บทที่ บทที่ 44 · Chapter 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,’ Ántonia 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.’

Ántonia 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, Ántonia 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, Ántonia. 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 Ántonia’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 Ántonia. 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 Ántonia

and I knew so well, and in the way we knew so well. They grew to be

very old people. He shrivelled up, Ántonia 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?’ Ántonia

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

Ántonia, 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 Ántonia 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 Ántonia’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!’