Chương Chương 38 · Chapter 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. Ántonia 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 Ántonia, 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