My Ántonia by Willa Cather (books for new readers .TXT) 📕

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.