Chương Chương 34 · Chapter XV

Late in August the Cutters went to Omaha for a few days, leaving

Ántonia 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, Ántonia came over to see us.

Grandmother noticed that she seemed troubled and distracted. ‘You’ve

got something on your mind, Ántonia,’ 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.’

Ántonia 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

Ántonia 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 Ántonia. 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, Ántonia 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 Ántonia’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 Ántonia 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 Ántonia at all, but made her sit down

in the parlour while she related to her just what had occurred the

night before. Ántonia 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