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<h2><span style="font-size: 144%">IV</span></h2>
<br>
“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.”
<br>
<br>
<p id="p0434"><span class="tei tei-hi"><span style="font-variant: small-caps">We</span></span> were singing
rhymes to tease Ántonia while she was beating up one of
Charley’s favorite 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 pocketbook
in her hand.</p>
<p id="p0435">“Hello, Tony. Don’t you know me?”
she asked in a smooth, low voice, looking in at us archly.</p>
<p id="p0436">Ántonia gasped and stepped back. “Why,
it’s Lena! Of course I did n’t know you, so dressed
up!”</p>
<p id="p0437">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.</p>
<p id="p0438">“Hello, Jim,” she said carelessly as she
walked into the kitchen and looked about her. “I’ve come
to town to work, too, Tony.”</p>
<p id="p0439">“Have you, now? Well, ain’t that
funny!” Ántonia stood ill at ease, and did n’t seem
to know just what to do with her visitor.</p>
<p id="p0440">The door was open into the dining-room, where
<span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> Harling sat crocheting and Frances was reading.
Frances asked Lena to come in and join them.</p>
<p id="p0441">“You are Lena Lingard, are n’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.”</p>
<p id="p0442"><span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> 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 pocketbook and gray cotton gloves on her lap.
We followed with our popcorn, but Ántonia hung back—said she had to get her cake into the oven.</p>
<p id="p0443">“So you have come to town,” said
<span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> Harling, her eyes still fixed on Lena. “Where
are you working?”</p>
<p id="p0444">“For <span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> 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.”</p>
<p id="p0445">“Well, there have to be dressmakers. It’s
a good trade. But I would n’t run down the farm, if I were
you,” said <span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> Harling rather severely. “How
is your mother?”</p>
<p id="p0446">“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.”</p>
<p id="p0447">“See that you don’t forget to,”
said <span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> Harling skeptically, as she took up her
crocheting again and sent the hook in and out with nimble fingers.</p>
<p id="p0448">“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.</p>
<p id="p0449">Frances drew her chair up nearer to the visitor.
“I thought you were going to be married, Lena,” she said
teasingly. “Did n’t I hear that Nick Svendsen was rushing
you pretty hard?”</p>
<p id="p0450">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 would n’t give Nick any land if he married
me, so he’s going to marry Annie Iverson. I would n’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.”</p>
<p id="p0451">Frances laughed. “And how do you feel about
it?”</p>
<p id="p0452">“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.”</p>
<p id="p0453">“That’s right,” said Frances.
“And <span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> Thomas thinks you can learn
dressmaking?”</p>
<p id="p0454">“Yes, ’m. I’ve always liked to sew,
but I
never had much to do with. <span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> Thomas makes lovely
things for all the town ladies. Did you know <span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span>
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.</p>
<p id="p0455"><span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> 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.”</p>
<p id="p0456">“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.</p>
<p id="p0457">“Too many, like enough,” said
<span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> Harling. “I don’t think a hotel is a
good place for a girl; though I guess <span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> Gardener keeps
an eye on her waitresses.”</p>
<p id="p0458">Lena’s candid eyes, that always looked a little
sleepy under their long lashes, kept straying about the cheerful rooms
with naïve admiration. Presently she drew on her cotton gloves.
“I guess I must be leaving,” she said irresolutely.</p>
<p id="p0459">Frances told her to come again, whenever she was
lonesome or wanted advice about anything. Lena replied that she did
n’t believe she would ever get lonesome in Black Hawk.</p>
<p id="p0460">She lingered at the kitchen door and begged
Ántonia to come and see her often. “I’ve got a room
of my own at <span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> Thomas’s, with a
carpet.”</p>
<p id="p0461">Tony shuffled uneasily in her cloth slippers.
“I’ll come sometime, but <span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> Harling
don’t like to have me run much,” she said evasively.</p>
<p id="p0462">“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 <span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span>
Harling sat.</p>
<p id="p0463">When Lena was gone, Frances asked Ántonia why
she had n’t been a little more cordial to her.</p>
<p id="p0464">“I did n’t know if your mother would like
her coming here,” said Ántonia, looking troubled.
“She was kind of talked about, out there.”</p>
<p id="p0465">“Yes, I know. But mother won’t hold it
against her if she behaves well here. You
need n’t say anything about that to the children. I guess Jim
has heard all that gossip?”</p>
<p id="p0466">When I nodded, she pulled my hair and told me I knew
too much, anyhow. We were good friends, Frances and I.</p>
<p id="p0467">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.</p>
<p id="p0468">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 color of her eyes—a shade of deep violet—and
their soft, confiding expression.</p>
<p id="p0469">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.</p>
<SPAN name="fig57" id="fig57"></SPAN><ANTIMG src="images/image08.png" width-obs="640" height-obs="1139" alt="Illustration: Lena Lingard knitting stockings" />
<p id="p0470">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
neighbor’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, traveling 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 every one realized she was as
crazy as ever, and she still ran about barefooted through the snow,
telling her domestic troubles to her neighbors.</p>
<p id="p0471">Not long after Mary came back from the asylum, I
heard a young Dane, who was helping us to thrash, 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 draw-side 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 had
n’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.</p>
<p id="p0472">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.</p>
<p id="p0473">“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! …”</p>
<p id="p0474">The Norwegian women did n’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.</p>
<p id="p0475">The time came, however, when Lena did n’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.
<span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> 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.</p>
<p id="p0476">“Maybe you lose a steer and learn not to make
somethings with your eyes at married men,” <span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span>
Shimerda told her hectoringly.</p>
<p id="p0477">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.”</p>
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