Chapter Chapter 23 · Chapter 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 Ántonia 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.

Ántonia 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!’ Ántonia 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 Ántonia

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 Ántonia 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 Ántonia why she hadn’t been a little

more cordial to her.

‘I didn’t know if your mother would like her coming here,’ said

Ántonia, 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 Ántonia’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 Ántonia 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

Ántonia 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.’