the eighth day after his arrival in New York he found the whole
affair exploited in the Pittsburgh papers, exploited with a wealth
of detail which indicated that local news of a sensational nature
was at a low ebb.  The firm of Denny &amp; Carson announced that the
boy's father had refunded the full amount of the theft and that
they had no intention of prosecuting.  The Cumberland minister had
been interviewed, and expressed his hope of yet reclaiming the
motherless lad, and his Sabbath-school teacher declared that she
would spare no effort to that end.  The rumor had reached
Pittsburgh that the boy had been seen in a New York hotel, and his
father had gone East to find him and bring him home.

Paul had just come in to dress for dinner; he sank into a
chair, weak to the knees, and clasped his head in his hands.  It
was to be worse than jail, even; the tepid waters of Cordelia
Street were to close over him finally and forever.  The gray
monotony stretched before him in hopeless, unrelieved years;
Sabbath school, Young People's Meeting, the yellow-papered room,
the damp dishtowels; it all rushed back upon him with a sickening
vividness.  He had the old feeling that the orchestra had
suddenly stopped, the sinking sensation that the play was over. 
The sweat broke out on his face, and he sprang to his feet,
looked about him with his white, conscious smile, and winked at
himself in the mirror, With something of the old childish belief
in miracles with which he had so often gone to class, all his
lessons unlearned, Paul dressed and dashed whistling down the
corridor to the elevator.

He had no sooner entered the dining room and caught the
measure of the music than his remembrance was lightened by his
old elastic power of claiming the moment, mounting with it, and
finding it all-sufficient.  The glare and glitter about him, the
mere scenic accessories had again, and for the last time, their
old potency.  He would show himself that he was game, he would
finish the thing splendidly.  He doubted, more than ever, the
existence of Cordelia Street, and for the first time he drank his
wine recklessly.  Was he not, after all, one of those fortunate
beings born to the purple, was he not still himself and in his
own place?  He drummed a nervous accompaniment to the Pagliacci
music and looked about him, telling himself over and over that it
had paid.

He reflected drowsily, to the swell of the music and the
chill sweetness of his wine, that he might have done it more
wisely.  He might have caught an outbound steamer and been well
out of their clutches before now.  But the other side of the
world had seemed too far away and too uncertain then; he could
not have waited for it; his need had been too sharp.  If he had
to choose over again, he would do the same thing tomorrow.  He
looked affectionately about the dining room, now gilded with a
soft mist.  Ah, it had paid indeed!

Paul was awakened next morning by a painful throbbing in his
head and feet.  He had thrown himself across the bed without
undressing, and had slept with his shoes on. His limbs and hands
were lead heavy, and his tongue and throat were parched and
burnt.  There came upon him one of those fateful attacks of
clearheadedness that never occurred except when he was physically
exhausted and his nerves hung loose.  He lay still, closed his
eyes, and let the tide of things wash over him.

His father was in New York; "stopping at some joint or
other," he told himself.  The memory of successive summers on the
front stoop fell upon him like a weight of black water.  He had
not a hundred dollars left; and he knew now, more than ever, that
money was everything, the wall that stood between all he loathed
and all he wanted.  The thing was winding itself up; he
had thought of that on his first glorious day in New York, and
had even provided a way to snap the thread.  It lay on his
dressing table now; he had got it out last night when he came
blindly up from dinner, but the shiny metal hurt his eyes, and he
disliked the looks of it.

He rose and moved about with a painful effort, succumbing now and
again to attacks of nausea.  It was the old depression exaggerated;
all the world had become Cordelia Street.  Yet somehow he was not
afraid of anything, was absolutely calm; perhaps because he had
looked into the dark corner at last and knew.  It was bad enough,
what he saw there, but somehow not so bad as his long fear of it
had been.  He saw everything clearly now.  He had a feeling that he
had made the best of it, that he had lived the sort of life he was
meant to live, and for half an hour he sat staring at the revolver. 
But he told himself that was not the way, so he went downstairs and
took a cab to the ferry.

When Paul arrived in Newark he got off the train and took
another cab, directing the driver to follow the Pennsylvania
tracks out of the town.  The snow lay heavy on the roadways and
had drifted deep in the open fields.  Only here and there the
dead grass or dried weed stalks projected, singularly black,
above it.  Once well into the country, Paul dismissed the
carriage and walked, floundering along the tracks, his mind a
medley of irrelevant things.  He seemed to hold in his brain an
actual picture of everything he had seen that morning.  He
remembered every feature of both his drivers, of the toothless
old woman from whom he had bought the red flowers in his coat,
the agent from whom he had got his ticket, and all of his fellow
passengers on the ferry.  His mind, unable to cope with vital
matters near at hand, worked feverishly and deftly at sorting and
grouping these images.  They made for him a part of the ugliness
of the world, of the ache in his head, and the bitter burning on
his tongue.  He stooped and put a handful of snow into his mouth
as he walked, but that, too, seemed hot.  When he reached a
little hillside, where the tracks ran through a cut some twenty
feet below him, he stopped and sat down.

The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he
noticed, their red glory all over.  It occurred to him that all
the flowers he had seen in the glass cases that first night must
have gone the same way, long before this.  It was only one
splendid breath they had, in spite of their brave mockery at the
winter outside the glass; and it was a losing game in the end, it
seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the world is
run.  Paul took one of the blossoms carefully from his coat and
scooped a little hole in the snow, where he covered it up.  Then
he dozed awhile, from his weak condition, seemingly insensible to
the cold.

The sound of an approaching train awoke him, and he started
to his feet, remembering only his resolution, and afraid lest he
should be too late.  He stood watching the approaching
locomotive, his teeth chattering, his lips drawn away from them
in a frightened smile; once or twice he glanced nervously
sidewise, as though he were being watched.  When the right moment
came, he jumped.  As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to
him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left
undone.  There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever
before, the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands.

He felt something strike his chest, and that his body was
being thrown swiftly through the air, on and on, immeasurably far
and fast, while his limbs were gently relaxed.  Then, because the
picture-making mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions
flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the immense design
of things.





End of Project Gutenberg's Etext of The Troll Garden and Selected Stories

</span>